Come and See

Sunday afternoon, Kyle, Lisa, Pooteewheet, and I went to the Trylon to see the movie Come and See.  It's a pleasant romp through the Belarus countryside in 1943 by a playful tween boy, Florian.  At least until the stacks of dead bodies.  And burning people alive.  And gang rape.  And...and...and....holy ^^^^ did that ever live up to the Bleak Week: Series of Despair category.  Anti-war, anti-German...it didn't pull any punches.  2.5 hours that flew by as it threw atrocity after atrocity at you.  By the time you get to the end, there's a German who knows he's going to die, maybe burnt alive, still saying, "Some nations just shouldn't exist."  At which point the ending is German war footage and footage of Hitler rolling in reverse, almost Wizards-esque, until we get to Hitler as a child, highlighting both the allegation by that same German that "it starts with the children" [he told the adults they could leave the building before they burned it with them in it if they left the children behind] and that some nations shouldn't exist.  

I like the part on Wikipedia that says, "Roger Ebert posted a review of Come and See as part of his "Great Movies" series, describing it as "one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead."  That's damn accurate.

Pooteewheet didn't get to see it because her ulcers kicked in so she went home in case they got worse, but came back to pick me up later at Arbeiter Brewing.  I took an hour to slough off the despair by picking up my four pack on my Arbeiter beer sub and a buy one get one free Stonewall beer. [wheat, fruited]. A very good beer.  They're having their release party for it tomorrow.    I gave away 3/4 of my four pack to my brother, who showed up because he was just down the street at Venn, my neighbor, and the host of the yard parties we go to, and it was still a really good subscription deal just for me.  I recommend Arbeiter highly.

Here's a nice phot of a bird that seemed to want my beer, or something I had, and a cyclist to wash away the despair.  If you ever get a chance to see Come and See, maybe don't.  Or do like we did and watch it with a large group so you have some ambient social support.

7 Grandmasters

Friday night we went to a double feature at the Trylon.  Ming and his wife went to the first movie with us.  Her very first time at the Trylon. I was super excited to see 7 Grandmasters [all about the movie and his Pei Mei style here: https://www.perisphere.org/2023/01/27/7-grandmasters-according-to-the-wisdom-of-shang-kuan-cheng-master-of-the-pei-mei-technique/ as well as at Wikipedia].  I didn't realize it was being hosted by the same Seattle film guy who co-streamed The Mystery of Chessboxing in the earlier days of covid lockdowns.  Jen and I [and for part of it, Aeryn] watched that with live commentary by Rza of Wu Tang Clan and, along with some National Theatre production that streamed at that time, it's actually a fond memory of being somewhat trapped in a non-social / non-in-person environment.

Fun movie, although the translations were a bit unusual.  Ming - who could read both sets of subtitles and understand the speaking, noted that the subtitles were a bit "Shakespearian" in nature which made for exchanges were they argued about who was a 'rascal' and to never trust 'rascals'.  There were probably better word choices.  But if you got in the flow, you knew what they were saying.  It's fun to see the Chinese characters.  There's a TED video where a woman tries to teach some basics of Chinese pictographs in a few minutes.  I remember vaguely that person looks like a little stickman.  So when they said brother and nobody and me [but not you] you could see the little man in conjunction with other characters.

The second show was a series of grindhouse trailers/previews the same collector had pulled together in all his time working with old 35mm movies.  The Grindhouse Trailer Spectacular.  That was fun.  Some truly awful trailers and a lot of breasts.  I think this one in particular - Black Cobra Woman - was the one that seemed to be implying people were sticking snakes in places they didn't belong.  And Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals sort of speaks for itself. Good write up here. Was a great time, although by the end I felt a little exhausted at the grindhouse onslaught.

Busy Weekend

Wow...very busy weekend.  

On Friday, I got a hankering for a banana split.  I could have gone to the DQ, but a DQ banana split is the very bottom of my banana split ranking.  I'd rather try something I know nothing about and take the chance I'm not getting ice milk with oversugared toppings.  So we [Poot and I] went to Dar's Double Scoop in St. Paul.  Very enjoyable and delicious...under that mess of toppings is coconut and two kinds of chocolate ice cream.  It's smaller than some banana splits I've had, but let's be honest, it's incredibly reasonable and the price was really good and I don't need a banana split twice that size.  It's always too much anyway.

