The morning after. Min and I slept in until around 11:00 and boy we needed it. We got up and got ready to go out. The family went out to see Eddie Murphy in The Haunted Mansion. As we expected, that was a really weak film. It had nothing special about it and it was highly predictable and overdone. It was also very short. I am pretty sure that we were only sitting in the theatre for about 78 minutes. But it is good that it was so short because they didn’t even have enough material to fill what they had.
Min and I went shopping for a while after the movie. We hit some of the sales but didn’t really manage to find anything good. Believe it or not, we didn’t even find any DVDs that we wanted to buy. Min did find tons of yarn that she wanted at really good prices and we went to Barnes and Noble and I found lots of history books that I wanted including “The Battle That Stopped Rome” which is about the Massacre of Teutoberg Forest which I am always studying as much as possible. It is nice to have a new work on the subject, this one is written in 2003, since the major archielogical evidence has been coming out over the last few years. The site of the massacre was only positvely identified by an English soldier in 1987 (the massacre occured in 9 AD so this is a major site to be able to elude scholars and researchers for so many years.) I am very excited to get more in depth into the battle. And the book is also partially written as a narative which makes it a lot more interesting to read.
After we got back from shopping, everyone played some more Scene It. Min and Mom got a huge lead and made it all the way to the end of the game while Francesca and I were still at half way and in last place. But we managed to come back while they were still working on their winning round and we managed to win at the last second. So overall, that is two wins for me between last night and today making Francesca and I the only two players in the house to have won two games. We rocked. After that, most everyone called it a night and the married kids (read: Min, Francesca, Bennie and I) watched The Medallion. I am hoping that I will enjoy it more this time than I did last time. At least we are getting another view out of this movie which will always be a struggle to get watched because it was so bad. There are so many Chan flicks to choose from out there (that we have) that this one isn’t likely to come up on a regular basis. Some of his recent stuff like Shanghai Noon and Rush Hour have been amazing and some of his best work but then The Tuxedo and The Medallion have been so bad to offset them. I think that cinemagraphers will look back at his third generation (3G) films as being a very hot/cold era of his career with the 1G being extrememly silly and cold and the 2G being very enjoyable – still silly – but reliably fun to watch.