So Close I Can Taste It

The Moose is a local bar we used to go to as university students instead of studying or when we got bored of playing Starcraft until 3 in the morning.  We'd head downtown on the bus and head to the bar on foot as a pack looking to satiate our beerlust and our raging hormones, which at the time usually meant a half a dozen Smirnoff Ice and then jerking off later before going to sleep to the images in our head of sloppy drunks shaking their half-clothed asses on the tiny, crowded dance floor.  It wasn't exactly the paradise we'd envisioned, but our intentions for drunken debauchery were pure and we were fuelled by the inherent belief that given half the chance we could lower the bar -and hopefully somebody's pants- before the night was through. 

A typical mission took place on Wednesday night because that when The Moose had their Wednesday Night Wing Special which meant that with the cost of the cover charge got you a ticket which you could exchange at a makeshift table by the kitchen for a pound of wings if you managed to get there before midnight when the kitchen closed.  This was not as easy as it sounded because on Wednesdays we were not the only students lured in by the promise of meat and booze so the line for the wings would typically take about an hour out of your night which might have been better spent trying to get more than your fair share out of a pitcher of Alexander Keith's or flirting in vain trying to get some pussy that was way out of your league.

There was, of course, a student bar on campus -The Wall (a name I can only assume was chosen by a Pink Floyd fan who managed to get some school committee high enough to actually accept this name)- that had more of a nightclub feel.  It was dark, with plenty of black lights to illuminate any white articles of clothing, or any lint on your shirt, and was centered around a small dance floor that was usually littered with drunk, horny teenagers and broken glass.  The music was played loudly enough to drown out most conversations, which was fine because most of the people there had nothing interesting to say.  The Moose is more of a sit-down pub-style place.  The decor is almost stereotypical of the bar you'd expect to find in an (almost) northern Canadian town, population under 60 thousand: roughly-hewn wooden floors, walls lined with halved logs to give the illusion that you were in a log cabin, and heads of various deceased animals on the wall.  Even the tables are made of seemingly rough cuts of wood, with just enough varnish to make it easy to wipe up the spilled booze, chicken wing sauce or blood that might wind up there.  I suppose the look they were going for was "modern rustic" although the relative success of the decorative style depends upon A) whatever the hell "modern rustic" actually means, if anything, B) whether or not you enjoyed spending upwards of four hours in a crowded log cabin that smelled of beer and sweat or C) whether any of the decor actually matters when you're so fucked up that puking all over the inside of the cab on the way back to the residence would later be considered a "high point" of the evening.

Th Moose was also a strange type of beast because it was actually two bars.  But not really.  Alcohol dispensing Siamese twins.  On one side you had The Moose (although the actual name was Moose's Loose Change Lodge, a name, I suppose, that was meant to appeal to the frugality of its potential patrons) and on the other side you had Scotty's Log Cabin.  The strange thing was both of these establishments were right beside each other, both had the same decor, and were both connected by a double wide doorway.  It was the kind of double wide doors you'd find in a hospital or a school or a mental hospital.  I don't know the local history well enough to understand how or why this happened, but I do know that Scotty's got the short end of the stick.  Nobody referred to this strange bastard child as Scotty's and the Moose.  It was always just The Moose.  Eventually -I'm not sure when exactly- Scotty's was eventually absorbed by The Moose, some kind of reverse binary fission where the weaker twin was absorbed back into the stronger.  It was a bizarre kind of natural selection, that rare occurrence where de-evolution and evolution happened to coincide.

Now The Moose is officially just The Moose.  Scotty's no longer exists in any sense of the word.  Complete obliteration.  The old Scotty's side has not only been reabsorbed ideologically, it has been completely renovated.  Gone is the tiny dance floor where we'd move spastically to the music, with a beer in one hand, helping to reinforce the stereotype of the white guy without rhythm.  It has now been replaced with a second bar that has less of a rustic feel and more of a industrial chic vibe.  The tables too are dark, polished wood, not the faux rustic shellacked two by fours.  Gone are the pool tables, replaced instead with several leather couches arranged around a giant flat screen TV in a makeshift lounge area where smooth pimp daddies can mack on nearby hardbodies during the interviews and ads between whatever sporting event is playing that night and then routinely ignoring them for 90% of the night and end up getting more pussy than me or my friends ever did when we were willing to devote more than our fair share of attention. 

All in all The Moose was an establishment that embodied hazy, half-realized expectations and complete disillusion of grandeur as much as it did fucking great wings.  So it was rather appropriate -I felt anyway- that on the 19th of March in this Year of our Lord 2011 that I found myself at The Moose with my friend Ryebone to celebrate his 30th birthday.  Not only was it a place where we'd spent countless hours of our youth consuming copious amounts of alcohol and wings, but it was also a place where we'd come with visions of glorious conquest and gone home empty handed.  It was a place where youthful anticipation had been dampened by cold reality.  It was a place where Ryebone and I would reminisce about "way back when" and nostalgically relate tales of those who went before us -like a couple of old army buddies remembering fallen comrades- and try to reconcile two opposing forces: the desire to remember things better than they were and the satisfaction becoming intoxicated on your own misery.  For me The Moose was the perfect place to celebrate Rybone's 30th.  It represented everything we had hoped to accomplish and threw into sharp relief how little we actually had.  It was at once momentous and disappointing, just like turning 30.

It started earlier in the week.  I received a cryptic call from Ryebone on Tuesday or Wednesday.  I assumed it was to set up our usual weekend plans which usually involved hanging out and watching a movie or two.

"Hello."

"What are you up to on Saturday?"

"Nothing," I replied.

"Feel like going to The Moose?"

Right away my blood pressure goes up.  I know that any time I leave the house for these kinds of missions I'm going to have to bargain with my wife.  For the record, I love my wife, but just like any relationship it's a matter of give and take.  It's a matter of raising Social Capital and then using that capital to barter for my own interests.  It's like a social bank account, and usually with my wife I'm running quite a deficit.  I know that for a mission of this magnitude, if I'm to even consider it, I'm going to have to barter potentially months worth of future capital.  I'm torn between the responsibilities of being a family man and the urge to go out and do stupid things with my friends.

"I don't know..." I start to reply.

"It's my birthday.  I figure we'd catch a movie and then grab some wings after"

Jackpot.  Fucking A.  Immediately my blood pressure goes down and I start to get pumped.  Right away I realize that not only is Ryebone's birthday A) a Social Trump Card that will allow me to go out without having to use up any of my own capital but also that B) I'm going out to have some fucking wings and beer on Saturday.  I just got a free pass for Saturday night. 

"Done.  See you on Satuday."

We set up the time later and we head out early in the evening to Rybone's birthday movie of choice which turned out to be BATTLE: LOS ANGELES.  This turned out to be an incredibly inspired choice for a 30th birthday movie because it was an overblown spectacle that was disappointing on several fronts.  BATTLE: LOS ANGELES was essentially a cross between INDEPENDENCE DAY and BLACKHAWK DOWN, and was about on par with the former and much, much better than the latter.  Much to the chagrin of Ryebone I have never liked BLACKHAWK DOWN and have consistently mocked and berated him for liking it during the entire tenure of our friendship.  I sneered at it the first time he made me watch that piece of shit.  I mocked him in university when he picked up the hardcore three disk edition.  I threatened to kill him once in a drunken fury if he didn't immediately denounce BLACKHAWK DOWN as the over-hyped, self-important tripe that it was and begin a lifetime of atonement by travelling the world and giving hand jobs to orphans at half price.  

But back to BATTLE: LOS ANGELES.  It's an odd beast insofar as it is actually a pro-US military propaganda film disguised as a Spring blockbuster about aliens invading the west coast of the continental USA.  The plot follows a group (brigade? platoon? unit?) of marines led by Aaron Eckhart (the guy who played Two Face in THE DARK KNIGHT) who have to rescue a bunch of civilians who may or may not be caught behind enemy lines when the United States (as well as other countries around the world) are attacked by an extraterrestrial invasion force that is apparently here to steal our water (really?).  The specifics aren't really important, let's just say all the important movie military archetypes are present led by the seasoned commander who just filed his retirement papers after a disastrous mission, presumably in Afghanistan or Iraq.  Maybe they actually mentioned it, I don't know.  Like I said, it doesn't really matter.

