Don't let your aim ever stray

I was long overdue for a new wallet.

As I entered my local mega-chain retailer, I noticed a lady of the Hispanic persuasion at the customer service section. She looked to be in the hardest version of her late fifties, and she had a sizable assortment of pants and shirts on the counter. Behind the counter, were two employees; the male employee was translating what the lady said to the female employee, and all I caught was something about not having tags for the items.

I continued my merry way, and picked up a wallet -- one of those RFID-blocking jobs. Then I went to the self-checkout line, and I heard a commotion. It was the two employees politely-but-firmly telling the older lady that she could not take those shirts and pants back to the clothing department. She angrily shrugged them off and tried to make a beeline to her intended destination, but the male employee blocked her, and she tried to push the man out of the way. The female employee then got on a walkie-talkie and called for security, and I think she may have thought she was far enough from earshot or she just didn't care, because I distinctly heard the employee refer to the lady as "this bitch". 

The lady became increasingly unruly, her voice got louder, and this was now becoming A Scene. The security guard -- all ninety-eight pounds of gangly shy teenager -- arrived and politely-and-only-politely asked her to leave, or at least that's what I could make out, over the lady's much louder and angrier voice.  

I was only able to make out the occasional swear word from the lady's mad invective, because despite being a Spanish-speaker myself, my Spanish is Mexican Spanish, which is to say, slow enough to be able to comprehend the fully-pronounced words being spoken. Her Spanish, on the other hand, was Non-Mexican Spanish aka Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Dominican, etc., a fast-paced onslaught of partially-completed dialogue which is where the stereotypical rat-a-tat-tat speech you hear in such funny movies come from.

There's also a third kind of Spanish: Castilian, which is what you hear Gwyneth Paltrow speak impressively in interviews. It's what they speak in Spain, but they speak it with a lisp. Imagine Ice T speaking Spanish, and that's Castilian. 

Anyway, our Non-Mexican Spanish speaker was vocally motherfucking the employees, while slowly but surely inching closer to verboten clothing department. She, like everybody else, had her mask on, so I was grateful for that, but I kept expecting her to pull it off to do something stupid, like spit at people. Instead, she violently shoved the boy guard, nearly toppling him over a display stand containing discounted Blu-rays and DVDs.

Listen, I'm not really an anxious person, or at least, I only get anxiety when I have to go to parties or get-togethers or any other kind of otherwise friendly situation with friendly people. But as far as negative scenes go, I'm surprisingly chill. I've had firearms aimed at me by cops and non-cops alike -- those are long stories for another time, preferably after you've bought me dinner -- and I was either too calm and/or stupid to freak out about it. 

But this situation with the lady literally made my heart beat faster and harder with every passing second. I also began to sweat despite the excellent air-conditioning in the building. At that point, I just wanted to leave, and every cell in my being started to scream GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. But the lone stubborn cell located somewhere in my testicular area responded with "Nah, buy the wallet, then leave." 

So I waited as the guy six feet ahead of me began to check out his various household products, all the while reasoning with my heart and my sweat glands to please -- please! -- keep it together for a couple more minutes. And that's when I heard the unmistakable sound of the absolute worst thing for me to hear. It is the sound that had, has, and will drive me into Lovecraftian depths of insanity, if I hear it long enough. It is my vocal Kryptonite, this sound, and it makes me feel helpless, anguished, scared, and enraged all at once:

It was the sound of a crying baby.

A placid-looking Asian woman and her well-behaved daughter had just entered the store, pushing a baby cart containing a toddler who should know better. But the spoiled boy on the overworked cart was pitching the biggest of fits. 

I desperately scanned the vicinity for an available register elsewhere, and there certainly were some available, if one wanted to wait behind scores of other customers. I even thought about just leaving while tossing a random employee twice the amount of the wallet's cost -- after all, I've pulled similar moves at restaurants, leaving money on the table mid-meal because of inconsiderate parents bringing their screeching spawn -- but I knew that would just cause more drama. 

Lady and gentleman, I had managed to make it for nearly a year-and-a-half of this goddamn pandemic without losing my shit, yet here I was, about to punch that clock. Because I don't believe in God, I could not pray to Her. Because I don't believe in people, I could not depend on anyone else doing the right thing. But I still believe in myself! And so, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and I transported myself somewhere else -- anywhere but that store.

I don't know where I went, all I remember is that it was not unlike the darkness, quiet, and serenity I fantasize about taking myself everyday. It was nice. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder and I opened my eyes and my ears and the baby was still screaming and the lady was still angry. I turned around to see who the tapper was; a young Asian woman, holding a basket, smiling while motioning towards the now-available register.

So I stumbled over to checkout my item, and looked over to see the angry lady with the clothes, now being walked off the premises while screaming mashed-together way-too-fast Spanish, but I was able to make out the swear words, and she would end every sentence by pointing at each employee and screaming: "Corona-vee-ruuus! Corona-vee-ruuus!" They managed to get her out of the store, and as she angrily walked out with the clothes, she gave out one last gesture of defiance by slamming her fist twice against the front window. 

As soon as the register spat out my receipt, I grabbed that and ran out the store with my new wallet, while making sure I was going the opposite direction of wherever she was going. When I got home, I still felt kind of rattled, so I turned on the Roku and looked for something to watch, and that's when I remembered: Oh my goodness! The Adorable Amy Adams had two films released on Netflix in the past year, and I've yet to watch them. Then it all made sense; the angry woman, the crying baby, the anxiety, the despair, all of that was the universe punishing me for ignoring our dear Triple A. 
 

Based on the memoirs of author/venture capitalist, J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy begins in 2011 with young Yale law student Vance burning the candle at both ends. In addition to doing the school thing, he's working three jobs to make up for what financial aid won't cover.

Money is definitely a big issue for the man, who in true modern-day American spirit, pays for things with multiple credit cards of varying limits and overextensions. It's too bad I didn't know him back then, otherwise I could've preached him the gospel of micropayments, but I'm sure he'd dismiss me on account of being a dirty ethnic and what do I know? 

Anyway, you'd think with his workload, Time is something of which Vance has little to no amount, and yet, he also has a girlfriend. I guess it wasn't enough for this asshole to have his hands full, he just has to have them fuller, and just as he's about to begin a week of interviews for a potential paid summer internship at one of the big law firms -- RING RING goes the celly. It's a call from his sister back home with the bad news that his mom has not only gone back to bootin' up that damn heroin, the dumb bitch has gone and gotten herself OD'd.

And so Vance drives his fried baloney sandwich-lovin' ass back home to Ohio in an attempt to get help for his absolute mess of a mother, and the film flashes back to Vance's youth in 1997, a year that shall remain forever glorious because that was the year that Good Burger graced silver screens all across this great nation. Unfortunately, this movie never acknowledges the release of that film, but at one point they do play "My Boo" by Ghost Town DJs, so I'll let it slide.

We watch as younger tubbier 1997 Vance lives with his mother Bev, played by The Adorable Amy Adams, but in the case of this film, I will have to refer to our Triple A as The Aggravating Amy Adams, because my word, what a goddamn trial! As we find out throughout the film, Bev wasn't always a completely addled chore of a human being. Having graduated high school, she went on to have a respectable career as a nurse, but somewhere along the way she started sneaking away an extra pill or two from her patient's prescriptions, and so on and so forth.

Faster than you can say Mommie Dearest, Bev displays magnificent feats of head-spinning manic-depression; she'll start as a happy loving mom who will gleefully drive her son to go buy some baseball cards, then one wrong word about one of the latest in a long line of boyfriends later, she'll stomp on the gas pedal and wonder aloud about just ending it for the both of them in the kind of fiery car wreck that would make Duane Hall jizz in his pants. 

I think it's supposed to be frightening to watch, but as someone who hates kids -- especially crying ones -- I got a huge kick out of watching Amy Adams beat the shit of this child. She's raining down thunder and calling him names and while I'm sure other viewers might be thinking "She's a monster!", I was like Go Amy Go! 

(By the way, the opening of the film features another adult punching another child, and that was also something I applauded during this film and will applaud in any other film.) 

Adams is pretty amped up throughout this movie, and that's both a highlight and a lowlight. To clarify, I don't think it's Adams' fault and I found it easy to find the truth in her portrayal of a boyfriend-hopping drug addict with emotional issues.

