Recently Rated Movies #5 (Halloween Weekend Edition, Day 2)

OK, by the time that I got around to seeing Vampire Bats on CBS Sunday night, I had been up since five that morning, and so I knew it was going to be rough going staying awake for the duration of this Lucy Lawless-starrer (a sort of sequel to Locusts, which appeared earlier this year on the same network, and to which I will admit I did not see). Jen wanted to see Craig Ferguson's cameo as "Fisherman #1" (which he has joked about incessantly on his show), and once he appeared (amusing as expected) and was dispatched by the bloodthirsty, titular villains, she was fast asleep. I made it halfway through and then was out for the evening. (At least, I was until four this morning. More on that below.) Judging from the first half, I didn't miss much in the second. (Though there is a rating below, I did not actually vote for it on IMDb. I don't vote for a film unless I have seen the entire thing. The rating below is merely for reference.)

It is now almost 7:30 a.m. and I have to go to work, but I have already seen three films this morning, so I will get to my office without feeling that I am totally missing out on my favorite day. Here are the Day 2 ratings:

Bedlam (1946) (DVD) - 7
The Ghost Breakers (1940) (TCM) - 6
It Came From Outer Space (1953) (TCM) - 7
The Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) (DVD) - 4
The Mad Monster (1942) (DVD) - 3
Vampire Bats (2005) (CBS) (first hour only) - 4.

Recently Rated Movies #4 (Halloween Weekend Edition, Day 1)

This October has probably been the smallest one in the last twenty years for me as far as Halloween is concerned. I usually gear up for Halloween around mid-September and keep the party rolling until well into November. I would usually average around three movies a day in that time, never repeating a movie over the Halloween month, and would ceaselessly haunt every video and music store in town for more additions to my ever-growing collection. My home, already jam-packed with all manner of movie effluvia to begin with, would become even more rife with monstrous action figures and statues, posters hanging from every inch of the walls and ceilings, constantly running horror films, a dry ice fog drifting from room-to-room (just for the hell of it), and party decorations dangling from corner to corner, all in an apartment too small to actually throw a decent Halloween party for more than, oh, say, five or six people. 

For much of the month, the only lighting that I would endure was from candles or from Jack-O'-Lanterns, both real and electric, and I often worked out plans for several costumes each year, finally working it down to the last-minute victors. And I gloried in working for my friends' theatrical company each of the past few years, running the box office for their Halloween productions, helping them create a series of increasingly elaborate Halloween lobby tableau, and getting the chance to not only scare the younger set and their parents, but also bring joy to their faces with our post-show trick or treating.

To say that Halloween and its attendant month of October is my favorite time of year is to put it mildly.

But this year is different in so many ways. I am far removed from my friends and family, but it is a self-imposed exile, so don't feel so for me in any way. For most of the year since I arrived in California, I have been fine with this feeling of remoteness, and have embraced the many changes in my life with open arms and a certain sense of long overdue bravado (if I may say so myself). There are so many new things in my life, and not a whole lot of time to worry or reflect on things right now. My birthday pretty much passed without incident, Thanksgiving has little importance to me except as a day of extreme gluttony (which I can do without), and Christmas will be nothing like it has been the past twenty years either, and I am fine with this. I will miss my family and friends, in some cases, to a severe level, but this really has nothing to do with the holiday (which I pretty much dismiss outright at this point), and simply has to do with the fact that I miss my family and friends. Period.

But, for some reason, Halloween is the most important time of the year for me, even if all of my friends are not on the same page as me. I get wound up for it far more than for any other time of the year (I often do a little wound up over Xmas, too, but this is more of a case of exasperation and checkbook shock than the joy I find in Halloween). My friends, quite adroitly, nicknamed me The Boogieman in high school all those years ago. Hell, they named me The Boogieman (or Boog, or Boogie), since many of them have practically called me nothing else since that time. I fought against the moniker at first, but have settled into embracing it wholeheartedly in the intervening years, and perhaps this is why I have fallen into such deep regard for this darkest but most playful of holidays. Every Boogieman's got to have a home.

So, here are the movies that I have seen since the last report. Another Lewton classic that is so gorgeous and creepy, it almost hurts; and a Rupert Everett-as-Sherlock Holmes case (he and Ian Hart as Watson acquit themselves better than the script does, but it was enjoyable. And it held some mild foot fetishism, which was an interesting touch).

