Our Internet is out at home; our Internet carrier, AT&T, claims our modem number no longer matches the number they have on file. WTF? This meant I didn't get much work done over the weekend, but it also kept me from killing excessive time online, so I finally started the back-yard garden (tomatoes, three kinds of basil, rosemary, two kinds of peapods) and did some heavy-duty cleaning.

And on Saturday, Cass and Chris and asparas and kneelbeforezod and I drove over to the Cascade Drive-In for Iron Man and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Well, really for Iron Man. The extra movie was just kind of a bonus.

It was colder than I would have liked; we brought blankets and folding chairs and started the evening under the stars, but the speaker nearest us was on the fritz and even huddling under a blanket couldn't dispel the cold wind in my face, so three-fourths of the way through Iron Man, I gave up and retreated into the car. Even so, I enjoyed the movie a lot, possibly because I've never read an Iron Man comic and know nothing about the character, so while I wasn't getting the in-jokes that made Chris comment that he could hear distant fanboy squeeing across the land, I also wasn't comparing the film to umptiddily jillion previous versions of the story, and wondering why I was sitting through it again. Also, the suit design was Teh Hot.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, on the other hand… scott_tobias says I have "an Apatow block," which may in a way be true; I just refuse to get on the crowded Judd Apatow bandwagon with all the other A.V. Clubbers. I thought The 40-Year-Old Virgin was pretty damn funny, and that's been about it for me and Apatow getting along. I never saw Anchorman or Walk Hard. I thought Knocked Up was poisonous and hateful. I was indifferent to Superbad. I have negative-no (sometimes rendered as No-minus) interest in You Don't Mess With The Zohan. Everybody around me seems to find films by Apatow and his circle of friends warm and hilarious and true-to-life. I just find them annoying.

And talking about it with Scott, I realized why; I just don't find immaturity funny or sweet. And all Apatow-related films at their core are pretty much about little kids in big kids' bodies. Sometimes they're trying hard to grow up and get over themselves, sometimes they're reveling and wallowing, but either way… I just don't care. I didn't find the plight of the protagonist in Sarah Marshall interesting. His ultra-hot, successful girlfriend of five years has dumped him for being a pathetic sad sack who spends an entire week at home in sweatpants, eating gigantic mixing bowls full of cereal and leaving his socks draped over lamps. And now he can't stop crying and stalking her. And he spends the whole movie getting over her to the point where he can literally scream at her that she's the devil and that his cock doesn't want to be near her any more. Which he does with the help of another ultra-hot woman who inexplicably decides she likes him in spite of his binge crying and overall patheticness.

I'm not offended by any of this the way I was over Knocked Up. It just didn't do anything for me as a story, because I couldn't sympathize with the protagonist or his all-his-fault plight, and I found the movie's obvious sympathy for him pretty cloying.

Realizing WHY, though, has made me pretty happy, because now I have a unified theory that explains why I don't like the films of Mike Myers and Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler, either. Thing is, I was a really serious child. Even as a little kid, I liked hanging out with adults and doing adult things and trying to talk to adults. So why, 30 years later, I'd want to spend a bunch of time watching grown men act more like bratty, whiny children than I did when I was a child, I don't know. At this point, I picture Judd Apatow as a man who has a bed shaped like a sports car and still wears footy pajamas. I don't wish him any ill. But I'm not joining him and his peeps on any more of these little self-congratulory kiddie sleepovers they call movies, either.

I'm-a feelin': satisfied