The Blob v. The Phlegm

Despite my best efforts to feed myself well and get plenty of rest, the sniffles that began the week devolved into a full-blown cold... flu... something that completely knocked me off my feet and onto the couch. I spent yesterday alternating between sleeping like the dead and watching movies...

Movie #1: The Blob

I would never have chosen this in a million years, except that the free movies on the Comcast On-Demand are terribly shitulous. The majority are last year's teen horror flicks or rom-coms from the previous two decades. But that being said, it does star Steve McQueen, a canned-cherry-pie-filling monster, and heavy-handed metaphors about conformity, the Fuzz, and the misunderstood youth. What surprised me was the following: the opening of the film is rather groovy with its ironic theme song and mod design; the film actually qualifies as an independent film (but I guess many the B-movie does); the movie is wicked self-referential, with a horde of teens watching horror B-movies and then being attacked by the blob in the theater; the misunderstood youth hero (Steve McQueen) becomes the good father by the end of the movie, even with a holy-family like pose with his girl Jane and her little bro. So much for rebellion.

Movie #2: Mad Love (a.k.a. The Hands of Orlac)

Is it possible to have a crush on Peter Lorre and not be weird? The whole movie is a classic exercise in mad scientist villainy: Dr. Gogol has got the maniacal MWAHAHA laughter, the exotic assistant, the God complex, the perverse Freudian crush (she was an actress in a theater specializing in the macabre who played a woman who undergoes torture), and the weird sensualist energy that is requisite for the creepiest of classic villains. It's all a cliche, but I find it (and the villain) strangely compelling. I really don't know what's wrong with me.

Movie #3: Management

The first third of the movie is a romance that manages not to be a rom-com, the second third is a cross between a bro-mance and Say Anything (yes, there's a serenade outside a window), and the last third visits rom-com territory. I got the sense that the movie was trying to offer a corrective to many genres at once (offering alternatives to the grand romantic gestures of the rom-com, the fart joke-sexual escapade bro-mance, and the neat, implied big wedding/big house ending of the rom-con)--which means it feels a bit of a mash-up, stylistically and in terms of narrative. But the interventions are all ones I'm on board with. And the alternatives offered are very charming and funny--e.g. Steve Zahn woos Jennifer Anniston via a couple of bottles of wine he doesn't understand to be vilely bad and an awkward butt groping. Which turn out to be weird and sweet. And who knew Jennifer Anniston could actually act?

Movie #4: Religulous

So, I think Bill Maher is by nature an asshole, but an asshole with range. He is by turns a blow hard, a demigogue, a misogynist, and just a contrarian trouble-maker. But usually, despite all that, I think he's funny. But in this movie, he's just as big a dogmatist retard as anyone whom he attempts to criticize/make fun of/humiliate. He manages to invoke apocalypse (man-made) to make an argument against apocalyptic religious mindsets. Which I imagine he thinks is a cool intellectual pony trick, but which comes off as just hypocritical and assinine. And offenses of all offenses, he's not funny. He doesn't deserve the effort of my googling a picture for him.