Notorious NPH

It's Oscar night (I think there's supposed to be a "™" or maybe an "®" in there somewhere), and as per usual for the last ten years or so, I am unprepared.

As a former (recovering?) film student, I take the Oscars very seriously. Perhaps too seriously, but what can I do? I love the movies, always have, and -- this is the part that has become the most important to me now, in my "advanced" age -- I also really, really enjoy watching people wearing clothes that cost more than my house.

Also: Neil Patrick Harris. I will watch anything he is in (and I actually HAVE, since I watched every. single. episode. of How I Met Your Mother).

So help me, I am a bonafide red-blooded American woman, despite all my attempts to avoid becoming such a creature for basically my entire life. I'm a stereotype. I make no excuses.

Used to be, back in the days when we were still dating, G and I would go out of our way if necessary to see all the nominated films. It was easier when we were in college and they would show movies on campus for $2. The hardest part about seeing Oscar movies back then was coming up with the $2. Then we got engaged and got jobs and got married and got a mortgage and got a kid ... and now we barely have time to change our underwear, let alone carve out countless hours to spend at the movies. (I won't even mention that $2 no longer buys a soda at the movies any more -- hell, you care barely get a movie theater box of Junior Mints at Target for less than that.)

ANYWAY.

I'll spare you all the long and boring details (TOO LATE, haha sucker!) and just get to the part I think you're waiting for anyway: "So, which Oscar-nominated movies did you actually see this year?" And perhaps as a corollary: "What did you think of them?"

Here you go. This is the entirety of the list of Oscar movies I've seen this year.

• Boyhood. I honestly can't say enough good things about this movie. It's the best movie I've seen in a long time, perhaps ever. Go see it and get back to me. (You can probably still get it at Redbox, which has been a godsend to patient cinephiles with nice TV's at home.) Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke were both beyond fantastic in this movie. I never really gave much thought to Richard Linklater's films (not usually my thing), but I have since reconsidered. I think it would be super if this wins Best Picture, as it is expected to. I usually root against the frontrunner, but I can't in this case.
• Gone Girl. We liked this one well enough. I'd read the book before we saw the movie; my husband didn't. I was not a particular fan of Rosamund Pike in this movie, but I'm not sure it's her fault; could have been the character. Ben Affleck was perfect, which are words I never thought I'd ever say.
• Into the Woods. It was pretty much exactly as I expected it to be. G and I both liked it (me more than him, but that's because he is not always hot to trot on musicals). Chris Pine was a revelation and probably the second-best thing in this movie after James Corden. Maryl Streep absolutely DID NOT deserve a nom for this; they gave her one anyway because she's Meryl, and that's bullshit.
• Big Hero 6. Highly recommended. Will be picking up the Blu-Ray on Tuesday. Okay, Shae? Can we stop with the civil disobedience now? Jesus Mary and Simon Peter. Mommy and Daddy can sometimes bend the laws of physics and space-time, but we just don't have the power to make Big Cinema do what you want it to.
• How to Train Your Dragon 2. Liked it. Basically The Empire Strikes Back, but with, y'know, cartoon dragons. My husband and I very much enjoyed playing our favorite game of "Name That Voice" while watching.
• Maleficent. Yes, this movie got nominated for an Academy Award -- for Costumes, but you know what? An O is an O. It was fine. I like watching Angelina Jolie chew the hell out of some scenery.
• Guardians of the Galaxy. My favorite movie of the year, but I am biased because I love Chris Pratt so hard right now. Not the best movie of the year, but my favorite. Already own the Blu-Ray, and already watched it at least six times. No regrets.
• The Lego Movie. Nominated for Best Original Song for "Everything is Awesome" which you are probably singing right now. I am disappointed that this movie didn't get nominated for Best Animated Feature because I thought it was the best animated movie of the year (and I am absolutely in the bag for Disney).
• X-Men: Days of Future Past. Liked it a lot, but thought Peter Dinklage was criminally underutilized.

That's it. Eleventeen hundred nominated movies, and I've seen nine of them. I suck. I can't make predictions in any categories because I haven't even seen enough to clips to guess what way the Academy might want to go. Although I can say this: I really hope that J.K. Simmons wins for Whiplash -- a movie I haven't seen -- and I hope that Michael Keaton wins for Birdman -- again, a movie I haven't seen -- just because I like those guys a whole lot and want them to have lots of success and stuff.

