I didn’t take this job to make friends, and believe me, I haven’t!

So my better half wanted to rent Twilight, and I didn’t want to watch it, but I figured, “Welllll, she did come to the hospital for me on forty separate days last summer, so I guess I could do this for her.” The film proved to be so entertaining that I was moved to say so on Facebook, whereupon I was openly mocked by my own cousin. Rather than fly out to Brooklyn to slap him around set him straight in person, I’m saving the brass knuckles frequent flier miles for later as I explain to y’all in tale-of-the-tape style

Why Twilight Was a Better Movie than The Dark Knight, aka The Steaming Pile

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT / STORYLINE:
Twilight presents us with Bella, a high school senior who splits from her mother and stepfather in Phoenix so she can move in with her father, whom she hasn’t seen in ages and who lives in a small town in Washington state. She meets Edward, who falls for her hard but can’t commit to her, seeing as how he’s a vampire and he’s liable to get overexcited and drink all her blood. (Same excuse my brother gives women to this day, come to think of it.) So the two men in Bella’s life want to care for and protect her, but they’re not quite sure how, and the general awkwardness between her, her parents, her new schoolmates, etc., makes you sympathize with the character and draws you into the film.

Steaming Pile gives us a guy who dresses up in black and talks funny (that’d be your hero there) and a guy who wears a jacket that clashes with his vest (that’d be your villain there). There’s a third guy who starts out good but then turns bad because half his face gets blown off and a woman dies. I think he should just be grateful he doesn’t bleed out through the open wound on his face but that’s just me.

ADVANTAGE: TWILIGHT

ACTION / SPECIAL EFFECTS
Twilight gives you some razzle-dazzle shots of the vampires scattering through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, scampering between treetops like six-foot-tall spider monkeys. (They can fly, these vampires can.) The highlight there was a memorable intramural vamp-versus-vamp baseball game which went a little something like this. There are some okay fight scenes where bodies get thrown about in the manner of Superman II, which is always nice. But probably the most impressive was a shot early on where a van spins out of control in the high school parking lot and is about to crush our Bella, but Edward swoops in out of nowhere and pushes the van away with one hand, leaving a gigantic dent in the side door. The shot gets maximum impact because it’s just the two actors and the near-fatal van, no CGI nonsense — it really looked like they both should’ve been killed. There’s that character development payoff again.

Steaming Pile gives you some combative car chases impressive in their waste of pyrotechnics, but it’s nothing that Doug Liman hasn’t done better twice in one decade with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity. Steaming Pile also gives you some fight scenes between Goodguy and Badguy which would probably be real exciting if you could see what was going on at all and figure out whom to root for.

ADVANTAGE: TWILIGHT

CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Twilight was filmed in the Pacific Northwest; loaded up with blues and greens, every shot looks invitingly rainy and cool.

Steaming Pile was filmed in the second circle of Hell, the better to hide the plot holes.

ADVANTAGE: TWILIGHT

ACTING:
Twilight has a bunch of unknowns putting in credible performances.

Steaming Pile has a bunch of overpaid fatcats picking up a paycheck.

Oh, okay, okay, we all love the Heath Ledger, and it’s really a shame that he was a jackass who continued to abuse drugs even after he became a father and who probably deserved to die young and alone taken from us too soon. That being the case, I don’t think anyone can give a fair assessment of his portrayal of Purplesuitbadguy just yet. In a few years people will be able to see the performance for what it was — the best part of the movie, but that ain’t sayin’ much.

ADVANTAGE AND WINNER BY TKO: TWILIGHT!! TWILIGHT UBER ALLES!! TWILIGHT FTW!!

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The price of regress

So yeah, it was about nine months ago when decided to purchase one of those trendy sub-notebooks that everybody was talking about. I settled on an HP 2133 8.9-inch Mini-Note, intending to use it for bloggin’ on the go. It ended up sitting in a box for a few months, but when we donated the second full-size family laptop a while back, it was time for Junior to get some exercise. Here is a short review of the product:

FAIL

Allow me to translate from picture into a thousand words. I found this thing so infuriating to use that I quickly sent it to a watery grave. I didn’t even take the time to ship it somewhere that would recycle its circuitry board, memory chips, et al. I threw it in the dumpster outside my apartment, and I hope that as its toxic chemicals eventually leak into the ground over a period of years, Mother Earth will come to feel a lump in her breast and sue H-P for giving her cancer.

