Summer Movies and a Fun Fourth

There were a ton of summer movies I was excited about and so far, I've seen two of them.

On Friday, we had a company movie day to see Ratatouille, which I adored. So much so it only furthers my desire to work for Pixar and move up to the bay area. I'm also going to see it again tomorrow night.

The voices aren't celebrity driven like Shrek and other mediocre animated films. The look of it is amazing. The story is well-written and never predictable or cliched, a difficult feat for an animated film. And the fur on the characters - well maybe it's because I know how hard it is to create computer generated fur, but it makes me want to pet the rat as much as I had wanted to hug Sully, the blue and purple monster from Monsters, Inc. If a company can make rats look cute and huggable, they got my vote.

Today, instead of heading toward the beach where gazillions of other people went, I steered toward the other direction. I headed toward Westwood to watch Transformers in the nice big Village theater, where they have all the fancy schmancy movie premieres. This is my favorite theater not only because it's an old fashioned one movie only theater, it's also has the best sound, crisp digital projected picture and it's huge. I lined up for hours to see all the Star Wars there back in the day, and it makes the movie watching experience that much more fun.

I have to say I was extremely impressed with Transformers. I knew it would be fun to watch but didn't expect much from these big budgeted Michael Bay splashy movie events. Let's just say my jaw was literally hanging open every time I watched the robots transform and battle. They came up with a decent story, good actors (especially the lead kid), decently fleshed out characters and of course, mind-blowing computer animated robots. I never thought those toys my brother and I played with as children could look so cool in "real life." It was also fun to see a couple of my friends' credits at the end of the movie.

After the movie, to celebrate feeling better after 4 days of some weird stomach bug, I risked a night of pain by getting some Haagen Dazs ice cream. Yum! And instead of sitting at home relaxing, I fought off the tiredness and the lonerish instinct, and accepted my friends' invitation for some nice grilled steaks at their place. We also managed to lean way out of their balcony to see the fireworks show down at the marina. If only we had every Wednesday off.