"'Date Movie' sucked," said Captain Obvious.

Yesterday, I watched the worst movie I've seen since the first half hour of Ultraviolet. The movie of which I speak is Date Movie. Just a day or two prior to that, I saw Scary Movie 4, and though I thought it sucked quite strenuously, compared to Date Movie, it was comedic brilliance on par with anything I saw in Talladega Nights.

"Yes, that's a no-brainer," you say. "Of course Date Movie was bad, you moron. What other possible expectation could you have had?" And you're right, my outwardly hostile theoretical blog reader, I did not expect it to be good. But it was the level of badness that was astonishing. Lazy, incompetent, unfunny, mysogenistic, nonsensical, and completely divorced from any identifiable reality, we were tempted to just shut the thing off 10 minutes in, but, like the 8-car pile-up on the freeway you watch happen from start to finish and then drive past, even if it means driving up on the shoulder past some obviously pretty badly hurt people, you can't look away. I think it's because Zucker makes these parody films in such a lackadaisacal way, these guys thought that seeming indifference was his secret for success. "Keep it loose," they must have thought. They kept it loose all right. So loose they didn't even have enough film for an entire hour. The running time of the film is only an hour and 13 minutes. About 20 of those minutes were absolutely cuttable, but they kept the extraneous footage in because without it, their end product wouldn't actually qualify as a feature film.

Anyway, I'd say avoid it, but I know I'm educating no one about this movie.

In other news, I got another office chair yesterday to replace one of the 3 I've broken in recent months. So far so good. This afternoon my wife and my sister and I drove up Georgia 400 to the biggest outlet mall I've ever been to. I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself much, figuring the whole deal would mostly be a collection of women's clothing stores I'd be playing cell phone Tetris in front of, but they did actually have a few decent stores, in particular two remaindered-book stores, one of which was closing down (probably to open up a second Big Dog store). So the books inside, already marked way the hell down, were also subject to a Store Closing Sale, which took another 40% off everything in the store. I got eight books, most of which were less than $3. One of the more interesting ones I got was a novel called The Prestige by Christopher Priest, which will be the basis for the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie. Just a few pages in I can tell it won't be boring. Yay. Reading.

Anyway. It's thundering like a bitch outside so I'm going to post this up and shut my computer off. More tomorrow.