Movie Experiment IV: Bananas

Sometimes planning just doesn't work as expected. Sometimes, like last night, it does.

The fourth Movie Experiment night came off flawlessly. The movie, #4 on my top 10 list, was Bananas, a 1971 farce involving Woody Allen as a sniveling loser whose search for love takes him to foreign lands. (I don't wear glasses, so I don't relate too closely to the character.)

Travelmate 2000 was kind enough to host the event, which was not held at my place because of Viewmaster's allergies to cats... allegedly there are three level of cat irritants, ranging from no effect to, like, swell up and stop breathing, and I didn't want to take a chance that one of my feline menagerie would be of the lethal variety, so I let TM2000 host.

Another deviation from the original concept: the four person party morphed into a five person party. Motown and Skynet responded as a pair to my invitation to participate in the Movie Experiment, and I wasn't sure if they HAD to go to the same movie or not, so I invited them both.

We had pizza (thank you, Pizza Hut's $10 for any pizza deal) and salad (thank you, Viewmaster) and banana nut bread (thank you, me, for taking the time to make and bake it) and we watched the movie.

No one in attendance, other than me, knew anything about the movie. Well, I think TM2000 knew Woody Allen was in it, but other than that? Nothing.

The movie itself is silly and it's got some dated material. It has fun with Howard Cosell (who died in 1995) and the Wide World of Sports (which went off the air in 1998). It also has obscure references (does anyone really know what the I Ching is?)

But the silliness is timeless. "Who am I going to leave this hospital to?" is one of my favorite parental laments ever. And this is a gem:

I had a good relationship with my parents. They very rarely h-... I think they hit me once, actually, in my whole childhood. They, they, uh, started beating me on the 23rd of December in 1942, and stopped beating me in the late Spring of '44. 

There's also the occasional wince-inducing line which portends the societally unacceptable relationship Mr. Allen has had with his current wife, "Doing a sociological study on perversion. I'm up to Advanced Child Molesting."

(Yes, he probably didn't have sex with her before she was 18, but marrying your lover's adopted daughter is weird, I think we'd all agree...)

After the movie, we talked for over an hour about... stuff. About the movie a bit, but mainly just telling stories. We got into an interesting motif of telling funny hotel/sleeping situation stories.

Viewmaster told a tale of a ski trip she took with some male buddies, including one who pulled an engaged chick back to their shared king-sized bed. Motown talked about a baseball trip he took once with six dudes in a hotel room. I told the story about Vancouver (January, 2008). And about Hawaii (July, 2008) and the other story about Hawaii (July, 2008) and fleshed out the Las Vegas (April, 2009) story a bit.

It sounds like a talked a lot. Maybe I did. I didn't mean to. :)

We also touched upon how my sense of humor rubs people the wrong way, both on Facebook and in real life. All four participants last night are enthusiastic about my blog at some level, which was an ego stroke, and it was nice to talk about the people I've offended and have the gang chime in with comments like, "They just don't get you!" and "Some people need to relax!"

I mean... I think that's true, too, but it's nice to have people agree with me.

The end of the night sneaked up on us, and we dispersed. I took the leftover food (TM2000 is headed for Vegas in a couple of days, so I felt no compunction NOT leaving food behind for the host) and walked home in the pouring rain. In spite of my lack of a jacket and in spite of the fact that the rain made my leftover banana nut bread a bit soggy, I was smiling the whole way home.

It was a good night.