Mood:
lazyThis weekend, I finally did see "The Full Monty", and it was utterly wonderful. (The audience, by my rough estimate, was about 140% women.) It was very well cast. The play was all the more charming and plausible for being a small-town production - you could actually believe that these were out-of-work steel workers, which I'm not sure would have come across quite as convincingly in the context of a big Broadway production. The kid who played the main character's son (Gaz in the movie, Jerry in the play) was wonderful. He had a very strong resemblance to the boy who played Red Whelan, with the same sort of self-possessed, more-grown-up-than-Dad personality.
I've also been watching Empire Falls, which was directed by Fred Schepisi, the director David would be working with on Last Man, assuming that funding can be found. Empire Falls was filmed not too far from here, in Skowhegan and Waterville. The area was all a-flutter while they were making the movie (not unlike Bowen, I would imagine). The newspapers were full of Paul Newman and Ed Harris spottings, as though they were rare birds that had accidentally blown in on an Arctic storm.
It's a well-done miniseries, worth watching if you can find it. The premise is similar to Seachange, in that it focuses on the doings of quirky characters in a little coastal town, but in other respects it's the mirror image of Seachange. Miles, who, like Laura, is divorced with a teenage daughter, wants to escape out of the small-town life, instead of into the small-town life. The town is also seriously lacking in charming, ginger-bearded, kerchief-wearing rogues. I'm just glad they didn't overdo the "ayuh" accents.
So, following up on the "foefiction" post from the other day...I forgot to mention, the main difficulty I'd have with writing foefiction is that there just aren't a lot of books/movies that I really dislike. Most movies have at least one or two redeeming qualities. The ones that are truly terrible and brain-destroying (like Spice World) I steer clear of altogether. But sometimes, due to circumstance, you find yourself watching something that wasn't exactly your choice. And when it's over, you're so relieved that you'll never have to go through that again.
The list of Films I Never Want To See Again is short, but potent:
1. Cool World A Ralph Bakshi movie in which wooden nickels devour children, limousines sprout breasts, and Brad Pitt has to say lines like "You're a wacka-doo". And very bad things happen if people have sex with cartoon characters.
I saw this film with a group of friends one night, when we were stuck in the middle of Kansas with nothing to do. It turned out, after the movie, that we'd all been sitting there separately thinking "Oh God...I really really really wish I could walk out, but I'm with a group of people." Sometimes peer pressure isn't such a good thing.
2. Independence Day My boyfriend wanted to see this. I wanted to see "The Importance Of Being Earnest". The boyfriend won.
After two hours of unremitting preposterousness, the final straw, for me, was being asked to believe that the alien mothership ran on the Windows operating system.
3. Twilight of the Gods Did you know that Marton Csokas made a gay Maori porn flick? Neither did I, until a Marton-obsessed friend brought it over and made me watch it. I suppose there are worse movies in the world, but I felt mildly dirty and violated after watching Celeborn cavorting naked in a rain forest. (My opinion of the film wasn't elevated by its inclusion on a DVD compilation called "Boys In Love".)
4. The "Barfing Immigrants" Film We Were Forced To Watch In Eighth Grade I don't even remember the title of this - something like "Land Of The Free" or "The New World". One day, the entire eighth grade was herded into the auditorium. The doors were chained shut, and we were shown a movie about eastern Europeans emigrating to America. It was supposed to make us appreciate what our ancestors went through to get here.
At the beginning of the movie, a little girl eats some raw bread dough. The yeast rises inside her stomach, bloats her up, and kills her, in a scene disturbingly reminiscent of "Alien". After a brief mourning period, the immigrants all cram into the steerage area of a clipper ship and get busy throwing up all over each other. Mothers spew on children, husbands puke on wives, brother blows chunks on brother. Buckets of mixed barf and diarrhea jiggle and slop onto the floor. The walls run slick with amoebic dysentery. Just when you think it's over, the hurling starts anew. (The vomit budget of this movie had to be well into six figures.) In the middle of all this, the filmmakers inserted the mandatory Childbirth During An Ocean Storm scene, with lots of blood and screaming.
When the movie ended, it was lunch period. One hundred whey-faced eighth graders staggered into the cafeteria on shaky legs, vowing never to immigrate anywhere. That day, the menu was gluey cheese pizza, and a canned pear in syrup that looked like a medical experiment. I vividly remember thinking: "If I just sit here quietly at the lunch table, without moving, I won't have to throw up."
For the coveted #4 slot of Movies I Hope Never To See Again, it's a difficult choice between the immigrant movie, and The Little Girl Who Slipped On A Snowbank And Got Run Over By The School Bus, part of a Bus Safety series that we were shown in elementary school. Both were about equally traumatizing. I wish I could say the same of the sex-ed movies we saw in fifth grade, but they were so vague that nobody knew what they were talking about. The "girl film" showed a girl wandering in a dreamy haze through a meadow. The "boy film" showed a boy sitting on his bed looking out the window. To me, it looked like the kid was suffering from clinical depression. "Soon", the narrator informed us loftily, "you'll be getting taller and going through changes." It was never specified what these changes were, though the playground grapevine rumored that they had something to do with armpit hair.
(Just think what a great job Dilios could have done narrating those sex ed films...."Only the strong can become men. Only the pimply. Only the strong. Only the pimply and strong and manly can become manly pimply men." As for the girls: "Soon, you will be giving birth to real Spartan men.")
I learned nothing useful about male anatomy from these films, despite having grown up in a house full of brothers, and despite playing "doctor" with my best friend Matthew at age 6. Matthew was the Eddie to my Amanda. We always picked each other first in gym class, spent hours hiding in trees in the woods, and were planning to get married someday. He was going to be an astronaut, and I was going to be a doctor, and we were going to live in a treehouse. A year later, our family moved to the next town over, where the school system had a better library of scary bus films, and that was that.
In a strange case of life nearly imitating art, I ran into Matthew again 8 1/2 years later, when we were 15, at a bookstore. It was a pretty gangly and awkward encounter. We probably didn't even have sixty cents between us, let alone three dollars.
Wow, this post wandered WAY off topic. I can already sense all of you slotting it at #2 under "Posts I Never Want To Read Again".
smelly
chatty
surprised
quizzical
hungry
accident prone
d'oh
energetic