Why so furious? I will start by making excuses like a battered spouse admitting that some of the fault in the relationship was mine. I’m nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses, and my hands sometimes tremble from all the exciting medication I take battling cancer. Between the Mini-Note’s smaller keyboard and the smaller screen, I found it extremely difficult to (a) write and (b) make sure that what I was writing wasn’t littered with embarrassing typos. “Days of lore” — I’ll never live it down.

The Mini-Note isn’t pretending to be big (there’s actually the word ‘mini’ in the name if you look closely), so if I had gone into a Best Buy and tried it out before buying, all of this could have been avoided. Of course, then I would have had to go into a Best Buy. And actually, I don’t think Best Buy sells it. Who else is around here, Circuit City? The Apple store is probably no good… Wait a minute, this wasn’t my fault, this was e-commerce’s fault! Jeff Bezos owes me $600 now!

I also lay plenty of blame on John Sculley for failing to license the Macintosh OS to different hardware manufacturers in the 1980s, allowing Bill Gates to market something called “Microsoft Windows.” I’ve heard of this beast and even tangled with it off and on back when I was still employed, but it’s been All Apple for me since 2003. Reuniting with my old nemesis I am aghast to see the state of him. My reaction is the same as when I first tried PCP — people really use this shit?

Turns out that Windows Vista is slow and unstable, much like Dick Cheney. Whenever I ran any app more taxing than WordPad the MiniNote would groan audibly from the strain, although it didn’t sound like a groan. It sounded like a million tiny demons typing at a million different keyboards, which is probably how the Vista OS was coded together, come to think. Something ain’t right with this software, because it does not play well with others. Take it somewhere with WiFi and watch how neurotic it acts: You have to give it a lot of time and attention and booze to have it connect. Your MacBook and your iPhone, they’re all like Hey we’re here, thanks for the vine.

The Mini-Note wouldn’t even connect to the laser printer I had, which is surprising when you consider they were both made by Hewlett-Packard. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that HP was headed up by someone who called Sarah Palin a “person of great accomplishment.” In hindsight my fervor for the HP sub-notebook should have been more subdued.

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Shootin’ rockets to the moon, kids growin’ up too soon

A partial listing of movies with adult themes that various adults allowed me to see back before I was an adult. We’ve talked about my mortality and my shitter on this blog, but in many ways this post is the most intimately revealing of all — you can look up the films on the imdb and figure out my real age.

First up, Lassiter, the film that turned Tom Selleck from a television joke into a bankable film star. My best friend and I were 13 when his mom took us to a matinee showing of the film, in which Selleck plays a dashing international cat burglar in 1939 London. The first place he burgles is fresh out of cats, but it does have a bored housewife who catches Lassiter in mid-rob and, naturally, disrobes. Six minutes in and there’s already a bare pair right up there, on the screen; couple minutes later Selleck is on top of a nude Jane Seymour. Just a few minutes after that and we get Lauren Hutton riding some guy and then stabbing him with an ice pick, Basic Instinct-style. I thought I might be misremembering that part, so in the interests of science I went to YouTube to check out the first reel. After my fifth viewing I began to think I may have given that “World’s Best Mom” mug to the wrong woman. Apologies, Mama DiBella.

But I can’t sell my own mom short. She did take me to see Flashdance when I was 12 — me and a couple of adolescent sisters who needed help developing insecurities about their bodies, I guess. Or maybe she was hoping the movie would inspire them to be dancers, or welders, I don’t know. What I do know is that she misheard a line from the Irene Cara title track: “Take your pants down and make it happen.” I says to her “Pay attention Mom — she hasn’t been wearing pants for the last hour and a half!”

And then there’s ol’ dad, he doesn’t get off scott free either. Took us all out for an afternoon of family entertainment when I was 12 — Risky Business. My overriding memory of this outing (passing even the generous servings of Rebecca DeMornay) was the moment when two of my sisters busted out an air-drum-solo to that Phil Collins song that plays when they “make love on a real train.” Must have taken hours of rehearsal time, I reckon. After the film Pop asked what I thought and I told him I gave it a boner thumbs up. He said “You were supposed to say you liked it but you didn’t understand it.”

If by “it” we mean “A laid-back parenting approach that lets a 13-year-old watch Purple Rain on cable,” then yes — I don’t quite understand it, but I liked it. Liked it very much indeed.

