BLAAGH

Dreams

I dreamt it was the zombie apocolypse.

A friend of mine has been working on a secret project but had been killed before he could tell us what it was or where he hid it.  

While walking through a nearby field we found it camoflagued against the ground - a hovercraft.

We figured out how to get in, how to make it fly.  We were working on how to make it land when some strangers happened upon us and wanted to take it.  While we were struggling with them, the door broke.

That's when I realized I was dreaming and the hovercraft turned into two pancakes I was trapped between.

Litterbox Haiku

You clean the cat box

He climbs in right away

And poops it all up

I FORSEE IT

Some day

our downstairs neighbor will come upstairs and knock on the door

(likely to bitch about some perceived sound we aren't even making, perhaps their next door neighbors are making it or nature is making it, who knows)

and he will ask to speak to my parents.

I am making this prediction now.

Perfect

ME: I have a social event coming up for which I'd like to look my best!

SOCIAL ANXIETY: INSTEAD OF LOOKING YOUR BEST YOU GOTTA GET ALL NEUROTIC ON YOUR FACE AND PICK A GIANT BLOODY HOLE IN IT 

Me: How is this?

SOCIAL ANXIETY: THAT IS PERFECT

I <3 Freddy

Every kid eventually comes face to face with their own mortality.  Their goldfish or their great aunt dies. This is just a part of learning about how the world works and what it means to be human.  I don't remember how it happened, but at some point when I was really young - younger than 10 - I learned it was possible for people to die in their sleep.  Probably I saw something on tv or overheard a conversation about it.  I'm sure I asked my mother about this ("Can people really die in their sleep?") and she confirmed it ("Yes, sometimes.") but I doubt she understood what I was really asking, which was: am I going to die in my sleep?   

Most kids probably could have processed this information and moved on with their lives, but I have been neurotic for as long as I can remember, and this is the first thing I can recall having obsessive thoughts about.  It became less of a question of not if I would die in my sleep but when.  I knew that this could happen to people but I didn't understand that there were extenuating circumstances.  That they were old, or had other health issues or were poisoned by carbon monoxide.  For me the association almost instantly became that sleep itself would kill me.  

I began to have a recurring dream; the imagery has still stuck with me even though it's been about twenty years.  I would dream about a cemetery, one of those old gothic types with ornate headstones and giant trees.  It was always night and everything was cast in a blue wash.  There was nothing more to the dream than that, just this one image, like a painting or a photograph.  My only experience with cemeteries at the time was through movies and television so it's pretty easy to see how this stereotypical, cinemeatic depiction ended up stuck in my head.  I dreamt about this haunted house style cemetery just about every night for a while, after lying in bed struggling to fall asleep and afraid I was about to die.  Even after the dream stopped this fear persisted.  

I doubt my parents fully understood what was going on.  I doubt any parent ever truly understands the inner lives of their children, especially at that age before they can fully articulate what they're feeling, but I don't think I ever even attempted to explain it.  I've always had problems with anxiety at night; I used to have night terrors as a toddler.  They knew something was wrong since I was obviously stressed out and was wetting the bed for so long they finally put vinyl covers on my mattress.  But something had sort of ALWAYS been wrong so they didn't know there was anything new going on.  This makes it sound like I was a total nervous wreck every single night and that isn't strictly true, I had good days and bad ones.  I had a happy childhood.  But memories of difficult time periods have a tendency to become embroidered over the years.      

It was around this time that I was introduced to A Nightmare on Elm Street.  My memory of these events isn't completely clear but I know I watched at least one of these movies with my older cousin Holli during a sleepover.  The timing is about right for five of the movies to have been released so we may have watched a few of them.  The important thing is that right there on the screen was a manifestation of the thing I feared most.  The characters went to sleep and then died, horribly.  I KNEW IT.  Holli had a replica Freddy glove tacked to the corkboard in her room and when I slept over I would lay in bed and stare at it.  I think I once even asked her to take it down because I was so freaked out.  It cast its shadow down the wall and I was positive it was going to come to life and crawl under the blankets with me.

You might assume that Freddy Krueger heaped on top of all of this other anxiety might have caused me to have a complete psychological meltdown but incredibly the opposite happened.  For me, dying in my sleep was such a confusing, nebulous fear that putting a face on that fear was almost reassuring.  I hadn't before known WHY I would die in my sleep, just that it would happen and I wouldn't see it coming.  Now that fear wore dusty fedoras and latex burn appliances.  He dished out horrible puns before he stabbed you to death and sometimes you could even escape him, if only temporarily.  