And if Meryl wins again? I'm flipping a table.

Very Short Movie Review: "The Muppets"

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We're kind of having a lazy weekend, what with it just being Thanksgiving and all that turkey still digesting and all. We were supposed to go get our Christmas tree today but we never got around to it; it's on the agenda for tomorrow. If we get around to it.

What we did do was go to the movies. We saw "The Muppets" because OF COURSE we did. We loved it. At least, I did. It is nice to see movies that don't rely on fancy CGI and special effects, with scripts that are cute and clever without being twee and precious.

Kermit, Piggy, Animal and the gang were spot-on; Jason Segel, Amy Adams, and Chris Cooper were perfect; the cameos were exactly as awesome as you expect Muppet movie cameos to be. Loved the blend of old and new songs. Overall, I think everything was done with just the right amount of winking at the audience.

If you love the Muppets -- and I imagine you do, since I love the Muppets, and you and I love all the same things, right? -- then you'll like this movie. This is, in my opinion, exactly the right way to reboot a franchise. Highly enjoyable. 8/10.

Bury My Heart in Hohman, Indiana

It all comes back to A Christmas Story, if you want to know the truth. It's possible that within A Christmas Story lies the answers to the meaning of life, the Universe, and everything, but at the very least, it is the mile marker on the Highway of Life that I use to locate my position in the cosmos.

At different times, I have experienced almost everything that happens in that movie except for getting to see first-hand the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window. I have lived the life of almost every character in that movie except for maybe Scut Farkus (and then I can't say with any degree of certainty that I've never been a bully in one way or another). I have been disappointed by mail-order decoder rings; and I've laid in the snow like a slug, that being my only defense; and I'm sure as hell that in the heat of battle I have woven a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging out in space.

So I've been Ralphie (still am, most of the time), and I've been The Old Man (still am, some of the time), and I've been Randy (still am, when it suits me) -- I've even been Flick with my tongue stuck to the metaphorical flagpole more times than it is probably dignified to admit to, but there you go -- and now I've gone for the superfecta by becoming Mrs. Parker and giving my kid soap poisoning.

Yes, that's right: I had to wash my kid's mouth out with soap.

I am not particularly proud of this particular bit of discipline, but it is what it is. Definitely not my proudest moment as a parent. The good news is that it wasn't because of cussing, at least not yet -- I'll have to cross that particular Bridge Too Far when we get there, I suppose. But in a way, this issue was worse, because it turns out that one of the multitude of bad habits that my kid has picked up from her friends in school is spitting when she gets angry.

Not the "good" kind of spitting, either. This is not the spitting for distance and accuracy that my friend the former Marine taught me how to do when I graduated from high school, being able to spit an empty Coke can off a picnic bench at 50 paces, the kind that ended up landing me a part in West Side Story when I was in college. This is nasty, feral-llama type spitting, and I absolutely won't stand for it. To me, spitting on someone is the most disrespectful thing you can possibly do, a Jerry-Springer-style dis, dirtier even than uttering the F-dash-dash-dash word. It's gross and filthy and Not Allowed, not ever.

I warned her, of course. When I last got a report of this behavior from her teacher, I told her that the next time it happened, I was going to wash her mouth out with soap. I even threatened to go out and buy a bar of Lifebuoy especially for the occasion, because there is no sense in doing punishment if it's going to be half-assed. I almost didn't make it through, when the school's director heard me referencing A Christmas Story and barely suppressed her laughter. But that was weeks ago, and it hadn't happened again, until Tuesday.

In the heat of the moment, I had to go with Dove Gentle Exfoliating, because that's what we had in the house. I told her: don't bite down, and don't lick the soap, and you'll be okay, but it would be gross, and anway, I said this would happen, and so this was what I had to do. She cried and fought and whipped herself into a right frenzy, as you might have expected. But she was a trooper, and she did her time (ten seconds, and it will go up by ten seconds every time we have to do it again, which I hope it never does), and I really want to believe that she has been rehabilitated, although I suppose we'll see, won't we? Even Ralphie became quite a connoisseur of soap, didn't he?

And, just like Mrs. Parker, I did take a taste afterwards. Soap is ... not tasty. So I hope we never need to do this again.

