That boy ain't right

5 thangs (tagged again? sheesh)

5 Things I'm Good At

1. Making M laugh
2. Making LM laugh
3. Not Worrying
4. Patience
5. Slacking

5 Places I'd Like to Visit

1. Australian Outback, Great Barrier Reef
2. Chichen Itza, Mexico
3. Taj Mahal, India
4. Barcelona, Spain
5. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

5 Things I Wished I Could Afford Right Now

1. Super high fuel-efficiency car: hybrid is probably not the best we could do, so I'm gunning for natural gas vehicle or maybe gas-powered but extremely light.
2. The ability to work as an actor for that (very) occasional check: it's all up to you, lucky lottery ticket!
3. Bigger house
4. Gym membership (sigh)
5. ...and, as long as we're dreaming, the scratch to get my smile fixed.

Top 5 Board Games (based on satisfying game experience, in no particular order):

1. Bang! (I downloaded several Western soundtracks from iTunes just for an accompaniment to this game)
2. Civilization (My family actually slogged through the novel of rules -- and we actually completed one game over several days -- that's where I get it from)
3. Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (still the best husband/wife game)
4. Power Grid (Deep, high pressure at every stage, and your initial decisions have far-reaching ramifications. Lovely.)
5. Tikal (Screw your neighbor! Screw your neighbor!)

Oh, fine:
5 Yummy Celebrities I'd Take to Porn Island (or whatever it's called these days, also in no particular order)
1. Hilary Swank
2. Salma Hayek
3. Emma Thompson
4. Marisa Tomei
5. Mira Sorvino

That should do it, I think...

done been tagged agin

Yah, sure, I'll bite. 'Cause I haven't humiliated myself enough yet -- why not go into my sordid and aimless past while I'm at it?

20 years ago, I:

• was a 15-year-old sophomore in high school, in Bakersfield, CA. I was reading Isaac Asimov stories, Sherlock Holmes stories, Philo Vance stories, Ursula K. LeGuin stories, and my parents' nonfiction books on the history of sex, nudes in European artwork, and the erotic fiction books they'd thought they'd hidden, on a fairly regular basis. I was very into building elaborate paper and plastic models at this time; I had a WWII obsession. I also had an obsession with my family doctor's daughter.


• I was very much into playing games and typing out little programs on the family Apple II+. We would be loyal Apple customers, all the way until I graduated law school.


• Also around this time, I had a peer group that loved to ridicule me. There was one day that I'd had enough and finally took a swing at one of the bigger guys, only to really regret my decision the rest of that day and for some time afterwards.


• Sensing a theme yet? At this age, I was not kissing anyone, and would not kiss a girl until my first year of college.

10 years ago, I:

• ...had graduated law school. Barely. I would soon take the bar, and be the only one taking it in surfer shorts and flipflops. Near the end, I was showing up to a class or two in rollerblading gear. I'd be the only person to dress up for Halloween (juggling court jester one year, Hamlet the next, complete with Yorick's skull). During this time, I would strike up a relationship with a classmate, and then eventually break up with her because she treated me like shit to an unbelievable degree. (I've forgiven her then and now, but I don't really have an interest in talking to her. She seems to be married, with a child of her own, and living in Scotland.)


• I would continue my hapless aimlessness by deciding that law wasn't really the thing I wanted to do with myself after all. I started taking unemployed nerd-type odd jobs, i.e. sifting through legal documents, doing document control for a property inspection company, and testing software for an outsource testing company. This last would be the start of a 10+ year career in a field I have an abiding "it pays the bills"/"it can be really interesting sometimes"/"God, please make the pain stop" kind of relationship with.


• I took my first improv comedy class and I got my first headshot photo taken (it was really awful). I'd forgotten about acting entirely until I'd taken some career counseling/"Artist's Way"/unleash your creativity kinds of classes at a learning annex in Cupertino. I had myself set on getting back into the visual arts, actually -- but it was there that I heard from the other people in the class, over and over again, that performing was where I should apply myself. Hmmm.

