Last night. Enter.. Movie plans, dinner plans. Two things that seemingly are simple events to coordinate and find information on. The Movie: Mr and Mrs. Smith. The dinner, some place in “The Avenue” area of White Marsh Mall (which ended up being Red Brick Brewery restaurant). The Players: Myself and Laurie, Boehm and Erin, Jason and Rachel (With a special guest appearance by Jeff, Laurie and Erin’s friend from college).

Lets begin with the fact that stories are about getting there and not just about the outcome. At least the interesting parts to tell. Sure we saw a movie, and got some dinner, that was all well and good. In fact i thought Mr and Mrs Smith was a cute movie that ended up being much better than I was expecting. It also didn’t surprise me at the end when i realized it was directed by Doug Liman (who also directed Swingers, like my most watched movie of all time). Vince Vaughn was a great supporting character, though i always wish there was more Vince Vaughn, since he plays such a great character in movies. As for the main cast, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt. Lets just say, this movie was centered and written and directed around the premise that they wanted to draw the largest audience possible. So they basically got two hot stars (who could do action movies), guy and girl, (somebody for everybody basically) and put in a love relationship story with the backdrop of mass destruction, guns and bullets. You pull the guys with the destruction and hot woman, and the girls with the relationship story and brad pitt. Its really a brilliant formula. The movie was well done i thought (with the exception of some weird camera shots at the beginning that just didn’t seem to work). I mean it was a little predictable at times, but honestly with this type of movie its not the twist (which there still was a small one, which made it good) its about how they get from the beginning to end of what you were thinking kinda was going to happen. People love to call stories bad because they’re predictable, and i kind of scoff at that. There’s other reasons why a given story is bad that people usually don’t key into. There are many common predictable story arcs that many writers draw on. Thus they are predictable (i.e. good hero underdog triumphs over big evil seemingly invincible power). A truly good story teller will tell the story is such a way that makes you enthralled to take the journey from beginning to end, despite the fact that you kinda figure a certain end is in site.

With that said. After the film was over, we were all walking out of the theater and Boehm and Erin were talking about how much they liked the film. To which i decided to reply with “Meh, i dunno i thought it was kind of uninteresting and predictable, i didn’t like it very much.” To which i was met with shock and almost disgust by both boehm and erin. They at first thought i was joking, which i was of course, but I think some how my dead pan delivery of my statement of the films lack of worth really did have them going. They immediately keyed into the fact that I had liked 2 other movies that they thought were horrible, and at that point wrote off my opinion of the movie. The very fact of their opinion on those 2 movies was the reason i did this stunt actually. I guess you could say i was being slightly evil and pulling some strings that i really knew i could pull easily. I in fact had told Laurie, in the theater (upon hearing them talking about how much they liked it when they got up from their seats) that I was going to do this possibly at dinner, just to screw with them. I ended up laying into it a little earlier than I had first said (because the opportunity presented itself) and Laurie really just couldn’t contain herself. She just started laughing kind of hysterically at what i was doing. The funnier part was that I had told Laurie on our car ride up to the theater, about Boehm and Erin’s dislike of these two specific movies (one of which Laurie really liked as well and said she’d back me up on that it was really funny). In the end i didn’t make it out of the theater without spilling the beans that i really did like the movie and i was just screwing with them. Erin of course jokingly scowled at me, and my propensity to take advantage of the fact that i seem to be able to say things completely absurd to her and be convincing to the point that she needs to question if she really believes me or not. Hey its fun, it kind of goes with how Erin and I interact.

After the movie Jason and Rachel had to split, because Rachel wasn’t feeling too well (sorry Rachel! i hope you feel better). So the rest of us went over to Red Brick station brewery and had some late dinner. Laurie’s best friend through college, Jeff, met us there for a drink while we got food. He was a cool guy, and i think we connected when we both ganged up in picking on Laurie at one point through dinner. She’s tough though she can take it hah.

As for how this sequence of events got started and planned for Friday night. Let me just say the plan changed maybe 15 times in the course of two days. Wow i was tired of talking about it by the end. Sometimes people’s schedules are just difficult to work together. Oh well, it ended up being a fun night so no harm no foul.