Cloudy Zombie Meatballs

I just finished watching Zombieland. It was a weird experience. I, and everyone who knew me five years ago, knows that this is a movie made for that five-year-ago guy. Violent, darkly funny, packed with pop-culture references. It's a good movie; I recognize that. Very clever, especially the Bill Murray bit.

But it didn't do much for me.

Conversely, my daughter and I watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs last Friday. She's just getting to the age where she "gets" movies. She gets jokes that are set up twenty minutes earlier. If she asks a question, it's about nuances in plot, not "Why is that pancake so big?" We laughed in most of the same places. When it was over, we looked at each other and smiled. As usual, I almost started crying because I knew that look in her eye. It was the look I get in my eye when I see a movie that totally blisses me out. After we'd spent several minutes going over the high points of the movie, she asked if we owned the DVD. I explained that we had rented it through Netflix.

After she went to sleep, I bought it on Amazon.

So here's the guy whose knowledge of zombie flicks was once second only to Max Brooks. Here's the guy with a vampire western in development. And here's the guy who prefers a PG animated movie to a hard-R horror film any day.

So. Very. Weird.