The screening took place at Buddies in Bad Time Theatre and was sponsored by Queer Ontario and Xtra!, with proceeds benefiting the 519 Community Centre’s Seniors program. In attendance were two of the filmmakers, Gordon Keith and Jack Lemmon, as well as The Body Politic‘s Ken Popert and Gerald Hannon. It was a truly amazing experience to share a room with so many of Toronto’s gay liberation activists, without whom queers such as myself wouldn’t have all the rights we have today.

After the screening, I spoke with the filmmakers, who wanted to know how I, as a woman, felt about the movie. They said they had tried very hard to show lesbian contributions to the fight, and they were curious to know if they were successful. I told them that it was incredibly powerful to see the footage of lesbians taking to the street in defense of the men and the gay community as a whole. It was also thrilling to see interviews with some of my queer heroes, Pat Murphy and Chris Bearchell, and rousing speeches from Margaret Atwood and June Callwood.

Watch the entire film on YouTube, or read more about it and download a copy from Xtra!

Right before my trip to New York, Space Channel was showing a Star Trek movie marathon. We diligently powered through each of the movies up until I left. Sadly, I only got to watch up until the eighth movie before I had to leave the country, so I missed out on Insurrection and Nemesis. Oh well, I have heard I wasn’t missing much. Generally, I thought the entire series wasn’t all that great. Most of the movies amounted to just decent, extra-long episodes of the show. Which is not a bad thing, really. I mean, for the hilarious interactions of Bones/Kirk/Spock alone, they’re worth watching. The most movie-like of the movies was The Voyage Home, which had an engaging script, time travel with an amazing purpose, and great interactions between the cast. Chekhov getting captured as a Russian spy! Bones bitching about medieval medicine! Uhura being baffled by San Francisco! Kirk doing a terrible job of hitting on a woman and making her pay for his dinner! SPOCK MIND MELDING WITH WHALES!!! Awesome. Here are my ratings for the series:

I, Star Trek: Boring but inoffensive
II, The Wrath of Khan: Campy awesomeness. KHAAANNNNN!
III, The Search For Spock: Kinda rambling and slow, but generally decent.
IV, The Voyage Home: WHALES! BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
V, The Final Frontier: AWFUL. AWFUL. Never leave Shatner in charge of a story. Ugh.
VI, The Undiscovered Country: Definitely an improvement on V, but more like a long episode than anything else. Lots of boring galactic council meetings. Lucas should have learned from this. Space politics, like real politics, are BORING.
VII, Generations: I liked this movie. It was actually the first Star Trek movie that I ever saw in theaters, so I’ll always be fond of it.
VIII, First Contact: Borg queen! Borg queen! Data being smarter than everyone! Awww, Picard, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you say things like “Engage.” Purrr. And the day is saved by Picard’s hot biceps of power and righteousness!

In sum, STAR TREK RULES!

As for the new movie, I thought it was great! We went to see it at the new AMC theater with the floor to ceiling screen and the surround sound that could make a girl go deaf. There were lots of awesome previews, like for Where the Wild Things Are and Terminator: Salvation.

I thought the new cast was great with one exception. If everyone had seemed like they were just doing impressions of the original cast, it would have seemed too hokey. But the actors playing Kirk, Scotty, Spock, Uhura, Sulu and Chekhov weren’t doing impressions, they were doing interpretations of the characters. The one bit of miscasting was McCoy. Bones was an effete Southern gentlemen with a drinking problem. He was a bit too small and weak for a Federation officer, and was really more adept at embittered snarking and sneaking pulls on his flask than at doing anything useful. This new Bones was young and tall and buff and looked like he could throw Kirk around the room. He mostly sounded generic except for a few times when he sounded like he was mimicking DeForest Kelley after having watched a few clips on YouTube. So yeah, not impressed with the new Bones. I miss the old Bones!