So these soldiers get into the combat zone, encounter some aliens, get cluster-fucked by their superior technology (and become overconfident because they seem to lack air support.  Eventually alien air support shows up, and all these characters are actually surprised that a species who has mastered INTERGALACTIC TRANSPORTATION would be able to have vehicles that -oh I don't know- fly!) find some civilians including the obligatory children and then proceed not only to rescue some of the civilians but then find the mother ship which turns out to be the central hub controlling all of the alien vehicles and then destroy it before being rescued themselves by other soldiers and heroically heading back out into the fray without so much as a bathroom break.  The reason this movie struck me as particularly strange was the fact that aliens were there at all.  The way the movie was written and filmed they could have just as easily set this movie in Iraq and have the soldiers fighting Taliban insurgents and you would have essentially had the same movie.  For some reason the filmmakers seemed intent on making their own premise contextually irrelevant.  The aliens were completely superfluous to the plot and this genre crossing seemed to be an afterthought that was designed specifically to attack the consumer on all fronts, so to speak.  Just imagine the conversation with the studio execs.

"So, yeah, we have this idea for a really dramatic war film where this troubled commander on the verge of retirement is sent on one last dangerous mission to rescue civilians trapped behind enemy lines.  Included in the platoon is the brother of one of the officers the commander got killed on his last mission, a young, headstrong officer who just became a father, and two best friends, one of whom is getting married soon.  They are put in a situation where they must work together and potentially sacrifice their own lives to protect people who may or may not be in serious trouble and kick some ass in the name of Democracy."

"Excellent, excellent.  I like what you've got so far.  But how about this: the bad guys are aliens."

"You mean, like, from Mexico?"

"No, extraterrestrials."

"What?"

"Aliens.  They are so hot right now."

"Well, I don't how I'm going to put aliens into the movie..."

"Great then it's settled.  Bad guys are aliens."

"Are you high right now sir?"

"Just a little.  I'll be in my office if you need me.  I'll be working on the next SAW sequel.  Boo-yah!"

Needless to say I was slightly underwhelmed by the whole spectacle.  In that way BATTLE: LOS ANGELES was both an excellent and terrible allegory for turning 30.  When I was younger I didn't understand when people would stress out about turning a certain age.  From my point of view at the bottom of the social ladder in high school I couldn't wait to get older and get the fuck out of that place.  I didn't understand why people would get so concerned about such an arbitrary number.  Why was 30 so much worse than turning, say, 31, supposing of course that you hadn't been diagnosed with cancer just after your 30th birthday.  Why was 30 a sign of aging but 28 a sign that you still had "time left."  It wasn't until I turned 29 that I really began to panic.  This artificial construction suddenly began to seem quite real.  There was some vague sense that I was somehow supposed to have accomplished some great Thing by the time I was 30, but I had no idea what.  All I knew was that  hadn't accomplished it and I began to feel disappointed that I had not lived up to these arbitrarily constructed expectations of Great and Terrible deeds I was to have accomplished.  What monument had I left for posterity?  Fuck.  I'd be 30 soon and then whatever shot I had at Making it Big will have faded into oblivion. 

But I wasn't 30 yet.  Rybone was.  He was the one whose failed expectations we were celebrating on that fateful night, so I felt a little better.  I had a few more months before my potential was completely expended so I ordered the all you can eat wings and ate as much as I could to the point of physical discomfort.  Ryebone ordered ten wings and finished eight of them, and again I mocked and berated him as is my wont, because I'm kind of an asshole and I will try to make you feel bad for stupid shit sometimes just for my own, twisted amusement.  We split a pitcher of Alexander Keith's that we couldn't even finish between the two of us and watched the UFC match that was on that night that The Moose's staff had tried to charge us double the cover charge to watch.  As the waitress went through all the specials she informed us that if we stayed past ten o'clock we'd have to pay the $4 cover that we'd already been forced to pay upon entering the establishment.

"Wait, wait wait," I said.  "What will you be charging us for?"

"To watch the UFC matches tonight."

"But we already paid for that when we came in.  They made it seem like we had to."

"Alright, calm down.  You have to tell me these things."

Not only had the assholes at the front door not informed us that the cover had been optional if we were we planning to leave by 10 o'clock, but they'd also neglected to have us enter the draw they were having to win god know what.  Those greedy fucks were so concerned about fleecing us for the cover that I suppose they forgot about the draw.  After that we went to sit down on the old Scotty's side at an empty table and were promptly told by a waitress that there was a waiting list and we'd have to wait by the bar, although she neglected to take our names.  Our sad pilgrimage to the bar ended about fifteen minutes later when the bartender asked us if we were waiting for a table, and when we responded in the affirmative and told her about the wait list, she gave us a quizzical look and told us that there was no longer any wait list and we could grab a table, and we ended up at the very same table we had claimed less than twenty minutes before.

I contemplated all this as I gorged myself on wings and beer and watched Cro Cop get defeated in a stunning turn around.  Ryebone and I left The Moose at about 11 o'clock and I was already starting to nod off.  I wondered to myself how I had lasted all those nights in university until two or three in the morning or if it was of any consequence.  Most of all I wondered about turning 30 and wondered if the evening had any particular relation to that arbitrary benchmark.  We watched a mediocre movie then ate the same old wings and drank the same old beer in a bar we'd spent our youth in, a bar which had evolved from total assimilation of its twin, a place where despite our years of patronage we were still treated like second-class citizens as the staff tried to hustle us out of our money, and we talked about how old we were starting to feel.  Overall it was satisfyingly disappointing.  Now that I'm getting closer to 30 I realize that not it is not some tangible turning point in my life, that the heavens won't open up and proclaim my life a total failure for all the world to hear.  There was never any real pressure to accomplish anything beyond the meaningless deadlines we set in our own lives.  Things happen when they happen.  Turning 30 is simply another day where nothing extraordinary happens, much like most other days in our lives.  And really, looking back, what the fuck was so great about our 20's that we're going to miss so much?  Turning 30 is (un)predictably ordinary. 

And there's something oddly comforting about that.                      

Why It Sucks To Be A Dad

"Next you're going to tell me Mon Mothma is my mother!"

Becoming a parent is a life-altering experience, but I suppose that goes without saying.  My wife and I didn't go into it blind, though.  It was part of The Plan when we got married.  Having kids was a conscious choice made by two consenting adults of (relatively) sound mind and (sometimes questionable) judgement.  It was a huge shock to the system, but it wasn't a shock.  I mean, we weren't ready to be parents, and we knew that, which is an important place to start for any potential parents.  If you think you're ready to be a parent you are most definitely not ready.  As a parent you automatically seem to just know other parents all of the sudden, almost like they can fucking smell it on you.  Somehow they always seem to know and they always come over to talk about kid shit (usually literally and sometimes figuratively). 

One thing I hear a lot of from parents is complaining.  And the more I hear, the more I fear for future generations, because if their parents are already this stupid, what chance do they have?  They've probably inherted their parents' stupid gene, and if they were lucky enough to dodge that bullet, they have a lifetime of stupidity indoctrination to overcome.  The odds are not in most of their favours.  I hear stupid shit like "I'm not getting enough sleep," or "I don't have any time to myself," or "My spouse and I aren't having as much sex as before," or "It's so much harder to go anywhere in public or to go on trips," or "I don't have as much money as I used to."  And when I hear this stupid shit all I can think is "Well, duh!"  What the fuck did you think was going to happen?  Your wife would pop out a kid, you'd put him in his bedroom for eighteen years and then you'd open the door to find a yuppie in a cheap business suit ready to head off to a dead end job like his dear old dad while the two of you travelled around the world getting into adventures like Indiana Jones?  I mean, before he found out that his kid turned out to be Shia Labeouf and had to live with that terrible, terrible disappointment.

Now I'm not saying that all those complaints aren't valid, because they're all true.  Becoming a parent means that you have to give up a lot of your independence and "freedoms."  My wife and I weren't entirely prepared, because you really can't be, but we went into the whole parenting thing with our eyes open.  There have been a lot of sleepless nights.  There's been a lot of the household budget reallocated from my DVD/Blu-Ray fund to diapers and tiny clothes.  There's been a lot of time redistributed to playing at parks that normally would have been spent playing video games or watching movies.  I can't just pop out to the movie theatre or the bar with friends.  There's no such thing as "popping out" any more.  Any excursion requires days -if not weeks- of logistical planning.  There's not a whole lot of going out with just my wife any more.  Apparently it's technically illegal to leave your three year old at home babysit your six month old while you go out with your wife to do score blow in a back alley before robbing a liquour store and beating a drifter to death with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup.  Well, I guess it's all kind of a legal grey area really.  The point is kids make life more complicated and I have now lost more shirts to puke and urine than I have socks to semen.

