ALLIGATOR: An oldie but goodie, written by one of my personal deities, John Sayles. As Leonard Maltin says, "If you're going to make a movie about a giant alligator terrorizing Chicago, this is the way to do it." It's a witty, tongue-in-cheek horror movie that delivers genuine thrills while skewering the Jaws genre. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.
MI VIDA LOCA (My Crazy Life): A slice of a life you've probably never seen before: girl gangsters in Echo Park (L.A.). It's a little rough around the edges, but it has a good heart, and it's something different. Mixed messages, though -- it ends with a strong sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves theme, but what they're doing is dealing drugs and killing. I didn't really see this under ideal circumstances, though. See, I was spending Thanksgiving alone, and one of my coworkers (who I later found out has severe mental instability) invited me to have Thanksgiving dinner with him because he was going to be alone as well. I agreed, thinking we'd go to a restaurant, but that morning he called me up and asked if I'd mind eating at his place to save money. Well, all right. So I raced to the store for supplies and frenetically baked a pie that was done just as he arrived to pick me up. We go back to his place, and I find out that "dinner" is leftover ravioli from a meal he made the night before. He serves it at the table still in the colander in which he drained it, dripping hot, oily water all over the table. Then he shovels salad out of the bowl with his hands onto his plate and starts eating in a way that actually nauseated me so much that I couldn't eat. Finished with "dinner," we put in Mi Vida Loca. Twenty minutes into it, he gets up and leaves the room without a word to me. I figured he was going to the bathroom, but a long, long while passed, and he never reappeared. I finally went to look for him and found him asleep in his bedroom. I went back to the living room and finished watching the movie -- his apartment wasn't near a metro station, so I was hoping he'd wake up and take me home. But the movie ended and he was still asleep. So I ended up having to pay for a cab home, not to mention having to scrounge for dinner and missing out on turkey. At least I got my pie -- he never even thanked me for it, so as I was leaving to catch the cab, I took it with me.
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