The opening sequence with Kirk’s father was probably the most emotional part of the movie. I found the rest a bit cold. But it was exciting and full of action and adventure and cool ships and funny aliens and evil aliens and sword fights and an overall great return to the madcap adventuring of the original series and there was NOT ONE GALACTIC COUNCIL SNOOZEFEST or BORING LECTURE ABOUT THE PRIME DIRECTIVE. Finally! Thank you, J.J.

The scene at the beginning with the Beastie Boys was, oh gosh, with the sound in that theater, I was just vibrating with sci-fi rocking goodness. The one flaw was the stupid Nokia plug that proceeded it. What was that? I mean, no product has ever been mentioned on Star Trek before and now we are going to start with Nokia? In the future when everything is perfect and there is no such thing as money or capitalism, why would there be a cellphone brand? Would brands even exist if they can’t sell anything? I mean, c’mon. C’mon! Was it worth pulling viewers right out of the experience of the idealistic future to make a few bucks on a product plug?

My biggest request for the sequel would be the addition of another female cast member. I understand being loyal to the source material, and Uhura is great and all, but really, the show cannot go on with one woman alone. I don’t even mind Kirk’s womanizing or any of the sleeping around the universe hijinks as long as there are some awesome female characters around, preferably MORE THAN ONE who is not something lame like communications officer or ship empath and who does not wear a miniskirt on a starship. Sheesh, Star Trek, for forty years you have sucked at this. Oh, and maybe Bones will work on his characterization more and next go ’round we can have more Kirk/Spock/Bones bickering/flirting. Finally, I would really like it if the movie could start with the Trek Theme and not some generic movie music. Also, Leonard Nimoy is still, and will always be, a very sexy man.

In other news, oh my god, William Shatner, what the hell is this? This type of thing is why no one asked you to be in the new movie. (If you get bored, skip to 3:51, that’s when it starts going entirely off the wall)

Southland Tales was pretty well ridiculed as the worst movie of 2006, although I hadn’t heard of it at all before watching it a few months ago. For all its flaws, I think it deserves some credit for being one of the most original, bizarre Hollywood movies ever made. Even if you think it didn’t succeed at anything it tried to do, you can’t deny that it at least tried to make that giant leap. The worst that could be said of that movie is that it was overly ambitious.

What I loved about Southland Tales was that, to me, it was the closest anyone has ever come to making a Phillip K. Dick book into a movie. Appropriately enough, considering that we’re talking about Phillip K. Dick, Southland Tales was not actually based on a Phillip K. Dick novel. This didn’t stop the movie from filling my head with visions of Valis or any one of Dick’s more crazy narratives.

No movie has ever better captured the feeling of reading a Dick novel. That hallucinatory, non-linear, totally bonkers plot filled with bizarre, nonsensical characters. That dazed feeling at the end, when you are suddenly unable to decide whether you have witnessed pure genius or just a meaningless acid flashback. Hollywood is always imposing structure on Dick, taking out the craziness and adding generically hot movie stars and a beginning and an end and a sensible middle. Southland Tales, possibly because it is not actually a Dick story, was free of this meddling.

Added to the surreal excellence that is Southland Tales, there is also the amazing cast. Now, not everyone loves Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as much as I do, but what other movie gives you Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star, and an additional supporting cast of awesomeness that includes Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Wallace Shawn, Mandy Moore, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, John Larroquette, Christopher Lambert, and Janeane Garofalo? Plus there is a lesbian anarchist collective trying to blow things up with bazookas and a crazy Sarah Palinesque First Lady bunkered down in a secret government location, shooting people left and right. It is also one of the best satires of the remnants of counter-culture in California I have ever seen and a vision of futuristic dystopia. WHAT COULD BE BAD ABOUT THIS MOVIE? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD? I somehow doubt their commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Stranger than Fiction: A+

Stranger than Fiction was way better than I thought it would be. I’ve actually been avoiding it, figuring that a movie with Will Ferrell can only be so good. The very creative script completely fucks with narrative, fiction and non-fiction, telling a story in which a boring IRS agent suddenly starts hearing his life being narrated. The voice belongs to Emma Thompson, an angsty author who happens to be writing a novel about a boring IRS agent. When Will Ferrell hears the voice intone “Little did he know that he was about to die,” he sets off on a quest to save himself from this death-happy author. The crazed plot owes a lot to Charlie Kaufman, which is great, because I think most movies would be way more exciting if they took place inside Charlie Kaufman’s brain.

