Welcome to February 2025. Where, in my city, that means snow that comes to your calves and windchills that are -40c. It's Day 32 of the year and the project as I write this. That means, it's time for the first update of the year's project. If you're new to me...the idea here is to see how much the first movie of the year you watch influences that calendar year. There is a well proven theory; specially among horror movie fans, that the first movie you watch on January 1st, will dictate how your whole year will be. I watched the 1988 cult classic Elvira Mistress of the Dark as my first movie of 2025.
Okay, so you might remember me commenting in the last part of the series, that the movie has a ton of drama and that I really hoped my life this year was drama free. You're not going to believe this, but like any good movie plot...or bad movie plot for that matter...the first month of 2025 was nothing but problems. My brother-in-law ended up in the hospital twice, one of my uncles had triple bypass surgery and another of my uncles found out he has cancer. Add on top of that, my mom had moved due to health reasons just before the new year, and my sister and I had to spend the entire month packing up her apartment. So drama.
I consider that a parallel right there. Next thing that parallels.
In the movie, Elvira gets an inheritance. With my mom's move my sister and I got some of the stuff that would have been an inheritance. I got two bookcases and the stack of cookbooks that came with it. Remind you of anything? For those who have seen the movie Elvira Mistress of the Dark, she gets a house with furniture, a dog and what she thinks is a plain old family cookbook. And of course, has issues with her Uncle.
Okay, so no house. No dog either. But, I did get a stack of something like fifteen old cookbooks and a few handwritten recipes cards. Nothing supernatural but still. I can't deny that is a parallel.
So what else goes on in the movie? She travels, performs live twice - once at the middle of the movie and once at the end. She also gets a new love interest about midway through and makes a ton of new friends/admirers along the way. These positive things are what I hope the rest of the year has instore for me.
Don't forget that I'm doing another one of my One Movie a Day Challenges over on my Letterboxd. And this would be the point where I tell you what I liked most this month of the movies I have seen so far this year. Clearly, Elvira Mistress of the Dark is one of the movies I liked the most, I finally saw the remake of The Crow and thought it was good. It suffered for the editing. I feel if they had removed the first 30 minutes and used snippets of that first 30 minutes in flashbacks it would have been a much stronger movie. And Saturday Night. As someone who actually grew up in the decade that Saturday Night Live was considered edgy and rebellious I thought they really managed to nail the vibe of the characters/actors. The scene where the actor playing Chevy Chase knocking on the door saying "candygram" had me in stitches; as the old skit "candygram...landshark" was always a favourite of mine.
And my biggest disappointment that I watched this month is Love off the Page. It's one of those Hallmark style rip offs that just didn't work. The story had so much potential but somehow fails. The idea is that a writer ends up reading this romance and then her real life becomes a mirror of it. But, you don't know when she's suppose to be dreaming, reading or what? The core idea is there, the way they actually shot and edited it is not.
I'll be back next month with the next report.
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