I began to dream about Freddy (of course I did) but he never tried to hurt me in these dreams.  He was interested in me in general but he never chased or menaced me.  These dreams were unsettling because he was in them but it was only because of his presence and never the content.  Freddy Krueger was just one item on a laundry list of things I was afraid of at night.  Ghosts, demons, the fear that my wall might grow a face and eat me (I think this came from an episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon).  As I got a little older more realistic scares were thrown into the mix and I worried someone might break into our house and murder me in my bed or kidnap my younger brother.  But the fear that I might die in my sleep for no reason at all still loomed very large and Freddy was its face.  I don't know what the turning point was but after a while the dreams about him ceased to become disturbing and instead were just nonsensical and weird.  I once dreamt I was at my grandmother's house and I looked down into the basement to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs in front of an easel he had set up.  He was painting bright, childish flowers with a plastic palette of Crayola watercolors.  Maybe it was the familiarity with the character since he was often on my mind.  Maybe it was seeing Robert Englund out of character, without makeup.  Whatever the case I realized he didn't want to kill me in these dreams, he never really had.  He just wanted to hang out.

My fear of him morphed into a twisted affection and the older I get the more pronounced it becomes.  Watching A Nightmare on Elm Street is like visiting an old friend.  In an odd way the character sort of saved me from myself.  I could transfer my very real (if overblown) fear onto Freddy and by the time I wasn't afraid of him any more, I had learned enough about the world that I had forgotten why I was so afraid of dying in my sleep in the first place.  He has become a part of my personal mythology in a way that no other fictional character has.  It is no coincidence that I chose to name myself after him when I started roller derby - a contact sport, a context in which I had no experience and felt afraid and unsure of myself and needed something to draw power from.  I have the Nightmare on Elm Street theme song on my phone and MP3 player because on some strange level I find it soothing.  For me, Freddy has become a symbol of how pointless fear can be, that being afraid of something is often about assigning it some power it doesn't have at all and that you can overcome it.  

Synopsis

I am behind the times on this but I finally watched Dario Argento's Masters of Horror Episode 'Jenifer'.  Maybe "watched' is not the right term since I turned it off midway through due to boredom and knowing exactly how it was going to end within the first few minutes (Wikipedia confirmed this for me).  Here is all you need to know:

Brian from Wings fucks the Phantom of the Opera.

 
           IT WAS MEANT TO BE

I Bet It Was Fish Oil

Overheard at work.

"Well, it's like the guy at GNC told me: you're only born with so many enzymes.  This supplement replenishes them."

Dear Movie Industry:

I think remakes are shit. 

There are exceptions to this rule.  There are exceptions to almost every rule. But generally speaking remakes are shit.  This is especially true of the current crop of horror movie "re-imaginings" (a phrase so sickeningly condescending and sweet my eyes roll into the back of my head automatically every time I hear it).  They are dumbed down versions of the originals with a much louder soundtrack and awkwardly inserted CGI and they are terrible.

A great movie has a perfect confluence of events.  The right director, the right actors, the right script, the right amount of money (seems like most of the time with great movies the right amount is "not enough".  Take note.), the right tone, the right timing.  To remake a movie is to stoop to such a ridiculous, pretentious level that you believe you can duplicate what is essentially a shitload of chance and luck.  You cannot do this.  You will fail and your movie will be shit.  This is like the same person being struck by lightning more than once.  Has it happened? Yes.  Can you MAKE it happen? No. 

BUT IT COULD.  Everyone keeps soldiering on with remakes with the same tenacity that people employ when they play the same lottery numbers every week.  They keep flushing their money down the toilet and fantasizing about greatness they are never going to achieve because they aren't really doing any work or putting forth any effort.

If you want to be a great director, a great actor, a great movie studio, you have to do more than give someone a dollar to buy the rights to violate their art.  You have to GIVE ME SOMETHING.  You have to give me part of yourself.  Don't tell me you are doing this when what you are really giving me is a pale shadow of that original intimacy.  Stop hesitating to make that leap of faith.  Stop assuming American audiences are too stupid to read subtitles and attempting to rewrite Japanese scripts CHRIST ALMIGHTY please stop.  Everything good will be lost in translation and your movie will be shit. Stop casting kids from the WB because they look good in tank tops, they are terrible.  Stop trying to fool me into thinking you've updated this movie when all you've done is write out all of the characterization and inserted some cell phones and laptops, you are not fooling me.  Stop slathering everything in a blue wash because you think that makes it look "dark" or "atmospheric".  Stop trying to give the monsters and killers contrived motivations, it makes you look like an apologist for criminals and psychopaths.  

