There are stacks of DVDs on my desk—several of them in fact. A few of them contain holdovers yet to be returned to the shelves from research needs, but the bulk of these stacks are movies I’ve purchased or been given that I intend to watch. The problem is finding—or making—the time to actually sit down and do that. I suspect that I am far from alone in this matter.
This was my third year as a judge, and as usual I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the entries, but then I’m impressed that anyone can create anything that’s even watchable in 48 hours—and most of these were much more than merely watchable.
Maybe this would be a good week to take a break from the studio steamroller and spend some time with the surprising array of movies of, let’s say, slightly more depth that are in local theaters just now.
As anyone who read last week’s column knows, I spent the past weekend at the Monster Bash in Pennsylvania where I had dinner with Jonathan Haze (Seymour in the original Little Shop of Horrors [1960]) and drinks with Ron (grandson of the Wolf Man) and Linda (granddaughter-in-law of the Wolf Man) Chaney and held the door open for Lou Ferrigno. I also spent far too much money on cinematic esoterica.
This week there’s a little something for everybody out there. The big offerings, of course, are Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (sometimes in 3-D, depending on where you see it—and your willingness to cough up the extra three to three-and-a-half bucks for that third dimension).
Yes, it’s my annual outing to the Monster Bash, which, for anyone who doesn’t know, is an affair where folks like myself get together to debate such things as the merits of Bela Lugosi’s performance as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. We do this to prove to the Trekkies and Star Warvians that they don’t have a lock on geekdom. It’s also proving to me that I’m getting too old for this.