Creature of the Night

Bless me, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, for I have not sinned: it has been 15 years since my last audience-participation screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I used to be huge into RHPS -- way back in the uncharted backwaters of time, when I was in college, I was part of an unofficial players' group in my dorm. My R.A. was, too, and some assorted people who lived in Brewster-Boland Hall, plus (of course) a couple of drama and film majors. Almost every Friday night, we would gather in someone's room, get some pizza and sodas and sometimes beer, cook up some toast and popcorn, and watch our favorite movie. Sometimes we would spend all night watching it over and over again, doing the Time Warp until 6:00 in the morning.

And it goes without saying that it was awesome.

I was a Rocky Virgin until my senior year in high school. I'd heard of it, and I had friends that were part of the cult that made the film a classic, but for whatever reason I never actually saw it in a theater until sometime during my senior year. Even to this day, I can't explain what took me so long to get hip to what the really cool kids were doing. Fear no doubt played a big part. I'd heard stories (we've all heard stories) about what happened at the Movies at Midnight, about the hazing rituals for first-timers, about the weirdness and chaos and awesome insanity that happens once the theater doors shut and the room goes dark and those lips appear on-screen.

It didn't help that there was always, for me, an unfortunate connection between Rocky and some degree of lameness; RHPS was advertised back then on the dork-ass "classic rock" station alongside one of the other fixtures of the Movies at Midnight, The Wall, a movie that I have not seen, never want to see, and that I will always and forever associate with potheads, dropouts, outcasts suffering a self-imposed exile from the "now."

(Blah blah blah some of my best friends yadda yadda gabba gabba hey. And it probably goes without saying that I have long since reconsidered my position on many of the other bands that they still play on that station, but you'll never get me to change my mind about Rush, no way, no how.)

(Of course, now Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Nirvana and The Pixies are considered "classic rock" by people who are literally decades younger than I am. Circle of life and all that.)

Anyway ... I can't remember who I was with the first time I saw Rocky, but I'm pretty sure I went with friends who were in the band, and who had already been seeing the show live for years. I do know that, not knowing what to expect, I dressed as "normally" as I could muster at the time. Ah, the era of grunge and teenage rebellion. They warned me, but I didn't listen. I stood out like a sore thumb, obviously, in my tattered jeans and flannel, while everyone else was in their lingerie, giant wigs, stilettos, 8-inch high patent leather platform go-go boots, glitter, sequins.

I never felt like more of a nerd in my entire life. And if I remember correctly, my rite of passage as a Virgin was to eat a piece of candy out of someone's crotch. (Don't worry, Mom, they were clothed.)

Me, in the "clean" version
of my Magenta costume -
Halloween 1993

After that, though ... hoo-boy. It's weird to say that learning how to do the Time Warp was a seminal moment in my character development, but it was. It really was. I never really looked at the world the same way again. And I mean that in the absolute best possible way.

Imagine being me in the twelfth grade: a giant brain trapped in the body of Tinkerbell, with no boyfriends but plenty of interest, not really fitting in anywhere socially, a budding writer with very little angst, friendly but not exactly popular, sarcastic and cranky, wanting to rebel but not really knowing why, all of this a defense against the world, because no matter what I did, I couldn't quite figure out my place in it.

And then I went to the movies one Friday at midnight, and there was all this stuff happening. People were yelling at the screen and throwing toast and dancing in the aisles and they were all dressed like freaks and lunatics and it was amazing because everybody was having, like, the best time ever. It was Halloween and a play and performance art and rock music and a drag show and a summer camp sing-along and all of the best stuff about being proto-emo and melodramatic and a little bit unhinged, all at the same time.

It was basically nirvana, for me. Almost a drug. I couldn't get enough. Every time I came home from college for the weekend, I would call my friends and tell them: "Rocky. Saturday. Be there." And by and large, they would.

In 1994 I started dating my husband and stopped going to see RHPS regularly, because he wasn't as into it as I was, and eventually I got too busy at college to keep my standing Friday appointment, until gradually it turned into 1995 and my audience-participation days ended. Sometimes I really miss them -- I still have occasional moments when nothing but doing the Time Warp in my cubicle can get me through the rest of the day -- so I am super-stoked about the upcoming Rocky Horror-themed episode of Glee (airing 10/26). I've been teaching Shae how to do the Time Warp, because there is no time like the present, right?