The movie also features Maggie Gyllenhaal as Will Ferrell’s love interest (this didn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it would) and Dustin Hoffman as an English professor trying to find out exactly what kind of novel Will Ferrell is in. The script for this was quite clever without being pretentious, leading to lines like “Aren’t you relieved to know you’re not a golem?” and other quotable gems. I love golems and any reference to them. Anyway…

What I really loved about this movie was the attention to detail. The set design, location choices, and costume choices were perfect. You got a complete sense of the kind of person Will Ferrell’s best friend, played by Tony Hale, was with a few lines about Space Camp. From Emma Thompson’s cavernous, cold office, to the endless rows of white boxes at the IRS, to Tony Hale’s futuristic, obsessively clean apartment, the set design was just fantastic. The white, clean lines and the bright, bright sun made Chicago look like some freaky, futuristic wonderland. I loved that all the characters were named after mathematicians, scientists or engineers, and the graphics that followed Will Ferrell around, creating geometry out of his precise movements. All the details were just so carefully chosen, right down to the Sue Grafton novel Dustin Hoffman is reading while on lifeguard duty. I could watch this movie a million times and still catch more new things in the background.

Be Kind Rewind: A+++

Finally, there is Be Kind Rewind. I cannot even begin to describe the joy this movie brought me. I am so happy I picked it up, having never even seen it before, from the Blockbuster pre-viewed DVD sale shelf when I was feeling depressed. I knew, despite mediocre reviews, that Michel Gondry would come through for me. Once again, there was a great attention to detail in this movie. I loved the fence camouflage designed by Jack Black’s character, complete with little diamonds painted onto his face. I loved the little details added to indicate that Jack Black was magnetic, from the weird sound effects to the wavy distortions to the cheap slapstick gags. The “remakes” of the erased video store movies were just perfect. And I loved the not-very-subtle criticism of the copyright system that treats art as a product, catering to corporate interests while preventing any new art from being made. I loved it all!

To watch Be Kind Rewind is find oneself filled with a childish love of movie magic, the kind of pure joy that makes you want to just go out and recreate lightsaber fights with sticks. It made me want to be more creative. I finished watching that movie and I was seized with the urge to include animation in my Coney Island movie. I was suddenly flooded with all these ideas. Anything was possible! Why, I could include Javanese shadow puppets! Or Terry Gilliam-esque paper animations! Stop motion effects! Anything at all!!! I can’t remember the last time a movie made me feel that way. Maybe when I was a kid and would draw little comics starring my favorite cartoon characters… that’s the last time I felt so inspired to create something new after watching a movie. I feel like writing Michel Gondry a letter of thanks. I can’t imagine he had anything else in mind.

1. There was some good casting going on in all these movies, starting with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan as boyfriends/arch-nemeses, Professor X and Magneto. Other casting I found rather inspired: Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, and of course, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. In this new movie I particularly enjoyed Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde.

2. The characterizations of some of the characters were pretty interesting, as well as occasionally reinterpreting the source material in creative ways. Wolverine was truly Wolverine, and Cyclops and Jean Grey were as boring in the movies as in the comics, which I found comforting. The Professor X/Magneto dynamic was well drawn, allowing them to hold respect and love for each other even as they drew to opposite ends of morality. Magneto, with his past as a Holocaust survivor, remained sympathetic even while serving as the villain of the story.

3. As for this latest movie, The Brotherhood of Mutants would have been more appropriately titled The Hot Mutant Lesbian Avengers, considering the casting, costuming, and rather obvious portrayal of Callisto and Arclight as girlfriends.

