Oh the Horror!

Good evening and welcome to my blog, and my views on cinema.  Today was a great day as it was my payday at work.  I had set aside $60.00 from this particular paycheck to be able to purchase two Weekend Pass tickets for Warren and I for the upcoming Horror Hound Weekend in Indianapolis, IN.  At the end of March, the 27th thru 29th, we will be enjoying our weekend at the Marriott in Indianapolis and the horror convention.

While there, we will be meeting the stars of many horror films, past and present.  I will be getting a few autographs and taking some pictures, as well as purchasing some items including DVDs and t-shirts.  We will have a great time, away from home and work, and spending quality time with one another and enjoying each others company.  I have been very excited to take this trip, as my birthday happens to fall on Saturday the 28th, and this is my birthday present to myself.  Maybe Warren will buy me something special that weekend – what do you say pal??? ☺  Anyway, one of my favorite actors growing up, Corey Haim, will be signing autographs at the convention and I’m planning on having a “Lost Boys” poster signed by Corey.  I’m also hoping for a picture with him.  Here are four of the movie stars that I’m hoping to pick up an autograph from.

We are less than two months away from our road trip to Indy!  This trip should be no problem for Warren and I as last year we drove to Oklahoma to attend a five concert called “Rocklahoma”.  This was about a 15-hour drive, where Indianapolis should be a few hours less.  What a great time that was in Oklahoma last year – great music, an enjoyable ride (although long), and good company with my partner Warren.  I would actually love to go again this year, but we will have to see what I can afford and where else we may decide to go.  We both love to travel, and usually take a week long trip each year.  This year we have been thinking about either Provincetown, San Francisco, or Key West/Fort Lauderdale.  They all sound good to me!  At least we would be warm wherever we choose.

Now on to my DVD pick of the week, “Lakeview Terrace”.  We have not yet seen this film, but it looks like a great thriller, and Warren and I both love these types of movies.  Samuel L. Jackson is a wonderful actor, so this movie should be very good.

Here’s a look at the plot of this movie…

LAKEVIEW TERRACE: A quick perusal of any of LAKEVIEW TERRACE’s promotional materials–its nervy trailer, its foreboding (and painterly) dawn-hued poster featuring Samuel L. Jackson looking less-than-neighborly in his squad car–not only reveals it as a thriller, but offers up aesthetic evocations of several popular home-invasion suspensers made in the early 1990s. Like UNLAWFUL ENTRY and PACIFIC HEIGHTS, LAKEVIEW TERRACE takes place in upper-middle-class Californian suburbia. The film’s ubiquitous purple sky and poolside lighting create an air of domestic bourgeois comfort just waiting to be upended by deadly social unease. In this mode, the surprises start when the film opens with intimate household scenes not of the film’s purported heroes, an interracial couple who’s about to move next-door, but of its not-entirely-apparent villain–a curiously middle-aged beat cop (Jackson) who raises a few eyebrows when he close-mindedly bullies his children, but seems sad and sympathetic. The cop, a black man named Abel Turner, watches blankly from his home when the first new neighbor he sees is an African-American wife (Kerry Washington)–and then reacts with quiet shock and disgust when he realizes that the white mover is actually her husband, Chris (Patrick Wilson). The invasion in this home-invasion thriller is, ironically, the one perceived by its psychologically damaged bad guy. Abel, offended and ostensibly law-immune, immediately begins jabbing Chris with a toxic passive-aggression that quickly becomes impossible to ignore. LAKEVIEW TERRACE adheres to a satisfying thriller construct. It’s also a little interested in exploiting the archetypes of squirm-inducing domestic threat–all the nasty scenarios viewers recognize from those earlier movies–to consider several facets of American racism: its inevitability in familial and casual issues and its existence in liberal white guilt as much as its poisonous mixture with mental illness.

It sounds like an interesting movie, right?  Well, I will probably pick up a copy of the DVD this weekend while we are in Minneapolis on Saturday, and we can watch it when we are at home on Sunday.

That’s about all from here today.  It’s getting a bit warmer, and also getting lighter earlier in the day…so we know that spring is getting closer.  I can’t wait until spring hits, and then summer – I’m so looking forward to the nice warm weather especially with this cold winter we have had here.  The snow can melt away anytime to!  As you can tell, I’m not a “winter” person.

Have a great night and drop me a line and let me know what you are up to and what movies you have been watching.  Until we meet again….enjoy!

Steve