Entries

Movie Reviews

What a bunch of adventures we had last night! Well, adventures and movie reviews.

I’m noticing as time goes on that Todd and I laugh together a lot. And I’m wondering why anyone would commit to a lifetime relationship with someone who they can’t laugh with. It sounds so lonely and so empty.

We knew we had to do laundry, and when Todd got home really early we decided to rent a movie and watch it in between going to the laundromat to change the washer and dryer and everything. So first we stopped at the video store, and right away found a really cool looking movie called Go Fish. Generally we both stay far, far away from movies focusing on lesbian women because generally they are some piece of…of…let’s see, what kind of word do I think would describe this movie — ah well, anything strong enough would probably get me in trouble with my net provider, so I’ll just say that piece of shit “Basic Instinct” (I mean, if you think that lesbian women are ANYTHING LIKE THAT AT ALL you are really off base) which I was horrified to find that Jill and Kitey both enjoyed tremendously and further horrified when Kitey said, “But it was such an excellent portrayal of a lesbian woman,” and I think it was when she realized I was speechless that she took me off the hook and said, “– compared to what Hollywood usually has to say about the subject,” which made me feel slightly better.

But I did check and it was written and directed by a woman, no idiot movie stars in it either, and so we decided to rent it. We stopped at the laundromat to put our clothes in the washer and there was this extremely upset woman sort of pacing around the laundromat with her friend talking to her and looking concerned. Far from what it looked like, which was that this woman had private information about the world ending in the next three minutes, she’d just lost five dollars in the change making machine. And we were just stupefied by her anguish over this five dollar bill. While we were putting the laundry into the washing machine I stood there trying to really empathize, think, “Okay, here I am, this woman who has had a bad day already, and I’ve decided to take my last five dollars until I get my paycheck next Friday down to the laundromat and do my laundry. The change machine eats my five bucks and now I’m so upset I’m hitting the change machine hard enough to really do some damage to my hand,” which the woman started to do after awhile. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it, because the absolutely most horrible thing that could possibly happen as a result of this situation, assuming that she has no friends who would loan her five dollars until her paycheck comes, is that she wears dirty clothes.

Then we both got a good look at her eyes and the weird, concerned look on her friend’s face and realized that the odds were that she was just off enough for this to truly be a huge concern in her life. Not that it wasn’t possible that she was a perfectly “normal” person that this was happening to — gad, Todd and I have had enough clerks cringe and wince when something goes wrong with whatever we’re buying (someone actually apologized to us this weekend for not being able to find the price on something we’d bought) and seen the look of intense relief on their faces when we don’t freak out and smiled instead that we know how horrible people are capable of being. When we got home we started the oven preheating so that we could have french fries, figuring that starting dinner would be dumb since we had to go switch the laundry anyway, and turned on the movie.

Well, so the first thing that comes on the screen is an ad for a computer game that actually looked great and made us even firmer in our decision to buy a CD-ROM soon. Then an ad for a wrestling video begins, that idiot wrestling federation, whatever the hell it’s called and we’re getting kind of worried and looking at each other and giggling, and fast-forwarded through it. At this point we were wondering just what kind of movie it was, and saying to each other how revolting it was going to be if they put in the wrestling ad because of the men who would potentially be renting this movie because they wanted to jerk off to lesbian sex, and that if it was that sort of thing we weren’t going to watch it, blech, and so another preview comes on and it’s for a really interesting Australian movie called Sorrento Beach, which we’re definitely going to look for next time we go to the video store. And then the movie starts.

There’s a fly buzzing around this gross looking room, and this gross looking man is looking through, I kid you not, PORNO VIDEOS and by this time we are really looking at each other and laughing, and I’m saying, “But wait, it said on the box that it won this extremely cool film award,” and so then this gross looking guy in the movie puts the only non-porno movie he has in his video collection into the vcr and starts it up and the first thing we see is “Starring: Adam Sandler!” at which point we both dived for the remote and turned the video off and went to check and see if this was indeed the correct movie, by looking up the title in the internet movie database (handy thing, that database). Neither of us could remember the title Go Fish, but I did know that it had some kind of sea/ocean theme to it, and the movie we had in our hands was called Going Overboard. A movie made in 1989 that was originally called “Babes Ahoy” and by this time we were laughing so hard we could hardly stand up and holding the video by its corners and getting ready to go back to the video store so that we could exchange it for Go Fish.

We went back to the laundromat first, to change the clothes so that they were in the dryer, and that woman was still there, having somehow gotten the change she wanted and was dealing with her laundry, with her friend still there and still looking worried. She was so angry that it was a little scary to be in the laundromat with her — the woman, not the friend. We went to the video store and got the right video, and then went home and watched about half of the movie and ate dinner, pasta with garlic bread and french fries too, and then went to the laundromat, picked up the clothes, put them away together and watched the rest of the movie.

And I have to say that Go Fish is among the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life. Rent it. Really. It is amazing. We found it at a video store that’s extremely mainstream, so unless you live in Missouri you should be able to find it. Here’s a review, if you’re curious, but it does give away a lot of the movie. It was the first time Todd or I had ever seen a movie that actually talked realistically and honestly about women, much less lesbian women (gad, it was like going to visit Kitey except Kitey wasn’t there) and it was sweet and funny and loving and — just go rent it. It did have some obnoxious things to say about het relationships, but both Todd and I had to admit that we had exactly those opinions about 90% of the het relationships in America and we just felt crabby and defensive about it because neither of us could say to the author of the movie, “Well, okay, but WE’RE not like that,” which we aren’t.

We got inspired, too, about making another video about our lives. We borrowed Sarah’s video camera the first time Kitey came to visit and I shot a huge amount of video, then took music and words and time lapse and played around with everything until I’d created a piece of film that even I was impressed with and excited about.

The Rat Race

Ranting and Raving