I liked their sculpture.  Here's Poot posing.  No need to do a mask version outside.

I did think this in the back where the BBQ joint [smelled SO good] and bathrooms were was pretty funny.  They didn't label the actual exit nearly as well.

 

On Saturday, we went to Aguirre the Wrath of God with K and L at the Trylon.  We hit Merlin's Rest for dill pickle soup, drinks, and fish and chips, and pasties first. I tried to convince my niece she should drive over to join us as she has a brand new license.

Aguirre was wonderful.  The scenes where he tromps around the boat dealing with monkeys and proclaims he will have a new kingdom and his rebellion against Spain to found said kingdom while everyone dies on the journey was surreal.  I'm looking forward to some of the other movies in the Warner Herzog series at the Trylon.

And last night, Poot and I went up to the Hook and Ladder to see Jill Sobule.  We stopped at Arbeiter Brewing first.  This photo isn't from last night, but it's from not so long ago when we went up specifically to catch the opening of the collaboration with Venn Brewing, Collider.  At 9.3% that stuff is heavy.  I'm headed up to find some in a growler tomorrow for my neighbor, as well as pick up a book at Moon Palace.

The Hook and Ladder was excellent for covid protection.  Masks and proof of vaccination. Not to mention the space isn't so huge you're swamped in people

The opening act was the Jorgensen Duo. Poot liked them enough to go chat and pick up an album.

Jill Sobule was hilarious.  Lot of hard core fans in the audience.  She started off with a fuck Aaron Rodgers and then told stories about songs she'd played while she was in the middle of brain surgery [including I kissed a girl].  Poot and I helped crowdfund her brain surgery, so those were cool stories.

She's brilliant on her instrument.  I liked the part where she launched into a little Jimi Hendrik riff in the middle of a not so hard core song.

Hausu

E was off to see Hausu at the Trylon tonight with some classmates.  I think yesterday after Monthly Munchies [our dinner group] at Wiederholt's, they caught Rocky Horror at the college movie theater.  Sounds more fun that waiting for trick or treaters who may or may not show up in the second year of Covid. [Addendum: first trick or treater - her name was Eden, she was maybe 3, and wearing a skeleton-decorated cap and was very excited I gave her an extra five pieces of candy].

Grandma E fixed up their Hausu hoody from the Trylon  It fell apart in the washing machine after one use and was patched, but then it fell apart immediately around the patch.  We're hoping grandma's new backing with some give to it will help, but she did refer to it as, "Made out of snot."

Speaking of Grandma E, Grandpa J came down with a case of breakthrough covid in the last week.  He went in for monoclonal antibody treatment and he seems to be doing ok after a slight fever and issues with his stomach.  We were supposed to head up there Sunday/Monday to help pack them up for snowbirding. That area up around mid-northern Minnesota is not the place to be out in public.  Actually, most anywhere isn't lately given the total lack of masking up.  Weiderholt's was pretty much mask free last night, despite being packed.  The grocery store seems about 25% masked.  And I saw a few folks get to the door and turn around at the Mason Jar near me when I walked to pick up leaf bags because there was a line inside unmasked.  Hospital cases in MN are still close to 100/day.  

The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1959)

Last night Kyle and I went to Lawless Distilling for some drinks (I had the Sargasso Sea, the pink gin shot, and the Cuban gin and tonic highball.  I tried to get Pooteewheet a 375 ml of pink gin, but they were out.  He offered me a cinnamon gin as an alternative. If you know Pooteewheet, that means what was intended as a present becomes a punishment.  So not a viable alternative).  It was really busy.  A very different experience than when I was there almost all by myself while E was doing Cardboard Camp planning and fun days over at the Ivy building.

This is Kyle with his super fancy coconut drink.  He said it was pretty good despite having to drink out of what looked like a penis coming out of a boob.  My Sargasso was delicious.  I'd definitely drink that again.  And the leftover crushed ice on top of square cubes made a perfect glass for a chaser of cold water.


