Saturday, March 24, 2007

Bonding

I had a rather nostalgic evening. My best friend, gr0d, came over and he brought his Mega Man collection for the PS2. My daughter was very excited to show off her new game, Sonic Heroes, so I smashed some bad-guys, (she's still working out the controls, and didn't want to be embarrassed about not knowing how to use the characters.) Then I broke out the dill pickle chips and root beer and got near the end of Mega Man X before getting frustrated at a vertical corridor and a mechanical spider which kept pwning us, (we switched off lives.) Then we had a game of Sexy Parodius, which is a parody of Gradius with a "sexy" twist, in that there are boob jokes and the antagonist is a cutesy little tentacle beast. gr0d has a strange schedule so he was pretty pooped by the end of the second game, so we sat around and talked about the last Fan Expo and looked forward to the next one. I'm hoping Hiro from Heroes will be there. 

I love gr0d and wouldn't change anything about him. Well, except for maybe the hours he works. I haven't seen him in a good long time without his being tired. I want to take him in so that I can make him get a day job. We used to live and work together and it was an amazing time, even though my job sucked the life out of me. gr0d was there to commiserate with and he's always been such a good friend to me. I feel bad that I don't open up to him more. I want to but I'm always embarrassed about opening up to any male because of the way I was socialised as a male. Men don't talk to each other much except to yell and praise each other like Vikings. It seems silly but that fear of opening up to men is real and it's hard to change, even when I want to.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Last night, neVer and I watched the Woody Allen movie, Scoop. In it Allen plays a successful stage magician who meets his co-star, a promiscuous, would-be journalist, during his act, calling her up on stage for a disappearing trick. While she is in the "de-atomizing box" she meets the third star of the movie, a famous dead journalist, or his eternal spirit. 

This is one of Allen's better plots, being a cohesive murder-mystery, but lacks the aesthetic beauty of some of his earlier works, although there are some rich-looking shots on an English estate. This is not to say I didn't like it, in fact I laughed more at this movie than I have for years, and in places Allen wanted his audience to laugh, at anything that wasn't a predictable, trite, and badly-written script.

One question I have about this movie is: Is Woody Allen the one talking into his co-star's breasts, or is it his character, Splendini the Magician? I get the feeling that it's a little of both, as sexuality is always a strong device in his movies.