:: Quiche of the Day ::

:: 03.26.2004 ::

It’s the weekend again, which means it’s time to hit the streets and raid the Cineplex! I myself will not be partaking in such an extravaganza this weekend, as I had my fill of Hollywood films last Sunday, but I will share the experience with you, so that you may be more prepared when you venture into the dark, air conditioned corridors. I’m going to tell you first how to see movies at a multiplex, and then I’ll tell you what movies are actually worth your time.


Part A: How to steal, I mean see movies
Today’s modern multiplex theater is two things: big, and expensive. Truly, going to the movies is an American experience. But when we go to the movies we tend to act like wimpy Europeans (sorry to all Europeans reading this) and play by the rules. I know you’re staring at a computer screen right now, but pretend you’ve just walked into a movie theatre, ok? Visualize, hum if it helps. Look, I’m humming with you.

Hmmmmmmm . . .

OK, so you’re in the theatre, right? Great. Look at that ten dollar ticket you’re holding. Is that lame 90-minute movie you’re going to see really worth ten dollars? Now look down that long dark hallway you’re walking down, the one with open doorways leading to theatres showing dozens of movies. See how it’s dimly lit and unpatrolled? Think to yourself for a moment - if I only see one movie at this multiplex and then walk politely out the door, will I be throwing away my time and money?
YES! YES IT DOES! The Multiplex is like the frontier, and we Americans, we’re the cowboys on that frontier, and if we want to get our fistful of dollars, we’ve got to do what Americans do best, we’ve got to take it! We can’t back down when we’re handed our tea and crumpets and say “Oh yes, this is nice. This is quite fine, indeed. Quite” No! We do not want crumpets, nor do we want tea! We want real food! We want Cheetos and Orange soda! We don’t want wimpy old margarine, we want butter! On both sides of our bread! We want no fewer than two movies in five hours, and if they won’t give it to us, WE’VE GOT TO DO WHAT WE’VE GOT TO DO, AND THAT’S GO THEATER-HOPPING! Doggone it!
It’s easy, actually. Study the movie show times carefully the night before and plan out a schedule, making sure to accommodate for each film’s running time. If you have more than an hour between films you’ll need to hide out in another theatre in between movies, which can work, but is less than ideal. Also be aware of extremely popular films, as the evening showings may sell out, leaving you stranded and embarrassed.
Get a good night’s sleep, then pack a backpack in the morning. If you’re going with friends you may not need reading material for the pre-show entertainment, but it’s never a bad idea to be prepared. Also, unless you’re willing to get totally reamed on popcorn and hotdog prices, bring your own food, because you will get hungry. I like to bring along fruit and bagels from the school cafeteria, but it’s up to you, really. A water bottle might be a good idea too, though I always forget mine.
If you hit the earliest showing around noon, you can probably make it to five movies before the day is done. Even at the exaggerated ten-dollar ticket price, that’s only two dollars for first-run films on the big screen. Brilliant!
Sneaking from theatre to theatre is in my experience quite easy, though it helps to know the layout before hand. Exit the theatre, proceed to the bathroom. Spend a few minutes doing bathroom stuff, proceed to the next theatre. Wait patiently through the “pre-show entertainment” through try not to watch it, as you’ll doubtlessly be sick of it before the day is over. The biggest thing to keep in mind is to stay casual, and don’t loiter in the hallways for too long. Act like you own the place and you know where you’re going. If you don’t call attention to yourself, no one will know you from Adam (or Eve, depending).


PART B: What movies to see.
Theatre hopping can be exhausting, but the great part isn’t just how many movies you can see, but how many different kinds of movies you can see. It’s like taking a core sample of American pop-culture. And you’ll probably end up having crazy dreams at night that feel like collages cut from pages of Variety or Entertainment Weekly. Here are the movies I saw last weekend, and my impressions.

1. Stasky and Hutch. OK, I guess. I didn’t like Old School, the director’s previous movie as it seemed to lack any real artistic vision. Ditto for this film. It’s just . . . bland. There’s some cute moments and the actors are funny, but it’s clear that this movie only wanted to make money. Which is OK, I guess.