But all that shit doesn't bother me, really.  I mean there are some shitty days when I lose my temper and I wish that for one hour my life was less complicated.  And I don' feel guilty admitting that some days I don't want to come home from work and don't want to deal with kids.  Some days it seems like it would be great not to have a family.  But that (usually) passes pretty quickly.  When I think about the birth of my children, and all the milestones, and all the triumphs, and all the shit, and all the times my daughter ran to the door smiling to greet me after work and all the times my son laughed when I sneezed and all the times that little bastard peed on me while I tried to change his diaper and he got that satisfied look on his face and I couldn't help but smile because I know that satisfied feeling after a good piss, and all the times my daughter asked me to go into the basement to visit King Kong or Yoda or have a light saber battle and everything more than balances out.  Having kids -despite all inconveniences- is actually one of the best things that has ever happened to me and I wouldn't trade them for anything (unless the price was right).

No, I am not quite the asshole I may have led you to believe with the title of this article.  No one could be that terrible.  Or could they...?  Congratulations.  You might be slightly less stupid than I probably assume you are.  Now comes the volta of my article, where I turn everything on its head.  Having kids isn't the worst part of being a dad at all.  The worst part about being a father is being percieved as being as being a father.  And I'm not talking about the Dirty Old Man Syndrome where middle-aged, married dudes somehow seem to require the attention (or percieved attention) of much younger women to somehow validate their own self images.  What I'm talking about is how one's identity is constructed, or at least interpreted.  It's essentially the same problem I have with people asking me what I do for a living, as if that's going to tell you anything about who I am as a human being.  It's not that I particularly hate my chosen career, it's that I hate getting pigeon-holed (or corn-holed) by a complete stranger because of my vocational preference or because of a biological function.   I remember both times being at the hospital for the birth of my kids and being referred to by the nursing staff as "the father" even when I was standing right there and they could have just as easily called me "hey you," or "that guy," or "mister" or "sir" or assigned me a number based on the order in which I came into the maternity ward.  It just really bugged me being referred to as "the father."  They way they used it seemed like such an antiseptic term.  Cold and impersonal.  You might as well just have called me "walking sperm bank."  All of the sudden my entire identity was boiled down to depositing my sperm into a viable uterus.

I hate having to play all these fucking social games with people, but sometimes it's necessary to expedite an undesireable interaction so I have to play my role.  But what makes it worse is that my identity apparently has to be boiled down to some single facet that every slack-jawed yokel can easily digest.  On the other hand, I suppose you're sitting there scratching your head wondering quietly to yourself how we're supposed to get to know each other if we can't ask each other mundane questions about our jobs and familial relations.  How else do we begin to piece together the identity of a person we just meet if we can't start playing amateur detective and gathering tedious facts about their life?

This is a problem.  I will concede... well, nothing.  I have found a solution to replace the annoying aspect of social interaction known as "small talk" thanks to one Chuck Klosterman.  If you don't know who Chuck Klosterman is then do yourself a favour and stop reading this and go out to the nearest bookstore (or amazon.com for the socially crippled) and pick up any one of his books and I guarantee instant, lifelong hapiness.  Suffice it to say the man is a genius well ahead of his time.  For Christmas I recieved a somewhat unorthodox gift.  It is a product called Hypertheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations which is essentially a box filled with fifty cue cards each with a hypothetical question written on it.  The product's author is Chuck Klosterman (see how it all ties together?) and most of the hypotheticals (or maybe all of them, I'm not sure) you'll recognize from his books, at least one of which you've finished reading which is why I assume you're back here. 

Anyway, Klosterman offers a little explanation about this product on one of the cards, which I suppose technically brings the count up to fifty-one and makes one of my earlier sentences wrong, but I was younger then and impetuous.  I've changed now, I assure you.  In his introduction he says, and I quote:

"Some people are extremely good at making small talk.  These people are better known as "idiots."  These are the kind of humans who can talk to a stranger for 40 minutes without learning anything essential about who that stranger is - they talk about the weather and about other people, and they mention what kind of car they drive and how old their children are.  They have conversations in public that are ultimately no different than silence in an empty room."

To me this makes so much fucking sense.  Like countless others before me I have endured excrutiating social interactions at various gatherings with friends of friends and complete strangers that I have had to have inane, soul-sucking conversations with apparently mind-numbingly boring, vanilla-flavoured automatons who apparently lead even more boring lives than a blind nun.  And although sometimes I've tried to break the mould I know that in some situations I've probably fallen victim to the Small Talk Syndrome (women know about shrinkage, right?)  myself and bored someone else to death.  And during the whole process, the final phase of which is discussing the terrible wedding reception/bar-mitzvah/baby group/family gathering/highschool reunion/Uncle Frank's release from prison and meeting his new boyfriend party with a fellow victim -be it a friend, colleague, or in my case usually my wife- we end up deconstructing each other so that we end up simply boiling people down into archetypes that we file away in various, oft-forgotten realms of our brain RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK-style.  We file under S for Sports Guy.  We file under A for Aggressive Vegetarian.  We file under C for Cunt.  We file under D for Dad.  But it doesn't have to be this way.  In his intro to Hypertheticals Chuck Klosterman goes on to say:

"... I see no value in asking someone a friendly, nonadversarial question if neither party cares what the answer is.  Instead, I prefer to ask questions where the solution is irrelevant - I pose hypothetical questions where how one answers the query matters far more than the literal conclusion.  There is no "right" answer to these kinds of questions.  The end never matters; what matters is how you get to the end.  What matters is how you think, not what you think."

Fucking brilliant.  However, where Klosterman's intent with these cards seems to be to create more stimulating conversation and more engaging social interaction to me it becomes more a question of identity.  Or more acurately, perception of identity.  If we took his advice to heart, if we asked each other questions about being trapped inside Bruce Springsteen's body or about kicking a friend in the ribs to save his life, then we cut through the bullshit and right to the heart of the matter.  I mean, what's the point of asking me questions that are easily (and somewht troublingly) available on the internet?  But if you ask me a hypothetical situation, if we enter into actual dialogue that requires us to explain how we arrived at a certain conclusion, not only might we have had a more interesting conversation, but also at the very least we might file each other under more interesting archetypes.  File under N for non-linear thinker.  File under P for Potential Psychopath. 

More importantly, though, engaging with each other in this way is far more productive.  Being a dad is great, but it's not the be all and end all of my identity.  Nor is being a teacher.  Nor is my obsession with watching and collecting movies.  Nor is my penchant for STAR WARS merchandise.  These things are not the beginning of who I am: they are byproducts of how I think.  What I do is a result of how I percieve the world around me, and that method of perception is at the very core of how we construct identity.  I think if one of the nurses at the hospital had asked me a question about whether or not I would save a friend from a grizzly bear attack in order to avoid a lifetime of rain (just buy Hypertheticals and read the damn thing) I think it would have eased some of the tension I was under at the time and I wouldn't have had to be just "the dad."  In a perfect world, in a perfect world...             

                    

Harry Potter and the Something of the Something

It's no secret to my family and friends and any passersby who will listen to me ramble on Forrest Gump-style about random events in my life that I am not a fan of the Harry Potter books or movie franchise in any way, shape, or form.  I can often be heard deriding JK Rowling's books as poorly written (both from a technical standpoint and in the narrative sense), unoriginal, boring garbage.  As much as I hate Rowling's writing, though, the movies suffer from some of the worst cases of movie-adapted-and-subsequently-butchered-from-a-book syndrome I've ever seen.  The problem is each book covers a whole school year in the lives of our hapless, young wizards which the filmmakers try to cram into two to two and a half hours of barely watchable, incoherent, mashed-together scenes.  The source material is sketchy enough to begin with, but then to run it through the Hollywood big studio meat grinder?  The audience is definitely not getting their daily recommended intake of awesome sauce.

