Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

Working through some Christmas-y movies with sol_se for the most part.

Movies I've seen before are in italics.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek Deep Space 9 (2019)
MST3K: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Bell Book and Candle (1958)
The Howling (1981)
WW84 (2020)

I cried like a baby at the end of IaWL once again. Never fails.

The DS9 doc was weird, but ultimately enjoyable. I thought it was a little odd that it was put together by the show runner, though.

I stand by my assertion that A Muppet Christmas Carol is a top-tier Dickens adaptation and Michael Caine is one of the best Scrooges.

Bell Book and Candle starts on Christmas Eve, so it counts. It's that other film about Jimmy Stewart's obsessive love for Kim Novak.

sol_se bought me The Howling on Blu-ray for Christmas (as well as the special edition of Curse of Frankenstein) because she loves me and wants me to be happy. Still a great movie. Very formative for teenage me.

I think I liked WW84? They spent more time on the emotional beats for Maxwell Lord than they did for Diana, which is an odd choice. There's nothing to approach the battlefield scene in the first one. I think this is probably one that's going to get worse in my mind as time goes on, but for the 2.5 hours it was playing, it kept my attention.

I was going to say that I didn't watch that much, but it ended up being seven movies, which is probably more than most people reading this watch in a week? 

Movies in italics are ones I've seen previously.

War of the Worlds (1953)
Delicatessen (1991)
Muppet Treasure Island (1996)
Knives Out (2019)
8 Women (2002)
The Italian Job (1969)
National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets (2007) with sol_se 

Delicatessen is a delight. It's reductive to call it Gilliamesque, especially since Caro & Jeunet are their own thing, but there's a lot of visual overlap. It's also in one of my favorite subgenres: cannibalism comedy, although the comedy and the cannibalism are separate things here.

Muppet Treasure Island is a disappointment on all fronts. Some of the puppets look shoddy AF, the songs are terrible, and Tim Curry does not steal scenes the way he should. The lead lad was kind of just there. I had better memories of this film, but they didn't match up.

I loved loved loved Knives Out. The entire cast is wonderful, the plotting is *chef's kiss*, the design elements are magnificent. I don't want to say any more so as to not spoil anything.

I made a good call following Knives Out with 8 Women, a French musical murder mystery, where a group of mostly-related women try to figure out who killed the head of the household, all while singing solo numbers about their relationship to love. More great casting and excellent production design.

I enjoyed The Italian Job well enough. Michael Caine is great. There are too many characters involved in the heist, so you never really get to know any of them except Caine and Noel Coward. I don't know about that ending, honestly.

National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets ended up being a perfect Saturday movie date for sol_se and I. I spent a lot of the movie making faces and facepalming, which is what we really look for. I also did a lot of bad Nicholas Cage impersonations.

Vividcon is in, like, a week and a half! *GLEE* Who else is going? Can I get a show of hands?

- Within the last few months, I've finished rewatches of Buffy, Angel, and Farscape. Now I'm pondering my next big pop culture move.

- jmtorres is our roommate now. It is awesome. She brought oh so many books.

- I really, really, really want to make an album-vid of Farscape a la Luminosity's Scooby Road, but finding good, consistent albums that are also salient to the subject matter throughout is *hard*. This is especially true since I only really discovered music in the era of MP3s, so I don't keep a lot of albums in my head.

- I'll have DVDs for sale at the orphan vids table at Vividcon again. Nothing new, just a repackaging of Volumes 1 and 2 from last year as a single unit. If you have one and not the other, let me know and I'll bring a few single-volume of each as well.

- Poking at a couple different vids here and there. Finished one vid, then decided it wasn't awesome enough, so I unfinished it.

- Went to see Puppet Up! on Friday. Puppet improv from the Jim Henson Company. Dirty, dirty dirty puppet improv. It was hilarious.

- Running Fiasco again at the con. Interest posts at Dreamwidth and Livejournal. There's still plenty of room on both Thursday and Sunday nights.

That's... pretty much everything I can think of right now.

This is why I love Neil Patrick Harris.