Good Movie Weekend

This past weekend thought it would be nice to take my wife to a dinner and a movie. Go me, I know. Unfortunately, living in semi-suburbia Riverdale, our options are limited for an all out night on the town. Long gone are evenings at Nobu followed by The Screening Room cocktails and film in TriBeCa...who am I kidding, it was more like Uncle Mo's and The Pavillion in Park Slope. Well, now it's more like The Cheesecake Factory and The AMC at The Palisades Mall. I know, you can smell the culture pesticide parking lot scent still on me from Saturday.

Anyways, beyond picking up a Yankee scented candle for my office (insert ambiguously gay joke here), we hit the latest Zach Braff film "The Last Kiss." In a building full of mega store chains totally devoid of authenticity, as the lights in theater dimmed, the screen delivered a refreshing jolt of originality.

I miss independent films. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie that I cared to remember. "The Last Kiss" is a story about facing life at a crossroads, making choices, being imperfect, and accepting that fact and moving forward. I thought the actors and script did a great job portraying their various mental states of confusion and struggle to find themselves. The fact that film's main characters were roughly the same age as me made the characters even more engaging and relative, even though unlike them, I was not a womanizing bachelor, a depressed recently dumped sad sack, a new father/verbally abused husband, or a soon-to-be father to a pregnant girlfriend.

I don't watch Scrubs on NBC, but I am becoming a Zach Braff fan (enter second ambiguously gay joke here). To boot, the soundtrack, like Garden State, is a winner.

And in case you were wondering, the candle scent was "Autumn Leaves." See you next year, summer.