Afterwards we went to The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1959) at the Trylon.  It starred Mel Ferrer, Harry Belefonte, and Inger Stevens.  And them alone.  That was the total cast.  The plot...some sort of radioactive incident/cloud disintegrates everyone on the planet.  Except: Harry Belefonte who was trapped in a mine in PA.  Inger, who was in an immersion tank and came out a day later than her friends.  And Ferrer, who was alone at sea in just the right location.  The thought experiment, it's more an idea than a plot, is that in a world devoid of people, do racial politics reassert themselves?  Spoiler: they do.  And...can they be overcome?  Spoiler: they can.  Everyone can live together in a happy Morman-polygamist dream at the end. 

Here's the original New York Times review.  Pretty cool you can find this on line: https://www.nytimes.com/1959/05/21/archives/screen-radioactive-city-the-world-the-flesh-and-the-devil-opens.html?fbclid=IwAR1PatrMM012IR01BYR6UC6RS2fbw_Ft5KI4AtUBqPoS8hoIC0xgijRTKVk

The film's title is based on Ephesians 2:2: (NIV): "You once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh”.  I'm still trying to sync that to the movie.  The flesh....yes.  The world...sure.  The devil?  I think they're referring to racial politics and prejudices as the devil in this case. 

I looked up some of the details about the movie. Per Wikipedia, Inger Stevens, the lead actress: "After her death, Ike Jones, the first African-American to graduate from UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television, claimed[16] that he had been secretly married to Stevens since 1961. Some doubted this due to the lack of a marriage license, the maintaining of separate homes and the filing of tax documents as single people.[17] However, at the time Stevens' estate was being settled, the actress's brother, Carl O. Stensland, confirmed in court that his sister had hidden her marriage to Jones "out of fear for her career".[18] Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner A. Edward Nichols ruled in Ike Jones's favor[19] and made him administrator of her estate.[20][21] A photo exists of the two attending a banquet together in 1968.[5] Her website also states that the marriage to Jones took place in Tijuana, Mexico."

She had an interesting life from a narrowly-missed-that perspective (NYT obit): "Bad luck always plagued her, Miss Stevens said. She col lapsed, along with 11 others filming “Cry Terror” in the Hudson Tubes, suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. Her jaw was dislocated while film ing a “Zane Grey Theater” TV show. In 1959, after a depress ing New Year's Eve party, she attempted suicide. And in 1961, she was the last passenger to leave a jet that crashed on landing at Libson and exploded half‐minute after her exit."  In the end, it wasn't that narrowly missed as she died of what seemed to be a barbiturate suicide.  She seems like she had such a wild life (burlesque, married to Ike), but couldn't synthesize something positive out of her accomplishments.

I wanted to capture what my friend's mother, Pat, said about the movie so I don't lose it: "One of the first "adult themed" movies I was allowed to see( at age 17).  I was amazed and awed. I couldn't believe it, having lived in small towns my whole life, and loving science fiction, that the books I had read were all so bland- I guess the library was good at censoring for teens. It is hard for people today to understand how protected and watched some of us were, especially girls. When raised by parents like mine , I remember getted grounded for two weeks for saying the word "pregnant" instead of "expecting" or "in a family way".  I thought the movie was amazing in its feeling of desolation and I was actually stunned at the interaction of the 3 people, and at the positive ending. Two years later I was having screaming fightswith my parents about not being able to go south with the freedom riders,and about sex before marriage (college will do that to a kid!)"

Samurai Rebellion

Our Monday Trylon visit.  This time my wife came along because we talked about Harakiri so much.  Samurai Rebellion was an amazing movie.  Felt almost GenX in how it dealt with issues of authority and what's right.

Harakiri

I forgot to blog that Eryn, Kyle, and I went to Harakiri, the 1962 version, at the Trylon last Monday.  An incredibly good film.  Solid revenge tale.  Beautiful movie.  Deserves it's 100% on Rottentomatoes.  I told Kyle it reminded me of the westerns where the traditional cowboy is being supplanted in modern culture.  And the grass in the fighting scenes reminded us both of the Japanese "horror movie" with the reeds: Onibaba, which we saw in the Japanese horror series back in 2013.