2. Dawn of the Dead. I like monster movies. I don’t care if they’re scary, I like them for the same reason I like science fiction - the way use fantasy elements as a medium to talk about issues regarding society and the human condition. Which is cool. Zombie movies have historically been used to comment on paranoia, the individual vs. society, consumerism, etc. Last summer’s 28 Days Later was not a perfect zombie movie, but it asked a number of serious questions and I appreciated it for that. The only questions Dawn of the Dead asks are “how long will our heroes last?” and “how much can we blow up, chop up or mutilate?” It’s essentially a nihilist film, and the onslaught of corpses that punctuate the end credits seem to underscore the point: you’re all going to die! It’s not thoughtful at all, only violent. There are some decent thrills to be had, but the number of times I wanted to look away (and often did), just wasn’t worth it. Interesting that this bloody film became the top movie at the box office, unseating The Passion another bloody film. I haven’t seen that movie, but I’ve been warned not to see it because of the violence and blood. I wish someone had warned me about The Dawn of the Dead.

3. Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This film had what was missing from Dawn of the Dead. Namely a soul. But also, it used its fantastic elements in a charming and thoughtful way to make a point. There seems to be a resurgence of spectacle cinema these days, perhaps due equally to CGI and post-September 11, with movies like Moulin Rouge, Big Fish and Chicago, (perhaps even Spirited Away) seeking to entertain the bejeezus out of us with lots of flash and dazzle and wackiness. The problem is that most of these movies paint in broad, thematic strokes and end up not really having a lot behind them in the end. Endless Sunshine has that same eye-candy and inherent playfulness to it, but it’s not backed by grandiose themes, and instead is grounded in characters who seem, if not completely real, at least real enough, and emotions that are tangled and confused rather than operatic. Some have suggested there’s a little too much music-video influence behind the whole thing, and that may be true, but this is one of the few movies where I’ve been simultaneously moved and viscerally entertained at the same time.

4. Spartan. This one’s a David Mamet military/political thriller staring Val Kilmer as the man who must track down the president’s missing daughter. If you go, count the number of times somebody asks, “where is the girl?!” because I lost track. Kilmer’s performance in impenetrable, and the plot feels almost staged at times, the plot keeps rolling at a constant pace and a few scenes are riveting. Still, I was never truly attached to the film until he finally connected with the daughter, the only character in the film who seemed human. I can’t entirely recommend the movie. William H. Macy is in it, I guess because this is a David Mamet film, but he basically just plays an guy in a suit who says some stuff. He’s seriously in ten minutes of the film. The twist at the end is not terribly surprising, given today’s political climate, but Mamet does a good job of combining Clinton and Bush into the unseen, unnamed President in the movie.
That’s all, I’m going to bed! More frequent updates should be coming down the line.

:: Aaron Humphrey 1:19 PM ::
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:: 03.15.2004 ::

What’s new with me: I got a job working at the school computer lab, where basically my mandate is to watch the print queues and make sure no one is printing files that are too big. And sometimes I have to get up and refill the paper. It’s not thrilling, but it gives me a chance to do homework and update my web page. I spent the weekend working until late at night on my friend Sean’s film shoot, mostly as Script Supervisor, but in a couple of scenes I acted as a zombie and ran around with other zombies in boxers and a dress shirt at 11 PM. Really not a bad gig. Finally, since I’m planning on studying abroad in Spain next semester, all the stuff going over there right now makes me a little nervous.
That was a bit lackluster, so here’s a minimalist poem based on my junk mail:

Your soulmate is waiting for you
Get your new car
Refinance your home for cash
Get a new car
Find and end to loonlyness,
Businessmen.


:: Aaron Humphrey 2:44 PM ::
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:: 03.05.2004 ::

Hi again, y’all! I finished up my study abroad application today and got it all turned in a whole half and hour before the deadline. The most awesome part was I had to make a faux-passport photo of myself. The results:



Erin says it looks mysterious because you can tell from my shirt that I love something, but you don’t know what exactly it is that I love. But then, that’s me, full of secrets and intrigue . . . while I was working on this picture I thought about all movies I’ve seen where characters make fake passports and decided I really should carry around a couple of these pictures so I can doctor up fake ID quickly when I’m in a tight spot, perhaps trapped in a cave or a hot air balloon with the Nazi authorities after me. But just because I’m posting it here, don’t think you can decide to print it out yourself and steal my identity and high-rolling lifestyle. No sir, it’s got that disclaimer on there. Only I have the master copy, and I’ll use it as I please, for Good or for Evil! (But probably for Good.)
By the way, for those of you that don’t know, I decided to apply to go to Granada, Spain in the fall. It’s a home-stay program, so if they let me in, I’ll get a Spanish family all for my own! I hope they have piñatas in Spain and not just Mexico, and I hope there are lots of little Spanish kids in my house who like to play piñata and I hope we will play it every day, or at least once a week, and we’ll do other endearing Spanish family stuff that I don’t know about yet, but it will be awesome and culturally enriching. Yay for culture! Yay for piñatas! Yay for this essay that I wrote about an hour before the application was due!
Yay, you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to!

