Laff while ya can munkee boy

The easter break has allowed me to indulge in one of my favorite and--in comparison to some of the others--quite wholesome pasttimes: watching lots of movies in a row. I always feel it hasn't been a bad day if I've seen a film I hadn't seen before. In the last two days I've seen a right few: Constantine, I had feared the worst. It's not too bad as a film, but if you're adapting a great comic character why throw out everything that's distinctive and funny about him? Anchorman, great but the actors seem to be having more fun than the audience; Roger Doger, is Jennifer Beals immortal? she looks younger than Elizabeth Berkley in this; Enigma, hilariously clunky exposition: is that a squeaky flooboard? could there be something hidden underneath it?? why yes, there is--better show a few more flashbacks of it just in case the audience is in a coma; and All the President's Men--ahh this is more like it! excellent, although it did make me want to smoke at my computer again and pretend like I've got to 'get me something to the front office' like a 1940s hack. This wasn't too bad, but nowhere near my previous record: 17 horror films in two and half days at the Horrorthon held every Hollowe'en at the Irish Film Institute. There a 13-year-old guy there who sat through the likes of Zombie Flesh Eaters and such former 'video nasties' while accompanied by his mother! I sat beside a girl who laughed hysterically all the way through I Spit on Your Grave.

Anyway, while attempting understand this habitual mania for cramming as many films as possible into my munted retinas until about 5 in the morning, I was reminded of the first three videos I ever saw and the one that I didn't. In primary school, I was staying over at a friend's house and we decided to rent a video player for the night. With it you got three videos. Bear in mind this was the mid-1980s in rural Ireland. Having a video player in the house was like owning a space shuttle or something. Anyway after much tortured deliberation we settled on
Return of Jedi (obviously), Brewster's Millions
(looked like it might be a bit racy) and Enemy Mine (reasons escape me--probably because the alien looked a bit like the one in The Last Starfighter).

The film I didn't choose, although I looked longingly at the cover was The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eight Dimension. It was almost 15 years later until I actually saw the damn film but in my mind, I built up into the best film ever made. I had overcomplicated it to the nth degree: as it was a parallel dimension movie, I thought all the characters were different versions of Buckeroo Banzai (Peter Weller) from different parallel dimensions--covering every possible permutation of sex and race. They're just his friends and there is not much real inter-dimensional travel in it. It's still great though, it's the sort of bonkers sci-fi you could only get away with in the 1980s: cars drive through mountains, it's got a cast you'll probably never see assembled again, and it make geeks look cool. It's also got some great lines, like "Laff while ya can munkee boy", "Evil. Pure and simple from the eighth dimension", and of course "History is-a made at night. Character is what you are in the dark."