STOP THE LISTS!

It’s believed someone from the LA Meetup brainwashed me into not posting here anymore. And it’s completely true, were it not for Odi and her vile ways, I’d be posting here all the time.

So to this I say…when are we meeting up again?

(That and I should be posting a bit more, now that I’m staying home way more.)

Oh, and hi STL!

What?? How dare you, Glemaud! You shall pay dearly for this uncalled for slander.

I’m shipping this cake to your house:

Hello, Glem.

Okay, that cake is awesome! So clearly I want it…

When is another meet up happening?

Houuuseeee!

I was thinking before I looked at it again somehow that the pipes were hooked up to the eye, and leaking tears through it. But they aren’t hooked up to anything!

Ok come on people, trying to throw your shoes over the fence of the White House? What’s next, your underwear?? Let’s try to do this with some gravitas already.

As lawmakers took to the political talk shows, a crowd of about 100 people protested outside the White House, part of a wave of protests spreading nationwide inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The Secret Service said one person was arrested and will be charged with assault on a police officer after throwing a shoe at a uniformed officer.

Lisa Simeone, one of the protest organizers, said the man was trying to throw his shoe over the fence of the White House but missed.

Jenifer Lynch’s Hisss is available to watch for free even tho it is not on dvd in US yet

this is a good day

I find October to be the only time where I can really justify watching horror films. I really can’t stand to watch them any time other than now. And even if they’re really bad I really couldn’t care less because it’s nearly Halloween. Is anyone else like this and has there been anything lately that you felt was a good discovery or have you enjoyed something more this time around than you did the first time?

I would say I have had to great finds here so far. The first is Quatermass and the Pit (1967) aka Five Million Years to Earth. An incredible sci fi/horror flick from Hammer directed by Roy Ward Baker. And the second is La Casa Muda (2010). This brief spanich film from Uruguay blew my mind just a couple of weeks ago. It’s shot (supposedly) in a single take which I have never seen employed in a horror film and it works to an outstanding effect. The tension only increases and never lets up. Everything is presented to you right there in one take.

i love quatermass and the pit! u should totally check out quatermass 2 if u haven’t! quatermass and the pit is the third part of the series and imho quatermass 2 is the best of the 3.

my best recent discovery in this vein was night of the eagle. pretty cool effects for 1962!

I was really confused when I saw the first film since it’s called Five Million Years to Earth. I though the other two films were going to be cheap knock offs of the first, but then I realised that they were all apart of the same thing. I’m going to have to check them out this weekend maybe.

I think that is the only film from Uruguay I’ve seen. I don’t think I can really remember seeing another. I may have, but there aren’t many times I would have to remember seeing something from Uruguay.

yeah it’s called ‘five million years to earth’ in the u.s but was actually made 10 years after quatermass 2 aka ‘enemy from space’. the original film is the quatermass xperiment aka ‘the creeping unknown’ (1955). they’re all worth checking out :)

i hope everyone will share some more obscure horror films!! i need stuff to watch!

Damn, if I would have known that was the last one, I would have looked out for the others first. I can’t stand to watch stuff out of sequence.

oh don’t worry, nearly everyone sees ‘the pit’ first; it’s by far the best known. i don’t think it matters as they were made so far apart. the stories are only connected by the quatermass character

That Night of the Eagle sounds really good. I haven’t seen a good witch film since I saw the Witchfinder General last year.

i love british horrors. blood on satan’s claw, the devils, the wicker man, the innocents, and of course many great hammer films, especially the frankenstein series

so if anyone knows of any films of this type please let me know! happy haunting :p

Have you seen The Haunting?

oh yes. with julie harris? that part when someone’s holding her hand gets me every time :0

yeah I figured you had. The Innocents has that same feel of leading you to believe one thing and it’s really not. I love both of those for that reason. The Haunting especially for all those wild camera angles. Those shots of that spiral staircase are so dizzying.

omg i’d forgotten that part.~

i even liked the others with nicole kidman altho it’s heavily indebted to these films. it was effectively creepy

The Others was ok. There were some pretty creepy moments in there. I’m not the biggest Nicole Kidman too, so that may have made it a bit more difficult for me to watch. I just recorded The Uninvited off TCM. I’ve been hearing about it for so long so I thought I’d check it out.

Switching the subject entirely, my kids played a CGI game from the Lego website tonight. One of the things you could do is punch other people. Despite entreaties from her older brother to stop so they could get on with the game, my daughter continued to use the button which allowed her to punch other characters, saying later at the dinner table that this was because she was punching “the high schoolers.”

Is it any surprise that the last stuffed animal she picked out at a gift shop was a huge rattlesnake?

She’s the perfect little sister for an older brother.

I do not celebrate Halloween by watching horror movies because after four years working at a DVD sale/rental store, I got really frustrated with people saying, “What do you mean the entire Hellraiser series is already rented out?!”

I celebrate Half-Halloween, the last week of April. That is when entire series are usually available to rent in completion.

Also, the place where I worked (and I would be willing to bet most places like it) have a six month thing about inactive rentals: if something doesn’t rent in 180 days (basically just short of 6 months), they pull them off and sell them. What this means for those series (Halloween, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw, etc. and so on and on and on) is that by April, installments number 4 through 6 (or final installment minus two) end up getting “pulled” to be sold as “Previously Viewed DVDs” (PVDs). This is because people will aimlessly watch those movies during the rest of the year too, but usually lose interest after number 3 and skip to the latest one. OR they don’t necessarily lose interest so much as lose track of which number they are on, so start working backward. Whatever the reason, the middle ones disappear.

