Addendum to Movies of May '10

An addendum: watched Moulin Rogue last night. Not a big fan. Lots of flashy lights but not a lot on the story front. I'd probably put it at number ten on my list below, which would push Survival of the Dead to eleven and The Number 23 to twelve.

It's been raining a lot today. I've spent a good chunk of the day sitting in my apartment waiting for it to stop raining. When you have a car pouring rain isn't much of an obstacle, but when you walk everywhere it becomes more than a little annoyance. And so I made the almost a mile long trek here to Borders to give you a post. And to mess around on the internet.

Movies of May 2010

Let's see if we can get a new monthly feature started. It's been a while since we've had one of those, right?

A while ago I talked about how it was my goal to watch a movie every other day. Either that or watch at least 15 movies every single month. I know that probably doesn't sound like much of a challenge, but I find that even when I have a lot of free time, I have a hard time sitting myself down and going, "Okay, time to spend an hour and a half or more doing nothing but looking at this screen." The nice thing about books and video games is that the mediums are pretty well tuned for interruptions. Not so with watching a movie, I think. You can read a book in spurts on the El. You could theoretically watch a film in parts with an iPod on the El, too, but that just doesn't seem entirely kosher to me.

I didn't quite hit fifteen films this month, which isn't entirely surprising, given that I embarked on my mission a little late in the month. Add my last week of work and getting ready for/all moved in to Chicago and you've got some problems. But here's everything I saw this month from most awesome to least awesome.

1. Gone With The Wind - One of the many classic movies that I haven't seen. I have a good excuse here, though: the thing's four hours long. So I watched it with some friends between the hours of 12 AM and 4 AM. Tiring? For sure. Worth it? Most definitely. It's nice to know that what might be the highest grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation) is one of the best ones.

2. There Will Be Blood - Finally drank the milkshake. Excellent movie. Some amazing stylistic stuff despite being incredibly understated. Some really hilarious moments in the midst of some grade A drama. And last but not least, Daniel Day Lewis is amazing here.

3. Humpday - I feel weird putting this one above some other movies, but what can I say? I really like this film. Imagine if Zack and Miri Make A Porno was a really clever and touching movie. And that Zack and Miri were both straight dudes. Don't let the dumb title and cheesy boxart fool you; this is a really phenomenal thinker of a comedy.

4. Some Like It Hot - The American Film Institute calls this the greatest American comedy of all time. And yet I've got Humpday above it. Is Humpday a better film than this? No. But I enjoyed Humpday more. Who knows? Maybe it's just a temporary infatuation. That could be. Because this film really has longevity still going for it. Of all the genres comedy runs the biggest risk of aging badly, but this one still hits hard.

5. Babies - Okay. I'm done apologizing for where I placed these films on this list. I could really do a lot of that here, but…okay, okay, I'll shut up. Babies. Four babies. No narration or subtitles. Just babies living their lives in different cultures. Beautiful cinematography, cute babies, hilarious moments. And not too long, either.

6. The Hurt Locker - If a horror movie is doing its job, you're freaked out. But by the time the movie's over, the freakout subsides. "Phew. Good think there aren't any scientists who really want to make human centipedes." But here's the thing about The Hurt Locker: there are people going through the insane stuff that happens throughout this movie every day. And that's, I think, is scarier than any horror film I've seen.

7. Mulholand Drive - A really baffling movie. The first two thirds are pretty easy to follow, albeit kind of quirky, but by the time the last third rolls around, you just don't know what exactly you've witnessed. I think I'm going to need to see this one again to really appreciate it.

8. Jesus Camp - Sort of the same thing as I said with The Hurt Locker: things get scarier when you realize they're real. Jesus Camp is a prime example of this. Still, not an amazing documentary. Just good. I personally would have liked to have seen more one-on-one interviews with the kids in this film. The psychology of all the craziness going on here is what really fascinated me. And I know that this may be impossible at this point, but I would really love to see a "where are they now?" on the kids from Jesus Camp.

