Media Junkie

Since Janey's been gettin her money-saving on, what with the whole unemployment situation and all, I've had ample opportunity to catch up on things like Movies on Demand, TV, and even occasionally splurging on going to a real movie. Going to the movies enables me to be in the company of people without having to actually interact with them. Perfect!

So here are my recommendations:

See Pan's Labyrinth immediately. And I mean immediately. It is dark and haunting and phantasmagorical, full of magical creatures and monsters (of both the human and non-human kind). Do not, I repeat, do NOT take children to see this movie. It's far too scary for little kids -- Disney, it ain't. And (spoiler alert!)





a child dies at the end.

I've become a die-hard Scrubs fan. It's the only show on television that can consistently make me laugh out loud. Lots and lots of guy humor (fart jokes, anyone?) but come on, scatology is frickin funny!

Hustle & Flow on demand. Terrence Howard should have won the Oscar for this one. As far as "everyone has a dream" movies go, I thought this one was far, far better than the incredibly overrated Little Miss Sunshine. And call me crazy, but I find the idea of a pimp and the whores who love him a much less creepy topic than baby beauty pageants. It's that whole JonBenet thing, ya know?

Back to Back Watching: Munich and One Day in September. In Munich, Spielberg does a surprisingly good job of portraying the ambivalence of revenge. At the end I was left with only the desolate feeling that revenge accomplishes nothing, but reduce the avenger to the level of the criminals. Almost as if, had the terrorists of Black September been caught and executed on the spot, it wouldn't have been as bad as the systematic hunting and murdering that followed. I know Spielberg took flak for "humanizing" the terrorists, but I commend him for taking the risk. One Day in September is a quite compelling documentary about the terrorist attacks themselves, narrated by Michael Douglas. It's utterly fascinating, and the most disturbing thing to me was one of the German policemen talking about being involved in the bloodbath at the airport and laughing. It had me thinking what the hell is wrong with those Germans, anyway?
(Then again, ask any German who is about 40 what his/her father did in World War II. You will, almost without fail, get a huffy response along the lines of "my father/grandfather was NOT a Nazi." To hear them tell it, you'd almost think there were no Nazis in Germany at all! Yeah, and my friend's Austrian father relocated to South America after the war for income tax purposes. Mmmm hm. Right.)

Secret TV Shame: Charmed. I can't help myself, goddammit! I managed to go all those years without seeing a single episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (you Buffy people are as bad as the folks going to Star Trek conventions) and unemployment caused me to get mildly hooked on this show. Not heroin-junkie hooked. More like caffeine-hooked. But I've even bypassed Law & Order repeats to watch it, and if you know me, that's saying something. On the older episodes, there's something repellently fascinating about studying Shannen Doherty's face -- didja ever notice that one of her eyes is, like, a quarter inch higher on her face than the other one? She's a living Picasso, really.

Well, that's all I've got for today, other than it's gorgeous outside and I'm going to go out and walk around.