Well, it was a day. I think I waited an hour too long to call the guy, and after 1100 he disappeared for the rest of the day. And then my phone screen got canceled for some reason, and they wanted to reschedule it for Tuesday at 1400, the same time I'm in another interview in Sunnyvale, so now it's on Wednesday...
Not bad conflicts to have, honestly. This is all far more activity than I had in the five months before we left for Mexico, so things are picking up. Unfortunately I may need to take the first thing available, so I may miss an opportunity...I don't know.
So I think we're going to see Queen of the Damned, and one or two people have confirmed Salon's review, so it should at least be laughable, with friends.
Story time. Sit down and put a cork in it.
Back at Skidmore they have a thing called Totally Free Movies, where they get second-run movies (maybe a month after they hit theaters) and show them in the largest auditorium on Saturday nights. This was part of the ongoing desperate effort by Student Affairs to make things happen on weekends that conceivably might not involve drinking or drugs. This worked out all right, except when the movies sucked, and even then they might be a nice two-hour diversion from hanging out by myself or with friends.
So it came to pass that Con Air came to Skidmore. I went partly out of boredom, but also because I knew that Emily, this girl from down the hall in the dorm that I'd been flirting with for a bit and liked a lot, would be there. I got there with a couple friends and said hello, and she asked if I wanted to sit next to her--well, we ended up dating for a few months, but those are other stories. Back to the movie.
I laughed, a lot. It was the funniest movie I'd seen in quite some time. But it's a remarkably violent movie, with people biting it left and right in a variety of unpleasant ways. It's shot deadpan as an action movie, and there aren't even that many jokes in the dialogue; it's funny in a lot of the same ways Invader Zim is funny, just by the sheer absurdity of what's happening, and the fact that the characters don't talk much about it. Meanwhile the body count rises, but for Pete's sake, it's John Cusack! How mean and vindictive could it possibly be?
I don't feel bad about laughing, because I think it's an honestly funny movie, and on various levels was meant to be that way. It makes me think, though, because I'm not sure my parents would enjoy it in the same way, if at all. How much more are the younger generations desensitized to violence in media? To what degree do we (and maybe more useful a measure, how many of us do at all) have a mental barrier separating "violence in entertainment" from "violence in reality"?