Bastard Swordsman

Last night Eryn and I went to Bastard Swordsman at the Trylon.  It's a Shaw Brothers film.  Usually those are slightly rooted in reality.  This one was downright strange and almost scifi-ish.  The main character, the bastard, learns "silkworm style" with his sister, girlfriend, and mother.  He finds out he's a bastard because while his non-biological father was sequestered for two years conserving energy for his "lethal style", his mother slept with his biological father.  Hence....bastard.

The trick to silkworm style is that it requires a male virgin and three women.  I'm not sure if anyone else was a virgin, but none of them seemed to have simultaneous access to three women.  They work together to fill him with feminine power.

Why? Because it results in silkworm skills.  Including an actual cocoon where he fights the bad guy.

And he can spin silk like a silkworm.  Sort of.  More like a ribbon dancer.

Eryn and I enjoyed it, but it was definitely different than 36th Chamber or Five Elements Ninjas.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

Last night Kyle, Eryn, and I went to see The 36th Chamber of Shaolin at the Trylon as part of their Shaw Brothers series.  I asked them to do a Shaw Brother series back when they were looking for showing input, but I think this is entirely attributable to one of the staff who's a fan. 

Eryn and I went to Northbound Smokehouse and Brewpub for dinner first.  She'd never been there and her opinion is the wing skin is a little more jerky-like.  Which I prefer.  But she does not.  So Buster's is still her optimal hang out in that area.  I told her next time we should try the Howe.

The movie was great.  I hadn't watched this particular one, although I've seen a lot of Shaw Brothers via Netflix.  It had a bit of a Game of Death feel to it with "levels" and Game of Death predates it by 6 years (1972 versus 1978), so maybe there's some pollination.  However, unlike Game of Death, the main character San Te isn't fighting enemies as he advances, he's learning specific Shaolin fighting skills and toughing up parts of his body.  Every time he makes use of his tougher noggin skills in actual combat the film focuses in on it, sometimes even in bit of slow mo, so you realize he's using something he learned.  Kyle called it the longest training montage ever in a movie, and that's a good summary.  80% training montage followed by 15% showing students the benefits of his training montage, followed by 5% using his training to defeat some bad people (although leaving the killing up to his students, one who wants to hack a guy with a sword 1000 times, but sort of wears out after a dozen).

The Bride Wore Black

Kyle, Lisa, Pooteewheet, and I went to The Bride Wore Black at the Trylon tonight.  I thought the Jeanne Moreau series looked interesting (there are two going on in town simultaneously), and the fact that Truffaut (the director) thought Bride wasn't right for his own tastes struck me as something I'd probably enjoy, particularly coming from someone who directed Fahrenheit 451.  

It's a revenge tale and parts of it are very amusing, although it's difficult to know whether they were originally supposed to be.  Particularly the blatant sexist entitlement of all the French men (a politician to be notes that women love politicians because they can rationalize that he set aside all of France for me for one night).  Killing someone via duct-taping them in Harry Potter's closet under the stairs and the whole scene with the child who can't communicate that Julie is not his teacher are also amusing, but not outside a bit of suspended disbelief.  What still comes through is that Julie is single minded in her desire to eliminate those that wronged her, which resonates with a lot of the revenge tales that have been filmed since The Bride Wore Black.  Ebert loved it in a review written before I was born.

This has nothing to do with the movie, but I thought it was fun to poke my camera phone into the window before the film started.  Eryn is looking forward to a seat being named after Peter Venkman.

Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life

Last night I biked up to the Trylon to meet Kyle for the Trash Film Debauchery movie Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life.  Unbeknownst to us, it was part of their Lifetime or After School Special series - something to that effect.  Despite watching a Lifetime movie for two hours, it was a good time and a great choice on TFD's part.  It stood on it's own without snarky commentary.  Basic story: swimmer is in a relationship with a good Christian girl who won't put out until it's something special, swimmer meets other high school students one who runs a webcam, swimmer gets obsessed and follows her cam, watches porn at friends' houses and on his girlfriend's PDA (oh yeah, PDA), with his mom's credit card, gets his little brother and brother's friend in trouble for porn (Vigin Vaginas, the bootleg CD!)...it's a spiral of porn!  So he goes rock bottom.  Loses his girlfriend, gets set up for beating up the webcam girl and gets beat up himself, gets suspended, his swimming performance and school performance tank, and he ends up face down bleeding in the unattended school pool before having a slow motion epiphany.

