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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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4:00 p.m. - 2008-09-18
I wasn't going to post anything new until I got some critical chores finished, mostly the final prep for priming the walls, but Poolie threw down a challenge. A challenge via SDG. They both seem inordinately interested in my answers (heh). Since movies are my favorite thing (okay, #3, sex and french fries come in slightly ahead of cinema) I could NOT resist. Besides, I did get the kitchen and dining room floors scrubbed and polished yesterday. Woman cannot live on house chores alone. First I want to thank everybody who linked, re-posted and otherwise passed along my previous entry. (Hi Doug!) Ever since Adlai Stevenson was soundly trounced for being 'an egghead' the American electorate has been coveting stupidity in its elected officials. I truly do not understand the motives of the anti-intellectuals. I have experienced the prejudice against the smart firsthand and have always been hurt and baffled by it, but people hate me for all sorts of bizarre reasons so being slammed for being too smart wasn't any odder than the grief I've gotten for being too tall, too happy, or having pointy hair. But honestly the fierce pride so many have in smirking, "Ain't gonna have no high talkin' uppity college boy runnin' my gubmint" is so outrageously self-defeating and counterintuitive that it nearly leaves me speechless. (I said, 'nearly') Time for us weirdos who think our 'gubmint' should be in the hands of folk who have brains, class, and who, oh I don't know, can read a newspaper to speak up and begin wresting our country back from the triumphant ignoranties. Understanding where one's best interest lies is a good start. Me? Whether it's my oncologist, my attorney, my President, or even the kid who sells me my phone plan, I'll go with the one who knows his stuff backward and forward every time. Anyway, let's talk movies. The rules of the road are: You must post ten, yes, TEN favorite films, and don’t include any that are sequels we’ll just assume you liked those as well. List when you saw it the first time. You must post the list in your diary, not my comments and no tag backs. Don’t include anything older than your birth year. (Everyone has great older movies that they enjoy, and honestly there are a number of fantastic older movies, but every smart person in the world can see those for the brilliance that they are… share something different). They don’t have to be in any particular order. Some come and go, or become less important over time, so your list can be fluid, #1 doesn’t have to be your most favorite. The Last Picture Show- The $1 Theater Bryan, Texas. A shabby re-run movie house it seemed wildly appropriate to see this in another Texas theater also on its last legs. Cloris Leachman's character broke my heart with her sad knowledge of how precious and rare simple happiness is. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory- HillTop Drive-In Malltown, NY. Saw it with my best friend whose very much older sister drove us. Elder sister Heather parked the car, excused herself for about 20 minutes and came back reeking of a smell I'd become familiar with some years later. Heather, btw, made about five trips to the concession stand during the movie then happily dozed off during the second show humming the Oompa Loompa song with licorice drool drying on her chin. Jaws- Hometown Theater Hometown, NY. Notorious cranks and tightwads, the family who owned the Hometown used to put homemade signs in the marquee displays and keep the promotional movie posters for themselves. Popcorn was pre-popped and came in big plastic bags from which your overpriced wee little bucket was filled with a rusty garden trowel. Stale and worm flavored! Sodas were purchased from an antique Coke machine and you had to drink your coke in the lobby with your head angled around the doorjamb to watch the show because you weren't allowed to take the bottle into the auditorium, you might keep it or break it and they'd lose the nickel deposit. The Hometown ran Jaws for over TWO YEARS straight. Stranded in the sticks and too young to drive yet, my friends and I saw Jaws over 30 times. We had this whole Rocky Horror thing going- reciting the dialog with the characters and a dance routine during 'Show Me the Way to Go Home'. By the 15th viewing we had started enthusiastically rooting for the shark, whom we'd dubbed 'Fluffy'. Star Wars- Malltown Plaza Theater Malltown, NY. The last movie they showed before hacking the auditorium in two with a shoddy plywood wall down the middle. From then on you always wanted to choose the louder picture because that plywood hadn't been sound-proofed at all. Made the mistake of trying to