Date night for the functionally inept

At the end of every school year one of David’s coworkers gives out Red Lobster gift cards. This year he got two because he also helped her clean out her classroom since she got ‘excessed’. Needing to get some ‘real food’ on our way to see a movie, we decided to stop at Red Lobster. There’s a Red Lobster by every shopping mall!
Red Lobster tries to be a fancy restaurant, they have a ‘wine list’, their servers are robotic in the recitation of their lines, the prices on the menu would indicate that this place was supposed to be nice. Red Lobster is not a nice restaurant. I’m sorry, April, I know of your love. Red Lobster is a restaurant for people who want to go to a nice restaurant and don’t know the difference. They know they want to go someplace fancier than TGIFridays or Applebees but aren’t quite comfortable with a place that isn’t a chain. Chains are comfortable, everything is rote, the chef isn’t going to surprise you with a reduction or a roulade. You can get a meal that fits your expectations and pay a lot for it. Your needs will be fulfilled and your lady friend might even put out (if she isn’t put off by the garlic salt on your breath).
You would think that a restaurant that specialized in seafood would actually know how to prepare the stuff. You would think that the shrimp would not be rubbery and overcooked, you would think things would be seasoned to accentuate the flavors. Of course, you would think that the meals would not be pre-cooked at some central processing facility, vacuum sealed in plastic bags and sent off to individually owned and operated franchises. How do you think they get the food to taste EXACTLY THE SAME every time you go? It doesn’t matter if you go to a Red Lobster 5 miles or 500 miles from your house, the scampi will taste not similar but exactly the same. Consistency equals comfort.
Anyway, flush with $50 in gift certificates we debated whether we would have enough time to eat and still get to the 9pm movie and we decided we would. The food was overpriced, the wine was overpriced, our waitron was terrified that we took more than the pre-plotted 3.25 minutes to peruse the menu and make a choice. We wanted to wait on a drink order until we chose our meal!!! Danger Kelly-Waitrobot!!!! How will you compensate for a situation outside the manual?
They served ranch dressing with the calamari. Need I say more?
We got out of there with bare minutes to spare and hustled over to the theater. We parked under the giant AMC sign and then had to walk all over to actually find the entrance. Perhaps they should have been clearer. perhaps I hate malls.
Point of contention: AMC theaters now serve popcorn that was popped in a central processing facility. I wish I was lying about this but I am not. The concession monkeys come out of the back room with giant bean bag sized bags of popcorn which they empty into the bin under a warming light. Also, you have to add your own butter flavored grease substance to the popcorn. It’s actually cheaper to let the customer decide how much they want (inevitably a lot) than it is to actually train the counter jockeys to apply the appropriate amount. This says that turnover is high and they don’t want to pay more than they have to for training. Having a butter flavored grease pump is a terrible idea. People look at it and think “I love butter on my popcorn! This is free! I’m gonna take all i can to satisfy my urges and stick it to the AMC man”. I can only assume that AMC has some sort of investment in cardiac medicine and research.
We got our tickets and the ticket taker asked us if we wanted to donate a dollar to get a chocolate bar. We passed up this golden opportunity but his dissatisfaction was apparent in how he mumbled a vague direction to the door we were to enter. We went to the door marked “Ratatouille” and went in. The place was packed and the movie had already started. We found a seat in the middle of a row, got some strange looks and commenced watching. It was so strange to me how they packed so much into the 5 minutes we missed. I was getting lost on the story.
Then it was over…how curious. It seems it was playing on two screens and we walked into the wrong one. Well fuck a duck. We’d now already missed 30 minutes of the show we were supposed to see. Feh, we went to go see Transformers since we missed it last week.
The Transformers movie is essentially a 2 hour paid advertisement for eBay, Yahoo, Apple Computers, GM automobiles, whatever company makes those little flash memory cards, The Strokes and the US Military. We paid $9 each to watch advertisements. huh. Other than the constant gratuitous shots of the GMC, Apple and eBay logos there were lots of things blowing up and I do like me some explosions in movies. The story line was thin…super thin….but hey, there’s a brand new Camaro! And explosions!
Having not watched the cartoon as a kid, I was a little surprised at what a retard Optimus Prime was. What was that fucking speech at the end? Do space robots join some sort of space robot Toastmasters organization to learn how to give speeches? He needed to take a writing class. Actually, all of them were sort of retarded in how they spoke (except for ‘BumbleBee’ he was more Nell-like), maybe it’s a space robot thing?
But things exploded…oh! eBay! I know eBay! and Apple! I own an Apple! I can relate to this movie.
The last scene was dork boy making out with slut girl (you know, the one that was all shallow and dating the football guy but ended up not being shallow and liking the dork guy because, you know, they are both deep and stuff) on top of his car. His car is a space robot with a face and a name and it considers itself a sentient being. So, essentially, they laid on top of someone and made out. They did this while all the other space robots were hanging out and watching.
Space robots are total pervs.
We made it home and I resisted the urge to vomit 3 kinds of shrimp all over my lap and we declared the evening a success!

One thought on “Date night for the functionally inept

  1. I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that scene at the end was a little pervy.
    I did like the movie though, but mainly because I was a big fan of the cartoon when little.

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