Movies

Pretty active day yesterday. We went to see Babe downtown at the Orpheum in the early afternoon. We were running not LATE LATE but behind, and then we were thwarted by the parking lots being full! Well, the second one we tried someone was leaving as we arrived so we managed to snag a spot. Then we ran down the block to the theater. Well, we got there just in time. We entered as they were starting the pre-movie Mighty Mouse short anyway. I had never seen Babe before (just Pig in the City many years ago). I thought it was pretty good and the emotional element was pretty well-done. I've said "pretty" an awful lot haven't I? Well, then we were downtown and we had the parking so we just walked all over. We went the length down Main St. Then we cut over to the river and walked along to Beale St. Landing. So we finally got to walk to the top of the thing (just when I wanted to last time we were there the guard chased everyone out as it was getting dark). The river was purty. Then we walked up the bluff and down to South of Beale to eat some stuff and drink some stuff. Their reuben fries are damn tasty. So we'd been having a nice leisurely time. All else we had planned for the day was seeing a movie thingie later on at 7. Well we're talking and sitting around and when we decide to look at the clock (Mary Beth had just made some comment that it wasn't yet 5) we see it's already after 6. Whoops. So we have to make it back to the car and then back home and then to Crosstown Arts where the movie was playing. We had time, but just. Indie Memphis was having a screening there of short films from Sundance. We'd only learned of it by chance the night before sitting outside after the Richard Buckner show (it's next to the Hi Tone). There were a bunch of people and we were wondering what was going on so I looked it up and found the thing about the movie shorts the next night! Well, the films for the most part were really good. There was only one I hated (weirdly it was the one I'd seen before online); it was like a music video with a guy lip synching to opera and his grandmother's in the background and it gets wacky with leather dudes and the tape player turns into a cgi robot. Everying else was good and some of it was great. My two favorites were probably The Cut (French Canadian and one scene with a guy getting a haircut from his daughter when he has weekend custody and she gets a phone call to go to a party that she doesn't even seem to want to and it's very sad and well-acted and very economical in everything, I think no music was played, nothing emotion was spoken but it was all there. My other favorite was I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked, a recreation of the video footage of his mom's final day that was accidentally taped over; his mom is a tube of something, he is a door handle, his dad is some kind of jewish thing with a turning handle (it's Israeli), his sister is a little statue of an angel. It ends with the discovery of the taped over footage and there's a second of the mom before it's a taping of "empty spaces" then it rewinds over and over to keep catching that small second of footage that wasn't lost. The next two I liked were the first and last: Afronauts and I'm a Mitzvah. The first was about Zambia's race to beat America to the moon. It was pretty spare and half funny and half not. I liked the pacing and the visuals. The last one had Jean Ralphio of Parks & Rec and it was a comedy (the whole thing kind've ended on a stretch of comedy) but weird. He's in rural Mexico with his dead friend's body mostly in a cardboard box and a delayed flight. There's also a picture of a weiner in it. The Rose McGowan one with the teenage girl in the 50s that gets murdered was good. It was called Dawn. I liked the Russian one that was called Love, Love, Love where some woman is reading her thoughts on love and then there's images, the images were good and I liked the framing. There was also a comedy called Verbatim that was taken from a deposition where a lawyer is getting frustrated with a guy who's claiming not to know what a photocopier is. The rest of the crowd thought it was funnier than I did. I mean, it was funny, but not roll over hilarious. I did enjoy it. Okay, so there it is. I went and talked about ALL of them. We grabbed some Sonic drinks afterwards. Now it is the next day. I did my tabatas. Alright.