So it's Saturday night, and I'm somewhat bored, but not bored enough to seek out some actual activity to occupy me. Picking a DVD to watch would take too much effort, more energy than I've got. So I resort to my fallback activity, which is flipping through all the channels with the remote. The Hubs is not the remote guy in this house, because the remote, as far as he's concerned, is superfluous technology when you can just get up and change the channel. Anyway, we don't watch TV in the same room, because, among other reasons, my lack of attention span and constant channel changes would put him over the edge. Anyway.So I've got the digital cable, which means that as I change the channels, I see the title of whatever's on that channel across the bottom of the screen, which means you don't actually have to watch for a minute or two to decide whether to stay there or not. I'm flipping along and I come across Muriel's Wedding, and I think, Worst. Movie. Ever.
Considering what appears to be my menopause-induced attention deficit, I can't believe I forced myself to watch this whole movie once. What a depressing mess. But really, is it my Worst. Movie. Ever?
Thinking. Thinking. Well, no. My Worst. Movie. Ever. has got to be Starship Troopers. I've also seen all, maybe most, of that one, because they were watching it once on the bus on the senior class trip and I had no choice because it was on the screen two feet in front of my face and I couldn't fall asleep. I did, however, turn away when the aliens were puncturing the troopers' heads and sucking out their brains. Oops, spoiler alert! Sorry.
(The second Worst. Bus. Movie. Ever. which I was forced to endure some of was The Sweetest Thing. It featured two of my least favorite things to see in a movie: girls with no morals or values engaging in gratuitous sex, and Cameron Diaz. But I was able to sleep through most of that one.)
Worst. Movie Theatre. Experience. Ever. is one I've written about once before, but it bears repeating because it was so absurd. Before we were married, the Hubs and I went to a double feature that showed Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange. I think we went because we knew they were both well-reviewed, well-made movies and all that, but neither of us considered the impact of seeing two such violent and psychologically oppressing movies together. Nasty.
Then there was Worst. Childhood. Movie. Experience. They always ran a Saturday matinee at the movie theatre here in Bizarro Town, usually a double-feature with a weird short in between, always some kind of odd race with contestants wearing numbers, and attendees were given numbers when they bought their tickets, and whoever won the race on film, kids with that number got a prize. I never did. (It's amusing now to think that I was at the movies, and the Hubs was probably there, and the Chum, and any number of people I know as adults but didn't know then.) Anyway, one week I convinced my mother's friend Doris to let her daughter, who was my friend but two and a half years younger, to let her go to the movies with me, no grown-up, just kids at the Saturday matinee. She was very reluctant, but we called the theatre and they said it was a kid-suitable movie, so off we went. It turned out to be a very gory horror film about murders at some creepy British estate and the only witness to all the killings was a cat, and all the murders were shown through the cat's eyes, like through a distorted lens. I don't think my little friend went back to the movies for years. She certainly wasn't allowed to go with me.
Scariest. Movie. Ever. My Cousin is a movie freak, and any visit to her or from her involves as many movies as you can fit in, sometimes two or three in a day. When I was in high school and I spent a week with her in Connecticut, where she lived at the time, over a school vacation, we went a lot, but the one that stands out is a French film called Que la b�te meure (This Beast Must Die!), which I believe was about a woman who was raped following her son's murder (and all kinds of other bad shit) and who ultimately takes bloody revenge into her own hands. This is probably the most I've ever wanted to run out of a theatre and never see the rest of the movie, but I had little choice, so there I was.
