Why My Husband Controls the Television

My poor husband!  Generally he schedules our television viewing; he doesn't like anything that's not prerecorded or time shifted, and i just go along.  We have dozens of tapes and DVDs he's never seen, that i watch after he goes to bed, me being the night owl.  He also doesn't like subtitles, so that rules out much of my movie collection.  He's an avid reader, but he has trouble following words/pictures at the same time. i suspect this also explains his disinterest in comics.  Every once in a while we're caught up on time shifted TV, and he asks me to pick the evening's viewing.

This throws me off because nobody wants to watch the combinations i'll put together when left to my own devices.  So i fell back on 'just got, haven't viewed', and an old favorite he hadn't seen.

We started with Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special, which is brand new on DVD and i hadn't seen since its original broadcast in 1988.  It's really nice and a teensy bit edgier than the regular series since it was broadcast in prime time.  It has aged well. It's crammed with cameos by Frankie and Annette, Cher (!),  Oprah, Zsa Zsa, Whoopie, Joan Rivers, Little Richard and Magic Johnson.  There are musical numbers by the wonderful Del Rubio Triplets, the Marine Corps Singers, Charo, Dinah Shore, k.d. lang, and Grace Jones looking fabulous singing 'Little Drummer Boy'.  Mrs. Renee and Pee Wee do a bent Draedel Song. The regular cast including Jambi, Miss Yvonne, Cowboy Curtis and Reba are accounted for as well, making for a breathtaking hour!  i haven't seen it with the commentaries, but there are TWO of them for performers and puppeteers and the amazing John Paragon is on both... so i'll be up late one night this week.

Necromania is a 'lost' hardcore Edward D. Wood movie recently released by Fleshbot Films.  The good news, i suppose, is that it's pretty much like the other Ed Wood films you might have seen.  It has more of a 'plot' and less penetration than porn we're used to seeing, even from 1971.  And, of course, the bad news is also that it's an Ed Wood movie.  So, it's alternately amusing and boring, but no more so than, say, Orgy of the Dead.  As in Orgy (or RHPS), a young couple is initiated into a new, lamely perverse world. Unlike Orgy, we were snapped awake by the eye-gouging cheapjack 70's decor used to refurnish the same room as separate sets and the unkempt appearance of the principals. Wood's screenplay reflected an obsession with the unmarried state of the protagonists.  If you are a Wood fan, it's a must.  If you're not, it's no Glen or Glenda? or Plan 9 from Outer Space, the gold standards of of compellingly bad cinema. Remarkably, hubby liked this a smidge more than PW, which wasn't quite as bad as he'd feared.

Jim had never seen John Carpenter's They Live, so i picked it for him as a safe guess.  He did enjoy it, and why not?  It's not great, but a solid little sf film that packs a stronger political message today than it did in 1988. With Big Trouble In Little China, it's probably my personal favorite film from a personal favorite director. In case you missed it, the always wonderful Roddy Piper is 'Nada', really a cipher of a down-and-outer in a deeply depressed LA.  He uncovers evidence of subliminal domination by alien invaders.  It has many similarities to The Matrix, but is less Gnostic and more Marxist.  The rough-and-tumble, Hawksian style Carpenter brings  won even my objectivist-leaning spouse over. The seemingly endless fisticuffs-of-pigheadedness scene between Piper and Keith David gets me every time!  Funny, chilling and provocative.  AND Meg Foster, too!  Great stuff, consensus achieved.

Comments

[Roxanne]

Ah, The Del Rubio Triplets! I haven't thought about them in years.

[Jim, Juana's hubby]

Juana's right, I hate reading movies. That said I loved Crouching Tiger.

The fight scene in "They Live" reminded me a lot of one of my favorite fight scenes in any movie, The Big Country, with a tremendous fight scene between Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck. This was one of my all time favorite movies and I think it was underrated by many. All the actors were at the top of their game in 1958 but IMO Burl Ives, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor, stole the show.