Really? THAT'S what you spell out?

Lisa, after reading this guys name on his mailbox: His name is Lars Thorwald. L-A-R-S.

That line from Rear Window always makes me chuckle because it's seems so silly - if you were going to spell out one of those two names, wouldn't it be the last name?

Suzanne Pleshette

Speaking of The Bob Newhart Show, how stunning was Suzanne Pleshette? What a looker!

She was outstanding as Bob's wife Emily, as the schoolteacher (and ex-girlfriend of Mitch) Annie in The Birds, and as the little dog lover/big dog hater Fran in The Ugly Dachshund, one of my favorite old Disney movies.

Labyrinth

Me: Let's watch a movie. How about Labyrinth?

Jonny: You can't make me watch that black magic-filled scarefest!

Movies that are better than you remember them being

Coal Miner's Daughter
Mask

Surely I have more examples, but these are the only two I'm coming up with right now.

Coal Miner's Daughter - this movie is just perfect. Once when I was extolling the virtues of this movie to some people a few years younger than me, this one guy said "Yeah, my mom used to make me watch that movie." I had to restrain myself from smacking him. Not only did he make me feel old, he also didn't properly respect the movie or his mom's attempt to try to share her excellent taste.

Watch it again if you haven't seen it in a while, and for sure watch it if you've never seen it before. Don't deny yourself the pleasure.

Mask - if you don't think this movie is good, you need to go back and re-watch it. It's good. It's good for a lot of reasons, but right now my favorite little gem within a gem is Sam Elliott's character's "Moustache Rides" t-shirt. Oh, that man and his mustache.


Here's an article about The Magic Movie Mustache of Sam Elliott,

But it's The Mack!

Jonny just got me this alarm clock for Christmas.

First of all, how hilarious is the brand name iCraig?

Secondly, everytime I look at it and see the word "iCRAIG" I think of Felisha the crackhead in the movie Friday saying "Craig . . . Craaaaaig . . . Let me borrow your VCR right quick."

Boise in the Hood

Back in 1991, when Boyz in the Hood was in theatres, the guy on the Moviefone phone line thing very enthusiastically and confidently pronounced it "Boy Zee in the Hood."

Twenty years later, every time I think of that movie (which is far more often than you could possibly understand), in my head I call it, in my best Moviefone man's voice, Boy Zee in the Hood.

Funny things someone else said

When I was in college I made my boyfriend go with me to see the terrible movie Bad Girls at the dollar theatre. Literally, a ticket cost just a dollar.

I should have known that a movie about cowgirl prostitutes wasn't going to be a winner, but I was a big Drew Barrymore fan at the time. Anyway, as we were both suffering through a particularly stupid scene, he leaned over to me and asked "Do you suppose that horse is chewing my dollar?"

It was funny.

Friday Favorite

One of my all-time tried-and-true favorite songs is Dropout by Urge Overkill.

This song is good and droney.

The lyric "hanging out in the parking lot at Dairy Queen" reminds me of Parker Posey as Libby Mae Brown in Waiting for Guffman. She's been working at the DQ for about . . . eight months.

Baby Fish Mouth

I know I should be watching Rudulph the Red Nosed Reindeer or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, both of which are on tv right now, but I can't stop myself from watching When Harry Met Sally yet again, on VHS no less. I've been going through something with that movie lately that I can't quite explain.

Anything that gets me out of doing these dishes is a welcome diversion.

Kirsten Dunst's hair and Simon Pegg's eyes in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

I'm in the midst of a Simon Pegg kick, so I watched How to Lose Friends and Alienate People last night. I enjoyed the movie (love that Simon!), but my favorite part was Kirsten Dunst's hair in her first few scenes (shown in the picture above). It was this really cool braid that somehow went all around her head in a seemingly endless loop. How do hair stylists execute these amazing hairstyles? They must be magicians. It's all I can do to pull my hair up into a ponytail.

Other than braid lust, the other thing that was in the back of my head the whole movie was wondering if Simon was wearing a contact lens in one eye, or maybe contact lenses in both eyes. Something I've noticed about him that I find completely charming is the fact that one of his eyes is both blue and brown. Per his wikipedia page, that kind of thing is called sectoral heterochromia. In this movie both his eyes appear to be blue.

Simon Pegg's eyes are pretty. He's such a dreamboat. He's got a clear case of Big Nostril, Little Nostril, but I love him anyway.

This doesn't actually have anything to do with Devo

You know how Mark Mothersbaugh is like the coolest and he's responsible for so much cool music? That's right, I said "like the coolest." Do you furthermore know that he owns his particular look, embodied by his glasses? As far as I know he has never made this claim, but I am. No one else is allowed to wear those glasses, only Mark Mothersbaugh. That's just the way it is.

Do you know this guy named Randall Poster who is "music supervisor" for tons of movies with really great music? At first I though he was like the coolest too, but then when I actually saw what he looks like, I totally changed my tune. He's trying to pull off Mark Mothersbaugh glasses! Not ok, Randall Poster, NOT OK. That look belongs to one person and one person only.

