(no subject)

Quick summary of my quick trip home to return furniture:

You know you're addicted to slurpees when...the guy at 7-11 recognizes and remembers you. And he's surprised you've been away as long as you have.

Why the hell come I can't sleep?

I must have stayed up too late this weekend, 'cause it's going on 2:20 am and I'm still up.

( Maybe I should babble incoherently about tonight's BSG finale (spoilers, duh) )

Sigh. I wonder if I'll still be so wistful in 2008 when the show comes back. And I thought the break between seasons two and three was awful. Woe!

(no subject)

This weekend, while luxuriating in a nice jacuzzi bath at home, I finally caught The Departed. I'd seen the original Hong Kong film, Infernal Affairs, and I'd been loath to warm up to the Scorsese remake if only because the original was so good, I didn't think a remake could do anything but foul up. I understand why the film had to be remade to make it in this country--if it ain't in English (or about Jesus if it's it damn forrin' speak), it doesn't sell. So I was reluctant.

I was then blown away. I never think things live up to hype, and I tend to come at things prepared to dislike them when they receive all this attention and praise and people keep telling me to see it. So The Departed was not only good, it was good enough to overcome all that had preceded it. Just superb filmmaking all around. The entire thing was lifted from the original--from plot to certain settings and shots--but it didn't feel like just a direct remake, to its credit.

( The rest has to go under spoiler-y cut-tag because I can't not talk about the story through to the end. )

That's just a bunch of raving to say that I actually respect Leo DiCaprio for this, like whoa. I suppose I need to see Blood Diamond now. Because if the Academy decided that he didn't deserve at least a nomination for best actor for The Departed, then his role in Blood Diamond must have been fucking spectacular. Of course, by that logic, I also need to see The Last King of Scotland to find out why Forest Whitaker actually won the Oscar...

I also watched a strange little independent movie I got from Netflix called Zerophilia. The ridiculous premise is that some people have a Z chromosome that, once activated, will cause them to change genders whenever they have an orgasm. It's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by another name (SCIENCE!) basically. The lead kid, who suffers from this condition, is told by a doctor that he has up to a certain time before which he will have to decide which gender he truly wants to be and then he'll be fixed in one gender. This would happen right as he's getting close to the (female) object of his desire, too, naturally.

The movie was cute, but the problems of tone left it as cute and not at all profound or disturbing, which it tried to be at points. The affected kid's best guy friend wigs out about this, and the usual protestations about "he's straight" fall away into being "I accept him for who s/he is no matter what" kind of predictably. It's his best friend's girlfriend and her position that sort of muddle the idea of this 'condition' as a metaphor for sexual self-enlightenment and experimentation. Her entire role is shallow. She basically upbraids her boyfriend who is determined to fix his friend as a guy with the cunning argument, "What's wrong with being a girl?" Boyfriend is so clueless he just never answers her, not even with very convincing "Nothing's wrong with girls, I like girls!" or stuff of that nature.

So it was cute, but the material, even with the bad sci-fi'y premise could have been so much more. It could have had more reflection on what it means to a guy who's always been straight-leaning to suddenly be a girl...who is also straight leaning for a girl and whether the immediate denial of such a thing as attraction for your own gender is automatic or a consequence of your environment--i.e., does hetero- or homosexuality trump gender (meaning you stay one or the other whether you're girl or boy, and if you change genders, your gender-of-choice in a mate changes too), or does gender determine hetero- or homosexual inclination? Can you only really be free to express homosexual urges in a body that wouldn't make sex with the homosexual object of desire technically homosexual sex? There is a zerophiliac who's gay in this and became one gender so s/he wouldn't be gay when having sex with men (again, the question of why s/he had to do that) but got no pleasure out of it when s/he did. In a stronger filmmaker's hands, this would have been less romantic comedy and more a comedic, romantic drama.