OK, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "Well, of course you don't think it's her fault, it's never your precious Amy Adams' fault". First off, get your fuckin' head -- get your fuckin' head straight -- she's not my Amy Adams, she's her own Amy Adams, thank you very much. And second, nobody's perfect and everybody is fallible, even The Triple A.  

But I don't think it's a bad performance, it's a lopsided one -- and I don't blame her so much as the filmmakers for that. See, the problem is that the movie doesn't give us nearly enough of sober even-tempered Bev to compare & contrast with the drugged-out hotheaded Bev that we see, like, ninety percent of the time -- and so, where are we to find any range, where are we to find the tragedy in what her character has become, if we don't ever really get to see that much of the better angels of her nature?

When you look over at the comparatively subtle performance by Glenn Close as Vance's grandmother Mamaw, I don't think it's a surprise that she ended up being nominated for an Academy Award while Adams wasn't nominated at all. Of course, I use the word "subtle" for lack of a better one. Maybe "nuanced" would be a better one? Maybe not?

What I'm saying is that as Mamaw, Close plays a tough-but-fair granny with a cigarette practically fused to her hand. But she's not just playing a one-note type, we get to see more of what makes her tick. For example, we find out that in her earlier years she ran away from a troubled home, only to have found herself in a brand-new version of the same thing.

On the other hand, we're mostly told that Bev grew up observing some of this turmoil, and we're told that she was particularly close to her father, despite the growing rift between the family. It would've been nice to actually see some of this, the way the film was eager to have us see Bev's wild and crazy antics, giving us plenty of Effect but very little Cause.

I get that there's only so much to get across in under two hours, so what I'm saying is maybe director Ron Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor should've worked more on finding the right balance before committing anything to celluloid -- ahem, I mean digital files.

It's too bad because here and there we see hints of Howard and Taylor's potential in making a very effective film; for example, the flashback format enhances the heartbreak because when we see a scene of Bev choosing to clean her act up, it only hurts more, because we know from the present day scenes that it didn't work out that way for her. 

But overall I was left feeling as if I had watched an early rough cut for what could've been a really good movie. Instead, Hillbilly Elegy is kind of a mess that's less a proper adaptation of the book and more like a haphazard dumping of all the book's various threads into Thunderdome and forcing them all to fight each other for narrative supremacy: It's a mother & daughter story, a mother & son story, it's a fish out of water tale, a fish back in water tale, it's a drama about dealing with an addict in the family, a comedy about cultural differences, and an overall lesson on how one must not fall into the same rut that previous generations fell into because of family trauma.  

Regarding that last part; I did feel that the running thread about characters being placed at the crossroads of doing the right thing, and sticking with family, right or wrong, was something Howard and Taylor did get 100-percent right.

Now I haven't read the book and for all I know, it handles all the above-mentioned themes, topics, and plotlines a lot better. Not that I'll ever find out, because I'm not gonna read that fuckin' book. I mean, the only reason I watched this movie was because The Adorable Amy Adams starred in it. But I don't give an inkling of an iota of a shit about J.D. Vance, and I know the ending already: He goes on to become an ardent chugger of Orange MAGA-cock. The End.

The second Amy Adams film I watched on Netflix is also an adaptation of a book by a morally questionable author, (and where she also plays an unstable character): The Woman in the Window, written by A.J. Finn -- and I was about to do an entire bit about how that's not even his real name, and what kind of cowardly douchebag would write under a pseudonym?

Uh...

While we're talking similarities, I found myself way beyond flattered upon realizing that my favorite living actor is playing...me! I mean, look, Adams' character, Anna, is a shut-in who keeps her human interactions to a minimum, preferring to plant herself on her comfy couch drinking and watching movies all day until she passes out. It's like looking in a mirror, only not.

Obviously they changed many details, like the name, gender, and occupation -- for the record, I am not a female child psychologist recently separated from her husband and child. I don't live in a NYC brownstone, nor do I rent out the basement of my brownstone to some dude played by Kurt Russell's son.

Speaking of that dude, there's a scene between him and Adams that shows quite possibly the biggest difference between the movie's version of me and the real me who is currently talking to you, and that is the way we celebrate my favorite holiday, Halloween. Let's just say we wouldn't see eye to eye on that issue.

Also, Anna suffers from genuine agoraphobia, whereas I am just insufferable. Anna's attempts to step outside result in her getting overwhelmed by her phobia, whereas my attempts result in me getting overwhelmed by my hatred of humanity, then returning home to bitch about these people on various social media posts and blog/podcasts. 

By the way, my misanthropy is why I didn't have as difficult a time as others during this pandemic, because as much as I enjoy going out to eat and going to movies, I enjoy not going out even more. If anything, the outside world completely showed me its whole ass during this past year-and-a-half, the outside world confirmed my worst suspicions about it, the outside world said "It's OK to stay inside". 

The plot begins a-brewin' when Anna partakes in her other usual pastime: Being a fucking snoop, which is something that I would never do. But here she is, spying on her new neighbors across the street, played by Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore.

They have a son, played by somebody's somebody, and he's one of those shy awkward teens that make you either want to hug and tell them It's OK, or you want to slap the shit out of them and order them to stand up straight and Speak Loud Enough So Everybody Can Hear You.

Anna gets friendly with the son, becomes wine buddies with the wife (who's amusingly named Jane Russell, like the actress), and is the requisite minimum of polite with the husband.  But soon Anna finds herself in a Rear Window kinda situation, except in this case, it's more like Front Window, because it appears that she spies with her little eyes the husband doing something really bad -- maybe even permanent -- to the wife. But good luck convincing everybody else, Anna. 

See, something happened in Anna's recent past; it is the reason for her agoraphobia, the separation from her family, and the lovely prescription drugs that she washes down with vino. Anna is all kinds of all over the place, and even her shrink is kinda getting tired of her shit. The shrink, by the way, is played by Tracy Letts, best known for writing the plays "Bug" and "Killer Joe" and for writing the screenplay to this movie.

Director Joe Wright makes a pretty canny choice of having Anna's everyday movie-watching consist of Alfred Hitchcock classics. Normally I'm against this sort of thing, because showing classic movies within your movie usually results in people wishing they were watching the classic instead. But I think it works here -- regardless of how you feel about this movie -- because it allows the viewer to consider the very real possibility that Anna is just seeing things.

Hell, I remember spending a three-day weekend at home fucked up on booze, weed, and shrooms, watching nothing but Shaw Brothers kung fu films all day and night. By Tuesday, I was convinced everybody around me had disgraced me and the Shaolin Temple. So why wouldn't Anna think she's in the middle of some real Hitchcockery?

Oh, that's another difference between Me and Anna; you can straight up O.J. a bitch six feet in front of me, and as far I'm concerned, I didn't see shit, I don't know shit, I don't want to know shit. I was busy tying my shoes the entire time, officer. But no, Anna's calls the pigs over and digs herself an increasingly deeper hole with a She's Imagining Things shovel. 

Now the movie is referencing Hitchcock, and it's aping Hitchcock, but the end result actually felt more like Dario Argento. This felt kinda/sorta like an American giallo at times, with a wonderfully garish mix of colors and lighting, a pulpy plot that favors trash over class, and where emotion beats out logic -- it just needed an extra on-screen murder or two or three. I don't think it's as good as early Argento joints like Deep Red or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage -- this is an American distillation of an Italian genre, after all -- but it's still a fun watch, if watched in that context.

I understand the reviews for this are pretty terrible, and I kinda get it; with a prestige cast and crew of award-winners and nominees behind it, one might expect something a bit more hoity-toity, and this ain't that. But I will not stand anybody who might have the audacity to say that Amy did not come to play.

She is excellent as Anna, and she manages to come off as both prickly and wounded -- probably from being so prickly, she can't help but hurt herself the most. She has a couple of certified emotional bangers late in the film; both are monologues, one given to a group of people, another to a camera, and either one would've made for a great Oscar clip in the category of Best Actress in a Fun Trashy American Sorta-Giallo. 

The film was delayed multiple times -- much to my dismay -- partially due to COVID-19 making a theatrical release not the most eligible option, and partially due to reshoots. I don't know what came out of the reshoots, but if I had to guess, the climax of the film was one of the results, because it does feel the most out-of-place with the rest of the movie. I've nothing against the climax, but I wished the film would've slowly worked its way to that wildly different tone, rather than suddenly whiplashing the audience into it. 

