Having lived in Austin and seen movies at the original handful of Drafthouse theaters for decades now, every time the brand has expanded, quality has dropped. I’m not expecting this change to be any different.

Yes! I work for a non-profit, providing a highly in-demand service to my community, for free or at a reduced cost. Nobody is getting rich doing what we do, but we are actively enriching and supporting our community. It is also a fantastic foot in the door for other forms of cooperation, community support, and mutual aid.

Not all non-profits are on the level, but no company with a profit motive will ever provide the kind of environment that a good non-profit can.

I am going to be living in my car starting in just a few days, and it is terrifying imagining all the ways that a single encounter with the police could destroy what’s left of my life. America, and my state in particular, is incredibly hostile to its own people, in such a staggering array of different ways that it can be hard to fully appreciate at times. We live in a bad country, run by bad people.

There’s a whole lot of different takes here already, so I’m just going to plug this very excellent book: Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life and bounce.

This dude is genuinely a nightmare. He’s an outspoken evangelical jesus freak who is explicitly using his position to maintain a deeply unjust water monopoly for his home-town farming community. Every part of his biography reads like he was cooked up in a Reagan-era laboratory somewhere to be the ultimate Republican. In the four years he’s been in his position he’s already completely dropped any pretense of working for equitable water rights. He’s a fully committed weapon for a specific, tiny, hateful little community full of water-thieving land-barons who derive those very same water rights from treaties that they reneged on with the local Native Americans. I hope he stubs his toe on every chair and table he ever passes, for the rest of his natural life.

Please do not solicit medical advice from the internet. If you are concerned, go to a minute-clinic or other doc-in-a-box. It’s much cheaper than the ER, and they’ll tell you if there’s anything to worry about.

He was an off-duty pilot catching a ride in the jump seat behind the pilots in the cabin, which is completely normal. The guy being a fucking lunatic is where things went wrong.

I dig RLM, and I like seeing what they thought of movies I’ve already watched, so I’ll definitely give that one a view once I track down the next few in the series.

Ha! I’m glad you appreciated it :-)

I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.

Thanks, I’ll be posting them here, as well as to my Letterboxd and a few other forums. If you haven’t read them already, you can find my reviews of the other Halloween movies (and others) here.

Unironically the best entry in the series. I play 5 occasionally, but 3 all the time.

I’m watching them all before the 31st. I am prepared for the high-water mark to be behind me at this point. I remember enjoying H20, but I saw it so long ago that that impression means nothing. I’ve heard good things about the most recent reboot trilogy, but I’ll have to make it through Rob Zombie-land before I get there.

The difference is that ‘color-blind’ liberals who co-opt the language and appearance of the civil rights movement without actually understanding or living the ideals behind it were the target of the joke, it wasn’t supposed to be funny just because it was blackface. I feel that the backlash to that movie is 100% the result of a lack of media literacy. Like, it’s not Citizen Kane, but to accuse Downey Jr. of racism for taking that role is to miss the point so hard it’s hard to imagine that the people who feel that way watched the same movie that I did. You have to be coming from a place of total refusal to engage with the subtext (or really just the text, absolutely nothing about Tropic Thunder is subtle in the least) of the work, and an axiomatic understanding of certain actions as always-racist without regard for context.

God I miss dollar theaters. The last one I know about closed down in 2012, but for about a year I saw movies there almost every weekend. They would get the reels from the local cinemark after they had run there, and they ran two screens all day, starting at 9am. The local film society would screen cult classics there too, and I saw some things I would never have discovered on my own. It’s a little slice of the human experience that is just kinda gone now.

In 1986, they first met Lynch (a.k.a. Kathleen, a.k.a. Ta-Da the Shit Lady), who was then working at a strip club called Sex World in New York City.[75] Though never an official member, she became Butthole Surfers’ famous “naked dancer”, performing intermittently with them through 1989.[9] One show in Washington, D.C., with GWAR saw Kathleen take the stage to dance in nothing but gold body paint and antique wooden snow shoes. At another particularly wild concert in 1986, Haynes and Lynch, by now completely bald, reportedly engaged in sexual intercourse while on stage, as Leary used a screwdriver to vandalize the club’s speakers. This came after only five songs, during which time Haynes had started a small fire.

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but the page for the band The Butthole Surfers is pretty excellent.

He’s not in a lot of stuff, but every time I see him I’m like ‘That dick, he let all the goddamn ghosts out!’

Edit: Also, “It’s true. This man has no dick.”

It’s a shame they don’t use this song in the film. Most likely due to how much this one leans into the 1980’s techno-thriller tropes, using such an iconic 60’s song might have clashed with that theme, although I’m sure a good director could do it in a way that worked.

I’ve been giving this some thought (far more than it actually merits, but that’s what I’m here for) and I realized that I don’t know how Michael knows that Laurie is his sister. She was two years old when he killed Judith, so there’s no way he recognized her (discounting a supernatural connection, which would be a totally valid explanation in this series) at 17. In the intervening time, he clearly learned some things about the world (like how to drive, and what Samhain means) but I think it would be very strange if Dr. Loomis were telling him anything about his family, at least after the first few years of their relationship, given the way that Loomis talks about Michael. So he should have no idea that his parents are dead, or that Laurie was adopted by another family in Haddonfield. In fact, we don’t know for sure that Laurie is even the same name he knew her by. She was adopted at four, but I can imagine the adoptive parents changing her name to try and shield her a bit from the notoriety of her birth family.

So, Michael shows up at his childhood home, ready to finish the job he started fifteen years earlier, but finds it empty, something he probably never even considered. Then, a girl about the same age as his remaining sister would be, who another person calls Laurie within his hearing (assuming this is actually her birth name here), just happens to turn up on the house’s doorstep? I think he decided in that moment that Laurie was his sister, and that he was going to kill her, completely absent any hard evidence to back that conclusion up. He happened to be right, but that’s probably down to Fate or some bullshit, not any actual knowledge that Michael possessed. From there, the only other people he kills in the first movie are canoodling teenagers, which is what (apparently) set him off in the first place, and he uses them to make a shrine to Judith, which makes me think their murders were really just auxiliary crimes, subordinant to his true goal of offing Laurie and making her the centerpiece of his Idol.

In any case, I no longer know whether this plot element makes any sense at all, but I’m pretty sure I need to just move on to the one without Michael, to wipe my brain clean and smooth again.