Embarrassment of Riches

I'm three days into my winter break, and it's quickly become apparent that I'm going to return to Chicago having seen about three dozen movies and with three dozen extra pounds.

I love coming home to Philadelphia and seeing the family, don't get me wrong, but its pretty clear that all I'm really going to do while I'm around is eat, sleep, eat, watch TV, and eat some more.

As one of four brothers, there's always been a lot of food around the house. But now that we're all in college, working, or in my case, college 2, you'd think my parents would dial the quarterly grocery spend down a notch. Not the case.

Come to think of it, that's probably why our dogs are a little overweight...

I've also been doing a lot of TV watching, primarily because I can't get over the sheer number of options when you order Comcast's super deluxe premium package. I thought I had a lot of choices in Chicago, but it's really hard to turn off the TV when there are 8 HBO's, 5 Cinemax's, 7 Showtimes, 8 Starz', plus multiple Encores and Movie Channels. And that's not even scratching the surface of the basic tier.

Then there's On Demand, which gives me just about every premium network show (including Flight of the Conchords...woo-hoo)

So I've started to catch up on some of the movies that I meant to see or had a passing interest in but never got around to. It's no wonder Netflix is working so hard on developing its streaming technology options...DVDs are dead (which I probably figured out two years ago when I stopped buying them)

Saw The Invasion...the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers...not great. I also checked out Clerks 2, given that I really liked the first one and never saw the sequel for fear of legacy tarnishment. Also not great, but a couple of pretty funny bits, the Kevin Smith over-writing is always a little tough to deal with given that's not how people ever talk. That and I don't really get why people like Rosario Dawson...maybe it's just that I saw her in Alexander...which remains in my opinion the worst movie in the history of cinema.

I did however, also check out Zodiac. That was really good. It almost made me want to invent a time machine to travel back to 1970's San Francisco...of course the Zodiac killer would be on the loose, but I think I'd be alright.