Well, I can say without hesitiation that I would have been better off seeing Winged Migration than Almighty Bruce, because Almighty Bruce was painful. Not unwatchable, like seeing The InLaws remake, but stuffed full of sactimony and highly crappy. But before getting into why that was a bad movie, a quick recap of the past few days: we went to Marin, and saw Ross, which is a very fancy town. I have to say, I never liked the name Ross. But that part of Marin is pretty swanky, and I am told it is the richest town in the richest county in the country. I guess that's true, though I'm not sure you can tell by driving around. You'd think it would be Beverley Hills or Malibu or something.

Eventually, we had lunch in town, at a place where the food was quite bad, and the turkey I got had that opalescent sheen, like a soap bubble that makes rainbow colors. Luckily it did not kill me. We drove by Sean Penn's house, which is surprisingly on the main street, right out at a major intersection. You'd think a lot of people would be out to kill him since he went to Bagdad and he would want some security. Earlier, we had summitted Mt. Tam, which might sound like a feat of mountaineering, but was really more like a strenuous two hour hike up some very steep slopes. Also we were with Mark and Stephanie, and she is three months pregnant, so it hardly seems fair to complain, especially since no one could keep up with her and she kept stopping to take her pulse to make sure it didn't go to high for the baby. But anyway, we climbed up there, which was nice and we saw some animals on the way, like wild turkeys and turtles.

There was a board up on the trail which said which animals had been seen lately and alarmingly there were a few bobcat sightings, plus some coyotes and other animals that can eat you, including a rattler, which can't eat you but can still bite you. Anyway, we did that and then went through Fairfax, which, I am told, is where Jihad Johnny,the American Taliban, John Walker Lind is from. Kind of an affluent hippie enclave. Then it was off to Mill Valley for dinner. No matter how many times I hear of it, I can't get over two details of local life, one being that houses are so expensive in what, to my eye, looks like swampland, and two, being that pizza is so bad. A connected condo in a housing development by the freeway is 1.3 million dollars, and pizza is relentlessly bad.

So we are at the point in the evening when we saw Bruce Almighty. Which, even having braced myself for a Jim Carrey movie, I wasn't prepared for his tired rehash of all his comic mugging and having the forced message that everyone should pray and believe in God. Even though he is, or was, kind of funny at various points in his career, his acrobatic mugging and smugness is enough to make me throw up my $3.25 bottle of water. I will grant you that parting a bowl of tomato soup is kind of a funny idea, but when that is the best moment in a movie, you know you are aiming pretty low. Actually, better than the tomato soup thing, Morgan Freeman in a white suit was probably the best thing about that movie, even though he was laying it on thick and deep, and even the jokes were stiff. It was like a pitch meeting come to life, as many films are these days, just a one liner stretched to two hours. Bear in mind that although the director had done Ace Ventura, he had also done Patch Adams, and this movie was much more like the latter than the former. I felt like I was made the right choice, since the only other movies were the Matrix II, which I refuse to see, Down with Love, which I also refuse to see as it has pie faced Rene Zelwegger wearing Jackie O outfits, and Winged Migration, which even though it just follows birds around, would have been a million times better. Oh well.