One and a Half Stars

Most nights after supper, hubby and I settle into the recliners, flip on the television, and halfway watch it. I say halfway because he is usually doing Sudoku and I am usually doing the crossword or crocheting. This time of year it's all re-runs, thank God for Netflix. Sometimes a movie will show up and hubby will say, "Who ordered THIS?" To which I usually reply that it must have been him, because I haven't been on the queue for (fill in the blank) weeks. Over the past three nights, we have seen three movies that were nothing like one another except that they had actors in them. Here is my mini-review.

Last night we watched "Tortilla Soup." It's about a widowed (or widowered, whatever) Hispanic man with three grown daughters who are nothing like one another except for the fact that they lack the Y chromosome. They are a typical close yet dysfunctional movie family and the story is fairly predictable, but it was sweet. What I really liked about the film was that the dad was a chef, so he made these elaborate spreads for family dinners. I'm talking cruise ship buffet type feasts. He was always chopping and dicing and sauteeing and grilling and stirring. He grilled stuff like bananas and cactus. Every night! Of course, his daughters complained about it. Ungrateful brats. I want to be adopted.

We watched "The Sentinel," which had lots of scenes like this one. Michael Douglas is a good actor, so I continue to watch his movies, even after his comment about seeing Catherine Zeta-Jones and becoming a "heat seeking missile." Nobody needs that image in their head. In this film, he was a secret service agent assigned to the First Lady and he took his job very seriously, if you know what I mean. A fellow agent and his former best friend (former because the guy thought Michael Douglas had had an affair with his wife) got killed and then the widow told M.D. that her husband thought that someone was having an affair with someone in the White House but he didn't know who. And there was a plot to kill the prez, and it was someone in the agency and they framed M.D. for it so he had to run away until he could prove himself and you can guess the rest. I just kept thinking, yeah, here's two guys I would want in my Secret Service. The dude that's boffing my wife and the idiot who can't figure it out.

The third movie was "Twister," and not the one that everyone knows and loves. No, this one starred Dylan McDermott and Crispin Glover. It was about a family in Kansas who were rich because of soda pop. The father was odd and controlling, the mother had left a long time ago, the daughter's ex-husband showed up to get her and their eight year old daughter away from there. The father had a very uptight girlfriend. And they were all stuck in this big farmhouse waiting out a tornado. Crispin Glover played the son, who was a total nut job. He did and said the most random things. We weren't sure if it was supposed to be deep or funny. We talked about turning it off, but we couldn't look away, so we actually sat through the whole thing. But then we had to play Super Smash Brothers so life would make sense again. There's nothing like throwing red polka dot mushrooms to put things in perspective.