By Katie

This is not a picture of me, but I do like it.

I just finished watching Playing for Keeps. Yep, that’s how bored I was this evening. It was so good I immediately logged on here so I could tell you all about it. Oh, I also looked at the last post I wrote to see if by chance there were any new comments (there was! Joy!) and noticed I wrote “new” instead of “knew” in a sentence where it definitely should’ve been “knew”, not “new”.

I love when stuff like that happens. I like to feel like a dipshit at least once a day. Actually that’s not right; if I can get through a day only feeling like one once, it’s a victory.  I average about 4 times…this morning I was driving around trying to find a particular coffee place and I was so lost I had to pull over and call the person I was supposed to be meeting for help. They patiently talked me through my directionally challenged haze, as they watched me through the window of the coffee shop, which I was parked directly in front of. That’s not the worst “I’m lost” story I have, either– the worst was the time I called Batteries Plus to ask directions…from their parking lot. I was so embarrassed when I realized what I’d done, I went right in and bought some batteries. You thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you? I needed the batteries, and  I’m too old to care anymore. That’s what freedom feels like.

Back to the movie. Look, I knew it was going to be horrible. We all did, didn’t we, back when Gerard Butler was making radio ads to promote it? “Hi, I’m Gerard Butler and you should see my new movie, Playing for Keeps!” Remember those? What? You can remember all the way back to two months ago? You. You stop with the false modesty, you’re not fooling anyone. But the star of the movie begging people to go see it on local FM is a sure sign of a winner.

Gerard Butler has made exactly one good movie, and that is Phantom of the Opera.* YES IT WAS GOOD, OTHERWISE WHY WOULD I HAVE SEEN IT IN THE THEATER NINE TIMES?

Playing for Keeps. Gerard is an old ex-professional soccer player who used to be all fancy and rich, and now is basically an unemployed bum (there’s lots of funny* stuff about how he has to ditch his landlord all the time because he is dead-ass broke).  He’s got a nine-year-old son and an ex-wife with whom he is naturally still in love, played by the lovely Ms. Jessica Biel (sporting some weird sister wife hairdo*). Gerard has done the still-in-love-with-the-ex-wife thing before, only Jennifer Aniston played the hair last time. I mean the wife.

Anyoots, G. decides to coach his son’s soccer team in an effort to be a better dad (we never know why his wife dumped him or why he was a bad dad to begin with, we just know that’s the case because Jessica Biel has a real sour look on her face and her arms crossed every time she talks to him) so naturally, every kid’s mom starts throwing themselves at him because soccer moms are a horny and dissatisfied bunch! Hilarity ensues as one after the other, Uma Thurman, Judy Greer and Catherine Zeta Jones try to get some of that. That, m’friends, is good comedy. I almost forgot about Dennis Quaid…he plays the douchey guy who bribes G into letting his loppy kid play goalie and  his tone-deaf daughter sing the National Anthem before the games. Is that a thing that happens before 4th grade soccer games? No matter.  Gerard decides he wants to be a sportscaster (isn’t that what he did in that movie with Katherine Heigle?) so he makes a seriously terrible demo tape that Catherine Zeta Jones helps him market in exchange for somethin’ somethin’. Nice to see the woman sexually exploit the man, for once. Am I right, ladies? In the meantime, he starts bonding with his kid and Jessica Biel finally tucks her hair behind her ears and looks a little bit less like that kid from The Ring.

ESPN hires him, he proclaims his undying love to Jessica Biel while she’s trying on a wedding dress to marry someone else, he gets in a fist fight with Dennis Quaid and Judy Greer ends up with his landlord, who finally gets paid. I’m pretty sure it took me longer to write this post than it took to write the script. And yet, I don’t regret watching it. Go figure.

*If you are Gerard Butler, my apologies. Please know that I continue to see your movies and that you are very rich, and those two things should offer some level of comfort. 

* Not funny

*My apologies also to any sister-wives reading this. I think it’s neat that you have 18 kids and only 1/10th of a husband.