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Wrap it up, SON

Yeah, so, seeing as how important it is to see all the Oscar-nominated films and performances before the Oscars are awarded in a broadcast that’s an hour longer than it needs to be, I made it a point to rent a movie last night that’s an hour longer than it needs to be. Ladies and gentlemen, Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood presents Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie in a serious movie over here: CHANGELING.

There’s no “the” in the title. That’s how serious this movie is guys.

It’s based on a true story. Let me tell you that story over the phone: “Hey did you ever hear about this woman in the 20s whose kid went missing, and the police couldn’t find her kid, but then they found some other kid and tried to pass it off as hers? I know like she wouldn’t notice, right? I know, I know. Yeah, I think it turned out her kid had actually been abducted by a total stranger who killed him, him and a bunch of other kids I think. Oh it was totally crazy, she’d be like ‘This kid isn’t mine, he’s shorter’ and the police would be like ‘Well he hasn’t been eating right, of course he’s shorter.’ Oh dude.”

The kid’s shorter, and that telling of the story is shorter than Clint thinks it should be, by a factor of maybe 100. See ol’ man Eastwood is going to make sure you really “get it” by making you watch the same scene over and over again. That scene goes like this:

Jolie: That boy — he’s not my son!
LAPDude: Sure’n he’s your son Mrs. Collins! You’re just a wee bit confused is all!
Jolie: That boy — he’s not my son! My son wasn’t circumcised and this boy is!
LAPDude: B’gosh and b’gora Mrs. McCollins, you must have circumcised him in the middle of the night and forgot is all!
Jolie: That boy — he’s not my son!
LAPDude: Ya really want another gold statue, that’s what all this moanin’ is about, isn’t it Mrs. O’Collins?

Now do you understand why it was a bad thing that the 1920s LAPD pretended they’d found the missin’ lad? Just to be clear here — we’re talking about this woman’s son! That makes the film important in its own right, and you have to sympathize with the Angelina character whether you like it or not, or whether Clint takes the time to tell you anything about her or her son so that you would care if he went missing. When the cops give her the boy who’s not her son you’re almost like, Well, close enough.

I mean, there’s no question that the story is remarkable, but that doesn’t automatically translate into a film that’s compelling, or even interesting. It’s definitely not going to be interesting in the heavy hands of an anal-retentive director who has to relay every single development his research team ran across. She told the police he was too short. She told the police he was circumcised. She told the police his pediatrician didn’t recognize him. She told the police his teacher didn’t recognize him. She told the police he was black. Are you writing this down? There will be a quiz later if you’re still awake after the second act.

Second act — the story is moving forward! Because I’m pushing it!* We find out what actually happened to my son. The one honest cop in L.A. goes out on a hot tip about an illegal immigrant Canadian kid staying at a ranch in the middle of fucking nowhere. Driving there he runs across a stranded motorist who might as well be wearing a John Wayne Gacy t-shirt and carrying a blood-stained machete. Krazee Eyez Killa gives the cop directions to his ranch / kill room — accurate directions! Always with the self-sabotage, these child murderers. It’s sad, really.

Anyhow, cop finds the place, finds the Canadian alien kid, finds out that my son was one of the victims in Gordon Northcott’s chicken coop. (By the way, anyone else disturbed by the fact that Eastwood keeps filming nine-year-old kids trapped in underground lairs? First Mystic River and now this. If I were a parent in Malibu I would have my kids skip right past Chez Eastwood come Halowe’en.) In any event the case of the missing son is resolved and the movie’s over and we can go home, right?

Wrong! You still got forty minutes left!

I gave up. Eastwood wasn’t finished with me but I was finished with him. He can squint all he wants and act tough all he wants and cash pension checks from his stint as mayor of Carmel all he wants, but I’m still not taking him seriously. Call me when he goes back to being a sidekick for a wise-cracking orangutan.
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* (You’re pushing it all right — Ed.)
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That’s what she said

Anyone else in the mood to complain about what was happening four years ago?

