Monday, January 18, 2010

you get a boner in your stomach?

Tonight, during the Golden Globes telecast that I had been waiting for, I found Angus on the Family Channel and felt incredibly torn: do I watch one of my favourite impossible-to-find movies from start to finish (commercial free, I might add) or do I keep it on NBC and watch terrible upsets like Carey Mulligan (of An Education, one of my favourite movies of the past year) getting snubbed out of her deserved best actress win? Sandra Bullock won out, at the Globes and in my living room. My Angus, as ever, went unwatched at the other end of the dial.

Admittedly, the movie isn't very good. It's got a pre-Dawson's Creek James Van Der Beek and a miscast Kathy Bates and an embarrassing George C. Scott and plenty of cliche. It sums up 1995 for me pretty well, though: I was nine at the time, and a real sucker for teen comedies. My love for this movie has grown over time, mostly due to circumstance: it hasn't been released yet on dvd, it's rarely shown on tv, and finding a vhs copy is like finding a needle in a thrift store. The hunt is hard. So whenever I find it, even if just in snippets during commercial breaks, I feel immensely satiated. Watch this scene and you'll see how heartbreaking it is. Well, how good it is. Just how not-terrible it is, particularly for a movie starring Dawson Leery.



Other 1995 tidbits, plucked right out of my childhood:





Monday, January 11, 2010

Johnson & Johnson & Dead

On December 31st I publicly announced (to the small crowd in our living room) that my new year's resolution was to "finish my thesis". Okay, fine, but that's not so much a resolution as an obligation: failure is only an option if I'm willing to shell out another 5 thou worth of tuition to buy myself more time.

My new new year's resolution is to be a better diabetic so I don't flame out at age thirty like Casey Johnson. Of course, continuing to avoid becoming a drug addict will probably help me out the most on this front, but still. Thirty years old? Diabetics should not be dying at thirty. We're supposed to enjoy long, glorious lives like Mary Tyler Moore.

Wait. I just looked up MTM on Wikipedia, and this is what it told me about her: "In addition to her acting work, Moore is the International Chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International.[26] In this role, she has used her fame to help raise funds and raise awareness of diabetes mellitus type 1, which she has, almost losing her vision and at least one limb to the disease."

Okay. My new new new year's resolution? To stop reading articles about diabetes that scare the crap out of me. I'd like to keep all of my limbs, if possible, thank you.