I Walked With A Zombie (1943) (DVD) - 8
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004) (PBS) - 6

And now, the first day of my three-day Halloween Movie Marathon, somewhat truncated by the fact that I will have to work on Halloween day, also the first time that I have done so in nearly twenty years. (Let's hope that nothing too untoward or terrible happens, like when I went to work for the first time in a long time on my birthday a few years back. Hint: my birthday is on the eleventh of September. Yes, that's right...)

The films:

The Leopard Man (1943) (DVD) - 8
The Body Snatcher (1945) (DVD) - 9
Isle of the Dead (1945) (DVD) - 7
Rabid (1977) (DVD) - 6
The Thing (from Another World) (1951) (DVD) - 9
The Ghost Ship (1943) (DVD) - 7
The Legend of Zorro (2005) - 5

Lewton Lascivious Behavior

Though I stated in an earlier post ("Recently Rated Movies #3") that I had been more than patient for most of this year in regards to the just-released Val Lewton Horror Collection and the still impending King Kong set, the real truth is that I have been less than patient about the situation for over the better part of the last decade, which would mean since I first read about the future of DVD's back around 1995. These releases would have been and were my first choices to appear on DVD, and I have reacted with supreme frustration over this time over the rumors and false starts that have afflicted me ever since.

I love the Lewton films of the 40's on an equal par with the initial spate of Universal classics in the 30's, and my weakness for these films is only superseded by the adoration with which I approach King Kong, the movie that I more than gladly offer up as my favorite film of all time. While possession of the Lewton and Cooper/Schoedsack libraries have been possible on VHS (and I have always had copies of them all except for The Ghost Ship, which I only saw for the first time and taped off of Turner late last year), it was ceaselessly vexing not to have gorgeous DVD prints in my collection while thousands of lesser films flooded the market.

The torture became unbearable once I got on the internet on a regular basis and the movie and video sites would regale me endlessly with hints and rumors of special editions, box sets, occasional "official" release dates and, worst of all, proposed cover art. Digital Bits has had the supposed Kong cover art on their site, without an official date, for the last couple of years it seems, dangling there carrot-like in the most taunting fashion. Due to my devotion to the cause, I would never fail to click on it only to have first DVD Planet and then Amazon.com tell me the sad ending to the tale. Though I have nothing against their wonderful site, Amazon is always the worst site to find out that something you crave is not coming out soon because of the January 2010 release date that is always plastered up there for something without a definitely set date. (The NewsRadio set drove me crazy last year after it was initially announced, then pulled, and then I stuck with that ambiguous 2010 date until it actually came out for good. Now if only DVD release dates could get married...)

Around the time that I first read about DVD's, I was definitely considering the jump over to LaserDisc. The chief reason for this switch in format? King Kong. Specifically, the Criterion Collection King Kong set that stared me down every time that I walked into the video store, screaming at me and beating its chest in a desperate bid to get me to purchase it, whether or not I owned a LD player. Without resorting to throwing his monstrously sized poop at me, the mighty Kong nearly convinced me to do it. I was saving up money for the nearly $100 disc and the even more expensive player, and it seemed than within a couple months I would do the deed and make the change for good. But then I began to read in the various video magazines of the coming future of video. I read about DVD, and I could sense that I needed to wait for this phenomenon to hit the ground.

So, I waited. And the instant DVD players hit the stores, I was in the market. But no Kong and Lewton. And I began rebuilding my collection of classic horror and sci-fi in the new DVD format, but there was still no Kong and Lewton. I read, in the waning days of LaserDisc popularity, of the release of the Val Lewton Horror Collection, and I held out hope that a similar thing would come out on DVD, and that this rush of RKO material would bring out the beast in a Kong release, but there was still no Kong and Lewton. The 65th and 70th anniversaries of Kong rushed by with hints of a Kong release, as did the 60th of Cat People, but there was still no Kong and Lewton. What would it take to get these out on disc?

Apparently, Peter Jackson.

I don't know the true how's-and-why's of Kong's delayed release. I don't really care to know. And I have no idea whether Peter Jackson's remake will climb or fall artistically, though I have great, great, great hope that he can pull it off (the early trailer was a terrific show of confidence, though the score problems scare me a bit and make me think there are even more problems with the production). I'm not even sure that Kong coming out has anything at all to do with the Val Lewton release, and that it is only the complete coincidence of their shared studio of RKO that bonds these different collections in my head.

