What Now?

"turning all our children into hooligans and whores"

May I recommend that you enjoy the following double feature?

Reefer Madness: Tell Your Children (1936)
Reefer Madness: The Musical (2005)

D. and I have enjoyed these films (albeit over two different days), and oh so fabulous a time we've had.

I should admit to a certain perverse interest in 1930s exploitation films, so I guess I'm an easy mark, but damn, these were fun!

What I particularly enjoyed about the latter was that it brings to the fore so many things from the original's subtext, such as American-ness as defined in opposition to foreign-ness and to black-ness and their associated sexuality. Plus, who doesn't love Alan Cumming?

And maybe all of you have already seen it, and we're the last ones on the block to get around to it. But if not, get thee to thy Netflix queue!

Damn, I love this movie

For my birthday, I got a generous Amazon.com gift certificate from my mother-in-law. Yay, MIL! I bought a couple of guides to Adventure City, a couple of sources for The Book, and a copy of Galaxy Quest. I love this movie, and I'm delighted to own my own copy now. I used to love it because it was all about the redemptive power of story-telling, which is my big thing. (For example, what happens if you stop thinking of yourself as the "glorified extra" and start thinking about yourself as the "plucky comic relief"?)

But of course there's also the power of working together -- aliens, actors, and geeky teenagers. The people united can never be defeated.

And tonight as we're watching it, D. has pointed out that it's also all about the transformative power of treating all people with respect. If you imagine that the science fiction nerd knows something worthwhile, if you think that your own best self has something to teach your less-than-best self, who knows what might be achieved?

And D. is now playing around with the idea that the film could work incredibly well in a Christian education session -- What changes if the story is actually true after all?

Plus, my chicken with 40 cloves of garlic (actually, about 43 cloves in the three heads of garlic I used), was fabulous. All in all, it's been a good Sunday evening. "Never give up, never surrender!"

Ooh, creepy!

D. just indulged me for the evening's entertainment. We watched Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which I was excited to see because it was a Bette Davis film that I didn't know. The little fact that I hadn't realized? It's a psychological horror thriller! Tagline: "Don't tell anyone what happened in the summer house!" OMG, it was so scary! I screamed out loud more than once, and at the end I was curled up on one corner of the couch, so that I wouldn't accidentally kick D. when I got startled, with my t-shirt pulled up over half my face (I'm not sure what I thought that was going to protect me from). It was like Miss Havesham meets Gaslight meets Hitchcock. (Side note: I hadn't seen Olivia de Havilland in anything but Gone With the Wind; she's fabulous!) Despite how freaked out I was, I'm now totally in the mood to see What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Bette Davis with the same director, Robert Aldrich, two years earlier in 1962).

But, thrilling as it all was, this was totally not the thing to watch while ostensibly calming down before bedtime. Even D., who wasn't freaked out by the suspense of the film, was kind of wired afterward. So we decided to watch something soothing before we head to bed. We had an episode of Barefoot Contessa on TiVO, an episode about roast chicken, which we thought would be relaxing. But then I started joking about how it would only be relaxing if Ina Garten didn't throw the chicken's body over a cliff into a lake in the middle of the night and if it then didn't come back to haunt her. Okay, you probably had to have been there and have just seen the film to think that was funny (although, come to think of it, D. didn't think it was funny either), but I totally cracked myself up as soon as I said it. In fact, I started laughing so hard that I started coughing and then had a whole coughing fit. So that relaxation idea still isn't working so well, since I'm now wired by the film, by my punchiness over my own lame joke, and by my coughing. Whew, what a night!

Maybe some herbal tea would help?