DAY 22: CALLING BIRDS TASTE LIKE CHICKEN

Modern thinking holds that when hot women dress up in costume, nine out of ten times they're going to be a slutty version of whatever they're supposed to be. Most of you have heard this piece of conventional wisdom before, especially if you're a fan of the show How I Met Your Mother. In fact, I think NPH's character Barney Stinson might have been the genius behind the theory. Think about it, you're in your twenties, Halloween rolls around, you hit a couple parties or do a Fright Night bar crawl and there's wave after wave of slutty nurses, slutty soldiers, slutty nuns, slutty cops and slutty super heroes as far as the eye can see. The sole exception to that last example being Wonder Woman. Then it's just a chick dressed as Wonder Woman since there really is no point in trying make that slutty, the normal costume does just fine on its own. (Shameless hussy!)

Well from what I've seen these days the same holds true for movies. Take any movie, make it about Christmas, next thing you know, shitty movie. A comedy with a Christmas slant becomes a shitty comedy, story of love set during the holidays becomes a shitty love story. Talking animal movies are the exception though, those are always just shitty no matter what. They're like the Wonder Woman of the film world. So it's no surprise that a Christmas mystery like Deck the Halls would turn out to be one shitty mystery.

First off I have to explain the graphic up top. I DVRed this one thinking it would be the Danny Devito/Matthew Broderick comedy you see on the left. Realized how wrong I was within the first five or ten… all right, more like twenty-five minutes. But it was still about Christmas so I went with it. I mean really, what was I gonna do otherwise, change the channel and look for something else? That's like effort or something. Shit, if I'm gonna do that then I might as well do… whatever it is people do when they're not sitting in front of the TV. Not really sure what that is, but I don't think I'd like it too much.

So the fun begins in this film when a dude dressed as Santa Claus kidnaps the owner of a funeral home and his limo driver mere days before Christmas. Said funeral home proprietor is the father of private detective Regan Reilly and husband of famous mystery author Nora Reilly. Santa and his little helper hold the dude and the driver for ransom, demanding $5,000,000 from the little woman's mystery novel empire. But Daddy's darling girl is on the case with a little help from some nosy chick she meets in the dentist's office. (HUH?) Together with nosy chick's bumbling hubby in tow they pound the pavement looking for the perp.

This movie was based on a novel by Mary Higgins Clark and her mom Carol. Apparently it's part of a series of books about Regan Reilly. And nothing in the movie made me want to run out and get any of the other books. Well, not really that I'd run anywhere, more like if I were so inclined I'd download it to my Kindle from the comfort of my couch. Didn't really want to do that either because I didn't care enough about the story or the characters or the plot or the clumsy way the detective duo stumbled through a series of lame clues to find the kidnapper and save the day. So no, won't be downloading any of those books any time soon… or ever. Besides, even if the story was really good and I'd wanted to buy the book series, my Kindle was all the way upstairs somewhere I think. That's kinda far and I was pretty comfortable on the couch so that thing might as well have been in Budapest for all the effort I was gonna make to go find it. I really am a lazy son of a bitch.

Regan's parents Nora and Luke Reilly were played in the film by veteran thespians (old-ass actors) Jane Alexander and David Selby respectively. This pairing made it kind of difficult for me to watch any scenes where the family was all together, especially at the end when Nora and Luke are reunited and spend a good two minutes snogging like a couple of teenagers.

snog |snäg| Brit., informal
verb ( snogged , snogging ) [ trans. ]
kiss and caress amorously.

There now, you've learned something today.

It wasn't Nora and Luke's amorous nature alone that made watching them a chore, it was the fact that back in '07 these two veteran thespians played a common law couple in HBO's rather graphic and sexually explicit series Tell Me You Love Me. And when I say graphic I mean… well it was all fine and good when the episodes focused on the young folks but then there were scenes where… Well I guess it's nice to know ladies are willing to do certain things for their men even when they're in their 70s, it's just kind of shocking to see them actually doing it. You don't expect to witness that sort of thing on television. You also don't expect to feel certain things inside… certain longings and desires you didn't know existed within you.

So anyway, yeah… kinda hard to see those two together again. I didn't mean hard… I meant it wasn't easy…

Shut up! They told us in health class that it was only natural for that to happen sometimes! Stop laughing at me! I'm not a freak!