The weekend in review
Jan. 10th, 2005 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiper+0: Friday night was fun. As I posted would happen,
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spazzkat and mamishka showed up to join solarbird, risu, and me in our belated Christmas gift exchange! We have to do that late every year, pretty much, given that two or more of us are generally gone to see family over the holidays. Conveniently, it also gives us all a bit more time to figure out what to give one another. ;)And mostly, it was an amusing exchange of Cheesy Goodness. Mimi gave us all Kim Possible puzzles, cute little bags full of candy, and Invader Zim pins and pens. She also got Dara a box set of Ed Wood movies; for Paul, she got a box set of three videotapes of episodes of an anime called The Bastard, which is chock full of amusing heavy metal references. For Rebecca, lots of CANDY!
Me, I got major points with Meems for giving her the first season of Magnum P.I. on DVD; I got her to make happy squee sounds. Go me! ;) And Dara was quite happy to receive the first season of Lost in Space as well--though that was almost as much a gift for me, too. I, like Dara, like me some cheesy Irwin Allen classic TV goodness. Rebecca and Paul got joint gifts from Dara and me, though. Paul got a $50 gift card from Target--because we'd thought we were going to help him finish out the rest of the cost he needed to get a DVD burner, except he inadvertantly thwarted our plan by spending all the other gift cards he had on other stuff he needed. DOH! But he was happy anyway and said it'd get him a video game. Also, Dara got him a small box of cute little drawing pencils as a stocking stuffer.
For Rebecca, as she has an impending Long Journey coming up, we got noise-reducing headphones to wear on the plane.
In addition to Lost in Space from me and Ed Wood from Meems, Dara scored an anthology called The Urban Bizarre, in which a work by
nihilistic_kid appears. And Paul gave us both a nice framed picture of the three of us that he'd taken at the zoo this past summer.And I got Fun in Acapulco from Paul, one of the 15 or so Elvis movies I actually want to own, and one of the few I didn't have on DVD yet. (I counted up--I've got eight Elvis flicks on DVD now, and a couple more on laser that I may need to get on DVD at some point. I still need Loving You, though!)
Dara got me the most unusual gift, though! She got me a print of a work I had admired at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this past September when we were there for Worldcon: La Jeune Fille en Vert by Tamara de Lempicka, and a book about her art which I will need to sit down and read. She was apparently quite impressed that I'd done an actual doubletake and gone back to look at that picture. ^_^
Rebecca informed us all sadly that she HAD gifts for us, but they were delayed in shipping! We assured her this was quite okay, and gave her her loot anyway.
In addition to exchanging gifts, we watched a Christmas-flavored episode of Kim Possible (which fit in well with the whole puzzles theme from Meems), and a few other random amusing things on the Tivo (I'm getting quite fond of Mythbusters). And we had yummy pizza from Pagliacci's, one of the things Dara and I miss about living in Seattle proper--but fortunately we won't have to miss it for long, because Pagliacci's is building a store in Kenmore. YAY!
All in all, a fine evening.
+1: Saturday morning, also as I posted about before, I couldn't sleep. I kept tossing and turning, and finally I staggered out of bed around 6:30 or so and went downstairs with the intention of watching me some Elvis. I figured as long as I couldn't sleep anyway, I should indulge myself with the King in honor of his birthday while Dara and Rebecca were still asleep. ;)
So Fun in Acapulco it was, to be immediately followed by Roustabout. These are not good movies by any stretch of the imagination, but they still amuse me to this day. Fun in Acapulco occasionally lets Elvis show glimmers of more ability to act than most of his movies let him exhibit: every so often he actually emoted! ;) Roustabout, though--oh, not good! But still cheesy fun. And it's amusing to see how every time Barbara Stanwyck comes on camera, my brain goes, "whoa, wait, somebody who actually can act in this flick!"
Dara got up on the tail end of Roustabout, just in time to catch Elvis riding back with grudging but good-hearted determination to finally do the right thing and save the floundering carnival, and admit he's head over heels for the Girl. "This is DUMB," Dara informed me. I told her, "Well, DUH. Elvis movie!" But it's got the triumphant final big song, concluded with the obligatory smooch as the credits roll. Good enough for me!
When the evening rolled around, we got in some cheesy TV goodness on Dara's behalf as well: "Follow the Leader", the season-closer episode in the Lost in Space box set. Once it got underway I realized I actually remembered it, way back from the days when I used to run home and watch that show back-to-back with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (Why yes, I AM a fan of cheesy Irwin Allen skiffy TV, why do you ask?)
