When working at camp during the middle of a busy summer, it can be a fun personal challenge to find the best ways of using my little time off. Along with sitting in a Starbucks and goofing around online, catching late night weekend movies was something that became a fairly regular habit last year. From “The Bourne Ultimatum” to “The Simpsons Movie” heading over to Yelm Cinemas became one of my favorite hobbies of the summer. I did some homework last month in preparation for the upcoming movie season and found a nice long list of movies that look pretty good. I’ll update this list as I see movies and add to it films not listed, and perhaps chime in any extraordinary thoughts that I have to share.

I’ve also listed a number of DVDs that I’m looking forward to coming out over the next few weeks and months.

In the Theaters:

√ Iron Man – May 2 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian – May 16 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
√ Indiana Jones 4 – May 22 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
The Promotion – June 6 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Get Smart – June 20 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Hancock – July 2 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Batman 2 – The Dark Knight – July 18th (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Step Brothers – July 25 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Traitor – Aug 29 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)

DVD
The Hammer – June 24 (Amazon.com | Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
John Adams – June 10 (Amazon.com | Trailer)
Recount (HBO.com | Trailer)
War, Inc – July 1 (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)
Noise (Rotten Tomatoes | Trailer)

Surprises so far….

Iron Man wasn’t a movie that I was planning on seeing but after hearing such amazing reviews, I saw it a few weeks ago and thought that it was really good. For the last few years these big summer blockbusters have been cleverly written, and haven’t been over the top. I’ve been looking forward to Mike Meyers’ new move “The Love Guru” for the last few years since I heard they were working on it, but after seeing the trailer its not making it onto my list this year. Also not quite making it onto my “must see” list is “The Rocker” staring Office star Rainn Wilson. There are a few other goofy comedies that look fairly funny, but there are plenty of other good movies out there, and you have to save something for fall DVD rentals.

You may notice the the new look here at northslope, along with the facelift I merged the blog with the front page.  You can find a past and future blog posts right here, along with photo updates and all the other usual fun northslope stuff!

There is nothing like a nice long road trip to make you never want to drive a car again…. I’m just kidding, I could have kept going for days if it wasn’t for the gas prices. We were gone for a week and logged just a little under 2,000 miles on our first major road trip since we’ve been married (and we picked the worst gas prices in the 5 years we’ve been married to attempt such a trip).

Our digital camera was being repaired during the adventure so all we had was our iPhone cameras, which turned out to be not that bad, and we were able to upload pictures to both the blog and flickr as we went!

Here is a recap of the main destinations:

• Santa Rosa, CA
• Dublin, CA (area)
• Stockton, CA
• San Fransisco, CA

Of course there were many other stops along the way, the most notable and fun being a stop in Ashland, OR on both the way down and the way back up!

(click here) for the photo gallery

(click here) for the northslope blog

San-Fran, originally uploaded by northslope.

Were spending a little over a day in San-Francisco today, after
leaving Stocktown this morning we headed to a few estate sales in the
city, which gave us a cool opportunity to see the inside of some very
old and very cool apartments/houses.

Right now were stuck on a cable car (seen behind me) in the middle of
Chinatown. There is a three cable car backup in the middle of the road!

Coffee Shops, originally uploaded by northslope.

We’re in ‘Pleasanton’ California right now, enjoying a nice long
morning of chocolate crossiants and free Tully’s WiFi. This isn’t the
first time we’ve hunkered down for a latte in between mini-trips and
its always fun to find a place to relax. Onto Stockton tonight to
spend some time with our friend Evan!