5 years ago, I:

• ...snagged a serious hottie. I was picking out cake.
• ...was working at what would eventually turn out to be my worst employment experience, ever. I rode out the bust with that job; and like a lot of employers, I'm fairly sure the powers that be -- still in existence there -- counted on the crappy economy to keep the disgruntled in line. I wonder what I would've done, or where we would've ended up, had I not taken this job.
• ...started acting in plays on a fairly regular basis. Soon after I married that awesome hottie, I landed what would turn out to be one of my favorite acting experiences: a huge debut in gay theater. I was the token straight boy in "A Few Gay Men", and I still have my "Honorary Fag" plaque from the rest of the cast to prove it. Although there's still the odd experience of having your new, loving wife see you mime oral sex on another man in front of a lot of people in a crowded, dark theater on a Saturday night. Mer was very understanding throughout all of this. I hope she finds an obsession -- no, apart from the obvious little boy sleeping in the next room -- some sort of driving desire that I can be understanding about sometime.

3 years ago, I:

• ...got fired from that crappy restaurant site. It was getting so that the extra hours, without even thanks for the work, let alone comp time, plus the resentment at being misused, meant that I had to force myself even to do the barest minimum amount of work each day. A lot of the time I couldn't even manage that. So my ass was out on the street. I went to a commercial audition right afterwards.
• It was around this time that I got signed by my very understanding and patient talent agency.
• I would have the best travel experiences of my life. (The awesome hottie has something to do with it.)
• Bri's Early Morning Stud Farm would come into existence. It's an odd sensation to know that you're having quite a lot of sex, but not really being able to remember it that well. This is also the time of humiliating and grubby semen-collecting exercises in front of a computer screen in an otherwise empty room (we were moving at the time). One of our friends even offered a room in her house as a private masturbation area, so that my little guys would be fresher. I declined out of general embarrassment and ickiness.

1 year ago, I:

• ...don't remember a whole lot. It's kind of a blur.
• ...had a couple of anxiety- and sleep deprivation-related nervous breakdowns. When the person you love seems to be destroying herself with worrying and anxiety, and there's nothing you can do about it other than go through the range of emotions including anger, depression, reflexive anxiety, resignation... it's not good for the psyche. Let alone what my wife was putting herself through at the time.
• ...Meanwhile, LM was planning his first blitzkrieg, Stewie-style.

so far this year, I:

• fell more in love with my wife
• watched my son turn into the Tiger tank I always knew he was
• gave up acting in plays, only to do the occasional voiceover or industrial film
• cultivated a huge board gaming obsession as a result of Mer being on bedrest during her pregnancy

today, I:

• did some work, but largely pissed away a lot of time at my current employer (the internet arm of a large retailer based in Arkansas, scourge of corporations, dictates economic policy with China, subject of a lot of punitive legislation and angry leftist documentaries, bad corporate citizen, etc., rhymes with Gall-Fart); planning my next employment jump; bitched with like-minded coworkers. We've come to the conclusion that while we're indebted to our current company for being, let's be honest, a hospitable and even nice (sometimes) place to work during weird times, we could be doing a whole lot better for ourselves. And it's not as if the place is going to stop being dysfunctional anytime soon.
• got an audition for another voiceover audition in the city
• blogged, under duress

tomorrow, I:

• go to the pediatric neurologist appointment, and will likely be told to get the hell out of her office with our happy caught-up child
• go to that audition in the city while fobbing off work with the pediatric neurologist appointment
• work out in hopes of losing 20 lbs on a crash diet - the agency is asking for new headshots to give out, and the ones I have are old, from when I first signed with them 3 years ago. Therefore I can't be the fatty I am now, or some other reason that drives people into eating disorders. At least I'm up to running 4 miles a day and doing 200 sit-ups whenever I hit the gym, although weight training is still a complete anathema to me.

