Monday, July 27, 2009

2 more signs of the oncoming apocalypse

I'm happy as a clam these last three weeks being thoroughly immersed in the best film festival in the world: Fantasia. My only complaint is that the blogging and reviews that are usually done while the festival is going on are really poor this year, especially in english. If I'd known Dread Central (who usually do a great job) was going to mail it in this year, I might have offered to do it myself as I have plenty to say about the festival and the 18 movies I've seen so far.

I'll talk about Fantasia later, I just wanted to take a moment to share a couple mini-rants with you today.

First of all, there is a new behaviour I've noticed at Fantasia and this is losers who show up for the show after the show has started and the house lights are down use their cellphones to light their way. I must use the greatest restraint not to spring from my seat and dash their cursed little toys over their head. I mean, c'mon, you are too fucking lame to let your eyes adjust to the darkness? I know part of this phenomenon is because someone thought it was a cute and clever re-application of the cellphone. Well it's not. It's weak and annoying. It's distracting to other moviegoers and infuriates those few men left in the world who have any balls left. If your night-vision is so poor that you can't see the stairs in a dark theatre, you need to stop leaving the house altogether. Better yet, please just kill yourself.

The other, far more disturbing thing I noticed is that it now appears to be impossible to buy underwear in any quantity. Now I'm sure this was always the case for homos, metrosexuals and Night At the Roxbury-types who buy designer underwear (just typing those two words together makes the bile rise in my throat), but now even Hanes and Fruit of the Loom brands come in friggin' two-packs! Two-packs! Who the fuck buys their underwear two at a time? I can not even imagine a scenario where a male would need to buy only two pairs of underwear, unless maybe you are on the road for a weekend business trip or something and forgot to pack your underwear (or soiled yourself getting too drunk with the clients). It's just another example of branding and commodification working its way down to every level of consumer good so that we have more packaging (and thus more waste) and an excess of false choice. Underwear should be sold in a minimum of 7 per pack, to make a solid week of having clean underwear. I even looked online (though I will look harder) and all the sites there sell only two-packs, with the occassional 4-pack of coloured underwear (which no man should wear unless they are boxers).

In New York, on Orchard street, you used to be able to get packs of mistake underwear for a really cheap price. They had some small error that made them not good enough to go into the main distribution channel, but I could never tell what those mistakes were. I don't know if those stores are still there, but does anybody from Montreal know if there are any places like that here? This used to be a shmata town, so possibly.

I love life, but fuck the world is a discouraging place when you are surrounded by untermenschian losers and an economic system that encourages their behaviour.

2 comments:

The Woman In Black said...

Please feel free to stop by Dread Central and add your comments to Andy and Paul's wrap-ups. I don't see much change in this year's coverage versus their previous efforts, but we're definitely open to hearing from everyone else at the show. The more viewpoints, the merrier!

OlmanFeelyus said...

Wow. The internet is amazing. I'm impressed you tracked back my throwaway comment. I didn't want to be too critical because I recognize that it's a hard job those guys do and I wasn't sure if they are paid or not. But since you asked, my major concern is just the quantity of posting. There hasn't been a new review in two weeks. They seem to have missed a bunch of crucial films (nothing on Deadgirl or The Children, for instance) and their wrap-ups seem shorter than last year.

Again, I'm a real hog when it comes to consuming this kind of media when Fantasia is live, so I appreciate the work they did. I just felt there could have been a lot more and had I known, I would have made the effort to fill in the gaps.

There is another major concern on your site and that is something I have flagged. It is way overloaded with scripts, some that keep breaking on Firefox, so that it is a real pain to go to the site at all. I hope your technical people can get that resolved.

Thanks for asking and keep up the good work!