Thank You For the Music

The local property inspector came by this morning while I was making my bed to make sure all the outlets were now up to code. He left satisfied, and I finished my bed and did my chores. Since it was raining and much cooler, I spent the morning baking Banana Muffins and finishing Iron Man and watching Mamma Mia!

Both movies were equally good, but in quite different ways. Iron Man is the Batman-like story of the spoiled playboy owner of a company that specializes in missiles and other military weapons of destruction. The playboy is taken prisoner while demonstrating his own weapons in Afghanistan...and is aghast when he sees what they're doing to both Americans and Middle East residents alike. He's hit by shrapnel and is only kept alive by a machine his company created. He escapes via a high-tech suit of armor he built himself. When he returns to the US, he vows to give up building weapons of destruction, which doesn't sit well with his scuzzy second-in-command who has been making deals with both sides...

While I didn't like it quite as much as the X-Men movies, there's still much to enjoy in Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr's excellent performance as the conflicted title superhero, a man who learns a very hard and damaging lesson about taking responsibility lightly, really makes the movie. Gwyneth Paltrow is also good as his girl Friday.

Going in totally the opposite direction on the hormones meter, Mamma Mia! is the very girlie tale of a young woman who lives on a remote Greek island with her single mother. Mom runs a ramshackle hotel on the island, staffed by locals and barely staying open. The girl is about to get married and wants to be given away by her father...if only she knew who she was. She finds a diary of her mother's that mentions three men whom she may have slept with the year she was born and takes it on herself to invite the trio to the island for the wedding. She thinks it'll be easy to decide which one is Daddy...but could you pick between Colin Firth and Pierce Bronsonan? Not to mention, Mom and her own buddies don't take it well...

And yes, there is lots and lots of ABBA performed. This is 110 percent a woman's movie. From the teary mother-daughter relationships to the music belted every five minutes and the goofy plot and crazy numbers (you've never lived until you've seen Meryl Streep and half the women on a Greek island performing "Dancing Queen"), no man should go within a hundred miles of this unless they're a major ABBA fan, a fan of musicals, or were dragged along by their wives. And yes, being a fan of ABBA and of musicals in general is also required. At least 20 ABBA songs are belted during the course of this movie, and not everyone doing the singing is actually good at it. (Pierce Bronsonan still makes great eye candy, but his singing's painful - and he has two major ballads. On the other hand, Meryl Streep has done musicals, and Christine Baranski's done Broadway for years.) I think this would be a great for anything involving groups of women, from girl's night in to a bridal shower or a bachelorette party.

The rain was long gone by the time the last note of "Dancing Queen" faded away. I took the time to finish up the raking. It only took me about a half-hour to rake the side path going to my apartment. There may be leaves on the ground, but it's nothing like the fall! Since I had time before work, I also ran Mamma Mia! and Iron Man back to the Oaklyn Library and picked up milk at WaWa.

Work was steady to busy for most of the night. No major problems, other than I left late because I didn't want to leave one person on duty, but it turns out there was no one else coming in.