I’m a film student and I came to Chapman University specifically to make movies. As a freshman I was wide-eyed and enthusiastic, sure that as soon as I got a camcorder in my hands I could change the world. But I soon found out, along with most of my compatriots, that I didn’t really have anything to make movies about, aside from being a student and trying to make movies. It didn’t matter how dramatic or stylized the script was, the films my classmates and I made ultimately ended up feeling rather . . . vacant. It wasn’t enough to have the drive. I realized that to make movies that make a difference, I needed to have something to say, I needed to know something about life.
Since then I’ve focused on broadening my horizons to see what I can learn about life. I’ve challenged myself by taking classes about history and culture, martial arts, literature, religion, language, anything I could learn from. And I decided to get out from the video editing bay and out into the world. I started with the town I go to school in, exploring alleys and storefronts in my free-time, walking or skate-boarding to places and breaking free from the windows of my friends’ cars, which had previously shielded me from everything but school and the mall.
I spent last summer working food service in a national park in a state I’d never seen before with people from countries I’d never heard of. It was an amazing, eye-opening and affirming experience and I knew I had to travel more. One country no longer seemed big enough for me.
Besides a desire to expand my concept of the world, I decided to apply to study in Granada, Spain for two main reasons. First of all, I’ve taken ten semesters of Spanish since I was a freshman in high school and always been thrilled by the language, but never felt proficient in it or confident in my abilities. Since high school it seems like people were telling me, “If you really want to learn the language, you have to go where they speak it.” I want that experience, I want to lose myself in a sea of Spanish, and find myself riding the waves of it. Even if I only learned to tread water by the end of the semester, that would be worth it.
Secondly, I’ve become immensely curious about religion and how man has tried to relate to God, the world and others over the long road of human history. Granada has a history of being one of the richest multi-religious cities in the world, with the confluence of Jewish, Christian and Islamic influences that occurred during the Moorish occupation. I want to explore the cathedrals and mosques of Granada, and hopefully get a better understanding of the world’s spirituality, as well as my own.
I’m still a film major, and I still want to make movies that make a difference. But I believe the only way to do that is to seek a difference in myself, to find things in this world that are worth sharing with others through my art. And I would love to be able to share with others what Spain has to teach me.

Wasn’t that inspiring? Wouldn’t you want to hire me? Or . . . admit me into your study abroad program?

:: Aaron Humphrey 3:18 AM ::
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:: 03.04.2004 ::

