No lightning at the drive-in, but the rain was pleasant.
Spider-Man was enormously fun (although my irrational conviction that Tobey Maguire was somehow channelling former CBLDF head honcho Chris Oarr kept giving it a slightly surreal quality: I kept expecting him to hit Mary Jane up for a CBLDF membership). Once Spidey was done, everyone else gave up then and drove home, and Holly and I stayed and saw
The Panic Room, a film of astonishing not-good-ness, particularly considering the director. It was, for want of a better word,
plotty in silly ways -- nothing felt like it happened because that was how it happened, it felt like it happened like that because that was what it said in the script. And it was predictable in stupid ways [
Panic Room SPOILERS ahead] ("Ah," I say to myself, as soon as the criminals come on, "A whiny snotty one, a good guy doing this for his kids, and an evil psycho. Well, the snotty one has to be killed early on by the psycho, and then the good guy has to save them from the psycho at the end," because I've seen lousy movies and movies-of-the-week with that sort of plot before and that's always how it goes.)
Which is the other good thing about being at the drive-in. I can sit there in my car predicting the rest of the movie, and saying things like, "She's talking to the cops. The bad guys can't hear her, they just know she's talking. Why doesn't she just say to the cops, 'My daughter's locked in upstairs with the two surviving criminals and we're in big trouble. Please now walk back to your cars and try to give the impression you've gone away because this is going to get nasty for us if you don't'?" And my daughter can say, "But if she did that it wouldn't be a movie, would it, Dad. Now please be quiet". You can't do that in a cinema, not if you have any consideration for your fellows.
