I set the alarm for 8 AM. I closed my eye for one minute...and the next thing I knew, it was 9:30. Oh well, at least I wasn't working until 1. I still had some time for breakfast and to give the kitchen a desperately-needed cleaning. It was almost as bad as the bathroom. The sink was really grimy, and the counter was a mess. I still need to vacuum.
Had just enough time to watch The Last Starfighter while I cleaned. Alex (Lance Guest) lives in a trailer park with his mother and brother. He'd rather be doing anything but fixing his neighbors' problems, but he's had a hard time getting a loan for college. His favorite thing in the world is playing the "Last Starfighter" arcade game at the trailer park's convenience store. It's a really big deal at the trailer park when he beats the high score...and they aren't the only ones who're impressed. An alien named Centauri (Robert Preston) shows up to whisk the boy into space, where he discovers the game was really a recruiting pilots to fight in an intergalactic war. Now, while he and his kind alien co-pilot does his best to help, he has to defeat the evil Xur, while his robot double on Earth (also Guest) tries to make time with his girlfriend (Catherine Mary Stewart).
It's too bad this one showed up just as the video/arcade game industry in the US was imploding. (In fact, there was supposed to have been a real game based after this, but it was canceled in the wake of the Great Video Game Crash.) This is actually a really fun and unique tale of what happens when one gamer's dream comes true...in a way he never believed possible. Preston in particular is a delight as the roguish alien recruiter, and Guest does surprisingly well as both the confused everykid and the robot trying to learn to be human. While the CGI effects in space are mostly dated now, they were state-of-the-art at the time, and some still look pretty good. If you're a sci-fi fan looking for something a little different, this is a long-time favorite of mine that really deserves to be better-known.
The movie ended and I finished the kitchen just in time to rush off to work. The hurry wasn't necessary. It was a warm, partly cloudy day, and we were dead for a great deal of it. It did pick up during rush hour, thanks to the clouds moving in. I'm wondering if a lot of people went away for Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend once it started to get warm. At any rate, other than some annoying customers, there were no major problems, and I was in and out.
Oh, and I got my schedule. In bad news, same amount of hours as last week...which is to say, nothing resembling enough. In good news, three days off in a row, from Monday through Wednesday, and next Saturday is the only really late day. In fact, I have a few early days for the first time in weeks. While more hours would have been nice, this will give me a chance to catch up on things after I lost time to being sick this week.
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