p e n g u i n d e v i l

As one would hope, the Holiday season brings good news! Even though I find some bugginess in my Firefox 1.5, hearing about us getting the trashy and always behind the time, IE out of our hair was refreshing news! And for your holiday reading pleasure, here is another nice article about our Macintosh world.

Back to now! Yes, Christmas was yesterday! Dvd’s Galore! I believe we picked up about 60 hours of films, so that should keep us busy! I was quite excited to find The Stanley Kubrick Collection under the tree! Whoa! Five of my all time favorites and three movies that, yes, I haven’t ever seen! This will be a set with serious re-viewing power! I plan to start with 2001. Anyway, yes, it was a grand holiday! Featuring the surprise appearance of my first personal handmade sweater! I have been awaiting this for soo long I started to wonder if I had imagined it! It was a wonderful surprise to find it all bundled up! How she snuck in those last 30,000 or 40,000 knits without me noticing is beyond me, I married a sneaky speed knitter! Anyway, I’m never taking it off… Also for the holiday, we spent the day at Annette and John’s where, after some endless marathoning of Pictionary, we settled down to watch Edward Scissorhands. They hadn’t seen it before and I think both Catie and I will always be up for this Burton Classic. I find these films refreshing. Between Pee-Wee and Sleepy Hollow (though yes, that was a bit dry) I always felt that he could direct no wrong. The last half dozen years? I’m not really sure what he’s up to, but I’m not interested. Strange, it now occurs to me, how the Coen Brothers have followed the same path. Through The Big Lebowski, not a bad film in the bunch (of course, better films then the Burton ones, except maybe Pee-Wee) and not really anything worth watching in the 6 years since then… Hmmm… What happened in those last years… Since 2000. Oh yeah, GWB.

Since we’re on the subject of movies, let’s see… We also gained the 1st season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. We watched a couple of them, they’re quite short but fun. The second one even starred John Forsythe, who I have fond memories of since the Dynasty years.

Also this last week we sat down to watch Poltergeist, finally. Yes, some of the effects have aged over the years (even the Steak scene, which really creeped me out when the movie came out has lost some of its convincingness), I would still venture to say that it’s my favorite haunted house movie. I still think that the story is really strong, the acting is great, especially Craig Nelson, the casting is really good, the plot has strong twists, I find the TV static parts to be engaging (maybe, as with my favorite horror movie, Prince of Darkness, I just have some fond feeling for hearing voices talking under TV static)… Anyway, sometimes it’s almost enough to convince one of an “other side”. Of course, it’s just a movie, but a very good one.

On a less strong path, we watched A Christmas Carol The 1938 version. I though that it was probably the most frustrating version either one of us had seen. It really seemed like they cut a third out of a finished movie and this was it. The movie ran along very quickly: most the the ghosts scenes seem truncated, Scrooge’s conversion to a good guy happened soo fast it was distracting and it removed alot of the “old Scrooge”-iness of him… It was basically a quickie feel good story for short attentions spans. I feel like the point of the movie should be the difficult conversion of Scrooge from an “Old Scrooge” to a nice, caring old man. There is none of that here. He is mean old Scrooge, then he is sweet old Scrooge. I sense little of the conflict in Scrooge that I felt should have been there. It seemed like a Hallmark version of the story and I wouldn’t recommend it at all. What I would recommended though is the included short, “Peace on Earth” I felt strangely shocked by seeing this cartoon. A pre-WWII cartoon in which all humans are dead because they warred themselves to death (shown via WWI). The grandfatherly squirrel (or chipmunk or whatever) who tells the story makes a very convincing case for the stupidity of war and the lameness and stupidity of humans. It was a very strong anti-war and “why are people such stupid jerks” message that I was really shocked to see it from right before WWII. I would say that it’s almost reason enough to own the DVD. If you haven’t seen this short, I would recommend renting this DVD just for that.