Plus I think a music supervisor for a movie just obtains rights for songs that the director wants in the movie, which is a pretty pedestrian task, so he no longer impresses me. There is no denying the fact that he is attached to some impressive film/movie combos, but he killed whatever chance he had with me when he chose those frames. More like Randall Poser.

1988 John Waters Hairspray movie vs. 2007 non-John Waters Hairspray movie

Old Hairspray: A+
New Hairspray: F-

I don’t have words for how bad the newer Hairspray movie is. Well ok, maybe a couple.

John Travolta as Edna Turnblad is by far the most frightening thing I’ve seen so far this Halloween season. Makes Divine, in the same role in the original movie, seem as safe and natural as a basket full of sleeping kittens.

Whereas Ricki Lake was genuinely charming as Tracy Turnblad, this new young girl just sang too much. Always with the singing.

I found that watching Cry-Baby immediately afterwards allowed me to erase the scary John Travolta images from my brain. Yay for John Waters!!

Meatballs

Have you ever seen the movie Meatballs? It's hilarious. The synopsis on imdb is "Wacky hijinks of counselors and campers at a less-than-average summer camp." ("hijinks"!! Best word since shenanigans!) That explains the basic idea but you can't begin to comprehend the laughs without seeing it.

When I was a kid, this one St. Louis tv station used to play the same movie pretty much the entire weekend. One weekend the movie was Meatballs and my brothers and I watched it maybe 10 times in those two days. I've loved Bill Murray ever since that fateful weekend.

I distinctly remember my mom walking in on me and my two little brothers all laying on the floor of her bedroom watching it on the tiny tv from our van and asking incredulously "You're not watching that again, are you?!" Then she told us to go play outside, which we didn't. Then she came back in later and got mad because we were watching it yet again and none of us had moved an inch the entire time. That tiny tv made the rounds of rooms in our old house when it wasn't actually in the van, though I can't really explain why the floor of my parents' bedroom was ever a good spot for it. The screen was maybe 6 inches and the picture was always terrible, but when you love tv you make certain sacrifices.

Jonny just quoted "Don't you change" from Meatballs this weekend, and we both throw out "What, no mustard?" on a weekly basis. I can sing you the entire C.I.T. (Counselors In Training) song on request. Quotes from Caddyshack come up quite regularly as well. God bless Bill Murray! A while back I went on a couple dates with a guy who admitted that he didn't really remember lines from movies and I'm not kidding when I say that that was one of the reasons why we only went out a couple times.

I'm a huge movie re-watcher to this day, using the skills I learned as a child. The last Chicago apartment I lived in didn't have cable so I watched Bottle Rocket every day for six months in lieu of tv. I don't currently have a "go to" movie, but the last time I did it was The Darjeeling Limited. Thanks for all the good times, Wes Anderson!

Jonny watches Polar Express all the time, and he has this funny bit where if somebody walks in while he's watching it he pretends the remote control is broken as if that's a valid reason for watching a kid's movie for the 100th time. [Jonny wants me to point out that this bit originated when he used to watch Beauty and the Beast on VHS constantly and if somebody walked in he'd claim that the vcr was broken and he couldn't get the tape out.]

Speaking of remote controls, my family has always referred to ours as "the mote." I wonder if anybody else calls it that.

A roundabout story involving Martha Plimpton

Have you ever seen the movie Pecker? The movie is just ok, but the soundtrack is a smile-inducing funfest! I was so charmed by the songs that I ran out and bought the soundtrack the very next morning after I saw the movie.

Martha Plimpton was in Pecker, she's currently on the tv show Raising Hope, and of course she will live in the collective hearts and minds of 80's kids forever as Stef in The Goonies.

This week on Raising Hope I heard a funny song with funny nonsense lyrics, Do-Wacka-Do by Roger Miller, that sounded like it would fit right in on the Pecker soundtrack. It made me smile.

Martha Plimpton looks great and I'm glad to see her on tv.

Eating Spaghetti in the Bathtub

When I saw Cloris Leachman eating spaghetti in a bathtub during this week's episode of Raising Hope, it took me back to a similar scene in the movie Gummo that haunted me for years. For years.

When I saw the movie Kids back in the mid-1990's, it affected me deeply. My teenaged life had been nothing at all like the lives of the kids in Kids, so it wasn't that I identified with them strongly. I didn't identify with them at all really. My square middle-class Midwest upbringing bore no similarities to the lives of these New York City kids who comparatively ran wild. Maybe it was the realization that someone's life could be so diametrically opposite from mine that struck a chord. I don't actually know what it was, but I do remember being so hypnotized by the characters and their stories that the first time I saw Kids I stayed up until five in the morning watching it twice back-to-back. Shortly after that I felt like I couldn't live without continued access to this movie so I special-ordered a VHS copy from a movie store at the mall. (Remember life before DVDs, DVRs, even before widespread use of our friend The Internet?! What a different world it was back then)

When Harmony Korine, the writer of Kids, directed his first movie, Gummo, a couple years after Kids came out, I was super-excited to see it. I was certain that lightning was going to strike twice and Harmony was going to change my life again. I wasn't wrong, but it wasn't what I expected. Gummo affected me strongly too, but not at all in the same way Kids did. Whereas Kids told the somewhat/sometimes attractive stories of 'cool' teenagers in NYC, Gummo tells the stories of complete weirdos in completely weird Xenia, Ohio. While Kids had instantly captivated me, Gummo immediately and forevermore repulsed me.