Layer on top of it a religious discussion (Green Day vs some Christian band and lots of discussion about going to church which culminates with the statement "I need to get radical!" which I would have never guessed anyone would have applied to church-going, ever),  a mini-morality aside about the impact of porn on a marriage, and a peer-pressure plot that focuses on how the porn spiral will quickly take you outside the realms of what jocks approve of, and there you go.

All of it much better in a theater with a crowd over popcorn and soda (and a pre-show cold press coffee to wash away the dust off Minnehaha road construction).

The worst part was that we were promised "I Married a Princess" would be next in the captions, yet it never came.

Kyle pointed me at this link I can't get to within my current firewall, but something awful is always amusing, so I'm looking forward to reading their take on it (and I'm sure it includes some fun outtakes): http://www.somethingawful.com/movie-reviews/cyber-seduction-his/1/

Catch Up - Part III - Trylon

We've been to the Trylon a lot in the last several months.  Usually I'd just say I've been to the Trylon a lot, but for the purposes of this post, we include me, my wife, Eryn, Kyle, Ming...all in some sort of configuration.  Kyle and I saw The Legend of Boggy Creek (seriously low-rent sci fi channel) and recently he, Ming, and I went to Why Don't You Play in Hell.  Kyle fell asleep.  Ming and I enjoyed it, although I could have done without the weird throwing up on the prayer-wish box parts.  Seemed extraneous.  If you approached it as just a movie about a mob fight that ends up with a amateur film buff getting involved and the whole thing going low-fund Kill Bill after a bunch of David Lynch-style background moments.  Well, it hit its intended mark.

I FAR preferred the Zatoichi series.  There are 26 of them!  But we watched four including the 1962 original, the 1963 sequel, the 1970 Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, and the 1989 remake.  Eryn went to the last three with me on Tuesdays after school and had a great time.  Like me - and unprompted - she preferred the original black and white versions with stylized sword fighting and a focus on the story and buddy-warrior aspect rather than the blood and violence.  The 1970 episode was very Spaghetti Western in the Clint Eastwood style and when they piled all the gold from inside the statues to lure in the bad guys - there's a scene where they have gold dust in their mouths - it really evoked the scene where Eastwood paints the town red and calls it hell in High Plains Drifter.  The 1989 version got rid of the stylized violence in favor of real violence and the main characters, who are at odds but very respectful of each other in the original (Zatoichi visits his grave in the second film), are more traditionally adversaries.  Probably my favorite series since the Halloween Japanese ghost series Kyle and I went to there.



Eryn loved the movies, but I think the two buckets of popcorn, soda, and coffee at Peace Coffee before the show each time also played a part.  It was a good place for me to work and her to get her homework out of the way.


For my wife's birthday in January we all went to Buster's on 28th for the first time since their fire, and then to Strait-Jacket.  Ming, Kyle, me, Eryn, and my wife.  A full contingent.  Buster's was great, although we sat so close to the door that every time it opened you had to debate whether to put your coat on.  Strait-Jacket is a funny thriller (now; perhaps it was scary or more suspenseful in its day) and very enjoyable.


The twist at the end wasn't unexpected, but it didn't make it any less amusing.
.