9. Alice - Recommended to my sister from one of her teachers. A foreign and surrealist retelling of a certain Lewis Caroll classic. And trust me: you can make Alice in Wonderland even more surreal than it was before. A charming movie in a very grotesque sort of way, but it outstays its welcome by the end.

10. Survival of the Dead - What a goddamn shame of a movie. It had so much promise, but…well, let me explain: the first half is just unremarkable, but by the time the second half rolls around, the audience I was with found itself groaning, laughing, and openly shouting "WHAT THE HELL?" Awful dialogue and plot twists abound. Avoid unless you're a diehard zombie lover or a lover of B movies.

11. The Number 23 - I don't rate a lot of movies on Netflix with just a single star, but I made a special place for this one. The main culprit for the awfulness here is the writing. Bad dialog, unbelievable motivations, and some really half-assed plot elements. And most importantly: who gives a damn if you can add up the number equivalents of the letters in your name to make the number 23? Who cares if you can do some mathy shenanigans to make your house address become the number 23? And even if the number 23 is everywhere - so what? So's oxygen. So's the letter "a."

The Dreadlocks Incident

My apartment is kind of a mess. I haven't really had time to fully unpack since I moved in. Luckily I have a four day weekend ahead of me, which should be nice and good for getting myself a little more settled in than I was before.

I am writing this post from the library. Typically, that'd be irrelevant, but I think it's worth noting because of something a security guard just said to me: "People don't sit like that in the library." (I had one foot on the chair and the other on the ground. Imagine if Captain Morgan was sitting on his barrel but still had one foot up. That's what I was doing.)

"People don't sit like that in the library." Which is a very odd way of saying, "Don't sit like that." At least I think that's what she meant. Though it could be - though it's highly unlikely - that she was just so floored by my weird way of sitting that she had to comment on it.

I was on the el on Monday returning from class. The red line heading north to Howard. About 8 PM. Not a very exciting time.

Then this guy - who was either crazy or drunk - gets on the train. He sits next to this white guy who has dreadlocks. Crazy/Drunk Guy is fascinated by the man's dreadlocks. He asks him questions about the dreadlocks. He notes the peculiarity of a white man with dreadlocks. And then he takes things too far. He starts playing with the man's dreadlocks.

Understandably Dreadlock Man freaks out, although he doesn't really show it. He's stoic. Quiet. He hasn't said a thing to Crazy/Drunk Guy this whole time. But his actions speak a hell of lot louder than words. He gets up and gets off of the train, presumably to get to a different car.

Okay, situation resolved, right? Not quite.

"What the fuck was that all about?"

It's this little blonde girl sitting not too far way from Crazy/Drunk Guy. The whole train saw the dreadlocks incident earlier, but they were all pretending that they weren't looking. Now everybody has to turn and look.

"Why the fuck did you do that?" she says.

"I was just playing with him," Crazy/Drunk Guy replies.

"No, you weren't," she says. "How the fuck would you feel if somebody started touching you like that?"

"I was just playing with him," he says again.

The conversation continues. It's a little quieter. Fewer obscenities. It's hard to tell what exactly they're saying, but somehow you know that it's gotten a lot more heated than it was before. Their conversation kind of aimlessly wanders around two opposing points: that a.) Crazy/Drunk Guy was being supremely dicklike in his behavior, and b.) Crazy/Drunk Guy was just having a little fun with Mr. Dreadlocks.

But then the conversation takes a turn. Crazy/Drunk Guy starts demanding that Little Blonde Girl be quiet. Then to shut up. And then he drops this bomb: "It's a woman's place to serve a man."

There's this collective gasp from the train. And then one guy shouts, "Bullshit!"

This man is sitting a good few rows away from the whole incident. He's wearing a wife beater with a Cubs logo. And he's sitting right next to me.

"Excuse me?" Crazy/Drunk Guy says.

"That's bullshit!" Wife Beater replies. (Irony intentional.)