Also, I wonder if the reshoots are the reason Jennifer Jason Leigh's role seems so minor for someone so major; she doesn't really get much to do with a role that could've been given to somebody cheaper for the same effect.

Actually, her role isn't that much smaller from the rest of the supporting cast, who definitely live up to the "supporting" part, because this really is The Amy Adams Show. If Anna can't leave her house, that means the movie doesn't leave her house. She spends most of her time alone, and so the other characters are left to be occasional visitors or intruders. If I hadn't known about the novel, I would've totally assumed that this was based on one of Tracy Letts' plays, because this story could easily play out on a stage.

While the movie is expertly made and very well-acted, I couldn't help but think that there was an even crazier and better version of this story begging to be told, just aching to let its freak flag fly, and I'm afraid Joe Wright was just a bit too buttoned up a filmmaker for the job. This needed someone like Brian De Palma or Paul Verhoeven or Julie Taymor -- someone with a strong sense of the operatic, absurd, and theatrical. They also would've known how to make the climax and the rest of the film feel like one and the same.

Hell, why not give it to Argento himself? It could've been his best American work -- or his worst movie ever, although I don't know how the latter would be possible, unless he had Brian Tyree Henry's character turn into a praying mantis somewhere along the way.

Minor complaints aside, I thought this nutty little ditty fit the bill, and it passes the test as actual entertainment and not simply an Amy Adams thirst watch, because I'm pretty sure I'd still dig this movie if it instead starred, uh, I don't know, uh, maybe, uh someone like Isla Fisher, or Karen Gillan, or Jessica Chastain, or Emma Stone, or Christina Hendricks, or Bryce Dallas Howard -- you know, any random actress would do. 

Well, it was nice while it lasted. I don't mean the Amy Adams double feature, even though that was nice as well. I'm talking about my brief post-vaccinated return to the outside world. I got to eat in a couple of restaurants, went to see a couple movies in actual movie theaters. But I'm going back inside. Not because of a virus or its various variants, no way. My reason is something else, something that I feel was best expressed by one America's last great poets of the late 20th century, Andrew Dice Clay, in his 1993 special No Apologies: "...'cause people are scumbags". 

The disappointed optimist

I have friends and coworkers who will bring up a movie and then tell me what Rotten Tomatoes has given it, as if I care. I'm far too nice to tell them that I don't give two shakes of a lamb's tail what Rotten Tomatoes has to say about a movie I want to watch. I have no use for that stupid critical barometer because I want to know as little as possible about a movie -- aside from what I already know that got me interested in the first place.

Also, I really don't care what other people think about a new movie that I want to see. At most, I'll search out a couple reviews from critics I respect, but it'll be after I see the movie. So I don't waste my time with Rotten Tomatoes. Get out of my face with that garbage.

So I was on the Rotten Tomatoes website one day when I noticed a feature there called Five Favorite Films where whoever was promoting a movie on the site would give his or her list of, yup, you guessed it, their five favorite films. They had Amy Adams there promoting a film, and of the very few people in Hollywood that I can stand, number one with a polite bullet on that short list is the lovely and talented actress known here as The Adorable Amy Adams. Regular readers of the blog have known about my admiration of Ms. Adams for years, and new listeners of this podcast have known about it as of about five seconds ago.

As for her five favorite films, The Adorable Amy Adams gave the following: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Vertigo, The Shawshank Redemption, and the 1998 family film Paulie directed by John Roberts. 

In the interview, Adams admitted that Paulie stood out like a sore thumb on that list but she wanted to be honest and include a film that she's watched many times. She also brought up Paulie in another more recent interview on Leonard Maltin's podcast "Maltin on Movies"; in that interview, both Maltin and his co-host Jessie Maltin gave Ms. Adams plenty of praise for her performances in her new films Arrival and Nocturnal Animals and they were sure Oscar was going to finally -- finally! -- give her her long overdue gold, Best Actress-style. Which of course, did not happen because Emma Stone won that year for La La Land.

But I don't blame Emma Stone; she did a great job and I guess all pale redheads look the same to the racist Oscars. No, I blame the Academy for instead giving Our Amy's nomination slot to the much-ignored Meryl Streep, finally giving that criminally underrated starlet some much-needed awards attention for some movie called Florence Foster Jenkins about an old lady who can't sing and it's funny funny funny oh ho ho she can't sing! It's com-e-dy!

While I had already seen the other films she mentioned on the list, I hadn't seen Paulie, and so I put it on my watchlist along with the thousand other movies I'm sure I'll get around to as soon as I win the lottery and then I can just stay home all day & night catching up to these movies and not have to worry about how I'm going to pay my rent.

Oh, it would be beautiful too, I would just sit there and watch movies and eat and watch movies and eat and occasionally use the bathroom and if there's company coming over, I guess I could take a shower. Then I can become one of those fat hogs who are too big to leave the house, then my body will give and I'll die and my fat 800-pound corpse will be somebody else's problem. Ha ha ha, kiss my fat dead ass, you skinny necrophiliacs -- and don't forget, I want to be buried, so good luck recruiting six pallbearers with both the strength and disregard for the concept of hernias.

So I was reminded to watch Paulie when I saw my friend Cathie mention it on her Twitter timeline, and so I tossed away the movie I had intended to watch that night -- take a hike, The Rules of the Game -- and here we are.

The film begins with Tony Shalhoub as Misha, a Russian immigrant in the United States, beginning his new job as a night janitor at the kind of research laboratory where animals of all species are kept in cages that I'm sure in no way affects their well-being and therefore ensures that any research done to them is 100-percent accurate. I'm just saying, if you want to know what shoving an electric prod up a monkey's ass will do to the monkey for the purposes of research, maybe you want to get a monkey who's been living a comfortable life in something remotely resembling the monkey's natural environment.

Because if you take a monkey that's been living in a small cage in a strange room and shove an electric prod up its ass, I'm guessing at that point the monkey has already given up on life and is all like "eh, my life has been shit ever since they took me away from my family in the jungle, my confusion and fear of this new place has faded, and now I'm just resigned to this hellish existence of having different shampoos applied to my fur and being injected with various experimental vaccines until I'm embraced by sweet, sweet death and the rest of my eternity is in a black void because animals don't get to go to Heaven or Hell because apparently only humans have souls. What's another twelve inches up my ass?"

No monkeys get electric-prodded up the ass in this film, by the way. I'm just saying. And for the record, animals do have souls and they all go to Heaven. All of them. They're too pure to ever end up in Hell. Fight me on this and I'll make it so that you find out personally whether you're going to Heaven or Hell.

Anyway, a couple of nights into the job, Misha is by himself and he's busy Good Will Hunting the floors when he hears somebody singing from the basement. He goes downstairs to this dark dungeon and finds out that the singing is coming from a conure (or parakeet or parrot, if you want to be that way) who is all by himself in a cage that is chained with a padlock, as if it were resided by some kind of psycho Hannibal Lecter of birds.

Soon he finds out why the caged bird sings -- courtesy of the bird himself, whose name is Paulie and he not only sings but he can talk, and I don't mean the standard bird talk where they're just mimicking what they hear, this bird is capable of having conversations and can even be a real smartass at times, or maybe that's just a side effect of having Jay Mohr provide Paulie's voice.

As Paulie proceeds to tell Misha his story, the film flashes back to when he was born and given to a little girl named Marie, played by Hallie Eisenberg, best known for a series of Pepsi commercials that ran in the late 90s. Everything is great between Marie and Paulie; they enjoy each other's company and Paulie even helps her with her stutter as they both teach each other words and how to pronounce them.

The film never explains why Paulie has the gift of speech, or if they did, I missed it. He just can. The best I can come up with is that the power of pure unadulterated love can make the miraculous happen. Yeah, sure, whatever. Tell that to Nadia Sandoval. I loved her so much, that if you were to harness the positive energy I gave, you'd be able to power rockets with it -- and yet all the e-mails and the letters and the songs in the world couldn't convince her that I was the one. I even held up a boombox in front of her house like my man John Cusack in Say Anything but then a Chinese dude came out and he told me that not only did she move to Paris five years ago, but she also makes a six-figure salary and is married and has two kids and there's no way I can compete with that, not unless I get a big raise at El Pollo Loco or Taco Bell or whatever taco truck I'm working at, like, right now.

