Lately – and by “lately,” you know I mean for the past several months – I have had the strongest urge to see movies in the theater. Unfortunately, my budget and schedule are not so accommodating to my various entertainment cravings.

That is where Redbox comes in, of course, and I am always thankful for dollar rentals. Especially when we find ourselves trapped in a rut of renting lame movies!

The good news is twofold. One, the lame movies all had leading men who are, as my title indicates, quite easy on the eyes. And two, we finally got a night out and an actual theater movie – and the movie was great. Here are my brief reviews.

Me and Orson Welles: I’m not going to lie to you. After I watched Zac Efron in 17 Again, I looked him up on IMDB to make sure he was, in fact, of legal age. Since I now know that he IS, I don’t feel [too] weird telling that he’s totally cute in this movie, too. And more importantly (AHEM),  this movie – though a bit slow – was a nice, feel-good story and a pretty educational (at least to me) period piece about theater in the 30s.

Just for the record, though, I have had to re-type the title of this movie twice now, because I cannot bring myself to automatically say “me and Orson Welles” instead of “Orson Welles and me.”

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: I think this movie might have seemed better if I’d gone in with the right expectations, or at least the understanding that it would basically be a live-action version of Aladdin. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that it was based on a video game. That probably should have been my first clue that it wouldn’t be a work of art. However, it does feature Jake Gyllenhaal doing his best impression of Aladdin. So there’s that.

Iron Man 2: I’d heard that this sequel wasn’t nearly as good as the first one. I don’t know how it could have been. Not that the original Iron Man was so incredible, but it was so surprisingly good. To me, it came out of nowhere. And I liked it a lot. This one? Not so much. As always, Robert Downey Jr. was fun and I always love Don Cheadle, but the movie was actually pretty boring. Also, Mickey Rourke is super creepy. (So was his character.)

Now for the good movie!

A couple weeks ago, my parents kept Annalyn for the weekend so Mark and I could redecorate her room (a.k.a. move in her “big girl bed” and try not to cry too long about how she used to be a baby). We did that but also took advantage of our kid-free evening and went on an actual date. After stuffing ourselves with Mexican food, we saw Red in the theater.

It was SO good. (And they played seven previews before it, which we both love, so that was a point in its favor, too.)

I’m not saying it’s the best movie ever. But it was fun, it was funny, it was fairly clean, and we had a great time watching it. What more could we ask for?

Several times during the movie, people in the theater clapped. That’s right: APPLAUSE. Granted, this is a movie about retired (older) spies coming back for one last adventure and basically kicking the new, young folks’ tail. And, a large part of the audience in our theater fell into that retired (older) category. But still. The movie was so fun, you just can’t help rooting for the characters so much that you clap when they (and special effects) win the fights and take out the bad guys.

And, as it turns out, Bruce Willis – though bald and old enough to be my father – isn’t hard to watch for a couple hours either. Go figure.

What movies have you seen recently?

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