So, the party last night.

The cake turned out, and so did the frosting. I got a snazzy new cake stand and this is what it looked like:

( Pictures of my handiwork! )

There were about ten guests, which is an ideal number to eat a birthday cake: everybody got a fair-sized slice, with or without ice cream, and I ended up with a couple of pieces left for later, but not enough to make a real pig of myself.

( Leftovers. )

Since this was also a film club gathering (with some extra guests) we also viewed movies. thallid and deceptivelyevil arrived first and cast their vote, and this meant the first movie we watched was Reefer Madness, cleverly colourized from the 1938 (or possibly 1936?) original cautionary tale. We quickly realized the colouring had been done by affectionate potheads, because the marijuana smoke was every colour from green to purple to pink.

( Coneycat rants about anti-pot propaganga for a minute. )

The movie? Was brilliant, for a given value of "brilliant" that encompasses "bad acting, worse writing, and really, really funny dancing." These were the most energetic potheads you have ever seen. The writers of the movie seemed fatally confused as to the respective effects of, say, pot, peyote, and methamphetamines, and the kids in the movie kept acting like speed freaks. And then there was the FBI agent with the file cabinet full of "marihuana" cases. Agent: "We used to have about a file a year. Now--do you see those cabinets?" Random party guest: "The one on the left is devoted to Jerry Garcia!" Agent: "There are many sad cases. This one is especially tragic: a young boy who, under the effects of marihuana, killed his entire family with an axe." Random party guest: "That'll teach them to stand in front of the Cheetos!"

We learned a lot from the film. Mostly how not to write a screenplay. The first few scenes wouldn't play, but even so it felt like much longer than an hour.

And then, in order to get the full spectrum of the drug experience, we watched Festival Express. Again. It never gets old. I seem to have developed a pattern of showing two movies when I host this group, one to laugh at and one to watch. Which appears to work, judging by the reaction of the guests.

Or maybe they were in a cake-induced state of euphoria.

The "not a birthday party" message didn't seem to get across, and I was a little embarrassed at the percentage of attendees who gave me presents. Not that I plan to give them back. latsyrk, who is a genius, made this little darling:

( Let's call him Socks! No, wait, that's what I call my socks... )

And then, as people began to drift away, a few of us watched part of The Last Waltz for the Neil Young content and we called it a night.

I should definitely do this again next year.

As I mentioned in the Gloryhound post, thallid is celebrating his birthday today. (How old is he? Younger than me, I'll tell you!)

So a gang of us are getting together at a restaurant and then we're going to play pool. Which is how we celebrating another film clubber's birthday last week.

At this rate, I will start to not suck at the game!

I went to 300 over the weekend with my brother, cousin, and a friend of theirs. It's based on a graphic novel which was loosely based on the battle of Thermopylae and is another of those green-screened deals like Sin City and the like.

And it was pretty good, but I was hoping it would be made of awesome so I was a little bit disappointed. I didn't like it anywhere near as much as I liked Troy, for instance. And I can hear you saying "Yeah, but you liked Troy because of Eric Bana." And that's true, although possibly not for the reason you think it is. The whole thing about his role in that movie was, Hector was an actual person. You could relate to him, and even when his decisions were wrong you could sympathize with his conflicts.

And besides, the big hand-to-hand battle at the end? That was two real guys whaling on each other with swords, and that's why it was thrilling. There are some things you just can't CGI.

It's not, God knows, that I am in any way opposed to war movies. Or bloodshed, come to think of it. It's just that the war movies I like, Master and Commander (Best. Movie. Ever!!!!!) and Memphis Belle and The Battle Of Britain (I'm told I really need to see Tora! Tora! Tora!) all involve people, and even when the movie more or less begins with a battle sequence like M&C does, you get enough of a sense of the characters on the screen as real people that you can relate to them.

Gerard Butler has some amazing abs in this movie, but because of the story they're telling his King Leonidas is pretty much a crazy-arse motherfucker from frame one, and there's not what you'd call a big character arc for him to deal with. This is not a complex guy, nor a head I especially want to get into. I mean, fine from the wind-him-up-and-let-him-go point of view, but I was strictly a spectator. I think the colours of the movie--everything was pretty much grey and washed-out--also held me at a distance. The characters all looked dead already.

