A long long night at the motion picture show

We’re strapped for volunteers at the Morris Theater because it’s Hallowe’en and there are so many events going on, so last night I did a triple-shift, sort of. The first show was The Other Mommy, which has received such dire reviews that I didn’t bother to watch it — and neither did anyone else, apparently. Attendance was zero people. The second show was the last gasp of our run of Clayface, which had an audience of three people. We can’t keep the theater alive with so few tickets, people!

Then we had the traditional midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the end of the shift I signed on for, and it could have been a discouraging end to the night, but about a hundred people showed up! And almost all were in costume! So I hung around to enjoy the spectacle, and helped a tiny bit at the candy counter, and then decided, what the heck, I’ll stay for the movie. The first time I saw Rocky was over 50 years ago, and one person admitted that they were a Rocky virgin and had never seen it, so I figured I had to stay to represent the whole range of experience properly. Also, how could I not honor the memory of the late Tim Curry?

It was a fun experience to see the movie with the full interactive audience experience, but I’m old, so now I’m very tired. I was thinking that next year I could go as Dr Everett Scott, the most straight-laced and boring member of the ensemble. I already have the wheelchair (which, fortunately, I don’t need to use any more.) Although I’m too old for even that part anymore!

Batman sans Batman

I saw Clayface last night, and mostly liked it. I appreciated the fact that it’s a movie set in Batman’s Gotham City, with no appearance by the guy with a cape, and no rehashing of Batman’s origin in the murder of his parents. It is set in the Gotham City milieu, which is an annoying flaw done only to draw in the comic book fans. It’s a bit grim. There’s a scene with a young woman alone walking into a subway that was the worst, most daunting cavern of industrial gloom which no one in their right mind would enter. Clayface is an interesting story set in the darkest environment.

It’s also a very dark story. It could have used a little contrast to alleviate the oppressive atmosphere.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone who is repelled by body horror. I’m undaunted by knives and needles and blood to the point that I have to offer another criticism: the scenes with blood were nowhere near bloody enough to be realistic. Of course, the notion that nanotech-infested flesh could crawl and reshape itself at will (I have concerns about the metabolic activity required, as well as the amount of information involved) is even more unrealistic, but that was the core premise of the movie.

However, the appeal of the movie is that finally it lifts the imaginative possibilities of a comic book movie out of the stultifying conventions of the past comics. Clayface may not be the great movie that is going to be taken seriously as a good drama, but I like the fact that I could walk into that theater and not know the direction the story was going to take.

Ugh. I am clayface. I just got back from the dentist, a filling on the left and another on the right, and now my face is totally numb. It’s supposed to wear off before my class, which is good, since I’m at risk of serious drooling right now.

A movie I’d like to see

This looks like a relevant and interesting documentary: The Last Picture Shows. It’s about all those small town movie houses that still exist, even as Hollywood tries to strangle us all.

Filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; theaters recently closed, theaters struggling to hold on, and theaters that—thanks to their thoughtful caretakers—are not only surviving but thriving. Between the stops along the way, Rustin poetically intersperses excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic film The Last Picture Show, as well as reflections on past and present hardships facing the film exhibition industry. The Last Picture Shows is not only a timely portrait of an industry in crisis, one facing the headwinds of consolidation, streaming, and the diminishing theatrical experience, but it also reminds viewers that even in vast cinema deserts, there are oases of community and gathering that remain, where the movie house continues to be a place of wonder, contemplation, and connection.

There were actually two centers of small-town life in Morris, the railroad station and the theater. The railroad station is a wreck right now, with no passenger rail service to our town. The theater probably fits into the category of “struggling to hold on,” but we are currently in the black, just barely. We’ve got costly plans to revitalize the theater right now, mostly mundane stuff like a $30,000 expense to repair the roof, and further down the road we plan to remodel the run-down restrooms, and update the marquee. These are daunting costs, especially for an institution only this year boasted a net profit of about $5000. We figure if we keep plugging away, pennies at a time, we’ll eventually get there.

Meanwhile, the next closest theater in the small town of Benson, the DeMarce Theater, has a “For Sale” sign posted. I don’t know if they’re failing, or if the owners are just aware of how much work it takes to keep these businesses afloat.

