so we may have a solution to the new, communistic, policy at the drive in of “no pets allowed.” and that’s all i’m going to say about that, but as it turns out, policy or no policy we would have forgone these first two weeks of the 2007 drive in season. they opened last weekend w/ Happy Feet & Casino Royale. huh? those movies are out on dvd now aren’t they, wtf? and this week the features are new but quite undesirable: Wild Hogs (ick), Blades of Glory (ehww), Norbit (pass), and Bridge to Terabithia (who?). think i’ll save my money this weekend.

speaking of saving money on movies, we have been watching movies via this great (in theory), new program from Tivo. now, if you have a tivo with a network connection you can download/rent movies from amazon. it’s called unbox. so you just register for the service on tivo.com then go to amazon.com/unbox and pick your movie, download it and pay for it thru amazon - they’re like $1.99 to $3.99 per. once downloaded they will stay on the now playing list on your Tivo for 30 days - but once you hit play, you have 24 hours to finish watching it before it self-destructs. there is currently a free-trial offer that gives you $15 to spend downloading movies. so why is it only “in theory” a great program??? because in practice it sucks! it is so not user friendly! it is so hard, once you have selected a movie, to figure out if it is actually downloading or not, or to see what you have already downloaded, etc. then amazon randomly charged us a dollar, which made no sense, so m called and yelled at them and they credited the dollar back, but at the same time wiped out the 3 movies we had downloaded and we had to start over, grr!! but ok, let’s call this the beta period and there are bound to be a few bugs; here’s the bigger issue… the selection of movies is really sub-par. i would not have believed there were so many movies out there that i had never heard of. it’s like the wost collection of movies ever assembled. there’s pretty much nothing new, apparently they are not made available until they have been out on dvd for several months.

but i found a few that i had been unwilling to take a chance on at hollywood video and downloaded them to my tivo for free. here they are along with what i thuoght of them:

Lady In The Water - UNWATCHABLE! makes “The Village” look like… (insert name of some movie that everybody agrees is great)! and i HATED “The Village!” it made me angry! but this one didn’t even do that. and yo, M., having a cameo in all your own movies is pretty cliche (you’re no Hitchcock, dude!), but to cast your self as one of the main characters is really lame, and really self-indulgent (you’re not an actor, dude!). absolutely awful, not suspensful, completely non-sensical. i want my money back - i don’t care that it was free!

Saw III - UNWATCHABLE! not that the first two were stellar, so i wasn’t expecting much, but soooooo stupid. not scary, just gross, and when gross is completely pointless it gives horror movies a bad/worse name. not that it didn’t have a plot, it did, a really stupid one. but enough already, mr. jigsaw, who appointed you judge judy and executioner for everybody?!

The Descent - SUPER-DUPER SCARY! also very, very gross, but the grossness served a purpose (tho they did go overboard with it). i am a bit claustrophobic so i was pretty stressed out from five minutes into the spelunking scenes, and it never let up. and they do something at the end that none of these movies has done before to make it unpredictable, and i appreciate that. wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone, but for the genre it’s pretty good!

The Prestige - pretty good, way better than “The Illusionist.” keeps you guessing. weird, but i liked it.

The Illusionist - okay, but not nearly as good as “The Prestige.” very slow start, fairly predictable twist, but not bad.

Man About Town - never heard of it, wouldn’t have watched it if it wasn’t staring Ben Affleck (and it wasn’t free), but it was ok, nothing special. you could see it.

let’s see… i think that’s it, but I do have more credit because amazon screwed up the billing again, and got yelled at again. but i’m gonna have to wait until there’s something better to download. geesh!

in the meantime, headed to hollywood video this week, pretty excited about seeing “children of men,” and maybe “pursuit of happyness” too. and maybe i’ll sit in the crv and watch them and pretend i’m at the drive in with my pet!