Just when I thought I was out...

As some of you may recall, DD and I recently made the difficult decision (okay – it was only a difficult decision for me) to cut the cord. This decision resulted in the gaining of many extra hours which were previously filled with CSI (original series only), endless Simpsons reruns and whatever heavily edited blockbuster was currently playing on TBS (aside - anyone else remember the TBS "Monkeyed Movie Shorts?" 'Cause those were frackin' HILARIOUS).

So what, you may ask, have we done with all those extra hours? Well, for one thing – we watch a lot more movies.

Well, we signed up for Zip again. Remember that one, where you sign up online and they send you movies right to your mailbox? And then when you’re done, you send the movies back, and poof! More movies. Forget that 10 minute walk to the video store – that’s for suckers! We walk 10 feet to the mailbox – nay, skip giddily to the mailbox – and there they are, our little cinematic bundles of joy, waiting for us like adorable little flat, circular puppies, that just want to entertain us.

And entertain they do – so far my biggest find has been the freakin’ awesome Battlestar Galactica series. If you don’t watch it, you should, because it’s great. I never saw the original series, but I had the feeling it was kind of dorky – well not so with this version. It’s well-written with great actors and way-cool action scenes and the premise is intriguing and the storyline is captivating and – although he is, quite possibly, the homeliest man in all creation – I think I love Edward James Olmos, who plays Commander Adama. Actually, what I want is for him to be my new grandpa, and he and Gran’pa Floyd can form a gang and they would be the toughest, gruffest SOBs who ever cut someone down with a terse remark, stared them into submission, and then whupped them – for their own good (I mean for the individual’s own good, not for my grandpas’).

Zip is also a good way for me to broaden my movie-watching horizons – I mean, y’all know how I feel about good and bad movies. With Zip, I can finally pick out all those movies I keep meaning to watch, but don’t have enough pirate vs. zombie action to stand out in the video store. Now they show up, and I get around to watching them – eventually. Like Atarnarjuat, which is a really, really good movie, once we finally sat down and watched it, which took two rental cycles and three days. But so totally worth it!

It’s also nice because you don’t have to agree on a movie – I can watch The Philadelphia Story (which – awesome suggestion Payton) while DD talks on the phone; we both pick movies we want and watch what we want. Although we do have similar tastes in movies (like how the day after we met we stayed in to watch Army of Darkness – now that’s true romance. Oh, also a good movie!).

We still manage to find time to do other things though – like go to the theatre! Actually, we do that a lot less now, but we did catch a couple of flics this weekend: Aeon Flux (which - bonus - is one of those rare movies that is actually directed by a woman - so go see it and support the cause of doubling the percentage of women-helmed films to 2%!) and Harry Potter (A-Mac – we’ll have to see the next one together to relive the old tradition – try not to be getting more ivy league education then, mmmkay?).

I have to say I really enjoyed both, because I like sci-fi/fantasy and cool action sequences and Charlize Theron is waaay hot whether or not you swing that way. So I recommend both, although one is PG fluff with both cartoony sequences and some surprisingly dark elements, while the other has wizards.

Well, that's all for me as of late - although we did find time to put up our holiday lights, mostly because everyone else in our section had done it already and damn those Joneses if they think we're not going to keep up!