Boom

formative moments

After semi-watching the Oscars last night (much pausing, a few backtracks, a lot of distraction and fast forwarding), I only have two things to note. 

One: I am so happy that Bret McKenzie won an Oscar, and that he won it for a song with/for/about muppets. True story: when Sweetie and I went to see the movie, we watched the credits to see who wrote the music and couldn't figure out who this brilliant Bret guy was. Then, thanks to the magic of a search engine, it was determined that we're idiots. We're so used to hearing and saying his name as Brit--thanks to the kiwi accents of Flight of the Conchords and us making fun of them in more recent years--that we forgot his name is actually Bret. 

Two: Thanks to the little video clips of people talking about movies that were important to them in their childhood, I briefly relived the magic of the first Star Wars movie. I barely remember seeing it, myself--I can pinpoint the theater and liking the little jawa guys and being freaked out by the trash compactor monster, but it didn't really stick. My earliest movie memory--I was 4.5 years old, at a drive-thru with my family--is Blazing Saddles. Aside from loving the whole thing (particularly the musical number at the end), the ridiculous bean scene where a bunch of cowboys eat baked  beans and fart around a campfire was oddly life-changing for me. While brothermine might challenge my memory of this, I recall the childhood home as being essentially a gas-free place. An occasional unvoidable burp demanded a politely horrified apology, and farting simply didn't happen, certainly not when anyone else was present, and possibly not even when alone because if it did in fact happen, it was certainly never admitted to. Sort of an "if a tree falls in a forest" propostion. 

This one scene surprised me for two reasons. First--I discovered adults are capable of farting. Second--my dad thought it was the goddamn funniest thing on planet earth. Considering that a year and a half ago I hosted a hilarity-filled Thanksgiving where the conversation revolved around desserts named "corn dump" and there was much reminiscing about variations on typing 58008 (I preferred 5318008) into calculators, I suspect that I imprinted on the bean scene more than I ever realized. 

word association

There is a house between my home and the light rail station that plays a small boombox from...well, I've heard it at 8:30am and I've heard it at 10pm. And at all hours in between. It's not that loud, and the music is frequently cool 70s soul, so I think it's kind of nice, but I'm glad I don't live right next door. At any rate, Sweetie and I walked past the other day and a particular song was playing.

 

We walked for a while, not saying anything, until this exchange:

Me: I wonder how many other people who hear Brick House think first of Muppets from Space?
Him: WHAT? Um, probably just you and like maybe two other...insane...muppet...weirdo...freaks. (these last words were muttered.)
Me: [long pause as I was utterly surprised.] Wow, really?
Him: YES. Really.

 

Pain, Disco

The home theater is installed, a hole was cut in the door and the couch moved downstairs, and lo, Bollywood returns to my life. And yours.

May your 2010 be filled with the Pain of Disco.The song-n-dance here are crazy; the subtitle lyric translations take it fully over the top into the Land of Awesome.

Last night, Sweetie and I watched Oldboy, a Korean adaptation of a manga that owed at least a small debt to The Count of Monte Cristo. I was tired, and at one point requested a backup because I lost track of the subtitles, having distracted myself wondering whether this movie was demonstrating "other cultures are incomprehensible" or "this was just made by some Korean Quentin Tarantino." Mostly, the latter--with perhaps a dash of the former. The first is interesting because I couldn't even tell whether what seemed crazy to me--the addition of not just one but two separate incest plot lines--was developed by the creatives or the money people. The second won for sure after reading this morning that Oldboy won an award at Cannes the year that Tarantino was chairing the committee handing out the prize.

Today, Sweetie was looking at other Korean movie descriptions, and had one I am compelled to post.
The film takes place in a mental institution. Young-goon, a young woman who believes herself to be a cyborg, refuses to eat and instead administers electric shocks to herself. Il-sun, a young male patient hospitalized for anti-social behaviour and schizophrenia, who believes he can take other peoples souls, befriends Young-goon. After Young-goon is given shock treatment, she believes that she has been recharged and fantasizes about killing the hospital staff who had previously taken her mentally-ill grandmother away. In reality, her physical condition begins to deteriorate rapidly. By convincing her that he had installed a food-to-electrical-energy converting unit (a rice-megatron) in her back, Il-sun gets Young-goon to eat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_a_Cyborg,_But_That%27s_OK

The title is I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK.
I prefer being bewildered at plot lines that do not involve puppies in outerspace, which seems more a case of bad focus-group-based decisions, which is sort of like being puzzled by another culture, only sadder.

Bollywood, again

One of the things I like about Bollywood movies is tracking the inspiration for the plots. We recently watched Koi...Mil Gaya, which is Close Encounters meets Forrest Gump meets Bad News Bears meets Crouching Tiger meets ET, as a musical.

The Bad News Bears part involves basketball, and man, if there's a hindi film actor capable of dribbling a ball properly, he's not in this movie. The big showdown involves alien-inspired superpowers, where the loser kids fly around the court making dunk shots. Before the kids start to fly, the evil adult team they're playing is shown primarily in close up, hanging from the basket. This is a good thing, because when the camera backs up...well, it's probably like watching an American soccer movie from the 80s or 90s. Special effects only go so far, when you're trying to cover up total incompetence.

Some of the flying shots lead to a particularly stupid conversation, about what constitutes traveling when one is attached to wires and bounding around the court. I'm not sure Sweetie has ever seen an entire basketball game, and I haven't seen one in years, so aside from the sheer idiocy of bothering to talk about it at all, I can't even vouch that either of had the basic rule right, minus the whole wire thing.

