Movies

Wherein I like to watch or would if these came to town and we solve the babysitter issue; otherwise, I'll probably just end up staying at home watching 5 year old episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on the Family Channel.

Probably me more than the movies, but there just hasn't been much the last few years that's sounded even slightly worth the effort to put up with the hassle of the movie theater. My two favorites of the year: Thank You For Smoking and The Matador. Here's what I'm interested in seeing now:

• Where the hell is Mike Judge's Idiocracy? Atlanta was one of the few places it opened, but I didn't know about the movie until after it closed. Ok, can I just send Mike Judge some cash for a copy of the DVD?
  
• Opening in three days: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D! Oh, yeah.
  
• Terry Gilliam's Tideland.
  
• Stranger Than Fiction. Saw a commercial for this and looked better than the description.
  
• Poppy Z. Brite attends a documentary about the old-line Carnival societies and debutante balls of Mardi Gras: Rebecca Snedeker's Invitation Only. Here's the NOLA review. And Poppy's reaction:
  

  By Invitation Only (I'm still snorking at us thinking we'd been invited to some exclusive deal) was an interesting movie made even more interesting by watching it with an audience. The filmmaker, Rebecca Snedeker, is a young woman from one of New Orleans' old Carnival royalty families. Her mother and grandmother were Queens of Carnival; her uncle was Rex; her father, it was implied, was a high muckety-muck in Comus if not the god himself at some point. (Comus' identity is never revealed.) She was slated to make her society debut and likely take her own turn as Queen of Carnival one day, but as she began to comprehend the discriminatory racial/class policies of the old-line krewes, made black and Jewish friends who weren't welcome at many of her social activities, and eventually had a serious relationship with a black man, she began to question whether she wanted to live this life and ultimately stepped away from it ... and then stepped back to make this movie, which is a rather heartbreaking blend of the genuinely disturbing racial issues inside Carnival and Snedeker's obvious nostalgia, if not actual longing, for a life that was once the ultimate fairy tale to her.
  
  ...Me, I'm not sure what I think of the various racial/class politics of Carnival ... or maybe I should say I'm not sure how to feel about them. I find it extremely disturbing that krewes with over a hundred years' tradition behind them chose to stop parading in 1993 rather than admit black members. They claimed it was the principal of the thing, but it looks like plain old hate to me. On the other hand, I tend to disagree with the ordinance forcing integration of krewes: they are private organizations, and I believe that private organizations are entitled to be hateful, racist, sexist, homophobic, fanatically religious, politically radical, any combination thereof, or just about anything else they like, as long as they're not actually infringing on anyone else's rights (and it seems to me that no one has the automatic "right" to be in a Carnival krewe). If they want to make utter asses of themselves, that would seem to be their business. However, it's hard to argue with the people who point out that Carnival krewes make use of taxpayers' resources, which would render discrimination illegal.