My new best friends are Comcast Digital Cable and the DVR it came with. The best part is not the ability to get the latest movies On Demand or the nicer picture or the enhanced interface or even recording in the background on the second tuner. It is all the extra movie channels such as Flix and Encore that play wonderful movies from 20-ish years ago that have drifted out of your memory. When I say you, I mean me and anyone else old enough to have an era of forgotten movies.
Perfect example: In the past week I have been able to catch two movies that I have not seen in ages and, while I won’t call them great drama, I will call them great entertainment. Big Trouble in Little China and Used Cars. And let me just state plainly that after seeing these two films again, I have decided Kurt Russell is enormously underrated.
The plot of Big Trouble in Little China, from none other than John Carpenter, is barely coherent enough to describe. There is some reed thin scheme involving a mystical bad guy named Lo-Pan who controls furies through magic and needs a green-eyed girl to suck the life out of because he is 900 years old and not really alive anyway. So he ends up kidnapping the girlfriend of Kurt Russell's gambling buddy because she is a Chinese woman with green eyes, which is very rare, but when the time comes, he discovers a young, green-eyed Kim Cattrall could also fit the bill, so he plans on marrying both of them then sucking the life out of them. Plus, we get a side light on the crisis of innocent Chinese girls being imported into the U.S. and forced into prostitution. Tough to make that one lighthearted.
Along the way, Lo-Pan also happens to commit the unforgivable sin of stealing Kurt Russell's truck and that proves to be his ultimate undoing.
Article comments