I told him I couldn't get a raise and that not only was that statement about me working in a Mexican fast food establishment racist, it was also the truth. Then I asked him if he wanted to go out for coffee and he told me that he was gay but not desperate. Or at least that's what I think he said, I mean, he had both the Chinese accent and a homosexual lisp, so excuse me for not having the best ear in the world to be able decipher Gaysian.

Speaking of speaking, I told you that Paulie not only talks, but he can carry a tune. He and Marie even share a song together, the Randy Newman classic "Marie". If you've never heard it, it's a beautifully depressing tune about some neglectful asshole who doesn't have the balls to express his deepest heartfelt emotions to the woman he loves unless he drinks enough liquid courage to do so.





What this has to do with the love between a girl and her bird, I don't know. I never saw Paulie sip on bird-booze from a bird-flask nor did he ever ignore her. If anything, he couldn't let her out of his sight, he loved her so much.

That leaves another disturbing possibility when you consider that the song was taught to Marie by her mother. So maybe the mom's a drunk, like one of those secret boozer housewives that used to run rampant back in the day, because there was only so much one can do to keep from going mad staying home all day because they hadn't yet invented the Internet or youth soccer organizations. There's only so many dishes you can wash, and there's only so many loads of laundry to launder, and there's only so many pot roasts to make. Soon you're gonna want more than just your common everyday Benzos to help you deal, you're gonna want to wash those down with some white wine. And then some more white wine.

Eventually nothing matters in your numbed state anymore except for your little girl Marie. But even then, you know she's not gonna stay little forever. Marie will eventually grow up. And then what? I'll tell you then what -- you keep drinking and you keep pilling, because the more you do, the easier it'll be to push the thought of the inevitable to a far off foggy place in the back of your mind.

Or maybe they just sing the song because the girl's name is Marie.

We soon find out that mom, Marie, and even Paulie have totally legitimate reasons to hit the bottle; one day, the father comes home and that's when we find out that we have a goddamn Great Santini on our hands with this military motherfucker. Marie goes up to him and this piece of shit actually tells her to shake hands with him first, then eventually they'll work up to kisses later. That left me immediately asking two questions: What the fuck? and Why the fuck?

Dad apparently was gone for a long time, because upon his return he's upset that Marie still stutters. He can't handle that, and after Mom puts Marie to bed, she then has to go downstairs and catch an ear-beating from him about Marie's uncured speech impediment, as if that was an issue he set his wife to fix while he was out killing commies for his country. Poor Marie might have a stutter, but she's not deaf, she has to hear all of this and the poor girl can only escape by dressing Paulie up as her fairy godmother and hoping he/she will grant her the ability to speak without stuttering, and it breaks my heart, man.

I don't care how many yellow or brown throats you slit in the name of Freedom, don't be like that with your daughter. Don't be a distant fuck. All right, look, ladies & gentlemen, if you're gonna have kids, please don't. But if you still are, at least be good to those little fucks once they're born. When I see shit like this in movies and especially in real life, it makes me thank God/Allah/Yahweh/Xenu/whoever-the-fuck for blessing me with the parents I ended up being life-saddled with.

I still remember this one time, way back in the day that I stopped at a friend's house and I listened to the way his mom was saying some fucked-up passive aggressive shit to him about what a fuckin' loser he was in her eyes. No wonder he had an underage drinking problem and seemed increasingly depressed with each passing day. I swear I wanted to run home to mommy and daddy and give them a big hug and apologize for whatever fuckin' bullshit I might've bitched about that morning. I can't handle seeing that shit, especially if its happening to the little girl from the Pepsi commercials. The fuck did she do? She never bothered me, she's not her brother Jesse.

By the way, this movie was made in 1998 but I bet you if this were made today, you'd have "patriots" losing their shit about how this military dad was represented. God forbid if this dude wasn't portrayed as a beautiful saint with red, white, and blue wings and an erect penis in the shape of the Holy Cross. I can see those diddle-faced twats on "Fox and Friends" bitching the live long day about how terrible it is that liberal Hollywood is making Our Boys looks like assholes.

Oh my god! Can you believe this? They're disrespecting our troops in this talking parrot movie! Of course what else would you expect from Hollyweird! -- wait, what? -- another school shooting? Yeah, whatever, anyway, for our last story of the day, America haters are now saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas! Can you believe that? We've made three God's Not Dead movies and they still don't get it! 

Anyway, this piece of work father buys a cat and is somehow surprised that Paulie and the cat mix about as well as oil and water, and he has the gall and the balls to be upset by that. Next thing you know, Lieutenant Fuckface over here puts Paulie in a cage and takes him away to God-knows-where despite Marie's crying and pleading for Paulie to come back to her.

What follows is a kind of bird version of Au Hasard Balthazar, in that we follow Paulie as he goes from owner to owner across the country -- that is, if Balthazar the donkey talked and actually participated in the lives of his owners instead of being an overall passive lunk who observed things and let things happen to him.

Nah, Paulie doesn't go out like that, he takes action -- he talks, he sings, he kinda dances, and the only time people get the better of him is when he's overpowered or as in one unsettling scene, he gets his wings clipped while he's screaming in pain and I'm like "this is for kids?!"

Yes, it is for kids -- there's an unnecessary fart joke that comes out of nowhere to prove that. It feels like something that was added in post-production at the last minute because the studio got all cowardly about sending out a family film that didn't satisfy every quotient including the scatological dollar.

Among the people he encounters on his travels: Jay Mohr in the flesh as a douchebag, Buddy Hackett as a pawn shop owner, Gena Rowlands as a widow, Cheech Marin as part of the problem in this great country, Jay Mohr again as a douchebag, and Bruce Davison as -- holy shit, Bruce Davison? I just talked about you in the last blog entry, the one about Crazy/Beautiful! Welcome back, bro!

So how are you doing, Bruce? You're playing the head of the research facility where Paulie ends up? That's cool. Are you as understanding and compassionate as the guy you played in Crazy/Beautiful? No. Ah man, fuck you then. Nah, you're cool with me Bruce, you were in Willard, bro. Remember that, when you were dealing with all those rats? And then they made a sequel without you and Michael Jackson sang a song about one of the rats? Now here you are dealing with birds, and unfortunately they didn't get Michael Jackson to sing a song about Paulie. That's kind of a missed opportunity, don't you think?

But that's OK because  -- talk to you later, Bruce -- that's OK because they do have Cheech Marin sing "Cancion del Mariachi" from the film Desperado, which I thought was a great choice because it meant the filmmakers didn't have to rack their brains too long while trying to look for a good Latin song for Cheech and Paulie to perform. That movie was probably playing on television in the background while they were having a script conference -- it would've been a dead heat between that song and "Babalu" by Desi Arnaz, if it weren't for that stupid intern accidentally changing the channel before "I Love Lucy" came on.

So let me talk about the Cheech stuff; he plays Ignacio (which they pronounce Anglo-style), the owner/operator of a taco truck that specializes in burritos. He and Paulie meet in East L.A. and become friendly business partners in performing song & dance routines for the patrons. I'm watching this and going, OK, this is cool -- Cheech is just a good dude running a business, nothing too unusual or stereotypical about him aside from the fact that he's played by Cheech. So I'm watching and I'm digging this, and then later it comes out that he's an illegal alien. Because of course he is.

At one point, somebody tries to fuck him over by falsely reporting to the cops that his business is unsanitary and that he's serving alcohol to minors -- hey, I wonder if he sold any to my friend with the shitty mom? You'd think that should be enough. But no, they had to add the most important detail that he's here without papers, and have that be the true part of the bogus police report.

Fine. Be that way, movie. At least Ignacio came off as a nice guy. I guess I should be grateful for that.

Speaking of nice immigrants, Misha the janitor is a really nice guy as well. Once he gets over the shock of meeting a talking parrot, he makes for a very patient and understanding person for Paulie to talk with. Everybody in this movie gives really good performances, including the 14 or so birds they used to portray Paulie before they threw them into an incinerator or wherever you put out of work birds. But Tony Shalhoub stands out in particular with his exceptional work here, especially during a monologue he gives Paulie about the regret he has for not talking to a girl from his past with whom he had fallen in love.