I don't care. All that I know is that the Val Lewton Horror Collection is here and in my nervy little hands, and that Kong is on the way. I have watched gorgeous prints of Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie and The Seventh Victim in the last few days, and this weekend I am going to hole up with the other 6 movies for Halloween. (The films are relatively short, just over an hour in length each, so holing up with take a total of just over seven hours, so I will see daylight at some point in the weekend.) I have also watched a good, not great, documentary called Shadows in the Dark: The Legacy of Val Lewton, which goes into fairly decent detail about the Val Lewton's life and RKO years.

A small disappointment for me is that only 7 of the 9 films have commentaries on them, for I feel that Isle of the Dead is interesting enough for simply Karloff's unique performance in it to merit some sort of breakdown of the film, let alone for the distinct story itself, and that The Ghost Ship certainly warrants a commentary track, given the darkness of the subject matter and mainly for the fact that the film was suppressed in the vaults for 50 years due to a series of legal battles owing to copyright problems (a battle that is brought up in the documentary, but is not enough for me).

The other disappointment is the lack of the other two films that Lewton produced for RKO: Mademoiselle Fifi (with Cat People's appropriately kittenish Simone Simon) and Youth Runs Wild. Though they do not fit the horror definition of the collection, and while I have not seen these movies and cannot attest to their quality or worthiness, I still wish they could have given us a complete RKO Lewton collection. Perhaps they could have included them in as Easter Eggs (and perhaps they did and I have not located them yet).

All told, so far it is an awesome set as is, though I am hoping for even more from the upcoming Kong set in this, the Year of the Missing RKO.

J.C. and the Second Coming of "The Fog", Pt. 2

I don't really have much in the way of rules regarding remakes. Some people despise them outright; some people are ambivalent when confronted with them; some people love them. It is my belief that most people have no idea whether or not the rehashed warmed-over film that they are watching was ever another movie in the first place. (I also believe, and I have seen a goodly amount of evidence to support this, that a large segment of the moviegoers in any theatre have no concept at all of what movie they are even going to see, even up to mere minutes before their ticket is bought. Why would they know whether or not a movie was a remake?)

I have a proposal about remakes that I wish were a rule, or at the very least something that would be tried more often since The Powers That Be insist on churning them out of the Drawing-A-Blank Factory: remaking not film classics or those of the established filmic canon (Psycho), nor beloved (or feared) cult classics (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), nor remaking classic stories over again every generation (The Three Musketeers), but remaking instead films of unfulfilled potential or sub-standard quality. Instead of trying to reconfigure The Red Shoes from the ballet stage into the modern dance/pop world and plugging a Britney or Kelly-type into it, remake instead a film which never quite reached its potential. Remake instead a film which might have been a terrific movie if only it had one or two more elements to put it over the top. Perhaps the film had a swell script but the wrong actors; maybe it had the right actors but a script that wasn't zingy enough to sell it to the audience; perhaps the budget was too small or the director too narrow-sighted to bring the vision in the script to life; or perhaps the script would have worked better in this location instead of that one or in a different time period.

Of course, no one wants to take a huge bomb and take the chance of recreating the fizzle. But there are plenty of films of middling nature that did relatively well at the box office for one reason or another that I would sooner have Hollywood take another crack at than ruin the memory of a great and established classic. Maybe, just maybe, there is a near-gem of a film sitting in Hollywood's past that with a little bit of elbow grease and slight revision can make it in today's market. Call it the Take 2 Scenario.

A perfect example for this experiment would have been The Fog.

As I related in Part 1, John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) is one of those near-miss films. I alternately like and am disappointed by it. It comes on like thunder but then the lightning never hits you, and you finish the film wondering about the rainstorm that just missed your drought-ravaged field. I want to love this movie like I love Carpenter's Halloween or The Thing or Big Trouble in Little China, but it is just missing that certain something. Certainly this movie could live anew were it to be remade with a slightly larger budget and a minorly appended script that made use of the extra breathing room and allowed the movie to flesh out just enough to make the film a great ghost movie?

Well... they remade it...and I wish that I could tell you the experiment was a success and that the Monster is Alive! It's Alive!

But I can't...

It's not just that the film is bad per se: there are already a dozen horror films released to theatres this year that are of equal or lesser value. The Fog has the usual decent-to-great production values with which most of the crop of generic PG-13 teen-wrangling "scary movies" seem to be studio-blessed these days. So, it looks good. This version might have that tad of an extra budget that Carpenter needed to get the little engine over the "classic" hill: while the original cost around $1 million, this new one ran up the also rather generic cost these days of $18 million. How that translates with 25 years of inflation I'm not sure, but it still should come out with the new Fog quite ahead in terms of budget.

