"The alchemist says your HMO was destroyed in a goblin attack."

I apparently need to learn more about World of Warcraft so I can mock it more accurately.

So barely a day after I write the first paragraph of the previous entry, I have my own personal Larry Craig moment at work. I find Craig a terribly amusing figure--these secretly sybaritic gay-bashers usually are, and Craig's a little more brazen than most. It helps that he's a colossal embarrassment to people who've done their level best to ruin the country for the past seven years. I'd never heard anything about the cult of bathroom toetapping (I guess I move in the wrong circles), but such moved through my mind as I did something a couple of days ago that every one of the people reading this has done--on the toilet. Fluffy (who I wanted to have certified at least five times today, God help me) installed new locks on the bathrooms (bathroom locks are good things to have in a public place, I'm sure we'll all agree) and very nice they looked, too. So I... performed my ablutions in a fair amount of confidence I wouldn't be disturbed. No sooner had I finished than I heard a splintering sound and looked up to see the door open, the wooden base of the lock fractured and some dope in a shirt and tie standing there with a suitably shamefaced look on his mug. Either he realized what a stupid thing he'd done or he sensed I wasn't into him. Was this part of some dipshit management training seminar way back when? Did "Brad" (let's call him such) have to wrench open doors to show he wouldn't take no for an answer, that he was a winner? I pictured him in a disused portion of some dismal office park, straining to pull yet another door open to the sound of his seminar leader clapping his hands, shrieking "earn this, Brad!" with a dog-eared copy of Sun Xi lying at his feet. But then I do these things.

 And if it has to happen, having the overture to Der Freischutz as your incidental music works great--I'm really trying to keep my face straight as I type this.

Equinox (1970): The Criterion Collection is an ongoing gem, having released probably hundreds of classic movies with full DVD extras, the masterpieces of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (no filmmakers have ever come closer to creating genuine magic on screen, I think) such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), and probably their most famous movie, The Red Shoes (1948), receiving particularly sumptuous treatment. Curiously, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the best of the lot and one of my ten favorite movies ever, hasn't yet, so far as I know. So why the Criterion people did Equinox I'll never know. An uncharitable part of me suspects that they, like many "serious" film critics, look down on horror and fantasy movies and decided Equinox was good enough to "represent," which, if true, was very, very wrong. There's an interview with horror writer/icon Forrest Ackerman that tries to explain the importance of the movie which was probably wasted on me, but then that was only because the movie wasn't very good (I guess). A "kid" named David (who looks older than I am) winds up in a hospital with a cross clenched in his hand and babbling about assorted nonsense. A reporter and doctor piece together his story and find out that he and three friends went off to find their professor friend who vanished in a nearby state park. A park ranger with prominent eyebrows tells them that the professor probably went back to the city. Despite some sort of alleged training in the occult, David fails to see anything wrong with the ranger being named "Asmodeus." There's some ancient book (I suspect this had something to do with Sam Raimi's original inspirations for the Evil Dead movies), monsters, other worlds, lots of running around, and wooden acting from the two romantic leads. The two mildly comic sidekicks fare much better, although much of the comedy comes unintentionally from the girl's rapidly shifting hair-lengths (her boyfriend played by Franklin Boers, later to become Frank Bonner and WKRP In Cincinnati's lustful Herb Tarlick). What distinguishes Equinox--to a point--is the model work on a number of monsters that menace the party. It doesn't quite rise to the level of Harryhausen, but it has its own rough-hewn charm, and it's rather impressive that it all started out on a student project for less than $7,000. Still, the sometimes clever special effects (watching the clay human "victims" get tossed around is genuinely hilarious) fail to make this much of a flick worth watching.

Green For Danger (1946): Criterion gets back to what it does best in releasing Sidney Gilliat's little gem of a whodunit from the immediate postwar British cinema. A couple of mysterious deaths take place in the wake of V-1 attacks on a rural English hospital, and Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard (Alastair Sim) finds himself called in to deal with the matter.  I made the huge mistake of reading Geoffrey O'Brien's superb introductory essay before writing this, and now feel horribly inadequate, my limbs all shrivelled up like a dead cockroach. He explains it with a verve and authority that I could never manage, but the movie's still a lot of fun, mixing the tropes and visual themes of the wartime drama, mystery, and, in a couple of places, horror movie, while remaining a fun, brisk little thriller. It helps that the original story was changed from the Blitz of 1940 to the V-1s of 1944, both fresher in the mind and sneakier in the attack, ratcheting up the tension. While the great Trevor Howard, Leo Genn (just as genially oily as he'd be twenty-five years later in Pete Walker's mildly disappointing sleaze classic Die Screaming, Marianne), and Megs Jenkins are excellent as some of the hospital suspects, it's Sim's show, as he perfectly inhabits a deceptively buffoonish Columbo-like detective who, even when he seems to have everything in hand, doesn't quite have all the answers. This would probably make a great bookend to a "Sim night"--Green For Danger, A Christmas Carol (1951; Sim's still probably the best Scrooge of all time), and The Belles of St. Trinian's (1955), not that I'm trying to give anyone ideas.