Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

I was off at TGIF/F last weekend (wonderful time, I miss everybody already), so we're getting a double decker this week. Also, apropos of nothing, but I just voted for Elizabeth Warren yesterday. It's a good feeling.

Movies I've seen before are in italics.

John Mulaney: New in Town (2012)
Killer's Kiss (1955)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Local Hero (1983)
John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City (2018)
D.E.B.S. (2004) @ TGIF/F
Charlie's Angels (2019) @ TGIF/F
Desert Hearts (1985)
Godzilla (2014)
Godzilla: King of Monsters (2019) (birthday present from sol_se!)
Ride the High Country (1962)
The Relic (1997) w/sol_se 

Killer's Kiss is an early Stanley Kubrick film. He hadn't quite found his legs yet and it's not nearly as polished as his next film, The Killing.

Some Like It Hot is so good. It really is one of the best comedies of all time. Criterion Channel has it up right now as a special edition, so there were a lot of featurettes for me to watch, including an extended talk with Tony Curtis.

I had an idea of what Sweet Smell of Success was, but I was absolutely wrong. It's a kind of noirish, a deep delve into the seedy world of New York publicity. This is actually the first time I've seen Burt Lancaster in anything and I was quite taken.

I found Local Hero endearing, especially the very young Peter Capaldi.

I was promised ridiculousness and D.E.B.S. did not disappoint.

The end of TGIF/F had me missing all my very gay friends, so I watched Desert Hearts in honor of them. It's a story of two women who find something together in 1950s Nevada. I liked it!

sol_se bought me Godzilla: King of Monsters for my birthday, so I rented the 2014 Godzilla and made a double feature of it. They're both very fun giant monster movies, although my heart will always be with rubber suits over CGI. Still, it's exciting to see Godzilla-Ghidorah-Rodan-Mothra fighting action.

I picked up Ride the High Country from the swap table at the last Vividcon and finally got around to watching it. I'm not a huge fan of westerns, but this was a solid film with great performances.

The Relic is very stupid and very confusing and basically perfect fodder for the Saturday sol_se  date.

So I'm trying to suss out how anybody could call gay marriage "discrimination." As sort of a guide I made, in GIMP, a very rough outline of what I think the individual viewpoints on the debate are, using stick figures that make xkcd look like Van Gogh. Let me know if I'm missing something or if I've inadvertently become really really offensive.

( Large image is large )

Yes, those are jetpacks in the third image.

President-elect Obama.

To borrow a phrase from Jess, "Hells yeah."

I just got a call from a real live person asking me if they could count on my support for Arizona Proposition 102, the "faith-based initiative" to "define marriage as being between one man and one woman."

My response: "You people are insane. Don't call here again." *click*

Fucking assholes.

If you're in Arizona, for the love of everything awesome, get to the polls on Tuesday, vote No on Proposition 102. Love should not be legislated.

- Finally was able to actually attend a THEM reconvene. We played Smash Bros. Brawl on Hammer's Wii, bothered some of the fine folks at the local Sonic, and watched the first two episodes of "Coupling." Lots of people there, lots of geeking out. Still can't get used to that damned Wii-mote, though.

- Great moments in awkward dialogue:
At the reconvene, I'm talking about why I didn't buy a Wii when I had the opportunity last month with this other girl who I just met and whose name eludes me.

Me: [midnightfae] talked me out of it.

Girl: What? It's the Wii. You have to ignore your girlfriend... (off my "uh, no" look) or wife...

midnightfae: (frosty) Roommate.

- My great-uncle Phil became an actor after his retirement, working mostly in very-low-budget dramas and a few horror films. He just got in touch with me asking what the policy about sending screeners to Classic-Horror is. I'm still trying to figure out how to tell him we don't really review movies that come from direct-to-video-only distributors or that don't have a distributor yet at all. The quality is almost always poor and the reviews stagnate on the site unread. I'm talking with Mom about how best to approach this.

- McCain says that terrorist might try to tip the election. "Vote for me or you vote with the terrorists!" What. Ever.

Have to finish up my Shivers review tonight. Appropriately for a David Cronenberg film, it's kind of mutated into a hybrid of literary critique and straight movie review.