Movies and My Older Brother

I took Scotland, PA over to my mom's tonight for potroast. I have decided that Scotland, PA is my favorite movie EVAH and so I wanted to share it with my mom & my older brother. My older brother, since he quit drinking, has become about the worlds most omnivorous movie fan. When he's not at sea, he sits around over at my mom's and watches movies by the hundreds, but he had never seen Scotland, PA before.

They didn't like it much.

I am horrified. Here I thought they had taste. So I've been thinking about my favorite movies, and why I like them, and why nobody else does. Now, I have two genres of favorite movie: truly bad movies, which I adore, especially if they have terrible monsters in them. I am kind of a one woman MST3K, although if the truth be told, there's nothing that ironic about it: I just love bad movies. Recently, I was very fond of Van Helsing, and The Day After Tomorrow. For older ones, I love everything that Hammer Films ever turned out with a kind of holy adoration, and I love Godzilla in all his incarnations, and his pals Gamara, Mothra and Rodan too. Then, on the other hand, are my more "acceptable" movie favorites. The Man Who Would Be King, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Coca Cola Kid,, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Wizards, Raising Arizona, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. (I'm tired of googling, for heaven's sake, y'all can do it as well as I can.)

Actually, I'm tired of this whole post. I had a theory when I started out that I really only like dark movies where there are no clear cut bad and good guys, or they shift around, but that might not be true. Who knows why I like those movies? I just can't understand why my family didn't. But then, go figure. My other brother thinks Ice Storm and the Royal Tenenbaums are not only wonderful, but possibly the keys to understanding our family, whereas I think that Ice Storm is horrifyingly depressing and our family, while bad no doubt, wasn't quite that dysfunctional. I don't think we were ever as mannerist as the Royal Tenenbaums, either, which was too affected for me.

The other point of this post was that I need to muse on my very early birthday gift from my older brother: two pretty much antique Apple laptops and tons and tons of accoutrements thereto. He's been trying to give them to me for ages and in a moment of weakness I said, okay, maybe I can use them. He got very excited and even bought new batteries for the damn things. I have some strange idea of putting linux on one of them, why, I don't know. Maybe just because. I don't have a clue how I'd go about doing that, I hate Apples, and these things are so old (10.1s) that I doubt I can use them for much of anything. I do have this weird obsessive compulsive desire to catalog my library and it occurred to me that a laptop would be good for that so I could carry it from bookcase to bookcase rather than carrying the books to the computer, but why I want to do something so utterly pointless is beyond me. I also thought that maybe I wanted them for travel, but let's face it: I don't travel. I go to the beach once every two years for a couple days. I can probably continue to live without a computer for that long. And, I am not even sure if I can possibly get these dinosaurs online. Well. Now I have them, and they're taking up my whole dining room table, and there's an antique scanner and an even older printer (it takes ribbons, not cartridges) in my car. What on earth should I do with them?