How did you spend your Labor Day? Out and about, getting in a last-minute summer BBQ, or visiting somewhere out of town?
My best friend, my girlfriend, and myself wound up having a semi-impromptu film festival. Suffering with merely a 46-inch screen, we relived such classics as John Carpenter’s The Thing and The Fog, Constantine (which brought up the question: does a male or female actor makes for a more convincing sexless/androgynous angel?), the original Child’s Play and the first Saw film (in prep for this year’s Halloween Horror Nights), Silent Hill , two short films (featuring actor Doug Bradley) called “On Edge” and “Red Lines,” and a bizarre film called La lengua asesina (The Killer Tongue) featuring Doug Bradley again, Robert Englund, and a very young Jonathan Rhys Meyers (before he became King Henry on HBO’s “The Tudors”).
And a good time was had by all…!
Kevin A. Ranson : ThinkingSkull.com 
It was a blast to see those movies, especially “Thing” and “Fog”, and I enjoyed sharing the insanity that is “Killer Tongue”. An impromptu horror film fest beats a BBQ anyday for me! Plus, “The Fog” actually got me spooked, proving that creepy atmospherics will beat gory torture films any day.
Now about those androgynous angels … yeah, a “pretty” androgynous man would have worked better for me in “Constantine” for Gabriel. The casting director may have thought different, but all I could think was, “Why is Gabriel a chick?”
Here’s a twisted thought for you: does evil make one masculine? If the casting director really wanted to defend their choice for Gabriel, why was the devil so utterly MALE? Lucifer was once just like Gabriel, in fact he was the most beautiful of the angels (his name meant “Light Bringer”, I believe). The actor playing the devil was awesome, best character in the film for me, but if you follow the Gabriel logic, the devil should have also been played by a woman.
I find it interesting that “good” was seen as feminine and “evil” was portrayed as masculine. Generally, Catholicism and many other sects prefer to see woman as evil, not man. I’ll file this under, “Things that make you go, ‘Hmmm….'”
Never mind that they were taking Gabriel utterly out of “Biblical canon” and making him behave more like the devil. At least they got him smacked down for it, though Gabriel and Michael would be the last arch angels to disobey God. In any event, the film was a bit nonsensical while pretending it made sense, and if it weren’t for the guy playing the devil, I’d have given it pretty low marks. It gets a B- solely for his sake (better than a D by far).