weekend movies

We have a theme happening here, albeit a weird one. Both of slept almost 12 hours last night. Well rested, we decided to try to find something to watch on the video on demand last night. After less than five minutes each of "Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd" and "Welcome to Mooseport" we almost gave up. Finally, at the very end of the listings, we saw something called "Wadd." It turned out to be "Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes." How is this a theme you ask?? Well, this morning we watched Wonderland. I guess they decided to show the documentary in conjunction with the "movie."

I quite enjoyed the documentary. I mean, I knew that John Holmes was a porn star (duh) and that he had a massive "endowment" and had died of AIDS. I even knew a little bit about the Wonderland Avenue murders but, not much. I had also seen "Boogie Nights" (Mark and I rented it and a bunch of movies with a DVD player on New Years Eve 1999 -- it was our introduction to DVD's) and I suspect that this documentary was born out of interest that "Boogie Nights" might have sparked. It was interesting to hear the interviews with his wife, his mistress Dawn and his manager Bill Amerson, amongst others, talk about their own personal relationships with John Holmes. Most fascinating to me was how each person seemed to know a different "John." What a class-A bull-shitter he must have been.

Now, I didn't have too many high expectations for "Wonderland." I saw that Val Kilmer was playing the John Holmes role and I thought that he would be too good-looking to be convincing. Overall, I thought that he was well suited to the part. I liked the pace of the film and while it was a little on the gory side, the story was interesting. It wasn't as good as the documentary but I didn't find it boring (considering we had just heard the story of the murders in a documentary last night). Surprisingly, Dylan McDermott was great as a scum-bag (I'm not a big fan of his). The whole cast was great actually. I wouldn't run out and rent it but if you're flicking and see it on tv sometime, stop. It's pretty good.

One thing that made me smile today: For the second day in a row, I got to sleep in. It was lovely!!