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The movies I'm NOT watching today

 I make life difficult for myself. I moan that the world's rough enough as is without us being assholes to each other, but I'm an asshole to myself. When I found Jonathan Demme's '08 RACHEL GETTING MARRIED in the dollar-store Treasure Hunt bin yesterday, my eyes lit up. A Demme I missed in its time and need to see! Everything else today is all bonus as of right now, I thought, picking up INSIDIOUS, DEVIL, GHOST IN THE SHELL, REPO MEN, ENDLESS LOVE, SABOTAGE, & FRANKENWEENIE at the same time. 

(I thought ENDLESS LOVE might be the Zefirilli original. I entertained visions of pairing JEREMY with ENDLESS love. What a fuckin' glorious writeup that would make. Of course, ENDLESS LOVE has been remade, god alone knows why, as a PG-13 YA romance. Of course, that's what I bought for a buck yesterday. God help me, at some point I'll probably watch it, too. Call me "Mikey.")


Of course, I walked on home and watched THE ROAD WARRIOR and JEREMY and ignored RACHEL. Got up today, started thinking what to watch. Thought about clearing out the unwatched horror stuff in my collection, then calling it something awful like "HORRORDAY CELEBRATION." Tried that, in fact. INSIDIOUS didn't take. Neither did ARMY OF DARKNESS.

Fuck it, I thought, walking to the store. Who is it I see in my mind giving my movie watching a grade? And how do I get him to leave? I'm turning a movie blog into a job again.

I came home and said, "Watch the movie that made your eyes light up yesterday."

I slept in this morning, but it's 3 p.m. It took a long time for the obvious to make sense today. Other hand, it's a slow, lazy July 4, I'm stoned, and it's time to watch a Jonathan Demme movie. Why am I giving myself a hard time?

Dammit. Some days, it just doesn't happen. It's another holiday alone. I'm usually inured to it, being the rule rather than the exception, but sometimes no movie can help me forget my family is happier that I'm not around, and that I probably am, too, though I don't want to admit it.

I thought RACHEL GETTING MARRIED might be the movie to prevent moody reverie today. Great choice. Anne Hathaway, whom I usually enjoy as an actor, plays a young woman coming home from rehab on the eve of her sister's wedding. Not immediately remembering going to my brother's wedding in Kentucky from the "facility" in which I lived, a sort of SRO hotel for homeless people with mental illness, didn't strike me as an option. That's too bad, since I spent the opening moments of the movie remembering this one conversation I kept having at his bachelor/bachelorette party:

Them: Bride or groom?

Me: Groom.

T: Groom? I thought I knew all Brandon's friends. He said none of his old Cincinnati pals were coming.

M: Uh, well, I'm his brother, Russell. You are -

T: Uh, Brandon never mentioned growing up with a brother in Cincinnati. You're really his brother? That's...strange.

Then the person would wander off, dazed. After the 10th time I had that conversation I told my parents I didn't believe I suffered from alcoholism and helped myself to a beer. Seldom had I been happier to return to my sleeping room catecorner to an open air drug market.

I cannot multitask getting high, thinking about that, and watching Hathaway navigate her family with exactly no fucks left. Much as I would enjoy spending the remainder of my holiday with a good movie or two, this may not be that holiday. I've watched PRETTY POISON, SKIDOO, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, THE ROAD WARRIOR, AND JEREMY in the last 72 hours. Again, why am I trying to turn blogging into a job I don't like? 

Blogging should ALWAYS beat smoking a blunt at 7 a.m. in the parking lot at Taco Bell. If that's too high a bar...



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