peep*blog

Sally and I watched The Other Boleyn Girl last night with very high expectations of it being terrible. And it was. Awesomely so. But, that’s not really the point of this post. I’m not gonna get into what a weirdo hypocrite Mary was (seriously, what was up with her wanting absolutely nothing to do with the King and being terrified to have to go to his room and then all he does is say, “Hey, I was a younger sibling also,” and she’s immediately in love with him??) or how creepy and useless their father was, or how Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman’s accents made them sound like they grew up in completely different parts of England even though they were sisters, oh, OR the fact that they used the WORD “sister” about 200,000 times throughout the movie, or the fact that Mary would have taken Elizabeth and raised her, like, wtf was that anyway, or the fact that we’re supposed to believe that Henry was still pining after MARY for years which is so untrue, like, I SAW the first couple of episodes of the Tudors, okay?

I’m not gonna talk about it at all. I do, however, want to bring up a very important subject that was raised in this movie: stalker cam.

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I want you to have a point of reference, so the following pictures are of Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey:

Okay?

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Sally and I watched a Lifetime movie last night called Don’t Cry Now. I won’t even bother going into the entirety of the plot, since it wasn’t anything too exciting (a woman finds out her stepdaughter is trying to kill her because she’s nuts and wants her father back all to herself, basically). But, there were these two things that happened in the movie that were just too incredible to let go.

Jason Priestly played the woman’s brother. There was some bad blood between them (he had been in jail for three years for conspiracy to commit murder, and he also was tight with their father who she had some unresolved issues with - issues which, incidentally, had nothing to do with her, quite frankly) and after her husband’s ex-wife is murdered (by the stepdaughter herself, it turns out - explained in a reveal that wasn’t ever really revealed and had to basically just be guessed at by us) she’s convinced that JPriest did it. I don’t really know why, since it doesn’t seem that he would have known this woman at all, and clearly would have no motive to kill her.

Anyway, the woman is pretty heinous to her brother and is suspicious of him and nasty and basically trying to catch him in any lie or criminal act that could give her cause to call the police and have him arrested again. (It turns out that he’s actually a cop, and the whole jail thing was a fake out so that he could become undercover vice without anyone knowing.) So, she goes to his house and sneaks into his bedroom and starts rifling through his drawers. She eventually finds a gun, but before that, she pulls out a box of something called Interceptors. The box is ginormous, and she sort of stares at it for about ten seconds before putting it back. There were a lot of scenes of this woman just having long, pointed reaction shots to things that weren’t in any way related to the plot. And these Interceptors? So not related to the plot.

Maybe she was surprised that he had a box of condoms in his room since he only recently got out of jail, but it didn’t seem that strange to me even before the “I was never in jail” reveal, considering this house belongs to him and did before he left for “prison.” And, he’s a guy. Condoms in his bedroom? Weird, right??? No, that’s what I thought.

The fact that he had a 48-pack was kind of bizarre, true, but honestly, that wasn’t the strangest thing about the Interceptors. The weird part was (and I don’t know if this is why the reaction shot was so long, because if it is, this movie instantly became awesome) that the economy sized box of Interceptors proudly displayed the phrase “Extra-Large.”

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And the second thing about this movie that was weird: the woman was being poisoned by her stepdaughter unbeknownst to her and, since she had been feeling a little flu-ish and had seen a bit of blood in her saliva one day, she decided to stop by the doctor’s office. She had also, unfortunately, just realized her husband (Joe from 90210! what would Donna think?) might be having an affair with his co-anchor at the tv station (incidentally, he was having an affair, but it was with her best friend - surprise!). Her husband and this anchor woman, btw, both being in perfectly normal-seeming health. And the woman having only had a little bit of acheyness and some nausea one night and a little bit of blood in her spit when she brushed her teeth in the PAST WEEK (symptoms the stepdaughter also displayed herself in the past week), asks the doctor to perform an AIDS test.

