We took a trip last night to the outdoor theater. Playing at the theater – Red Eye, the new film from Wes Craven and Wedding Crashers, starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.

For the first time I can remember, I actually liked both films playing at the outdoor.

Red Eye is not what you would expect from a Wes Craven film. Craven usually creates the blood bath films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, or our DVD pick from yesterday, Cursed, a story about modern day werewolves. Rather, I would characterize it as a very intelligently made thriller. No real gore – just suspense. There is no good way to begin describing the movie without giving away too much, which to me is always the sign of a great movie. The whole thing works. Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie an 89% fresh rating.

The second movie was Wedding Crashers. I was absolutely convinced walking (or driving) in that I would hate this movie. It just seemed like a stupid idea. It wound up that up until the ending, I loved it. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play two people who crash weddings to meet woman who are caught up in the idealism of marriage, and therefore pretty easy to score with. They decide to crash the wedding of the Secretary of the Treasury (played by the one and only Christopher Walken), where Vince meets a woman who becomes completely infatuated with him (making him want to leave) and Owen meets the Secretary’s daughter, who he wants to try and win from her boyfriend. They wind up spending a weekend with the family and, as they say, “wackiness ensues”.

I haven’t laughed this hard at a movie in a long time — well, at least since we saw Hitch. It is non-stop funny. Owen Wilson is a little irritating at times (he tends to strike me as whiny a lot), but Vince Vaughn makes up for that.

As I said earlier, I thought for sure that I was going to hate this movie, even though the Cinecast guys both gave it high reviews and it rated 74% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The ratings definitely reflected this one and I admit I was wrong. Each of these movies make the cut of movies that I will be waiting for to be released on DVD so that I can scoop them up and add them to the collection.

Overall, it was a pretty good movie night. Those come few and far between these days.