Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday wishes to moonlightalice!

May you flourish, grow, and thrive on new excitements, dreams, adventures, and so on! May you laugh long! Be and feel as loved as you are! And may you live to see your enemies crushed before you.

Sorry, too much Star Trek. I'm channeling Klingons. Still, there are worse things that to triumph over ones adversaries. While you enjoy the good times of the next quarter-century, why shouldn't those good times include some mighty smoting?

Enjoy your day!

The short-short version of a week

Over vacation, I managed to catch a nasty cold that pretty much flattened me when I let it. I'm at that not-quite-recovered stage where I still sound stuffed up but can breathe. Cough's better, but still very gross-sounding on occasion. At least I don't get those coughing fits so bad that I hurt any more! Woo?

Other stuff happened:
-I got an A in statistics despite bombing the final. There were questions about older material that I didn't know to expect because he didn't send out an e-mail to that effect until after I'd taken it (since I took it earlier). I'd be aggravated except that I got a good grade overall, so that's a wash.

-Finished Prison Break, otherwise known as the most ridiculous TV series outside of Heroes or Smallville that doesn't have either of those series' excuse for its re-cock-ulousness. The mastermind who engineered the first of all the prison breaks became MacGuyver and then Jesus in that last season. It was nuts.

-Speaking of Heroes---CANCELLED!!! Oh thank you. I don't know who to thank--the assorted hosts of Heaven or Hell?--but I thank you. Oh thank you thank you thank you. I'm free! Free at last! For real, I almost cried. I hugged darkling1 when he told me. So much joy!

No Nutritional Value: Weekend at Bernie's

Because Netflix threatened to remove it from my Watch It Now queue today, I watched Weekend at Bernie's last night.

Why, other than the fact it's expiring on my queue, would I watch this? Well, curiosity for one thing--Weekend at Bernie's seems to be a movie that lots of people reference but few have actually seen. Also, 1980s screwball comedies are just...they're a genre unto themselves, you know? They're frequently not laugh-out-loud funny, and although the better ones (Coming to America, Better Off Dead) have some memorable lines, it's really all about the absurdity of the set up in a way that modern comedies...aren't. Modern comedies want you to laugh at a sight gag or a punchline. 1980s comedies expect you to go along for the ride and get your amusement out of going, "Why? Why would anybody react to this situation like this???"

And that's what I got out of Weekend at Bernie's. Instead of immediately calling the police upon discovering a corpse, the two dudes decide to fake like the guy's alive and hope they'll get away with it long enough to figure something else out to do with it when it stops being a passable prop. Because it's a 1980s screwball comedy, the straight man drops the call-the-police plan every time the girl of his dreams walks into the room. What follows is an hour of antics with a corpse, many of which are less funny than the fact that the murderer is in fits because he thinks he keeps failing to kill the dead guy. Who behaves this way!?

Another thing: some of these comedies wait an awful long time to deliver on the premise that seems to be their sole source of amusement. "Antics with a dead guy" would seem to be the whole point of the movie, but Bernie's still alive 40 minutes into a 100-minute movie. That kind of build up is nowhere in comedies today, possibly for the better, seeing as 40 minutes of Andrew McCarthy's "acting" outside of the screwball setup is worthless.

Weekend at Bernie's is ultimately fluff--nothing you need to see to get the aforementioned references but nothing that it harms you to see either. Unless 80s fashions hurt you--there was a shot of men in business suits where the pants were shorts, gro-oss--it's harmless.