An AIDS test! And then she brings it up again when she talks to her best friend about her suspicions about her husband’s cheating on her. An AIDS test! And THEN, when the doctor calls to tell her she’s being poisoned, the first thing she asks is, “Are the AIDS test results back?” The doctor, of course, quickly dismisses the negative result because she’s being POISONED!

And it’s not like she didn’t know that someone was out to get her. She had received an ominous warning from the husband’s ex-wife just before she was killed, so she knew she was in danger. But, of AIDS???

There was also a pretty great scene where she walks in on her husband and her best friend in bed, but without being able to capture her husband’s totally stoked face pre-noticing his wife in the room and subsequent “who is this woman on top of me?” face post-noticing his wife in the room, it just wouldn’t be fair to tease you. Sorry for doing it anyway.

When I was around 12, I used to have these epic Uno tournaments with my friend Meghan. We would play for hours and we would have single games that went through two or three reshufflings of the deck because we just couldn’t get down to zero cards. We even combined both of our Uno decks several times to make a gigantic draw pile. We were nerds.

But, anyway, we never played with anyone else. It was always me playing Meghan and that was it. I imagine I played my brother or sister or Dad once or twice, but Uno was really this showdown between us two. We were besties, but we fought all the time, and constantly accused each other of cheating and Uno was a real war. We would relish drawing forty cards and having a huge hand full of non-number cards. It’s a much better game when you play against one person, because every single non-number, non-regular-wild card means you get an automatic second turn. We would pile up all these cards and act all sad like we were losing and then go on this super bitchy rant, slapping down cards. “Reverse you, go back to me; skips you, goes back to me; draw four, goes back to me; draw two, goes back to me.”

She still lives across the street from me, but I haven’t actually conversed with her in probably three or four years. We just never cross paths, which is kind of weird. But, I still remember exactly how her room looked back then and how we couldn’t listen to music while we were playing and how playing Uno was something which was Very Serious for us. I’ve played Uno since, obvs, but it’s never the same. Games don’t last that long and there’s never anything at stake (like the fact that you get bragging rights for a week after the game is over, which was how long it took for the loser to stop sulking and trying to convince everyone that cheating had so obviously occurred).

My dad’s work was having some kind of company picnic sort of thing a couple of weeks ago, and they were playing games. He was even sent home with some, one of which was a card game called Rats. It’s kind of the opposite of Uno (you want to end up with all the cards instead of none), with absolutely no strategy. Like bizarro Uno mixed with war.

It sucks when you lose at a game that takes real strategy. It sucks even more when you lose several times in a row in a game that is completely based on luck. Because, then, well, you’re not a bad card player. You’re just a natural loser. I lost twice in a row at this game tonight with Sal.

But, then we decided to play one more game before going to bed. One more game which lasted over half an hour and literally drew blood at one point (the result of an attempt to snatch up extra cards gone terribly awry). Uno 2.0? Maybe not. But, all I’m saying is, I won that last epic game, and I’m going to be talking about it until Sally finally asks for a rematch.

My friend Carly wrote me an e-mail the other day that contained only the subject heading “OMG YOU GUYS” and the following url: undressedtv.com

I can understand the brevity because as soon as I clicked on it and found out what it was, there weren’t really words. Someone is uploading all of the episodes of Undressed from, I’m assuming, their old VHS tape collection (since it’s not out on DVD). They currently have Season 1 up, which I’ve been watching over the past few days.

If you never saw it, then Undressed was this horribly acted show on MTV that was all about sex and who was having it and how. Perhaps their first live action scripted series, but I’m not sure about that. It had three or four vignettes going at once in each episode, running sort of like a soap opera, and each story arc would only last a few episodes each. Characters would drift between vignettes, too, so the main character from one would become the sister of the main character of another a month later.

It’s one of those ensemble cast shows where, for years after it ended, you’d find yourself going, “Don’t I know that guy from somewhere?” in reference to every day actor in a bit part in every tv show or made for tv movie you’d ever see. And the answer almost always came back to, “Wait, wasn’t he that guy that liked that other guy and then had sex in the laundry room with him on Undressed?”

