journal features

movie review - Rocky Horror Picture Show

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1998.03.07

Thanks to a friend, I now own a copy of this video. I first saw it in high school with a gang that went downtown (no way was this thing showing in suburban Calgary in the '80s), and it's got a special place in my heart (the place for off-the-wall cult flicks). The entire insanity of a movie made to lovingly send up '50s sci-fi and the indulgent '60s and '70s. Perfect!

There are actually two movies here; the movie the crew and cast made, and the movie they intended to be experienced, with maybe 20% of the lines supplied by a raucous audience. It's got great music, a superb cast, fourth-wall breaks, the odd murder to set the tone, and an inevitability despite the crowd warning one character, "You'd better make it good, you got shot the last time I watched this." I mean it all comes off without being too self-referential, somehow.

Underlying it all is a pretty straightforward message that is explicitly stated: "don't dream it, be it". The villain in the story lived that motto to excess of course, and he certainly dragged his um crewmates into that excess as well. But in showing the repressed Brad and Janet who they are, he puts them on a path to "being it" that they never would have found on their own. I envy them, and salute him.

How do you do

So, here's to everyone that ever danced the Time Warp solo on the deck of a ship. Hmm; it might be time for another tattoo.

A favorite. Strongly recommended. Tim Curry is a genius.

rand()m quote

Society is indeed a contract... [the state] is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

—Edmund Burke