Blackmoor Vituperative

Happy New Year!

My sweetie and I spent New Year’s Eve at the Keswick Theatre near Philadelphia, seeing a three-movie marathon live performance of Cinematic Titanic. In the tradition of getting ram chips by saying good things and bad things about a movie, here goes!

Good thing: The Keswick Theatre is really nice. It’s probably the fourth or fifth nicest antique theatre in which I have seen a movie.

Bad thing: Being in a chair designed for someone born in the 1800s, between people whose figures are, shall we say, generous.

Good thing: Seeing folks from MST3K perform live! Whoo hoo! We had seen Mary Jo and Mike at GenCon back in the early 1990s, but this was even better.

Bad thing: Trace and Joel apparently have the same tailor.

Good thing: Trace still does a killer Barney Fife impression.

Bad thing: Joel’s “Gilbert Gottfried” internal monologues and “high pitched voice on the other end of the phone” routines weren’t funny in 1990, and still aren’t.

Good thing: The brothers on one side of us (shout out to Mike and Andrew! Happy new year!) were really friendly and fun to talk to.

Bad thing: The guy on the other side was alone, not interested in talking, and kept fiddling with his huge backpack (why? I never saw him take anything out of it or put anything into it — weird).

Good thing: Three twisted films, two of which I had never seen, and the third which was weird enough that I saw new weirdness even though I’d seen the film before. Good choices!

Bad thing: The aspect ratio was set incorrectly for the first movie (even though I saw them trying to correct it at the beginning — they left it distorted! Why?!), and the second movie was cropped to force it into a 4:3 aspect ratio, which ruined at least one joke. I don’t know why this does not bother other people as much as it does me, or why it is so difficult for people to figure out what seems so absurdly simple. Look, it does not matter what the shape of the screen is: adjust the aspect ratio until you see the whole image, without distortion. Don’t crop it, and don’t squeeze it in, out, up, or down to fit some arbitrary shape. Is that so freaking hard?

Good thing: Spending New Year’s Eve doing something completely new and different, and not being nauseous the next morning and wondering what happened after that third round of “candy corn” shots!