Plus, the guy who played Faramir was the narrator (there's a frame story going on) and in Lord Of the Rings I don't think I noticed his voice being prissy and nasal. Although come to think of it, it was in Van Helsing, but I thought that was just... Van Helsing. Anyway, his character is therefore a peculiar choice for a bard.

There are those who have taken a modern political message away from the film. I am not one of them. There is a great deal of yelling about freedom and reason and the Hope Of Civilization, but I found it very difficult to stop being scared of the Spartans' spooky-ass Hitler Youth children. I prefer to look at the movie strictly as a big noisy coolly-animated spectacle, thanks.

Mind you, it occurs to me that the war movies I like also feature ships or aircraft that in some cases rise to the level of characters, so that may be another factor here. No, I don't like cavalry scenes, thanks, and I was grateful that all the animals pretty much looked CGI (the wolf at the beginning especially, and he was deliberate, but there's a sequence involving elephants that I was pretty glad I didn't believe in.)

And then there's the whole issue of the good guys all being white and mostly blue-eyed, while the bad guys are mostly swarthy and darkeyed like... well, Eric Bana, frankly, when they didn't look like Amaar. Honest to God, it's not that I have a problem with blue-eyed people, at least not most of the time, but in the movies I sometimes sort of hate us. (Since it's an epic set in classical times practically everyone speaks with a British accent, thus avoiding the Pointlessly Evil English Guy thing. Butler actually sounds a lot like a pissed-off Sean Connery, which astonishes me because it's my understanding that Connery hasn't actually spoken with a Scottish accent for years.)

So: fun, but not as much fun as I had hoped. I shoulda got the popcorn.

After 300 it was my turn to host movie night. I had a few crime movies in mind but you know, my bloodlust was pretty well sated for the day and I ended up forcing everyone to watch The Silver Brumby (under its North American title The Silver Stallion), an Aussie family movie in which a youngish Russell Crowe is repeatedly outwitted by a wild horse. And sings a wash-day song to a blue heeler, which was worth the price of the DVD right there.

Following The Silver Brumby (which kept getting mixed up in thallid's mind with Lord Of the Rings for reasons I'll let him explain) we also watched The Nugget, another Aussie family-type movie featuring, how coincidental, Eric Bana. And that turned out to be charming (thank you, sagitare!)

Plus we had Cheesy Garlic Mushroom Bread, which seemed to be enough of a hit that nobody minded the Pony Club movie we began with. And as an antidote to multiple decapitations the whole evening worked like a charm.

...here is a picture from one of my colleagues:



There's a movie I would like to see.

You learn some interesting things about people just by what they choose to show when they host movie night. Last night we were treated to The Super Inframan, a Chinese action picture from the 1970s rightly described by our host as "sort of like Power Rangers on acid."

It was awesome, but even better were the trailers included in the bonus materials, featuring a nearly endless list of undubbed kung fu pictures. Undubbed is definitely the way to go, by the way. Knowing what the characters are saying just ruins things.

Because of a small scheduling glitch I'm hosting in two weeks' time, and now the pressure is on to find something really... suitable. I'm thinking Judgement at Nuremberg, for instance, wouldn't suit the tone of this event.

A couple of my friends have these monthly get-togethers with a few of their friends and watch movies. Often bad movies. People take turns hosting and picking the movies. They kindly invited me to join them.

This weekend it was Black Christmas, which you may deduce is a slasher flick. Have I ever mentioned that I just don't do slasher flicks?

Well, neither did the person who selected it! We both spent fully a quarter of the movie with our hands over our eyes, and the selector kept asking herself, "Why did I choose this movie??"

It wasn't as gross as it might have been, the victims were only subjected to very brief moments of terror before being dispatched, and it had a genuinely creepy ending. But it must have been a bit of a comedown for star Olivia Hussey--that's Juliet to you and me. (She had awesomely shiny hair, I must say.)

Anyway. I host in February and I can guarantee there will be no slasher flicks on offer.

I might go for a little car porn, though...