New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

“Christ, the whores these days get uglier and uglier. Would you pick her up?”


I watched all three movie adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy - for the first time each - on my desktop Mac this past week. One was a Redbox rental, the other two I streamed from Netflix. There was a time when I could not, or would not, have been able to do that. I did not allow myself to watch any movies on any sort of computer device until late 2003, when necessity and circumstance got the better of me.

In the immediate months (fall of 2003 and most of 2004) following my divorce, as I cut my expenses to the bone and sold away all my DVDs, CDs, books, cassettes, and videotapes, I lived in one bedroom of a cramped two bedroom/two bath apartment 10 miles outside of Portland, in the town of Beaverton (which Simpsons creator Matt Groening used to like to tell interviewers he was actually from, just to say the name out loud). I roomed with a single mother and her two young boys, who all shared the master bedroom. The boys suffered from distressing food allergies that she was still attempting to diagnose and pinpoint. There wasn’t much in the way of any pre-packaged food she could give them without risking severe reactions, so the tiny hovel was always overpowered with the scent of whatever fresh vegetables she was boiling on the stove or meal she was slow cooking in the crock pot. If occasionally the smell was far from pleasant, the emanating heat kept the space cozy and I would often fall asleep to the sounds of her puttering around in the kitchen and/or various sauces or recipes bubbling and popping into the wee hours.

Being still responsible for the lion’s share of the mortgage on the house that my ex-wife and I had recently purchased and that I would never live in, I needed someplace cheap to call home. I knew being choosy was not an option. At $200 a month, the room — which I would peg at about 150-175 square feet—fit the bill. I got a free futon from a co-worker. I borrowed a 13-inch television set from a friend. The antenna had seen better days and only two channels came in with any sort of dependability. I had no VCR or DVD player. I had a five-year-old Toshiba laptop that was already on the decline, technologically speaking, but it would have to do. And it did.

For the next year, everything I rented from the library or video store I watched on that laptop. There were quite a few keepers:

Brother Bear - This Disney film features one of the most uproarious commentary tracks ever. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas play a pair of moose in the film — moose that talk like the iconic McKenzie Brothers the pair created — and they recorded the commentary in character as if the film was real. Without being in any way inappropriate, it easily stands as one of the most subversive artistic expressions ever commissioned and allowed by the Mouse House. The two take jabs at moviemaking, Hollywood, Disney and any other topic that springs to mind. Moranis and Thomas are on fire for 85 mins as they seemingly improvise their way through from one end to the other. I still haven’t seen the film “straight” and don’t know if I could.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5