Everything goes better with cold medicine

Being sick has forced me to spend a lot of time curled up on my beloved love seat (how can anything be so comfy and yet so very ugly?) watching movies. I've been working my way through DVDs that i own, but haven't watched, in alphabetical order (you know me), leading to the unholy double-feature of Barbarella: Queen of the Universe and Batman: The Movie. Holy hallucinations, Batman, feverish and on cold medicine is NOT the frame of mind one should be in for these movies - or else it is PRECISELY the frame of mind you should be in for these movies! I can't remember when i last saw Batman, but the only things i remembered were Lee Merriweather as Catwoman and the "Bat Shark Repellent Spray" scene. Maybe it was the fever, but man i loved this movie. With lines like, "The sum of the angles of that rectangle are too monstrous to contemplate" and "... a submarine filled with human jetsam," how can you go wrong? From crash landing the Batcopter at a Foam Rubber Wholesalers Convention that Batman thought he "saw from the corner of my eye" to a dastardly plot involving a giant Jack in the Box and an exploding octopus i thought i was going to laugh myself silly. Plus, this movie has shown me what i want for my birthday: please, please, please, won't someone get me a post-war surplus, pre-Atomic submarine retrofitted to look like a swimming penguin, complete with rear flapping flippers, pleeeeeeeeease? Of course the non-stop hilarity of Batman was a much needed remedy for the ... uhhh... spectacle that is Barbarella : Queen of the Universe. Wow. I originally saw this movie in the mid-80s for an urgent and incredibly important reason: this is the movie from which Duran Duran chose their name! So it has been 20 years since i witnessed Barbarella. Wow. What was with the 60s? Wow. That's some movie. It's very... let's go with, subtle. If i read the multi-layered subtext correctly, war is bad, sex is good and there should always be huge screens of bubbling-ooze effects (were those ever cutting-edge?) to gaze at when high, my pretty-pretty. Don't get me wrong, this movie was fun and funny, but i think probably unintentionally so. I laughed at the sheer incredulousness (is that a word?) of it all - beds shaped like women, hookahs with men swimming in them, attack dolls (they were actually scary), attack parakeets (parakeets, people?), attack orgasm-pianos (never thought i'd have a reason to use that phrase), pure liquid evil and a nymphomaniac tyrant queen whose crown is a giant horn. Like I said, subtle. It was suppose to be over-the-top like a comic book, but, wow. I've never seen danger so unsuspenseful and sex so unerotic. I do have to give Barbarella this, the effects may have sucked, but at least it was visually vibrant and interesting. Plus great costumes; i love color-coordinated boots! The experience does leave me with one burning question, though : how could anyone take Jane Fonda seriously about anything after this?