I want to give the writer of this film, Laurie Craig, extra points for the connection between Misha's inability to tell a woman he loved her and Randy Newman's song "Marie", which if you remember what I said a few years earlier during this blog entry, is about being unable to tell someone you love them. Except of course, in the Marie song, that problem was solved via the miracle of alcohol, while apparently Misha is the one Russian on planet Earth who doesn't drink. Let that be a lesson for you sober straight edge motherfuckers.

There are other examples throughout the film of characters who have hesitated in doing something they wanted to do, and how the passage of time ultimately fucked them in the ass for not going through with it:

Misha didn't speak up to the woman he loved, and so she went on to marry his best friend.

Paulie was afraid to fly, which led to an accident that resulted in his separation from Marie.

Gena Rowlands' character gave up on her dream of going to the Grand Canyon after the death of her husband, and ended up spending the rest of her golden years going nowhere.

Ignacio never fixed his pesky naturalization issues and is now back in the old country teaching OTMs how to say "Waas Sappening".

And Marie's mom hesitated in tying her piece of shit husband to a bed before setting that motherfucker on fire.

I was surprised by how Paulie was able to sneak in such serious internal struggles in a goofy family movie about a talking parrot. Yeah, I know, you're right -- it's a stretch. Speaking of stretching, you should really limber up before you go fuck yourself.

Amy Adams has said that this movie makes her cry, and my friend Cathie on Twitter warned me that I would get teary-eyed while watching it. While I enjoyed the film and was touched by certain moments, I did all right in the Man Up department and was ready to call out both The Triple A and Cathie because not a single tear was shed -- and then the ending happened. Upon watching the final revelation that hammered home the film's running theme, my balls faded away as I gradually turned into Matthew McConaughey during those couple of scenes in Interstellar when everything was not alright alright alright.

Paulie is a sweet-natured film with the occasional laugh and a couple of tearjerker moments. It is truly a movie that the entire family can enjoy; the kids will like it and the adults won't feel like hostages while watching it with them. And it's good enough for grown-up solitary shut-ins like myself. It's a nice movie. It put a smile on my face. And it makes such precious sense that who I perceive to be The Adorable Amy Adams would call Paulie one of her favorite films.

I'm happy that I finally saw the movie, but if there's one thing that disappointed me about Paulie is that it failed to wipe away the memory of my old neighbor who had gotten a parrot of his own and took to having it perched on his shoulder. Everyday, I would arrive home after work and run to my door before the newly retired gentleman across the street noticed me. Because if he did, he would call me over for a little chit chat, which would mean I would have to talk to him and try my best to ignore that the man's shoulder was always caked with bird shit. He had to know what he had going on there, he had just had to! And yet he did nothing about it, which meant that he didn't care and he was consciously or subconsciously getting off on being nice to me in behavior while being incredibly hostile towards me in appearance.

In conclusion, I'm glad I called the cops on his drug-dealing son. That's what the little fucker gets for not giving me a discount.

No one ever uses the turn signal

For as many years as this country has left, November 2016 will forever be known as the month that our very own The Adorable Amy Adams had two films released in which she had a starring role, and both of them have had Oscar buzz. Also this was the month where that other thing happened.

I finally made time to catch them both the other day at the Arclight Cinemas in Pasadena, where I tortured myself with the lovely scent of freshly made popcorn that I can't eat yet because of some recent dental work. I was able to eat an overly salted soft pretzel, though, which I'm sure gave me about a week's worth of sodium in one bite.

First, there was Nocturnal Animals, written and directed by (I Don't Pop Molly, I Rock) Tom Ford, adapted from a novel called "Tony and Susan" (which has now been retitled after the film because, well, money). The Triple A plays Susan, a well-off art gallery owner who is married to The Lone Ranger from The Social Network and has a daughter in college, but clearly she's not happy, despite living in an awesome house that's clearly populated by the damning evidence that the person occupying it has nothing but Good News in her bank account. But at least she's aware. Susan tells her friend that she feels bad about feeling bad, because she knows she has it good.

The scene where Susan confides in her friend? They're having a dinner party in that scene, and one of the guests is this young woman who is being cheerfully vulgar to the crowd, and we find out she's a famous actress. I'm going right ahead and assuming that character was a kind of swipe at Jennifer Lawrence, at least because she appears to be the Hot Actress Who Is Such A Regular Joe Like The Rest Of Us du jour, that's who I was reminded of. There is the occasional moment like that in this film -- all of them during the Susan art-world scenes -- that made me want to laugh out loud and e-mail Mr. Ford the Catty Motherfucker award.

Anyway, Susan receives a package in the mail from her ex-husband, containing the proof for his new novel. The name of the book is "Nocturnal Animals" and what's better than having the title of the movie said by someone in the movie? I'll tell you: having the title of the movie show up during the movie.

You mean, like in the credits?

Bitch, you know what the fuck I mean.

So she's reading the book, right, and luckily we don't follow each word she reads but instead we see it played out. The story begins with Donnie Darko from Nightcrawler taking his family on a road trip through West Texas. His wife is played by Isla Fisher aka The Australian Amy Adams, and that right there is why Tom Ford is my dude: he knows what's up. There's also a daughter played by quite possibly someone who was created in a machine using both Adams' and Fisher's DNA. He and his two Amys end up in a horrifying situation that took me off guard. I hadn't seen any trailers or ads for this on purpose, I just knew it was a Tom Ford joint and The Adorable Amy Adams was in it, all I expected was that it would probably look good.

Darko's family end pissing off a group of the kind of angry/cruel/irrational rednecks that would probably feel more at home angrily F-wording up the proceedings in a Rob Zombie film and you can tell these assholes are just looking for an excuse. It's possibly the most worked up (in a negative sense) I've gotten watching a film this year, I was feeling both tensed up and enraged. I swear a couple times I wanted to scream at the fucking movie screen. Plus, I was thinking, what the fuck, this is Texas and nobody has a gun? Isn't that the whole point of that fucking place -- that they're like their own little country that plays by its own rules and shit?

Ford's almost as sadistic as those characters, because right when you're all worked up and ready to see what's about to happen, the film cuts back to Susan taking a break from reading because the events in the book are working her up in a negative way too. (Also, she's seeing a lot of parallels between the characters in the book and Susan & Ex-Husband.) The novel then turns into something that feels like some Cormac McCarthy shit written in between chapters of "No Country for Old Men", and that's when Michael Shannon shows up and he is, to nobody's surprise, great in this.

Everybody is great in this, like Mr. Jake Gyllenhaal; this poor guy has been really putting himself out there every year to good notices and nothing else. The Academy finally gave an Oscar to DiCaprio, now they need to give it to Jakey G. here before he does something rash like cine-torture himself for Alejandro G. Innaritu. I don't know if it's going to happen for him this year, but Jesus, at least give him a Supporting nod because I think the dude deserves it for his work here.

I would be surprised if Amy Adams gets any kind of award recognition here. Because her character is more internal, that means all her beats have to be subtle, so hers is not a particularly showy performance and you know Oscar is kinda deaf and vision-impaired; they'll probably be able to make out Gyllenhaal but they'll be squinting their eyes and cupping their hands to their ears going "Whaaa?" at poor Amy. Whatever, she's always been bringing the quality goods to these proceedings, which is all that matters.

(Until she eventually wins, of course. Then it will be all that matters. Suddenly Oscars will mean everything.)

The film cuts between the novel, Susan reading it and doing her art gallery/unhappy-well-off-woman-in-her-40s thing, and flashbacks to when Susan and her ex-husband (also played by Gyllenhaal) were in their early 20s. That last part, the early 20s stuff, really tripped me out because there is some kind of movie magic being used here to make them look like they just finished promoting Junebug and Jarhead in '05. If there's CGI de-aging being used, then it's not as heavy as when they young'd up Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War -- either that or the technology has improved that much over these past few months, because it looks a lot more natural.

I'm thinking it's a combination of aging up Adams (black clothes and caked on makeup) and Gyllenhall (thick ass beard) in the beginning, and then cleaning them up in the flashbacks with some light CGI work. Whatever the case, it's not just the wow factor of that shit that got me, but it worked because it really hit me how much happier and fresher the characters look because Life hadn't bent them over yet.

This is Ford's second film, following 2009's A Single Man (which I rambled about somewhere here) and like that film, this one is pretty goddamn good. (Like that one, this one isn't the feel good movie of the year either.) He wrote the screenplay adaptation and knocked that out, he gets good performances from his actors, he is clearly a big part of the visual look for this film -- a film so beautifully set designed and shot-composed, one could freeze-frame a random moment and frame it on a wall.