Another band played Chapman Radio Presents at Braden again tonight and I dropped by right as I was getting back from Advanced Screenwriting - it was Juliette Lewis and The Licks. They had posters up earlier in the week, and I had thought the name Juliette Lewis sounded familiar because I had acted in a production of Romeo and Juliet when I was in fifth grade, and was therefore familiar with the name. Even though it’s spelled differently. But I didn’t really know that until just now . . . it turns out my spellcheck only likes the name of the fictional Juliet, so I guess the real Juliette’s parents spelled her name wrong. It also doesn’t like the word “spellcheck” for some reason, I guess it wants to be called a “spellchecker”. Well forget that!
Anyway, it turns out that I actually know Juliette Lewis because she starred opposite Johnny Depp in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, a movie I saw recently. I enjoyed the film, except for that I never understood what her character she saw in him. But whatever, she’s a movie star, and her band played at my school!
It was a loud band, too. The kind my mom wouldn’t like, lots of drums and yelling. Lots of energy, too, everyone was jumping up and down in time with Juliette, who was not exactly singing into the microphone (it was more akin to screaming) and sounding sort of like a boy. There’s a charming smoky quality to her voice when she talks, but all that subtly pretty much went out the window when she broke out the punk-vocalist shtick. Which is cool, everyone likes yelling as long as they aren’t the ones in trouble. Her hair was a lot longer than in Gilbert Grape, which I guess makes sense, since although I only saw that movie last month, it actually was filmed something like ten years ago. So she had time to grow it out, probably.
She didn’t look like a movie star, really. She looked pretty grubby and suitably college-rock band-y in jeans (?) and a ‘Los Angeles 1981’ tee-shirt. I like reading tee-shirts, but I don’t really know what hers meant. It looked new, too, so I’m guessing it wasn’t vintage. Can you get Los Angeles 2004 shirts right now? As like a commemorative thing? Perhaps she just liked that year.
I should have asked her when I had the chance, when I passed her sipping a water bottle and talking to a girl from the audience after the concert. Her voice wasn’t smoky anymore, it was thrashed, burned. She seemed happy, though. But I wasn’t thinking about the tee-shirt then, so I didn’t have a reason to talk to her. “Besides,” I thought, “I’d only be talking to her because she’s famous.” There were palmcorders following her all around the stage during the performance, and you can be sure plenty of digital flashes sparking from the crowd’s cameras as well. No one seemed to pay a lot of attention to the band, who all looked older, balder and more manly than her. They were, in fact, men. They rocked aggressively, perhaps thinking if they loosened up they’d be totally upstaged. But as it turned out they were working so hard that they were drowned out the white noise of their own energy. Everyone was bunched close to the stage because she was Juliette Lewis, famous actress, not because of the, if not extraordinary, at least very existent, merits of her band and musical abilities. And I could get self-righteous about the whole thing and talk about how damaging and fake it is to treat celebrities like that . . . in fact, I was going to. But really, if she was a famous actress, I probably wouldn’t be writing this at all.
Goodnight.

:: Aaron Humphrey 3:18 AM ::
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:: 03.03.2004 ::

My dad visited this past weekend, just to hang out and see my side of the ‘hood. I wasn’t sure what we would do, because I don’t really do that much . . . these last few days my life has been pretty filled with just writing and rushing around getting study abroad stuff figured out . . . and before that I was in Minneapolis and before that I was too sick to move . . . and that pretty much takes care of the whole semester so far. But anyway, it turns out that we didn’t have to really do anything in particular. My dad is a doctor - saving people’s lives is what he does for work, and for fun he climbs mountains . . . in Oregon, Alaska, Peru, et al. I’ve always thought of my dad as someone who likes to do things, and when he comes to visit, boy, you’d better have things ready to do!
But it turns out I didn’t need to. It turns out that my dad enjoys simply browsing book stores and thrift stores the way I do. We can both be appalled at antique lamps with fake feathers glued to them and spend hours pouring over used books and old records. We even thought some of the same vintage shirts were cool, which if you know The History of Me, My Dad and Fashion, is if not a completely rare occurrence, at least a notable one. There are things that I wear that he likes, and it makes me proud to wear them. There are also things I wear that he thinks are rather ridiculous . . . and I’m pretty proud to wear them, too.
We ate a couple of meals at a Cuban restaurant down the street (Felix’s for those in the know), and Dad ordered a Spanish beer. It was called Alhambra, which is a word I’ve always liked, and always seemed like a place I’d like to go, and I’m legal now, so I asked for a sip. I expected it to taste as awful as beer has always smelled to me, but it didn’t actually destroy my mouth. It was interesting. Dad ordered a bottle for me and I eagerly jumped to ask the waiter, “do you need to see my ID?” I flashed it proudly. My hair is a lot shorter in that picture. I should have waited for him to ask, though, so I could be defiant about it, “Yes, as a matter of fact I AM 21!” instead of “Look at me, I am so legal to do this!” Anyway, the waiter brought me an Alhambra and dad and I made jokes about “kicking back brewskis.” However, a sip of beer and a bottle of beer are two entirely different things. Have you ever gone to Baskin Robbins and tried a sample of something in a little pink spoon, something like Lemon-Raisin Sherbet, thought it could probably been good and then been unable to eat any more than a second spoonful when you actually get it? That’s sort of what it was like. I drank two glasses of water and probably an eight of a glass of beer during the meal. The water was to wash the beer down.
So beer isn’t great, but my dad is, and I had a really cool time with him. It’s not said often enough, so I’ll say it here: I’m thankful for my parents!
(Also, I don’t have any anti-alcohol agenda here, I just think it all tastes pretty disgusting. Personally.)

:: Aaron Humphrey 1:11 AM ::
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