another day renting out videos
So last night I ended up watching Vampire in Brooklyn at a friend's house. The first thing you have to realize is this movie is based on a story by Charlie Murphy. The second thing is that it plays like a mid-90s Vampire: The Masquerade session run by Charlie Murphy, who let his brother Eddie play a ridiculously over-powered character so that he'd agree to be in the game, while everyone else has never played an RPG before. Eddie actually feeds his blood to a human character and makes him his 'ghoul,' but in this game being a ghoul makes your body parts fall off and your skin melt(maybe someone wanted his ghoul character to eventually become a Nosferatu clan vampire). I know the White Wolf folks borrowed a lot from Anne Rice, whose vampire work I haven't read, so I figured the whole ghoul-human-henchmen thing was ripped straight from V:TM, but for all I know it might be from Rice. Anyway, they also make it plain that vampire's don't make other people vampires by feeding off of them, which also reminded me of the White Wolf games. White Wolf really should've put out "Clanbook: Blaxploitation" when this movie came out. A lot of the scenes are basically excuses for VampEddie to use special vampire powers; assuming his victim's identity, hypnotizing humans into doing his bidding, turning into animals, using magic to make a slum apartment into a lavish penthouse, ripping people into pieces, and generally not dying from things that would kill humans. Anyway, there were a lot of special vampire powers, and only a few of them were used in service to the plot, so I ended up imagining Charlie Murphy looking through the V:TM rulebook saying, "Ooh! That's awesome! He should definitely be able to absorb people's thoughts, c'mon let's a write a new scene..." Wes Craven directed, so it's possible the RPG-ness all came from him, but Charlie Murphy's name was all over the credits so I really prefer to think this was all Eddie Murphy's brother's game put on screen. I'm just waiting for the DVD with commentary. Sort of.
If you're not a role-playing gamer person, reading that really won't be worth your time.
Crazy people who look normal really throw me off. A guy came into the store and looked like a perfectly normal Santa Cruz dad. Clean clothes, clean-shaven, looking at movies like anyone else. But when I said hi to him he responded with a bunch of sentences that made absolutely zero sense. Just random phrases and words strung together. Something like, "I used to get donuts, but now the internet clothes me in the sun." Then he went into our bathroom for a while, which worried me. He came out, mumbled something, then walked out. When I checked in the bathroom it was clean, but he had stolen the toilet paper and the little spring-loaded thing that holds it into the toilet paper holder.
Just another day...