Friday Jon and I were going to go out for dinner and a movie for our date night, but decided we’d rather stay in and watch some of the DVD’s that we keep buying and never watching. Watched “The Mechanic” with Jason Statham, and Ben Foster, it’s a remake of the 1970s movie of the same name with Charles Bronson in the lead role, and a young Jan-Michael Vincent in the co-star roll. I really enjoyed the original movie, and was looking forward to seeing this one. I usually enjoy Statham in any action roll, but not this time. He was still as good as he always is in the heavy athletic rolls, and as he says in the extras, “Stunt doubles don’t have much of a chance with me.” He really does do his own stunts and there are some incredible ones in this movie. But Jon and I both found this new version to be brutal. There’s no other word for it. It wasn’t just violent, but that one step more to brutal. I’ve seen worse, but they made you care about the characters, so the violence was felt as well as seen and that makes a big difference. In a way it’s a compliment to the film that we never want to see it again. Then we needed to cleanse our pallets to something a little lighter. That Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows 7.1 was a step up in cheerfulness should clue you to how dark “The Mechanic” was, because Harry 7.1 is not a cheerful film, but then it wasn’t a cheerful book either. But now we’ve watched it and Jon has agreed to see the latest Harry Potter movie in the theater with me. I’m a bigger fan than he is of the later books. Date night finished the way all good date nights should with nefarious fun.
Saturday Meerkat and Chica brought the truck back from ComicCon and Jon and I helped them unpack it. Then they went off for lunch, and our friend, Charles, came to visit. We’d all planned to go out shooting some of the bigger guns, but it was storming and outdoor shooting doesn’t work in lightning and thunder, so we did lunch, and caught a movie. We saw “Cowboys and Aliens”. It was a wonderful film, with some dark moments full of high emotional content so if you have little ones it maybe too harsh for them, but other than the little ones I recommend this movie. It’s the best Western I’ve seen in years, and it has science fiction and cool, scary aliens! It’s like a cross between “Shane”, “Aliens”, and Clint Eastwood’s early Spaghetti Westerns, but higher production value, and much more character development. It’s one of the few films I’ve seen where almost every single character that has more than one scene on screen had wonderful character growth and just good scenes. This is an actor and writer’s movie, because it’s good for both. It’s also a really amazing action flick, and has some genuinely scary moments. Special effects are amazing, and the stunt doubles earned their money on this one. All three of us loved it! Since we hadn’t seen Charles in at least two months, we did dinner, as well, and just caught up. There’s always so much when you haven’t seen your friends for awhile.
Sunday, Chica and I met for breakfast just us and totally blew our diet with International House of Yumminess. I have a real weakness for their strawberry and banana pancakes. I ate my eggs first. We hadn’t seen each other in two weeks and we caught up with some serious sister time. 🙂 Then we got Jon breakfast to go went back to the house and got ready for Grandma to drop Trinity off so we could all go shooting. It was beautiful day, no storms to stop us this time. Chica hadn’t been shooting in years, but she’d never shot an AR. She loved it! Jon worked with her while I continued Trinity’s shooting education in the next booth. She was still working with her Remington 514 .22. It’s a bolt action which helps you concentrate on each shot as you learn. But all three of us girls had trouble with the only targets available at the outdoor range. All three of us are dyslexic in varying degrees, and the new targets had multiple targets on one piece of paper, and the pattern was too busy for our dyslexia. That meant that sighting down the barrel and taking our time to aim meant the target began to waver, or almost strobe, which made it difficult to aim well. I’ve never had this much trouble with any target, but then I usually use a simple silhouette, or bad guy target, but this range won’t let you use man-shaped target. We never realized that being dyslexic could be a problem at the range. I used Trinity’s rifle trying to find a fix around the problem that we share and finally found that if I shouldered the rifle, did a quick look down field, then looked away again to rest my eyes, then point and shoot. Point and shoot isn’t the best way to get great scores at the range, but it was the only way to work around the “moving” target. One of the range masters was helpful once he understood the problem, but he told me that if I could shoot like that with point and shoot, that it was pretty good. I did manage to cluster so if the target had been a bad guy they wouldn’t have been happy, with a .22 it would have been a quick kill, but eventually it would have been, though, honestly, I wouldn’t want a small caliber bolt action to be my only gun at such close quarters – not enough time to get off the multiple rounds you’d need for stopping. We called it and had a late lunch, then back to the house where Jon and Chica cleaned the AR’s and loaded magazines for next time. Trinity was on her computer and doing Hero Factory. Somewhere in there we also watched “Guys & Dolls” which Trinity needed to watch because she’s practicing some of the songs from it. Her teacher had recommended she watch, and it’s not a hardship to watch one of the old Hollywood musicals. As Chica said, “Perfect lightning, and wonderfully romantic.” She’s right, though, weirdly, I’d never thought of it that way, not sure why.
Now I have our pug, Sasquatch, is napping in my lap trying to push my iPad out of the way with his “elbow”, Trinity is on her computer, Chica is looking at gun parts on her iPad, and Jon is puttering on his computer. One of us will occasionally call out what they’re looking at, or ask a question of the others. It’s the techie equivalent of all of us reading different books, but sharing fun parts out loud. Time to think about dinner, but first, tea.