I remember watching -or rather, being forced to watch- the first three or four HARRY POTTER movies and I remember being bitterly disappointed in all of them.  They were all so bland and generic and randomly cobbled together that thinking back I get all of the movies completely confused.  I can't remember when the giant spiders showed up or whether the motherfucker with the googley eye showed up in the same movie as the Tri-Wizard cup or whether he was riding a griffin or getting high at Hagrid's crib or whatever.  It all kind of blends together to me.  The one thing in my mind that really made the movies furstrating to watch -besides the endless examples of deus ex machina in practically every fucking scene- was the poor transition between scenes which is a problem in every HARRY POTTER movie.  One example is the passage of time.  From one scene to the next could be a couple of minutes or half a year.  There's never any clue as to where you are temporally in the story and it really throws the audience for a loop because for a couple minutes you're wondering to yourself what the fuck is going on and it really takes you out of the movie because you have to consciously recalibrate yourself.  It's jarring.  The worst example I can think of in the series is HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE where all of the sudden it was the end of the school year and the other wizard schools were getting ready to leave.  And I was like, "What the fuck?" because there was absolutely no textual clue given to the audience.  It was just assumed that through some kind of magic you could just divine the timeline with a wave of your magic wand.  All it would have taken was a short cut to a magical calendar with the pages flying off or even just a line of dialogue like "Hey, Harry, remember three months ago when you had to fight off those water nymphs before they bit your dick off?" or whatever and it would have made it a lot easier to follow.

The other problem with the Harry Potter-verse, like I touched on above, is how hapless and disempowered the main characters are.  This problem stems from Rowling's sloppy writing and is exacerbated by running it through a Hollywood writing chop shop.  Harry Potter has yet to solve a problem on his own.  Every time he's in trouble he is saved from out of the fucking blue by some convenient plot device that may or may not relate to some stupid item or person or spell mentioned briefly in passing.  Or maybe not ever mentioned before at all.  Or maybe the device is so obviously highlighted (like practically winking at the audience highlighted) that you just know that this is going to never be mentioned ever again in the rest of the book/story until Harry's in danger and just happens to need that one specific, esoteric thing that is not woven into the narrative but spilled on it.  It's really a crap shoot.  The point is Rowling went through (presumably) great lengths to create this (a-hem) highly detailed universe, but then goes through drastic lengths to undermine its internal logic.  I mean it seems like every ten goddamn minutes Harry is being chased by some giant spiders or is faced with a dark wizard and he never takes an active role in his own salvation.  It's always some magic car whisking him away, or another character coming to his rescue at the last possible second, presumably for dramatic effect, but after the five hundredth fucking time it wears on you.  And if course if you're mortally wounded there's always a Phoenix feather or some shit to save you.  Or you can always go back in time and fix your mistakes.   

But, I put all of that out of my mind as I went to see HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS with a group of eighth graders.  After six movies I thought that perhaps there had been some kind of progression.  I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and I hoped beyond hope as I grabbed my popcorn and pop that now that the actors and characters were older we would see a grittier HARRY POTTER, one that spoke to a slightly more mature, discerning audience.  The posters and trailers gave me dim hope.  As I sat down to witness HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 in all of its IMAX glory my hopes were almost immediately dashed.

Right from scene one director David Yates begins to alienate anybody in the audience who is not a hardcore Potter fan.  I missed the last couple of movies and books and there was absolutely no exposition or explanation given as to the current state of affairs.  We get the general feeling that somewhere some shit has hit some fan, but there is no fucking clue as to what.  We get a series of sad scenes of Hermione erasing herself from her parents' memories and Harry's aunt and uncle abandoning their underage dependent leaving him all alone in an empty house.  And I had no clue why.  Then Harry's friends show up to sneak him out of the city, and again no specific explanation is given.  Anybody who's paid attention in the slightest knows that Voldemort is after him for some reason, but we're given no specifics.  All I was asking for was a quick flashback or a quick line of dialogue or maybe a SPIDER-MAN-style opening credits recap.  Something.  Anything.  But no, a bunch of wizards and wizardettes show up and take some potion so they all look like Harry so they can play decoys to draw fire from Harry as they escape the city.  Later even this chase scene which was kind of exciting was rendered utterly irrelevant, which I will discuss shortly.

As I watched DEATHLY HALLOWS I couldn't help but start thinking about X:2 which I had happened to watch on TV a couple nights before.  It wasn't just that my mind started to wander and was replaying a much better movie in my own head, although it certainly helped make the two and half hour run time more bearable.  It was more a connection my mind made between the similarities of the powers the characters in these two universes possessed.  Here's a quick rundown of the powers Harry and company seem to possess: they can shoot balls of fire, they can teleport through space, they can look like anybody they want to, they can travel through time, they have telekinesis, and Harry has a cloak somewhere that can turn him invisible.  Hermione even pulls out a potion at one point that heals up Ron after some problems with teleportation.  So essentially they have all the powers of (in keeping with the Marvel Universe) The Human Torch, Nightcrawler, Mystique, Jean Grey, Sue Storm, and Wolverine combined.  Think about that for a moment.  Let your imagination run wild and explore all the wondrous possibilities.  Think of all the shit you could rain down on your enemies with that kind of arsenal.  Think about that opening scene of X:2 where Nightcrawler fucks up all the president's men with only the power of teleportation.  Now, what do you suppose Harry does?  Does he teleport in and shoot some fireballs into the faces of those smarmy Deatheaters?  Does he take over Snape's identity and then telekenetically choke Voldemort, Vader-style?  Would it surprise you to know that he spends the bulk of the movie... hiding?  Doing nothing?  No, sadly, it didn't surprise me either.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS was so frustrating to watch because aside from one wizard shoot out, Harry, Ron and Hermione spend the rest of their time hiding in the forest and conveniently teleporting out of trouble, until one time at the end they don't teleport away from danger for some reason, even though they easily could have.  Instead, they decide to... run?  And then out of all the possible spells Hermione seems to have at her disposal she... shoots Harry in the face disfiguring him MINORITY REPORT-style?  Even though he is instantly recognizable because of the lightning bolt scar on his forehead?  What the fuck?  Teleporting was overused the entire rest of the movie (the deus ex machina of the week), but then it was abandoned for no good reason other than it had to be in order for Harry to be captured.  The teleportation was also the plot device that completely negated the chase scene at the beginning of the movie which I said I would mention later.  Why couldn't they just have teleported from Harry's house to the secret hiding spot?  Wouldn't that have been a lot safer and smarter?  There seems to be no rhyme or reason given as to when it is OK to teleport sometimes and why they don't at other times.  Remember that internal logic thing I mentioned before?  Yeah, that's what I was talking about.

The only thing that rivalled the teleporting plot device in narrative-destroying power was Hermione's handbag.  She apparently cast some Spell of Hammer Space on this fucking bag so that she could fit everything she and Harry and Ron could possibly ever need.  And I mean everything.  No matter what happened you could be sure that she had something to deal with the situation.  Change of clothes, an entire tent filled with camping paraphernalia.  Everything.  This particular bit of deus ex machina completely took all remaining steam out of the already steam-lacking narrative.  Speaking of Hermione (who apparently grew up into a full-blown hottie in the past couple years at Hogwarts); why the fuck isn't she the focus of the stories instead of Harry?  She's the one who knows all the spells.  She's the one who comes up with the ideas.  She does research, she prepares for the unknown, and she saves Harry and Ron's collective asses on an almost hourly basis.  How the fuck is she not the chosen one?

And then there's Voldemort himself.  Why the fuck doesn't he give his troops a shoot to kill order?  At one point Helena Bonham Carter's character Bellatrix Lestrange has Harry dead to rights, but she has specific orders from Voldemort that only he is allowed to kill him.  Only him.  There is no reason given for this.  It just seems like the classic bad guy hubris, but taken to laughably ridiculous extremes.  There is no logical reason given why A) Voldemort doesn't just issue an order for the Deatheaters to bring him Harry's head on a platter or B) Why Lestrange -who is obviously unhinged and highly homicidal- doesn't just kill him anyway because she's a fucking lunatic who escaped from Azkaban.  What the fuck?  And then Harry Potter is saved by the convenient plot device of the week, this time in the form of an elf (I don't know his fucking name) who (*mock look of shock*) teleports into the enemy base and springs Harry and his pals before teleporting them all to a sunny beach somewhere.  It's just so fucking weak and once again Harry falls ass backwards into and out of trouble through no effort or fault of his own.  The stronghold of the Dark Lord, and this fucking elf just waltzes in?  I mean the entire movie Hermione is setting up powerful charms to make them invisible and protect them.  You think maybe Voldemort -Lord of All Evil and Master of the Occult- would set up a few simple protective spells around his home fucking base?  Maybe make it invisible, or block teleportation -a skill obviously common to any wizard with a magic wand and a few years education at Hogwarts- something that ninety percent of the main characters are able to do?  I mean, what's to stop Harry or one of his friends from teleporing in while Voldemort was taking a shit and just blast a fireball in his face.  Or warp in while he's sleeping and cut off his head?  Seems like a no-brainer, right?