see Interiors when Earthquake! was playing next-door. Every time Diane Keaton spoke there was a huge rumbling crash and shrieks in full Surround Sound™. Interesting, but not what Woody Allen intended, I'm sure. Anyway, Star Wars. Drunk as lords on a lethal mix of 7-Up and Everclear we'd snuck in with us (huge purses being the thing in 1977, lucky us) we had a vague idea this might have been a cool movie if we'd had enough brain function to pay attention, but as it was all we could do was giggle over how Matt's 7-Up bottle (from which he'd peeled the styrofoam label) made this really loud clanking noise when he accidentally knocked it over and it rolled all the way down from our back row seats to the front of the auditorium. We did go back and see Star Wars sober, and it was a cool movie and I had the hots for Darth Vader so bad it hurt. My mad pash ended abruptly during the sequel when Darth admitted to siring that whiny mamby-pamby Luke. No bad boy lover could father such a pantywaist and still be an object of lust for this girl. Breakfast Club- a rental seen at my next-door neighbor's apartment in College Station, Texas. It was Thanksgiving and we broke-ass young married couples had pooled our resources to cobble together a holiday dinner. Since Cindy's oven worked and she and Scott had a color TV they were the hosts by default. How much do I love Breakfast Club? When Mike and I were gifted with our own color TV and a VCR for Christmas three years later the first video I bought was that one. It was also one of the first DVDs I bought too. If stranded on a deserted island (that had media equipment and electricity, of course) and I could only have five DVDs, Breakfast Club would definitely be one of them. Dracula- Podunkville Cinema Podunkville, NY. The theater is gone, there's a bank drive-thru on that lot nowadays, but back in the day Podunkville Cinema was a damn fine place to watch a show. Old enough to have a balcony, at the Podunkville the houselights would go down and not one or two but three curtains would draw back and rise in graceful swoops of velvet and scrim. Made any movie (no matter how crappy) seem like a wonderful treat. The Dracula I've listed is the Frank Langella one. The one with the screwed up names of the heroines and Kate Nelligan's oh so 70's emancipated Lucy Seward and the over-the-top John Williams score. Say what you will about the film's silly Gothic cheese, Frank Langella was sex-ay!!! Sir Lawrence Olivier had nothing to be ashamed of by appearing is this stylistic extremely soft core porn masterpiece. No Dracula before or since has been so babe-a-licious. Murder By Death- The Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9 on a rainy Sunday afternoon sometime in 1979. On Sunday afternoons if I wasn't at work it was my job to iron my mother's clothes for the coming work week. Even though it was a bother to lug the ironing board upstairs from its basement home, I always did it because then I could set up in the den and bury my resentment of being my mother's lackey with a good dose of TV. This was back before cable and way before VCRs so you got your movie fix on regular TV and Channel 9 was the undisputed king of re-run movies. Sure, Channel 5 had Chiller Theater and Channel 7 had The 4:30 Movie, but Channel 9 always had a movie on. That day I was lucky enough to stumble on Murder By Death. A spoof of every manor house murder movie ever made and one of Neil Simon's funniest, I remember almost wetting myself laughing. My fiercely resented status as Mommy Dearest's slave melted away to almost gratitude for being in front of the TV at the right time. Murder By Death is that funny. Pulp Fiction- Malltown Discount Cinema Malltown, NY. (Home of the Bottomless Popcorn Bucket!) I'd not heard anything about this movie and had no idea it was a comedy. I spent the first 15 minutes or so being absolutely horrified over how awful these people were. Then I got on the beam, realized I was watching snark elevated to a rarefied art form and sat back to watch the rest of the movie with satisfied glee and a rather envious wry grin on my face knowing I wouldn't, couldn't ever be as brilliantly devious as Quentin Tarantino. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle- AMC multiplex Galleria Mall Malltown, NY. Already a fan of John Cho from the American Pie movies, this stoner buddy road picture tickled the shit out of me! I hadn't seen such cheerful racial send-ups since Blazing Saddles. Add in that I was probably more stoned than Harold and Kumar together and yours truly was one happy girlie. It's a mark of this movie's excellent silliness that I have since seen it again while totally unaltered and still found it freaking hilarious. "Did Doogie Houser just steal my fucking car?"
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