Undressed came out in 1999, which was my senior year of high school, and since almost every other show that dealt with high school life that came out either before or during my high school years (Saved by the Bell, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy) were so beyond different from reality (except for Daria, whose two characters Daria and Jane were EERILY similar, both in personality and in their relationship to each other, to my friend Laura and me) that I just didn’t expect any portrayal of high school to be true to life, I didn’t think of the high school-age characters’ story arcs in Undressed as anything other than fiction. The stories that followed post-college adults? Whatever. They were old.

It was the college-aged kids that got me. I was headed for college in a year and I defy any 1982-born college-bound teenager watching that show for the first time to not have had the thought, “So, wait, are people REALLY gonna be having sex in the laundry room all the time, because that’s, like, where I’m gonna want to clean stuff.” And the first time I saw NYU’s Hayden dorm’s laundry room, I had two reactions: 1) Wow, it’s a LOT dirtier in here than it is on Undressed. And 2) Why is that guy looking at me like that? I’ve gotta get out of here.

The funniest part about watching Undressed now is how innocent it seems. Kiki, the promiscuous blonde (who’s in a monogamous relationship when the show starts, so I don’t really get the whole promiscuous tip) gives her nerdy roommate a vibrator as a gift so she could stop being so uptight and when Gina’s unable to get off by fantasizing about the disgusting male models in a Playgirl-style magazine, she assumes that Gina’s a lesbian and gives Gina a little peek at her GIANT SATIN GRANNY PANTIES. Hot.

Katie and Dave are having problems in their relationship, so they try sleeping with other people (in their tiny one-bedroom apartment). When Dave’s prospect comes out of the living room and tries to seduce Katie by talking about her “other” “down there” piercing, Katie’s first reaction is, “Wow, I could never let a guy do that to me.” The other girl says, “It wasn’t a guy…” And there’s this whole beat where I guess you’re supposed to be all, “Ohhhhhhhhh, she’s bi! And now THESE two are gonna have sex!” And that may be what I thought way back when, but as I’m watching the show now, I’m like, “So, what, she didn’t think that there are female piercers?”

It’s not like I didn’t know anything about sex back then, either. I knew the basics and I watched Real Sex on HBO (not regularly, obvs, but when I was with a bunch of friends and we were all just trying to act older than we were while simultaneously trying to gross each other out), so I knew about some of the creepier kinds of sex out there, but I guess it was just the proximity to my own college years that made this show make me think that this is what my life was going to be like: mildly unattractive people just constantly trying to hook up with each other and using really cheesy innuendos and metaphors to get their points across (like “eager beavers” and “raincoats”). Oh, and every straight person is going to think at some point that they’re gay.

The other day when I called my friend Mike to tell him about this website, he started watching an episode and said that, despite our degrees from NYU, we had never really been to college, or, at least, the college that we thought we were going to go to from watching Undressed. Which, I have to say, re-watching Undressed, though it has been awesome, has made me really really glad that, if that WAS college, I missed out.

Who knows how long this site will be online, since studios are so quick to scream copyright infringement lately. For now, though, I’m really enjoying remembering what life was like before I was ever independent and before I ever knew anything about anything.

So, Sally and I have been watching the BBC show Robin Hood. I mean, big surprise there. But, anyway, we wouldn’t have even heard about it except for the fact that this guy Richard Armitage is one of the stars, and he was in this movie North and South which we watch all. the. time.

But, anway, so Richard Armitage in North and South is this completely moral, decent, upstanding citizen who is misunderstood by the woman he’s interested in, who incorrectly pegs him as an immoral, heartless, evil mill owner who hates his employees. But, she eventually (over a series of super embarrassing encounters that make her realize what a jerk she’s been and a lot of over-dramatics from RA’s character) sees that she’s wrong, and they get together, the end. I mean, I’m making it sound like a shitty movie, but seriously, Sally and I watch it probably more than 6 times a year and it’s over four hours long.