And then I thought: Wait a minute.  Doesn't Harry Potter's underworld of wizards coexist with our world?  I mean, all these wizards are so caught up in their own worldview that they ignore the obvious.  One fucking handgun could end the reign of the Deatheaters.  They seem to be so overly concerned with magical attacks that they would be completely caught off-guard by something as mundane as a gun.  Rambo or John McClane could clear out a room of these death eating fucks in no time.  Or what about explosives?  Why don't Harry and his friends simply get a couple pounds of C4 explosive, teleport into Voldemort's mansion while everyone is asleep and plant it underneath the giant table the evil wizards have their meetings around every morning?  Even if you don't kill Voldemort you could probably wipe out most of his cronies who he seems to depend on almost completely and really cripple his whole regime.

But that last paragraph sounded kind of nitpicky.  I can appreciate that in the context of the story wizards want to bust out some wizard shit.  I mean, I, as a STAR WARS fan, would never expect a Jedi to use anything except his light saber and the force to solve a problem.  And I can dig how the wand is like the light saber of the Harry Potter-verse and it sometimes even looks cool when Snape or whoever is shooting bolts of energy at dragons or quiditch balls or evil spirits or whatever you shoot at with your wand.  (And here comes the...) But again it is so frustrating to watch a wizard become completely useless once he loses his wand.  I know a light saber-less Jedi is not as impressive either, but at least the Jedi can still bust out mind tricks or telekenisis.  It seems without a wand a wizard is completely unable to channel any magical powers at all and is about as useful an anthology of Vanilla Ice's greatest hits (I can only think of one).  Again, this is me just being nitpicky, but I feel that it really slows down the storytelling and is incredibly frustrating for the audience.

Now a lot of readers (especially those who know me) might think that I went into HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS expecting -nay hoping- that it would fail.  This is only half true.  Hoping for crap is only satisfying in the sense that I feel personally justified in my opinions when it turns out to be true.  However, I always try to go into a movie expecting something entertaining because I don't want to feel like I wasted my time watching crap.  I was actually hoping that DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 would be a step up from the other Potter flicks, but I was really disappointed that I was so disappointed.  The writers and director had a real chance to go darker and grittier, but instead I was bombarded with the same, tired shit that made me hate the rest of the movies: lazy writing in the form of convenient plot twists, the inability of the main characters to take action, and a complete sabotage of the universe's internal logic at every possible turn. 

And since I'm on a role here, what the fuck was with the name?  DEATHLY HALLOWS.  See I kept hearing "hollows" as in the geographical term like a low lying area.  So I thought the deathly hallows was a place.  It took me a while to clue in and then I realized it was "hallows" as in the transitive verb "to make something holy."  I had to look it up, but having been forced to go to church for years and years as a child that kind of vocabulary is pretty common.  But in the context of this title, it's just plain confusing especially to kids reading the book or watching he movies.  All the other movies and books had concrete ideas: a stone, a goblet, a chamber, a prisoner, an order.  Then you have a concept which -from what I can gather- is "making death holy" or "worshipping death" which I can dig, and makes sense when it's finally explained twenty minutes before the end of the movie (in a pretty cool animation, by the way, which was my favourite part of the movie aside from the ghostly make out scene between Harry and Hermione), however at this point it's too little too late.  (Just as an aside: When the dude mentions the invisible cloak as one of the deathly hallows, why doesn't Harry react?  I mean he has that shit.  There can't be that many cloaks of invisibility out there, right?  This has to be the one, but he doesn't say anything.  I would have been all like "Holy shit, guys!  This is totally awesome!  I fucking have that thing at home in my closet!" But Harry just stares dumbly at the dude telling the story.)

 As you might expect I'm going to give HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 a pretty low rating and you'd be right.  I'm giving this movie a 3/10 = A Slightly Bruised Teenage Wizard's Head With a Confused Look on His Face as He Realizes That Having His Best Friend Bang His Daughter is Much Worse Than Banging His Current Girlfriend  

Come With Me if You Want to Cum

A few weeks ago I rewatched TERMINATOR: SALVATION for the same reason a lot of people do: they bought the special edition BluRay with the extended cut and wanted to see Moon Bloodgood's tits.  (On a side note, is that a real fucking name?  Is there  Mr. and Mrs. Bloodgood out there somewhere with stacks of TERMINATOR: SALVATION giving it out to visitors telling them "That's out daughter!"  Or was that her stripper name?  Or is she a digital character left over from LORD OF THE RINGS?  "Destroy them, Bloodgood!  They have the ring!")  I freeze-framed through the criminally short scene, washed my hands, and continued watching the movie.  Soon after the much-anticipated partial nudity there was a sex scene between Sam Worthington's character Marcus Wright and Bloodgood's character Blair Williams and I was suddenly struck by a conundrum that was far more troubling than time travel or robotic assassins made of liquid metal or stealth "infiltrator" cyborgs who were somehow to remain inconspicuous with thick, Austrian accents.  The problem I faced revolved around the question: "Do Terminators fuck?"

Now the short answer to that question according to TERMINATOR:SALVATION is "Yes."  However, let us examine the implications of this answer.  First of all in order for a Terminator -a cyborg that is more man than machine- to engage in sexual intercourse it would first have to have fully functioning set of genitalia.  Since most of the Terminators in the movie franchise were male and the Terminator in SALVATION was male, let's focus specifically on the penis.  Let us assume for the sake of this argument that there really is a watertight, completely logical explanation as to why these killing machines were equipped with half mechanical schlongs that pertained, perhaps, to their purported function as infiltrators - essentially, deep cover spies.  Now if we're working under that assumption then the Terminator's manufactured dicks would have to pass for the genuine article.  The first thing a counterfeit cock would need to be able to do would be to simulate various states of being: essentially have a erection.  But not just an erection.  It would have to look convincing flaccid as well as erect and would have to appear to an outside observer (ie. whatever hot piece of ass the Terminator was banging - because Terminator's don't do fat chicks) to become erect in a natural way (ie. not too quickly or too linearly like a simple set of hydraulics simply pushing out).  It would have to pass both the visual and the tactile tests, because as a deep cover operative you never know what kind of situation you might find yourself in.  I mean, you can't always just walk in the room and pull down your pants to reveal a perfectly sculpted, raging hard boner.  In the heat of the moment she might reach down your pants and start stroking you off and a simple piston shooting out would be a dead give away.  As I'm sure you're all aware an erection occurs as the result of the the spongy tissue in the penis -the corpora cavernosa and corpus spongiosum- becoming engorged with blood due to sexual stimulation, be it physiological or psychological.  So the cyborg penis would have to have some kind of mechanism that contained a spongy substance that reacted in a similar manner when introduced to liquid which would have to be able to be pumped in and out of said tissue via a pump of some kind and said system would have to be self-contained.

OK, so now let's assume that we have a system like the one described above with a spongy substance that engorges when a liquid is pumped into it and goes soft again once the liquid is pumped out.  The second problem that the designers of the mechano-dick would face would be ejaculation (but don't worry, there's a pill for that).  Now we've got a dick that looks real and becomes erect but it still has to blow its load all over some post-apocalyptic tits, presumably for the sake of espionage.  This one might be a little bit more tricky.  See, the erection can be computed by the Terminator's "neural net processor," but usually getting an erection doesn't take that long.  It's far trickier to come up with an algorithm to determine the average time until ejaculation.  I mean, you can't just set a timer or the resistance hottie you're sporking will eventually clue in to the fact that it takes you exactly six and a half minutes to reach ejaculation - the average for human males between the ages of eighteen and thirty.  And boom!  There goes your cover and you might promptly be smashed into scrap metal.  It's hard out there for a cybernetic pimp.  You'd have to have some kind of program to make the Terminator blow his load at random intervals and varying intensities during sexual intercourse to make it seem more organic.  Logistically you'd also have to have a storage tank filled with some kind of white substance to simulate the ejaculate because although Terminators are covered in organic tissues they don't have all the necessary internal organs like a prostrate to actually produce any bodily fluids.  Even Marcus Wright didn't have all of his internal organs, just a brain and a heart, and presumably some kind of rudimentary circulatory and digestive system (just wait for my follow up article "Do Terminators Shit?"  Prepare to have your mind blown) in order to keep those two organic organs alive.  So you'd have to have a sizable storage tank to hold your virtual spooge, because once again you don't know how long your Terminator's deep cover mission might last.