I can't remember what theatre in Chicago showed Gummo, but I remember it was old and dirty and I was wearing a ridiculously short dress that just barely covered my bottom when I was standing up (Ah, Youth!). The longer I sat with not nearly enough material between my body and that dirty seat, and the longer I watched scene after scene of filthy houses and strange-beyond-belief people, the grosser I felt. The scene that disturbed me the most was the one where a dirty kid is taking a dirty bath in a dirty bathtub while eating a plate of spaghetti. I'm not a germaphobe, but I couldn't get all that dirtiness going on out of my head and I went straight home and took a shower, plus I couldn't bring myself to eat spaghetti for years after that. For years.

I'm sure I can find the scene on youtube, but honestly I don't want to see it again and I don't want anyone reading this to feel like they have to watch it either. Trust me when I tell you that it's OK if you never watch a minute of Gummo. Just picture every house you've ever seen on Hoarders being in the same tiny burned-out town, and that entire town is wholly populated by the 32 people included in a bizarre special Redneck edition of the Who's Who of Mental Illness.

Chipped Tooth

I liked The Town.

Jon Hamm being an FBI guy instead of Don Draper didn't bother me in the least.

I also liked that one of Ben Affleck's front teeth was a little bit chipped. One of my front teeth is chipped a little too (less than his), so I feel like we're Chipped Tooth Buddies now.

TV Babies**

I'm going to see The Town tonight, but I'm concerned that it might be weird to see Jon Hamm as someone other than Don Draper. I loved him on 30 Rock though, so I guess it will be ok. Hopefully I can avoid thinking of him as Donny D. the whole time.

Lately I've been having a hard time separating actors from their previous characters. For instance, last week on Parenthood there were a couple scenes with Lauren Graham (Lorelai Gilmore from Gilmore Girls), Mae Whitman (George Michael's girlfriend Ann from Arrested Development), and Zosia Mamet (Peggy's lesbian friend Joyce from Mad Men), and I couldn't stop thinking "I'm watching Lorelai, Ann, and Joyce!"

It doesn't help that Lauren Graham's character on Parenthood is pretty much the exact same character as Lorelai, plus that show has Coach from Coach, Nate from Six Feet Under, and Lyla from FNL so I'm already thinking that kind of thing the whole time.

I watch too much tv.

** you should watch Drugstore Cowboy this weekend.

River Phoenix

Recently I watched A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, a terrible River Phoenix movie that I love in a way that only a girl who was a teenager during River's short movie career can. It reminded me of being fifteen and being sooooooo in love with River. The scene in Stand By Me where he breaks down crying while telling Gordy the whole story about getting busted for stealing the milk money? It's almost too much raw emotion to handle.

I've always been completely fascinated by the whole Phoenix family, but particularly smitten with River. He was my first big Celebrity Crush (not counting this thing I had for Howard Cosell when I was really little - don't ask). When he died in 1993, I was truly saddened even though he was an actor and not someone I knew personally. We'll never get to see him create a brilliant new character in another movie (like Devo in I Love You to Death) and that's a shame.

Speaking of Stand By Me, I take comfort in the words of Chris Chambers (River) when Gordie (Wil Wheaton) asks him if he's weird: "Yeah, but so what? Everybody's weird."

Fast Forward Nine Months

Joan and Roger: I can't wait for Joan to give birth to a little white-haired baby holding a highball glass! Even though Joan is married and probably shouldn't be having dinner at a secluded geriatric diner with her former lover, I'm not judging her. I know right after I'm the victim of a mugging in a bad neighborhood, the only thing that calms me down is to walk about ten feet away, then frantically have sex standing up, pushed against a residential building that someone just walked into. It's comforting.

Megan the Receptionist: I just love her. She seems like such a sweet, nice young lady. I think I want her and Don to end up together. Did you know she is played by the same actress that had sex in the bathtub with Darryl from The Office in Hot Tub Time Machine?

Miss Blankenship: We hardly knew ye. I'm dying to get the full story about her relationship(s) with Bert Cooper (and Roger) back in the day!

Betty: She keeps getting worse. I wouldn't mind seeing her character killed off.

Sally: What a wreck this poor little girl has become. I feel bad for her but at the same time I feel like a firm backhand from Don would straighten her up a bit.

Swatch Dogs and Diet Coke Heads

It's Winona Ryder Weekend around here!

Last night I watched Heathers and I'll probably watch Beetlejuice later tonight.



Something interesting I learned from the special features for Heathers: there was an alternate ending that involved Veronica (Ryder) blowing up instead of J.D. (Christian Slater), followed by a prom in heaven. Sounds intriguing.