“You are a very handsome man.” — yesterday as part of that odd film series I mentioned in this post I ended up seeing the sometimes okay sometimes pretty damned draggy Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (they’re showing the fourth one in two weeks but the main organizer and host of the pre-movie dinners hates that one, so we’ll give it a miss). Went with a good mix of folks (I missed sitting next to Yen, who I knew would give her usual venting of brilliant spleen during anything that wasn’t entertaining enough, though she quite liked the film in the end).
But it wasn’t so much the film as the experience this time around, more gentle chat and random sharp comments during the screening, not to mention the somewhat failed attempt to try and do a pre-show trivia contest of some sort. The host was game for it but was somewhat foiled by the sheer lack of numbers in the theater — Wrath of Khan had a decent turnout but not this one — and the presence of three on-the-verge-of-teens dudes in the back, one of whom responded to a question about the hairs on Vulcan beards (or whatever the trivia question was supposed to be) with the quote I used to start this piece. I was sorta expecting that the entire screening would consist of little but snark, but once the film started it was all quiet back in their row. Maybe they were just really impatient to see 1984-pixelated computer displays on 23rd century ships.