Now you might be thinking (or yelling loudly to the heavens, I don't know what kind of freak you might be) that this is all just idle speculation by some dude obsessed with dicks, but really this logistical point is pivotal to the entire continuity of TERMINATOR: SALVATION.  Everything in the movie hinges on Marcus Wright's dick functioning just like a real one.  You see in order for the movie to make sense Marcus can't know he's a Terminator any earlier than he does or else the whole narrative falls apart.  Even before he has to pass the Williams/Bloodgood Cock Lie Detector Test he has to be able to fool a tougher critic: himself.  I mean imagine you wake up in some strange medical lab and you begin wandering the post-apocalyptic landscape scavenging for food and you're lying there huddled under some rock all alone on a Friday night and what are you going to do?  Well, after mourning the loss of everyone and everything you held dear, you're going to rub one out.  Now the problems are compounded because you have a human brain that has to be fooled not only by the feel of the erection and the ejaculation, but also by the actual physical sensation, which would necessitate organic nerve endings in the hands and the penis.  Essentially, you have to program a device so well that it has to fool itself.

And this to me is the most ludicrous part of TERMINATOR: SALVATION.  How could Marcus not have known he wasn't really yanking his own trouser snake and by extension realized that something was terribly amiss about his own body and not discovered his true nature much sooner in the movie thereby completely altering the storyline of the movie?  But I have to put all that aside and assume that the designers covered all the problems I just discussed in a board meeting and implemented them on the assembly line.  For me the willing suspension of disbelief revolves not around marvels of robotics or time-travelling paradoxes but in the problems with fooling a machine with his own dick as he jerks off in the ruins of some old shell of a building.  It's going to be hard (pun intended) to go back and watch TERMINATOR: SALVATION again with this new mindset, but I guess if I want to enjoy the movie I'll have to put my intellectual analysis aside and not be so nitpicky.  I just hate to be left with such a philosophical mess on my hands (pun also intended).                 

From the Mouths of Cereal Boxes

For as far back as I can remember breakfast cereal has been a source of wonderment and anticipation.  This is not because I particularly enjoy soggy, sugar-infused grains formed into flakes or squares or whatever as opposed to a good solid meal of eggs, bacon, french toast, a bagel, home fries and baked beans (although most mornings I get the big, soggy bowl of Frosted Flakes because that's typically all I have time for).  In North America this is not unusual as breakfast has really become synonymous with cold bowls of milk-drowned cereal I can only assume is due to extensive marketing on the part of the major cereal companies and our own laziness as a culture that prevents us from getting up half an hour earlier to cook up some good eats.  I can personally attest to the laziness, but I can only speculate on the marketing strategies used by Kellog and Post though it doesn't take a Harvard grad to figure it out.  Marketing at its core is not that complex and it generally follows two (hopefully separate) lines of thought: sex and children.  In the case of cereal the marketing has typically been targeted at children in the form of flashy cartoon characters (except Count Chocula who lacks both flash and an appetizing hook.  I mean, a shit-coloured vampire?  Dark, depressing and the colour of feces.  Fantastic.) and cheap, plastic prizes inside.  The second one was fucking genius.

There were some days when the thought of getting the prize in the cereal box was all that got me out of bed in morning.  There were some even worse days when the thought of that useless hunk of plastic was all that kept me going through the whole day.  Kindergarden can be a harsh mistress.  And for me it wasn't even a sure thing.  Having three siblings gave me (at best) a one in four chance of getting my hands on that motherfucker.  There came a point where intervention on the part of mom and dad simply didn't cut it any more.  First of all, they couldn't keep track of who's turn it was, because (and righfully so) they probably didn't give a shit about hunks of plastic shaped into barely recognizable characters or shapes in the bottom of boxes of Shreddies.  So it became a battle royale, survivor of the fittest, secret, stealth, preemptive military strike scenario.  You had to be a fucking cereal prize sniper in my house to get your hands on the goods after a while. 

There used to be more of a random element because the cereal companies would just kind of toss the prizes into the box haphazardly.  I always imagined some dude named "Miguel" with a ratty moustache and a hairnet whose grasp of the English language consisted of "Yes", "No" and "Fuck you Eddie Murphy" with a stupified look on his face tossing those prizes into the boxes as they went by on a conveyor belt.  Sometimes you'd get the prize with the first bowl.  But then the cereal companies got craftier and started maing sure the toys were located securely at the bottom of the box.  This necessesitated a change in strategy.  You couldn't just wait until the box was empty.  We played the "trying-to-take-exactly-the-right-amount-of-cereal-to-time-it-so-you-emptied-the-box-next-time" game for a while but quickly realized we could just skip all that bullshit posturing and just reach down into the bottom of the cereal box.  But you couldn't just reach in when the box was full and you couldn't do it in full view of anyone else in the family.  There was a point of critical mass when the box was empty enough that you could reach in and quickly snatch the prize and draw your arm out without making a mess and thereby drawing attention to your covert operation.  If any of your brothers or sisters saw what you were doing there would immediately be a rush to claim the prize and usurp all the time and ffort you put into stealing it from them in the first place.  Penultimate worst case scenario was a call for arbitration from mom and dad almost guaranteeing that the person who had preemptively seized the prize would be excluded from the selection process entirely thereby negating days of careful planning.

Still it made breakfast something more than just picking through your bowl of Lucky Charms for all the marshmallows and then secretly dumping the soggy, brown, bloated, tasteless cereal pieces into the garbage when nobody was looking so you wouldn't get the "kids starving in Africa" bullshit speech.  We must have gotten hundreds if not thousands of these fucking toys.  I remember several campaigns in particular.  There was the monsters in my pocket era which was small plastic figures of famous monsters such as the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster.  There was the Star Trek campaign (that one I remember pretty vivedly was found in boxes of Shreddies) which allowed millions of prepubescent geeks, nerds, and fanboys to collect tiny models of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D of course.  The sad thing is I didn't even have to look that up on Wikipedia), the Borg cube, the Klingon Bird of Prey and the Romulan warbird that they could either display proudly on their windowsills or engage in riveting interstellar battles on the playground with their friends before being beaten up by bullies with seemingly Gorn-like strength.  The warbird in particular I remember being particularly rare.  There was a host of other shit too like some kind of strange disk shooter with pictures of Darkwing Duck on them.  They got discarded pretty quickly.  

Breakfast cereal is such an integral part of our culture that one can't but be conscious of it and over time I've noticed a shift in ideology particulrly with the types of prizes they've put in them over the years.  I remember a gradual shift away from the toys to various other prizes.  With the advent of DVD's movies were now small enough to put inside -or even stick to the outside of- cereal boxes, although only the shittiest movies need apply for this position.  Can you say AIRBUD or THE MASK?  Yeah, it got that bad.  Those were some dark days for cereal eaters and free-thinking people the world over.  For a while there I noticed that small books were becoming popular prizes, though I was in university at the time so breakfast for me usually consisted of waffles, leftover pizza, or some raw Pilsbury choclate chip cookie dough and a glass of orange juice so luckily I never experienced the disappointment of finding a fucking book in my cereal that must have emotionally crippled an entire generation of children.  Then there was a drastic shift in breakfast cereal marketing ideology that focused not on the children who -I imagine it was always assumed- would theoretically bug the shit out of their parents until they caved and bought them whatever sugary, cavity-forming crap had the prizes they wanted, but on the adults who were actually spending their hard-earned cash on said sugary crap.

This ideology shift led to such things as send-away offers.  Now I suppose there were always send-away offers, though now they seem to occur with more frequency and as an adult I pay attention to that shit now.  My wife and I got, like, five free shirts thanks to boxes of Cheerios after the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Now they had stupid Olympic shit on them, but they were full size, decently constructed shirts that cost me no money so I'll suck it up and wear a stupid hockey score on my chest.  The best thing, though, is now some cereal companies have made some kind of deal with Cineplex Odeon and every so often they print these coupons on the inside of boxes of cereal like Oatmeal Crisp (get the almond, it's fucking delicious) that -depending on the month- get you either a free general movie pass or a free small popcorn or drink.  To me this is worth its weight in gold and was perhaps the most brilliant marketing device in the history of cereal.  Two cultural icons coming together.  I say "breakfast", you say "cereal."  I say "default social activity," you say "the movies."  Either way this new prize really brings back those feelings of excitement and anticipation I had as a kid waiting for the next hunk of plastic to fall out of my box of Fruit Loops.