Double-feature at the bijou

My wife, Mary, is from a family with two sisters, and they taught me the meaning of sisterhood. Back in the 80s and 90s when we’d occasionally have family get-togethers that I dreaded: three sisters in one place with their mother, and they’d talk nonstop from the instant they walked through the door. Imagine four women chattering non-stop — I was shocked to discover that they didn’t take turns talking, they over-talked one another incessantly, and all I could hear was a high-pitched excited babble that never ended or resolved into actual comprehensible conversation. To me. They seemed to know exactly what everyone was saying.

I was not alone. Mary’s father, who was a veteran US Marine who’d fought in all the major Pacific battles in WWII, would sit quietly, slowly sinking into our chairs as the sonic assault continued. He had the advantage of years of training and intense combat experience, and also more years with these four women than I ever had. Me, I was the fresh meat, the raw recruit who could only learn by suffering through the engagement. We came out of it alive, together.

I bring this up as background because I did a double-shift at theater last night, and the first movie I saw was Practical Magic 2, a movie I’d never heard of, nor had I heard of Practical Magic 1, but it must have been popular, since it featured A-list stars, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, etc. It’s all about sisterhood among a family of cursed witches, cursed to never fall in love. The waves of estrogen were gushing off the screen, but my training at family gatherings helped me persevere. The cast was almost exclusively women.

There was one earnest, caring boy at the beginning, but the daughter he was dating made the mistake of saying “I love you” to him, triggering the family curse and sending him out on a bicycle to be run over by a truck, so that he spent the rest of the movie in a coma, conveniently. I was thinking that they’d never have this problem if they lived in the Midwest, rather than New England, because here we’re all emotionally repressed and never communicate our feelings.

The rest of the movie is a trio of family witches stumbling about crumbling ruins in the English countryside, looking for a cure for the curse. There is magic involved, and many whispered conversations where they overtalk one another. They do find one possibly helpful man, but they take him out with a frying pan to the back of the head and a sleeping potion, so he’s not cluttering up the climax of the movie. There is a third man, but he’s the villain, naturally.

There’s a battle where the three witches join psychic hands and use the power of love and sisterhood against a screaming, ranting man. I’ll let you guess how it ends up.

Was the movie any good? I don’t know. The magic was nonsense and was only conjured up when the plot needed it, the story was pure schmaltz, but from the outside looking in, I can empathize and comprehend how a story of sisters working together could appeal. My wife wants to go see it now, so I might be seeing it again.

The second movie was more my style: Resident Evil. One man, battling a series of indescribable horrors, alone, with virtually no conversation the entire movie. He’s on a solo mission to deliver a vital component to the Umbrella Corporation in Raccoon City, and that’s absolutely all you need to know about the plot. I just nailed it. Do I need to go on?

OK, a little more explanation. Umbrella Corp has ‘accidentally’ released a horrific virus that has spread through the population. This virus doesn’t exactly zombify everyone (I’m tired of zombie movies), but is instead a kind of infectious body horror disease. People fuse into these disgusting masses of limbs and heads that try to snarl everyone into a gooey corrupted form by biting or spewing bloody filaments or ropes of intestinal glop.

The best part of the movie to me was the protagonist, who was doggedly running this mission while maintaining a constant mumbling running monolog of profanity, consisting of mainly repeated variants of the word “fuck”. It was beautiful. I identified perfectly with his character — that’s exactly what I would do if I had to run through a city full of slimy predatory body parts. I wouldn’t be an action hero, I wouldn’t know how to use the guns he picks up, just like the protagonist, but I would be angrily railing against the situation under my breath.

The bottom line: not a great movie, lacking any depth at all, but just about a perfect capture of a standard video game scenario.

It was an interesting pairing of two movies that are more or less the antithesis of each other. What I’d like to see now is a synthesis — it’s going to take a lot of slime and blood and horrific gore, but if there were a fusion of a sisterhood power movie with that guy constantly snarling “fuck” as he tried to figure out what was going on, I’d watch it.

Is Primeval worth watching?

I tried watching this old BBC series with an interesting premise: strange, random anomalies keep popping up around Great Britain, providing temporary two-way passages to and from the distant past. It’s a great set up for a monster-of-the-week series, as ancient creatures pop up and terrify the locals and give the scientist protagonists opportunities to travel to the past. I like the idea!

