Last week I wrote about buying a house and noted that we would be moving in on Tuesday. We did exactly that and then moved right back out. The very evening we moved in the wife and I both took showers. Upon exiting, I noted that the tub was very slow to drain. An hour or so later my wife asked me if I had made a mess getting out of the tub as the towel I had put down was sopping wet. Further investigation noted large amounts of water filling in around the toilet.
Our lines were clogged and all that shower water was backing up. We used up every towel in the house and the daughter and I played a game whereupon we filled up tiny cups of water from the tub and dumped it outside. This was mainly to calm her down as she thought the whole house was going to wash away. We stayed one waterless night there and then moved back into the apartment.
Well, moved isn’t exactly the right word since 95% of our stuff is now in the unlivable house. We borrowed an air mattress from my parents, grabbed a few clothes, some stuff to eat, and are now squatting at the apartment. When we bought the house, it came with a warranty and so we’ve been using that to make some various repairs. The warranty works like any insurance which is to say slow. The plumber is supposed to come out today. Hopefully, he will get the pipes fixed and we’ll move back in again.
But it has been a long week filled with back aches from sleeping on air mattresses, belly aches from eating too much fast food, and generally fraught with anxiety. Which makes for one of my worst transitions to actually talking about the pick of the week but here we are.
Green Room is about a punk band that plays a gig for a bunch of Neo-Nazis. Things get decidedly claustrophobic and tense when they accidentally witness a murder backstage and are subsequently trapped in the titular room while all those skinheads try to kill them.
I’m a big fan of trapped-room stories and this one has garnered a lot of buzz and good reviews. It stars the late Anton Yelchin plus Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, and Patrick Stewart. It was directed by Jeremy Saulnier who gained a lot of attention for his Kickstarter-funded film Blue Ruin.
I’d be on board with this film any way but after spending a week trapped in our old apartment with very little furniture and nothing to do I feel like I’ve lived through my own version of this story and that definitely makes the Green Room my pick of the week.
Also out this week that looks interesting:
Carnival of Souls (Criterion Collection): This low-budget cult classic about a woman trying to escape a horrible past and winds up in a haunted ghost town gets a HD upgrade from Criterion.
Everybody Wants Some!!: Richard Linklater directs this “spiritual sequel” to his marvelous Dazed and Confused where a group of baseball jocks hang-out, philosophize, and pick up girls in the days before school starts. In anybody else’s hands I’d give this one a big pass, but Linklater has proven he can turn such tepid material into cinematic gold.
Crimes of Passion: Arrow Video does their thing to this Ken Russell-directed 1984 flick about a boring fashion designer who lives a double life as a hooker. Kathleen Turner stars as the girl, and Anthony Perkins is the priest who obsessively stalks her while attempting to change her ways.
Allegiant: The Divergent Series: The third in this popular (?) film series gets a Blu-ray release just in time for the fourth and final one to hit theaters. With the wild success of Harry Potter, it seems like every other person is writing fantasy novels for the YA crowd and then turning them into films. I don’t know anyone who has seen any of these films and I don’t see any kind of buzz about them online, but presumably they make money as they keep making them. Maybe I’m just not the right age for them.
Slasher: Season One: Chiller TVs first foray into an original series is about a girl who moved back to her hometown (where her family was brutally murdered years ago). Of course, more murders occur in a decidedly slasher-film style. There’s been a lot of horror-themed TV lately from The Walking Dead to Scream Queens to the very similar-to-this-sounding Scream series. I’ve not seen much of it but I love that it all exists.
Cat in the Brain: Lucio Fulci’s gore-filled meta-film gets a Blu-ray upgrade and a glow-in-the-dark cover.