The little blue ewok-esque ET fellow didn't eat Reese's Pieces. The US isn't just the only country on this planet where peanut butter is beloved--it's the only place in the whole universe. Or perhaps whoever owns the sun is now endorsing Bollywood; sunlight is what the alien lived on. In a few more years, when my brain has become even more thoroughly muddled, I will probably come to believe that the sun is peanut butter flavored because of this.

No More Rockin for You

Air Guitar Nation is a better documentary than I bet you think it is. Worst thing: stupid expensive/unavailable song rights means that you hardly ever actually hear the song that is being "played". Sometimes, like in a kick-ass pretend solo, it's sort of confusing.

Semi-spoiler, but my favorite thing in the whole movie: The Finns who started the Air Guitar World Championships started it as a peace movement. Founder's explanatory comment: "When you're holding an air guitar, you can't also hold a gun."

So of course, since seeing the movie, I have been trying to shoot my pretend pointer finger pistol while wailing on a pretend guitar solo. So far, I think he's right, unless your gun is actually a backpack flame thrower with a forehead mount, which might not exist yet, but would surely rock.

And Saani Kuisma's comment about the founder comment: "Sounds like something the Finnish would say." Which I did not think to make him explain. And now, amidst my pretend rocking and pretend gunslinging, I wonder about what he meant.

A Whole Lot of Short Movies

Even with our planet-sized home movie screen, I tend to not think of myself a Film Person; I saw very few movies as a kid (and the only ones that really stuck in my brain: the spider scene in the first Indiana Jones, the first/fourth Star Wars flick, and The Cat from Outer Space) and then went about ten years as a young adult where I saw about two movies. One of the biggest changes in my life with Sweetie has been the switch from seeing live music shows to seeing more indie theater and film festivals. Still, I rarely think to pay attention to festival schedules or look ahead to see what movies are coming out in a given month, and I'm only recently developing the ability to say movie-things like "Wasn't X also in that other movie with the bear?" and "Hey, that extra's face was also shown briefly on the T-V!" But I still resist using the word "film" to describe anything other than the material I use in a camera, which means I'll end up watching some obscure and arty thing at a festival and still call what I saw a movie. Which probably makes me sound like a yahoo.

This weekend is the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival at UW, and Sweetie just sent me the schedule. There are a lot of appealing movies, and I'm glad that my love of Bollywood movies is effective training for watching 3.5 hours straight. I don't want to miss the river section, but I also can't pass the competitive birding flick that is immediately after the river movies.

Better Than Paris

We watched Paris, J'taime and I loved almost all of it, but especially--like as much as I have loved anything in a movie all year--loved the Brits stumbling around the graveyard having an argument. Rufus What's-His-Name says to the actress I think of as Bird Bones: "Is that what people want out of their husbands? Pratfalls?"

And my answer, oh ye husbands of the world, is yes. Pratfalls.

Yo-yo Garter

Sweetie and I watched a movie last night, of the most excellent title Yoyo Girl Cop. Apparently, there are earlier movies with the same basic plot line, and they're all based on a manga/tv show that translates to "Delinquent Girl Detective". Best absolutely mindless movie I've seen in a long time, including a battered cop with a pet chicken, a mysterious pop song interlude, a number of teen suicide bombs, and a crazy-marvelous thigh holster for carrying a yo-yo under one's school uniform skirt. Sweetie does not recommend earlier movie versions, for a very simple reason: Nobody wants to watch yo-yo stunts in a pre-CGI world. The string has to be stupidly gigantic in order to be visible.

My shoe-store-owning friends at Market Street Shoes have, at least in my head, become cee-gar-chomping business tycoons. They've been working all year to open Market Street Athlete, which is now set for mid-November; now they're also opening Triple in early December, which is going to be a sneaker boutique up above King's Hardware. Market Street Shoes isn't going anywhere,either, so that's three stores since opening about 15 months ago. I should remember their lives when I feel too busy to breathe: three cool stores and three great kids (speaking of those kids, at least two of 'em are learning parkour, and the oldest one goes to a school where they teach a class called Revolution 101. We only thought we were cool, in comparison with these kids.)

Must Must Must Be A Samurai

Sweetie and I watched Grizzly Man last night. Given 30 seconds and access to a recording device, human beings show themselves to be creepy, stupid or both. Given the same time and access, foxes are adorable and entertaining. Given about five seconds, grizzlies show themselves to be well worth staying away from. Which seems like a "duh", and only got duh-ier during the movie. (Did anyone else catch that he'd named one of the foxes after himself? Did I mention "creepy"?)

I learned this morning that our wee Beagle is full for the dates we wanted, so we're going on a bigger-but-not-too-gigantic ship, Mary Anne (some descriptions mention her "slim rump" instead of a "narrow stern", which, hello! Look for photos of Sweetie posing on the slim rump!). She's real purty-like, but we were confused because the maps and details say that she's got 14 double cabins but only holds 16 passengers, and clearly there's something wrong with that math. Turns out, no--for this year, at least, those numbers are right. It isn't clear why, so far--hopefully the remaining cabins are haunted by ghosts or something.The dates of our Amazon trip and the sail ended up with four days in Barfy Town, which is two more than we really wanted, so we're looking into a hotel on one of the islands for two nights.

More importantly, we're looking at tiny and adorable LED headlamps for the jungle part of this trip. How else will we be able see the caiman before they attack?