Remember dinosaurs? They were really popular in the 90s, as children correctly intuited that the human race was vast, lumbering, and doomed. With vestigial dangly arms. Now, God help us, it’s vampires, who future historians will say represent our view that we inhabit a world where we are simultaneously bored with everything life has to offer, and desperate to have it last forever. (more…)
I have a rule. I actually have many, but this is a very important one. If there’s a new snack on the market, I have to try it. Pizza Ruffles - check (this was more than just snack irony; I actually miss those little guys). Gummi fried eggs that taste like eggs - check. Doritos flavor X-13D (I’m not kidding about this; Doritos released a corn chip in a black bag called X-13D, as a gimmick to promote their experimental flavor. No one bought it [except me, see “I have a rule” above]; it tastes like pickles left in the sun too long. Je ne regrette rien) - check.
The Nuart is conveniently located across from a heavily trafficked 7-11, so I was delighted to find the latest novelty - Takis, which are basically corn chips rolled in the shape of taquito. Being as blanca as can be, I went with Crunchy Fajita flavor, since I didn’t know what Fuego flavor was. But when I go back, I’ll try those.
They were fine I guess, filling and bizarre, but what would my life be if I had never I tasted them?
I had my Quantum of Solace report all planned. It was to be about identification, and the way movies put us in the place of the hero. I was going to open with the time someone said I looked like Daniel Craig. And no, I don’t (as my friends, the only people reading this, will tell you. Actually, if they’re the only people reading this, they’re going to have to tell themselves), and yes, I still believe that I do. I also believe that I look like the monster in The Bride. Not the actor who played him (Clancy Brown), but the way that some make-up artist imagined the monster of the Frankenstein story. You can accuse me of having either a too high or a too low self image, but if I’m a monster, at least I got to kill Sting after he left the Police.
What is it about an abandoned mall? Is it the allure of having a whole post-apocalyptic world to yourself? Do we see ourselves in the eyes of the empty non-starbucks coffee shop windows, cast aside, hoping someone will buy a muffin? It is all these things, but in the case of the Sunset 5, it is in particular, the charm of a lost and forgotten era. Ah, you say to yourself, remember 1995?
The Crescent Heights/Sunset complex is probably cursed, since it occupies the spot which used to be occupied by the Schwab’s drugstore, which was the place where Lana Turner wasn’t actually discovered. It’s now just as dead as Schwab’s, with two empty floors of exposed plywood standees from a once flourishing Virgin Megastore, the paint shadows of signs marked CDs and DVDs peeking through the floor to ceiling glass. A visit to the Sunset 5, and you are transported to a carefree time of television that you couldn’t fast forward through, cell phones that you couldn’t talk on (we called them pagers) and moments in your life where you weren’t constantly connected to all the knowledge in the universe. 1995, when people ‘bought’ ‘music’ at a ‘store’.
I can’t really say anything about W., since I was 2 minutes late into the theater. This is not such a bad thing when seeing a film at the Landmark 14, which frequently shows my arch-nemesis: art house trailers. Trailers are bad enough, since they give away all the good parts, up to and including the ending, but art house trailers are simply agonizing. Forget the foreign language film trailers that pretend to be in English (with sudden bursts of single words like “Ha!” or “Oh”) - because there are fewer films, the trailers run for longer periods, sometimes as long as six months. I saw the trailer for Snow Angels so many times, it was practically its own terrible movie.
Since we’re on the subject of the Shakespeare fetish, I’m going to go way back, to 1998, and a film called Shakespeare in Love, which was a good movie.
I don’t mean that as a compliment.