——PRESENTING—–

21 GRAMS: ORIGINAL SHOOTING SCRIPT

STARRING:
Benicio Del Toro as “Born-Again Hothead”
Sean Penn as “Bad-Ass Mathematician”
and
Naomi Watts as “Peroxide Rich Bitch”

Interior:
BORN-AGAIN HOTHEAD (BAH): Jesus saves me $400 a month in car payments – I won this pickup truck at a church raffle.
LONG-SUFFERING PARTNER OF BAH: Yeah, well, I hope Jesus is gonna save our house now that you got fired from your job at the golf course.
BAH: Fffffff. That job didn’t fit my gritty ethos anyhow.
Mrs. BAH: Gritty or otherwise, it paid the rent. How are we supposed to live?
BAH: Trust in God. Listen, if He can get me through Excess Baggage, He can get us through this without breaking a sweat.
Mrs. BAH: I hope you’re right. I’m worried about our kids.
BAH: Is there a rod around?

Cut to:
BAD-ASS MATHEMATICIAN (BAM): Yecchh, I’m dyin’ ova heah. But look at me go, I’m on a respirator and I’m still sneakin’ a smoke in the bathroom. Heh heh heh, Phillip Morris has a friend in us bad-asses.
LONG-SUFFERING PARTNER OF BAM: Are you smoking again!? You’re going to kill yourself!!
BAM: Hey, how ya ’speck me to be a bad-ass if I don’t laugh in the face of death and support the tobacco companies?
Mrs. BAM: Your doctors said –
BAM: Hey, fuck the doctors. I’m from the streets, I don’t care about rules.
Mrs. BAM: How can you be a rebel from the streets and be a math professor at the same time?
BAM: I teach my kids the new math. Rules are there ain’t no theorems.

Cut to:
PEROXIDE RICH BITCH (PRB): My life is awesome. I got a big house. I got two blonde daughters. I got a husband who’s loaded. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades, etc.

Cut to: FLASHBACK! of PRB in $80,000 kitchen baking cake with daughters.
BLONDE KIDS: Yayyy, we’re making a cake in a kitchen, yayy!!
PRB: Yayyyy!! Daddy’s gonna love this!
BLONDE KIDS: Mommy, do you love Daddy?
PRB: More than liquor itself, kids!
BLONDE KIDS: Then how come you and daddy are never in the same scene together?
PRB: Scheduling conflicts.
BLONDE KIDS: Mommy, will you eat this cake with us?
PRB: I can’t – it’s got 21 GRAMS of fat.
BLONDE KIDS: Mommy, what is your deal? Are you like a soccer mom? Do you have a job? Where are you all day?? Why are we always with dad and not you? Are you getting a divorce? You’re acting like everything is so perfect but this whole set-up makes no fucking sense!!
PRB: That’s it, no more TV for you two.

Cut to:
Mrs. BAM: I love you, bad-ass math professor. I wanna take care of you. I wanna nurse you back to health. I wanna have your baby.
BAM: God, I hate you.

Cut to:
Mrs. BAH: Born-again hothead, what took you so long? You’re late for your own birthday party! Say something, you look more intense than ever!
BAH: Some serious shit went down. I just killed a man and his two little girls. And it’s killing me inside. Are you listening, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters!?
Mrs. BAH: You got in an accident with your God-given truck? Guess that makes you a real holy roller!
BAH: God, I hate you.
Mrs. BAH: Yeah, well, so what kind of car were they driving?
BAH: No car, they were walking and I ran them over.
Mrs. BAH: Come again?
BAH: They were walking across the street and I ran them over.
Mrs. BAH: You ran over three people at the same time?
BAH: Gritty enough for you?
Mrs. BAH: That doesn’t make any sense. How do you hit three people square on the nose in one blow? Were the two kids standing on the dad’s shoulders or something?
BAH: C’mon I’m trying to be intense over here.
Mrs. BAH: And why were they walking, anyway? This is America, people don’t walk twenty feet to the mall entrance if they can help it! Where did all this happen?
BAH: In the beautiful part of town where rich bitches and architects live.
Mrs. BAH: Whaaaa????? But we live in the gritty part of town!! What were you doing in the beautiful part of town?
BAH: Well I was having a drink with my boss, celebrating the fact that he fired me. The bar was in a second gritty part of town, and I thought even I couldn’t take the intensity of driving from one gritty area straight through to another, so I took a two-hour detour through Cherry Hill, got off the parkway, and proceeded to meander through residential areas block by block.
Mrs. BAH: Hmmmmm. I still don’t get how they were walking around in the suburbs. They wanted to take in the scenery on the way home from Pottery Barn?
BAH: Long story short, three people dead, no witnesses, I’m turning myself in because God says so, and I’m gonna have matching statues that read “Best Supporting Actor.”
Mrs. BAH: Right.
BAH: Right.
Mrs. BAH: Right.