SO, once October swings around, since everyone is suddenly all completionist rental crazy, the store has to order three or four copies of the entire series for rental to meet demand. What THEN happens is that after Halloween is over, the horror section is filled to literally bursting, and so to cut down we eat through all of the “inactives”. That means, obviously, the extra copies of 4-6 of whatever series that never rents when it’s not Halloween, as well as, depressingly, those horror movies that seldom rent at all (i.e., the good ones).

Thus, ergo, vis-a-vis, I try to rent the entire series in April, when nobody is watching them, just before they get pulled, and also in the hopes that it will preserve enough copies until October that they do not have to order as many more copies and thus repeat the process to such a degree.

Half-Halloween. Just like real Halloween, except harder to get chicks to dress in skimpy clothing for the occasion.

Edit: side rant. Oftentimes I would tell customers/friends/other people about the 180 day inactive thing and they would get really huffy and be like, “But you HAVE to keep the movies there because someday I might want to get around to them and that just makes the new stuff eliminate all the old and that’s terrible!” I felt like that too—the first year I worked there. The other three years, I had enough perspective that I got it. First of all, the number of new titles coming in weekly, there just simply is not enough space to keep storing all that shit. Secondly, 180 days looks like a small number but it really is a long time, and the thing is, during all of that time, it keeps getting misplaced and misshelved by customers and put out of order and just generally in the way. Once you see the shelves as something less of an entitled collection and more of an archival disaster in bulk, you can willingly become disinterested enough that it no longer matters if it’s a Blue Underground or a Criterion you’re pulling, just as long as it GTFO. Also, this is the most straightforward supply-and-demand set-up possibly observable in such a situation: if you REALLY don’t want that movie to be removed, rent it, and then it won’t be removed. As it turns out, the first few times I did a rental pull almost all of the stuff I pulled was like, “What the hell is this stuff?” And occasionally, you DO find a really cool title in there you would have never heard of if it hadn’t been isolated by its non-rentedness and pulled from the mass of alphabetical noise that is the rental shelves. MOST of the time, however, you can see why these titles never rented. Sometimes you can even see a title that you hadn’t even thought about since that day a few years ago when you said, “Man, nobody’ll ever remember this one.”

What I would do as one who does the rental pulling (and see the thing was a lot of those sorting/alphabetizing/retagging/merchandise control stuff was given to me for three really good reasons: 1) I knew what 90% of the stuff I touched actually was and where it belonged; 2) I loved to do it because it gave me greater familiarity with precisely whatever we had in stock; 3) customers and I had a satisfying relationship of mutual loathing, so it was better to keep me focused on alphabetical noise than their stupid faces) is if it were titles that I actually really did want to get around to seeing, or thought should stay, I’d rent them myself. In a pull of about 200-300 titles, that usually amounted just to the limit of movies I was capable of renting (10). It would only become a problem those times when the store would be up for a massive restock or reshelving or whatever, when thousands of titles would be purged and I’d have to make some hard decisions between saving Clean, Shaven or Hidden Fortress. And I’d usually hold off on the Foreign Film section until the end (not the classics though. That actually was the easiest section to eviscerate, you’d be surprised.

—PolarisDiB

I really, really, really wanted to work at a video store but they didn’t hire me… even though I put Agnes Varda and John Cassavetes as two of my favorite directors. Apparently it got me into round 2 of application screening, though, since the manager said they throw away everyone who puts Quentin Tarantino there, which I had done to show that I can (try to) relate to average movie-renters as well as the more sophisticated ones. But I think I wasn’t hip enough, because most employees there were UGA film-studies majors whose sole aspirations in life are to smoke, wear ugly clothes, and give Wes Anderson a blowjob.

Also, I really like the idea of half-Halloween! I decided last month that I was gonna watch horror movies all October, but now that the Criterion sale has been rumored I’m gonna focus on Criterions. And half-Halloween makes a lot more sense anyway!

DFFoO, is that a real story or are you being sarcastic? ’Cause that paragraph made no sense to me at all.

—PolarisDiB

it makes a bit of sense, as a teen I was turned down during the interview process cause I told the boss lady my favorite director was Woody Allen. She said I would have a hard time relating to most customers.

These days, people who work in these stores no little about movies, cannot even answer basic questions about mainstream films much less art or classic

No it’s a real story… I guess I was a little sarcastic at the end because I was bitter about not getting the job and because I don’t really like UGA film studies majors. Here’s what happened:

1) I turned in an application to Vision Video in Athens, GA. The application asks you to list your 5 favorite directors. I choose Agnes Varda, John Cassavetes, Quentin Tarantino, and two other people I can’t remember… probably Godard and Harmony Korine… my goal was to try to show a fair amount of breadth in my choices, and that I can relate to sophisticated and average movie-renters. Although I probably chose different directors, because those five don’t show that much breadth…

2) I wait a week or so, walk into the store to follow up with the manager, who tells me that normally they throw away all applications that list Quentin Tarantino, but he decided to keep mine based on the fact that I also put Agnes Varda. I think “yess! I think I’ll get this job!”

3) I wait another week or so, and go back in, and he tells me that they’d already filled all their openings. I feel disappointed.

4) Disappointment increasingly turns to bitterness over the next year, since every time I go in to rent a movie the counter is manned by someone who I decide is dumb. I overheard one talking about how they had to watch Breathless in one of their classes today and hated it because it was “boring and derivative.”

I typed the story earlier sentence-by-sentence while doing stuff for work and didn’t read over it, so I guess it is pretty incoherent.

EDIT: Yeah, I just read through how I described the story earlier… it really doesn’t make any sense! Sorry!