A Daddy/Daughter Night, Movies With Psychological Fright

I got frustrated with not being able to make a proper mic pickup for my cardboard guitar, so I jammed a regular mic into it and plugged it in. It's temporary, but it works, even with my metal pedal.

It took me forever to finish The Satanic Verses, but I'm about to start Midnight's Children, and hopefully that one won't take so long to read.

I got a new page of Golden Brown up, so mosey on over to read it. Not there, there! Not there! THERE!
The pictures posted above are from today. Isabella and I went to "Knight for a Princess", where she got to eat some chicken and dance, and then come home with a bag of goodies. I felt somewhat underdressed, but if I dressed up more, I wouldn't have felt the least bit comfortable. The dinner was okay, the music sucked (they played Miley Cyrus and even the dads seemed to know the lyrics), and Isabella behaved very well. The first time she hit the dance floor, she barged into a circle of kids and danced with Miss Red River Valley (tight dress in the second shot). She was patient, even when she was getting tired. In the last pic, she's sporting a shirt she got from the event.

What have I been Watching?

Some Like It Hot- Believe it or not, it's my first Marilyn Monroe movie. A couple of musicians witness a mob murder and go on the run in drag as part of an all-female swing-jazz band. Among the girls in the band, they encounter 'Sugar', a ukulele-playing singer with a boozing problem. There are apparently suggestions of homosexuality in this movie, but I think people are looking a little hard. There are plenty of risque aspects, though. Guys in drag get checked out by plenty of other men at the resort, one of whom takes a special liking, and at the end of the movie doesn't seem to care when he finds out he's been chasing a man the whole time (that would be pretty much the only actual 'gay' part). Monroe missed very few chances to shake her tits for the camera, and her behavior while shooting the film was apparently pretty deporable. But who knew she could play ukulele!

Frenzy- A serial rapist/murdere strikes and the victim's ex-husband is a prime suspect. The scene in which she's killed is a little disturbing since they all but show the rape and then the strangulation by necktie. Oddly enough, Hitchcock throws a little comedy in as well. The inspector disusses his case with his wife, who cooks him Doug-awful dinners like squid or pig's feet. While he is visibly struggling to get the food down, she is offering her perspectives on the case. Hitchcock couldn't have picked a better ending for his movie. It's very abrupt and decisive, but still leaves one wondering what is the next step.

Comic Book: The Movie- Mark Hamil plays a comic geek who is obsessed with a character named Commander Courage (kind of an amalgam of Golden Age superheroes, most notably Superman, Batman, and Capt. Marvel that I can tell). When the character is revamped for modern times he is hired on as a "consultant", but he stirs up trouble with the snakey movie execs by procuring an old school Commander Courage costume, tracking down the creator's only living relative (who subsequently finds out he's due royalties), and eventually ends up arriving at the press conference dressed as Commander Courage to call them on their genre-destroying ways. There are plenty of references to Batman, Frederick Wertham (though the doctor in the movie is fictional), and there are cameos from tons of good actors & directors, many of whom actually were involved with stuff like Batman: the Animated Series(Hamil himself voiced the Joker). His business partner is played by Tom Kenny, most remembered right now for his giving voice to Spongebob Squarepants.

It was kooky, but on the whole, the movie turned out to be written pretty well and addresses issues in comics like creator proprietorship and the effect of movie adaptations on the comics industry.

Joshua- An 8-year-old genius is jealous of his babysister and hatches an insane little scheme to remove her from his family. This movie was extremely well-written. The only bad parts involve the "inlaws" The writers seemed like they were trying to establish the religious fervor and overbearing nature of the dad's parents in about 2 minutes. Still, one of the things I was fascinated/unnerved by was the fact that with everything that befalls this family--baby suddenly starts crying at night, causing mom's postpartum to resurface full force and make her go fucking nuts, which then causes dad to become unfocused and let his work slip and his eye wander to his coworker, which leads to Evangelograndma to come to watch the kids so mom & dad can get a break, you see how this goes. Anyway, Grandma falls down the steps and the dad realizes the son Joshua is behind it all, and begins to shun him. He keeps away from Joshua, accuses him of wrongdoing, and in the end even resorts to physical violence to keep his son away from his 3-month-old daughter. What makes it unnerving is that you NEVER ONCE see the kid actually doing anything. You know he's doing something, because the dad even has a video of the kid waking up the baby, and knows the kid has access to some kind of poison that killed all the classroom pets at his school, but Joshua always acts innocent, and never admits or is caught doing anything. What one notices, however, is that the parents bring their own problems, long hidden, to the surface. The dad comes from an overbearing household and internalizes his anger, which can and often does lead to quick, violent outburst, and the mom had postpartum depression when she had Joshua. This kid does a thorough job of remaining creepy throughout the movie.