No movie night for me tonight. I'm not in town. I drove up north to Winnipeg yesterday. My brother Clyde and his brood are in town visiting family. My mother lives in Winnipeg and some of my brother's wife Henri's family live here too. C&H have three kids; Spenser, Hunter and Paige.
The trip was pretty much a blur of 20 ounce coffee's and prairie landscapes. I don't find the drive across the barren midwest of much interest anymore, and it's less interesting in the winter. I needed the coffee so I could have a reason to stop pretty often to pee and it helps stay awake. I never sleep well when I travel.
Crossing the border is pretty easy yet. No passports are needed, next year they say. I'll need to get a passport pretty soon. I thought about going to get one while I am here but all the gov offices are closed for Good Friday. Not so good, eh. It also meant most of the stores are closed.
I got into town about 2:30 and drove over to mom's to find them out. A bit later they arrived, just having come from WalMart with a new air purifier. I hung about with my mom and the others on thursday. For supper my brother took us all to The Royal Fork. I had never been there before. It's an all-you-can-eatery and the food was mostly ok. Not as nice as the Old Country Buffet. That's a Minneapolis based grazing chain. The customers were just as fat as in the States. According to this webpage the place is not an all you can eat. It seems they might throw you out if you eat too much.
After hanging out at mom's I took off to stay over at Mike and Susan's house. It's a new one, just barely 12 years old, and I hadn't been there before. It's near Polo Park which is west of downtown. My mother lives to the north on the eastern side of the Red River. Something like that. The nice thing about Winnipeg is that it's just not that big and I can drive from Mike's to my mother's in about 15 minutes. And there was a good tail wind today, and that made the wind chill over a 1000 below. It's cold here on the Prairies. Winnipeg used to have a reputation when I lived there for being the windiest city in Canada. It's still blows pretty good there. You'd think you'd see windmills for power generation.
Friday morning I had coffee and toast and lazied about a while before heading off to see mom and our traditional trip to the Salisbury House. I do like those Cheese Nips and fries with gravy. The cole slaw is pretty good too. Here's a PDF of their menu. I tried calling the house my brother and family were staying at but they had left and were on the way to mom's. We waited and eventually Clyde, Paige and Spenser showed up having stopped for pizza. They tagged along to the Sals and the boys had donuts and Paige had some fries, sadly with no gravy. After more yakkin' with the kinder it was back to Mike and Susan's for supper with Steve and Val. Their three kids were all home, or doing something. After a bit of supper and some more yakkin' Val left to go play soccer. Val and her middle daughter Meagan were both playing on a soccer team mostly made up soccer mom's and coaches. They play indoor soccer in an old curling rink now shut down. There were slabs of ice around three sides of the central observation core and the fourth rink was covered with astroturf and people played soccer on a small field. The game is two 25 minute periods and was fun enough to watch. All of Steve and Val's kids are soccer players and Val is a manager or coach. I can't remember which. Some of the players were much better than others but mostly it was just for fun. Since it was good friday the bar was shut down. Again with the not so good. Now it's 10:30 and we headed back to Mike's for some shut eye and a quick blog.
While I was out of the country the Movie Night boys soldiered on. Here's a report from Spearhauk:
You were fortunate to be in Canada for movie night this week.
First up was a movie Ryan loaned me that Joe made the mistake of saying someone told him was pretty good, so we watched it: OLDBOY, an utterly unpleasant "mind bending revenge tale" (according to the NY Times.) Unfortunately, although the movie practically promises you PAYBACK type of revengin, it doesn't deliver. SPOILERSSome unlikable sap is locked up for 15 years in a cell modeled after Motel 6 by persons unknown for reasons unknown. He spends his time watching TV, eating dumplings, getting gassed with valium for haircuts and hypnotism, and training for the promised but little delivered revengin. The central revenge scenario is actually all about the revenge by the guy who locked him up.
Turns out your life is essentially set by what you do in high school, hypnotism giveth and taketh away, and incest is fine as long as no one knows or no one remembers.
Seems our prisoner spied on our warden in high school and saw him fucking his sister, so he told everyone in school. This freaks out sister who has hysterical pregnancy, so brother kills her thinking she really is pregnant by him, and then seeks elaborate revenge on tongue wagger by imprisoning him at that unique Korean institution Revenge Prisons Are Us (an apparently booming enterprise) and hypnotizing this sap and his daughter so that they end up unknowingly fucking each other when he's released (hence the revengin). For the first half the movie taunts us with expectation for a huge revengin when our guy gets out, but "the twist" is who's revengin whom. Our guy makes the Big Mistake when he could kill the warden and doesn't because he wants to know Why he was locked away. Moral - don't give a shit about psychopath's motivations. Just kill 'em and get your revenge. I guess that's the other moral, along with the incest is alright in secret moral.
At times well directed, with elaborate CGI scene changes, and many disorienting twists that keeps you guessing about the film's direction, the editing was too often limp and the film way too long. The few traditional revengin scenes were poorly handled and not convincing, like the one when our guy goes through a hallway of thugs with only a hammer. Just not convincing. The main problem is just everyone in the film are miserable unlikeable people (even the innocent daughter).
The happy ending is our guy is hypnotised to forget he was hypnotised into fucking his daughter.
My favorite scene was the guy's daughter's hallucinatory flashback where she's on the subway with a giant ant sitting at the other end of the car. It was a metaphor for loneliness and how this can lead to being fucked by your father or something, but way out of place in the film.
I can't believe I forgot to mention all the torture. Must have been tramatic amnesia.
To wash the taste of this really foul movie out of our mouths, we turned to the 50 Movie Sci-Fi box and found only lies. The box said we were going to watch "King of Kong Island", but the movie was actually called "Kong Island", except there was no Kong and no island. Basically there was some nut job implanting mind control devices in gorillas in some jungle somewhere, to rule the world somehow (tho it was clear that even mind-controlled apes weren't the best choice for getting things done). There was also a sacred monkey jungle girl who had some nebulous relationship with the apes, who was topless but had amazing hair that virtually always covered her breasts. This was wrapped around by another revengin plot with some other guy who just failed to simply kill when the killing was good. We all agreed, however, that this movie, while technically poorer in absolutely everyway to Oldboy, was more enjoyable. (We're talking a thimble full of enjoyment here.)
Back to Garth: I did see that last movie. I have that 50 movie pack too. I haven't seen Oldboy but they were raving about it at Ain't It Cool News. I figured I wouldn't care much for it. I don't care for this new trend of torture films. Things like Saw and such. This doesn't sound any better. A little torture goes along way, a lot is of no interest to me.
