As you can guess from the picture to the left, The Girls and I went off to see The Pacifier this weekend. While I am not going to particularly recommend it to anybody, it was certainly less bad than I was anticipating and had several things that, in a different movie, could have been quite good. I wish that they'd done a few more takes, though, on some scenes when Vin Diesel lapses into a Mike Tyson lisp ... which just implies lack of focus on the actor and lack of caring on the production staff. There were some familiar faces in the cast (in many cases wisely taking a lot of the comedic "heavy lifting" off of Vin Diesel), Faith Ford as the mom, Lauren Graham (from Gilmore Girls) as the principal, Chris Potter (Peter Caine in the second Kung Fu series) as the Navy guy, Carol Kane in a totally gratuitous "comic relief" semi-cameo as the ex-Miss Czechoslovakia baby sitter, a cameo from Kids In The Hall alum Scott Thompson as a theater director, and almost a co-starring role for Brad Garrett (huge elder brother Robert from Everybody Loves Raymond) as the creepy wrestling coach. All-in-all, it wasn't bad if you don't mind huge plausibility holes in the storyline.
The picture to the right here is something that I saw last week when The Wife and I were off delivering "goody bags" to various school counselors ... it's a sewer cover we were parked over on Clark street, and I was amused to see the little fish cast into the design with the warning "Dump no waste! Drains to waterway" ... sort of cute, and I'd never noticed these before.
Things have been a particularly unpleasant admixture of crazy busy and deeply depressed around here of late, with both The Wife and myself being in deep funks about the business. On top of that, I still have pressure being put on my about my Mom's place and lingering stuff from Eschaton that I need to deal with, but really don't have a clue how to dig out from under. I just HATE being in situations like that ... I can work 18 hour days 7 days a week to get projects done, but when it's a matter of "how the hell can I do this?" in a situation where I have folks pushing at me for a result, I drop into a really ugly "locked up" state. Needless to say, this has not been a very fun time.
