Too Much To Dream

Movie nite

I just happened to catch The Faculty on SciFi tonight. Oh, okay, I taped it. Sue me, Elijah Wood starred, and I'm going through a cute young thing midlife crisis, though I don't see what's so "critical" about it. Anyhoo, the thing was billed as far as I have always known as a rather lame ripoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Leave it to movie people to totally ignore the fact that the film is actually a shoutout to Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.

Anyway, it wasn't a bad waste of time, though the concept the filmmakers had of what high school is -- or was, in 1998 -- supposed to be like was hilarious. Were they all home schooled -- or more likely, did all the screenwriters graduate from Beverly Hills High? I also had somehow missed the fact that John Stewart was in it, and got to come to a bad non-end -- you'd have to see the film to know what I was talking about. And the ending was a little too pat, leaving one wondering, in the way these films do. Worth renting out as part of a two-for-one bargain.

In between preparing dinner and setting up the vcr I caught bits of the previous offering, Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. I had thought about taping it too, but the bits I saw made me rather glad I didn't bother; it didn't look like one of Polanski's better efforts. Perhaps I should watch the whole thing. Maybe one day if I have nothing better to do, but I have already suffered through a Bad Polanski Film, which I actually paid to see (Bitter Moon), so I don't see myself seeking it out, even for the novel sight of Johnny Depp made up to be a graying-haired, bespectacled scholar.

I forgot to add: the version of The Faculty that Scifi chose to show was the cleaned-up, one might say Tipper-Goreized, version of the film. That struck me as just so wrong; when you know that a character said "Fuck you," not "Forget you," that throws the whole viewing experience off-kilter. For chrissake, the thing was on at 9:30pm EST, when all impressionable young things are ideally supposed to be in bed dreaming of Spongebob Squarepants, or whatever. Family Hour is over at nine pm, or it is supposed to be. A minor point, maybe, but it bugged me.