Cut to: A FLASHBACK! with
LONG-SUFFERING PARTNER OF PEROXIDE RICH BITCH: Jeez, this is awful. I can’t stand the Peroxide Rich Bitch anymore. I know she’s my babies’ mamma but she’s so phony and self-absorbed. She’s always hittin’ the sauce. And whenever we make love I feel like I’m going to get impaled by her protruding hip bone! You’d think her ass only weighs 21 GRAMS. No wonder I look way, way older than my 37 years. But what can I do? A divorce would really hurt the kids. How can I get out of this? Hey, there’s a truck speeding through the intersection, now’s my chance!!

Cut to: Hospital, with
PRB: My beautiful babies are dead! Oh my God, oh my God!!! Are you listening, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters?

Cut to: Hospital, second floor
BAM: Look at me, I’m a bad-ass math professor with a new heart. This is gonna give me renewed energy, a new outlook on life. I’m gonna go take on the day.
Mrs. BAM: We did it!! You’re alive! All that work, all that suffering, it’s over! We can have a beautiful life together and raise a child!
BAM: Jesus, do you EVER stop?? First I need to track down the donor.
Mrs. BAM: The donor’s dead, you fucking moron.
BAM: Oh. Well maybe he left some heirs lying around. I need to do this, I need to go on this journey, find out who I am, this is a part of me, I need this.
Mrs. BAM: How many of those painkillers did you take again?

Cut to: Wake of Mr. PRB and the BLONDE KIDS
PRB: Thanks for coming.
COOL CHICK FROM CARNIVALE WHO SHOULD BE THE STAR OF GREAT MOVIES INSTEAD OF HAVING TO TAKE SLOPPY SECONDS FROM IDIOTS LIKE NAOMI WATTS IN PRETENTIOUS MOVIES LIKE 21 GRAMS: You know I’m here for you.
PRB: I’m not going to press charges against the born-again hothead. Nothing’s going to bring back my two little blonde kids.
CCFCWSBTSOGMIOHTTSSFILNWIPML2G: You’re a strong woman, you’re handling this really well.
PRB: I’m heavily, heavily sedated. I’m gonna go on a rampage in a reel or two.
CCFCWSBTSOGMIOHTTSSFILNWIPML2G: I’m here for you.

Cut to: Dirty, gritty prison cell
BAH: I’m a born-again hothead in jail. All this grit is making me question my faith. What kind of God would give an ex-con a truck and then let him drive it around in the suburbs for two hours just so a depressed architect could throw himself and his two little blonde girls in front of it?
PRIEST: I’m going to pray for you.
BAH: There is no God, only grit, etc. etc.

Cut to: a FLASH-FORWARD! Ho ho, I’m a sly devil
BAH: I’m gritty and I’m in jail.
Mrs. BAH: I sold the truck and hired a lawyer. He’s gonna have you out of here in two hours!
BAH: God, I hate you.
Mrs. BAH: What about our kids!!
BAH: I hate them too.

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: (Watches PRB from a distance)

Cut to:
BAM: Hey.
PRB: Ack!! Who are you?
BAM: Just a cute guy trying to hit on you with a totally stupid line about eating alone being bad for your kidneys.
PRB: Yeah, well…
BAM: Look, it’s been almost an hour and a half, and we’re still not even in the second act. Let’s try and wrap this up before the next ice age.
PRB: All right, I’ll fuck ya.
BAM: Whoa, whoa, give me one scene where I can be a romantic little bad-ass math professor.
PRB: I’m still heavily sedated, so you call the shots.

Cut to: Restaurant that charges $20 for a glass of wine
BAM: Yeah, math, you got your sine waves, your cosine waves, your calculus… it kind of makes me think of you. It’s beautiful that way. Oh, and I memorized a couple of lines from this one pretentious poet, I picked some guy from like Valenzuela or somewhere, there’s no way anyone’s used this on you before.
PRB: How does a math teacher afford a place like this? And how did you know that this restaurant would be right by my house?
BAM: Have another glass of wine. It only weighs 21 GRAMS.

