I’ve written about writer/director/producer Sean Abley’s Socket movie here before, when it first hit the festival circuit. Now the movie is out on DVD and available from TLA Video. TLA Releasing put out Socket and the TLA media empire is descended from the Theatre of the Living Arts experimental theatre group in 60’s Philadelphia.
A couple of days ago, Sean Abley and a couple hundred of his closest friends got together at MJ’s Bar in Silverlake to celebrate the release of Socket on DVD. The event was hosted by promoter Jovy Janolo and producers John Carrozza, Doug Prinzivalli, Matt Mishkoff, and of course Sean himself. The VIP goodie bags included an interesting-looking DVD of a spooky movie called Amnesia, a coupon for a discount on TLA releases, and a pass for thirty free minutes of VOD which promise to “put the HARD back in hardcore DVD.” Blue Blood’s Forrest Black had the honor of receiving the final goodie bag of the night. The doorman apologized to me and told me he guessed I’d be re-gifting because the stuff in there was for, you know, jacking off. I was expecting the DVD and such to be more like what I would get at a regular business convention for web professionals, but TLA in general and Socket and Amnesia in specific appear to be for the purposes of movie movies and not jack off vids. Then again, I couldn’t get the VOD site to load, so maybe my tender sensibilities would have been scalded. Oh, and I’m a chick, so I guess I’m expected to care whether fictional characters romance and fuck exactly who I would personally want and be able to romance and fuck. …
I know some science fiction fans get peeved when SF movies have overly traditionally attractive people in them. Then again, some science fiction fans found the captain in that Serenity thing attractive, so there is no accounting for some people’s taste. Ew. Anyway, The Fifth Element is one of my favorite movies, mostly because I’m a big Luc Besson fan and nobody does exhausted-but-toughing-it-out like Bruce Willis, but, while perhaps not my own personal perfect woman, Milla Jovovich was just fine there too. And she looks mighty badass fine in the trailers for Resident Evil 3 aka Resident Evil: Extinction. And she is playing opposite Oded Fehr, who was the terrifying genius mastermind on Sleeper Cell. I’m not really down with the Vegas being all destroyed though. I love Vegas. Aesthetically, the movie looks like a more Western-styled Mad Max via Maxim or FHM. Check out the trailer to see what I mean.
The tagline slogans for this flick are all pretty entertaining across the board:
1. A zombie needs only one thing . . . the living.
2. All bets are off.
3. Experimentation. Evolution. Extinction.
4. This fall all bets are off.
5. We have witnessed the beginning. We have seen the apocalypse. Now we face extinction.
6. What happens in Vegas . . . stays in Vegas.
As all of my friends know, what happens in Vegas only stays in Vegas if we don’t take photos and then post the pictures online.
Harlan Ellison was going to be doing some sort of screening and question and answer session tonight. I realized that it had been about a decade since I read anything by Ellison, meaning I pretty much stopped reading his work when I came out to the West Coast. Although books are a serious vice of mine, Angelenos do not tend to be big readers and this makes it easy to just sort of not think of some writers I once would have been hyper-aware of.
At any rate, some friends and I went to see a sort of documentary/promo piece for Harlan Ellison tonight. It was a potentially not quite final cut and of course it was a book event in Los Angeles. I was all fretting, when we arrived with only three minutes to spare, that it might be sold out. Oh yeah, book event in sunny Southern Cali. It was only about a quarter full, but the audience struck me as quite devout, despite Ellison heckling us all during the Q&A portion, comparing our relative silence to a boring Jackson Pollack painting or something. I don’t recall the exact analogy, but, even though it did not quite work for the situation, it still sounded fairly entertaining the way Ellison said it.
The movie had a lot of delightfully well-delivered lines and a few bright spots. Writer Neil Gaiman describes a telephone answering machine message where Ellison told Gaiman he was a dead man, that his house would be burned down, salt would be poured on the radioactive remains, etc. and finishes saying “call me” and Gaiman tells the story with surprisingly humorous delivery. Actor Robin Williams wanders in and out of the flick and of course it …
Although Socket will probably eventually appear under the Gay & Lesbian heading in my Netflix account, it is a straight up genre flick and the genre is psychological horror/dark SF. The basic storyline is surgeon gets hit by lightening. Cute intern in the hospital he is treated at hooks him up with a support group for people who develop cravings for electricity, after events like being struck by lightening. They start a romantic relationship and, of course, it being a spooky movie, everything goes horribly awry.
The surgeon’s cravings for electricity require a more and more powerful jolt for him to get his fix. He figures out how to implant sockets in his and his lover’s wrists. This leads to both a nifty vampire subtext and entertainingly blatant metaphors for things like meth and cocaine-fueled bathroom sex, which are the sorts of topics most amusingly approached in metaphor. The movie is partly a meditation on the nature of addiction, albeit perhaps a tongue-in-cheek meditation.
The best part of the film is indubitably Sean Abley’s masterful ear for simultaneously believable and humorous dialogue. The characters banter with one another in a lighthearted way which puts a smile on the viewer’s face and feels tremendously real, like they are actual sympathetic people you could know in real life. It is pretty rare that I see a movie where the …
I’ve written about writer/director/producer Sean Abley’s Socket movie here before, when it first hit the festival circuit. Now the movie is out on DVD and available from TLA Video. TLA Releasing put out Socket and the TLA media empire is descended from the Theatre of the Living Arts experimental theatre group in 60’s Philadelphia. 