Like most things in life, however, the free movie pass cereal prize has been a mixed blessing at best.  Over the past couple years these coupons have driven me to use them up before they expire on movies I might not otherwise have seen.  This has led me to watch such disasters as OBSERVE AND REPORT and FIGHTING.  Although I didn't pay any money to see these films I paid a much higher cost.  I can't recall any of the good movies I've seen because of these coupons, though I do recall using many of them and I it wasn't all on shit.  Most recently, however, I was bombarded by another salvo of these coupons and for whatver reason was unable to use them up until the very end of February and so ended up going with my buddy Ryebone to watch UNKNOWN on a Sunday evening.  It's kind of strange looking back that my social callendar was dictated by the back of a cereal box.  Perhaps that's kind of pathetic or perhaps Dr. Ian Malcolm was right about all that chaos theory stuff.

I wasn't too worried about UNKNOWN, though, simply because it starred Liam Neeson.  Yes, he inspires that much confidence.  I wasn't expecting a sprawling cinematc opus by any means, but I envisioned something along the lines of TAKEN 2 or at least TAKEN 1.5 judging by the thankfully misleading trailers.  What I got was something entirely different.  UNKNOWN is not an action-packed thrill ride by any stretch, although it does have some requisite Liam Neeson kicking some serious ass scenes.  What UNKNOWN is really about is how we construct our identities, although it lacked the subtlety of other movies that have dealt with the same kind of themes like MEMENTO. 

UNKNOWN follows a scientist by the name of Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) who is in Germany to give a lecture at some kind of green energy summit.  Almost immediately upon arriving at the hotel with his hot wife Elizabeth (January Jones) he leaves her to go back to the airport to retreive a lost briefcase.  To get back to the airport he enlists the services of perhaps the hottest cabbie in the history of the universe (Diane Kruger).  On the way back to the airport, however, Harris and his cabbie get into a freak accident and he wakes up from a coma a few days later with extensive memory loss.  He tracks down his wife only to discover that she seems not to know him and some other poser (Aidan Quinn) has taken over his identity.  Now on the run from the law and from some other mysterious agents with obviously sinister motives Harris and the hot cabbie have to fight for his right to party... and exist.

Now the logistics of literally stealing someone's identity as opposed to traditional identity theft (ie. using a person's identity via credit card or some other piece of identification to impersonate them for monetary gain)are mindboggling, and under normal circumstances would be completely impossible (ie.making your wife willingly believe that somebody else who looks nothing like you but starts using your name is the man she's been married to for the last fifteen years, assuming of course that she's been sexually satisfied that whole time, which isn't necessarily your fault, I mean sometimes you just want to go to sleep after a long day) however in the context of this movie it all makes sort of perfect sense.  I say in the context of the movie because the entire premise of UNKNOWN is compltely ridiculous and only makes sense within the realm movie logic where a cranial injury can selectively destroy a man's real identity leaving a recently constructed one still in tact and not affect his fine motor skills or his libido and that simply learning the truth about himself is enough to trigger the ass-kicking portions of his memory, but nothing else.  But, I mean, you can (and countless loses on the internet do on a daily basis) pick apart just about any movie so I won't condemn the ridiculous because that's what I go to the movies to see: the ridiculous become probable.

UNKNOWN was a strange beast: a B-list action movie maquarading as an A-list psychological thriller with an A-list cast.  And it was slightly successful.  Liam Neeson basically carries the film, though the rest of the cast did a great job too.  The great thingabout Neeson -besides the fact that he's an amazing actor- is that he is totally aware of the type of film he's making and even though he plays a role like Martin Harris completely straight.  He knows the type of film he's in and doesn't try to make it more than that.  He is a completely unpretentious actor which really helped save the film.  UNKNOWN really raised some fascinating questions -albeit awkwardly- about how one's identity is constructed, but it never goes into any real depth exploring those themes which was only slightly disappointing.  UNKNOWN seemed to be having an identity crisis of it's own: was it a spy action thriller or was it a psychological exploration set within the context of the spy movie archetype?

In the end UNKNOWN was a lot like those prizes I used to get in cereal boxes as a kid: eagerly anticpated, briefly enjoyed, and quickly discarded.  It was a nice distraction and (in my case at least) worth the price of admission (because it was free!  Get it?).  It was a nice little distraction on a Sunday afternoon, but it will definitely go on my "Won't Buy It Myself But Will Accept It As AGift And Might Not Sell It For a Few Years" movie list.  Still, UNKNOWN was by far not the worst thing I've ever found in a box of cereal.  I give UNKNOWN a 5/10 = One Confused Looking Head Getting a Cab Ride From a Hot Cabbie On His Way To Foil An Assassination               

The Circle is Now Complete

I know this is kind of old news, but it is of such severe cultural significance that I feel strangely compelled to comment on it, much like I feel strangely compelled to reach my hand down my pants whenever I see Kristen Bell on screen.  Since sometime in 2010 there has been a SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD video game, which is certainly not news to anyone, let alone anyone in the gaming world, at least in the up-to-the-minute sense.  When I first heard about this phenomenon, I was blown away.  As I took a step back to examine what wa happening I wondered quietly to myself Why does nobody else's brain seem to be on the verge of meltdown upon hearing this news? and Why do so kiwis look so much like testicles?

Let me explain.  The video game thing, not the kiwi-as-balls thing.  SCOTT PILGRIM the video game was based on the movie, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD which was based on a series of graphic novels which was heavily influenced and informed by video games.  Bam.  What, mind not blown yet?  To some this might seem like a needless over-analysis, but to the truly enlightened it is like hearing Jesus's sermon on the mount that time he went to that Grateful Dead concert and got really high and stripped butt naked and jumped on stage and started screaming about giant flaming arrows falling from the sky.  OR something like that.  The point o the whole thing is, the thing that really blows my mind, is how culturally influencial video games have become.  They now inform themselves.  They have become a source of their own inspiration in a far more significant way than just adding some of Donkey Kong's cousins in the sequels to Donkey Kong Country.  It's like a cultural perpetual moton machine.  It's analogous to Martin Scorcese making a movie based a book based on a true story about an earlier Martin Scorcese movie.

It's not just inspiration.  Everyone is fucking "inspired" at some point by some kind of bullshit.  Thirteen year old girls feel "inspired" by their favourite Lady Gaga song.  Artists the world over are "inspired" by the beauty of nature, or tragedy, or the juxtaposition of innocence versus experience or some shit.  Yeah, I know, we're all inspired at some point in our lives.  The SCOTT PILGRIM video game represents something more than simple inspiration.  It represents a cultural shift in perception, a self-awareness in a sector of society.  It's like the merging of Commander William Decker with V'GER at the end of the first STAR TREK movie.  The birth ofa new form of life.  It is the difference between inspiration and self-determinism.  Anyone can be inspired to do something, but not everybody can be aware of that inspiration and let it guide you at the same time you guide it.  As Darth Vader might say "I was but the learner now I am the master."  Of course he might also cut your fucking arm off and blow up your planet.  Still.  He'd probably also play some SCOTT PILGRIM on his XBox while eating sushi and quoting THE BIG LEBOWSKI if he were still alive.      

127 Hours... Of Awesomeness

So I was recently on a man date with one of my homeboys, known to the criminal underworld only as Ryebone, Defiler of Waywad Souls, and I became aware of two things: I was suddenly acutely aware of my extremities, and I was slightly distracted by the size of my friend's penis television.  It was much smaller than normal.  It didn't have the same output.  It wasn't as breathtaking as I had remembered it when it had first been revealed to me in all of its glory.  This is because Rybone recently had a little surgery accident which resulted in a penis transplant damaged TV.  I won't get into particulars as just mentioning it puts our friendship in serious jeopardy because of an explicit warning from the Defiler not to mention it to anyone let alone the single nutcase legions of fans who follow my blog, but suffice it to say his brand new fifty inch plasma TV was inoperable and we were forced to watch 127 HOURS on a thirty-two inch Dynex with a measly 720p resolution.

