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Shobhit picked me up at work at 4:00 yesterday, and then we drove all the way down to Renton to see an advanced screening of a small movie starring Steve Coogan called
The Penguin Lessons. And it was . . . fine. Solid B.
It gave us something to do. Although I'm not fully convinced it was worth the effort: leaving work half an hour early, driving 40 minutes to get there, driving 40 minutes to get back. We also stopped at both the Tukwila Costco and the Central District PCC on the way back, which meant I couldn't even start writing my review until 9:00, even though the movie got out at about 7:00.
I wrote a bit about this in the review: Shobhit got an invite to this screening through AARP's "
Movies for Grownups." Shobhit is 51 so he gets regular commumications from AARP, but of course the people most active in these things are much, much older. There was maybe a 90% chance I was the only person in that theater still in their forties. Maybe an 80% chance Shobhit was the only one still in their fifties. There was a lot of white hair in that room.
The screening was at 5:00, and we didn't get in there until about ten minutes before that. Only the front two rows still had available seats, so we sat in the middle of the second row. It wasn't ideal, but we made it work.
There was an older lady volunteer who spoke briefly before the movie started. She clearly did not have a working knowledge of how movies or genres work. "It's called a dramedy," she said, "which is both a drama and a comedy. Which doesn't make any sense, but, okay." She was clearly reading off some kind of information sheet. She noted some information that sounded like it had come from focus groups. Not very many people expressed interest in this movie (great selling point!), but the people who did see it were glad they did. Where do I fall, then? I was actually interested in this movie once I found out about it—I like Steve Coogan well enough, and was compelled by the premise—but was somewhat indifferent to have seen it. As I said, it gave us something to do for the evening.
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— पांच हजार सात सौ अस्सी एक —
Once I was done writing my review at home, Shobhit showed me
that AARP web page for "Movies for Grownups," who no longer has any in-person screenings listed. There are several virtual screenings, and none of them look as compelling as
The Penguin Lessons did. And that movie was just . . . good enough.
Shobhit can almost always predict the grade I'm going to give a movie. We were walking back out to the parking garage at The Landing shopping center in Renton, and he just said, "B?" I chuckled and said: "Yes."
Anyway, the movie, the shopping, and writing the review took up my entire evening. I'm only posting a tad later than usual now because I had this week's Office Relocation Committee meeting and, to my moderate annoyance, they always have them scheduled during the lunch hour. Which means I need to post this and get back to work!
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[posted 1:09pm]