And man oh man, you can tell a Tom Ford joint from the others just on the fact that everybody here is so impeccably dressed and groomed. (Even the West Texas stuff gives everyone an artfully disheveled kind of look.) They all look like they stepped out of ads from a fashion magazine; as soon as I saw Armie Hammer step in for a giant glass of iced coffee in this movie, I'm thinking Fuck I Need That Suit I Need That Haircut.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: EFC believes Tom Ford would make a stylish-as-fuck James Bond movie if they're cool with an American/Texan directing a 007 movie.

Also, there's two instances of Girls Wearing Glasses here, and in case you didn't know, that's like a thing I have. It's not a fetish, no sir, I don't need glasses to get hard or achieve orgasm, it's not that kind of party. I'm just saying it ups every lady's attractiveness quotient by like 10 percent for me. I can't explain it, it just is, dude. Like, if I had directed She's All That, it would've been about Laney putting those glasses back on after her makeover. Anyway, Susan puts on glasses sometimes to read the novel and then later on Jena Malone shows up in a pair of thick frames and that put a smile on my penis -- FACE! I MEAN IT PUT A SMILE ON MY FACE!

(The rest of you Gyllenhaals and Hammers can stick to contacts and laser eye surgery. No glasses for you. Nobody wants to see that shit. My eyes are Exit Only, bro.)

I hate this motherfucker Tom Ford, this man who already won at life long ago but then decided to become a filmmaker -- and he's great at it! At least so far he's great at it. Maybe next time he'll fall on his face and get to feel what it's like to be loser for once HAHAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT FORD

If you're into seeing naked obese women jumping around with firecrackers but you're not really interested in this film, then show Amy your support by buying a ticket for this movie, and then sit down and watch the first five minutes of this, then get up and walk over to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and watch that shit. I mean why not? They don't need your money, they're gonna make like 20 years worth of sequels for that shit. But I want to see more movies directed by Tom Ford and starring The Triple A, and that shit ain't happening unless some fuckin' cash is flowed into their current projects.

I then flowed some more money Ms. Adams' way while dealing out ducats in Denis Villeneuve's direction; the second half of my Triple A Double Feature was the aliens-are-here movie Arrival. Look, I get it -- there was no disrespect intended towards David Twohy and Charlie Sheen by giving their film the same title as theirs, they shot this as Story of Your Life which is the title of the Ted Chiang's short story it was based on. But I'm sure the studio suits were like Nah, Bro, Nah and so now we have these dueling Arrivals.

Except I think some respect was paid here, because the original film is titled The Arrival while this one eliminates the The. The filmmakers are saying "It's cool, we're Arrival but you guys are THE Arrival and no one will forget that." It's kind of like what they did with the Evil Dead remake a few years ago; they were Evil Dead but Sam Raimi's will always be THE Evil Dead.

Had I not known that this was from the director of Sicario and Prisoners, I would've thought this was a Terrence Malick joint early on. It has that same handheld shallow-focus personally close/personally distant look thing going on with narration over it, and I'm thinking, wow, has his style become like a thing now? Like I see even dudes like Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan taking this style, and I'm afraid I'll get sick of it, the way I'm sick of zombies now. Meanwhile, much like George A. Romero, it seems like Malick is getting props as the originator while everybody else makes bank off of it. It's not fair, but whoever said this shit was?

So yeah, it opens with our Amy as Dr. Louise Banks, she's a linguist but she works for a living as a professor at a college, she's probably too busy to correct your grammar and all that shit online or at least I don't think she does. Or maybe that's just an English major thing, I don't know what Dr. Banks majored in, so who knows if she would correct your tweets and e-mails if she knew you.

Come to think of it, I don't even know if she has any friends, she just has a nice house by the lake -- oh shit, that reminds me, both her character in this film and her character in Nocturnal Animals share similarities in that they both hang their hats in nice pads and both have trouble sleeping. So there you go, it's the Amy Adams Lives In A Nice House And Can't Sleep double bill, ya'll,

Anyway, she lives alone in this nice lake house -- well, she lives alone *now* because in the beginning we watch her raise a kid until the kid becomes a pre-teen who then dies of some disease, so we're dealing with that heavy shit too.

But yeah, she lives alone, and she's so into her bubble that one day she's walking through the university while people around her are looking all weirded and freaked, but she doesn't notice this. She then walks into her class and wonders why there's like five people in this big room, then everybody's phones start to ring and she's like "Huh?" until she turns on the giant flat screen television behind the dry-erase board and that's when I went HUH?!

Bro, I missed all this good shit. In schools primary, secondary, and post-secondary, if we were gonna watch television for something in class, that shit had to be carted in on some big metal tv-stand shelf cart-thingy. And it was the square tube tv, too. Man, these kids today now have giant flat-screens to watch the world go ape-shit on? Lucky motherfuckers.

Or maybe not, because I was talking to my niece and nephew and they told me that at their schools they got rid of soda machines and sugary snacks and all that shit. The food is all health conscious stuff, and part of me is thinking that's a very good thing because we need to wean the future generations off of garbage that does nothing for you other than give you a brief moment of joy in this overcrowded sinking ship of a planet. And the other part of me is like, damn, so you kids missed out on insane lunches like Rice Krispies Treats washed down with a Dr. Pepper, which was one of my go-tos in high school. I'm really surprised I still have all ten fingers and toes, to be honest with you.

Anyway, so she finds out on the tv that giant spacecrafts have materialized out of nowhere, 12 in all, and they're hovering over different spots in the world. There's one chilling out over a field in Montana, USA and that's why Colonel Ghost Dog shows up to recruit her to join the Devil's Tower-meets-Tent City festivities out in that field to help them figure out how to communicate with the things inside and figure out what they want. She's joined by Marvel's Hawkeye, playing a scientist who's all about the math, so fuck that guy -- because math is the fastest way to remind me how stupid I am.

What your usual sci-fi action-adventure would spend about a couple minutes on, Arrival devotes its entire running time; the movie is all about trying to figure out how to figure out what these aliens are saying. They just want to be able to ask these things what is the purpose of their visit, business or pleasure? Of course, you have different ideas from different kinds of people; a couple of educated libtards like Dr. Banks and Hawkeye think it's more of a peaceful let's-help-each-other type of visit, while shadowy creepy CIA types like the dude from A Serious Man (not to be confused with Tom Ford's A Single Man) think these aliens are on some Independence Day type shit. Then you have Colonel Ghost Dog who is more of a I Don't Question Orders, I Just Follow Them type who just wants good enough answers from Banks and Hawkeye to give to his superiors. (He's also from a part of the country I haven't figured out yet; based on his accent here, he's either from Boston or Texas.)

Upon finding out that I was going to see this film, a buddy of mine who had already seen Arrival told me that he liked it and then we had the following text exchange:

See, my Good Friend here has my Amy Adams admiration figured out incorrectly, but I indulge him by responding in kind because that's what Good Friends do. You talk to me about Amy Adams like that and I'll indulge you too, you son-of-a-bitch bastard.

(To be honest, I felt like Ms. Adams needed to cover herself up during the bathtub scene in the Batman/Superman movie because there were plenty of men in the audience who were going to get the wrong idea about her. And we most certainly couldn't have that. She's a nice girl! Plus, I didn't want her to catch cold.)

I'm a sucker for scenes of Smart People Figuring Shit Out, like, my favorite scene in Apollo 13 was when all those nerds are gathered around a table and they're told they have to find a way to get one device to connect another device using only the various tools and junk on the table and Arrival is kinda like that scene. It's a slow-moving film but not boring, it's just they're taking baby steps in this one; the funny thing is even with a deliberate pace the film takes more than its share of shortcuts.

Like early on, when Banks and Hawkeye are taken on-board the ship to talk to the aliens, they go through this whole process of getting on a scissor lift that elevates them to the ship's entrance, then they hop off and let the ship's anti-gravity thingy carry them the rest of the way, where they then begin walking the rest of the vertical path like it ain't no thing. Then they get to this glass wall where the aliens are on the other side -- by the way, kudos for finding a way to give us aliens that don't follow the usual humanoid shape with big eyes and all that. They're kinda spider-y, kinda octopus-y, and they're both cool and scary at the same time.