Crazy/Drunk Guy gets up and walks toward Wife Beater - and by extension, toward me. I am still trying to hold up my charade of just reading my book, no need to pay attention to me, but I'm getting worse and worse at it. At one point, when I'm trying to turn pages to maintain the illusion of reading a book, I start flipping them the wrong way.

Eventually Wife Beater starts asking Crazy/Drunk Guy why he believes that women should be subservient to men. Crazy/Drunk Guy says that Jesus says that it's okay.

"Oh, come on," Wife Beater says. "You know what it says right after that?"

"That's what it says!"

"You know what it says right after that?!"

"That's what it says!"

"What it says after that. What it says is this: that a man should have a slave and that a slave should obey his master."

A silent gasp from the el car. This is supposed to have a certain sting to it, since Crazy/Drunk Guy is black and there are obvious racial implications in what this guy's saying. But Crazy/Drunk Guy just doesn't get it. He keeps ranting about Jesus and the bible.

And then halfway through his monologue, which is just too crazy for me to record here, he says this: "You know what, man? I've had enough of this. Fuck the Bible! Fuck it!"

Wife Beater doesn't know what exactly he's supposed to do or say at this point. It's like Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny arguing whether it's duck season or rabbit season, except Wife Beater did not engineer or expect this change of position in the same way that Bugs Bunny might.

But Crazy/Drunk Guy is getting really impassioned. I'm afraid there's going to be blood spilled and that I might accidentally get hit or something. But luckily it doesn't come to that. The train makes it to the Fullerton stop. I get off. For all I know the argument - if you can even call it at this point - went on for another twenty minutes after that.

A few minutes after that I'm walking down the street. A guy on a bike rolls alongside a moving car.

"HEY!" the biker shouts. "How fast are you going?"

"Thirty five!" the driver shouts.

"Thirty five!" the biker says. "I'm going thirty five right now!"

The Apartment

I moved into my apartment yesterday. I am in Chicago now. My apartment is pretty nice. I am avoiding using apostrophes (and subsequently the possessive "s") because it is weirdly placed on my netbook, not to mention kind of tiny.

This is what it looks like. It is a studio. It is currently very messy but that will change when I get around to fully unpacking, I'm sure. Crap. Apostrophe.

A lot of DePaul kids seem to live there. Just about all of the guys I've seen are very bro-y. Everyone else is very athletic. When I come up and down the stairs I see people dressed up like they're ready to go jogging. Maybe no one here actually goes jogging. Maybe they dress up that way so people think they go jogging. Maybe there is only one person who actually jogs and they have caused everyone to dress up like pretend joggers. This whole masquarade is the result of one person's responsible, healthy living habits.

I don't have cable or internet in my apartment. There are plenty of WiFi signals, but they're all protected. Unfortunately none of my neighbors are dumb enough to make their password "password." A few of them, however, are dumb enough to make their password the same as their network name. Despite that being the case, I still couldn't really get online from my apartment.

As a result of this lack of internet access this post is coming to you from the library. That's probably the way things are going to go for at least the next few weeks. I'm going to see if I get by just getting internet access from coffee shops and libraries. It'll certainly be inconvenient, but the nice thing is that I'll be forced to get out of my little tiny apartment if I want to get online. If it works out okay, I'll spend less time in my apartment and less time online. I like that. At least I like the idea of it.

Classes start tomorrow.

The Back Of The Book

I just finished Salinger's Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. The prior was okay, the latter was kind of tiresome.

Someone owned this book before me. As evidence they left behind a receipt from a bookstore in Colorado dated 1999. They also scribbled something in the last blank pages before you hit the back of the book.

This is what they wrote. As far as I know the writing is original but the ideas expressed are familiar. Isn't that always true of anything someone writes though, I guess.

I've tried to remain the formatting and spelling. Here goes:

Do you believe in POETRY? not necessarily the actual written poems or 'words' but POETRY as a characteristic of a truely beautiful Angelic human being. You my dear FRIEND are poetry, You are a POEM, that only GOD, him/herself couldve created.

The next page:

Much ado about You.

You are a poem in Its truest sense.

You flow lyrically from every pore. You inspire, and move me and others no doubt to extremes.

