— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ उनासी —
We had a surprisingly large number of attendees at Action Movie Night last night—and that was with a couple of regulars unable to make it! Ben, whose turn it was supposed to be to choose the movie, had a work dinner he had to go to. When this happens, the choice falls to the next person on the schedule, so Joe got to choose this week. Joe is one of four people who actually live in our complex who made it last night—an unusually high number even by that metric.
Let's see if I can remember everyone who made it. In the end, there were 11 who came last night. There were Tony, Jake, Ryan, Chris G, Joe, Sean, Daniel, Gina, Shobhit, myself, and a guy whose name I didn't know who was a coworker of Tony and Ryan's that they brought.
Gina only comes every once in a blue moon, and she introduced Daniel to the group, as he had been staying with her for a while for some reason. It sounds like he isn't anymore, but he's kept on coming regularly. He's clearly eager to get his name put into the rotation for the people who come regularly enough to get to choose the movie. That'll add another two weeks to the full rotation that we have currently, making a total of 13 people and thus a 26-week rotation, a solid six months.
I noticed last week on
the complete movie list that I have my next choice coming up soon—well, soon-ish, anyway. There are three more turns to my next choice, which means six weeks. That puts my next choice scheduled for April 17. I'm pretty sure I know what I'll bring to watch, which I've had bubbling at the top of my list from the very start.
Anyway, for the first time we actually brought an Indian dish for our food offering—and it proved unusually popular. Shobhit made his signature eggplant dish, but instead of serving it with rice or parathas, he used the "mini naans" we recently got from Costco—but, sliced in half, oiled, sprinkled with fresh chopped garlic and baked. It became sort of like a baba ganoush, with the bread pieces used for either dipping or having the eggplant on them as a spread (which was how I ate them).
I ate an astonishing amount yesterday. I had my cereal for breakfast when I forgot I would be going out for breakfast with Gabby and Amy, where I then ate an entire (and delicious) goat cheese omelet. At work Noah set out some very delicious samples of mini cakes, four of them, and I had more than four bits of them. I couldn't seem to stop going back into the kitchen to basically graze on them. And all this was before the Action Movie Night potluck, where I had two slices of the green pizza Tony brought, and three or four of the half-mini naans with eggplant, and a bit of the potato chips Jake brought.
Oh, and Shobhit made us both martinis, which we literally brought downstairs with us in martini glasses. (I usually bring my cocktail down in a lidded Yeti insulated mug.) When Shobhit and I got into the elevator, two other people from the building, who we don't know, were in there. One floor down from us, Joe joined us, with his DVD player in hand. It made the elevator unusually crowded, with five of us in there—two of us holding a martini in our hands. "It's like a party in here," Joe said.
Anyway the point is I really threw caution to the wind yesterday. So did Shobhit. Stunningly, when I weighed myself this morning, it was 0.1 lbs lower than yesterday, after it had been steadily going up for like four days. I have no idea how that worked out.
The last odd thing was that multiple people in the group remembered that they had watched the sequel,
Cranked: High Voltage (2009) already, and were amused that they were now watching the two in reverse order. Except both Jake and I referred to the master list to find out when the sequel had been watched—and it's not on the list. This really perturbed Tony in particular, who maintains the list. "This is a Mandela effect," he said. But, he couldn't let go of his certainty that it had been watched, but could not make sense of it getting missed on the list. I don't think anyone has gone through it to make sure there is a record of every single date covering every other Wednesday since 2012, though. It's entirely possible there is a hole in there somewhere.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ उनासी —
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ उनासी —
Okay, now I have to bring up, once again, how "Action Movie Night" was first (in my opinion, regressively) called "Man Movie Wednesday." The online sheet with the full history, to this day, has the heading "MMWed Movie List." And even though Britne is now a semi-regular who is a woman, and Gina shows up every once in a while (like last night), honestly more often than not the movie that gets chosen really fits the bill of what you might expect of a so-called "Man Movie Wednesday."
Joe's choice certainly did. He chose the 2006 Jason Statham movie
Crank, which more than one person declared a "great pick" after it ended.
Here's the thing. It wasn't
terrible. It had a compelling premise, one the
most popular Letterboxd review quite aptly described as a "remake of Speed, with Statham being the bus." Someone injects him with a poison that will kill him as soon as his heart rate goes down, so he has to go through the whole movie keeping his adrenaline up. This made for some pretty great action sequences, including a car plowing through a shopping mall and winding up sideways on an escalator; a motorcycle chase in which he is wearing nothing but a hospital gown; and an honestly visually impressive, climactic helecopter sequence over downtown Los Angeles.
In the middle of all that, however, the script goes places so problematic that I honestly found myself wondering where the line would actually be before I finally said, "Okay, I'm out" and leave. I suppose the ambilance came in because, in spite of the movie's annoyingly coked-up editing and cinematography, I often found myself entertained in spite of that stuff.
As I noted in
my own Letterboxd review, the movie has an uncomfortable amount of casual racism, homophobia and misogyny. The first such moment is when Statham's character is trying to get a cab driver out of his way, and in order to do it he points at the guy and yells at nearby diners, "Al-Qaeda!" so the diners all jump the guy. Gross.
Statham kills the brother of the guy who injected him, and when he learns the brother's necklace was a prized family heirloom he says, "I always knew you two were faggots." He uses the word "faggot" at least three times in the movie. No thanks.
There's a scene with Statham's character and his girlfriend where they have sex in public in the middle of a crowd in order to keep his adenaline up. Except that it starts with him forcing himself on her, making the whole thing dangerously close to a rape scene—until, magically, the woman starts to want it and so then they're going at it consentually. Except this isn't how consent works and people knew this even in 2006. The problem is that this movie was made for the "men's rights" bro types and all of these moments in the film are utterly disgusting.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ उनासी —
[posted 12:39 pm]