Or maybe if the best idea you've had recently is "we should remake this movie" you should just stop making movies entirely.

Let's Make A Monster Baby

Every time I tell someone "I went and saw Splice" the first thing they ask is "DOES SOMEONE FUCK THE CREATURE" so I'm just going to get that out of the way right now - yes.  Spoilers after the Overview.  

OVERVIEW

Splice stars Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley and is a story about two scientists doing genetic research for a pharmaceutical company.  They successfully create a hybrid creature made of human and animal DNA; what follows are their attempts to deal with the consequences of their decision as the monster rapidly develops.

While this movie never fully devolves into fiasco territory, it does skirt greatness for a number of reasons.  Character behaviors are erratic and odd at times.  Critics have commented on its "black comedy" and while there are some genuinely dark, funny moments a lot of the laughs for me were incidents of unintentional hilariousness.  Was the audience laughing because what we were seeing was so ridiculous or because we were uncomfortable? Even now it is sort of hard for me to say.  I was never frightened or surprised by anything I saw - by the end of the movie it had become an exercise in waiting for the dominoes to fall.   

Brody and Polley do a fine enough job with the material and Delphine Chanéac as Dren is lovely and menacing, by turns innocent, vulnerable and sexy.  It will make for a good weekend renter some rainy night when you have nothing better to do.

REVIEW

Ah, to be young and in love and also a mad scientist.  Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley work at a lab which has been purchased by a pharmaceutical company.  They are flush with the success of their most recent project: the birth of disgusting creatures which resemble gross, writhing penises.  There are two, a male and a female (Fred and Ginger).  These creatures are hybrids made from the genes of multiple animals and will apparently allow the pharmaceutical company to test drugs and do all sorts of interesting research.  They are also hoping to use samples of their tissue to isolate a protein which the company will then patent and make huge stacks of money with.  But wait! Adrian and Sarah have developed a new splicing technique, which they believe will enable them to utilize human DNA in their experiments.  They'd like to try it so that we can commence with curing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.  The pharmaceutical company balks and tells them no, just focus on the protein, please.  This is not interesting enough for Adrian and Sarah who troop back to the lab and create a human/animal hybrid gene sequence.  Sarah wants to squirt it into an egg.  Adrian bites his fingernails and looks pensive but they go ahead anyway.  Sarah assures him they will abort it once they know for sure they can produce a viable fetus.  The audience knows she is full of shit.  This is a process that will repeat itself over and over again for the course of the film.

Of course the fetus develops and gushes into the world on a wave of synthetic amniotic fluid after stinging the shit of of Sarah's arm and almost killing her.  This means that they know the creature is deadly while it is still tiny and adorable and made of CGI and puppets.  Adrian is reasonable and wants to kill it.  Sarah disapproves and points out that it is developing rapidly, that they have the unique opportunity to observe its entire life cycle.  Her logic is that since it will be dead soon anyway they might as well let it live and Do Science To It.  They keep it in the splicing lab, where apparently no one needs to go now since everyone is busily working on isolating the protein.  Everyone except for Adrian and Sarah.  Doesn't anyone wonder where they are all day long? And isn't the idea that hopefully sometime soon the lab will begin work on developing live hybrids again? How do they intend to explain the giant robot womb being destroyed? Who knows!

Eventually the creature gets larger and is played by a little girl in a cute blue dress.  She is discovered by Adrian's brother, who also works at the lab.  He is appropriately horrified but takes no action other than to berate Adrian for caving to Sarah which is apparently a pattern of behavior for him.  (By the way, seriously? Your brother breaks the laws of man and nature and you bitch about his marriage?)  They move the creature - which they name Dren - to the basement.  At one point she gets sick and while she is in a cold bath to bring down her fever Adrian Brody tries to drown her.  They discover she has a second set of amphibious lungs.  This is a setup so that the fully mature Dren can swim naked in murky water later on.  

In the meantime the lab puts on a presentation for shareholders featuring Fred and Ginger.  Something goes horribly wrong and they attack each other, eventually ending up as piles of bloody, hybridized pulp and meat.  The pharmaceutical company does not approve of this and approves even less when they discover the cause behind the attack: Ginger turned into a male and no one noticed.  Having the males caged together did not go well.