Cut to:
BAM/PRB: (Kissing, moaning, panting, shoving)
PRB: Come upstairs.
BAM: I have your husband’s heart. They transplanted it on October 11.
PRB: WHAT!?! YOU FUCKING FREAK, YOU FUCK!!!!! GET OUT, YOU MATH GEEK!! GO JERK OFF ON M. C. ESCHER YOU BITCH!!!

Later that morning:
PRB: I love you. Don’t ever leave me.
BAM: I can’t live without you.
PRB: Let’s make love and look agonized.
BAM: And let me read Sam Shepard while you rest afterward.
PRB: Then let me look agonized some more while you have a nap.
BAM: We’ll sleep in shifts in case bin Laden comes for us.

Cut to:
Mrs. BAM: (Packing up, leaving)
BAM: You can’t do this.
Mrs. BAM: The hell I can’t. You hate me, you don’t want to have my baby, and my reward for nursing you back to health is to find you in bed with a rich bitch.
BAM: This has to end.
Mrs. BAM: Uh, duhhhhhhh!!!

Cut to:
BAH: Relax, folks, I’m still in the movie. I haven’t forgotten about you. I left my long-suffering wife and my crummy kids so I could get an even grittier job – seriously, I think I’m literally working with grit. I cut my hair and I look almost African, I’m that dirty. And I live in an end-of-the-line motel. This rocks.

Cut to:
BAM: Thanks for meeting me.
TOUGH UNDERWORLD GUY: No problem. Most of my customers are math professors, really.
BAM: Did you get everything?
TUG: Here’s a background file on the PRB, the dead guy, and the guy who killed the dead guy. I had to work extra hard on that last one, seeing as how he never got charged and lives in the gritty part of town.
BAM: Yeah, and…
TUG: Oh, right, the totally untraceable gun, with six bullets at no extra charge. Your total today is $349.99.
BAM: Put it on my bar tab – I’m feeling gritty.

Cut to:
PRB: You have to kill him! We have to kill him!!
BAM: Okay. (Pause.) I killed him.
PRB: Hooray!!!!
BAM: By the way, your husband’s heart really sucks, I’m going to die again.
PRB: By the way, I have a cocaine problem.
BAH: By the way, the bad-ass math professor was lying when he said he killed me. I don’t know why, considering I actually want to die.
PRB: Coming right up, bitch!
BAH: Bring it on, bitch!
BAM: I’m going to make everyone happy and kill myself. (Everyone in the audience, anyway.)
BAH: The bad-ass math professor killed himself! MAN, thass gritty!!! Guess the cops won’t charge me for this, either. By the way, PRB, sorry I killed your whole family.
PRB: It’s cool. He had a $5 million insurance policy. I used the proceeds to buy some more coke. I just snorted … 21 GRAMS.

(Fade to black, roll credits)
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If I may be so bold

Let’s face it. I am a latent homosexual It’s easy for me, with the luxury of time afforded the unemployed, to pick on minor errors of grammar and style in articles written by journalists working on a strict deadline. Fair enough. I’m going after bigger game this time, picking on minor errors of editing in two films that seem unimpeachable.

First, The Shining. Could just as easily be named The Chilling — this is a spooky classic that really gets under your skin. If you haven’t seen it, well, you’re a moron. Sorry to break it to you. But I’ll tell you the plot revolves around a family hired to look after a hotel in the dead of a Colorado winter. The father ends up going boing-koo-koo and two people die. The end.

It’s a two-hour film, but it is taut as a hanging and gives you just about as much room to breathe. There’s not one shot in there that doesn’t belong.

Except for that one.

During the film’s climax, the demons of the hotel reveal themselves and help terrorize the long-suffering wife/mother, played to perfection by queen weirdo Shelley Duvall. At one point she sees a sex act between an industrialist and what seems to be history’s first furry. A bit later, she runs into the lobby, which is now chock-a-block with skeletons and cobwebs, and shot with a purple filter.

In between, racing through the hallways of the hotel, she comes across a dude in a tuxedo who raises a cocktail glass to her and says, “Great party, isn’t it?” Did I mention he has an axe wound in his head and blood all over himself?

That’s the bit I would snip, not only because it’s bad, but because it’s redundant. First, the wife/mother has been victimized enough. Second, it’s just not that scary — we’ve already had a few scenes in the movie with tuxedo-clad bald guys who speak in eerie British accents. And fifth, it’s pretty weak, a bit obvious in its irony. Hey, wait a minute — this isn’t a great party at all! He’s lyin’!!

