On Christmas morning I woke up early and since I couldn’t sleep I got up at 3:59. It was a white Christmas outside because of the overnight snow. I did my yoga and worked on revising one of my poems until 6:00, but then I got sleepy again.
I went back to bed with the intention of sleeping until 7:00 but I woke up at 7:30. I wanted to stay in bed but I didn’t want to waste all of Christmas sleeping.
I got up and did a short song practice, just selecting certain songs that needed more work or others that I particularly liked.
I did some writing and then in the late morning had breakfast while watching Birds of Prey.
It begins with Harley Quinn having just broken up with the Joker. As a means of closure she blows up the chemical plant where they consummated their relationship. But she has always taken advantage of the power that had come along with being the Joker’s girlfriend and she got away with being an asshole to a lot of people. But once word gets out that she is on her own it becomes open season on Harley Quinn. One of the people who has it in for Harley is narcissistic mob boss Roman Sionis, particularly because she has recently broken the legs of his driver. The singer in Roman's club is Dinah Lance, also known as the Black Canary. When he sees her save Harley from two guys taking advantage of her because she is drunk, Roman changes Dinah’s job to being his new driver. Meanwhile Gotham cop Renee Montoya is investigating a mob hit. The hit was performed single handedly by The Huntress. Montoya is also trying to track down the stolen Bertinelli diamond. Roman has acquired the diamond and has sent his sadistic right hand man Zsasz driven by Dinah to pick it up. But after Zsasz gets it a pickpocket named Cassandra Cain who lives in Dinah’s building deftly lifts it from his pocket, not knowing what she has found. When she gets picked up by the cops for her other pickpocketing she swallows the diamond. Roman is in a rage but when Zsasz tells him that they’ve captured Harley and that he can blow off steam torturing her to death he cheers up. Harley convinces him that if he doesn’t kill her she can retrieve the diamond for him. He tells her she has until midnight. Harley breaks into the police station and proceeds to make fools of the cops with her “fun gun” which shoots non lethal but effective projectiles like bean bags, powder bombs and glitter. She frees Cassandra after fighting lots of cops and gangsters. Montoya gets fired. They go shopping for food that will make Cassandra shit and she takes her back to her place above Doc’s restaurant and introduces her to her pet Hyena Bruce, named after Bruce Wayne. But Doc sells Harley out and so one of her enemies slingshots a bomb into her apartment. Harley decides to turn Cassandra over to Roman and tells him to meet her at the amusement park. Dinah drives Zsasz there and the Huntress and Montoya are also on their way. Harley ties Cassandra up in a toilet and leaves. Montoya is drunk and attacks Harley. Harley throws her out of a window. Dinah and Zsasz arrive and Zsasz incapacitates Harley with a drugged dart. Dinah tries to free Cassandra but Zsasz points a gun at her and tells her to cut Cassandra open. The Huntress arrives and kills Zsasz with her crossbow. He is the last one on her list of the ones who killed her mobster family when she was a little girl and she has trained her whole life for this moment. Harley recovers and then Roman and an army of his men converge on the amusement park. Harley suggests she, Montoya, Canary and Huntress team up, so they do. The ensuing battle with Harley fighting on roller skates among the amusement park props seems like a tribute to the camp sets of the old Batman TV show. Roman gets away with Cassandra and Harley goes after him on her roller skates with the help of the Huntress and her motorbike. When she catches up Roman has a knife to Cassandra’s throat but Cassandra has a grenade she stole from Harley, pulls the ring and puts it in Roman's pocket. Harley flips Roman over a railing and he explodes halfway down. The women go to a restaurant and the burrito Cassandra orders finally sends her to the bathroom. She calls to Harley for help and then they steal Dinah’s car and drive away. Harley pawns the diamond, gets rich and makes Cassandra her apprentice. Montoya, Black Canary and Huntress form the Birds of Prey.
I have never heard the word “fuck” used in a major motion picture more than in this movie. I think DC has been goody goody for so long they are trying too hard to make up for it. “Fuck" is a beautiful word but anyone that uses it that much certainly doesn't think so. One doesn't overeat because of a love of food but because one has a disorder. It certainly has more F bombs than any other DC film.
