Movie Reviews!

I have four days between the end of summer classes and the beginning of winter classes. True to form, I haven't managed to do anything terribly interesting during this break. I stayed up until four AM one night, but that was because the pest control people were running a loud compressor right outside my window, spraying poison into the fourth floor of the dorm. If I closed the windows, it got unbearably hot and muggy. With them open, the noise was even louder.

So I made the sensible decision and played Nethack until I couldn't keep my eyes open, which was around four AM. Just as I was piling pillows on top of my head to block the noise, it stopped. I took this as an indication that I was blessed and promptly fell asleep, only to be woken up at ten AM by what sounded like a chainsaw. I took this as a sign that I wasn't ever going to get a full night's sleep, and gave up. It seems a little odd that the poison guys would spray their death-gas in the wee hours of the night. I suppose they didn't want to disturb anyone.

The dorms are in the process of reopening, and I believe some sort of sports championship is in its last throes as well. Workers have systematically adorned all the empty rooms with window clings depicting the letter "O" in either green or yellow. In far-off Willcox Hall, my associate Spider reported that they keyed into her room in her absence, washed away a lovely whiteboard marker drawing of a spider I'd done on her window and left a sterile O cling in its place. Bastards!

The housekeeping staff in Carson is much nicer, so I awoke that day to find all the other rooms' windows O'd except mine. A couple of the clings had been slipped under my door. I gleefully ignored them.

Other than that, nothing interesting. In the absence of a roommate or even neighbors, I'm sinking slowly into a familiar state of extreme apathy broken only by occasional web browsing and taping "Men in Black: the Animated Series" every day at 3:30 PM.

In an attempt to combat this, I've rented a couple of films and managed to work up the enthusiasm to actually leave campus and watch a third. The films in question are THX 1138, All That Jazz, and Blood Simple, perhaps not the best choices for cheering-up purposes. This was the first time I'd seen all of them, although my mother tells me that All That Jazz was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. She says I seemed to enjoy it. That would explain a lot, Mom.

I watched All That Jazz first, still tired from a weird night's sleep with power tools. I ended up sprawled on my roommate's vacant bed right in front of the TV, prone and propped up by plenty of pillows. I couldn't rest my head on the pillows without half-knocking my glasses off, turning the colorful dance routines into a bunch of Beanie Babies in a dryer.

Then I had a brilliant idea! I put my right arm on the pillow and rested my head on it, then held my glasses in my right hand, closed my right eye and watched TV through the left lens. Worked perfectly, except that I had to put one of my pillows on the floor to catch my glasses whenever I fell asleep. Which was fairly often, mostly because I had one eye closed already and was resting comfortably on a stack of pillows.

I was kind of relieved later to read reviews criticizing the 20-minute dream sequence and all the pointless dancing around. I thought I might have imagined that.

It was still an okay movie. If you want to watch a 1970s beard guy screw up his life, die and still be one smooth bastard, I can't think of a better film for it. John Lithgow was in it, young and looking amazingly like a John Cleese character. There was an actor named Leland Palmer, but I couldn't figure out which one he was. It's still a neat Twin Peaks coincidence, though.

THX 1138 was a different experience. I watched that the next day, having had enough sleep, and I'm pleased to say I maintained an upright position throughout the film. I was sewing up my backpack again - these shoddy bags today, am I right, kids? - and needed something to keep myself occupied. Letterman was a rerun, and then I remembered I had a tape to watch.

THX 1138 was a lot like Let's Visit the World of the Future by Ivan Stang, which apparently was made a few years after it. THX 1138 in fact had a budget but very few actual interesting bits. I suppose that was in aid of its premise, a sterile city of clones run by a computer, but it was a little boring. There is a limit to the number of white corridors someone can run down and still retain my interest. I'm glad I've seen it, if only for understanding where Paranoia came from.

During the film, I fixed the webbing on the built-in pencil pouch in my backpack by independently reinventing darning. I'm getting more domestic by the day. Then I reinforced the straps AGAIN.

This time I was a lot neater with the stitches, an important factor to consider because I was mending a black backpack with white waxed dental floss. The stitches still stand out, but I went over them with an even satin stitch so they look like piping. Then, and this is the genius part, I covered everything in Goop to waterproof/wearproof it, theoretically. It looks like it'll hold up for a while.

I felt a little funny about gluing over stitches, like hammering nails through a pie, but then I realized that it was a backpack anyway. It wasn't like I was using pop rivets on a prom dress.

The day after that, I rode my bike to the Bijou and saw the reissue of Blood Simple. I didn't do anything during that movie, mostly because I was in a darkened theater. I did check my blood sugar with the aid of a penlight, but that was during the coming attractions.

Visually, Blood Simple struck a balance between All That Jazz's huge cast of colorful things and people running around for essentially no reason and THX 1138's identical white-clad clone guys wandering around for utilitarian reasons in a future that was also painted white. Blood Simple had actual (albeit 1980s) people in it, doing actual things. At this point I had also caught up on my sleep, too, so it was much easier to pay attention to things.

I am still unsure whether Blood Simple was a comedy. Funny things happened, and these two enormous women in front of me laughed uproariously at intervals, but it was more of an uneasy movie overall than a humorous one. Basically, this loser bartender guy, his loser girlfriend and his loser girlfriend's loser husband are at odds. The loser husband, played by that one guy who played Nixon, hires a loser private investigator to kill the lovers. A black guy exists who is another bartender and not a loser, and he hooks up with some slutty chick. Then people die and other people draw the wrong conclusions and it's all very Romeo and Juliet or I Love Lucy, inasmuch as I want to yell at the screen,

"Don't wipe that blood up with your shirt!"
"DON'T TOUCH THE CRIME SCENE!"
"If you didn't kill him, call the police!"
"Check his pulse!"
"Probably you should tell someone about the dead guy!"

Then there are wacky misunderstandings which lead to more killing but could have just as easily led to the lovers trying to steal a piece of concrete with John Wayne's signature in it. That's an allusion to an I Love Lucy episode, hampered by the fact that I only watched about seven minutes of it.

Much like Dawn of the Dead, the black guy and the woman survived. Perhaps he was a helicopter pilot when he wasn't tending bar for the loser husband.

I liked that most folks didn't automatically die when shot, and blood got everywhere despite efforts to clean. I don't have any experience with covering up a murder, but I once had to deal with a bedbug infestation. It was very similar to this, except that I did a better job washing everything than these yahoos did and I didn't have to bury anything in the middle of the night. I did move the contents of my closet into another room in the middle of the night, but that was because I couldn't sleep.

So of the three movies I watched in the last few days, Blood Simple was the most entertaining. All That Jazz was like a watered-down and happy The Wall and would be good to watch if you have a cold or it's 2 AM and nobody loves you. THX 1138 was visually kind of neat but like nearly every other future dystopia movie with the possible exception of Sleeper should be watched with people or snacks about. It was late by the time I was done with it (and my backpack), and I would probably have had scary future dreams if Space Ghost hadn't been on.

Goddamn. I need to hitchhike across the country or something if I'm going to keep up this "write what you know" bit.