I am now officially better than Stanley Kubrick. If he doesn’t like it, he knows where to find me.

Another gem of a film with a tiny flaw? No Country for Old Men. Now, nobody is a bigger fan of this film than I am. I’ve watched it enough times to act out the scene in the gas station in its entirety, calling on two of my lesser-known personalities to do so.* The Oscars are as arbitrary as baseball’s MVP awards, but I was still pleased to see NC4OM clean up. So what kind of jackass thinks he can improve on the Coen Brothers?

This kind!

Here it is: There’s a scene where Woody Harrelson’s character, Carson Wells, is hired by (wait for it) the “Man who hires Wells.** It becomes clear right away that Wells is a maverick (and a goofball) when he sits down without being asked, because his employer strikes him “as a man who wouldn’t want to waste his chair.” This is also the scene where Wells is asked how dangerous the Javier Bardem character is: “Compared to what, the bubonic plague?”

In a word, Wells is insouciant***, a point further underscored by the last line in the scene, where he asks his employer to validate his parking ticket. At least that’s the scene’s last line in the universe where I have final cut, because I find the next exchange superfluous:

Carson Wells: You know, I counted the floors to this building from the street.

Man who hires Wells: [sighs] And?

Carson Wells: There’s one missing.

Man who hires Wells: We’ll look into it.

It’s a nice enough exchange, taken straight from the book, but it’s redundant. Everything prior to it has established that Wells is independent and not intimidated by authority, nor by Anton Chigurh. Watch it a couple times and you can see that it slows the pacing down just enough to be a problem. A problem for me at least, seeing as how I need to trim those seconds from films so I can spend hours complaining about them.
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*To the delight of, em, the rest of my personalities.

**Awfully imaginative, that Internet Movie Database.****

***That’s Woody Harrelson, insouciant all over.

****You’re still not David Foster Wallace — Eds.
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Suggestion Box

Some things that are not as hard as the mattresses at Seattle’s Inn at the Market. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

The cobblestones on the streets of Pike Place Market

The surface of Highway 5

The heart of Donald Rumsfeld

Motorhead

The Saturday Times crossword puzzle

Robert Plant’s cock circa 1971

Lane one, Paul’s Bar and Bowling, Paterson NJ

Tungsten

The California Bar Exam

Tyler Durden

And, finally…
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… wait for it…
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A comfortable mattress you might actually sleep on

Next week, a list of things that are not as cold as the hot water at the same establishment.
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If you’re not into the whole brevity thing

Watched Savage Grace last night. You know, the based-on-true-events-and-some-we-made-up flick where Grandpa made a fortune in the plastics game, but a couple generations later the heirs have become kind of shiftless? Julianne Moore stars as the long-suffering wife of a Baekeland scion* played by some probably British guy who looks like a cross between Jeremy Irons and George Harrison. They both smoke, so they have that going for them, but he’s cold — he undercuts her at dinner parties and unleashes surprise buttsex on her. And that’s just the first reel!

“Trapped in a loveless marriage,” she turns her attentions toward her only son, played by (at various times) a guy who looks like a young Thurston Moore, a ten-year-old kid, and a baby. Mommy and Tony become very close as they traipse through Paris and Mallorca and some early-Ibiza-type town whose name I can’t recall. I don’t want to give away any of the plot, but eventually they have sex and he stabs her to death after getting upset about a dog collar.

Goofy recap aside, I actually liked the film. Julianne Moore (no relation to Thurston) could never be bad. The father and son actors are all right, and the cinematography (or was it the mise-en-scene) is quite good. But you want to hear the real reason I liked this one?

Because it was over in under three days!

The imdb clocks this one at 97 minutes. That’s pretty tight for a story that has a lot going on in it — the book on which it was based was more than 500 pages long. I don’t know offhand what the typical pages-to-hours ratio is, but (to reach for more surprise buttsex) Ang Lee got more than two hours from 65 pages of “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx. Jack, I swear…

[This is the part where I would go off into an Andy Rooney tirade about films being too long in general these days, and how can it take two and a half hours to tell the story of a guy in a cape fighting a guy in a green vest and purple jacket, but I don't want to sound like Andy Rooney, so this paragraph isn't here.]