The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T

The family (Eryn, Pooteewheet, my Dad and I) went to The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T at the Trylon tonight. I made reference to the movie in my master's thesis on dystopias as it shares a few features, at least in the mind of a kid and, as a piano-based dystopia, is rather unique.  Lot of laughter in the theater as much of the humor has held up well over time, such as the joke about being paid time and a half, Bart's interactions with the adults in his life and dislike of constant piano practice, and the atomic sound absorber,  While most people I've talked to haven't seen the movie, they don't realize they've seen or heard Dr. T in one of his other guises.  Hans Conried, among many, many other roles was the voice of Snidely Whiplash in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...Really

Friday we went to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Theatre in the Round.  I didn't know anything about it and, at first, it was strange.  Miss Brodie is a peculiar character talking about how her female students are the crème de la crème and she's putting old heads on their young bodies.  Over the course of the play it becomes evident that what she's really saying is that she has these ideas about how exciting the world should be, how much grander it should be than her own life.  And those ideas spill over into how she interacts with everyone, positioning them to be Lady of Shallot-like, resistance fighters, and other characters in an internal view of the world that, while it isn't obviously crazy, is warping and dangerous to her students, particularly given her status as their teacher.  One student, the one she positions as the practical and dependable character, rebels and fills positions that don't fit Miss Brodie's plans for individuals, on purpose to push at Miss Brodie and to show her that the way she's casting her students in roles that fill her grandiose, literary, visions of the world are limiting and, eventually deadly.

It was a very uncomfortable play - and one of the few at TiTR over the last several years to make me really think - in how the teacher's belief in her the greatness of her students was, in the end, limiting and problematic, despite being a draw for those students and the men who loved her and who couldn't fulfill her internal narrative (made external).

An amusing TITR-specific story is that Sue, who I used to work with, was there and noted that the nudity in the show was undertaken by someone her son had been in high school with, which made her feel particularly old.

Saturday, my wife and I went to the Trylon (yeah, new projector, paid for in part with corporate matching dollars from our donations.  TITR listed donations from us which were matched as well.  It's good to know my art-related donations are going to places I frequent).  They were showing Picnic at Hanging Rock.  It wasn't nearly as fast at the Zatiochi series Kyle, Ming, Eryn, and I have been attending, but it was surprisingly similar to Miss Jean Brodie in a few respects (Zatiochi is not).  At one point one of the teachers says of Miranda, who disappears, that she's like a Botticelli angel and it comes with all the baggage that being that angel would entail.  Something to look at rather than a character of action.  Shortly afterwards, all the gazing at Miranda (and her friends) that has happened, turns to active searching as they disappear at Hanging Rock, nearly naked by the terms set forth in the movie (stockings, corset, gloves).  Sexuality in part has caused them to disappear as visions of courtly/painted love.  It is a SLOW movie.  But that gave you plenty of time to think through what they were doing, and why the search was so important, and what their disappearance was doing to all the other characters in the movie.  Pooteewheet (my wife) and I thought at first it might be based on a real event.  But it's not.  And that makes the unresolved ending all the more intriguing in a movie.  When I popped over to Wikipedia to look up what else Peter Weir has directed, it wasn't a surprise to see The Truman Show, The Mosquito Coast, and Gallipoli (which was the one I knew).

Burt's Bees

Kyle, my wife, Eryn, and I went to see Burt's Buzz at the Trylon tonight.  It's a documentary about Burt Shavitz, who was co-founder of Burt's Bees, and the face on their products.  He lives a simple life close to nature in Maine and wasn't part of the almost billion dollar sale of the company based on his original sales of honey.  As he says during the movie - and as others say of him - he only really needs some land, his dog, and not much else.  He's definitely an interesting character who lives life at his own pace.

I enjoyed the movie, which really focused on Burt's character and how it has (not) changed over his life.  The end of the movie really captures the pace with which he lives his life, a pace my wife found excruciating, and the son of the woman who sold Burt's Bees and had him sign over his share talks about how Burt finds more in a short walk than anybody he knows and that it's contagious.

It is also NOT this documentary: Burt Talks to the Bees

Young and Innocent

Kyle and I went to Bridge on the River Kwai on Sunday.  Unfortunately, as the title sequence started, it became obvious it wasn't what we were expecting. I think it was the title "Young and Innocent" that gave it away.  Fortunately, it wasn't some sort of Trash Film Debauchery soft core porn...maybe I don't mean fortunately, that would have probably been amusing...but an Alfred Hitchcock flick from 1937.  We'd paid.  We had popcorn.  We were prepped for awakeness with an infusion of Peace Coffee.  So we stayed.

