For those of you interested in reading the Tool review I slapped together for the Des Moines Register, they’ve already archived the story on their web site. You can find it here.

I totally forgot to mention it, but Cami and I ended up going to Miracle on Friday night. It almost didn’t happen. Des Moines saw it’s 3 huge snowstorm in two weeks that day and it dumped another 4 inches on us. I spent an hour and a half shoveling out drifts from my driveway when I got home. By the time I was finished, I didn’t want to go anywhere!

But then movie geekdom got the better of me. I realized that if we didn’t see Miracle Friday night, we probably wouldn’t see it at all that weekend. Saturday night we were having dinner with friends and Sunday night is my all-important Simpsons/Sex and the City/Curb Your Enthusiasm entertainment block. I would go to a matinee… but I’m not 80 years old.

So, we caught the late show on Friday. By the way, did anyone else know that Miracle was over 2 hours long? Who would have guessed.

I really enjoyed the movie and that says a lot because I’m not usually one for sports movies nor do I know anything about hockey. Compound the issue with the fact that I already know how it ends and, well… that’s one sticky wicket.

Still, Miracle hits all the right notes. Inspiring. Emotional. Poignant without being too over the top. You can tell it was made with great care toward the players and their stories.

Kurt Russell knocks it out of the park (to mix metaphors) with his portrayal of Herb Brooks. He spends most of the movie being a hard ass to his players, but there are moments where Russell disarms him so completely with only a few glances… it’s amazing. It really is one of the best performances of his career.

I don’t know if anyone is going to walk out of Miracle thinking it’ll be a big Oscar winner. Most likely, we’ll forget about it by June. But it IS a finely-crafted movie and probably the best one of the year so far. See it now before it drops out of theaters.

On Saturday night, I went to a midnight showing of John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink. It’s the classic tale of love between a rich kid and a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Will their interclass love blossom, or will it wilt under societal pressure? It sounds timeless, doesn’t it? If you consider the number of laughs it got, I’d say no.

One scene in particular shows that Hughes aimed too high. On their first date, Andie (Molly Ringwald) and Blane (Andrew McCarthy) have a downright unpleasant time at a party where his friends harass her for being poor and then at a rock club where her friends harass him for being a preppy. When Andie gets home, she declares to her drunken, jobless father (who is curled up on the couch wearing nothing but a bathrobe, ick!) that she’s in love. The lousy setup isn’t the only reason that makes it hard to believe; McCarthy’s acting range consists of two emotions: boredom and a bug-eyed look of surprise. He’s a long way from anything that would make him close to charming.

Despite the acting and the writing, I’m not going to complain about all of the things that make it a bad film; it’s beyond that. It has entered the realm of it’s so bad it’s good. How can you not smile when Blane’s friend Steff (James Spader tells Blaine that he “wouldn’t be too jazzed about dating a girl like Andie.” The last time I heard the word “jazzed”, my mom was telling me how much she and my dad were looking forward to going on a cruise. Obviously, I’m being temporally centric and watching the movie from the perspective of 2004. It’s almost better that way. If not, I would have ignored the scene where Andie’s boss, the owner of a record store, proudly looks at the 78’s that she just stapled to the ceiling and says, “I love it. It’s so modern.” The biggest laugh comes from a scene involving an Apple IIE that would stupefy even today’s programmers.

Amidst blockbuster names like Ringwald and McCarthy, Jon Cryer steals the show as Duckie, Andie’s strangely-styled friend who is so enamored with her that he rides his BMX past her house fifty times a day. Cryer nails a scene where he lip syncs an Otis Redding tune so well that it almost makes you feel bad that he’s half a man on CBS.

When Jared posts these movies reviews of his, it makes me feel like I’m totally slouching when it comes to my movie habit.

Goodness, there was a lot of formatting in that post of his…