New year, new movies.

1. (1655.) The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)
Just your run-of-the-mill buddy road action romance comedy spy movie for chicks. Being a mash up of so many genres, it stuck mostly to the established stereotypes of each. That there were so many moving parts (and actors having fun) kept it from being stale. I enjoyed it.

2. (1656.) Chopping Mall (1986)
Imagine Short Circuit with Johnny Five replaced by Micheal Myers and you get this so very 1980s slasher flick. Recommended to fans of Friday the 13th (I'm talking to you, Keith).

There were better Coke shots before this, but I wasn't ready.

3. (1657.) A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
I liked this as a work of fiction, but I just could not accept Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers. (And although the protagonist is based on a real person, I think it's ridiculous to call a film about a fictitious person a biography.) Therefore, the highlight of the film was the miniature sets used for establishing shots and transitions. If you want to see a movie about Mr. Rogers, I'd recommend last year's Won't You Be My Neighbor documentary instead.

4. (1658.) Kansas City Confidential (1952)
Good, suspenseful noir about a man-done-wrong chasing down the men who did him wrong. Enjoyable.

5. (1659.) Magnificent Obsession (1954)
This is dreary melodrama follows a horrible, trust-fund cad (Rock Hudson) who falls for the woman whose life he destroyed (Jane Wyman) and becomes the world's best brain surgeon to fix her. Ugh.

6. (1660.) The Lodger (1927)
Alfred Hitchcock's third film was obviously heavily influenced by the German expressionism films of the era. As so many silents do, it sags a bit in the middle, but it's totally worth a watch for Hitchcock fans. (It contains the first Hitchcock cameo appearance, by the way. His back is to camera in an early shot of a newsroom. I missed it.)

More to come.

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Here's something a little scary for you on this Friday the 13th: more evidence that Dr. Frederick Wertham, author of the industry influencing Seduction of the Innocent, was right arguing against the subtle, damaging influence of comic books on America's youth. These panels are all in sequential order as presented in Superman's Action Comics #20, published in 1940.

Sure, I eliminated some filler panels there, but only to make the subtext clearer for scientific examination. Gay equals good times. Not gay equals bullet in the face. Clearly the message here is that if you are a heterosexual, you shouldn't go to any gay Hollywood parties. They'll kill you. I suppose that this really makes you look at those post-Oscar parties in a whole new light, doesn't it? Note that Superman is not at the party. Why? Because Superman is not gay.

With messages like these buried in super hero comics, it's no wonder that Rock Hudson and Tom Cruise turned out gay. (Personally, I think Rock Hudson would have made a great Superman, by the way. Were he not, you know, dead.)

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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