down weekend turned busy in a blink of an eye

this weekend was suppose to be a relaxing, do-nothing, type weekend.

when will i ever learn that in my world, that rarely exisits?

it started off with my mom and dad coming back with chaeli way earlier then expected friday night. by the time they left and we got chaeli off to bed, it was almost 11pm! i was just too tired to start cleaning the house then.

saturday morning arrived and after a slow start where we eased ourself in, doug and i started the house-cleaning process after brunch. it only took us an hour and a half. i must admit that having doug help is definitely easier - it just gets the process done that much faster.

when we finished, i still had an hour to shower, get myself and chaeli dressed, before heading out to the movie theatre.

then on sunday morning, we ended up getting together with my friend and her two kids whom were visiting from washington d.c. they were only in town until tuesday so sunday morning was the only chance we had to see them. chaeli had a blast playing with the two kids. and we had a great lunch together at a near-by chinese restaurant that opened a year ago - doug and i haven't had a chance to give it a go up until then. afterwards, we took the kids to a place similar to chuckie cheese for them to run around in the indoor playground for half an hour.

good times.

anyway, as for the movie...

chaeli had been bugging us for weeks to take her to see transformers - revenge of the fallen. when the movie came out on wednesday, she was quite anxious that we were going to miss our change in seeing it in the theatres. i tried to explain to her that it would take awhile before this movie, a sure-box office hit, to leave the theaters. she didn't quite understand and since both doug and i were excited to see this movie, it didn't take much convincing to take her to see it.

sometimes, my own kid amazes me. it was a 2.5 hours movie and because it was the first weekend, we went in to grab our seats early. she was pretty much sitting in that seat for a good three hours. granted, she was starting to get a little tired and restless by the last 30-35 minutes but she hung on until the end.

and, there were a few scarier scenes compared to the first movie but the girl didn't even flinch. she just sat there, totally engrossed with her favourite robots.

[note the below does not give away the storyline at all - but does critique on the style of the movie]

as for me, i loved it but i think the first is my fave. this one was a bit too long and while i had no issues with the more complex plot, others seemed to be critisized the movie for it. i do, however, have a problem with the introduction of too many new characters at once, which is what they did with the robots (only one new human character was introduced). with the additional robots, there were the twin autobots whom reminded me of jar jar of star wars.

the intention was for comic relief which just didn't seem to work for me. plus, i counted seven comic relief type characters and for me, that's just way too many.

in addition, the introduction of these new robot characters took away from the overall, character development that i would have liked to have seen - not just with the humans but with the autobots.

one critique from the last movie was that not enough emphasis was placed on the robots and too much was placed on the humans.

it was obvious that to compensate for this, they just decided to add more robots - both on the autobots and the decepticons side. but... what happened was far less interactions between robots. while some of the main autobots were still there like ratchett and ironhide, we rarely got a chance to hear them speak. they were there more just for the fighting. only optimus prime and bumblebee had most of the dialogue, as did some of the decepticons.

the focus was still mainly on the humans. so i don't know why they thought that just by adding more robots would help. it didn't. it so did not make it any better. i would have rather had them stick to the way they had it in the first movie.

having said that, i still really enjoyed the movie but more as an action type movie only. and the special effects had me mesmerized.