— छह हज़ार एक सौ —
We had eleven people for Action Movie Night last night, although I'm only going to call Greg an "honorable mention" for the purposes of my Social Review—he only arrived right as the movie was starting, so I barely caught a glimpse of him all evening.
Shobhit and I brought our latest box of Costco spring rolls as our food contribution. They tend to go pretty easily, although surprisingly not nearly as much as the pasta we brought two weeks ago. I wound up eating way too many of them myself as a result. They are "mini," but still, I must have eaten 15 of them. And I had two slices of the pesto pizza someone else brought, which was really delicious. And one of the chocolate chip cookies. I ate way too much is what I'm saying. This was all on top of the rum-and-Cherry-Zevia-Cola I brought as my drink.
Shobhit didn't have time to work on dinner this time, as he had a Zoom meeting between 5:00 and 6:00, and then we barely had time after that for me to record a video audition for him. He did have the spring rolls already opened and set out all over the cookie sheet for putting in the oven by the time I got home, even though I didn't need to put them in the oven until shortly after 5:30.
Anyway, those in attendance this week included Tony, Jake, Ryan, Ben, a guy named Brian from Ben's work that he brought along, Chris B, Derek, Daniel, Greg, Shobhit, and myself. Once again there were only three empty seats in the 14-seat theater.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ —
— छह हज़ार एक सौ —
There was no need to use Andrew's portable projector—and he didn't make it this week anyway—but, Tony still had to go upstairs and get his own DVD player.
The projector is finally installed, and Tony had gotten an email from Alan, the building manager, saying everything was good to go! I asked Tony shortly after we got down there to the kitchen for the potluck portion of the evening if he had operated the machine yet, and he was like: "That's a good point." He and Ben, whose movie choice it was this week, went in there—and several minutes later they came back out, saying they could not get the DVD player to work. He wouldn't try to fix it either, as Alan has been so adamant about none of the components being touched, after how often the old projector broke due to, at least as Alan clearly assumed, residents fucking with it. But, the new projector works fine, and once Tony connected his DVD player to it, the movie played fine too.
The projector is a fascinating thing to me, as it no longer hangs from the ceiling—it's on the wooden cabinet right below the screen, and it projects up onto the screen at an angle. But, the picture looks totally fine. A couple of times there was an odd sort of ripple in the image and I wondered whether that had something to do with the projection, but otherwise the picture looked better than ever; Alan did note that it's now all 4K, so that's cool.
My only concern is the DVD player, and the plan Alexia and I just made for a double feature in there on November 1. My plan is to get DVDs from the library, and I just hope the DVD player gets figured out by then. We're going to watch the two-part miniseries that started the
Battlestar Galactica series in 2003, and I can watch it on Pluto in a pinch, but in that scenario we'll have to sit through commercials.
Anyway, Ben's movie choice was actually an unusually good one (not that unusual for Ben, who has pretty good taste, but kind of unusual for the group):
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which I had not seen since its original theatrical release in 2003.
This was also longer than a lot of movies we watch at Action Movie Night, clocking at 138 minutes, so we started shortly after 7:00. Daniel had barely gotten the Trader Joe's chicken casserole he brought out of the microwave when we all went into the theater. He said, "I guess we're starting early"—and I don't think anyone ate any of that. He also later left the theater to go into the kitchen, grab his two huge bags, and bring them back into the theater with him. Why the fuck does he carry all that shit around with him everywhere, anyway? Granted, I don't know specifically what his living situation is, but I know he goes to movies probably even more often than I do.
I did enjoy the movie, though, even if I won't likely feel any particularly compulsion to watch it again for another 23 years or so.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ —
[posted 12:35pm]