Afterwards, we agreed that the suspense factor of 1937 didn't hold up well today.  Basic plot: actress dies and is found on a beach.  Women see man running away from the body (he's going to get help).  Dead actress has been strangled with the man's raincoat belt.  Man escapes from police, meets police commissioner's daughter, and because he seems so wonderful, they seek his raincoat.  They find it, courtesy of a bum and a bar fight.  But it's no help until they find the matches in the pocket and the bum recalls the man who gave him the raincoat had a two-eyed nervous blinking habit.  The follow the matches to the hotel where the murderer, a very bad drummer in a blackfaced band, od's on tic-control medication to stop his blinking and ends up drumming worse, almost passing out, and spontaneously confessing to the murder.  Of his wife.  Bit different from CSI where they always start with the spouse.

It's been a good run at the Trylon.  My wife, Eryn, and I went to Big Trouble in Little China which neither of them had seen and both enjoyed. And my sister and I went to Resilience, about a Korean adoptee in Sioux Falls, SD, who had been given to international adoption by his aunt and grandmother while his mother was at work.  She'd assumed he was in Korea with a rich family, not in South Dakota with a family that was falling apart.  It was an interesting look at a specific case that was very sad in many respects, both from an adoption perspective and from the perspective of being poor and family dynamics being, well, often sad.  I hated the scene where he decides to go to Korea to find work and live with his birth mother to get some space between him and his crazy adopted mom and his separation. The older of his two little girls is obviously devastated while his younger daughter laughs, obviously not understanding what it potentially means that her father is headed to the other side of the world.  It's good to know that he's back in his daughter's lives by the end of the movie.

On a less glamorous note, before Resilience, my sister and I went to Midori's Floating World for sushi and when I came out, I had a parking ticket.  Parking ticket at approximately 6:30 p.m.  Receipt good until 7:30 p.m.  I took many pictures with my cell phone of the parking spot id, the car, the citation, the receipt, the electronic meter with it's current time, and then all those things in all possible combinations.  But Hennepin County told me today they'd dismissed it as it was obvious from the receipt the meter was in err, not my parking skills.  Good reason to keep those little slips of paper.

Things I Didn't Buy at Goodwill - For Kyle

While Eryn was eating her Jimmy John sandwich, I popped into Goodwill to look around as it was right there.  While looking through the albums, I found the first two below in different stacks.  I set them out front to take a picture for Kyle and then, while digging through another stack, I found a third album.  Who knows how many I would have found if I'd kept looking.  Apparently one, Sunshine Day. I think Ricky Tanner really likes his dog.

Given this little blurb, "Ricky Tanner (born 1963) was a member and soloist of the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ricky as a treble had a rare bell-like crystal clear voice. His last CD recording (as a 21 year old tenor) was made in 1984, just after returning from an LDS mission trip," his career seems to have coincided with Donny Osmond's career who had his teen idol years in 71-78.  They may have even sang together when the Osmonds sang with TMTC.  I bet he needed a pretty sister instead of a dog if he wanted to really hit it big.  The Donny and Marie article at Wikipedia is worth looking at for the list of guest stars and for the fact that it was originally created by Marty and Sid Krofft.  And yes, I did point you at the Boy Choir and Solist Directory which includes novels about choir boys.  Feels like a weird fetish site after you browse for a while.


A bigger version of the image is at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nodtonothing/13297170903/sizes/l/in/photostream/ 

Kyle pointed me at a Rod McKuen album from his own Goodwill adventures.  This is the one to own - it seems special, almost like preparation for his very first television appearance.  My sister might appreciate that he was an uncredited voice in the original The Little Mermaid.


I was so tempted to get this for Ming.  But I don't think he would have appreciated having it as much as I would have appreciated giving it to him.  It was almost worth it on the off chance I found myself with five minutes of unfettered access to his garage wall and a handful of screws.


And one thing Kyle and I learned from Rewind This (Rotten Tomatoes, Offiicial Site) at the Trylon is that in any batch of VCR tapes, you can always find at least one double tape copy of Titanic.  Or two...


Or three...


Or four...