So, anyway, in Robin Hood, he plays this character Sir Guy, and he’s the bad guy to Robin Hood’s good guy, so of course there are TONS of people who pull for him, because who doesn’t pull for the bad guy, right? And normally I would agree. And, add in RA’s own special brand of awkwardness that he brings to the role (he’s kind of stalker-obsessed with Lady Marian, who hates him, and he gets really flustered whenever he goes to talk to her), you’ve got, like, the perfect new pretend husband for me, right?
Except, he’s making it really hard to know what to think, because he’s all fluttery-eyed when Marian walks in the room half-dressed and he’s saving nuns and he appears to have some moral compass when his mentor the Sheriff is at his worst. But, then, I mean … the guy’s hiring slaves and killing fathers and leaving his own baby to die in the woods and wearing eyeliner and head to toe leather, which I realize is a plus for a lot of people, but, I mean … a head to toe, completely leather outfit? Really? It’s got a sleeveless duster with an attached capelet. It does! And this bizarre kind of piping all over the sleeves. Just look at it for yourself.

Oh, wait, did I mention the popped collar?

What does one think about this guy? Okay, well, Sally and I just sort of sit there and giggle uncontrollably because, without going to that cartoonish, scene-chewing place that the Sheriff goes to, he’s the goofiest bad guy ever.

In the bonus section on the dvd for The Skulls is one of those on-the-set documentaries about the movie where they interviewed Josh Jackson and Paul Walker and the director about how this was one of the most important movies of the 20th century (or something to that affect). Of course, in the interviews with JJack and Leslie Bibb and Hill Harper, they’re very serious about their Craft and the Script and the Direction and how it was important to them to Dive into their Characters. The director also goes into a lot of detail about how the movie is so important because it gives a good message to young people (no lie: he thinks that the movie’s message is that you can risk everything to get back your soul and he goes into this whole Faust analogy which included a lot of nervous giggling… point being that he at least thought that this movie was better quality than the average teen movie, and I’m not gonna argue with him, because I don’t enjoy arguing with people who are delusional). Anyway, Paul Walker’s interviews are, of course, a little more Paul Walker, where he gives off his typical Paul Walker impression of, “This is… the movie… I can’t remember the name of it, does anyone remember? I did this movie, is the thing. And I played a character.” He just seems very uninvolved.
But, as deep as my love for Josh Jackson runs, I have to say that the thing about The Skulls that keeps me watching it over and over is PWalk’s Caleb Mandrake. I mean, there’s nothing better in this movie, I’m sorry. Did you want a list? That can be arranged: The 15 Reasons Paul Walker’s Performance Makes the Movie

15. He Has an Amazing Shooting Face

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Review forthcoming. Answers will be provided.

Surprisingly enough, there’s actually a business attached to this blog, despite the fact that we talk about it extremely rarely. When we started the blog, we figured that happenings and goings on at the business, or maybe shout outs to other indie businesses, would be the main focus. But, the thing is… There are so many blogs out there that talk about the cool stuff you can buy (whether it’s indie or not), and we didn’t want to compete with them. And as for chronicling the business thing, there just isn’t enough new and different to talk about. While owning a business is really super exciting (honestly, I’m not being sarcastic) and we love every bit of it, it’s actually just kind of like a regular job. In that, it’s not that exciting if you’re not the one doing the work, I guess. So, that’s why all of the posts have to do with movies and tv and books and stuff, because that stuff is interesting to us and, we think, interesting to the people that stumble onto our blog. Or, more interesting, anyway, than chronicling trips to the UPS store to drop off packages or ordering new yarn online or something.
But, the thing is, we do run a business, and we have been running it for the last almost four years now, and we love it possibly in an equal amount to how much we love pointing out gnarly clothes from old movies. So, anyway, since we hardly ever even mention Peep Accessories in any substantial way, I figured I would take you on a little tour of the factory and let you see how things work around here.
This way, to Peep Accessories…

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