The only hope to keep the lab open at this point is to isolate the protein and sell the hell out of it but Adrian and Sarah are too busy with Dren to bother.  She is now nearly fully matured and very pretty and super tall with crazy ostrich legs.  There is talk of renovation at the lab which will include the basement storeroom (why renovate the basement of a lab that isn't generating any revenue? Who knows!) so Dren has to be moved.  But where can you house a totally unique, dangerous creature the likes of which no one has ever seen before? Sarah Polley has a suggestion! How about a creepy, abandoned farmhouse in the woods? Of course! This is the house she grew up in apparently.  Sarah shows Adrian her childhood bedroom which looks like a bag lady's shopping cart with a mattress thrown on top.  They are attempting to trick you here into thinking you have learned something about the background and motivations of the character.  Don't be fooled.

Dren is installed in the barn where she quickly grows bored.  Sarah finds crayon drawings Dren has done of Adrian.  The audience snickers.  Everyone knows grossness is impending.  Sarah's behavior becomes erratic, swinging pendulum style back and forth between maternal and cold, stern, analytical scientist.  There is little rhyme or reason behind this so I guess we are supposed to assume it is her Difficult Childhood that made her this way.  

It is somewhere around this point that the movie goes completely off the rails.  Adrian realizes that the human DNA used to create Dren came from Sarah Polley which the audience already figured out ages ago and he is creeped out.  Dren starts to get bitchy and dangerous around Sarah and seductive and sweet around Adrian.  Dren kills a cat she was once affectionate toward (FORESHADOWING).  Maybe she has PMS.  Sarah decides to strap Dren to a table and chop the stinger off of her tail.  For some reason she undresses her completely to do this (Dren is nude for the remainder of the film).  Sarah takes the hunk of meat back to the lab to use it to synthesize the protein.  Adrian returns to the barn to check on Dren, trips and falls and lands with his wang inside of her.  Sarah Polley walks in on them and stands in the doorway of the barn totally stunned.  The audience laughs uproariously. Adrian Brody chases their car with his pants hanging down and his butt crack peeking out.

He eventually returns to their apartment where he and Sarah resolve to kill Dren since they've isolated the protein and creating her has obviously driven them both insane.  Whatever maternal instincts Sarah had toward Dren have shriveled up faster than Adrian's erection did, and while Adrian told Dren he loved her it is apparently not enough to keep him from killing her and reaping the profits from her DNA.  Considering they both seemed to think of her as a daughter to a certain degree this is all extraordinarily fucked up.  How they think they are going to pull off killing her at all is beyond me since she is obviously stronger and a more well-equipped predator than both of them combined.  When they go back to the barn they find her in the water tank, unresponsive and apparently dying.  When she dies they cry and bury her and burn all of her stuff.  

BUT WAIT! Their boss from the lab shows up all pissed off saying there was HUMAN DNA in the protein (like DUH you guys way to go) and wants to see What They Have Wrought.  They tell him he is welcome to dig her up if he wants.  Except she obviously isn't dead, everyone who has been paying attention knows what is going to happen next.  Dren swoops down and takes the douche bag boss away and we see her on the roof of the barn and she is a DUDE NOW.  I cannot really buy this, honestly.  Okay, so Dren has amphibious DNA and yes there is precedent for fish and such having hermaphroditic characteristics and turning from females into males and vice versa.  And yes, it can even happen in humans sometimes sort of.  But when it happens in humans it happens during puberty and if Dren's growth is so accelerated shouldn't this already have happened around the time she turned from a little girl into a sex machine? I have no idea if this stands up to actual science.  I was past caring at this point because as soon as Ginger turned into a male we knew it was going to happen to Dren eventually as well.  Also because he is picking off the other males in the room it is obvious he now wants to fuck Sarah Polley, which he does, forcibly, and it is disturbing.  Adrian Brody attempts to get Dren off of his woman and the two of them wrestle for a bit before Sarah smashes Dren's head with a rock.  Before she can land the killing blow because she hesitates like a dumbass, Dren stings Adrian in the heart and kills him.  

So of COURSE Sarah Polley is now pregnant with a monster fetus and the pharmaceutical company is paying her to carry it.  Her husband is dead, her monster daughter/son raped her and impregnated her so now we have dealt with abortion and genetic manipulation and incest and playing God and really there were just too many concepts in this movie and not enough actual exploration of what it all meant.  

Dreamcrusher

(I am attempting to swap out the nose hair trimmer on my husband's beard and moustache trimmer.)

Husband: Whatcha doin?

Me: Trying to get this nose hair trimmer on.  It won't go on!

Husband: What for?

Me:....to trim my nose hair?

I am slowly destroying all of his illusions.  Sorry, honey!