In the next year, I:

• ...will sound like a complete trite fortune cookie wisdom-spouting bastard, because it's late and I want to get to bed, therefore I:
• will enjoy my lovely wife
• will revel in my mischevious, cunning, theatrical, comedian son, especially when I start swim class with him
• will fail to take many things seriously
• will play games of Ra, Mall of Horror, Taj Mahal and Fury of Dracula

I think that's it. What do I win?

ideas are bulletproof

We both loved it. A highly successful night at the movies, mainly because we've seen so many crappy or mediocre movies that when a good or great one comes along it's amazing to watch.

Now I have to dig through the whole house to find the source material so Mammamer can see it.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Just got finished watching this movie, and I'm still trying to process it a little.

One of the problems I have with Wes Anderson movies sometimes is that they're in-your-face quirky, as if he has a big neon sign somewhere in the movie telling you how artily clever he is. A lot of his movies also deal with someone's refusal to reach maturity or accept life as it really is -- in fact, all of them do. Not that I really have a problem with that; just that I wish it was a little more understated.

This one (that reminds me of Wes Anderson a tiny bit), while it had its really funny moments -- particularly about a whole ongoing thing involving a little kid and his chatting on the computer about poop -- is mostly a slightly sad love story about how everyone has their own secrets, pain and problems, and it's about that human need to find someone who'll take you in despite all that. Definitely not a romantic comedy as it was sometimes billed I guess, but an odd little movie that doesn't try to hit you over the head with its cleverness.

There's a recently-divorced dad who manages to set his hand on fire in front of his kids in the first scene, and who is desperate to try and have a relationship with his two sons, and screws up in spite of himself; there's the video artist (what would you expect from a movie directed by a performance artist, anyway) who wants her work to be seen but is extremely embarrassed and put off by the politics involved in the art world; there are the dad's two sons, who seem to spend a lot of their time typing out ASCII pictures on the computer, having filthy chats with random people over AIM, and being harassed (literally and sexually) by the local teenage girls; and the little girl who keeps a secret hope chest in her room stuffed with merchandise.

And it's a romance, but definitely not in the crappy tried-and-true romantic comedy sense; the leads are real-seeming enough, even though their characters are dealing with loneliness and pain.

Like I said, really weird and really quiet, but it's still making me think, which is more than a lot of movies do for me. (And the scene at the end is really affecting. Not Lost in Translation affecting, but affecting.)

It won scores of awards and is on a lot of critics' ten best lists for 2005, but I'm still not really sure why. It was good, but I wouldn't say it was that good; it's too weird for that. But again, I'm still thinking about it... which is probably why it won those awards. It's very different and yet affecting somehow, and being different stands out.

(She has a number of projects, it looks like. I particularly like this web-based one, with its assignments. You can even get "grant" money!)

you too can be a heroin mule!

We've decided to abandon Netflix -- owing to the hectic movie-watching schedule accorded to us as parents -- in favor of simply going to our local video store. (That, and Mer is entranced by their porn selection.)

Anyhoo, on our first day back at the video store we went a bit nuts and got the maximum, 3 movies, which we actually watched with whirlwind intensity over the past few days along with our last Netflix movie:

40 Year Old Virgin, which was funny in places but more genially sweet than anything else. I might've figured, since it was directed by Judd Apatow, who directed one of my favorite TV series of all time.

Batman Begins, which was pretty damn good for the oversaturated market of superhero movies. I'm somewhat of a heretic in the comic book nerd population in that I actually love the very first Batman movie, even though yes, Nicholson is only acting Nicholson. A guilty pleasure. This one is Batman as if it was Blade Runner, or maybe Taxi Driver, with all the brooding gritty intensity you might suspect. (That, and the digital Scarecrow effects are damn creepy.)

