Movie Night: Cats and Dogs

Those of you who've been around Kal's World for a while are familiar with Movie Night. This is when we break out The Sandra Bullock Scale© to rate the Saturday night movie choices of the Jones Clan.

The Sandra Bullock Scale© was devised to rate a movie sleepability, due to my inability to stay awake through any Sandra Bullock film since Demolition Man. A perfect score of five out of five represents a movie's a) stupifying boredom combined with b) lack of even token nudity despite hot chickage [see Practical Magic... what a waste of time, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock and zero nudity... Rated PG-13 for sensuality my fanny...])

Cats And Dogs (2001)

This movie was the purrfect (bwa ha ha, I kill me!) Sandra Storm.

1) I've already seen it at least five times
2) It's a stupid movie
3) I'd been raking leaves all day so I was kind of tired anyway.

You see, we've finally broken down and gotten Netflix. Now, this is great because our local rental shop closed down over the summer (due to Netflix), and the closest rental place is the next town over that we generally go to twice a month for groceries, so we've been spending an average of $15 per rental, when figuring in all the fascist late fees.

Netflixhas been great. We've been getting two movies a week, and haven't had a problem watching them over the weekend and returning them in time for two new movies the following week.

Last week, however, I had to mail the movies back from Pleasantville instead of Boston, and the pony must have been sick, because I cut it a bit too close and with the federal holiday on Saturday we missed getting back one of the movies in time.

(A digression, if I may. The Pleasantville Post Office is a small branch personed [can't say "manned" anymore] by two people with the urgency of... well... two not very urgent people. They really belong off in Vermont or something, but we're stuck with them. Fine. That's okay, I'm generally not interacting with them too much, since I work normal human hours I leave town and get back to town long before they've opened at 9am and boarded up at 3pm. [Or something like that, I really can't be bothered with the details right now.] But on a couple of occassions recently I've had need of them during a normal business day.

So I trundle up to the Post Office, only to find that they're closed for lunch. They take a lunch hour! From 12:30 to 1:30 they're closed. WTF? There's two people in the office. How hard would it be for one person to cover the desk while the other one scarfs up their Campbell's Soup in their lovely Mr. Zip thermos? [I've got one of those from 1974, it's a prized possession].

And wouldn't lunch hour be the exact time when a service industry person be most needed by those of us who have real jobs? We're going to slip out during lunch and buy our stamps or pick up our certified letters from lawyers threatening us that unless we don't stop sending those love letters to Kate Hudson there's going to be real trouble, but, jeez, it seems that she and Owen are taking some time off from each other, and little Ryder really needs a father figure and...

Oh... Sorry about that.

BTW: Kate: call me...

Any way... Okay, better get back to the main point of this post...

Digression: Off)

Yes, hmm... where were we? Oh, yes. So no kid movie from Netflix this week, and we had to plumb the vast catalog of Family Jones-owned movies for the evening juvenile movie. The Boy, whose turn it was to pick the movie, came up with this stinker. I think I lasted ten minutes. But since I've seen it like eleventy-hundred times before, a couple of notes:

1) How depressing would it have been if this had been Charlton Heston's last movie? As it is, he only did four movies after this (assuming he's done with acting, which I would say is the case four years after a diagnosis of suspected Alzheimer's disease).

2) We have to put a stop to stars having children. This is what happens when stars have children, they make these crappy kid movies. I've got to believe that was the case with Heston, he was doing this for his grandkids -unless his Alzheimers is more advanced than otherwise thought, and he thought he was signing on to some sequel to Planet of the Apes or something... Ye Gods.

3) There is no three. Really. This movie stunk. All over.

Look, I like kids movies. I like not having to think too much about the plot and I feel smart when I get the jokes obviously targeted at at the parents in the crowd.

But this movie didn't have any of that. And, on top of that, it went out of its way to annoy you. It also miscast just about every voice part, with the exception of the puppy voiced by Tobey Maguire, who pulled off the naive newbie routine. But people like Jon Lovitz, Sean Hayes (Jack! of Will and Grace), and Alec Baldwin use so much physicality in their acting they're wasted in a voice only role. Beyond the "oh, yeah, that's so-and-so" they didn't bring anything to the roles.

So, the rating. I was toying with the idea of a "6 out of 5" Sandras award for a movie so awful that you actually try to go to sleep during it to save yourself from having to watch, but that would require work;

Cats and Dogs earns...

5 out of 5 Sandras

Next up: the adult movie of the evening, Thank You for Smoking.

And Kate: really, Wifeypooh would be okay with an open relationship kind of thing. I'll treat you better than Owen, and I won't look like a homeless person like Chris...