Okay, now for the bad stuff:

1. Speaking of Callisto and Arclight, why were they even in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in this movie? The X-Men movies don’t really seem to be made by anyone who has ever read X-Men comics or has any interest in remaining loyal to the source material. They are not labors of love like Spider-Man was for Sam Raimi, they are cliched action movies made by hacks like Brett Ratner, who could give a shit less about respecting the X-Men legacy. Yeah, it would be awesome for one of the movies to feature Callisto, but not if she’s just going to be some random Magneto follower, and not bad ass leader of the Morlocks.

2. This disloyalty to the source material has also resulted in a tendency to either whitewash or Americanize the good guys. The Storm of the comics was royalty, a proud Kenyan woman having grown up in awful poverty after losing her family to violence in Egypt. In the movie, she’s Halle Berry. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Halle, but I think it’s rather racist that Storm was downgraded from a strong Kenyan woman with a longstanding commitment to helping her homeland, to a light-skinned African American woman holding absolutely no political affiliation.

This movie followed up on the Storm debacle by taking Colossus and changing him from Russian to American. Why? Why are all the X-Men American? Nightcrawler seems to have disappeared, leaving a force for good made up almost entirely of white Americans, with Storm serving as the one and only person of color (unless we count blue as a color).

Which is not to say there are no people of color in X-Men 3. They’re there, they’re just the bad guys. The “bad guys” in the Brotherhood of Mutants are made up almost entirely by freaks, queers, and people of color like Callisto, Arclight, and that guy who could shoot spikes from his face. And they have a Holocaust survivor as their leader. Let’s just say that I had a hard time rooting for their destruction.

3. Finally, my main problem with all these movies is that they try to fit WAY TOO MUCH stuff into two hour installments. You just cannot feature every single X-Man and every single villain from decades worth of comics into one movie and a few sequels, you just can’t. When you try, you end up shortchanging everyone. The Phoenix storyline just didn’t belong in this movie, as there wasn’t any time at all to explore the character of the Phoenix or allow her to do anything cool. It was just like BAM! She killed Cyclops! (good riddance) BAM! She killed Professor X (what the fuck?) and then BAM! … She stands around in a quasi-Victorian coat looking angry. Shoehorned into the main storyline of Magneto and his fight against the “cure,” the Phoenix storyline was just silly.

Then there was the Rogue-getting-cured storyline (shortchanged!), Mystique getting cured (lame! and shortchanged!) Juggernaut showing up (shortchanged!), and the assorted appearances of a million other mutants who don’t get story lines or even names. Looking at the cast list on IMDb, I see that the movie apparently featured Jubilee, Psylocke and Kid Omega, not that any of those characters had a line or any distinctive characteristics.

However, after all that ranting, I have not reached the biggest problem with this awful, awful movie, which is as follows: Although I’m sure this wasn’t the intention of the filmmakers, the bad guys were actually the good guys, and the good guys were… useless, ineffectual, and, at times, traitorous to their own cause.

The reason I loved X-Men above all as a kid was because the story of the mutants was such a powerful metaphor for the oppression of Others in our society. The mutants are one big metaphor for being queer. They “change” when they hit puberty, are tossed out by their families, spat on in the street, and legislated against by the government. Conservatives are always trying to “cure” them of their “affliction” or kill them entirely, just for the sin of being different.

This makers of this movie did not understand this struggle at all. This movie opens with our heroes, Prof. X’s School for the Gifted, aligned with Beast, now employed by the US government as “Secretary of Mutant Affairs.” Big Pharma has developed a “cure” for the mutant X gene, which they insist will be voluntary, although Beast soon learns that the government has actually used the “cure” to generate weapons to be used against mutants. Beast is, for some bizarre reason considering that the government has behaved similarly in the previous movies, shocked and surprised that he has been lied to by the President of the United States.

