sex and documentaries
Well, I just finished up weekend #1 of four with Shobhit gone to India.
I had a lot of sex. Hey, I had to fill up my free time somehow! I went to Steamworks both Friday evening and Saturday evening, mostly because when I go on the weekends, my receipt gives a $5 off coupon for your next weekday visit. I may be a slut, but I am also cheap, and Shobhit taught me well. Still, two nights in a row, which I don't believe I had ever done before, was a little much. I honestly don't think I'll ever do that again.
That's hardly all I did, though. Most of Saturday was taken up by Laney coming over for a Braeburn Condos Theatre Double Feature, this time parts three and four of the 1970s-era Airport franchise: Airport '77, which was honestly the most fun of all four of them (with the plane getting submerged in 100 feet of water, it was basically Airport meets The Poseidon Adventure); and The Concorde: Airport '79, which was easily the dullest of all four movies.
One of the sort of fun, ridiculous ironies of the Airport movies is the first one is really the only one with much time at all spent at an actual airport; the rest of them would have been much more realistically called Airplane -- which, of course, was exactly what the greatest comedy of all time was called, 1980's Airplane! Which, of course, will be part of our next double feature, now scheduled for Saturday, March 23. And what will we watch with it? Die Hard 2, which is set at an airport!
We also set a date in April to watch a double feature of Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men, neither of which has Laney ever seen, amazingly. I mentioned it when we saw a middle-aged Jack Lemmon starring in Airport '77. Also: aside from Airplane!, which of course I have long owned on DVD, I have easily found all of these movies at the library to place holds on. My double features with Laney tend to be with older movies that the library, as it happens, has in their collection. So for the most part, Shobhit's point stands that I can use the library in lieu of paying the stupidly expensive $15 monthly fee for my Netflix DVD account, which is now canceled. Now all I pay for is the streaming service, which cuts my monthly Netflix expense by more than half.
I think Netflix actively wants to wean people off their DVD service anyway, what with the expense, how much lower the average quality of the discs is anymore, and the closure of many US Postal Service distribution centers several years ago adding at least a day on average for discs to arrive in the mail. And of course, they want their customers to focus on their many great Netflix original shows and movies they have on their streaming platform.
So then the highlight of my day yesterday was to take myself to see the first-ever science fiction blockbuster to come out of China, The Wandering Earth, which was . . . pretty terrible. Don't see it!
I would have been far better off going to see the foreign film Everybody Knows (starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz) at the Uptown, but that is a SIFF Cinema theatre and I would have had to pay an extra $9 for it. I was considering going to see that one on Friday evening, actually, and wound up changing my mind because the reviews were mixed enough that it occurred to me: I'd get greater value out of watching something cool streaming at home than I would out of paying extra for a movie I might not even like that much.
And then, of course, two days later I went to see a movie I genuinely hated. But! That was at the AMC at Pacific Place and I pay a monthly membership to see up to three movies a week for a flat fee there so it made no difference to what my cost would be either way. Hopefully a documentary I plan to see there tomorrow evening will fare better.
Speaking of documentaries, I spaced that part 1 of Leaving Neverland, about two of the now-grown accusers of Michael Jackson molesting them, aired on HBO last night; part 2 airs tonight, so tonight I've got four hours of a documentary to watch, that I am now sure will finally convince me what took me years to accept: that Michael Jackson was a bona fide pedophile, not just some out-of-touch super-rich pop star with a skewed sense of appropriate behavior with children. I already posted about this twice on social media, and I haven't even seen the doc yet. The article about it did well enough to convince me, though, which for me kind of makes this vital viewing.
(And, I say this as a childhood victim of molestation, something that was almost certainly directly related to both my being a virgin until the age of 28 and my being totally slutty now -- neither of which are logically open to anyone's particular moral judgment, by the way. When it comes to Michael Jackson, the issue was always the tendency to equate wildly excessive talent with wholesome goodness, which affects even those of us with actual experience with pedophiles. His persistently rabid defenders have no power to change the clear evidence that Michael Jackson was a sexual predator.)
[posted 12:26 pm]