Started another beautiful spring day with two swashbuckling Backyardigans episodes. Tyrone and Pablo are "The Two Musketeers" who fight the Empress' Guards (Uniqua and Austin). A mysterious masked girl wants to join them, but they keep telling her no...until she proves herself worthy of being a musketeer by rescuing them. Librarian Uniqua becomes "The Lone Returner," another masked heroine, when a book is missing from her stacks in Vejos, California. When Don Austin takes off with an overdue book, Uniqua follows him to the borders of Mexico to get it back!
Thankfully, work was far easier and quieter than yesterday. There were still a few grumps around, but most people were just happy to be enjoying weather that jumped into the mid-to-upper 60s. It got so quiet, at one point, I helped one of the baggers return carts. My relief was on time, and I had no problems getting in or out. I bought two boxes of frozen vegetables on sale and headed home.
I changed into lighter clothes and spent the rest of a gorgeous evening cleaning, baking cookies, and watching movies. I did Trading Places as I scrubbed the bathroom. A pair of elderly billionaire brothers who are also obnoxious misers (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) make a bet that they can't turn a criminal into an upper-crust scion...and a scion into a criminal. The men they choose for their experiment are con man Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) and broker Louis Winthrope III (Dan Ackroyd). Soon, a bemused Valentine finds himself wearing fancy suits and learning all about commodities trading, while Winthrope finds himself out of a job and a fiancee and living with a sharp-witted prostitute (Jamie Lee Curtis). When both men discover the scheme, they enlist the prostitute and Winthrope's butler (Denhom Elliot) to beat the billionaires at their own game.
While the trading scheme is dated (computers and stricter rules about trading enacted several years after this movie came out apparently makes the brothers' plot impossible today), the comedy about nature vs nurture and how people would react if their circumstances are changed remains pretty funny. Murphy and Ackroyd are good as the pair who learn what it's like to live on the other sides of their respective tracks; Curtis is even better as the sensible street woman. For fans of John Landis' other comedies, the cast, or 80s movies.
I'd moved on to making quick soup of canned chicken and leftover veggies and the next movie after briefly sweeping the last of the sticker balls off the porch. Now You See Me also involves an elaborate scheme to get back at the rich. We move from high finance to the world of magic, magicians, and illusion vs reality. Four solo magicians (Woody Harrison, Isla Fisher, Jesse Eisenburg, and Dave Franco) are brought together to become "The Four Horsemen," who use their illusions to rob banks and give the proceeds to the audience. The FBI, including the determined Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and French newcomer Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent), want to figure out how they're pulling off these magic tricks. So does a former magician (Morgan Freeman) who now discredits magicians on TV for a living. But the real "man behind the man" isn't whom anyone expects, least of all the Horsemen themselves....
While many critics complained loudly about plot holes, I was trying too hard to figure out what everyone was doing and when to see any myself. If you love the cast or twisty comic thrillers with a slight supernatural angle, you'll really enjoy this one. Ruffalo was the stand out as the by-the-book agent; Freeman also had fun as the smug former magician who tries to be one step ahead of everyone else, including the police. This was a big hit last summer, and I can see why - you'll probably need a couple of viewings to catch all the clues and plot points. Highly recommended for fans of the cast or of Ocean's 11-esque light caper films.
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