As promised, here is my report on the 2006 Maryland Film Festival.
I've told you already about Opening Night, so I won't re-hash that. Friday night went pretty much the way I planned - I stayed home, did a few chores, played City of Heroes, and basically pampered my exhausted wife when she finally got home from her 16-hour day in the box office.
Saturday, I saw:
The Mad Magician - A great Vincent Price 3-D movie. The 3-D was spectacular. The movie was actually pretty good too.
Full Metal Jacket - Matthew Modine was there to host it. He started telling us a story about discussions he and Stanley Kubrick had about the ending. He got as far as telling us how the book ended when it occurred to him to ask how many of us had never seen the movie. About a third of the audience raised their hands, so he decided the story could wait until after the movie played. There was some good natured jeering sent his way regarding spoiling the ending.
I've seen Full Metal Jacket many times, but it's a completely different experience seeing it on a big screen with people who have never seen it. The drill sergeant got a lot of laughs.
The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang - The guy who wrote and directed this was 1st Assistant Director on Napolean Dynamite. This movie is definitely similar, but it has more of a plot. Very funny, especially if you grew up in the 80's. The director told us that it will be out in limited release (wider release if it does well) in September, with the DVD planned for December. Keep an eye out!
Sunday, I saw:
The Secret Screening - The MFF managed to get permission to show "a highly anticipated summer release". In order to get this permission, they were required to have every audience member sign an agreement promising not to discuss the movie in any media until it is released in theaters. There were security guards making sure everybody had their cell phones off. We all had to stop and have a guard wave a detector wand (Metal detector? Some kind of electronics detector? Don't know!) at us. After the movie started, a guard walked up and down the aisles with an infra-red scope, making sure nobody had pulled out a hidden recording device or cell phone.
As you can probably guess, I'm not telling you what movie it was. It was a very good movie, and when it does come to theaters, I promise to tell you that that's what I saw back on that fateful day in mid-May.
Stomp! Shout! Scream! - An homage to the beach party/rock n' roll/horror movies of the 60's. It involves a girl band's car breaking down in a small beachfront community in south Georgia that has recently acquired another visitor - a skunk ape, the Everglades version of Bigfoot. It's very low-budget, the acting and the writing aren't all that great, and it's played straight, not as a parody. It was pretty good for what it was. It's supposed to be the first chapter in a Skunk Ape Trilogy, wherein the lead singer of the girl band finds herself in different types of bands at different times (this one was a 60's girl band on the East Coast, the next will be a mid-70's country band in the Midwest, and the third will be a late-70's punk band on, I assume, the West Coast). The skunk ape will, of course, turn up each time.
The Eagle - This was the annual silent movie accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra. This was a Rudolph Valentino movie, one of his last. There were some plot holes (perhaps due to lost footage), but Alloy did an amazing job yet again. M hadn't seen them before, and her socks were duly knocked off.
The Eagle was the Closing Night movie, so that ticket included a BBQ over by the box office tent. There were ribs, some amazingly good chocolate chip cakes, and a live band. I saw the director of Stomp! Shout! Scream! doing The Twist with some other filmmakers over by the band. A good time was had by all.
M had a pretty stressful time doing her Box Office Manager thing. She may or may not do it again next year. Maybe we'll just see movies together next time.
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This week's JACK-FM censorship: "Changes In Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" by Jimmy Buffett. Original line: "Good times and riches and son of a bitches". JACK-FM line: "Good times and riches and bruises and stitches".
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My healthy ways have gone to hell in a handbasket. We were doing rather well: regular visits to the gym, little to no fast food. It was a heady time. Then I got sick.
It wasn't even that bad of an illness. Just a head cold. I thought it was allergies from mowing the lawn for the first few days. But it drained my motivation to do anything. So I didn't go, and M didn't go without me. Still, the diet stayed relatively healthy, and I actually lost a bit more weight, probably from the effort my body was making to issue the cold virus its walking papers.
The cold has been gone for a week and a half now, but having gotten a taste of not going to the gym, I've been reluctant to take that chunk of time back out of my evenings. It was an easy trap to fall into. And now the loss of motivation has gotten a hold on my eating habits.
I pulled into 7-11 last Friday and saw a Hostess truck in the parking lot. I gave into the product placement and got myself some cupcakes. Ealier this week, I had nothing at work for lunch. I didn't feel like going to the store across the street to get stuff, so I settled for Pringles and a Baby Ruth candy bar. I did have some Kashi cereal for breakfast, so it wasn't all bad. But the BBQ pork sandwich and fries I had for dinner made up for the nice breakfast. The nadir came when I had 5, count 'em, 5 slices of pizza for lunch on Tuesday. And not even particularly good pizza. I followed that up with a dinner of... more pizza! The dinner pizza came from Papa John's, so at least I wasn't slumming it that time.
The later part of this week has been more under control. I expect to be getting back to the gym regularly next week.
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We now come to the part of our program where I list my 21 random iTunes tracks. Rock n' roll!
1. "Dirty Laundry" - Don Henley
2. "La Ci Darem La Mano" - Luciano Pavoratti and Sheryl Crow
3. "Oh Marie" - Sheryl Crow
4. "Take On Me" - a-ha
5. "Wish You Were Here" - Pink Floyd
6. "Georgia On My Mind" - Ray Charles
7. "Punk Rock Girl" - The Dead Milkmen
8. "Behind Blue Eyes" - The Who
9. "Inside Joke" - Eden's Poets
10. "Where Do The Children Go" - The Hooters and Patti Smythe
11. "She's Not There" - The Zombies
12. "Cecilia" - Simon and Garfunkel
13. "For America" - Jackson Browne
14. "When I Come Around" - Green Day
15. "The Killing Moon" - Echo and The Bunnymen
16. "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" - Whitney Houston
17. "Blue Skies Over Dundalk" - Mary Prankster
18. "Let's Spend The Night Together" - The Rolling Stones
19. "Prove My Love" - The Violent Femmes
20. "King of Wishful Thinking" - Go West
21. "It Was A Very Good Year" - Frank Sinatra
* Yes, you read that right. Sheryl Crow can sing opera.
* She's also the first artist to have back-to-back songs on my list, so far as I can remember. "Oh Marie" is one of my favorites of hers, possibly because it didn't get released as a single and thus become overplayed. It's on her self-titled 1996 album.
* "Punk Rock Girl" is my favorite Dead Milkmen song. It's rare to find a song that combines alt-rock and polka.
* Listening to "For America", I notice how little has changed in the 20 years since that song came out. Well, I suppose things did change for a while, but they changed back.
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