House of Flying Daggers, one of the few that I'd consider owning -- amazingly stylized, oversaturated colors, and incredible acrobatics. That and it has a plot that's pure melodrama, but you'd expect that. The digital effects are a tiny tiny bit dated, but with visuals straight out of a marriage made in heaven between Bruce Lee and Busby Berkeley, it almost seems like every frame is a work of art. That, and there's a whole fight sequence in a bamboo forest that's eerie and chilling -- like the entire troupe of Cirque du Soleil became assassins.

And the downer of the list, Maria Full of Grace. It was in this movie that I learned how a pregnant 17-year-old can practice to become a drug mule: on grapes. If you can swallow a full grape and not gag, you've got a future career in the growth industry of the drug trade. (I must admit I'm curious, so next time I go to the grocery store I'm going to get a bunch of grapes just so I can find out. After all, I don't know how much this whole Silicon Valley career is going to last.)

further AM wonderfulness

KABL AM 960 out of Oakland plays all sorts of big band jazz, vocalists from the great Age of the Rat Pack, and older songs from Neil Diamond, the Carpenters, etc. They know their demographics, since every ad during station breaks is for reverse mortgages, insurance, and medalert bracelets. I'm certainly learning the lyrics to all those jazz standards my mom liked to sing to herself while making breakfast.

Oh, and the best thing about them is that Mondays through Fridays, from 9-10 PM, they play radio dramas and comedies. The show name is When Radio Was, hosted by a nearly comatose Stan Freeberg, but this show plays old noir radio dramas, old sketch comedy programs, and other things from the 40s and 50s.

And then there's KOH AM 780 out of Reno, and any real gander around the website pretty much gives you the tenor of the day over there on the air in Reno. However: late night is the domain of Coast to Coast with George Noory and Art Bell, sort of a two-man Kook Batshit AM Truth Squad. Highly entertaining, especially when they talk to people who've seen UFOs and ghosts.

And then there's always listening to the local Bay Area Hateful Jesus station to see what's got the Focus on the Family people worked up. Duh. The "foundation of traditional marriage", every single day.

high and low culture

Ah, yes, the television:

I've recently discovered a new favorite show. As I've told people many times before, Mer and I are addicted to two things: good movies and horrible TV.

I originally experienced my new favorite show on one of those "look at what wacky TV those foreigners have" shows. It was Takeshi's Castle, a characteristically over-the-top Japanese game show where the whole idea is about humiliating the contestants, in every single show. Japan apparently doesn't have the same network of liability laws and insurance coverage that the US does.

Every single show is a "Dear Japan" moment. You can hear the sternums crack. People willingly wear humiliating giant daruma doll and football player costumes, and slog through mud and sludge. They go charging headfirst into walls and across large fake rows of dominoes. And there are upsetting shorts.

It speaks to something really dark and, well, boring in my character (or maybe it's simply my deep Teutonic love of schadenfreude) that this show hasn't really gotten old yet for me.

And now it's been reborn on the SpikeTV network (the NETWORK FOR MEN, in which I imagine millions of Beavises and Buttheads) as Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, a sort of cut-rate-MST3K-meets-Iron Chef-meets-Jackass.

Sigh. Brings a tear to the eye...

Then on to high culture:

Normally I can't stand Inside the Actor's Studio -- mainly because James Lipton has his nose so firmly implanted in the small intestine of whoever he's interviewing that the poor interviewee is visibly uncomfortable. One comic said: "He has the stench -- the STENCH -- THE STEEEENNNNNNCH! of failed actor... aaaaaaaagh!"

But tonight was unbelievable. The entire cast of The Simpsons. Most of the show consisted of the various voice actors answering questions from Lipton, in character.

10 seconds of Dan Castellaneta answering questions as Abe Simpson almost made me wet my pants. I'll be saving it to tape if anybody's interested.

Of course I'm boiling with envy at all of these people. Being a voice actor for the Simpsons means that you work from 10-2 (without a break), and you're completely free to pursue other acting gigs. Nice life... and of course, working with the likes of Hank Azaria and Nancy Cartwright can't be the worst thing in the world.

just saw "revolutions" with coworkers

Massive spoilers below. But you probably saw the damn thing already anyway.

