Due to our jetlag, we woke rather early Sunday morning. Since we were up we figured we could go see a matinee at the Pavilion. Oh hooray, we can pay $6.50 instead of $9 to see what Hollywood is serving up these days. We ate at the new diner in Windsor Terrace and then hastened over to the movie theater. What were we in a hurry to see? What else would a patriotic American couple see early Sunday morning on Memorial Day weekend? Why, Pearl Harbor of course!

Please, listen to me--do not go to see this movie! It is the biggest steaming pile of cow shit I have ever seen. You would think we'd have learned not to go see patriotic movies premiering on national holidays. For example: Independence Day. Poor Kyle, unbeknownst to me, had already seen this expensive piece of crap the day before he took me to it. It was one of our fist dates, the first movie we saw together, and I thought it would be fun. Lots of explosions and such. I love how Hollywood is always making movies where catastrophic damage is wrought on Manhattan, as if Los Angeles wasn't the target most American movie goers (who have to shell out nine hard earned bucks to watch the sputum they spit out) would choose to destroy. That whole part about Randy Quaid being some sort of martyr? Who thinks this shit up? Oh and how is Jeff Goldblum able the write a virus that knocks out the alien operating system? The aliens were so technologically beyond our limited capacity; even the scientists who were studying the crashed space ship weren't able to figure out what to make of the it. Oh, oh and I love the scene at the end where the Bedouins are rejoicing as they dance around one of the crashed alien space ships. How did they knock that out of the sky? By stoning it? Kyle gritted his teeth and sat through the entire movie--just for me! Now, that's love.

The second noxiously patriotic movie that should-have-been-missed-but-unfortunately-was-not was the aptly named The Patriot. The only part of this movie that was remotely interesting was the hatchet massacre carried out by an insane Mel Gibson, who was obviously having some sort of post traumatic stress disorder flashback. How else could he single handedly murder twelve British troops with a tomahawk while his impressionable young sons watched in abject terror? And wasn't that British commander, Mel's archenemy, just the most despicable character? Yes, those British are really horrid and uncivilized. Could that character have been more of a caricature? Just in case his shooting Mel's son wasn't heinous enough, the writers also made sure he burned down a church full of colonists. Yes folks, he's evil. I love it when movies clearly delineate who is good and who is bad, as if I weren't smart enough to figure out that in an Hollywood movie called The Patriot the Americans would be the good guys. There were other disturbing aspects to this movie, such as the way the script totally glossed over the whole slave issue. Oh, leave it to Hollywood to erase one of the most horrible parts of our history. Did you see how that red headed guy hated the black man, but then went on to call him his brother by the end of the movie? Oh, America is so wonderful! I was in absolute stitches at the end when Mel (on foot and armed only with an American flag on a stick) and the evil Brit (on horse with sword and gun) faced off. It was almost exactly like the Simpsons episode when Mel films a remake of "Mr. Chips Goes to Washington" and then kills everyone in Congress and impales the president with the American flag.

Pearl Harbor suffers from the Titanic syndrome. That's when Hollywood decides that historic occurrences, which are inherently interesting and tragic in their own right, need to be fictionalized with a sappy love story for Americans to shell out money to see them. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a momentous occurrence in our history. It was a devastating attack on American soil and it forced us into a bloody war. The part of the movie where the attack took place was phenomenal. The effects were amazing and I really got an inkling of what it must have been like to be there and witness the carnage. Unfortunately, the attack didn't happen until an hour into the movie and afterwards there seemed to be two more hours of trashy, dime-store-novel-soap-opera plot to suffer through. Oh, and did I mention I hate Ben Affleck? I despise him and his little baby teeth. I usually avoid any movie he's in, but unfortunately I broke with tradition in this instance. Stupid me. Thankfully the other guy was hot, whatever his name is. And I don't want to spoil the ending for you, if you choose to see this pile of doggie doo, but the love story part has such an unsatisfying end, I just wanted to puke.

Memo to self: don't go to see whatever opens Fourth of July weekend.