October 31, 2011

Singing, And Plants.

Today is a day of WeenHallow. It is also a day where I work for like hours and stuff. THE TERROR OF WORKING YOUR JOB ooooOOOOOOOooooooh!
In any case, I’m going to be busy and shit. You know how it is. I guess I don’t really have anything particularly Halloweenesque to talk about. I talked about the party last time. What to do?

Well, I did watch Little Shop of Horrors.

During the party, Essner had some Halloween Pandora station running, and it played some music from the musical. Clicking through Amazon Prime Instant Videos the next day, I saw it on there, shrugged, and watched it while I cooked a meal and then ate said meal, and I enjoyed it.

I had thought I had seen this movie before. I mean, I was really sure I had. But it was obvious, as I watched it, that I hadn’t. There were just lots of moments that I really didn’t recall, and whole songs which I had no memory of. Surely I would have remembered “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space” if I had heard it before, right? It was really a fun little movie, and I’m glad I did see it.

I spent most of my time watching doing two things, though: attempting to figure out how you’d set this on an actual stage, and marveling at the weird collection of famous people in the film.

Seriously, this is a show that’s done a lot in smaller theaters, with smaller casts, but I spent a lot of the film attempting to picture how you’d do a decent Audrey II in the sort of budgets that those sorts of things would allow. Obviously, the movie had some super serious puppeteering because it’s a movie, but you’d have to have some level of that, no matter what. Would you have someone standing inside Audrey II the entire time, working the mouth? That would be a completely terrible job to have. I guess you wouldn’t have working vines? I don’t know how you’d make that happen, but that’s really a big part of Audrey II having a personality, and being able to gesture. It also seems like he’d be such a big set piece and so elaborate that it would be nearly impossible to get him off stage for scene changes. Surely someone smarter than me has figured this out, but I was spending a lot of the time wondering.

The other thing is, goodness, there were some odd faces in there. There was a young Christopher Guest there near the beginning that I didn’t even recognize at first. Crazy. Steve Martin had a huge role that, once again, I didn’t even remember as part of the film, which just goes to show how much I was wrong about having seen it before. Then Bill Murray is just in there as a masochist for like… no reason at all. Just because Bill Murray is awesome. So he’s there. How cool is that? For some reason John Candy didn’t strike me as shocking as those. It was just a weird point in most of their careers to be in this film.

Anyway, I enjoyed. That was my random, vaguely horror-related movie of the time period. Now back to work! Work work work. Happy fear and candy day.

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