Our friend Tim drove out from Dayton and spent Thanksgiving and much of yesterday with us, and we all had a lot of fun. In lieu of cooking turkey, we went to dinner at J. Gilbert's restaurant; the service was pretty slow, but the food was excellent so it was worthwhile.
Afterward we saw The Mist; I really enjoyed about 2/3 of it and disliked 1/3 of it. The really good parts were all the performances, especially Thomas Jane's, and the monsters. The monsters were really cool. One part that I didn't enjoy was Marcia Gay Harden's character. Some reviewers have claimed the character is an unrealistic cartoon; sadly, she is not. I have encountered many people just like that in my life, and I have worked hard to deal with them as little as possible. So on the one hand, kudos to Harden for creating a memorable character that got under my skin, but on the other hand I did not enjoy watching her at all.
The other part of The Mist I really did not enjoy was the ending. Gary and Tim liked the ending quite a lot; I found it deeply unsatisfying as a moviegoer. It's also seemed to me and others to be needlessly mean. Gary and I will agree to disagree on this one; no divorce is imminent. But the mosters are really cool.
Yesterday we hit Half-Price Books and I found some good reference books and Gary found his much-sought copy of The Corpse Grinders, a cheesy horror movie from 1971. It was pretty entertaining -- the two leads clearly got their start in porn. A main character gets killed twice with no explanation. Cats attack people, and people are obviously flinging the cats onto themselves, and the cats are looking at the camera like "WTF is happening?" It's awesomely bad.