Two Movies

Saturday night the whole family gathered around the TV to enjoy popcorn and a movie. We settled down on our comfy king sized bed to watch Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the new one. By the way, the stove in my new house makes perfect popcorn. It is a flat surface stove. I swear it is such an impovement over my last stove. Of course, the last stove we had was an ancient gas stove that the previous owners of our last house left for us. I think someone sat on the surface; it caved in in the middle about an inch, making the burners unlevel. A level surface is most definately crucial for a good batch of popcorn.

We watched Willie Wonka on my new $33.54 DVD player from Walmart. We used to have four working DVD players. One we smugly sold at a garage sale, thinking it was austentatious to have so many DVD players (isn't our face red now?). One is the PlayStation 2, which lives in the basement and is kind of touchy when it comes to playing DVD's. The other two bit the dust due to the vigorous attention it received during Lucy's maniacal button pushing phase.

Armed with a $50 gift certificate (thanks Grandma!) I bought a cute little DVD player. Wow, is it nice! It plays DVD's! With no problems! We know where the remote is! The remote is white and so different from the two black remotes we have! The remote came with batteries! We are very pleased with it. Doc never ceases to be amazed by its diminutive size. I'm just glad it works and it was cheap.


Lucy picked the movie out and after some cajoling, Riley agreed to watch the movie too. We all laughed at the funny parts, danced to the grooving parts, and teared up a little at the end. Well, not all of us teared up. I love this movie. I like it better than the original. The best part of this movie, of course, is the Oompa Loompas. They are all played by the same guy: Deep Roy. We watched the special feature: the making of an Oompa Loompa and got to see Deep prepare for his many roles. It is amazing how much he had to do. His hard work and natural talent and charisma pushes this movie over the top for me. His Oompa Loompas are cute, wise, cunning, clever, and sexy. I could watch him sing and dance all night.

The girls enjoyed this movie, too, although the squirrel attack always bothers Riley. When the movie was over, the girls danced as the credits rolled. Another special feature of the DVD is "Learn the Oompa Loompa Dance". We tried that for a little while, but it was getting late and time for bed. We'd have to save the Oompa Loompa dance for another time.

Yesterday, we enjoyed our DVR. Doc recorded the enhanced MASH from AMC. The enhancement was this: they showed the film in letterbox format and ran Pop Up Video like bits of trivia about the movie along the bottom black stripe. I've enjoyed this movie in the past, shrugged and moved on. But having watched the first nine seasons of the TV Show anew (we have them on DVD) and having the "enhancement", I got so much more out of it. First of all, it gave me something else to look at when they were showing all the gore. Secondly, it gave MASH wonks like me and Doc something new to chew on with regard to the story line.

Some fun facts about MASH:

• The guy who plays Radar was discovered playing Charlie Brown off-broadway. He also dropped his pants during the infamous nude shot of Hot Lips in the shower. Apparently she saw him and it surprised her so much she waited a few beats before hitting the deck (in previous shots, she went down too fast).
• Most of the cast were recruited from improve troups.
• Robert Altman's son wrote the lyrics for "Suicide is Painless", the famous theme song. Apparently, he's made more off royalties for that song than Robert Altman made off of the movie.
• Whenever the screen writer came on the set, someone would yell, "get the script! The screen writer is here." The writer thought it was a joke, but it wasn't. Most of the dialog was improvised. Ironically, he the screenwriter won an Oscar for this movie.

We really enjoyed the enhanced version of this movie. It was nice to be able to read the trivia rather than listen to the director/producer/stars talk over the movie on a commentary. I mean, my God! This is a Robert Altman movie. They are already talking all over each other! Imagine if you added a handful more. By the way, this sort of "realism", this overlapping dialog, I find it very annoying. To me it seems pretensious. But, it looks like I'm going to have to live with it. I plan to enjoy A Prairie Home Companion as soon as the Pact allows.

And speaking of the Pact: we are surviving quite well, thank you very much. So far, neither one of us has broken down into tears. I'm really glad we are doing this; I didn't realize what a compulsion it was for us to purchase movies. At Wal-mart, I felt freed from the need to scour a $4.88 DVD bin. I saw they had a copy of Dave, a movie I really enjoyed, probably would have bought pre-Pact, but probably would never watch. I passed it without even blinking an eye and only spared a second of pity for those who were drawn to sort through the bin. I'm sure they didn't need my pity, but it felt good to look down my nose at them anyway, an added benefit of sacrifice.