Bad Timing

I took the train (blue line) back from the Trylon last night.  I've done it a few times now that bicycling season is sort of over (I'm more worried about the cars in the dark than I am about the cold.  They don't pay attention in the winter and the dark.  But I will admit, I'm not a fan of sub-32 temps on my bike.  It's difficult to dress perfectly given the temp variations.) - it's an easy option now that the Red Line bus runs up and down 77 all the time.  And I've been practicing going to places that don't really require a car.  The U of MN is a good example - there's never a reason for me to take a car there - the bus is actually faster most days, at least on the weekdays, and runs from my house to the alumni center, which is where I go for conferences.

If I go to a 7:00 p.m. movie, the walk to the train station on Minnehaha is almost perfectly timed.  I show up somewhere between 6 minutes and 2 minutes before the train pulls up.  So today, it showed up 3 minutes early.  I was trying to stuff my dollar bills into the machine while the car doors were open, but just wasn't fast enough.  Another guy sprinted up behind me and just hopped on.  He appeared not to have a pass, because he pondered the ticket machine for a moment before going for it.  I thought if you got caught without your ticket you'd just have to pay for the ticket.  But the fine is up to $180 and you have to touch your pass to the pass scanner, so he was risking some serious money.  Not that it mattered to me - I wouldn't have hopped on without a ticket even if the fine had been the cost of the ticket.  I'm a bit of a goody twoshoes when it comes to following rules.  It seems to be a habit Eryn has picked up.  She doesn't like to break rules, even when we tell her she can.  But it is a lonely ride except for the part between airport stops.  Just not a lot of traffic on a weeknight from just shy of downtown to the Mall of America as you can see.

Clint Howard

Kyle and I have caught two Clint Howard movies at The Trylon, courtesy of Trash Film Debauchery.  The first was Ice Cream Man (1995).  And tonight we saw Evilspeak (1981).

Ice Cream Man was definitely more amusing with its plot about a killer ice cream man who blends people into his butter brickle ice cream after escaping the lunatic asylum (the lunatics are literally running the asylum).  Evilspeak was like a really bad adaptation of Carrie (1976), except Carrie is a goofy looking Clint Howard.  The high school is a military school.  Clint gains his powers from Satan and a Satanic priest, Esteban, not from natural abilities.  And the incident that sets him off is his dog being sacrificed and getting puppy blood all over his hands, not getting pig blood dumped on his head.  Although there were plenty of pigs in the movie eating everyone.  Evil pigs.  There was more eviloink then there was evilspeak.

It was pretty brutal as far as Debauchery movies go.  I could have sworn it was about 3 hours long, the killing scene went on so long.  And it's much more difficult to feel sympathy for Clint Howard than it is for Sissy Spacek.

I'm not even sure what the point of the computer was, despite that it played a large part.  Supposedly to translate the Latin from the evil book.  But as the computer answered questions without any real context, I"m not sure the book was necessary.  Clint flew around like this after he got his powers, splitting the heads of everyone for an interminable amount of time.  But the flying with the sword was actually a welcome relief from a.) the short scene where the commandant spanks Clint for not performing and the secretary gives a smug smile from her desk, and b.) the longer scene where women are vying to be Miss Heavy Artillery while the cadets hoot and the soccer coach talks about how hot they are at sixteen and seventeen.  That's right.  The puppy sacrifice and Jake the academy chef who cooks shirtless weren't the most disturbing bits.

The History of Future Folk

Kyle and I went to The History of Future Folk this week at the Trylon, presented by Sound Unseen.  It was exceptionally good.  Even better than Daimaijin, which was a decent Japanese monster movie we saw there not so long ago.  Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 96% critic rating and an 86% view rating which is much better than the 6/10 from IMDB which in my opinion is just incorrect.

It's funny, but played as a straight piece of science fiction with some excellent humor as a foil to what is at times a creepy but nice story about a stalker alien in love with a Hispanic cop, a touching family movie, and a musical with enjoyable guitar/banjo duets and bucket-head outfits that look like Maximillian from Disney's Black Hole.

Definitely one of the reasons I prefer going to the Trylon rather than to my local theater. If I look back at Signpainters, Daimaijin, the Japanese horror series, Plankton, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Last Circus, Onibaba, Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan....all from Trylon.