Magneto, a Holocaust survivor who has seen this whole thing happen before, and having predicted this obvious development, has begun building a mutant army to fight the “cure.” And here is where, to me, the X-Men and The Brotherhood switch positions as hero and villain.

Beast, in his attempt to work from inside the dominant power structure, seems more like a flunky for The Department of Indian Affairs than an effective check on the government or advocate for his own people. Prof. X’s School, filled with white prep school kids being taught to control their urges, starts to look a lot like the The Log Cabin Republicans.

Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, filled with freaks and queers who refuse to change their appearance in order to be accepted by mainstream society, and who refuse to go along with a policy of assimilation and appeasement, starts to look way more like the radical groups Queer Nation or The Lavender Menace than supervillains.

The inclusion of Callisto as one of the Brotherhood’s leaders, the depiction of the Brotherhood as a ragtag bunch of society’s rejects, and the fact that the Brotherhood hangs out in an abandoned inner city church leads me to think that the writers of this story got The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, legitimate villains, confused with The Morlocks, a band of persecuted freaks who lived in the New York City sewers.

The culmination of the movie is a battle pitting Magneto and The Brotherhood against The X-Men, Big Pharma, and the United States Government. Magneto heads to Alcatraz Island, where Big Pharma has hidden “the cure,” in order to destroy it. There he is faced with the United States military, armed with bazookas, missile launchers, and automatic rifles loaded with syringes filled with the “voluntary” and irreversible cure. Beast, having been lied to and betrayed by the government, still accompanies the X-Men to this battle, defending Big Pharma and a government-backed military force armed with weapons aimed at wiping people like him off the face of the planet.

What follows is a wholesale slaughter of mutants by the US military and the X-Men. The X-Men didn’t go there to try to stop the fight or to just save the small child whose blood was being used to make the “cure.” They went there to join the battle. They don’t fight to disable or disarm, they fight to kill.

Am I supposed to be happy when Wolverine slashes to pieces mutants fighting for their right to exist? Am I supposed to be satisfied when the entire Brotherhood, basically a group of poor kids with no home or family, is massacred? Should I be pleased when the X-Men inject Magneto with the “cure”? They don’t capture him, they don’t kill him in battle, no, they obliterate him as a person. They succeed in doing to him what the Nazis failed to do so many years before. The X-Men are, as Magneto so dramatically monologued earlier in the movie, “traitors.”

“This is why you can’t trust people who say they’re going to work from the inside,” offered my partner at the conclusion of the film, and I would be inclined to agree. This movie pits assimilationists against radicals, it pits people who agree to change so they can fit into society against people who demand you accept them just the way they are. The day this movie came out was a sad day for mutant-kind as well as all the Others they stand for.

-Eye 3
-They Wait
-Poltergeist
-Dead Calm

The Eye 3 and They Wait: B

Both these movies were lent to us by our friend S-Chan. Stark and S-Chan are way more experienced with the Asian horror movie market. I haven’t even seen The Eye, forget about The Eye 2 or any other Pang Brothers movies, but S-Chan insisted that no prior knowledge of anything at all was required for The Eye 3, and boy was she right. The basic plot of the movie is as follows: Some kids from Hong Kong go on vacation to Thailand, where one night, they decide they really want to see ghosts. Of course they use the instructions found in a cursed book, full of all sorts of bad ideas, and much horror (or, more accurately, hilarity) ensues. The plot of this movie was ridiculous. Everything was played for laughs. Let’s see… there was the part where two break dancing kids start a dance-off with bodies possessed by ghosts, the time one of the characters kicked a small child down the stairs, thinking the kid was a ghost, and the effective method of repelling ghosts by farting. Yes, you heard right, farting. The ending was kind of silly, considering how the first 98% of the film had been comedy, but whatever, a good time was had by all.