But then, in the very first episode, Cutter, who is searching for his wife lost in the past, finds a human skeleton in the dirt, he quickly runs his fingers over the rib cage, and announces, “It’s not her. It’s a male.” Say what? Do the writers have the bad idea that men and women differ in the number of ribs? That would be embarrassingly bad.

I braved the second episode, which features giant ancient spiders! Way to sidle past my doubts, writers. These spiders have massive chelicerae which seem to be orthognathous, much like those found in tarantulas (the Aranea are labidognathous, and can pinch their pointy little fangs together.) Some people are bitten and envenomed, and some dork suggests that they can’t be spiders, they must be scorpions, which is silly, since scorpions have relative small chelicerae. I had to stop there, because the credibility of the scientific contributions of the writing team is about nil at this point.

For those of you familiar with the show, is it worth it for me to continue? I’m here for relaxing entertainment, not exercising my arm shaking my fist at the TV.

Friday Night at the Movies

Last night, I watched Coyote vs. Acme. Of course it was good! The plot was simple, the nostalgia was elevated, the cartoons were familiar, and violence was absurd and straight out of the 1950s. Take your kids, they’ll have a grand time! Although, to be fair, if you don’t have kids, you might want to stay home, unless you’re a real fan of Warner Bros. animation, or you just love to see anvils falling on characters’ heads.

My curse is that I couldn’t watch it without wondering what the world would be like if we had to share it with colorful, invulnerable characters who could build destructive weapons that could wreak horrendous devastation on humans and our property, but which could do them no lasting harm. The answer was clear: they’d become CEOs of corporations and destroy us all.

Bonus: I volunteered as projectionist for the 7:00 show, but no one volunteered for the 9:00 movie, so I stayed to cover that one, too. It was light work, since only two people showed up for Insidious: Out of the Further. I sold them their tickets and a few concessions, but then I could just sit in the theater and watch the whole thing, undisturbed.

It was awful. I have never liked the genre of supernatural horror; even in the long ago times, I detested The Exorcist and didn’t find it at all scary, just silly. The problem with these movies is that the screenwriters have no constraints, they can just invent random abilities and constraints, and the whole point is to generate “spooky” situations for the human protagonists. This whole movie was a couple of wide-eyed frightened people scuttling through a dark haunted house with flashlights — so bad lighting, an occasional ghost popping up for a jump scare, and an arbitrary series of hoops the good guys had to jump through to banish the ghosts. It was stupid. And this was the sixth movie in the franchise! I walked out.

I found the previews far more entertaining, which isn’t saying much. Crawlers is coming out later this fall!

OK, normal, real spiders become threat because of abnormal, unreal behavior. I’ll probably watch it. It’s fun to watch stupid people freak out over a situation I’d probably find charming.

Another movie coming out is Spider Island. It’s the same premise as Crawlers, or Arachnophobia, for that matter. I kind of suspect that Arachnophobia would be far superior.

The main feature of this movie is that it is set on a tropical island resort, so we’re going to get lots of spiders with pretty girls in bikinis. It’s not a combination that appeals to me, so I’ll probably skip it unless it’s shown right in front of my face.

Quality entertainment with TNT and exploding cigars

I am working the Morris Theater tonight, and we are showing…

I’ve been looking forward to this, but at the same time I am being reminded that my childhood was filled with horrific cartoon violence — and we laughed and laughed. Was my mind poisoned by Warner Brothers?

I also remember the great Saturday morning tragedy, as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and the whole gang were gradually phased out, replaced by the insipid ersatz sit-com bullshit of Hanna-Barbera. If there is a sequel to Coyote vs. Acme, I’d like it to be a war movie where Acme-fueled Warner Bros. protagonists demolish the Flintstones and the other cheaply animated dreck dribbling out of Hanna-Barbera.

Where should Paloma go to college?

