make your own blair witch parody.
The most inevitable headline of the summer: PowerBook used to edit 'Blair Witch' parody.
We were supposed to see a sneak preview of End of Days, the new Schwarzenegger film (written by a friend of mine) that's opening this Thanksgiving, last night. We'd gotten the passes at American Beauty and Fernando understood his part of the plan--get to our house early, because we had to go to some place named Chatsworth and God alone knows where that is.
I have now been to Chatsworth. I still don't know where it is.
Fernando got to our house at 4:30 and we took off. I figured that heading west on 101 then meant we were going to take a while. I was, in the parlance, "wrong." 101 was empty. We got to Chatsworth before 5:00, only an hour before we were supposed to be there an hour early. We were the first people holding blue pages--bring me the blue pages--there.
The guy we've seen at every single damn test screening, who has this funky haircut, was already there. We wandered around the grounds of the Pacific Winnetka 21, we ran into another person holding a blue sheet who said, "The screening's been cancelled."
We did not take his word for it. I sought out Mr. Funky Hair, who said that the screening had been cancelled, but we should just hold on and we'd get free passes to another movie.
Eventually they lined us up and took our blue pages away, handing us a sheet of explanation--there had been "a corruption of a private process," which one of the people there to run the test screening said meant a copy of the movie in its current form had gotten out somewhere: the Internet, video, something--and then tickets to another movie.
We went to go see The 13th Warrior, which I think Fernando and I are in agreement was worth every penny we paid. Actually, I think Fernando wanted a refund. Darin liked it quite a bit better than either of us. The 13th Warrior is best described as a Western that takes place in Dark Ages Scandinavia. Arab poet Antonio Banderas--gorgeous--gets shanghaied in a group of Norsemen to go back to the wilds of somewhere very cold to rescue some people who are being threatened by the monsters that must not be named.
(If this sounds like the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead, that's because it is. Disney changed the title because they thought it sounded too gruesome--like The 13th Warrior doesn't sound too generic?--and because they had no idea what to do with this movie, which sat on the shelf for well over a year.)
It's the old ranchers-vs.-the settlers thing--one group takes, the other farms. It's a very dark movie--literally, as in it's difficult to make out what's going on in long stretches of the movie. There are also stretches where we have no idea what's going on, which bothered both Darin and me (I think Fernando had checked out by that point).
On the up side, lots of well-developed men with their shirts off much of the time.
Viking-fu. Antonio Banderas-fu. A weak ending. Decent matinee fare.
A friend of mine wrote a parody of The Blair Witch Project called The Oz Witch Project, which, as you can imagine, involves Dorothy and three friends going into the forest to seek out the witch. It's very funny and much more on-target than most of these stupid Blair Witch parodies that have come crawling out of the woodwork.
(I have to admit that when I heard the title The Oz Witch Project I had a different idea: the Nazi, the Lawyer, and Adebisi go into the forest, and the Witch takes off as fast as she can, because she's no longer the worst badass in the woods. You need to have seen HBO's Oz.)
I met Mary this afternoon for a walk around a nearby park near our houses that I hadn't even known existed. Grace is so big! (I know. I will continue to be surprised by this for 18 years.)
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com