Pirates of the Caribbean, Too

I had an unexpected opportunity to have my two daughters (ages seven and thirteen) from mid-afternoon Friday until Saturday morning, so naturally I took advantage of it (I imagine that a common thread in this blog will be that I, as the non-custodial parent, won't get to see my kids nearly often enough). That meant that I had to come up with a quick entertainment plan, but this was easily achieved: Pirates of the Caribbean II opened on Friday and I would actually be able to get the girls into their first viewing of a kid flick before their mother (or mine) beat me to it (as they already have with Cars and Superman Returns and The Devil Wears Prada and just about everything else this summer). I'm kind of glad I missed out on Prada, though. Southern Man will go to chick flicks, but only when he must.

We had a couple of hours at my place first, where the girls jumped on the trampoline and threw together a quick dinner (I keep plenty of kid food like "Easy Mac" in the house for just such emergencies) while I did battle with a futon I had purchased earlier that day (the assembly of which is probably deserving of an entire post) and just generally enjoyed having my girls nearby. Then we made a quick run to the furniture store so I could check some assembly details on the futon (I swear, the instructions were originally written in Sanskrit, badly translated into Chinese, and then run through the babelfish to get an approximation of the King's English - and then photocopied a couple of dozen times until the illustrations were nice and fuzzy) and then headed to the Mall to do a little window-shopping and see the movie.

I'm not normally one to hit the concession stand, but the girls gave me the sad-eye treatment and I quickly caved. They are learning all too quickly that their daddy misses them and will generally do whatever they want when we're together. We got our popcorn and headed down to the movie, hoping to hit the water fountains on the way in. Note to the DA: it should be a criminal offense to deliberately not have water fountains in the cinema. Fortunately, the girls didn't protest too much when I balked at buying $4 drinks from the Pirates of the Concession Stand.

If you want a full review (or ten), click on the Rotten Tomatoes link above. Suffice it to say that Pirates II is sillier, scarier, longer, and not quite as clever as the original. It also suffers from middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome and at the end serves mainly to set up the third film (including an unexpected twist that I won't reveal here). Nonetheless, it was a thrill-a-minute ride and we all enjoyed it immensely; the theater was packed and it's fun to be in a good crowd at a movie like this. Readers who note that I took a seven-year-old to a PG-13 film will either be comforted or concerned to know that she is a long-time movie veteran; we took her to Men In Black II shortly after her fourth birthday (which she enjoyed immensely) and she has been a devoted movie-goer ever since. I've always thought the kids would always have fond memories of "special" movie outings such as midnight openings, and I've taken them to several even if it was on a school night.

The rest of my abbreviated Weekend With The Girls was anticlimatic; we went home, where my youngest promptly crashed on the couch while her sister and I finally conquered the futon. She then camped out on that and I went to bed. We slept in (ah, how nice it is to not wake up to that blasted alarm clock), had a leisurly breakfast at McDonalds, and I returned them to their mother about mid-morning. I get all three of them next weekend and I'm already looking forward to it.