Two things I wonder about:
1. Where does the preoccupation with hair come from? So many of these horror movies (and this even carries over to the North American remakes) involve gross long hair, usually wet or tangled or obscuring the eyes. I am wondering if this is an older cultural tradition or if this is a new trope that has developed in horror movies.
2. Is Thailand to Hong Kong what China is to the West? The depiction of Thailand in this movie was chock full o’ Exotic Otherness. Hm.

They Wait is a Canadian movie about a family, Canadian mother, Chinese father, and son, returning to Vancouver for a funeral. The return happens to occur during “Ghost Month,” and of course (not so) scary events ensue. The boy starts seeing ghosts, ghosts aggravated by his family, whose fortune was built on a terrible sweatshop they operated in the past. The boy falls into a coma, and it’s up to his mom, the only one who believes that supernatural causes are at root, to save him. Good things about this movie: the kid is ADORABLE, Jamie King, who I didn’t expect much from, was actually pretty decent, and Terry Chen is really, really hot, oh my god. It was nice that they didn’t make the ability to see ghosts some mystical Chinese power, as the white mom is the believer, along with the son. It wasn’t a very scary movie, but it was entertaining enough.

Poltergeist: A+++

Ahhhhhh! This was the best Eighties movie I’ve seen since Roadhouse last month. Why have I never seen these movies? I really missed out. This was awesome. Remember the days when Steven Spielberg made fun movies? Those were the days. Okay, the number one most awesome thing about this movie: Craig T. Nelson. I love me some Coach. Seriously, if Craig T. Nelson were in everything, my life would be complete. I loved the depiction of the parents in this movie. They were so real. They weren’t all uptight and parental, but they weren’t hipster yuppie parents either. They were depicted as having a life outside of their kids, cool enough to smoke pot in the bedroom, but not so cool as to live something other than a typical suburban lifestyle. Awesome. The mom was hot, another added benefit of watching this movie now, as opposed to as when I was a kid. I loved the scene where Coach catches her using the daughter as a guinea pig to test out the poltergeist. Hahah.

As I was watching this movie, I was thinking about how they don’t make movies like this anymore. A horror movie that was gross and fun and a little bit scary, full of in-jokes for the adults and slime for the kids, and with zero body count. I think the art of making movies like this has been lost through the assumption by the film studios, starting in the Nineties, that the entire audience for horror movies was between the age of 15 and 21. And now the entire horror industry seems to have become dominated by the grossest of the gross, high bodycount, extreme gore slasher film. Bah! Give me Poltergeist over the Saw franchise any day. Poltergeist is a treasure trove of tiny moments that can be enjoyed again and again. How many times can you rewatch Saw. I hope the film trend swings back in the other direction soon.

Dead Calm: B+

Remember when Nicole Kidman had a kinky mass of red hair and weighed more than five pounds? Relive those days by watching this movie. This was a pretty decent thriller that Stark and I caught on TV the other night. I was down with watching it as it starred Sam Neill, whose terrifying performance in Event Horizon traumatized me in high school. He plays a Navy officer whose wife is in a terrible car accident that kills their son. He decides the best cure for her depression would be to sail out into the middle of the ocean and have no contact with civilization for “as long as it takes.” I thought this sounded like a terrible plan, and Nicole was mostly catatonic at the beginning, so who knows what she thought, but really, what a stupid idea. There is nothing freakier than being stranded in the middle of the ocean on a tiny boat with only one other person. How awful. Anyway, as they’re floating around, in the midst of the least relaxing vacation ever, they see another ship on the horizon that looks like it’s in distress. Suddenly here comes Billy Zone, rowing towards them. Oh no, don’t let Billy on the boat, dude is creepy! Ah, you didn’t take my advice, well, here goes the rest of the movie. Like I said, it was a decent, no-frills thriller. I haven’t seen one of those in awhile.

