Friday, February 16, 2007

Cabin Fever

New Reviews This Week:
Music and Lyrics
Sweet Land
Hannibal Rising

This week was a painfully quiet week. It started with the threat of snow. Lots of it. And after last week’s hour-long trip in an attempt to see Norbit, I’ve gotta tell ya, I wasn’t all that excited about getting more snow—or about having to share the road with a bunch of people who drive like they’ve never seen snow before.

It began early on Tuesday morning. By the time we got up, a few inches already covered the driveway. My husband got up to shovel—and not long after he got back inside, it was covered again. So Tuesday was officially declared a snow day. He called his boss (who had been trying, for two hours, to get to the airport on the other side of town) and got permission to work from home—so he set up shop in the next room. It was like working in a real office with real coworkers—only I didn’t have to get dressed up or put on makeup or anything.

The only problem with the whole snow day thing was that we had a screening scheduled for that night. My first thought was to skip it—because I really didn’t want a replay of the Norbit fiasco. But then, as the day wore on, and as the cabin fever started to set in, we began to reconsider. It would be nice, we thought, to get out of the house. We’d just leave really early and prepare for an hour or two of clutching the steering wheel and dealing with all the other idiots on the road. When the snow turned to ice, though, I changed my mind again. So instead of braving the slippery roads to see Breach, we stayed home and pulled a DVD off the Watch Me pile instead.

Wednesday was another snow day. Every school in the area was closed. Businesses were closed. And about eight inches of snow covered the street in front of our house. Since we’d heard on the news the night before that the city had hired pretty much anyone with a plow on their truck to help clear the major roads, we knew there was no way we’d be seeing a plow anytime soon. That, of course, meant that the afternoon screening that I’d planned to attend was out of the question. I’m dedicated to my job and all, but I’m not stupid enough to spend most of the day trying to push my car out of the neighborhood just to catch a movie. Instead, I spent most of the day staring out the window, quietly praying for a plow to come by. Or a neighbor with a snow blower. Or a bored neighbor kid with a shovel. Anything to get us out of the house.

On Thursday, things had cleared up enough for the kids to go back to school—and for the big kids to go back to work. That’s not to say, of course, that the roads in our neighborhood were cleared—and when a friend stopped by to get me out of the house for a cup of coffee, I ended up pushing her truck down the street.

By Thursday night, though, I was more than ready to get out of the house and get back to a screening. Sure, I was looking forward to seeing the gang again. But the fact that the screening was for something as potentially funny-bad as Ghost Rider made it all the more exciting. A month or so ago, one of the guys forwarded us this clip from YouTube—all of the funniest clips of Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man. And after watching that a couple of times (because, really, you can’t watch Nicolas Cage in a bear suit punching out some unsuspecting woman just once), how could we not be excited to see the guy play a flaming skeleton on a motorcycle? According to Bill, it was sure to be absolutely craptastic. And you know what? It was. And nothing cures a bad case of cabin fever better than an evening of craptacular comic-book-movie awesomely-badness.

I feel much better now, thanks to Nicolas Cage and his flaming skull.

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