Sunday morning found us with family down at Kansas City’s own City Market.

The City Market is a wonderful area downtown to pick up fresh fruits and veggies for a very good price, shop at specialty stores, and eat good food. My parents picked up a few things before leaving for home and we at lunch with Mike and Abby at Winslow’s, a very good BBQ joint. We left the market with fresh spinach, red and yellow peppers, strawberries, oranges, Ranier cherries, and limes. Mary also picked up some local honey as she was told that local honey helps with allergies. Later that night we had delicious “Big Salads” made from our bounty.

Monday was movie day. We were in the process of Netflix returns so I went to the local Blockbuster. Haven’t been there since we started Netflix. We made chicken fajitas with the peppers that we purchased from the market the day before and parked ourselves in front of the boob tube for some mindless entertainment. Our viewing pleasure included the following films in the order pictured:

Dodgeball: After Vince Vaughn’s terrific performance in Mr. and Mrs. Smith I was in the mood for more and assumed this was a no-brainer. I was correct in that my enjoyment of the movie would have increased had I severed my brain stem. There were funny moments and it was no better or worse than I expected but Vaughn was much funnier in the limited time he was in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

House of Flying Daggers: This was a beautiful martial arts movie. The cinematography was fantastic. This is a movie to enjoy just for the scenery and the way that it was shot. The story was good, with an appropriate number of twists and turns. I haven’t seen Crouching Tiger…I know, I’m a bad man…so I cannot compare it with that movie but I have seen Hero and which I feel is a much better movie. I recommend them both but if you haven’t seen them then see this one before you see Hero.

Welcome to Collinwood: This is an ensemble piece somewhat in the vein of Ladykillers. A group of bungling local small time crooks attempt to pull off their “Bellini”, a jewel heist that will set them up for life. Collinwood was filled with subtle humor and entertaining performances, especially from Sam Rockwell and Patricia Clarkson. We both really enjoyed this but the humor wasn’t all laugh-out-loud funny. I did find myself caring about the characters by the end and felt the writers did a great job of bringing this movie to its conclusion.

Returner: This movie starred Takeshi Kaneshiro who was also in House of Flying Daggers. I had been wanting to see this film since the day it was released on DVD. The cover was very intriguing and I had read good reviews on other people’s blogs. This movie, intentionally or unintentionally, is an amalgam of Matrix, Terminator, E.T. , Equilibrium, and perhaps several other science fiction films. The main character, Miyamoto, is a gun-for-hire and during his latest job he shoots a young girl by mistake. She recovers and tells him she is from the future, sent back to prevent the coming alien invasion of earth. Returner is a stylistic movie that does mimic other recent films but they pull off the effects beautifully and the movie is very fun. The story is entertaining and it was well worth the time spent. Interestingly they speak English in the future…this confused us in regards to subtitles as the movie opened with English dialogue and English subtitles. We changed things around and ended up with the dubbed English and were not thrilled with the voice overs so we quickly switched back to the Japanese language track and turned the subtitles back on. See it, its fun!

Mix in snatches of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian,

and an evening walk and it was a pretty great Day Four!