Harley Quinn is not a character I’m familiar with beyond the Suicide Squad movie in which she stole the show. She certainly carried this one too since the story and the other characters were pretty annoying. But Margot Robbie’s Harley is charming and also nuts so it was easier to get through the movie watching her.
I know more about Black canary and the Huntress because I’ve seen them in many comics. In the original comics they both come from Earth 2, which is where all the original DC characters exist, such as Superman and Batman from the 1930s. Black Canary first appeared in 1947 in Flash Comics. She didn’t have any super powers originally but later when she moved to Earth 1 the dimensional shift affected her voice and made it super powerful. I don’t mind that they made the Black Canary black. That makes sense but this character didn’t seem as light on her feet as the one in the comics.
The original Huntress is actually the daughter of the Batman and Catwoman of Earth 2.
I didn’t even recognize Ewan McGregor when he played Roman.
In the afternoon I made stuffing for my turkey. I had a stuffing mix that I got from the food bank but it smelled rancid so I dumped it and made it from scratch with bread, sautéed onions and sage, oregano, thyme, salt and pepper. I stuffed the turkey got it roasting, basting it every half hour. I also made cranberry sauce.
I edited some photos that I scanned a couple of months ago of me posing with my daughter Astrid at the Don Valley Art Club. I think the pictures were just so they would have something to make paintings from.
The turkey turned out great. I had a drumstick, a potato, gravy and cranberry sauce with a beer but I forgot to have some of the stuffing. I tried to watch Wonder Woman while eating but the torrent that I’d downloaded wanted me to get a code from a website to watch the video. I knew a 695 megabyte file of Wonder Woman seemed too good to be true. I deleted it and downloaded a 1.7 gig version, while watching the one Amos and Andy TV show that I’d managed to download.
In this story Andy has just proposed to his girlfriend Loretta and he rushes over to Amos’s place to tell him the news. But when he gets there Amos introduces him to their guest Mary. He falls in love and forgets about Loretta. Now he wants to marry Mary but he has to figure out how to get out of the engagement with Loretta. The plan is to have Loretta come over so he can take her to get the marriage license but when she gets there Kingfish and Calhoon burst in posing as police detectives. They say Andy is the most notorious bank robber in the country. Loretta leaves saying she never wants to see him again. But later she sees Andy’s wedding announcement in the newspaper and her father and brothers go to Andy to force him to buy a marriage license with Loretta. Amos tells Andy that nothing can stop him from marrying Mary if they do it right away and so Andy goes to book a chapel for the next day. He tells Lightning that if his fiancé calls to tell her they are getting married in the morning. But Loretta calls and he tells her instead. Later Andy tells Mary. So on the day of the wedding when the wedding march begins to play, two brides are crowding the aisle to get to the front. When Andy sees them both he runs. Outside is a female taxi driver and he gets a ride. In the end we see Andy and the taxi driver going to pick up a marriage license.
While having coffee with chocolate covered raisins and nuts with yogourt I watched the rest of The Sugarcubes Live Zabor from 1989. It hadn’t fully downloaded so it was a bit glitchy but it had been in my torrents for a year and so I figured it was time to watch it and remove it from the list.
They certainly were an energetic band and everybody seemed to have fun. There was documentary footage of the band members’ lives in Iceland. The male lead singer Einar was extremely dynamic. One member of the band does a skit in which he poses as a preacher from the southern US and he does a very good accent. The keyboardist Margret Ornolfsdottir takes the viewer on a tour of an Icelandic supermarket. She says the Icelandic people were starving until they realized they were surrounded by fish. Bjork makes a claim that the little pixels on a TV screen are there to control people’s minds. It seems the whole band are also involved in cinema and television and Margret has written several episodes of popular Icelandic shows. Bjork was married to Eldon the guitarist for one year, but they divorced two years before this film was made.
Wonder Woman finished downloading and it works, so I’ll watch it tomorrow.
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