My Big, Exciting Weekend

Yes, I know, there was no blogging yesterday. For once in my life, I wasn't sitting in front of my computer all day. Instead, I went up to Albuquerque with a bunch of friends and caught some cinema. (Since it was indie theaters we went to, you're supposed to say "cinema" instead of movies, right? Or is that only if what you're watching is "artsy"?)

Anyway, we went to see Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation, which was about 25% really funny and clever, 25% reasonably entertaining, and 50% mediocre-to-completely-crappy. As advertised, though, it was plenty sick and twisted. And we got 3-D glasses.

Then we caught Bubba Ho-tep, because, as geeks, we are subculturally obligated to worship at the shrine of Bruce Campbell. In case you haven't heard of this movie -- and it's likely you haven't, given its nearly nonexistent distribution -- it stars Campbell as an elderly Elvis Presely (or maybe he's an Elvis impersonator, depending on whether you think he's delusional or not), who, along with a black guy who believes himself to be John F. Kennedy, battles to save the residents of a Texas nursing home from a soul-sucking mummy in cowboy duds. Bizarrely enough, the whole thing is not as ridiculous and campy as it sounds. It's a clever, quirky story that reminds me a tiny bit of the writing of people like Christopher Moore or Chuck Palahniuk. And, despite a lot of laughs and some quotable one-liners, it's actually, in part at least, a serious and rather melancholy meditation on aging and death. The pacing is far from perfect, I admit; it felt rather longer than its actual 90 minutes to me. But it's well worth seeing if you like a little bit of strange. And, hey, Bruce Campbell does a really good Elvis.

After the movies, we stopped by a local independent bookstore (which didn't have the book my friend went in to find), and a Hastings (which did). Having already bought up my book quota for February, I was very, very self-controlled and did not buy any books. I did, however, walk out of Hastings with a hundred dollars worth of DVDs to compensate. Sigh.

Oh, and then we bought Krispy Kremes. And then we came home.

For me, this is a really, really full day.