This week has been a dead loss for me. I've watched a lot of stuff, but most of it comes through in fragments. I've been laid up by a leg injury, and the pain meds tend to fracture my attention. I once watched Solaris while doped up on codeine and vaguely delirious with pneumonia, and I won't make that mistake ever again. "Nothing challenging," was my mission this week. I had to abandon Oliver Assayas's excellent and propulsive Carlos when I realized that the girlfriend character had changed somewhere along the line and I failed to notice it. I'll get back to it when I can actually pay attention to the entire through-line of the narrative. I also watched various television things, from the X-Men Evolution cartoon to the pilot episodes of Twin Peaks (also probably a mistake), Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Enterprise. In my current state, Star Trek: Enterprise trumps the hell out of Next Gen. I was surprised at how good that opening episode was, crappy theme song and all. X-Men Evolution, on the other hand, was just what I needed. The episodes were short, and didn't insult my intelligence. They actually managed to capture the charm and broad themes of the classic X-Men comics without ever going near the Dark Phoenix story. Bully for them. Between this and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Marvel appears to be catching up to DC's animated output. It was only a matter of time, I suppose.
One thing that did engage my attention was Zombie Girl: The Movie (2009, directed by Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall, and Erik Mauck), which documents the efforts of a 12 year old girl in Austin, TX, to make a feature-length zombie movie. The girl, Emily Hagins, has the full support of her parents and her mom is her best ally in the project, but over the course of the movie, you begin to see the strain between Emily and her mom. It's a fascinating relationship, though it's one that tends to drag the film down a little in its third act. What carries the movie through is the sheer "Let's Put On a Show!" moxie of Emily and her friends. She has the drive to make the movie and, by golly, she does. It takes her two years, but when she premiers the movie at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse, it's cause for celebration. Hagins, who is 18 now, has made a couple of other films since Pathogen, and I'm kind of curious to see them. This is the movie that Super 8 probably should have been, but that's another matter entirely...
Vulnavia, I'm new to your site, having found it through the Monster Blogathon, and I just had to read this one. I laughed because I had 2 surgeries back to back (really, no pun intended!) within a period of 2 months. I was on Percocet all that time, and it's a total blur. People tell me about entire conversations that I don't remember at all, and laugh because I was usually drifting in and out of the whole talk.
ReplyDeleteI too was unable to stay focused long enough to watch anything that required thought. I mainly lived on Errol Flynn (my first love), 1930's mystery black and white loves, Charlie Chan and my favorite sci-fi's that I practically know by heart anyway. I couldn't read at all. And you know what? Despite the pain and inability to walk, I had the time of my life. Percocet is great! It takes something like that to truly appreciate movies like 2001, a Space Odyssey and the original Reefer Madness. I did see Reefer Madness in an old theatre in 1969 in an old theater re-named Middle Earth, in which all seats had been removed and everybody brought blankets and lolled around on the floor watching the movie. The air was blue with pot smoke, so if you were cash-light, you could just breathe and get high. It was great! Now, everyone would have been arrested and sent to jail for 10 years
The politically INcorrect moral of the story is that drugs can be fun, and take care of pain! I enjoyed your ramblings -- hope you don't mind my own!