 I remember hearing a story on the news a couple of years ago (turns out it was actually in 2003) about some dude who was hiking and got his hand trapped under a rock somehow and ended up having to cut off his own arm in order to escape back to civilization and sub-par American health care.  I don't know why, but that story always stuck with me, maybe because it had sparked many drunken debates about whether or not I or my friends would be "hardcore" enough to cut off our own arms to survive.  Turns out that guy was Aron Ralston and he has since written a book about his ordeal (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) and had this movie made about him and all that stuff I just said at the beginning of the paragraph was essentially the plot of the movie.

I'll have to admit hearing about this movie first elicited a "What the Fuck?" response. I just couldn't imagine that there would be enough of a narrative when your main character is trapped under a boulder for about ninety percent of the movie.  Luckily Danny Boyle is a visionary and James Franco turned out to be a decent actor despite all proof to the contrary in the SPIDER-MAN franchise (although to be fair if he was trying to play it over the top in SPIDER-MAN 3 then he succeeded brilliantly.  If.).  This is obviously a character driven film, but if you're asking yourself how 127 HOURS remains engaging for ninety-four minutes, then you should stop reading this and just go watch the fucking movie.  The short answer is that Doyle uses two devices in the movie to construct a narravtive: dreams/hallucinations/memories and a camcorder which Ralston (Franco) uses to record his thoughts and feelings, usually addressed to his parents.  But we'll get to that later.

The biggest enjoyment in watching this movie boils down to asking yourself the question "Would I be able to cut off my own arm in order to survive?"  This enjoyment is amplified exponentially when watching it with a friend.  Then you can really go through the whole dialogue, which essentially comes down to an exchange of three lines:

"Oh my god, that's fucking crazy man!"

"I know.  Hey, dude, do you think that if you were trapped somewhere with you hand under a boulder, or maybe a really fat dead guy, that you would be able to cut your own arm off to survive?"

"No way man. (*insert reasons why you couldn't do it here*)"

I guarantee you no matter who you ask nobody will ever in a gazillion cagillion years will anyone answer "Yes" when you ask them if they would be hardcore enough to cut off their own arm in order to survive.  And if anyone says they can do it they are completely full of shit... unless of course you're talking to Aron Ralston in which case you can give him a pass.  This time.  Now there may actually be other people out there with sufficient steel content in their scrotums to actually cut through their own arm to free themselves in a real survival situation, but this is one question you just can't answer until you're actually in the situation (Much like the eternal conundrum: "Would you agree to live with Andy Dick for the rest of eternity if it meant that every other human being who ever lived would have a perfect life free from disease, discrimination, war and Taco Bell?"  Now, I know your immidiate gut response (after the urge to vomit your own lungs out) is "No," but I know there are some true hard heroes out there who could take an annoyingly effeminate bullet for the good of humankind.).  And if anybody does answer "Yes" then you can be sure that person is completely full of shit and something of a royal prick.

This. of course, is not what the movie itself is about, however it's how most people watch the movie -and survival movies in general- so it's worth mentioning.  I mean, after watching ALIVE, who didn't have a conversation with his buddies about whether or not they could eat each other (in a totally non-gay way of course).  When watching this movie my mind kept going back to high school English class and those archetypes my teachers always gave me to analyse the conflict in a narrative.  You know, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Lesbian Clowns From Outer Space, and all that bullshit.  It occured to me that a lot of people might have gotten the wrong idea, that many viewers might watch 127 HOURS was about Man vs. Nature when it's really about Man vs. Himself.  Normally this type of internal conflict would be boring as shit, but luckily Danny Boyle's direction and James Franco's acting really kept me engaged.

This is where the hallucinations and the video camera come in.  With these narrative devices we are given a look into Ralston's past as he examines the people and decisions he's made in his life so far.  The hallucinations/dreams give the audience insight into his personal life such as the relationship -or lack thereof- with his sister and parents and a failed relationship with an old girlfriend.  Through the video camera Boyle is able to externalize Ralston's internal dialogue in the form of a video diary of sorts intended -for the most part- for his parents but really more for himself.  (There's one particularly memorable scene where Ralston performs  a little play where he acts as an exuberant talk show host interviewing himself.  There's a lot of powerful stuff revealed here in a very comedic way particularly how hard he is on himself like at the end of the conversation:


"Aron Ralston: Now, is it true that despite, or maybe because you're a big fuckin' hard hero, you didn't tell anyone where you were goin'?
Aron Ralston: Uh...yeah. That's absolutely correct.
[Aron as the host] 
Aron Ralston: Anyone? 
Aron Ralston: Anyone
[Aron as the host]
Aron Ralston: Oops!
Aron Ralston: Oops"  )

And this self-dialogue is really the core of the movie.  It's not so much a story of physical survival but of emotional survival.  It's not about a man cutting his arm off -it's about a man's journey to develop the will to cut it off.  It's about self-actualization.  Having his hand trapped by a boulder in the middle of nowhere apparently seemed like a case of life imitating life.  Ironically, this was something (at least according to the movie) he had always strived for in life: isolation.  His flashbacks are all about how he alienated himself from his family and loved ones both physically and emotionally for whatever reason.  Whether he had emotional issues that wouldn't allow him to get close to anyone else or whether he was depressed or whether he was fed up with all the bullshit of having to deal with human beings and he just wanted to be left the fuck alone it's not explicitly mentioned and it doesn't matter.  The problem wasn't other people: the problem was Aron Ralston.  Pushing other people away was a way of pushing himself away, a way of not dealing with whatever emotional issues he had, a way of not dealing with his life.  A path of avoidance.  He was being stretched in two different directions: his personal need to isolate himself from the rest of humanity and the very human need to be with other people.

Eventually, running low on water and growing tired of the taste of his own piss, and of course being scared to death by that bastard Scooby-Doo (you think you're so fucking funny don't you, you son of a bitch?) Aron is faced with the final realization that if he wants to live he has to free himself by cutting off his own arm.  The way he rationalizes this (at least in the movie) is through a strange sense of fatalism:      

"You know, I've been thinking. Everything is... just comes together. It's me. I chose this. I chose all this. This rock... this rock has been waiting for me my entire life. It's entire life, ever since it was a bit of meteorite a million, billion years ago. In space. It's been waiting, to come here. Right, right here. I've been moving towards it my entire life. The minute I was born, every breath that I've taken, every action has been leading me to this crack on the out surface."


I can sympathize with this sentiment because during a recent outing to Wendy's I had sort of the same existential epiphany when trying to decide what to order.  It's an interesting way to rationalize cutting off his own arm because really you could use that logic to rationalize anything.  Stealing the Mona Lisa.  Fucking your girlfriend's hotter, younger sister.  Kicking your neighbour's yappy little dog (and by "kicking" I mean "running over repeatedly with my car."  Hypothetically, of course.).  My life has been moving towards this one moment.  In Ralston's case it has a special significance, of course, and is not nearly as frivilous as my examples seem to be.  (The key word being "seem.") In this case he isn't just leaving his arm behind.  He's dropping off his emotional baggage.  In the end Ralston sees his situation as a challenge, not only for himself but to himself by fate.  This is his own personal burden to bear: his own cross.  This is Ralston giving fate a wedgie.  It's like Jesus cutting off both of his arms and escaping from the cross.  (And before you ask, yeah Jesus could cut off both of his arms.  He's fucking Jesus, dude.)  The rock Ralston is trapped under becomes an analogy for all the shit in his life that's weighing him down and preventing him from progressing in his own life.  He has stagnated and his desire to be isolated is a symptom not a cause of his unhappiness.  And Aron Ralston was unhappy.  Despite how he is depicted in the first sixteen minutes of the film -as a happy-go-lucky adventurer- he is obviously very unhappy with his life.  And that's the core of the movie.  A man choosing life.  Choosing to move forward.  This makes sense in the larger sense of the movie as well because it's essentially the final message in TRAINSPOTTING as well.   


Definitely watch 127 HOURS.  It is a fantastic piece of cinema and easily one of the best movies of 2010.  It is a fantastic story of one man's triumphant journey, and also there's the cool scene where he cuts off his arm, which is pretty fucking graphic.  (Wait for the part where he has to cut through his own nerves.  Pure teeth-grinding gold.)  I give 127 HOURS a 9/10 = One Hardcore Outdoorsman's Head Cutting Through His Own Arm But Only After Trying To Masturbate One Last Time Before He Dies