August 7, 2009

• The Funky Film Festival

  I love books.  When I get sleepy, I stick in a bookmark, and take up where I left off whenever I’m ready.  Books don’t need to be rewound, and as long as the cats don’t remove the bookmark I can find my place without scrolling through “scene selection.”  That said, video can be enjoyable, if it is enjoyable video.

  My Old Fart and I have markedly different views on what constitutes enjoyable video, except that we both like mystery and action.  His tastes tend towards horror, sci-fi and fantasy a lot more than mine do.  He does not like romance, straight drama or psychological thrillers, but a drama, romantic comedy or thriller with a good script, cast, direction, and production values, could be high on my list of favorite movies.  He doesn’t like westerns in general.  I like some westerns, if they are done well.  I generally view horror movies with horror, but make exceptions for exceptionally good movies.  Greyfox (aka Old Fart) has a category of film that he calls, “so bad it’s good,” but to me a bad movie is never good.

  When we lived together, it was never much of a problem.  He would go rent videos and if Doug and I didn’t want to watch with him we would play games or read books.  Paradoxically, our differing tastes have become more of a problem between us since he now lives in town and we still live out here in subarctic suburbia.  I don’t get to watch the good ones from the videos he rents, for one thing.  I don’t go rent videos.  Renting a video means committing myself to making another trip to the store a day later, and M.E./CFIDS often prevents going anywhere or doing anything two days in a row.

  Greyfox also buys cheap video from discount bins at Wal-Mart, used ones from Blockbuster or library discard sales, and even finds them in dumpsters sometimes, and that is where the real video problem between us got its start.  When I go to town for supplies or when he comes up the valley, he always has what he calls, “media bags,” for us.  They include magazines and books, the comics and selected interesting bits he has culled from newspapers, and various VHS and DVDs he has collected.  He says he chooses them with our (Doug’s and my) tastes in mind, but we often wonder about that.  In effect, other than what we get from radio and internet, Doug’s and my media exposure is filtered through Greyfox and his weird (to us) tastes.

  A year or two ago, he saw an ad somewhere for a collection of 50 “horror classic” movies on DVD, but the ad didn’t list the titles.  He asked me to research it online and see if I could find the contents.  I did, and that led to the purchase of a collection of sci-fi B movies as well as one called 50 Drive-In Movie Classics.  He read off the titles and we rejected them, so he kept them.  Sometimes, for some reason none of us understands, he does send up video we say we don’t want to see.  Sometimes he sends them back to us several times after we reject them.  Go figure. 

  More recently, he bought a collection called Box Office Gold, presumably because each film had at least one known name actor.  After watching a few of them, he decided I’d like them and even before watching the entire collection he sent it up the valley for me.  I judged a few by their titles to be watchable, and was wrong about as often as I was right.  We discussed it in one of our nightly phone calls and he said he’d had a similar experience.  I ended up going through the whole collection one-by-one, watching at least a few minutes of each movie, and writing brief reviews for him.  I titled my sheet of reviews, “The Chill Wills Film Festival,” because if my count is correct, Mr. Wills had supporting roles in seventeen of those 50 films.

  The next time he had me searching Amazon for info for him, I decided I could use an antidote to his questionable taste, and I bought 50 Hollywood Legends.  For several weeks, I have been working my way through a bunch of wonderful and not so great old movies.  They include one of the best war movies of all time: A Walk in the Sun, which I had never previously seen.  It has Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson in Rain, which I had seen when I was too young to get its significance.  I really liked Lady of Burlesque with Barbara Stanwyck, and didn’t even bother watching all of The Fat Spy with Jayne Mansfield and Phyllis Diller.  That last mentioned film, made in the ’60s, was apparently done to cash in on the popularity of James Bond and beach party movies.  It flopped.

  This week, I saw two silent classics, Joyless Street with Greta Garbo and Blood and Sand with Rudolf Valentino.   I remember enjoying old silent movies when I was a kid.  My tastes are more sophisitcated now, I guess.  My purpose here is not to review the Hollywood Legends collection.  I have a story to tell.  These movies did to some extent get the nasty taste out of my mind from Greyfox’s B movie classics, but I had frankly been getting a little tired of old films.

  I went to Wasilla yesterday, mainly for a “new” microwave.  The $15 thrift store oven works great, which is a grand improvement on the old one which would light up, make noise and produce some heat — but not in the food, just in the metal housing.  There was an unusually heavy bounty of media to be picked up this trip because the Wasilla Public Library had its bag sale and Greyfox had bought bag after bag of books, magazines, VHS tapes and DVDs.  I have, for example, all but volume 1 of The Ascent of Man to watch, sometime, when I’m in the mood for more or less obsolete anthropological theory.

  But last night I was in the mood for some entertainment.  I started with something called The Killing, a Frank Capra film.  Why I started with that “old” movie, I don’t know.  When it was done,  I watched 2 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  By then, Doug’s online game session was over and we started watching Shoot ‘Em Up with Clive Owen, written and directed by Michael Davis.  I liked it.  It’s surreal, stark, violent and funny, which is a combination that’s somewhat hard to pull off successfully.  It’s no fault of the film that I fell asleep before it was over.  I was exhausted.  I’m still recovering.  I don’t expect to spend all day at the computer.  In a while, I’ll nuke something quick to fix and easy to eat, then dig through those media bags, and then I’ll crawl into bed and watch some more video.

  

  • 2:31 pm
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