Cluedo? Shoedo!

In the current cozy mystery that I’m reading, a woman is hit on the head by an unseen killer.  When she comes to, she continually refers to the attacker as a “he”. It’s brought to her attention that she couldn’t know the sex of the person who attacked her from behind. Then, she remembers that as she hit the ground–just before blacking out–she saw the heel of a man’s shoe. Tada–the person who hit her must be a guy!

After reading that–I looked down at my men’s shoes and thought:

Perhaps, I can get away with murder…

Buttons, boxes, and getting older…

I think I’m finally starting to “feel” my age. It seems that, as far as movies go, everything that’s *new* today is just a retread or remake of something that was originally created in the 80’s .  It’s like there is a recession of ideas and studio execs are saying, “hey, why spend money on new stuff when we still own rights to this property that was a popular in 84!”

Happens in every generation–a lot of the things that were new to me in the 80’s weren’t new to my parents. For example, that great hook from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation turned out to be a sample from a Sly & The Family Stone’s Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). It feels like I’ve crossed over into another layer of the “adult” zone.

Take, for example, The Box– a horror moving coming out in November-

The Box

The thing is, I remember when this same story was an episode of the Twilight Zone (80’s version). Back then it was called Button, Button.ButtonButton

In 1984, there was V, a cheesy tv series about aliens who befriended humans…but then turned out to be not so nice.  It’s 2009, and the aliens are back.

Maybe in another 20 or so years, there will be a Rob Zombie type who wants to do a re-interpretation of Saw.  Sigh.

Movietickets.com – No Homo!

After seeing the movie black./womyn.:conversations with lesbians of African descent–movietickets.com invited me to write a review.  This is what I originally wrote:

Most mainstream ideas of who black lesbians are and what they are like come from images/media NOT created by black lesbians themselves. That’s why black./womyn: conversations… is such a breath of fresh air. The documentary contains interviews with a wide variety of black lesbians who discuss a multitude of topics.

I would say that the overarching theme of the movie is: How do you exist/survive in a world where everything that you are (black, female, lesbian) is NOT valued–if not downright despised?

Though people are frank and honest, it’s not a depressing film at all and has quite a bit of humor.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t post it because it is laden with profanity. It took me a few minutes to realize that the offending, profane word was “lesbian”.

According to it’s review guidelines, movietickets.com reserves the right not to post a review that contains “Obscenities, discriminatory language, or other language not suitable for a public forum.” Yet, Movietickets.com had no problem with showing the word “lesbian” in the movie title, selling me tickets to the movie, or sending me confirmation and review invite emails with the word “lesbian” out there for all innocent eyes to see.

I bet–and I can only guess at this because customer service for movietickets.com hasn’t responded to my email–that the site’s only goal is to keep knuckle-heads from using “lesbian” in a degrading manner. Having the word scrubbed from acceptable language does not solve the problem….

Just to experiment, I replaced the word “lesbian” to see what substitutes the comment box would take. What got flagged as profane: queer and gay. What was acceptable: carpet-muncher, lezzie, and muff diver. (I opted just to use “not straight“.)

So, good job movietickets.com–who needs words like lesbian, gay,  or queer mucking up a public forum when carpet munching, muff divers will do just fine?

[Yes, I know that people can “report” comments  with those other words–but it’s a sad day when “lesbian/queer/gay” is automatically assumed profane but “lezzie” is open to peer review.]