OMG, the movie Spy. It’s brilliant. It’s being neglected (by the press? by a studio that ran trailers before it was released but gave up on advertising it after its opening weekend?) but that’s OK, it’s the kind of thing that’s best enjoyed on the basis of fuzzy word-of-mouth recommendation anyway.
SO: Go see it. It’s badass and funny and Melissa McCarthy navigates the minefield of smooth + sexy + powerful + also self-doubty + sometimes clumsy + fainty at the sight of blood. She’s the action hero *and* the comic relief rolled in to one. She is a Movie Star, and writer/director Paul Feig is her #1 fan & her partner in crime.
Future references for this week: SCOTUS legalized marriage equality nationwide. Bree Newsome climbed a flagpole in Columbia, SC. Everyone stopped airing reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard.
Tuesday we ate at Bar Virgile with our friend M, and then hung around the house playing Fluxx, which is such an anti-game, inasmuch as it violently discourages any sort of strategizing, and infuriates rules people.
Thursday we saw a pretty good baseball game between the US Collegiate National team and the Cuban National team. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the US team consists entirely of freshmen & sophomores. They beat Cuba 2-0. (They had apparently no-hit the Cubans the night before in Cary.) I felt kinda bad, but not as bad as I’ll feel a year from now when the entirety of Cuba looks like Myrtle Beach.
Friday night the Cubans came back & trounced the US 5-1. And two of them defected! (Before or after the game?)
Thursday night I took a turn at WXDU’s weekly metal show. Playlist here. A mix of some old faves, new faves, and stuff that’s currently on our playlist. We’ve been adding a lot more metal to our regular playlist, which is kind of amusing to me. I doubt that many of our DJs would seriously consider playing metal during their regular shifts — it can be hard to drop into the middle of a heterogeneous set. Harder to mix than country, rock-n-roll, various world musics — due, I suppose, in part to the fact that modern “extreme” metal is pretty far removed from the blues roots of so much of the rest of that music.
Anyway. It was fun, even if I did cop out & devote the last ~45 minutes to two songs from two of my favorite albums of the past 9 months, Yob’s Clearing the Path to Ascend, and Bell Witch’s Four Phantoms.
Last night we finally made it out to see Dope. Holy shit, what a great movie. Black teen geeks in Inglewood, trying to make it out of high school & their dead-end neighborhood alive & sane. It’s dirty and funny and intense, in more or less equal amounts. Parts of it are as improbable as Scott Pilgrim vs The World; parts of it are as real as anything Spike Lee or John Singleton ever did. It’s basically equal parts Boyz N the Hood and House Party. (Intentionally so — the main characters are obsessed with 90s hip-hop, and the director has explicitly stated that he was emulating the feel of those movies.)
So yeah, go see it. We saw it at Northgate at 7:50 on a Friday night with about 12 other people. Which is too bad, because the movie would benefit from a packed & rowdy house, and because I’ll be sad when Northgate finally closes down, which seems inevitable.