Anyway, this was actually one of the better episodes of the show despite ol' Irwin indulging in one of his favorite plot devices: "member of the cast is possessed by evil spirit/alien/monster of the week". This time it's John Robinson on tap to get glommed by an evil alien warrior spirit, who's determined to take over John's body and use it to get the hell off the planet (presumably so that he can get back to his original homeworld and kick the asses of whoever stranded him there in the first place). And there are bits of this episode that are almost good, bits where you can see "Whoa hey, wait a minute, Guy Williams can actually act." I also learned for the first time during watching this that Mr. Williams was not American by birth; 'Guy Williams' was his acting name, and he was actually born Armando Catalano in Argentina! Who knew? I went my entire childhood without having the slightest clue that that man wasn't American by birth--which just goes to show that he was actually pretty good with faking an American accent!
Dara pointed out that he wasn't quite perfect--that in many scenes involving the Professor, he's a bit stiff in his delivery. But this may well be part of him not being quite there with the accent. And I agree with her. Because in this episode, there's this scene towards the end where John-possessed-by-evil-alien has a big fight scene with Major West, and for one line, Williams slips out of his usual 'Professor Robinson' accent and suddenly sounds Spanish. And suddenly, he's a lot more fluid and graceful in his delivery. We both went "WHOA" at the sound of it.
And now we want to see some of the old Zorro TV series he was in, just to compare his performance as Don Diego to his performance as John Robinson. Hee.
But there are two scenes in this episode that come this close to making the episode good and giving the viewer a taste of what the show could have done if they'd taken it seriously all the way through (the very first few episodes are the same way, too). There's a scene early in the episode where John's still fighting off the alien and he loses it in front of his family, Don, and Smith--but then is convinced by Maureen to go off to his quarters and rest. Will comes to check on him and we see two nifty character development things: #1, John's actively angsting about his children missing 'normal' childhoods, and watching this, I'm suddenly thinking, 'Whoa, hey, John, you're almost a three-dimensional character here!' And #2, Will is visibly troubled by seeing his father in a vulnerable state, which goes to show that Billy Mumy was a good actor as a kid (and he grew up to be a good actor too on Babylon 5).
Later, we get another almost good scene, where the alien's getting more control over John and Smith of all people tries to help out by coming to check on John and figure out what's going on with him. And with one line about feeling nothing but boredom, combined with how he sits in his chair and gives Smith this supremely bored expression, Williams is very good at conveying how the alien clues in fast that it's not even worth his time to lie to Smith. So he scares the crap out of him instead by telling him the truth AND in an almost genuinely creepy fashion: the alien switches back and forth between speaking in his own voice, disembodied... and making John talk for him. Brrr. Naturally, Smith wigs out--but this time you can't exactly blame him. ;)
Lastly, though this actually has nothing to do with the episode itself--we get the obligatory teaser for the next episode, which in this case will be the opener for season two and suddenly OH HEY WE'RE IN COLOR WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? Hee hee hee. And you are reminded how the camera crew at the time just must not have been trained all that well yet to work in color, because suddenly everybody's costumes are these vivid, almost garish shades. Dara geeked happily at me about how the costumes were originally chosen to look good in black and white, NOT color--they were designed to give good contrast and gray-scale shading.
Much cheesy fun TV goodness. Makes me look forward to getting the rest of the series, and makes me hope Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea will eventually hit DVD as well!
+2: Last but not least, we had SNOW SNOW SNOW on Sunday. Dara has already posted happy fun snow pictures (and snow movies!) over on her journal, and to this I will add that it was great fun to see Kenmore looking all wintry. It was especially entertaining to go down the slight drop of elevation from our Uplake neighborhood to nearby Lake Forest Park--just enough of a drop that there was a palpable temperature difference and a lot less snow on the ground.
And we got to the Town Centre shopping center, and we deposited monies in the ATM, and we got hot chocolate, and lo the hot chocolate was good. I noted while at the Starbuck's that they have something called "drinking chocolate" now, which sounds quite tasty--apparently it's thicker and richer than hot chocolate, and they suggest having a serving of it with dipping cookies. MUST try this at some point. But right then I wanted the hot cocoa, which I got with peppermint, because yum. And I got a hunk of banana bread as well.
On the way out I saw a couple of ducks crossing the parking lot, so I went to follow them to see where they were going. Since the shopping center is very close to Lake Washington, and since the parking lot itself has a bit of a pond, ducks in the immediate area are not unusual. However, EIGHTEEN DUCKS was pretty cool. Even if the stupid birds didn't always figure out where the bits of banana bread I threw them went.
Also, Great Harvest Bakery's Irish potato bread is really, really good. We got some of that on the way home, along with another loaf of tasty bread to use for dipping into Chicken in Stuff for dinner.
And we got home and had a cozy afternoon and evening, and that was the end of the weekend!
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