When Joe and I saw an early preview for the new Maya Rudolph/Jim-from-THE OFFICE flick, AWAY WE GO, the two of us were like, "Uh, yeah, maybe on cable." Which was disappointing, because I adore Maya (and was so bummed when she quit SNL, though completely understand why she did it) and, of course, heart Jim (though loathed his Mandy Moore/Robin Williams piece of crap comedy that we did see on cable, after which I made fun of Joe because he actually LIKED IT).

Anyway, reading through the latest issue of EW, I come across an article about Rudolph that made me go, "OH MY GOD I HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW." Why? Because it's directed by Sam Mendes (AMERICAN BEAUTY, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD), and the screenplay is by - and why did I not know this? - Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida (who are married). Also, why did I not know that Maya Rudolph's boyfriend/baby daddy was Paul Thomas Anderson? I think the last time I was up on his love life, he was still with Fiona Apple (and where is she now, anyway?). The film's supporting players include, but are not limited to, Allison Janney, Catherine O'Hara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Jim Gaffigan.

BTW, here's the official trailer. This is NOT the commercial/preview we caught a couple of months ago, which painted the movie as a screwball comedy that didn't seem all that funny.

For those of you who are reading from home, I've embedded the real (good) version below as well:

So I haven't posted since Lola Week ended, and I'm pretty much all Lifetime-movied out but I will say this:

Having one of my books adapted into a TV movie was one of the coolest things that ever happened to me. And while yes, some of the novel's characters were cut, and some of the plot was chopped out, and while JoJo looks way more like LiLo's distant cousin than how I pictured Morgan Carter, I honestly enjoyed the hell out of the movie. I thought JoJo did a really good job as Morgan, and I loved Valerie Bertinelli's take on Trudy. Even more than that, I loved their dynamic together. So while the actors may not have been obvious choices to me, in the end, I think the casting was brilliant and helped bring even more viewers to the film. And of course, as an author it's really encouraging to see the spike in fan e-mails, especially by people who ran out and bought the books AFTER watching the movie.

Pleased? Why, yes, yes I am.

Now, the reason behind the non-posting: I've been sick. It's a weird kind of sick that started in the beginning of last week but manifested itself not as sickness so much as extreme tiredness. There were a couple of days where I slept 12-14 hours, which I never do - normally, if I get six or seven, I'm good to go. And then I started to get the heavy headed feeling and the post-nasal drip and then WHAM! Full-on grossness. By Saturday, my illness had struck Joe down, too, which meant our weekend was spent not working on projects and cleaning up around the house but camped out in the living room having a major movie marathon.

This is the upside to being sick the same time as your honey. You get to have guilt-free chill time where you can catch up on all sorts of DVR'd flicks, take as many naps as you want, and fight over who gets to cuddle with the dog next. As for the movies themselves, I should mention that I'm one of the only people I know who no longer have a Netflix account. I canceled it a year and a half ago because I was too busy to get through two to three movies a week, plus I have a pretty hefty cable package. So, now I wait for stuff to come on cable. Which means that I only just got to see ZODIAC, which was two and a half hours long but didn't feel it, not for a second. It totally made me want to watch SEVEN again, but more than that, it reminded me why I adore Robert Downey Jr., who was fabulous as the increasingly erratic Paul Avery. Yeah, I know everyone went nuts for him in IRON MAN; I personally wasn't as impressed.

After ZODIAC we queued up GONE BABY GONE, which is one of those movies that is so harrowing to watch you almost wish you'd avoided it. I started crying early on, when the mother of the missing girl starts talking about how hard it is to raise a child on her own (not because I sympathized with her, but because I was so disgusted by her self-righteousness). I felt sick to my stomach through most of it, and kept turning to Joe and saying things like, "This is a hard movie to watch." After it was over, the two of us were so depressed that we vowed we'd make up for it by watching a feel-good comedy the next day.

Unfortunately for us, we were under the misperception that NO RESERVATIONS, that Catherine Zeta-Jones/Aaron Eckhart rom com about two chefs and an orphaned Abigail Breslin, would fit that bill. Well, I should say unfortunately for me, because Joe actually LIKED IT. (I teased him mercilessly the rest of the day.) Breslin was cute in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, but she now suffers from that Dakota Fanning fate of getting by on cliched preciousness. People, it's not cute, and those of you who encourage this kind of cloying behavior should be shot. I normally adore Catherine Zeta-Jones, if for no other reason than she's gorgeous to look at, but here I found her annoying and unbelievable. Plus, every moment of this film was totally predictable. Here's me: "If she's in there watching home movies, I'm going to scream" (she was). "If feathers fly out of those pillows I'm going to scream" (they did).

After that train wreck, Joe napped and I watched Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE, which was very pretty in a sugar-spun candy confection kind of way, and an amusing look at the dysfunctional sex life of two royal teenagers who married before they knew what to do with a boner (or maybe even what a boner is). But after a while it devolved into a series of slo-mo shots of Kirsten Dunst twirling in a field of daisies and the footage looked like it could've been outtakes from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. Plus, it ends before the beheading, so it feels anti-climactic in a sense.

Finally, we watched NOTES ON A SCANDAL, which was brilliantly acted and so full of pathos that I wanted to squee the entire time I watched it. No, it wasn't a gut-busting comedy, but hey - when you're sick the last thing you want to do is venture out into the real world to watch PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. Besides, good British drama feeds the soul in a super-nourishing way and can remind you what good filmmaking is all about.

It would've been a lovely end to an otherwise uneven day of movie viewing, if my cold hadn't suddenly veered into stomach flu territory. So I ended the evening clutching a trash can and bemoaning the fact that my dinner ended up on loan and not for keepers.

I have a long, long week of work ahead of me, but I'm still so completely drained and not up to any of it. Hence the subject line calling for a caffeine jolt. To brew or not to brew; that is the question.

NEXT UP: Two GCC tours.