Serious Movie Lover

Sarah and Kimberly (at left; the Rest of the World, at right) are nothing if not “gals on the go.” They barely have time to honor each other via Luna bar and pick up a new pair of jeggings, let alone finish watching Center Stage for the tenth time. They are dancing as fast as they can! Wasted Weekend is a weekly discussion of the films they watched, half-watched, or turned off in disgust during the previous few days. We hope you still respect them after reading this.

This Italian poster adorned Kimberly’s wall for many years. What a weirdo.

Kimberly: So did you manage to avoid the sunshine and all that pesky vitamin D (a little rickets never hurt anyone) and see anything interesting over the weekend? I watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in lovely HD. I was a huge “Twin Peaks” fan as a pretentious teen, and I recently rewatched the entire series on the Crime and Investigation network (a real network that also shows “Nash Bridges” reruns—imagine the bidding war with USA that took place!) and although it’s totally obtuse and infuriating, like much of David Lynch’s work, it’s also gorgeously shot and occasionally thrilling. When this prequel (covering the last week of Laura Palmer’s life) was released I made two of my high school pals see it with me in the theater—I promised them it would be scary fun and they didn’t need to be familiar with the series to understand it. Boy were they mad at me afterward! About as mad as when I begged them to see The Crying Game and swore it had a really fun twist. It’s almost as if I didn’t want friends. Anyway, it’s no wonder this isn’t shown on cable often, because it would make zero sense to the uninitiated. But if you’re familiar with the series, it really holds up, once you get past the (maybe purposefully—curse you, Lynch!) off-putting opening 30 minutes featuring the always atrocious acting of Chris Isaak. It moves the focus away from the entire town and zeros in on the incestuous Palmer family during the last week of Laura’s life (so it’s a real upper, is what I’m saying)—which worked out well considering Lynch had alienated much of the original series cast by the final season. Sheryl Lee is amazing—she plays innocently sweet prom queen just as well as loony, drug-addled prostitute (H’wood’s two favorite lady roles, rolled into one!). She was a bit long-in-the-tooth to be a teen by this time, but she pulled it off beautifully. And man, is she an excellent terrified screamer. That shit haunts my dreams. The Los Angeles Daily News even proposed she receive an Oscar nod. Which is almost as good as an Oscar nod! She was quite a find for Lynch, and it’s a shame that she seems to be relegated to Lifetime roles and TV guest spots as of late. Hopefully you watched something delightfully incest-free? 

Sarah: Incest? No. Weirdos? You bet. I avoided the outdoors long enough to catch most of Home Movie on IFC. I watch this one whenever it pops up. It’s a short-ish (66 minutes) documentary introducing five weirdo families and their weirdo homes. There’s a flute-playing family of hippies who bought and remodelled an old missile silo, an inventor who built hilariously unnecessary robotics into every aspect of his home and lives with a “personal assistant” who speaks with the dead, a delightful old lady who lives in a giant tree house in Hawaii, and a redneck alligator wrestler living on a houseboat in Louisiana. The highlight of the movie, though, is a couple who have remodelled every inch of their home to suit the fancies of their 20-odd cats. They admit that they’ve devalued their house by over $50,000 by adding stuff like flame-shaped holes in the walls that lead to a series of brightly painted walkways up and down the walls and a giant carpeted ramp leading up into the ceiling. These people are fantastically crazy. I saw them on a recent episode of “Cats 101” on Animal Planet (I watch only the most sophisticated television), and apparently they’ve recently been hired by a local cat shelter to design a large kitten play area. Best job ever, y/y?

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Sarah and Kimberly (at left; the Rest of the World, at right) are nothing if not “gals on the go.” They barely have time to honor each other via Luna bar and pick up a new pair of jeggings, let alone finish watching Center Stage for the tenth time. They are dancing as fast as they can! Wasted Weekend is a weekly discussion of the films they watched, half-watched, or turned off in disgust during the previous few days. We hope you still respect them after reading this.

Sarah: So Spring finally showed up this weekend! It was so pretty outside! My dedication to wasting time inside with bad cable was challenged, but I fought through it and managed to watch some notable garbage. First off, a wise friend of mine clued me in to some fine original movie programming on SyFy, and I caught the end of Ice Spiders. I missed the setup, but the plot was your typical “evil scientists vs. Olympic ski team battling it out for the good of mankind” scenario. We’ve seen it a thousand times! But this time, there were giant scary spiders to contend with. Except, it seemed like there were only like three spiders total? And yes, they were large, but they weren’t THAT big. Like about the size of a golden retriever? So not that scary, really? Anyway, the ski team had to lure the spiders into the snowboarding half-pipe by skiing for their lives, and then they blew the spiders up or something. The SyFy Moral™ for this one was that the government is always up to no good. And sometimes, even if you blow up the mutant spiders, they’re still going to cover it all up so no one will get the real story, leaving you and your ski team to just shake your heads and head off to dinner with your new scientist girlfriend. Obligatory mildly recognizable C-list casting: Dr. Michael Mancini AKA Thomas Calabro.

Keep hitting the ice spider with your ski poles! That ought to do it!

 Kimberly: SyFy better watch it with the subversive content—Big Brother is watching. I watched the spider-free The Children’s Hour on Saturday afternoon with the windows open, so it counts as outdoor time. Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine star as friends running a boarding school together. When one of their charges starts a rumor that they are lesbefriends, all hell breaks loose—it was 1961, after all—the parents pull their children from the school, and scary townies start ominously driving by in their pickups (it’s unclear whether they’re considering torching the place or just hoping to see some hot girl-on-girl action, but super creepy nonetheless). In the last moments of the film MacLaine reveals that there was some truth to the student’s lie—she is in love with Hepburn. Then Hepburn goes for a quick walk and MacLaine kills herself. Holy yikes. Very mixed feelings about this one. Though I appreciate that MacLaine doesn’t play the character as sexually predatory, her revelation turns her into a ranting, raving lunatic and her suicide feels like an inevitability (and a relief for everyone). Hepburn is then portrayed as some kind of hero for not only enduring the rejection of the town, but the advances of her friend. It makes me sad to think about young gay men and women watching this movie in the ‘60s and walking out of the theater feeling hopeless. On a lighter note, a very eye-catching James Garner (who, it should be noted, looks nothing like Ryan Gosling as a young man, duh) plays Hepburn’s fiancée. Cutie pie alert. Read more »