By the time our scientists are boarding the ship for the first time, Ghost Dog and company have already gone through all of this, to the point that Ghost Dog shows no signs of excitement or tension or anything. He seems kinda bored by it. And I'm thinking, holy shit, that's a whole movie right there! Imagine what these guys went through at the very beginning of this -- and how long! -- how long did it take them to figure all that shit out about how to board the ship and deal with the anti-gravity and all that shit, before being all nonchalant about it by the time Banks and Hawkeye arrived? If I remember it right, it was about two days before Team Banks arrived. Two days! These boys had to have been working around the clock. And who was the lucky son-of-a-gun who took that first step onto that ship?

(They do carry a bird with them in a cage with every visit, placing it a few feet ahead of them. So maybe they should give that bird a medal of some kind. Or some quality newspaper for its cage.)

Anyway, that's what I mean by shortcuts. We'll never know that or how even in the brief period of time they are able to make the advances that they make and then I remind myself that it's a movie and that they only have so much time to tell this story before losing us all in the minutiae. Besides, that Cleveland Show-looking motherfucker Neil Degrasse-Tyson would shit all over it on Twitter (if he hasn't already) on how much they got wrong while never understanding that all the degrees and smarts in the fucking galaxy will not help him reach the self-awareness required to step back for a couple seconds and say to himself "Neil, you are doing a lot of good for humanity by stressing the importance of knowledge -- in particular in the fields of science and reason. We need a lot more of that in a world drowning in superstition. But dude, you are a thin-skinned asshole who thinks he's fucking hilarious, and that, sir, is not a good combo."

No sir, a good combo is Amy Adams and Denis Villeneuve. Arrival is a heavy-on-the-science sci-fi joint with some surprising emotion popping up here and there. It features a great performance by The Triple A, but, oh Amy, I'm sorry but you're probably not getting any Oscar gold with this one either. I'm thinking about it, and I'm realizing that she ends up doing a lot of acting by herself, which has to be one of the hardest things for an actor. I think I mentioned this on the blog a while back, but there is what I call the Robert Forster school of acting, named after one of my favorite actors who will never win an award because his stuff is so subtle and within and I already told you how the Academy gets down with performances like that. And I think for these two back-to-back performances, she took a brush-up course at that school.

Also, it does that movie thing that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang made fun of, where if a shot lingers on a nameless character a little too long after the fact, like the cook in The Hunt for Red October, you can bet the fuckin' Brinks truck that Chekov's Extra is going to pop up in some plot-changing shit later, you just fucking know, bro!

As for the ending, I liked it but I can see how it would piss off others. It's not a twist, by the way, at least not in my book (pre-orders available now!), just a revelation that some people have issues with, either for logical reasons or whatever else they have a bug up their asses about. I dug it. It kinda reminded me of the ending to -- well, shit, it reminds me of the endings to a lot of things, to be real with you.

OK, I'll mention one of them -- Runaway Train, and I feel comfortable saying that one without feeling that I spoiled something because you will not be able to figure out the connection. You would need to invite me to an expensive dinner that you will pay for, and it would have to be after I've had at least half of that meal before I explain to you how I feel that both this film and Runaway Train have similar endings. They all have to do with Free Will, I'll give you that much/little.

(Also, they are both similar in that this film also features a scene where Amy Adams is shouting out of a runaway train screaming at an evil warden in a helicopter above her while sticking her middle finger at him, in between taking slugs out of Eric Roberts' flask, saying "sucka" in every other sentence.)

It was a morning/afternoon well spent at the Arclight Pasadena. I don't know if they do this for all the movies at the Arclight, but for both Arrival and Nocturnal Animals there was a clip before each film telling us that after the credits there would be some extra behind-the-scenes stuff. They were each about five minutes or so; the Nocturnal Animals one featured Gyllenhaal and Ford and it focused on how the ending could be interpreted, while the Arrival one featured Ms. Adams doing her impersonation of her French-Canadian director -- which I of course found delightful. I appreciated these little extras, called "Arclight Stories" because they allow you to stick around after the credits for other reasons aside from finding out if there are any hints about what the next Marvel film is going to be about.

Nocturnal Animals or Arrival? You can't go wrong with either one, whether you're an Amy Adams fan or a fan of good movies. But I get it. You have kids, or just like Dwayne Johnson so much, you just have to see Moana, right? It's cool. I mean, you can go fuck your mother, but it's cool.

Suddenly you need Oil of Olay

I was going to see this but then I wasn't going to see this. Then I was. Or I wasn't.

As I was going to tell the gentleman on Facebook in my comment when asked if I was serious about not seeing this film, before I realized this was better off posted on my blog: I'm afraid, Kris. So very afraid. Afraid to sit there after paying for the ticket, the popcorn, the soda, the candy -- all that to make the experience easier to sit through -- all that time and money and end up with the feeling that I've been had.

Because of the reviews, oh man, those reviews. I wasn't surprised, because in the comic book movie family, compared to goody-two-shoes Marvel Films, DC Comics is more like the fuck-up brother with moments of potential but mostly he needs a boot in the ass to help get his shit straight. But wow, these are particularly toxic, these reviews. If there were ever road signs telling me that there's rocky terrain and an unfinished bridge up ahead, the reviews for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice were it.

I kinda liked the last one, Man of Steel, even though I had some serious issues with it -- namely, for a "fun" superhero movie it was pretty goddamn gloomy. But then maybe I'm the asshole here and it was never supposed to be fun, maybe Snyder & Nolan felt like the kids today, they've had enough fun in their lives and it's time to smack 'em with harshness. Times have changed, bitches, and it's time to toughen up, knuckle up, and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps: You want Reading Rainbow to help you enjoy books? Kickstart it with your dollars, kid. You wanna go to Sesame Street? Subscribe to HBO, you little lazy bastard. And you want a nice Superman who stands for Truth, Justice, and the American way? Watch the old shit, you young fuck.

Where was I? Oh yes, this film and why I was torn between seeing it and not seeing it. If you are a regular reader than you see this coming much like I saw most of this film coming, even though I never watched a single trailer. You know what I'm talking about -- you know who I'm talking about.

Oh, Amy. Why do you have to be such a talented -- but more importantly, sincere and likable! -- actress who seems genuinely appreciative of her success and carries no airs of fakery? And if you're just that good at hiding the fakery, then you are in fact the greatest actor ever because even the best thespians of either gender fail miserably at doing that.

Meryl Streep is my jam, but man oh man is she suspect whenever she doesn't win something. And remember Anne Hathaway's shameless attempts when she was racking them up for Les Miserables? Or remember your co-star Melissa Leo winning Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter? Oh man, she was the worst at that. Her high/low point was singing along at the end of the Oscar ceremony to Over the Rainbow, holy shit, she thought we would buy that OMG DREAMS DO COME TRUE look on her face.

What I'm trying to say is that I'll follow you anywhere, but wow, it would've been so much easier for me to wait for the R-rated Blu-ray of this movie, rather than deal with the rest of the country going to see this at the same time when I already knew who was going win and lose between Batman and Superman: The studio over the audience. But you're in this movie, Amy! Anyway, sorry for using my one straight-up question as an excuse to mostly put down others. Sorry about that, Amy. That was very un-Amy of me and I need to fix that.

Take care and be well.

Signed, Me.

The Adorable Amy Adams returns as Lois Lane, but I wasn't that hot on seeing the sequel in the theaters and the reviews only made me colder to it. So then I'm in the position of only being interested in seeing this film because The Triple A is in it and even then, what if she isn't in it that much? What am I left with? Something so cynically put together then thrown at the great unwashed masses with such overflowing contempt towards us that it might as well have been directed by Transformers-era Michael Bay and titled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on the Fallen Dark Moon of Extinction Fuck You Dummy Dumb Dumbs Stupidheads We Love You As Much As Politicians Do So Go Get Fucked You Morons And Shove It Down Your Entrance And Shove It Up Your Exit And Thanks For The New Cars And Houses You Bought Us We'll See You Next Time With The Next Bucket Of Cine-Slop You Cuntfaced Pig Headed Sheep People?

I remembered feeling burned by the second Transformers garbage bin that was Revenge of the Fallen and I swore I was done with that series, but then people kept going on about how the third one was actually the one to watch. What to do, I wondered. Am I actually going to have to see this one? So I hedged my bet by taking some of that fine green herb with me and toking up like a muthafuckin' soldier in the parking lot. And you know what? The movie wasn't that bad. It wasn't that good, but it wasn't that bad either.

