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Okay, to be fair, I didn’t actually watch this entire movie.

What happened was this:

We went camping this weekend. Or rather, we tried to go camping. But in the act of getting our family out to the Olympic Peninsula on the weekend of a National Holiday (our very most important one if you are very nationalistic) my husband and I decided to divide and conquer.

Having this week off from Montessori…

(worst parental week ever BTW. I love my kids but apparently, not enough to want to stay home with them 24-7. Or even 24-3 as was my case)

…the kids and I left early.

The plan was for us to head out to Meme’s house  (read:May-may) on Thursday morning. This, it turned out, was a perfect plan because A)Meme lives out on the Olympic Peninsula; B) I got a little extra help wrangling my precious little evil snowflakes and C) we literally drove right on to a ferry thus avoiding the obligatory 4-hour ferry line that always accompanies a national holiday weekend.

Also, we never actually went camping.

Because it rained. A lot.

After the Memorial Day Camping Deluge of 2010 (Bring your own Ark!) I enacted the rule that goes like this:

If it is still raining by noon on the day of the camping trip, we are not going camping.

I love the outdoors and all but being stuck in a tent with two squirming, squealing, squelching children for three days is no one’s idea of fun.

In all actuality, it was nice and bright and sunny outside when I called the park ranger to cancel our reservations but I knew what was coming. Oh, I knew. It hasn’t NOT rained on us all season so I figured hell – if Meme is willing, we’ll just stay at her house for the weekend and pretend like we were camping. Since she lives on several acres of awesome, the kids didn’t mind (I checked.)

On Friday afternoon I hauled ass down to the Bainbridge Island Ferry terminal to pick up my husband. He walked on the ferry after work  and we neatly avoided all the ferry traffic.

It was a cunning plan.

For dinner that evening Brian and I had some burgers. Catfish had three glasses of sugared-up crack and some macaroni while the youngest ate two tablespoons of catchup and a balloon (I’m so not kidding about that.)

It was all good fun.

So there’s a Hollywood Video in Poulsbo. Did you know that the Hollywood Video chain is going out of business? Brian did.  Naturally, we had to stop at the Hollywood video and check out their selection of movies that were on deep going-out-of-business discount. For two people that originally met in a movie store, it was a jolly good time!

We ended up buying fourteen (fifteen?) movies. Or at least I think that was the final tally. I lost count after chasing down a joyously screaming 2 year old intent on purchasing the Barbie rendition of  Thumbelina and Alex Merkin’s Across the Hall. I’ll let you guess which one we brought home.

The Catfish was very serious and intent in his choice. He looked over every movie twice, asking appropriate questions when necessary (But, do the bad guys get caught? Do they go to jail? Is this a… girl movie?) until finally selecting a movie neither his father nor I had ever heard of, entitled The Secret of Loch Ness. As far as movie covers appealing to five year old boys go, this one had a bit of promise:

I mean, there's a friggin' MAGICAL DINOSAUR on the cover.

Well, well, well. I am here to tell you that someone has a LOT to answer for this evening.Yes, I’m looking at YOU Germany.

(Ummmm….this is probably gonna contain a few spoilers.)

THIS exciting looking movie is, in fact, a German made-for-TV movie set in Loch Ness but aparently filmed in Austria. That’s cool. The scenery was very pretty.

However, least you be fooled let me set you straight:

This is not, I REPEAT, this is NOT a movie about the Loch Ness Monster.

I know, I know – I thought it was too. I mean, Nessie is RIGHT THERE ON THE COVER and all. But sadly no, it is not about magical Scottish dinosaur monsters at all. Well, maybe a little bit.

You see, there’s a guy and he’s looking for the Loch Ness monster. And then there’s a kid and he’s watching TV or something. I can’t really be sure because I missed the first fifteen minutes of the movie which, apparently, is the most important part because without knowing the set-up, you can only guess as to why the little kid wants to find his dad that his mom told him was dead but who is clearly looking for Nessie because he’s being interviewed on German television. And something something something about a crazy grandpa.

So the kid, Tim, thinks he’s being sly by telling his mom that he’s going over to a friend’s lake house but in reality is getting on a plane to Scottland to find his not-really-dead father who, PS and by the Way, has no idea of little Timmy’s existence.

But the crazy grandpa lets him go and lots of corny things happen involving a mysterious cab driver (who looks exactly like the guy that interviewed the not-dead father on German TV)

You with me so far?  Good. Because now comes one of three scenes that actually include Nessie as a sort-of character. Tim, the kid, follows Dr. Erik Winter (his not-dead father who had no idea he is Tim’s not-dead father, even though the have the same mole on their hands *GASP*) onto a boat and out on the lake. There the boat gets bumped by…yep, NESSIE! And then Tim falls in the water and is presumed drowned.

Meanwhile, back in Germany…

Tim’s mom Anna finds out that Crazy Grandpa let Tim go to Scotland in search of his not-dead father (and the great love of her life.) She gives crazy-grandpa a stern look and high-tails it to Inverness.

Or tries to…

*cue maniacal laughter*

The same mysterious cab driver picks her up at the airport and deliberately gets her lost in the Austrian..er…ah…Scottish countryside. We can only assume it’s so that he can be sure little Timmy is well and truly dead before they get there.

BUT LITTLE TIMMY ISN’T DEAD! Oh thank GOD!

Nope, he’s rescued from drowning by a knock-off Gollum CGI character named Oakie. And when I say knock-off, I mean to say that they used the same exact facial structure as Gollum. At one point Tim actually asks him if he’s a Hobbit. He’s not. He’s a druid. Because that makes so much more sense.

