Skip to main content

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...



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mediocre be thy name: John Gulager's Zombie Night

 Anthony Michael Hall, Daryl Hannah, Alan Ruck, Shirley Jones. Dir. John Gulager, The Asylum, 2013 For those unaware, The Asylum is a film production company specializing in cheapo horror and action titles, most subgeneric ripoffs of whatever horror/scifi/action titles are popular that year. Referred to as "mockbusters," these low budget achievers look like their big-money brethren, often featuring solid B-list casts, as Zombie Night does. Though The Asylum has attracted a following, the more serious, hardcore fans of el cheapo horror (et al) tend to turn up their noses at most Asylum product. Marc Edward Heuck, Our Man in the Valley, summed it up thusly: "I don't watch much Asylum fare, because frankly they're not awful enough, they're just mediocre. Like, they're not content to just have the monster or the topless girl and the requisite scenes therein and otherwise leave talent alone to be unique like Roger Corman was, they micro-manage all the pe...

I love Twinkies: Tommy Lee Wallace's IT

 Harry Anderson, Richard Thomas, Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid, Annette O'Toole, Tim Curry. Dir. Tommy Lee Wallace, Warner Bros., 1990 I had one problem with the 1990 TV movie (run over two nights back in '90, NBC called it a miniseries, but as a dvd-feature it runs three hours and six minutes, a little longer than Avengers:End Game) and it's a big one. I loved all the stuff with the cast as kids, in the first part. Only Seth Green among them went on to be household-name actors and their anonymity at this remove gave their performances a spontanaeity and freshness that helped me buy them as screen versions of the novel's characters. The adult versions, essayed by an ensemble of B-listers and small screen stars, however, didn't do much for me.  I'm willing to lay that off on a poor screenplay to some extent, but IT proves definitively that Harry Anderson, despite two hit sitcoms, cannot act. At all. It goes on to prove that Richard Thomas, Dennis Christopher, An...

Cuck Fiction: Charles Vidor's GILDA

 Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George MacReady, Steven Geray. Dir. Charles Vidor, Columbia, 1946 My favorite erotic fiction deals with cuckolding. The stories fascinate me. As people, cuckolds don't seem to think they're worth nice things. Or happiness. On the other hand, the cuckolding partners and their multiple lovers don't come over as the clear victors, either. Part of the fascination - maybe most of it - lies in trying to decide which party comes out the MOST degraded.  Is it the submissive, sensitive husband and his unsatisfactory size/staying power? Is it the "slutwife" who finds satiety in being transformed into a fuckdoll to humilate her husband? Or is it the lover - often black - who gets to degrade the sexy white lady but who doesn't otherwise matter? As in bdsm scenes, if the cuck is most degraded, that means he also "wins," as his desires to see his wife turned into a promiscuous slut while he gets to be bi without shame are most fulfi...