Blackmoor Vituperative

We watched Double Indemnity this evening, which stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. I am a huge fan of the genre, yet somehow I had never seen this classic. It was so much more hokey than I expected. From the self-consciously hard-boiled narration, to the snappy nonsensical patter, to the “twists” in the plot that are more spoof than suspense, I kept thinking that Larry Blamire would have made this movie if Billy Wilder hadn’t made it first.

I enjoyed it, but I chuckled a lot.

Tonight’s entertainment at Castle Blackmoor was a Jodie Foster double feature: Foxes and The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my parents went to drive-in movies. During one of the movies we went to (Eaten Alive? Smile? Alien?) I remember seeing a trailer for Foxes, but I had never seen the movie itself until tonight. It had a very “after school special” vibe to me. The moral of the story? As far as I can tell, the moral is to not accept rides from extras in the David Lynch movie next door. (Also, Cherie Currie is probably a high maintenance girlfriend.)

The second movie was The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane. I first (and last) saw this when I was about 13 or 14, on TV, or perhaps HBO (which was not a given, back in those days). At the time, I thought that I should very much like to meet Rynn Jacobs (played by Jodie Foster), because she was like me: clever, lonely, and somewhat homicidal. Lucky for me, I did marry someone who fit that description. But back to the movie… this is probably one of my top ten favorite films. If this is not the best Jodie Foster movie of all time, it’s in the top three, definitely.

Around this time in 1998, Susan and I were eagerly installing the X-Files computer game. We were so excited! It took 7 CDs to install (which was absurd at the time). You would not know it from reading the reviews on Amazon, but this game was ludicrously difficult. On our first mission, we were assigned to look for clues at a warehouse. We went inch by inch over that warehouse, and found nothing. Nothing.

In desperation, we turned on the in-game help, thinking this would get us past whatever stumbling block we’d encountered. We went back to the warehouse, and examined it inch by inch.

Nothing.

We went back to FBI headquarters for more information, but none was to be found. We went back to the warehouse and examined it inch by inch, and found nothing. In frustration, we went back to the FBI and tried to shoot Deputy Director Skinner, but the game would not permit this. We spent hours trying to do something, anything, to get past this warehouse assignment, to no avail.

Eventually, I uninstalled the game and got rid of it. Maybe I sold the game, maybe I gave it to Goodwill, and maybe I just threw it away.

To this day, the X-Files computer game remains the worst video game I have ever played.