No, the main problem is that they took an initially underwhelming and disappointing story and then it just got even more underwhelming, though not necessarily more disappointing since one could not go into this venture expecting that much. Part of this could be due to the competent but bland touch of director Rupert Wainwright, who, despite having previous horror film experience on his resume (Stigmata), has yet to make one that is either good or that doesn't reek of his MTV past. (The man directed the M.C. Hammer movie, which may prove to be his closest venture towards creating a horror classic.) Just because you have been given the opportunity to direct multiple horror pictures doesn't mean that you are good at it. Most likely, it means that you are a studio drone who is just barely adequate enough at your job that a studio will throw you another picture every year or so. Much of the blame could be placed on Carpenter and Debra Hill's original evocative but thin story. I personally think it's a terrific set-up for a horror picture, but the script was lacking a final punch the first time they aired it out and that it needed just the smallest revisions in plot to blow it out. And the finale in this version doesn't really work, and while there are revisions to the plot, they seem to have built up the Tom Welling and Maggie Grace characters, simultaneously taking away from the DJ character played by Selma Blair. This, of course, means that the blah actors take center stage while the fun one is stuck in quicksand.

Outside of Blair, who always brings something fresh and gonzo to even the smallest of roles (and that pretty much describes the bulk of the roles in which she gets stuck), there is not much to recommend in the acting department. Tom Welling is no Superman on the big screen, so perhaps there was some wisdom in the decision to go with another actor in that upcoming project (though the jury will be out on that decision until next year). Maggie Grace goes from her ensemble comfort on "Lost, where she rarely has to break out of her pretty little pout, to the lead role here of Elizabeth (previously portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis) and to say that she stretches in the role would impart the mistaken image of her actually being Mr. Fantastic, because I believe that is the only way that she could ever stretch in any role. There is a blankness to her mall-rat features that is both infuriating and strangely compelling, but only in ways that take you out of thinking about the movie in which you are seeing her "act." There is a small amount more to this character than mere ingenue, and she blows it.

My main problem with the film is the character of the fog itself (and it is a character). I'm fairly certain that Carpenter created most of his fog onset (along with resorting to aerial photography and presumably, stock footage), not overwhelmingly relying on the rather simplistic approach (at least, nowadays) of creating it with computers. Perhaps they thought this would help The Fog come more alive, like the haunted entity that it is meant to represent, but like the majority of computer-generated characters, while there are some nice moments, the overall effect is one of cheesiness. Though not half as cheesy as, say, the Living Flood in The Mummy Returns, or any effect in any Stephen Sommers film for that matter. (It is sad to say that his most believable creations were in Deep Rising.)

John Carpenter, who holds a producer's credit (along with a shared one with the late Ms. Hill for the story) should have directed this movie in its second incarnation. Instead of resting on his laurels as a Master of Horror (and there are people out there who regard the initial version of The Fog a masterpiece, but then again, I know someone who loves Can't Stop the Music, and in a completely unironic fashion to boot. So there's no accounting for taste or wisdom), it would have been nice to see him take another crack at his script with the added budget and more advanced effects, sort of like Hitchcock when he took another crack at his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. Whether it is an artistic up-or-downturn is not the point. It just would have been a more interesting thing to view than this: just another middling "horror" effort to add to the pile of recently failed theatrical flotsam.

Stay out of The Fog...

Recently Rated Movies #3

I haven't gotten to the theatres since last weekend, but on Friday I thankfully received my set of The Val Lewton Horror Collection, the glories of which I will most likely pontificate on later this week. I have been waiting for this time of the year as patiently as I can, given that both the Val Lewton and King Kong sets, both overly due since the advent of DVD's, were to come out and fill sorely empty gaps in my collection. (Of course, I did have VHS copies of all of these films. But once you go DVD, it drives you mad knowing something that you love so dearly is not in the predominant format of the time.)

In the meantime, Serenity proved to be slightly more enjoyable the second time around (even though my rating for it stayed the same); The Fog proved to be made by people more dense than the titular atmospheric condition; and a handful of French and Japanese "classics" allowed me to cleanse the pallet for my week of Lewton. (This week, I also have an ongoing date with the Veronica Mars Season 1 set, that began last night and will continue until I catch the girlfriend up on all of the intrigue in snooty, dirty and underhanded Neptune, California.)

À bout de soufflé [Breathless] (1960) (DVD) - 9
Kwaidan (1964) (Criterion DVD) - 9
Bande à part [Band of Outsiders] (1964) (Criterion DVD) - 9
The Fog (2005) - 4
Serenity (2005) - 8
Cat People (1942) (DVD) - 9
Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005) - 7
The Seventh Victim (1943) (DVD) - 8

Expense, Schmexpense...