When I watch that episode, I know I'm going to have a moment or twelve where I am crying from laughter and also from the floods of memories I fully expect, from the time when I was a "Creature of the Night" myself. But I know I'll be doing the Time Warp until Christmas, and you better believe that if I see those lips on my television screen at any time from now until the day I die, I will stand up and scream, "SING IT, BITCH!"

Obvious T-Shirt Choice Is Obvious

Palmer Community Days were over the weekend -- a wonderful little fair in the town where I grew up, where I used to have to go work at bingo for the choir and where I could, half a lifetime ago, stalk ex-boyfriends until they would give up and call me just to get me out of their hair for a while. It was the early '90s, and mistakes were made.

This is the first time we went to this particular carnival with Shae, and I don't know that I would have been overly excited except for one thing: PONY RIDES. (Well, actually, there were two things, and I will get to the other one on Friday.) I've always wanted to go on a pony ride, and you never know when they're going to pop up, so you better believe that we went.

Ponies are SO COOL. I can totally understand why little girls get completely gaga over them. A very big part of me wanted to just stand there and pet their manes and do some braids and tie them with ribbons. Yes, for real. I didn't even tell my husband that.

Shae had her choice of ponies, because when we got in line there was nobody else there. I personally would have gone for the pretty palomino-ish one with the golden hair, but Shae chose "the little one."

Which is actually a donkey. But not a flying talking donkey, sadly. I'm not sure she could have handled that much excitement. Although it would have been AWESOME.

And just for the record, SHE picked out her sparkle horsey shirt to wear to the carnival, not me, although I was not about to discourage her.

Let's Go To The Movies!

It was so hot this weekend that we only spent part of it in the pool -- that's how you know it was hot. It was too stinkin' hot yesterday to get in the car and drive an hour to get to the pool, so we decided to do something different: go to the movies.

We've never taken Shae to the movies before, so we weren't sure what to expect. She's seen movies, of course, but only at home, where she can lay out on the couch and order us around and "plause" the DVD so she can run to the potty. This was her first trip to the theater.

I tried to sneak a couple of pictures with my cell phone inside the theater -- I mean, seriously, the three of us shared a bag of popcorn that was bigger than my head, and she thought the fold-down seats were a hoot -- but. Um. Yeah, cell phones don't take great pictures in the dark. And it wasn't like I was going to bring the good camera to a first-run cinematic experience.

She did really well. She was mostly quiet, she watched the movie, didn't ask a lot of questions, and didn't once have to get up to pee. Of course, we did have her liquids strictly rationed, but still.

She liked running around in the lobby pushing all the buttons on all the machines. We didn't give her any money, just let her press everything. She thought the claw machines were "broken" but she didn't make a big deal out of it, just moved on the the next video game or love tester or gumball dispenser.

Looks like she's a natural FPSer. Like father like daughter.

(This is from Saturday, and totally gratuitous, but I like it, so I included it. My blog, my rules. Pfbbt.)

All in all, it was a great afternoon out. It helps that the movie was fantastic. I mean, it was G's Father's Day, not mine, but I'm pretty sure her falling asleep in his lap when we got home made it all worthwhile.

WTF!? Friday: Uncle Oscar

Way back in the uncharted backwaters of time (the mid-90s), I graduated from Syracuse with what is maybe the most ridiculous degree ever: a B.S. in “Writing for Telecommunications” -- i.e., writing for television, radio, and film. I am proud of my degree, of course, but to say that it goes unutilized in my current field of employment is probably the greatest understatement in the history of ever.

I mean, really: I do billing for a technology company. Aside from the occasional nastygram to particularly belligerent salespeople, I don’t do much writing at my day job.

But back in the day, I had aspirations. One of my professors, who is now one of the world’s leading experts on TV criticism (yes, really), said once that I might have had a future in that business, but I guess it’s pretty fair to say that life got in the way. Not that I will ever let that stop me from having opinions (see: “Dancing with the Dorks”). I love the movies, always have, always will, and I generally have some strong opinions about them. There are films that are beloved that I can’t stand (“Gone with the Wind,” “Forrest Gump,” “Titanic,” just to name a few), and I tend to champion little bitty things that nobody but me has seen (“Searching for Bobby Fischer”). If you have a week and a half and enough booze to get us through it all, I could tell you where the Academy has gotten it wrong and where they have gotten it right in the last 20 years.