Paula and I rented three DVDs for ourselves from Video Americain (and a tape for our daughter) over the Labor Day weekend. DVD rental is great, because it's even less of a commitment to watch something than renting a tape–you don't even have to rewind a DVD once you've determined it sucks. All you have to do is eject it, and move on.

The winner of the 20-minutes to eject sweepstakes this past weekend was Punch-Drunk Love. Despite the glowing reviews of Adam Sandler's performance, and some initial promise, there came a point where it was time for us to cut our losses and move on–but not before Paula and I picked up a new trademark conversational exchange for the week:

Our other choices for the weekend were Bowling for Columbine and Lost in La Mancha. And, for our two-year-old daughter, Paula picked up the allegedly safe all-ages Kermit's Swamp Years.

“Bowiling for Columbine” was great…at least what we watched of it. Since we got a late start, and since the film is 2 hours and 15 minutes long (remember, folks, check the runtime before your rent), Paula fell asleep about a third of the way into the second hour. I lasted a bit longer, but by 1:55 Moore was preaching to the choir anyway, and I figured we could always pick up with the movie again sometime.

“La Mancha” got thrown into the player right after “Punch-Drunk” got punched out. Originally intended as an extra for the DVD of the movie it documents the (aborted) making of, “La Mancha” bears witness to Terry Gilliam's attempt to adapt Cervantes' Don Quixote for the screen, filming in Spain. Barely a week into production, the whole thing comes unglued. You just shake your head at every cursed turn the project takes–a rainstorm literally washes out a location and some of the crew's equipment in the process; the exteriors are interrupted by the noise of F-16s dropping bombs on a nearby NATO bombing range…you begin to understand why Orson Welles tried for over 25 years to make a Quixote film without ever completing it. The video is better (and shorter) than Project Greenlight could ever hope to be.

The really bad surprise was “Kermit's Swamp Years.” I was watching it with my daughter, who started to lose interest–and it was a good thing, because the bad guy in the movie turns out to be a high school biology teacher who relishes frog dissection a bit too much–in fact, his subjects are ALIVE during the dissection apparently, as he straps one of Kermit's panic-struck swamp friends to the dissection tray. Who the hell wrote this? Who the hell let this be filmed? An otherwise bland coming-of-age frog tale is turned into a PETA activist's nightmare.