At the movies: Tag

It seems to me that one of the keys to liking a movie is to go into it thinking you're not going to like it. So making a movie recommendation seems a bit counter-productive, because then you'll walk into it expecting great things, and inevitably you'll be disappointed. But I'm doing it anyway, because I went to see Tag this week with some friends, and it was really fun, way more fun than I was expecting it to be. The gist of the plot is that a bunch of guys in their forties have been playing a game of tag during the month of May since they were nine. Antics ensue.

Reasons I went to see Tag: 1) It is largely set in Spokane (pro tip: pronounced Spo-Can), and when you live in a big, sparsely populated state, a city that's a mere four and a half hours away is practically your next door neighbor. When we first moved here 26 years ago, back before we had Wal-Mart and Costco and Home Depot/Lowe's, everyone in town drove to Spokane a couple of times a year to stock up on whatever we couldn't get here locally. It was like living in pioneer times and driving your Conestoga over the pass (except it only took 4 1/2 hours).

2) At the end of the movie, when they show a photograph of the real men who inspired the movie, the guy in the priest duds really is practically a next door neighbor, since his parish is one town over from here, a dozen miles away. So of course, because this is still a relatively small town in spite of the fact that we now have all the above-mentioned stores plus two Starbucks (three if you count the one inside Target), there was a big spread about it in our newspaper.

and 3) there was absolutely nothing else I wanted to see (that I hadn't already seen) and we really wanted to go to the movies. So, it's fun. But probably not fun enough to have gone on and on about it. If you can manage it, go in with low expectations. You do wonder what the deal is with Jeremy Renner, because he is (of course) awesome at the action parts, but whenever he has to actually act, the scene goes flat. I love Hawkeye so this was disappointing to me, but it's possible they had to film around his busy schedule and none of them were in the room at the same time. Fair warning: lots of salty language, which doesn't bother me, but one of my friends was unimpressed.

I was going to do this as the first part of my Seven Things post for this week, but it got so long that I'm posting it separately.