el tercer ojo

Not a Party Report

Last summer I wrote a sort of short story about a furniture fantasy involving an ad for a Chesterfield sofa.  Recently Casey Morgan blogged about the attractiveness of said leather furniture under a blog entry called When Furniture Is Hot.  

So last night as I was surfing a bit and thinking about bedtime I found this picture.  Have I mentioned I've got a thing for Clive Owen? Oh, I suspect I have, even without his having given an on-screen spanking in Shoot 'Em Up.

Yes, okClive Owen is smoking in this picture, which generally does spoil spanking fantasies for me, but I'm willing to be flexible.

Btw, when I finally get back to the rest of the party reports, I'll be able to tell of a conversation about Clive Owen spanking the lovely Amy Hunter.  

Clive, if you're reading, Amy says it would be okay with her.   Just send her an email.

What is it about robots?

One way in which my dad and I are alike is that we both love to go to movies. In fact, growing up, I remember us as going to see a movie and then out to dinner every Friday night. I'm sure we really didn't go every Friday, but enough so that's what my memory is. He's always liked to see whatever the newest, hottest movie is the weekend (if not the first night) it opens.

I do too. The first / midnight showing if possible.

When the first Star Wars film came out in May of 1977, my family went on the opening Friday afternoon. Or rather, we would have gone except that when we got to our local San Diego theater, it was already sold out. My mother suggested we pick another film. My dad had another idea. He bundled us all into the car, went over to a pay phone and made a call. When he came back, he announced that we were going to get an early dinner at McDonald's (a huge treat in itself as we rarely had fast food) and then we were driving to Palm Springs for their evening show. The manager had apparently promised to set aside 4 tickets (and besides hardly anyone was in Palm Springs in May). So we drove an hour and a half to another city just so we could see this great new thing. It was great too.

I mention it not just to point out why I love film and take it seriously, but because I fell in love that day. Unlike so many of my friends, it wasn't with Han Solo either. I fell in love with R2-D2. So much so that it's hard for me to feel menaced by the Doctor Who Daleks. After all, they do have the same sci-fi I'm-a-robot-not-a-trash-bin look about them. Part of me is still in love with him and was even pleased that in his more recent incarnations he's been able to fly. (Why "he" is male is yet another question, but perhaps one for another blog entry).

With all this in mind, I'm very pleased that Pixar has created another film robot to fall in love with. His (and it appears clear that "his" is the correct gender) name is WALL-E ( for Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) and he's a great character. The film, also called WALL-E is delightful too.

Paul told me before we went that it was being hailed as "the best" film Pixar has ever done. That's setting the bar pretty high as far as I'm concerned as both The Incredibles and Monsters Inc. are amazingly good. After seeing it this afternoon in a (warning: celebrity sighting alert*) Westwood audience that included Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Guest and their children, I do think it's a unique Pixar film. Why? Because it doesn't rely on voice acting to carry the story-- in fact there's very little dialog for much of the film. The animation has to carry the emotional weight of the story, and it does it beautifully.

Maybe that's a reason (other than his basic cuteness) that WALL-E reminds me R2-D2. Neither robot can speak, yet they manage to convey enough emotion and goodness that as a viewer I became completely attached. Oh yes. They also both manage to save the world.

Okay, R2 helped save the universe, but you know what I mean.

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* Before you ask, no I didn't go over and talk to them or ask for autographs. This is Los Angeles and that sort of thing just isn't done. Especially when famous people are somewhere with their family. That said, this is as least the 6th time I've run into Jaime Lee Curtis in Los Angeles or Santa Monica over the years which is definitely more than any other Hollywood person that I don't actually know. Weird.

"Shoot 'Em Up" Spanking

I'd say I was startled, but the fact is that I knew from a newsgroup post that the spanking scene was there somewhere.

Yesterday afternoon I went to see this comic book - style film Shoot 'Em Up starring Clive Owen (yum!) partly because I like cartoonish violence, partly because Clive Owen was in it, partly because there's a spanking scene. I got to go with with someone into spanking who I know from Shadow Lane -- something fun but also nervous making as I always have a hard time meeting new people (he ended up being a delightful movie companion.

The film was about a B- to C+ (for me, lower for my companion who gave it a D as he's apparently not got my crush on Clive). There were a number of reference to different kinks and fetishes (including breast feeding), but the main spanking wasn't done in a fetish context at all, something which made it ever so nice for me. 

Below this point could be considered a film spoiler so fair warning.

The set up is good -- Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) spanks the woman partly as a diversion -- the pretext is a mother is yelling at her child, smacking him and threatening him with a spanking. Mr. Smith goes over, scolds her for hitting her child and then publicly spanks her about 5 times, supposedly to show her what it feels like. While the spanking is not done OTK, it *is done* in a way those of us who've been smacked in public over clothes might remember.