1. 2 hours of my life I'll never get back. It sapped my will to live, but it was still better than Reloaded.
2. Best video game I've ever seen.
3. Neo meeting the machine AI was cool.
4. Preceding Trinity death sequence took forever.
5. Cosmology of trilogy doesn't make sense.
6. Why would you ever want Keanu Reeves as your Messiah?
7. Mechs defending Zion were goddamn ridiculous. Same with the pointless 16-year-old-as-hero sequence. Bleah.
8. Slimy Frenchman character was thankfully minimized.
9. Movie actually made Agent Smith less interesting.
10. Forgot most of what it was about immediately afterwards. Desperately wanted to see "Mystic River" next door when I got out of it.

nothing succeeds like utter shit

Oh goody.

I think I need to lie down now.

I knew it was going to happen -- the ending scene of the movie might as well have had "AND WE'RE GOING TO TAKE YOUR MONEY WITH THE SEQUEL, YOU DEGENERATE IDIOTS... HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" superimposed over the credits.

But why??? Why? If there is a God, why does He/She/It hate us so damn much? If this is a cosmic test, haven't we been tested enough already?

(Kudos to shan for making my day a little more disturbing with this nugget of infoweirdness.)

open casting call for moviegoers

Mer and I thought it was so good we're willing to see Lost in Translation again with other like-minded folks. It's only at the Shoreline now.

Other movies we feel we need to see sometime:

Seabiscuit: yeah, it's all done through hazy filters and maybe sepia-tinged schmaltz. But we've heard it's got solid performances all round, and we're definitely Chris Cooper fans ever since we saw Lone Star.

thirteen: it looks like an after-school special to me, or at least a Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad. But Holly Hunter is usually pretty good, when she's not playing an accident fetishist.

The Magdalene Sisters: one of those movies that'll be really hard to watch -- who doesn't love a good night out watching atrocities of the Catholic Church? -- but it's actually the movie I'm most interested in seeing for some reason.

Whale Rider: so many people have given us so many positive blurbs about this movie that I figure we have to see it eventually. Gave one or two of them shivers.

And yes, Lost in Translation -- I already have a soft spot for it.

loneliness and love letters

Saw Lost in Translation tonight.

Simply amazing -- it so accurately captures what it's like to have jet lag, be lost in wonderment at another culture, and be lost in crippling loneliness all at the same time. It's a sad movie of sorts, even though Bill Murray is moving towards a more understated comic genius, even as he's watching his life threaten to slip away from him.

Nobody captures loneliness and alienation quite like Sofia Coppola. I think I still prefer her first movie, but not by much -- mainly because you could visually see a family disintegrate over time; the browning lawn, the dying tree that's finally chopped down and hauled away, the peeling paint. (The soundtrack also put Air on the map.)

In any case, though, Lost in Translation is a Blade Runner love story. Tokyo at dawn, Tokyo at 4:30 in the morning, Tokyo at all-night parties, the Tokyo of neon, pachinko parlors, strip clubs, karaoke bars, harsh fluorescent lights... and two people who simply need each other, who need to know that their lives have possibilities, find each other and explore the city.

Amazingly shot and amazingly acted. When actors can act when they're not saying a word -- I live for that.

(Besides, rumor has it the annoying actress character is based on Cameron Diaz.)

MJ, we must set another karaoke date soon. I shall sing Earth, Wind and Fire, The Doors, Elvis -- doesn't matter.

Underworld -- underdone

yeah, yeah, spoiler alert and all that. Mer and I saw it with S & MJ last night.

It sucks the high hard one.

Let's start with the negatives, shall we?

1. Dialogue that sounds like an army of scriptwriters raided every horrible cop movie cliche. Yes, cop movies.

Villain Who Isn't Really Much of a Villain 'Cause He's Really More Oily than Threatening, and Also a Terrible Actor: "Soon, you'll see things my way."