There you have it folks. Savage Grace: Good-looking, short and perverted. Just like Tom Cruise.

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* No easy synonyms for “heir,” are there?
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Nonstop service to Budapest

Yeah, watched the Criterion edition of Stranger Than Paradise last night, trip down 80s hipster memory lane. I saw that movie I don’t know how many times when I was a little kid teenager — maybe a million. I’m sure I could recite entire scenes from memory, complete with a 100% authentic impression of Richard Edson; what could Max do about it? Speaking of Edson, am I the only one who didn’t know he was the original drummer for Sonic Youth? Street cred takes another hit there.

Like anyone else,* when I saw the movie back then, all I could think was how COOL everything looked. The city looked cool, the actors looked cool, the soundtrack? Cool as Ice! Was the John Lurie character cool? Just look at his hat, baby! He’s lean and he smokes cigarettes, what more do you want?

Seeing it again with the eyes of an old dork who likes Paul McCartney songs**, I finally realized what a low-life Lurie / Willie is. I mean, he acts pissy about having to put up his Hungarian cousin for ten days, complaining that she’s going to disrupt his schedule — his schedule of laying around watching TV and occasionally going to the racetrack. He alternately ignores and insults here, only warming up to her after she reveals her talents for shoplifting — maybe she’s a low-life like me!

Then she leaves and a year goes by. Willie and Eddie grift about $500 out of some poker players — one of whom is played by Michael Morra, who delivered my new favorite drug, Dilaudid, to Sid Vicious the night he killed Nancy Spungen. Small world. Anyhow, Willie tells Eddie they should drive to Cleveland to meet up with the Hungarian cousin, Eva. That’s right — Willie hasn’t scored in a year, and he thinks his best shot is with his teenaged cousin! Rock on, cool guy!

They meet up in Cleveland, Willie behaves marginally better than he did in New York, then he kidnaps / rescues her and drives her to Florida. I’d hate to give away the ending of this suspenseful romance, but let’s just say they have as much fun in the Sunshine State as the Mosslers did.

Still a cool movie, though.

*As if I have any idea what anyone else thinks
**With the Beatles, I mean, don’t give me that Wings shit
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I got your autopsy right here, pal

Movie night at Casa Totem again, so let’s get into Walter Monheit mode and review these bad boys. First up? Autopsy: Postmortem with Dr. Michael Baden.

Hated it!

No, it was okay. I like Baden but this was a little skimpier than I expected. First off, $20 and it’s only an hour? Demerit. But the bigger problem is that he’s discussing five cases where he really can’t add a lot of value. I mean, Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend and OD’d; pretty cut and dried, so to speak. That nutty woman really wasn’t a Romanov; I think that debate’s over. O.J. Simpson? Come on now.

It was interesting to hear his critique of the original autopsy of JFK — evidently it was botched, presumably on the orders of the Bilderberg Group. We’re through the looking glass here, people. And you do get to see grisly photos of dead JFK, dead Nicole Brown, and dead Nancy Spungen, which is cool if you’re a ghoul. (It’s great when you’re straight.)

Of course what I found creepiest was the image of the fireman’s lungs after he helped clean up Ground Zero. Then again, I do have cancer in my lungs, so I’m a bit sensitive on that score. So the JFK and 9/11 stories were good and the other three were so-so. Rent, don’t buy.

Then we started Heima, which documents the free concerts Sigur Ros gave across their native Iceland that one year. It was great — too great for me. I must have been too tired when I started watching it because after half an hour I was like “Okay, this is probably the last show…. okay this one is probably it… okay…” At one point my wife got up to take an aspirin (another clue?) and I checked to see how much longer I was in for. There was still a half hour to go and I folded. The movie won.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s excellent. The photography is amazing, the music is incredible, and seeing Iceland and all the little Guðmundsdóttirs is a trip. I highly recommend it, even if you don’t dig the Sig. But the film’s intense, or at least it was too intense for this old bat at that late hour.

In other movie news my citizen activism has paid off again — the imdb has added the two ‘memorable quotes’ I submitted for Dangerous Game. I’m kind of too old to watch bad movies just to laugh at them any more, but if that’s your thing, this is a good one to check out. Harvey Keitel screaming, some other dude screaming so loud his voice cracks every other line, Madonna trying to act? You’re golden, pony boy.