The bag-girl at the grocery store was wrong. She wanted her $10 back after she saw the new version of John Carpenter's 1980 atmos-fest The Fog. I felt that, actually, only about $8 back would be warranted in the case of my visit to the film. Of course, I went to a matinee and it only cost me $8. Matinees, teenagers, matinees... I know it's only cool to go to movies at night with your friends, but you can save yourself two whole dollars. Put it towards your condom fund and stop having babies...

Truly, I do not require any of that $8 back. I have three mottos that I live my movie-going existence by: the first is "I Will See Any Movie Once" and the second is "Any Movie, At Any Time." (I will tell you of the third motto at another time.) The second motto ensures that any time a friend or relative asks if I want to see a film, and I not near death or have other plans already, I will absolutely go to that movie, no matter what it is; the first motto is basically a check to make sure that I don't weasel out of a film belonging to a genre of which I am not especially enamored. This explains how I keep ending up at Sandra Bullock movies.

This also means that I never whine about the expense of going to the movies. People act with shock over the rise in ticket prices, meanwhile the price of gas and every other freaking thing in the world goes up in price at the same pace, if not more. Sure, like anyone, I wish movies were less expensive, but that is just not going to happen anytime...ever. So, I lie to myself, pretending that my $8 or $10 buys me two hours in a dark room, where I can relax and shut out the outside world (however little I actually let that happen), letting my mind drift, bounce and crash through whatever fantasy path that I have chosen for that afternoon or evening. You are really renting an empty chair for 4-to-5 dollars an hour, and as a bonus, you get to watch a movie.

Of course, people then whine about the expense of the food and drinks at a movie, and yes, they are exorbitantly priced in general, but no one is forcing you to eat or drink at a movie. While I do often do have a beverage at a film, I rarely get anything to eat. First off, the myth that movie popcorn is some sort of sacred treasure is just that: a myth. Ever see the counter attendant pour a large garbage bag of pre-popped popcorn into the bin? You rarely get freshly popped corn at a theatre anymore. (I am not speaking of revival houses where they revere such experiences). Don't even get me started on the "butter-flavored" topping. The only thing in the world that tastes like butter is butter. So, unless you pull out a stick and start melting it in front of me (as they would at the late, lamented Capri Cinema back in Anchorage), I don't want anything to do with it. I don't want anything on my popcorn that oozes sludge-like from a pump sitting on the counter.

I understand that movies, in the minds of most people, are supposed to be an experience, and often that experience includes a silo-sized tub of sludge-corn, a mega-mega-mega-volume soda and an encyclopedia-sized box of chocolate tooth-gluers. And sometimes I partake of that exact same experience, too. But you don't need to do that every single time that you go to the theatre. Without even being cheap about it, you can go to a film and just see the film. Enjoy or hate the movie on its own terms, and don't worry about the expense of the experience. The experience is what you make of it, and so is the expense. Don't let the expense cloud your judgement of a film. The expense is what it is: everything is expensive these days. I'm not making an excuse for the theatre chains: they probably do charge too much for films and food and drink, but they are in a business and the consumables are where the theatres make their profits. If people didn't want to come partake of their product, they would be out of business. Proceed however you wish...

As for myself, going to movies is one of my avocations, and like any hobby, there is a certain expense involved in supplies. And I have accepted the cost of those supplies. If I mean to see movies at a theatre, then that is the price that I have to pay. If I am low on bucks that night, I don't go. I make a judgement call. Of course, the "Any Movie, At Any Time" motto often causes me to go broke momentarily, but not since I left Anchorage for warmer climes and now have a decided lack of local friends to tempt me with choices.

This post was supposed to be about my review of The Fog, but instead of writing about it, I seem to have gotten lost in it...

Recently Rated Movies #2

Just a couple of films to add today. My theatre plans fell through earlier in this week, so Good Night and Good Luck will have to wait until later (it was not playing in our area yet on Tuesday, much to our dismay). A second viewing of Serenity is the target for us tonight, and I plan on seeing the new version of The Fog in the theatre tomorrow.

