This is my last weekend all to myself. Looks as though I'll be gainfully employed soon.
Seems that the past year of my life wasn't entirely wasted - between E2, IRC, and many, many hours frittered away playing a diabolically addictive MMORPG, I've upped my typing wpm from about 20 to almost 60. This is good news, as I have no other discernable marketable skills.
So I got hired - sort of. I still have one final interview at a doctor's office. I went in today for a few hours to get a feel for the place, and it seems just busy enough to keep me from goofing off on the internet and just slow enough to facilitate my re-entry into Real Life ®.
So it is incumbent upon me to spend the next forty-eight hours ministering to the Gods of Mindless Entertainment by raptly absorbing several PPV movies that I missed in their theatrical runs.
This afternoon I watched Sin City, the Robert Rodriguez splatterfest based on the comics by Frank Miller. I don't think I blinked much. And damn, I really missed the party.
This is a film that was created for midnight showings in Dolby Surroundsound, meant for popcorn with extra butter, custom-designed for a date with that awesome Comic Book-Obsessed Geeky Ex-Boyfriend With Whom You Were Really Better Off As Friends But For Whom You Still Have The Occasional Hots. It's cinema that sounds as nasty-cool as it looks, with lots of bone-crunching fights and throaty hookers and whiskey-voiced antiheroes choking on their own blood and teeth. It's as slick and empty and ultraviolent as a psychopath's wet dream.
It's a film that should ideally be followed by a boilermaker chaser at That Dive Bar You Used To Go To Back In The Day Because The Bartender Was Way Sexy. It's pulpy and graphic and gross and sexy and gritty and above all a film meant to be shared with people who, like you, have a bit of a twist in their wiring.
So it wasn't really a good film to watch on PPV alone on a Friday afternoon. But it was fun anyway - a guilty kind of fun, mind you, like getting drunk all by yourself on cheap vodka and self-pity in a dim bedroom while reading letters from your ex.
Not that I'd know that feeling or anything.
I'm sure that, considering the preponderance of Geeky Guys And Girls On E2 With Whom I'd Secretly Enjoy A Brief Yet Meaningful Tryst, Sin City has been lovingly dissected here on our virtual pages. Hopefully by Walter, our reigning king of film. I didn't check, but I trust in our collective geek consciousness that the film has received its due here on our little intarweb outpost.
The sad truth is that I married my Comic Book-Obsessed Geeky Ex-Boyfriend With Whom I Was Really Better Off As Friends But For Whom I Still Have The Occasional Hots. And the sadder truth is that I can't call him up and ask him to go to a film, because when we exploded we fell back to earth with a giant sickening thud from which there can be no recovery at all, ever. And I miss my friend.
Back when we were having lots of contented illicit sex in his grungy old apartment, he had an entire bedroom wall covered with comic books he'd lovingly encased in plastic comic book condoms. He had an armchair artist's eye for color and detail, and a number of the meticulously arranged covers on that wall were from Frank Miller's Sin City cycle. They were stark and arresting and irresistible, like razor blades and dirty girls who wear too much black eyeliner.
I asked him about the stories (tell me a story, Sam, please would you tell me a story?), and I vividly remember a snowy night in a chilly room on top of a tatty afghan. I wasn't cold because I was in his arms. He laughed a languid gravelly antiheroic postcoital laugh. He lit a cigarette and murmured smoky pulp fiction storylines into my ear until I was sleepy and drunk on good sex and dangerous stories, drifting on a bloodwarm tide of illusion and afterglow. The snow outside was falling softly, softly falling, and my soul swooned slowly as I heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of our last end, upon all the living and the dead.
And I fell asleep in that precise state of blissful indolence that descends only after gorging on hours of sex with your best friend, a state that's banked to a delicious slow burn by an unshakeable, untested faith in pulp fiction fairytales, the ones where the dame finally lands the hardboiled guy and they live Slightly Sordidly Ever After.
So this movie was bittersweet, but mostly bitter, and not very sweet at all. Some of it tasted remarkably like tears.
Maybe The Ring 2 will be more fun. And less fraught.
I think I need a job from my vacation.
Well, I'll be damned. I finally checked, and Walter, my man, you did not let me down.