Short, sweet and worked for me. Not a great film, but getting to watch a spanking in a vanilla film not done to mock the fetish and watching it with a spanking friend was worth the price of admission for me.

Of course the fact I've had spanking fantasies about Mr. Owen since Closer did help.

The Sisterhood

Last night I went with my two closest friends from graduate school to see what definitely ranks as the best "chick flick" I've seen in a while.  Maybe ever.  The film is "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants".  I'd read parts of the book while sitting on the floor in a bookshop (yeah, I do that a lot) and had been struck by how smart it seemed for a book aimed at teenaged girls... so often books aimed at that age group are dreck.  Still, I was a little nervous.  As a 30 something I'm pretty far removed from teen culture.

(spoiler alert)

Anyway, the film was great.  Each of the four women who make up "The Sisterhood" are interesting actresses and each is given her own storyline.  I especially enjoyed watching Carmen's (played by America Ferrera of "Real Women Have Curves") storyline, not just because it was a small teen issue (trying to reconnect with her divorced and absent father) but because her energy literally lights up the screen.  My heart broke for her, over and over again as she tries to figure out why her divorced father seemed to have replaced her (and her mother) Puerto Rican selves with a blond, white family.  The women of the new family (a mother and daughter) are blond, willowy and Southern. 

The galvinizing moment for me was when Carmen turned on them in a bridal salon for discussing how her size makes the dress which had been made for her too small and how they'll have to start from scratch on something new for her.  They refer to Carmen as "the other one"  relative to the blond daughter, Kristy.  Carmen comes out of the dressing room barefoot, yelling and suggests that they tell people that they forgot to consider that her father's daughter might be from another culture and have another body type.  Or that they should just say there aren't enough bolts of material to cover her "Puerto Rican ass."  This struck me not just because I felt for her humiliation and isolation in that moment, but also because I wished for myself that at 17 I'd realized I wasn't overweight, that I just had a different body type (curvier) than the lanky blonds I lived around in Southern California.  Knowing that might have saved me a decade or so of fruitless dieting and frustration.

In the end, the film was about friendship and the importance of trying to find a way to stay together -- to express love -- across physical distance.  This spoke to me and I found myself remembering being 17 and wishing for a magic pair of jeans to share with my best girlfriends.

Who would you call?

Yesterday Paul and I planned to go the Arclight see the film Shi mian mai fu (House of Flying Daggers), a nicely surrealistic martial arts film I've been wanting to see.  But as these things go we got stuck in traffic on Sunset and arrived 10 minutes after the film had already started.  As an alternate choice, Paul surprised me and asked if I still wanted to see Hotel Rwanda, a film I've wanted to see for several months, but that I thought I'd see alone as it isn't really his sort of picture.

The film is wonderful in a way -- Don Cheadle's performance is fantastic.  It, the film I mean, suffers a bit through its effort to garner a PG13 rating.  I say suffers because we end up hearing about acts of horrific violence, but we never have that moment of crystalized horror (in contrast to the moment in The Pianist when the father in his wheel chair is thrown from the upper floors by laughing Nazis when his family says he's unable to leave the apartment).  I'm not big on gore, but I know what happened in Rwanda and feel, despite its desire to raise the consciousness of the West who looked away from the horror when we should have interveined, it inadvertantly filtered a bit too much.

That said, one of the most thought-provoking moments was the scene where Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager and hero of the film, tells the 1000+ people he's sheltering that they must save themselves, that the West and UN have forsaken them.  He tells them to make calls, to tell people that might be able to help them that if they cannot, that this is goodbye.  The caller and their family will be killed.  I found myself wondering on the ride home what I would do.  Could I help this person who reached out through the phone asking me to save them from death?  Who could I call on their behalf?  I'd try everything, even if I thought my effort was doomed as I suspect most people would.

These thoughts merged into a discussion I'd had earlier about the notion that one life is worth more than all the world.  That the individual life had to matter.  And so, why do I need a phone call?  I haven't made calls, I knew what went on in Rwanda and, though frustrated at my nation's inaction, I did nothing more than feel frustrated.  So many died.  Paul Rusesabagina has said repeatedly as he has received humanitarian awards that he only did what he thought he had to do.  He's also commented that "never again" are the two most misused words of our century.  For indeed, genocide is allowed to happen again and again (witness Sudan) as our leaders discuss whether "genocidal acts" constitute "genocide."

So my question for myself, and for my small circle of readers is were someone to reach out to you/me through the phone begging for your/my help to save their life and you knew you were their only hope, who would you/I call?  Then having throught that and knowing the situation Darfur, why do we wait to be personally asked?