Uber-Vampire that Looks Startlingly Like William S. Borroughs in a James Brown Cape: "You are expelled from the mansion!"

Kate Beckinsale, Who Really Doesn't Need to Slum for her Husband-Director, Explaining Way Too Much Uninteresting Plot: "Craven is a bureaucrat, not a warrior."

Kind of a warning sign about the movie you're watching when the crappy villain is named Craven.

Like Kevin Murphy would say: "She's a vampire who doesn't play by the rules. And she's got a vampire captain who's angry at her for not playing by the rules."

2. The whole movie takes place in three very cheap locations: the streets of Budapest, the Eyes Wide Shut mansion, and an abandoned warehouse/subway station. I think there's one location scout that just owns the abandoned warehouse all of these movies get filmed in.

3. A story that nobody cares about, since it's fairly incoherent to begin with and the characters also insist on TELLING YOU EVERY LAST DETAIL. Much as I love hearing about the minutes of vampire clan meetings, I could do without it when all this movie was trying to be was a Matrix-y supernatural action movie.

4. Even by this movie's low standards to begin with, the action stuff fails -- we've seen all the Matrix action before, all the flips, all the gunplay, all the PVC and cooler-than-thou Goth aesthetic. Let's just say I'm very tired of that cynical calculation of many action movies these days: put people in form-fitting Goth outfits with guns, and you've instantly got your movie. The script writes itself. Or doesn't.

5. I'm getting older, so movies are getting LOUDER. Everybody wants their movie spiced up with White Zombie (or some lame Hungarian equivalent) to show that it's HARDCORE and KICKASS and AWESOME. It all just sucks.

6. There's a massive African-Brit who plays a menacing werewolf (oh, sorry -- Lycan) henchman. He's one big motha, except the menacing effect is totally destroyed by his voice. Ned from South Park and Donald Duck had a love child. Hilarious.

Advantages:

1. Nice shots of Kate's heinie. Which sorta made me wonder about her husband's willingness to focus on it onscreen.
2. Jesus is mighty pissed and craves blood.

...in which I am a Queer Eye casualty

The show has been, well, an interesting influence on me. For one thing, Mer and I usually watch the show as soon as it comes on Tuesday nights. Sure, there are the funny bits where some poor schlub gets ridiculed on national television (at least in this case it's relatively good-natured); sure, there are the before and after shots that are simply amazing.

Little did I know that I'd take a couple small principles from the show that I'd apply in daily life. However, the net effect has been somewhat of a wash, as I'll relate below:

1. Recently, while I was in blog blackout, Mer and I went to the mall on the weekend and descended upon an "Express for Men" store (or, more accurately, the store descended upon us) where I proceeded to engage in a stereotypical gay man (or heterosexual woman) form of shopping: find what sort of coutoure works for you -- typically items not on the sale rack -- and incur some credit card debt while banishing whatever bad thoughts you had about life in an orgy of shopping.

I came away with two pairs of very nice-looking buttoned shirts (solid colors, one in a very nice deep electric blue) on sale for $20 apiece, and a surprisingly expensive pair of slightly distressed jeans to wear with them. These were actually a great purchase; I've been getting all sorts of compliments around the office about my new looks. Better than walking around in the standard engineer uniform, anyway.

But the real story is what's next:

2. Deep while we were in the throes of our depressing move, Mer and I had seen enough scenes of painful back-waxings that the thought was implanted firmly in our heads. She'd look at my back somewhat wistfully -- yes, I'm a timberwolf normally -- and say things like "well, it's your choice, and I love your back hair anyway... you could just try it and see if you like it." This is the way my wife tricks me into doing anything painful or stupid: appeal to my unfailing sense of adventure and trying new things. Very sly of her.

Bouyed by my new-found desire to wear basketball jerseys without fear and not scaring children with my Afro-styled shoulders, we make the appointment.

