After work, I took the F train over to Park Slope in Brooklyn and had fun escaping from the aboveground Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street station, which resembles a haunted castle. I was on my way to Ned’s, who resembles Keith Haring1 and is the brother of a friend, Megan. In addition to the siblings and myself, Katie showed up. Until they left to go see Munich, some sub-letters of Ned’s from Amsterdam were hanging out, too: Antony, Rosa and their white yarn-haired dog, Max. Actually, Max didn’t go to the movie, instead staying with us and moping around for lack of attention after we stopped petting him.
After we determined Franny’s, one of the area’s most-lauded newish pizza joints, didn’t deliver, we pored over a flurry of takeout menus and settled on Aunt Suzie, Ned’s favorite Italian restaurant. My eggplant Parmigiana was rich and tasty! They were out of tiramisu (blast!) but the replacement cannoli were mighty good; Aunt Suzie doesn’t fill them until they’re ordered, so the shells stay nice and crisp.
We convened at Ned’s primarily to watch Trapped in The Closet, R&B musician R. Kelly’s “hip-hopera,” which began its deformed life as a music video, expanded to several and is now available in 12 “chapters” on DVD. It is the foresworn duty of Ned and Megan to promote Trapped in the Closet as the next so-bad-it’s-good Rocky Horror Picture Show-like cult classic. I think they’re on the right track; it’s already been mocked by South Park and Mad T.V. (“Trapped in the Cupboard”).
Man, is it ever bad. It’s like a poorly acted community theater play without dialogue, only R. Kelly’s monotonous describe-the-action song lyrics and the rare sound effect. He stretches a lot on these rhymes, pairing “Beretta” with “dresser” at one point, or when he can’t think of one, rhyming the same word. He also has trouble pronouncing the “th” in certain words, like “baffroom.” He plays the lead character, Sylvester, as well as “the narrator.” The plot, a convoluted tale of infidelity, is pitted with gaping holes, unlikely coincidences and a cast of characters that grows larger and more caricatured until it includes a woman named Bridget, which necessitates the rhyming inclusion of a midget and subsequent appearance thereof.
We decided we hadn’t enough punishment and watched the whole thing again with director’s commentary, which is R. Kelly sitting in a darkened room, smoking a cigar and watching his film on a widescreen. He turns around frequently to mug at the camera, explain what’s going on in a particular scene and why it’s genius, and talk about the “cliffhangers” that join the chapters, one of which involves a woman brandishing a spatula, which he speculates is a cliffhanger because it’s not a cliffhanger, an anti-cliffhanger, if you will. The whole mess culminates in a comment along the lines that “the whole world is trapped in a closet” and a threat that he will continue releasing Trapped in the Closet chapters until he is stopped.
We followed this up with the documentary Grizzly Man which is about Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the giant grizzlies of Alaska under the guise of protecting them, even though they live in a national park and exist in numbers great enough that it’s legal to hunt a certain percentage of them each year. Treadwell captures frequently amazing footage of the bears, particularly a scene of two of them rearing up and attacking each other on a beach, where they resemble extremely tall sumo wrestlers. But most of it is Timothy’s self-videotaped ruminations on himself and the bears, which he’s given cutsie names, and scenes of him getting really, really close to them and then acting surprised when they lash out. Not to ruin anything for you, but Treadwell and his girlfriend end up getting killed and eaten by a bear, their remains, collected from the ground and the euthanized bear’s stomach, filling four garbage bags. Idiots.
We agreed that if we would have been in high school, our assignment at this point would have been to compare and contrast the two movies, focusing on the narcissism of the protagonists. Instead, Katie, Megan and I took the F train home because it was like 3 a.m. at that point. Good times.
Aunt Suzie
- 247 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn (Between Carroll and Garfield Place)
- (718) 788-2868
- Meal 6 of 52: eggplant Parmigiana with salad ($11.90) and half a cannoli ($2.90 for whole cannoli).
1 Katie and I had each met Ned once before and I had mentioned to her earlier the Keith Haring comparison. She wasn’t in a position to agree or disagree because she didn’t know what Keith Haring looked like. Then, when we arrived at Ned’s apartment, what should he have hanging at the end of a hallway but a large, framed Keith Haring print. That still doesn’t help out Katie with what Keith Haring looks like, but maybe it suggests Ned is aware of the connection. I don’t know; I forgot to ask him. [back]