Anyway, somehow Oakie decides to give Tim a gift and hands him a bracelet that is a brazillion years old and worth an unspecified amount of untold riches that we could never guess but let’s just say that it’s a LOT. Got it? Do you want me to spell it out for you some more? Because I can, if you like.

Of course there are bad guys in camp. At first they plan to find Nessie (before Dr. Erik Winter), steal him away and sell him to a Japanese business man that has promised to pay top dollar for Loch Nesshimi. But when little Timmy is found (the..ah…druid walked him back to camp) with the valuable bracelet, the evil-doers slyly steal the precious bracelet (IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY) and then decide to change their nefarious plans from dead monster meat to the druid jewelry business.

Herein lies the first time my son spots a mistake in continuity.

For the record let me just restate that he is FIVE years old. Movies with ice-age dinosaurs, monsters with removable eyes, and a universe of talking cars all make sense to him. What does NOT make sense is why these bad people are allowed to steal this kid’s valuable bracelet and then NEVER GIVE IT BACK. EVER. EVEN UNTIL THE END OF THE MOVIE.

Jerks.

But they don’t and I have to explain that A) those people are mean and B) this is a terrible movie. He is now on board with me because there is altogether too much C) talking about relationships in this supposedly kid-friendly movie.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that the mom finally caught up with Dr. Erik Winter and now they are together trying to find little Timmy who has gone off with the Oakie the pseudo-druid to save a magical rock from the evil-doers. But really they (mom and not-dead dad) are just arguing about why they broke up 12 years ago and which one of them is a bigger idiot (I’m paraphrasing.) Plus, there’s a bad guy with a gun.

The story jumps back and forth between the parental argu*yawn*ment and little Timmy following the pseudo-druid around, saying “GOD DAMMIT” and “SHIT!” every other sentence which is scandalous even for me. And I like swearing.

All the while my poor son keeps pointing to the cover of the movie and asking “When are we going to see This?”

Never son. This is a lame-ass movie.

As we watch, it slowly dawns on him that he may have wasted his chance at getting a new movie on poorly dubbed, Made-for-German-TV drivel. It breaks my heart to see him learn such harsh lessons.

But I like to look on the bright side of things. So, although we wasted almost 90 minutes watching a terrible movie, I got to mediate my son’s first experience with false advertising. We talked about it afterward and, to my surprise, he was not as upset about the bad guys getting away with theft as I thought he would be. He seems to have figured out that you can dislike a movie, not because the bad guys are scary and mean, but because the entire plot is mind-numbingly stupid.

I am so proud.

So, to make up for the disappointment, I promised him we would watch a bona fide good movie next weekend for family movie night. Now I’m trying to decide between Time Bandits and The Never Ending Story.

Having seen neither movie, Catfish is angling for The Never Ending Story. I suspect this may be because he thinks it means that he can watch TV for the rest of forever.

P.S. The mysterious cab driver turned out to be Merlin. HA! I bet you didn’t see that one coming!

You’ve seen the 2006 version with Daniel Craig, no? That was an awesome movie. A little parkour, a little black tie, a little flash and roll – it’s a very good time.

This was not the 2006 version. Nope.

Not by a looooooooooong shot.

This was the original 1967 version starring David Niven, Peter Sellers (sort of), Orson Wells, Ursula Andress, don’t forget Woody Allen, and just about anybody that walked into the studio and asked for a part.

Had I known it was a satire of the Bond films before I watched it. . . .

. . . .No. Actually, that could not have made it any better. It may have kept me from being so scandalized at the end. It may have swayed my decision to watch the movie at the start.

I can honestly say that I’m glad I saw this movie if only for the fact that I never ever have to see it again.

EVAR.

This was, without a doubt, the strangest and most confusing film I’ve seen since The Man Who Fell to Earth. And in TMWFTE at least I got the gist of it even if I fell asleep four or five times.

This was more like “Laugh-in” meets “Benny Hill” appearing together in a Vegas stand-up act to make fun of PBS’s “Mystery” series while swathed in velvet and feathers. If asked to describe it in one word I would have to say

WTF?

Is about as one-wordy as I can get. As far as the non-existent plot goes here is what I gleaned from the movie (and the subsequent Wikipedia article I had to read to learn what the hell I just watched)

James Bond retired in 1917 after luring his one and only love, Mata Hari, over the border to France in order to face a firing squad. For some reason the British Secret Service needs him back so they devise a plan to bring him back into the fold by blowing up his house. In the explosion ‘M’ dies and he has to return the only extant piece of him, his toupee, to his Scottish widow. Evil super-group SMERSH found out that’s where he would be and planted all sorts of honey-traps posing as the widow and her bazillion daughters….

…oh good lord, You know what?  If you really want to know what the hell happens in this train wreck, read the Wiki article on the plot like I did because I can’t even begin to regurgitate it.

That was FUCKING AWESOME.

Dear Catherine Hardwicke,

Seriously?

The book was 498 pages long.

From pages 423 to 452 there is a bit about a fiend that wants to kill Isabella Swan because he is an actual blood sucking jackass vampire.

The rest of the story is all teen hormones and “oh-I-love-him/her-so-much-s/he-just-doesn’t-understand”

Don’t get me wrong now, the 13 year old girl inside of me has already read the book three times. But seriously Ms Hardwicke, for a book that is literally steeped in unrequited teenage, virginal-vampire suck-face there is surprisingly little actual falling in love happening in your movie.

There is a lot of brooding (as there is in the book so I guess, good on ya there). There is a surfeit of scenery and there is a virtual cornucopia of eyebrows.

And yet I remain confused as to how the characters go from”Oh, it’s that chicky again. I think I’m gonna throw up” to “You are my own personal brand of heroin” and never really sit down and get all dreamy with each other. I mean, how do they flirt through all the eyebrows? (more…)