The tune you sing is a symphony of Angelic comosure.

You, my friend, are truely the last poem...

And the final page:

spirited dismisle of denial

spirited apprehension of history

spiritual denial of existence

spiritual acceptance of true poetry

spiritual happiness of wandering thoughts

spiritual faith of belongedness

spiritual fatigue

spiritual singin

from an

ANGEL

Some Things About My Chicago Trip

I meant to post this quite a while ago, but between my last few days of work, submitting forms for this new apartment and just general lollygagging, that hasn't happened. So here we go.

• On the way up I saw a billboard for Iron Man 2. There was a picture of Iron Man on it. And then in big letters it just said "HOY." And originally I thought that it was an expression of masculinity - like a big grunt. Like there's nothing we can say about this movie but: HOY! After about five minutes of rumination over this bizarre ad campaign high school spanish came back to haunt me. In case you were wondering, "hoy" in spanish means "today."
• On the El I was listening to these two Asian girls talk about their friend who's recently learned english. He apparently doesn't like speaking english, because it's a much more direct language than whatever it is he used to speak. For instance, when he went to hang out with one of the girls' friends, he turned to her afterwards and said, "Your friend Charles is so well built!"
• Also on the El: a guy described his friend as "innocently retarded."
• Adam, my former roommate, was telling me about this time that he climbed one of the trees outside of the dorms, where he did some reading. Not after long a public security officer came up to him and told him to get out of the tree. He obliged, but afterwards he followed the security officer around. "Why did you kick me out of the tree? Is it liability stuff? To protect the tree? To protect me?" "It's to protect you," the officer said. "These trees, they don't hold up very well. They don't got enough juice in them!"
• A friend of mine graduated from Shimer last week. As a part of the speech she gave, she tossed off her graduation robe and performed a tap dancing number. A wonderful picture, but my favorite part is Jesus peeking around the corner in the right.
• I had a dream about a mime show. Longtime readers probably know that I rarely have bad dreams; just bad mime show dreams. This one was different though. It was an awful mime show, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Like we were reveling in the badness. And the audience was eating it up. Eventually the runtime went on so long that someone had to stop the show and kick everyone out of the theater. So I guess that's the closest I've ever had to a good/bad dream.

I decided that I'm going to attempt a goal over the summer: fifteen films a month. That's a movie every other day, give a little leeway.

Post From The Megabus A Few Days Ago

I intended to write and post this thing from the MegaBus, since they advertise that they have free WiFi and all. But there's a caveat. And one that they actually mention pretty prominently on their website: there's no guaranteed free WiFi. Sometimes it just doesn't work. (I'm paraphrasing of course; I'd look up the actual phrasing, but it would be my luck to get onto a bus with malfunctioning WiFi.)

The bus arrived almost an hour late. Actually that's not entirely true; fifteen minutes after it was supposed to arrive - about 5:15 or so - the bus pulled up. The driver got out and announced that he still had yet to pick up our bus driver. "So give me about 20 minutes." And with that he drove off. About a half hour later he was back.

The clientele here is okay. Not quite as shady as that of Greyhound, but I should admit that my experience with Greyhound entails rides between the hours of 9 PM and 5 AM, which may just as well be referred to as Shady Hour. Even though it's well over an hour. What it lacks in possible/definite just-released-from-prison folks it makes up for in friendly-to-the-point-of-being-a-wee-bit-creepy folks.

The guy sitting across the aisle from me was pissed that WiFi wasn't working. "Lousy service," he said. Hey, man. You probably paid $12 tops for your ticket. You get what you pay for.

We just pulled into Iowa City. I've been asleep for most of the ride. Except, of course, for the parts where the 9 year old boy behind me decided to start going, "Woooo! Woooo!" Eventually he stopped but I had a plan for if he kept going. I decided I would walk up to him and say, "Let me tell you a story. I was once on a bus and there was this old man. He had a long beard and crazy eyes. And he kept shouting and shouting the whole bus ride. And you know what happened? People complained. And he got kicked off of the bus." And then the kid would (theoretically) go, "But what happened to him then?" And then I would say, "I don't know. The police probably picked him up." Thankfully he stopped though. Which is good, because in hindsight said shenanigan would probably end up getting me kicked off of the bus, if anyone.