On the big day, the technician is a somewhat gruff French lady who ushers the both of us to her table with the pans of hot wax and the obnoxious New Age music playing over her stereo.

Already something wrong is about to happen. Everything goes quiet.

The hot wax is painful enough; but one warning sign you're in for a bit of pain has to be when the person ripping your hair out has to use one fist for leverage against your back as she uses her other hand to rip strips of hair directly out of you.

Now, I have a fairly high tolerance for pain most of the time; you steel yourself for the shock, the pain comes, the pain subsides, and then you relax.

This is altogether different, especially when she hits the areas along my spine or my neck. Mer tells me later that while she was impressed with my ability to control my pain, she could hear me breathing quite heavily with the pain shocks...

Shaken and defeated, I take a look at my pink back. So far so good, although it looks very weird next to my front.

I guess it's been said that men gain empathy for women when this is done; I say the hell with that. Nobody with a lot of hair should have to do this. Jesus.

I spend the rest of the day feeling a bit weird in my clothes.

The next day: the nightmare of waking up with a huge itchy rash all over your back, which doesn't really go away for the next 2 weeks or so. And I'm just dumb enough to wonder about doing this again -- because it gets easier, right?

The hair is just starting to grow back now -- and no Laker jerseys to my name. Whee!

music for a bipolar world

Music for when I think about how the world is basically fucked and what irreversible things human beings are doing to the planet: NIN's "Into the Void."

nothing ever grows and the sun doesn't shine all day...
tried to save myself, but myself keeps slipping away...

For those who don't mind a little R&B in their diet, in the tradition of those sexless artists like Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin... there is only what is quite possibly the sexiest song in the known universe -- the radio edit of Floetry's "Say Yes". And the rest of their hiphop/R&B vibe isn't bad either, but for some reason only the radio edit of "Say Yes" provides the full desired bootylicious effect, not the one on the album. Around here it's called the "booty song".

The Song That Should Be Played in a Smoky Nightclub of the Future, Sung by a Robotic Chanteuse: Sounds from the Ground's "Lean on Me".

only in SF

There are 8 million stories in the naked city.

stories of suck

Meredith and I have a long history of going to see really really bad movies through no fault of our own. Sure, there are the times when we'll tempt fate intentionally, and we've got a cushion of funny people around us, but we have a bad history of being lured in by the promise of cinematic wonder -- or at least competence -- and being beaten into submission by movies that hate us.

Case in point: today, as part of our weekend together to reconnect and recharge our batteries, we hung out together at part of the Jewish Film Festival. It's important for Mer to connect with aspects of cultural heritage, and none of her Jewish friends are at all interested in seeing film festival movies. Anyway, this particular festival had been kind to us before. Some big highlights from festivals past included digitally restored (and slightly edited and retouched) footage of Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1962, a movie that's basically an awesome feature-length music video of Kurt Weill's life and songs (speaking to the German in me and the Jew in Mer), starring Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Elvis Costello, and Lou Reed, among others. And my favorite: one of the first horror movies ever made, an ass-kicking silent full of great German Expressionist sets (some better than Metropolis) and full of antecedents to Frankenstein and so many movie monsters to come: The Golem. The best part -- a live klezmer band to provide a horror score. I recommend all three of these, even the Eichmann documentary, but "The Golem" may not be a rental movie kind of experience. Even the pictures on this site really, really don't do the movie justice. (The extrerior sets made me wonder what Paul Wegener -- the director and Golem himself -- could've done with Lord of the Rings had he been alive and had the budget Peter Jackson did.)