Movies
- Roadhouse
- Magnum Force
- Friends With Money
- Batman

Books

After Dolores: A

If I were to place this book in a list of the Sarah Schulman books I’ve read so far, in order of my favorite to my least favorite, it would go as follows: Rat Bohemia, After Dolores, People in Trouble. I Rat Bohemia so much that I started reading it again as soon as I finished it. People in Trouble disappointed me. Maybe because Stark told me it had been nefariously plagiarized by Johnathan Larson when he wrote Rent and then… it really wasn’t the same thing at all. So there was that expectation, but still I wasn’t a big fan. I found the characters quite irritating. But After Dolores was fantastic and a very close second to Rat Bohemia.

The book follows the narrator, a depressed, chain smoking, hard drinking coffee shop waitress around New York. She’s been dumped by Dolores, a terrible person, and yet she can’t get over her. Dolores rarely makes an appearance. Instead, the book deals with the narrator’s interactions with a series of characters, from a woman with a gun pretending to be Priscilla Presley, to a young Punkette having an affair with an experimental actor. It manages to shift between funny and sad and scary and angry without even one misstep. It also hits several of my kinks:

1. Lesbians
2. Greasy coffee shops and dive bars
3. Being poor in New York in the Eighties
4. Lesbians

Please Kill Me: A+

After so many years of reading glorified vanity pieces masquerading as the unbiased history of the punk movement in the Seventies, this book was a bit of fresh air. Structured as an oral history, with decades worth of interviews from everyone from artists, to writers, to record label staff, to musicians, to groupies, this book tells the amazing warts-and-all story of the rise of New York punk. There is no kiss-assery or attempts to forgive bad behavior on account of genius, it is just all there. Iggy sleeping with 14 year old girls, Johnny Thunders beating his girlfriends, Dee Dee Ramone turning tricks on the street, years and years worth of drugs and violence and egos. Not to be read by anyone wanting to preserve their hero-worship of any punk star except for Debbie Harry, who comes off smelling like roses.

Movies

Road House: A+++

Hahahahaha. Why have I never seen this movie before?? Oh my god, what an incredible entry into the “Everything and the Kitchen Sink” school of movie making. This movie is like every awesome movie of the Eighties rolled into one and starring Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze with a mullet. Patrick Swayze with a mullet playing a renegade philosopher/academic/Tai Chi master/glorified bouncer/lover of the century. I love how this movie basically invents the idea of a “cooler” that would be so famous as a BOUNCER that everyone across the entire country would know him by sight. This movie hits so many of my kinks:

1. Patrick Swayze. Shirtless constantly. In leather. With a mullet.
2. Sam Elliott
3. Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott being so clearly IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER, I was tempted to write fanfic before the movie was even over.
4. The myth of small town America
5. Roadhouse bar full of rough and tumble, yet lovable characters.
6. Evil corporate villain that improbably controls everything, is in love with the hero’s girl, and thinks he can never be defeated! Plus, he has homoerotic henchmen. And a cool pad full of weird Eighties crap. And angsty memories of WAR. Hahaha. Endless fun.
7. A taxidermied bear.
8. Semi-decent Eighties music.

Magnum Force: B

We spent the big bucks on fancy-ass cable (okay, we got a deal where we would only be spending 10 more dollars a month) and scored AMC. The very first day the cable took effect, what should be on but day two of a Dirty Harry marathon. I was very excited. Magnum Force proved to be worth my two hours for sure. First of all, there was the awesomeness of San Francisco in the Seventies – decrepit, corrupt, full of dealers and pimps and dirty cops, and with the added bonus of muscle cars. The plot was completely and totally predictable, but whatever, what matters is the journey. Dirty Harry going home and being randomly propositioned by the Hot Young Thing who lives upstairs. Dirty Harry getting propositioned by his ex-partner’s naughty ex. Dirty Harry getting checked out by the gay guy from upstairs while defusing a bomb. Dirty Harry brandishing his big, phallic gun. Dirty Harry taking down an entire ring of vigilante cops and just wandering off into the sunset. Sadly, we missed the rest of the entries in the series, but knowing AMC, they’ll be on again next month.

Friends With Money: B+