This is the notorious professionalized liberal making machine

The Secretary of the US Department of Transportation is an airhead lawyer and former reality-TV “star” with no qualifications in transportation, Sean Duffy, but hey, you knew because he has a high appointment in the Trump administration that he was unqualified and incompetent. At least it’s better than his previous sinecure as the acting administrator of NASA! The last I heard about Duffy he was advising us to take advantage of the long delays at airports by doing calisthenics in the terminals. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

What I didn’t know is that he roped in a bunch of corporate sponsors who wanted to curry favor with the Trump administration, like Boeing, Toyota, Shell, United Airlines, Comcast, Royal Caribbean, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Lyft to fund his summer vacation. He, his wife, and his 9 kids got into a gigantic RV with a following camera crew to drive all around the US for 6 weeks or so. Boeing and Toyota each coughed up a million dollars to pay for the extended joy ride.

I haven’t had a vacation in years. Maybe I’d be able to if just one of those corporations gave me a million dollars. Unfortunately, I’m not a corrupt opportunist like Duffy, and don’t have any influence on our government.

So anyway, one of the purported justifications for this trip was to visit colleges, for his kids who were of age to enter college. They visited Harvard. His daughter Paloma wants to go to school there. Duffy has opinions.

After declaring that they were a highly conservative family and that they had raised their kids in a strictly Catholic environment, he announces that she cannot go to Harvard because he didn’t believe that Harvard offers a well-rounded education.

His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, declares We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they are steeped in faith and values, so the idea of dropping her off at a place where they would undermine that or undo all those things makes me worried.

Because he is a profoundly stupid man, Sean chimes in And again I don’t want them to get one viewpoint, I want them to get a lot of different viewpoints, but I don’t want them fed only one viewpoint that is contrary to the way my kids were raised, completely oblivious to the fact that he has just contradicted his wife and himself in one sentence. Because he is truly, deeply, stupid and unthinking. He then claims that Harvard has professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls and corrupt their minds.

Uh, I’m not the greatest fan of Harvard (I think they are over-rated and too rich for their own good, and that we have numerous great institutions of higher education all over the country), but Harvard is not particularly liberal, and they are not a machine with the goal of churning out liberal students. The liberalism is a side-effect of getting a lot of different viewpoints. Harvard has a lot of prestige, a lot of money, and has a privileged status in the world; if any of my kids had had the opportunity to go there, I would have encouraged them, although it probably would have bankrupted us. Duffy wouldn’t have that problem. He’s just an ignorant goober attached to an administration that hates education.

I am wondering about poor Paloma. What shithole school would Sean and Rachel like to ship their daughter off to? I hope it’s not Liberty University, but that’s probably not Catholic enough for them. Sean is a graduate of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, a private Catholic college which I wouldn’t describe as a shithole, but it probably doesn’t have the status the Duffys would want. Notre Dame? Bad news there, they expose their students to a healthy diverse student body, and she’d probably end up learning about feminism and equality and reason, all those things the Duffy family opposes.

I’d recommend that she attend the University of Minnesota Morris, if Harvard is off the table. We don’t have a professionalized liberalizing process here, we just let students be who they want to be, and help them get the education they need. Paloma might just fit in perfectly here.

Texas hates education

You spend years, decades even, in deep study of a complex topic, and you keep abreast of the current literature. You regularly attend meetings with fellow experts to compare information. You take this knowledge seriously and try to pass it on to the next generation of scholars.

Then some yahoo in shitkickers who teaches Sunday School and got voted into office tells you you’re wrong and puts a gag on your teaching.

That’s how I feel about the threats to higher education right now. Texas A&M led the way, with administrators clamping down and telling professors they had to reflect their bigoted ignorant views on race, gender and sexuality.

The professors are fighting back, though. They’re suing the regents.

The lawsuit asks the judge to rescind instructions requiring professors to remove particular readings or subjects and declare the policy unconstitutional. They allege the restrictions violate the professors’ First Amendment rights and are so vague that faculty cannot determine what they may teach without risking discipline.

Good for them. These are the heroes we need.

The American Association of University Professors brought the lawsuit alongside four professors: Texas A&M professors Leonard Bright, Vanita Reddy and Landon Sadler and Tarleton State University professor Aaron George. They are represented by the ACLU of Texas, the national ACLU and the Houston law firm Yetter Coleman. They sued the system’s regents in a federal court in Houston.

After they clean up the Board of Regents, it’s time for the citizens of Texas to step up and fire Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.