A bunch of people got onto the bus not too long ago. I tried to put on my best "don't sit next to me" face. I like leg room. Anyway, putting on said face is kind of difficult. Too little and its unnoticeable and too much and you just look silly. I settled for somewhere in between; a look that I think screamed "I'm either on something or just got off of something or desperately want to be back on something." The leather jacket, messy long hair and bandanna helps with that look, as does having just woken up from a lousy nap.

The bus driver says we'll be there by 12:30, if not sooner. What a story, Mark.

Megabus Adventure

Every now and then at work I have to do VOEs - that's verfications of employment for those of you not playing at home - for married couples. Many of these couples work at the same company as one another. Sometimes they even have the same job title. And then I wonder: is this how they met? All the best to Mrs. and Mrs. Smith if they met as correctional officers for the Colorado State Prison.

I have to go to work early tomorrow. At seven to be exact. Worse than my usual 9 AM, but a hell of a lot better than my 5 AM shifts at Caribou. The reason is because I'm going on a Megabus adventure come 5 PM. I've got an appointment with an apartment finding firm in Chicago on Saturday. Thus the Megabus. Free WiFi and electric outlets. And $12 tickets are a plus too.

Okay. Now my keyboard is malfunctioning. And I can't move my mouse. This is not good.

Now I closed my laptop. Freedom again.

Scottish Basketball

Last night I dreamed that I was watching a sports game on TV. The game was called Scottish Basketball. None of the people playing appeared to be Scottish. No kilts or bagpipes. Nor was there any signage that said SCOTTISH BASKETBALL. I just somehow knew.

The game went like this.

First the ref - a big bald man in a suit - stood in the middle of the court, illuminated by a single spotlight. He had a little table in front of him. On this table was a big bottle of Tobasco sauce. He took the sauce and rubbed it all over his face. By the time he was done his face was raw and bloody.

And then he took a revolver out from his suit jacket pocket. And he fired it into the air. And Scottish Basketball began.

There were two teams of six men. The game was like a regular game of basketball except for a couple of twists. When a timer ran down or the ball was passed more than six times, the basketball was shot by the ref and his beloved revolver. He had impeccable aim. Regardless of what was going on, no matter where he was standing, he always managed to shoot the ball and nothing - and more importantly no one - else.

Then I woke up and I was thinking about Scottish Basketball. For about five seconds I thought that I needed to start my own game. And then I wondered what the hell I was thinking about.

It's Finished

The screenplay is done. Admittedly it is not a hundred pages as dictated by the Script Frenzy rules; instead, it's 92. But this little project of mine has never really been about following the Script Frenzy rules; it's been about writing and completing a feature length screenplay in about a month's time.

Is it any good? No. Like any first draft, there are a few moments that shine and offer some potential. But the majority of the script is suck. That's okay, though. A quote by Huxley comes to mind: "There is no good writing, only good editing."

Will I ever get around to editing this thing? I don't know. Like (I think) I've mentioned earlier I have too much else that I want to work on right now. And this thing would require a lot of editing to at least become decent. We're talking about three or four drafts before it became, at the very least, okay. And maybe in a couple of years I'll have the urge to try and do that. But maybe I won't.

It might sound like I'm bemoaning the awfulness of this script - and I don't mean to sound like that. For me to really bemoan the awfulness of this script would mean that I'd have to say something like, "I wish that I'd never written this thing." I don't feel that way. In fact I'm glad I wrote and finished this. Completing a feature length script is kind of like finishing a really big book. In the latter case, you think, "Okay, well, if I can read Infinite Jest, what else am I capable of tackling?" And in this case I'm thinking, "Okay. If I can write something this long, what else am I capable of writing?"

Today I'm going to go over to Kinkos and have the thing printed out. I think that'll make this more tangible.