because movies are bad right now

Oceans’ 13 – C (we get it you’re cool and we’re dumb for seeing it)

Fantastic Four 2 – D, (awful)

Ratatouille – A- (made me want to go to Europe and talk to animated rats).

As expected so I have nothing really to report on the movie front. In fact though the worst thing I subjected myself to this weekend was a viewing of one of my first stand up performances in DC in October 2003 (my 5th month ever doing comedy). Wow did I like my Arnold Schwarzenegger impression! I thought my girlfriend was going to dump me after we watched it. Sort of like finding out your significant other was a Dungeons and Dragons champion four years ago. But I am much better now and have been getting some interest from some people out in LA (don’t ask – I will have my people call your people).

So after embarrassing myself and, despite having a newly installed TiVo, I decided to exercise my brain a little and get back to reading.

I recently finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It won last year’s Pulitzer for non fiction. You think that would give me enough credibility to read it freely on the bus and train. However, my copy had a big “Oprah’s book club” sticker on it, which opened me up to numerous catcalls of “homo” in those same locations. Fortunately my girlfriend is familiar with Oprah and her damned stickers and removed it for me. It has been a while since I read a really well regarded piece of literature, which reminded me why I don’t generally like “literature.” The book is good enough and at times had me very invested, but for the most part all I could give it was a shrug of the shoulders. Granted, it takes a lot more creativity to make a book like The Road, which is about some nondescript post-apocalypse and the journey a man and his son take looking for anything (food, shelter, meaning, hope – i.e. they are both stand up comics) in the bleak future. I think all John Grisham does is punch in a southern town, a branch of law and one crime into Microsoft’s Grisham 2007 and voila! A new novel is born. However The Road was not as great to me as I’ve heard it is. Then again I may just be uncultured swine.

Now I am reading Barack Obama’s new book. I like where the man is coming from. And that is mostly because he is quickly replacing Adam Sandler as the man I am most often compared to looks wise (in the supermarket 3 days ago a man came up to me and said, “My God you look like Barack Obama. I told him I was and got a $250 campaign contribution). However, my mother was not pleased when I visited yesterday and she saw the book. That is because my Mom has been the president, for the last 15 years of the “Please let Hilary Clinton be president so I can die in peace” club. Now she would vote for a black man for president, as long as that man was a Democrat and not my father. However after me and my brother the people my mother will defend against anything and everything are Bill and Hilary. Sorry Barack, but you won’t be getting Yosemite Anne’s vote until the general election.

I am actually still waiting for Al Gore to run, but if he does not I will be voting for either Hilary, Barack or John Edwards, although I actually like the idea of a Bloomberg independent ticket – sort of like Ross Perot, but with more Jewishness and less crazy.

I don’t know what I will have to report the rest of the week because I am on vacation this week from my day job. Probably just some more reading. Next on my list is “The N Word: who can say it, who shouldn’t and why.” Chapter 1: Half Haitian, Half Irish men who look like Adam Sandler cannot. Chapter 2: Barack Obama can. Hmmmmmmmm.