If anyone is interested in the full breadth of my vote history on IMDB, they have recently added a new feature that allows public viewing (as long as the viewer is a registered user of the site) of a friend's movie ratings. The link is now listed on my Link section on the side of this page, and I will also list it here for those interested:

http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=5871005

And now, with only a smidgen of ado, a couple of new ratings. Both films were DVDs that I purchased today and have watched already (it is my Saturday off), and one of them is most timely indeed, given that I just mentioned the new version of it above. I felt it was time to catch back up with the underwhelming but atmospheric original, along with the still genuinely creepy 1978 remake of one of my favorite films of all time, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I don't normally go outside of my normal Amazon/Best Buy/Costco channels for purchasing, but there was a promotional candy display in the Halloween section at the local grocery with a batch of horror films, all for $9.99, and these two caught my eye. I did, however, have to deal with the bag-girl's teenybopper assessment of the new version of The Fog, which she had seen the night before and hated. "It was, like, so boring, andifeellikeiwastedtendollars! I guess it had some scary stuff, though..." (This is exactly what she said and how she said it.) I will see for myself...

The Fog (1980) - 6

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - 8

Recently Rated Movies #1

Someday, I will discuss my ratings system to a greater degree. For the moment, let me state that I rate on a scale from 1 to 9, not so much to piss on the IMDb 10-ratings system, but actually to piss on the 4 or 5 star systems so prevalent in review culture instead, which make no sense to my head whatsoever. Somehow, mathematically, the 9-system does make sense to me.

Every few days on this site, I am planning to post a list of the latest films that I have seen either in theatres, on TV or video, and the subsequent ratings that I have given them. (This is mainly to give me a quick-hit item to throw up on the blog on days when I don't have the time to devote to a larger post.)

And so, without further delays, the first of those lists:

Tongan Ninja (2002, DVD) - 5
A History of Violence (2005) - 8
Saw (2004, DVD) - 6
Chikyu Boeigun [The Mysterians] (1957, DVD) - 6
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) - 8

A Declaration of IMDbendence

Try as I might, I couldn't fight it. 

I struggled mightily against the awesome pull of IMDb and its 46 quadrillion movie entries. (That's where I lost count in doing research last night. I went "46 quadrillion and...," then Conan made his hissing-at-the-cameraman noise and I lost count. Oh, well... there's always tomorrow night...) Was it even possible that I, severely movie-addicted since I was a mere child, could even begin to resist the megaforce that is IMDb? (Though the reverse maxim of "Words, not deeds" proves to be more true in their case.) I have been movie-database mad for much of my life, with a library full of Who's Who books and Encyclopedias of Film, Actors, Science-Fiction, Westerns, etc., etc., etc., what have you. And while it may not be the end-all be-all of movie websites, it has proven, after extensive testing by the Cinema 4 laboratories, to be the closest that I can find right now.

How slowly, how surely I was sucked into its vortex. Little did I know, as I perhaps looked up a couple of movies that I had just seen to see just who played that hot waitress in that throwaway scene 40 minutes into the picture, what lay lurking online, hungrily awaiting me behind its brightly glowing interface. How could I have possibly foreseen the trap laying in wait for me as I went back to the site again and again, reveling in my newfound treasure trove of information, when after a few dozen more lookups, I took it upon myself to become a registered user. This was merely to take part in the polls, but then it proved providential when I decided to write a handful of reviews for some sorely neglected titles. And then began the voting of a couple thousand of movies off and on for about a month, until the day that I asked, "What's this? They have a built-in filing system for personal video collections?" It was the beginning of the end...

It's a year later, and after entering over 5,000 titles, meticulously categorizing them into sections that will only make sense to the deranged, and injecting laboriously detailed notes into each one, I am now a full-on IMDB junkie. I know that it is not perfect, and there are many features that I would alter or excise, and others that I would add, but that is a discussion for another time. For the moment, it is most important that I have admitted that I have a problem. Still, beats heroin as a monkey on your back...

Such is the same with this blog. It seems that I am yet again trapped in another whirlpool built of endless keyboard clattering and very little sleep (though they are two items that I am completely used to already). As for blogs: I knew about them, resisted them, read a few, resisted them, read a couple of them that intrigued me, begrudgingly resisted them, read many that made me shake my head in disbelief that anyone could be that idiotic from day to day, happily resisted them, then a number of friends began some...

Blogger begin to speak to me like the shady letter "O" salesman off of Sesame Street: "Psssst... Hey, Bud! C'mere! Why not get a membership, and then you can comment on your friend's blogs, and, OH! By the way...in case you might be interested... you can start, you know, your own... blog... if you want to... it won't even cost you a nickel..."

"A nickel?!!"

"Rigggghhhhttttt...!"

So I bought the "O" and took it home that night...

And here I am.