Credit where credit is... Don't.

One of the guys at bowling said, "Hey, do you want to do something this weekend?", and since I can listen to a re-airing of A Prairie Home Companion online, I said I guess so.

We ate dinner at the Mellow Mushroom. Do you know how hard it is to find a pizza place that offers sliced meatballs as a topping? Almost as hard as finding a pizza place that offers a white pizza. (Note: I have seen only one place that offers lobster pizza since my parents spoke of one in Milwaukee, where they lived after they got married.) I'm going to have to go back to this place because I couldn't eat both at once -- and, maybe, if I don't go on a Saturday night, it won't be so crowded and loud. (Don't bother with dessert. A short walk will take you to an ice cream place where you can get a good sundae for less than a $6 lemon bar.)

Just up the street, past the perfectly good theater they closed last year when they opened the new one for no good reason other than it was new (according to my companion), is the movie theater. (Gosh, I love the proximity of things in downtowns.) I had warned him that I wasn't a movie-goer, but he came to understand this when I noted that two of the movies available were sequels of movies I hadn't even heard of in the first place. One is based on a video game (a video game?); one is a chick-flick (ick); one is yet another Robin Hood movie (with an Australian actor in the lead) -- and what's the deal with 3-D movies nowadays? I thought 3-D died with Vincent Price. (Actually, I thought it died before Vincent Price.) We settled on the sequel of something called Shrek. It was actually pretty decent for a stand-alone movie, as the beginning gave me enough background to follow along.

The next clue to my companion that I'm not a movie-goer was the mild chest pain I suffered when I saw how much the ticket was. And, no, I do not want to donate that extra fifty cents to the local hospital (although I might have needed their help if I had gone to see what the concession prices were) because I'm already aghast at paying $9.50 to see a movie. Isn't there a cut-rate theater in town that shows movies weeks or months later for just a couple of bucks? At least we didn't go for the 3-D version, which would have cost a third more. Next time, can we at least go to a matinee (which is only slightly better priced)?

I was pleased, however, when I saw that the theater had a wide aisle between upper and lower tiers. Someplace in this world actually offers leg room! (And I only had to retract my legs twice, when theater-goers walked by.) If the rocking seats had stayed in the slightly reclined position, I might've fallen asleep. Check that. Sleep wouldn't have been possible because the volume was cranked to a nearly painful decibel level. (You remember that scene in the Tiny Toon movie How I Spent My Summer Vacation? Buster and Babs go to a movie. When it starts, the sound blasts them back into their chairs, and the movie screen shows, "The audience is now deaf." That's what it was like.)

At the end of the movie, I was interested in seeing the song credits (for what is ostensibly a children's movie, it sure had a lot of songs that I recognized). Naturally, they were at the very end of the credits, just before the year and copyright information.

For the life of me, I can't understand why everyone and his dog has to be included in the credits nowadays. In the "good old days", like the movies shown on TCM, you see just the actors and the key production people. (Incidentally, the guy's name you see on some of the old Technicolor productions was on my mom's side of the family.)

I'm serious. When I saw "Facilities" listed in the credits, I knew they had gone too far. When you go to a movie, do you care about the people who change the light bulbs, clean the toilets, or mow the lawns at the building where all the computer animators work? If someone filmed a movie here where I work, would they also need to credit the nursery that grew the trees you see in the background? What about the truck driver who delivered the trees? What about the employees who planted and watered and fertilized the trees? Enough is enough.

Well, yeah, I was cranky. It was six hours between meeting for dinner and the end of the movie (what with all the strolling around downtown we had to do because we missed the earlier showing), and I normally would've been in bed three hours before that. Wouldn't you be cranky, too?