Anyway. That has all changed. A disturbing trend has emerged -- don't take your husband Brian to the Jewish Film Festival, because the movies will suck. And suck. AND SUCK. Don't take him, and they'll be great. Past offenses for the past few years would include:

1. Something from Argentina about a whiny unappealing guy with pinkish puffy nipples and mangy, patchy chest hair. Oh, and he gets to sleep with models. Mer and I didn't focus on the plot too much because we were too morbidly fascinated by the main character's grooming problems.
2. A French movie in which a young woman has sex with (I guess) several different men, one of which is able to penetrate her through several layers of clothing. Either that or he's satisfied simply with dry humping. What do French men say during orgasm? "Mon Dieu. MON DIEU. MON DIEU." Makes sense, but it helps if you chant it in low, gravelly tones like a Marseilles sailor.
3. The most boring war movie ever made.

On to tonight's crapfest:

4. We were sold on an independent film set in LA with Nestor Carbonell, Janeane Garofalo and John Ritter. What we got was something that didn't have a coherent thought in its empty head and thought it was really, really clever. I bet the words "edgy" and "quirky" were used a lot at production meetings. Mainly I just wanted to take these characters and force them into timeout by watching the next movie on this list.
5. The Glow=The Slow. The whole movie is about a woman who may or may not have experienced a visit from an angel with a severed wing. Oh, and the Glow can drive beat-up trucks and make Star Trek conventioneers walk around on farms. Being the Kubrick fan that I am, I'm accustomed to glacially-paced movies, but mostly what I wanted to do here was sleep. I'm not really a pig by nature, but when I find myself wishing that the main female character (yes, her name really is Tinkerbell) would get naked simply to make this stupid thing more interesting, something's wrong. Something is doubly wrong when nudity is hinted at in one shower scene, and then delivered when an obese, hairy man is bitten in the ass by a spooked dog and wanders around in the dust clutching a bloody towel around his privates.

Meredith owes me, dammit. And so does that movie.

A long time ago, and we were first dating, I took Mer up to the German Film Festival up in the city, at the Castro. You may not think it, but it was every stereotype you could expect: a tall blonde woman in a cruel black leather outfit announces in accented English about the evening's film (and yes, it's a FILM, not a movie... oh the pretension); the short that precedes the movie is very very weird and disturbing but good; the movie itself is a three-hour adaptation of Kafka's last novel. Since the novel was unfinished, so is the movie: it abruptly ends in mid-frame. Thank God.
Since we had just started dating, we hadn't reached that point in our relationship where we were comfortable overcoming awkwardness and that very real desire to please and be accomodating, comfortable enough with each other to say: "Can we just leave this flaming bag of shit, please?" So, for three hours we nervously sat there, wondering if the other one was liking this... thing, this movie that has three hours of people wandering through blizzards, having sex on cold, sticky, dirty ice-encrusted German barroom floors, having conversations that went nowhere (which is kind of the point with Kafka, I admit), wandering through blizzards again, having sex on the barroom floors, more crappy dialogue, trudging through more blizzards...

I think it was a good thing that I fell asleep, otherwise I might've run screaming and then I might never have seen my future wife ever again.

I woke up and didn't realize that time had passed. Another blizzard.

Lest you think that film festivals alone are responsible for all this, we went to see Johnny Depp's latest. Boring as hell too. I think I started getting bored right in the previews, when I found out that there's going to be a Haunted Mansion movie. With Eddie Murphy. Me, I'm waiting for the "It's a Small World" movie -- they can play it for (or to) the prisoners in Guantanamo, since nothing else seems to be against the Geneva Convention there anyway.

And they say Hollywood is out of ideas.

will they do our place?

New favorite show: Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Sort of a combination of Trading Spaces, Martha Stewart, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Bravo lets these guys get away with all sorts of suggestive commentary and a few swear words; the straight guys they visit are all emergency cases (pizza boxes under the couch types, or tiles coming up in the kitchen and kids' toys cluttering the living room, i.e. "the Toys R Us crack den").

Many bon mots later (at least one great zinger per show, usually from Carson, the queen bee of the five), the subject is transformed, all in good fun -- and the results, I'd say, put Trading Spaces and the like to shame (although this show obviously doesn't have TP's artificially limited budget).

"You had me at mazel tov."