Movie and a dinner

We went to see Kick Ass this afternoon with some friends. I've been looking forward to this movie for quite a while! I've devoured the previews that were up online and even fan'd the movie on Facebook, and was really excited and looking forward to it. I can't remember if we heard good things about it beforehand, although Adam usually only wants to see a movie if it got good reviews (he listens to Rotten Tomatoes and Entertainment Weekly sometimes as well) or good word of mouth, so it must have. I didn't know much about it except it was about some amateur "super" heroes, and the visual humor in the previews was highly promising.

I loved it! The story was good, I thought. Not too complicated, but interesting and compelling enough to like the characters for what they were doing. I thought that Hit Girl was the least fleshed out of the main characters, which was too bad, considering that she was the one I was looking forward to identifying with the most, and was most excited about from the perspective of, let's have some girls that kick ass for little girls to look up to. In fact she was a pretty fantastic fighter, but her character was kind of flat. Nic Cage was in one of his good moments. I've heard he's a huge comic book geek, and here it goes to good use. Kick Ass, the main vigilante, is surprisingly vulnerable to physical damage, but it works. His alter ego is pretty irritating, but high school boys are pretty much uniformly annoying, so I guess that's not a huge surprise.

The one thing you might want to be aware of ahead of time is that it's pretty violent and bloody. More than I expected. And I was shocked and disturbed to see after the movie ended that the people in the row in back of us had a small girl with them, of no more than 4 years old! I am serious, this is not a movie for a child to see. It was quite violent and in some cases horrible things happened. To bad guys, but still! I ask you, are people truly idiots?

After dinner we went to Red Robin for dinner. When I lived in Manhattan I would have sooner gone without dinner than eaten at a chain restaurant, out of snobbishness I grant you, but also because there are a million choices and if you eat at a chain you are just being beyond lazy and unimaginative. But if you want to go out to dinner in New Jersey and you don't want to spend a bundle (and drive a while) you basically have chain restaurants to choose from. Not the center of haute cuisine. But it was nice to see our friends and hang out for a meal.

Now Adam is playing Bioshock 2 and I am catching up on bills and procrastinating on putting together a proposal for a freelance project about which I met with potential clients yesterday morning. I haven't done freelance in a while, but this looks like a very interesting project, and I want to do it. Tomorrow I kind of have to buckle down and write up the proposal, since I said I would get it to them by EOD Monday.