when my wife goes away i sometimes overdose on movies. yesterday was no exception. both my mother and my mother -in-law were having a mother's day get together with various siblings. they don't live in the same town so the only thing we could do was each cover our own respective mothers.
so yesterday morning, mrs. noz set off for central pennsylvania and i hung around here. i saw three films: pieces of april, morlang and bubba ho-tep. they were about as different as 3 films can be.
"pieces" was probably the best of the three. my parents saw it at the sundance film festival the year before last and told me to look out for it. then i forgot about it until i saw the box in the video place. i had a vague sense that i wanted to see it for some reason, but couldn't remember exactly why. so i took it home and loved it. the biggest problem is that mrs. noz would have liked it too. when she is away, i not only try to gorge myself in movies, i also try to see things that she would probably not like. i failed with "april." she would have liked it too. i'm sure because she just told me that her twin sister liked it. mrs. noz always likes whatever her twin likes. (though that doesn't always go the other way around). but although i really should have seen it with her rather than on my own, i highly recommend it for the rest of you.
"morlang" was a film i got from the film movement in december, but i hadn't gotten around to watching it until now. the film movement is a sort of dvd of the month club that produces films directly to dvd that do well in the film festival circuit but don't pick up a distributor. as a member of film movement, the pick the film for you, so you never really know what you're going to get. the films have been a mixed bag. i like some but not others. morlang was solidly mediocre. part of the problem was that the liner notes spoiled the surprise ending. of course i read them before i watched the film and so i wasn't exactly sitting on the edge of my seat the whole time waiting to see what happens next. though technically it was really well done, i just had a hard time caring about it. perhaps it would have been better if i hadn't read the damn box.
"bubba ho-tep" is your average elvis-fighting-mummies flick. it was showing as part of midnight movie series down the street from me. it was a perfect midnight movie, full of camp and vigor. elvis presley, it seems, did not die, but rather got sick of fame and switched places with an impersonater (who died of the drug overdose instead of the real elvis). the film begins with elvis in an east texas nursing home with a black guy claiming to be JFK a few rooms down the hall. like most east texas nursing homes, this one gets nightly visits from a soul sucking mummy. thanks to some hieroglyphic graffiti the mummy leaves in the bathroom stall, the elderly elvis and JFK are able to engage the mummy in a life or death struggle outside the nursing home. i won't spoil the ending by telling you whether evil or good triumphs, but it was a good thing to see in the middle of the night.
