It's Monday night and I'm bummed out that this long weekend is nearly over. I left work early on Friday and pretty much sat on my couch for the next 12 hours with a friend. We broke up the couch-sitting with a couple walks to get food, but the rest of the time we talked and listened to music and smoked (I'm not saying what) and watched a movie. The rest of the weekend was about that same wonderful low level of activity. There was a bar. There were errands. There was coffee. There was writing. There were phone calls. There was a rehearsal. There was a mall. There was another bar. There was basketball. There was a stairwell behind a hotel on the Sunset Strip. There was reading. There was cleaning. And there were four movies.

The first movie, on Friday night, was Stir of Echoes. This is pretty much a B thriller starring Kevin Bacon as a man who sees dead people. It was pretty tense at times, but fairly predictable. He was fine - he was Kevin Bacon. A retarded girl. Kathryn Erbe. Kevin Dunn. (Yeah, I know - who?) Someone described it to me as basically a subplot of The Sixth Sense. And that about sums it up, in more ways than one. Likable. Forgettable.

Next was Addicted to Love. Griffin Dunne directed it. Meg Ryan was miscast in it. Matthew Broderick was Matthew Broderick in it. Some French dude stole the piece. I rented this for research on something I'm writing. I'd already seen it but remembered it as being fairly inoffensive - and I was right. Great last line about Lassie. Likable. Forgettable.

When I finally saw American Pie six months ago, I did not like it. I thought it was very unfunny and way overhyped. But worst of all, it tried to emulate the teenage tit movies of the 80's, with very little nudity. Well, Road Trip only has a bit more nudity, but it simply has a much tighter script and better characters. There isn't a whole lot to say about Road Trip, other than it's a fun movie to see on a Sunday afternoon at the mall. Likable. Forgettable.

American Movie is a documentary about a filmmaker trying to finish a low-budget horror flick somewhere in Wisconsin. Sounds like crap, but this is not just one more addition to the annoying "film about film about film" genre. What makes a good documentary is character - and the filmmakers hit the jackpot when they found the two leads of this film. The main guy, Mark, is a loquacious, drunken, manic-depressive, deadbeat father, who is obsessed with finishing his movie, "Coven", (which he mispronounces with a long "o"). His friend Mike is a big teddy bear who fried his brain with acid, and it shows: vacant stare, nervous laugh, addiction to lottery tickets. He's so unbelievable a character that no one could have made him up. This is a very fine movie, robbed for not having gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. And the best thing: if you go to www.americanmovie.com, they give you Mike's phone number in his basement room in Wisconsin, where you can call him and talk to him "if he feels like picking up". Very Likable. Totally Unforgettable.