Movie Review: Other Halves (1984)
Other Halves (1984)
Director: John Laing
Runtime: 106 min
Dark Soup Rating: Obsessive-Compulsive Mashed Potatoes
Over the weekend I went to see Other Halves from New Zealand director John Laing. There is a lot to tell about this movie, so let me get right to it.
The outing started at home, where I was trying to find my shoes. I’m a firm believer in wearing shoes whenever you go to a public movie theater. I know that the paparazzi always prefers that I go either barefoot or in sandals, because then they can come up with funnier captions for their photos, but some days I just have to ignore their wishes and do whatever I think will work best.
But I just couldn’t find my shoes anywhere. Once I realized that I was having trouble finding them, I checked under the couch cushions, because lost things are always showing up under there. Unfortunately, all that was there were half-sucked lollipops, a day-old baguette, and small little flasks of black ink.
It was then that I realized that I would need to call in reinforcements if I was going to make it to see this movie.
I reached for my emergency phone, and when someone picked up on the other end, I immediatley stammered on about lollipops and shoes and moonbeams through the sunroof while driving on the beach at night. After I got all the important facts of my situation out and formally declared an emergency, the person on the other end told me that she couldn’t handle emergency shoe searches because she was just a trainee.
At this point I realized that getting someone else to help me was a pointless task, so I slammed down the phone — yes, slammed, I was angry and hungry at the way she let me declare an emergency without interrupting me to tell me that I could not do so via her ears — and tried to figure out some other plan.
Unfortunately, the shoes that I was looking for were my planning shoes.
This was not going well.
In anger and desperation I started taking hammers off of my tool shelf and smashing through the drywall with them. As I progressed from one side of the room to the other, confused little termites poked their heads through the fresh wall holes to watch what I was doing. Some of them sat their, mouths gaping open in amazement, for they had never seen anything like this before in their short, wood-filled lives. Some of the other termites were older, wiser, and glowing with experience, and they knew that I was someone who had lost his shoes, and this was not anything worth making a billboard about.
And, sure enough, I eventually smashed open the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom, and there were my shoes wedged in with the insulation and termites. They were now covered in drywall dust and termite puke — those little unexperienced buggers sure can’t hold their freshly eaten wood pulp when they get excited — but they were my shoes, and that’s what mattered.
I quickly slammed them onto my feet and proudly walked out of the house, shoe-footed and hotheaded and ready for a movie.
The movie wasn’t very good. What’s this New Zealand thing, is it different than Australia?
When I got home, I put up new bookshelves all over the place to cover up the holes in the wall. Then I glued books onto the shelves so that my visitors didn’t get the wrong idea and try to treat my house as a library. I was sick and tired of shouting at people to put down my books and leave, so I figured I might as well kill two birds with one bookshelf.
So, it all worked out in the end.