Several years ago I was appalled when I kept hearing what seemed like to me, lighthearted reviews of a new film. There was even talk of it being a musical, which I simply could not believe. How, I wondered, could you make a musical about war starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor?
The movie in question was, of course, 2001’s Moulin Rouge!, a far cry from the musical I had imagined depicting the atrocities committed by the notorious Cambodian Communist Party led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge.
Really, how could you even make that kind of a mistake? Even given that I’m a semi Broadway geek, at that? I chalk it up to a life more or less in the news business. As a former reporter and college political science major, it’s just in my nature to keep up with current events, even when I’m not particularly keeping up with current events. This happens frequently during Big News Stories. After a solid week of tsunami coverage, though something like this is intensely interesting, important, and grave, I still get on overload and take a break from daily NPR, CNN, and Facebook friends’ updates. Consequently I miss other stories that they manage to squeeze in between Snooki and Tan Mom updates.
So recently I began to hear about the new movie, The Avengers. I don’t actually go to the movie theater all that often any more. A month or so ago we ventured out to the art-house cinema here and saw The Artist, the Academy-Award winning silent film. Loved it. Before that — eh. I can’t remember. Probably something Cohen-related.
But the point is when I heard “Avengers,” my mind again went totally elsewhere. Namely, to cat suits and bowler hats. Yes, I was expecting a remake of the 1960s British television series with the awesome clothes. If I could be said to aspire to anything when I was under the age of 10 years old, I probably wished I could be Emma Peel in skin-tight clothing, dangerous-looking boobs, and a gun. When I wasn’t wishing I had my own horse, naturally.
Like when reality finally dawned and I didn’t expect to see Nicole Kidman in the jungles of Cambodia, at some point I realized that this new Avengers movie wasn’t going to be about Mr. Steed and a lady with the awesome rack. No, there was too much yapping on the Internet about it. Oh sure, I do have plenty of geeky friends online, but “avengers” seemed to be a bit too prominent on a bit too many lips. I wasn’t hearing anything like “the new Diana Rigg” for instance.
Then the teen crowd began to get involved and I knew my assessment of the situation was rather, shall we say, off base. Midnight showings? Tickets purchased in advance? Behavior for The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, maybe. Not the revival of an ancient (to them) TV series featuring English eccentricities with a side of science fiction, fantasy and fighting crime.
But hey, it more or less pegs me for who and what I am, when I make these hare-brained assumptions. I know pop culture, but it’s my pop culture. Call me if you need market research on the nerdy preferences of a Southern/midwestern white lady of a certain age. Just keep me out of the jungles of Southeast Asia if at all possible.
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And yes, I totally want Diana Rigg’s boots. As if you didn’t know.
I’ve been, you see, watching The Walking Dead on AMC, a series now in its second season based on the graphic novels by the same name. It was conceived of by Kentuckian Robert Kirkman, who hails from Cynthiana, so zombification-wise, I’m pretty much at Ground Zero.
Since stomping onto the set in the pilot episode, female lead Lori, wife to Our Hero Rick Grimes, has been ubiquitously clad in my go-to shitkicker, the Frye harness boot. It’s even the same color as mine, so my preoccupation is justified (sort of). You go, girl.
I know there’s going to be a lot I have to give up when facing down the undead every day. Fashion just isn’t a priority when the only medical practitioner you’ve got is more familiar with fillies than impaled fibias.
Behold. Or rather, perhaps — “BEHIND!”
If you’re like me and have children, you’ve seen most Disney movies approximately 3,298 times each. In addition, you probably foresee a future when you watch one Pixar offering or another at least another dozen times or so before it’s retired and the kiddoes have moved on to MTV, Horders, slasher flicks or some other horror that passes for popular entertainment.
Which brings us to Monsters Inc., a general favorite and in heavy rotation a few years ago. If you recall the movie, you’ll remember that it’s a huge plot point when the scream factory is contaminated with an artifact of the human world. A sock returns to Monster World with a monster just fresh from a kid’s closet. Immediately there is a shut-down on par with a nuclear core meltdown. Decontamination experts are dropped from the ceiling. It’s a 2319!!
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