Since then, I've cut down -- way down -- on the ganja. Once upon a time I approached Wake & Bake levels and then I surpassed it, then I realized I was becoming one of those weirdo stoners that I can't stand and I started to exhibit behavior I loathed in my fellow pot-smoker. So now it's relegated to the occasional Saturday night/early Sunday morning nightcap, or the occasional legit bout of insomnia.

Or a movie I'm not too sure about.

And so, I got up Saturday morning and drove to the 9:00am IMAX showing of BvS: DoJ, playing "The Love Movement" album by A Tribe Called Quest, which turned out to be their final album. (RIP Phife Dawg!!!) I arrived at the theater by the time "Find a Way" was ending (it wasn't a long drive) and in the parking lot I busted out the vaporizer and got to work inhaling as much as possible in the short time window available, turning the greenery inside into a nice toasty shade of Fall leaves.

Then I ambled my way inside and you bet your ass I bought some nachos and a two-bladder sized Camelbak of Cherry Coke. I found a good seat and in a couple minutes I was surrounded by children -- kids to the left of me, kids to the right, and here I am stuck in the middle of a good-fucking high. I felt irresponsible but fuck it, these kids need to learn about this shit. I figured I was OK so long as they don't have some weird law I'm not aware of, like, I don't know, like if being stoned near children qualifies as a Sex Offense or something and next thing I know I'm locked up with Popeye from Blood In Blood Out except he has higher standards than my ass, so instead he just beats the shit out of me.

I actually watched the trailers, except for the Captain America: Civil War one, because audio can't really spoil shit for me, except for when the kid next to me screamed out the name of someone who pops up at the very last second; Suicide Squad looked interesting; Ghostbusters looked funny and as far as that movie is concerned, I'm good to go despite Melissa McCarthy being in it. The kids around me were pretty hyped up about it, and they were all boys, so take that you adult jagoffs who can't take females bustin' ghosts.

Anyway, for these ramblings on Beavis Dodge below, keep in mind that I was as high as Terence Herman Edward Dickens when I watched all of this.

SHIT IS GONNA GET SO FUCKING SPOILED NOW. COME BACK LATER IF THAT MATTERS TO YOU.

The film begins for me with The Adorable Amy Adams and we're following her as she interviews an African warlord over there in the African Outback or whatever they call it, and it's a pretty awesome entrance or maybe it was a decent one but because it's Our Amy that ups it like 50 percent. So anyway, during all this it's revealed that her photographer's camera has a tracking device in it, so naturally the warlord does his thing (it's noon and he hasn't killed anyone yet) and puts a .45 slug into this photographer-about-to-become-a-corpse's head.

Now get this -- that guy who just got killed? I find out later that was Jimmy Olsen. No shit. Jimmy Fuckin' Olsen. I guess that was supposed to be a Holy Shit moment except, uh, I don't remember this dude in the last film and they didn't give you any establishment of his character here -- not even a hint or clue. So it's not really a Holy Shit moment, at least not until you look it up online because you saw Jimmy Olsen in the end credits but didn't remember seeing him in the movie. I honestly don't know if that was a Fuck You from the filmmakers or a We Just Don't Give A Shit from them, whatever the fuck ever; Lois ends up getting saved by Supes, so it's all good.

You know who also doesn't give a shit? Superman. Later on, Lois has an awkward conversation sitting in a bathtub while Clark Kent (played by The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) stands over her, and she talks about how Senator Holly Hunter is having press conferences featuring Stock African Townspeople saying Fuck A Superman, He Didn't Save Shit and Clark's like I Don't Care.

You sure don't, Clarky. I wish you did, I wish we saw more of you actually doing heroic stuff and not just the aftermath where Mexicans touch you like you're The Jesus, and I wish you were portrayed with the same vim and vigor that Henry Cavill brought to the U.N.C.L.E. joint, and I swear sometimes it felt like somewhere off-camera there was a gun being pointed in Cavill's direction, with some sweaty guy whispering "That's right, limey, you keep not enjoying yourself. If I see even a speck of light in your performance, it's curtains for you! Now jump into that bathtub even though you're wearing clothes, because that's as lighthearted as it's gonna get!"

Hey I don't mind seeing Amy Adams in a bathtub, but it's not you get to see much anyway, but if you're into hot dudes then you get Clark standing in his underwear and cooking eggs which didn't seem very smart given all that hot oil that could potentially burn him but then again, he's Kal-El, what does he care? He might as well crack eggs on those fuckin' washboard abs and fry 'em with his Evil Devil Eyes Heat-Vision and forget about ever washing dishes.

Meanwhile in Gotham City -- just located across the water a few miles away! -- Batman (played by Argo) is doing his thing saving people and branding a fucking Bat logo on the criminals before sending them to prison (where the identification will get them killed). I guess tattooing a number on them before sending them off to a place full of similar folk to be murdered would be too much work. Even Alfred (played by Dead Ringers) is put off by this branding shit; he tells him that he wasn't like that before and Bruce pretty much gives him some bullshit about how things are worse now so I guess he has to be, uh, worser. It's also kinda hinted that Bruce Wayne is a drinker, like Affleck in real life.

Ah, I kid the rich and handsome actor and director of Academy Award-winning films who wins at life while I just blog about it. Sorry for hurting your feelings, Ben. I remember when the news came out that he was going to portray Batman, and I never had a problem with it. If anything, my only complaint was that he should be directing the movie because he's a damn good director. As it is, in his actor-solo mode I thought he was really good and it kinda bums me out there isn't a solo Batman movie featuring Affleck doing some more stabbing and shooting and bone-breaking and setting people on fire.

It's a trip, man, it's like Snyder and company thought the already controversial Burton/Keaton Batman was a pussy. But love it or hate it, you gotta give points to this Batman for using an electronic voice modulator so he doesn't have to do that lame growl voice that Christian Bale had to do. One day, when I'm ready to die, I'll find Bale at a bar and walk up to him and give him sooooo much shit about that voice.

Or maybe I won't give him shit, because according to those e-mails that were leaked out of Sony, my man C.B. stepped in and gave a little of that Light Trashing magic to that niece-molesting actor-bullying fuckhead David O. Russell for making The Adorable Amy Adams cry. HE MADE HER CRY. This shitmouth has a history of this, and it takes a Bale or a George Clooney to ring this asshole's bell every once in a while which is not nearly enough. So I'm happy his ode to poor Stockholm Syndrome-suffering Jennifer Lawrence, Joy, underperformed at the box office, because the more of those he makes, the less The Powers That Be will throw dollars at him, and the sooner he becomes Yesterday's News -- at least until a decade or two later when when his old movies become popular again and he tours the revival cinema circuit to blah blah the packed enraptured crowds, the way we do with Former Hot Shit/Terrible Human Beings like William Friedkin. And I say this as a major, major, major fan of William Friedkin -- the filmmaker.

And I think you see a bit of where my crush on The Adorable Amy Adams comes from: the possibility that maybe she's a genuinely decent human being and yet she managed to find success in a business where nice people finish last and walking twats win awards and get away with terrible behavior. I can't help but cheer on those kinds of people. This blog entry will be hilarious to read after it comes out that Amy Adams is like a secret Nazi or something, or she does something stupid and open up a Twitter account and have an opinion. Then that will be the end of The Triple A.

Anyway, fuck those guys. As much as I think the movie really begins with Our Amy, it actually begins with this cool sequence that goes back and forth between Young Bruce Wayne at his parents' funeral and the night they were shot dead by Joe Chill (after Thomas Wayne makes the incredibly smart move of taking a swing at the handgun-toting Chill). Then it goes into him falling into that bat pit and getting all batted on and I guess he's the King of the Bats or something now because they encircle him and levitate him up towards the light.

It worked for me, and it made me think for a second that I was actually watching a straight-up new Batman reboot (which I guess it is, but it's also a Superman film, a Justice League film, etc.), but then it goes into the events of Man of Steel, when the World Engine is fucking up Metropolis and I guess it wasn't doing a fast enough job, so here comes Superman and Zod to speed up the destruction process.

While this is happening, Middle-Aged Bruce Wayne is driving his SUV trying to get his people out of one of his buildings, but hey, he's the star and they're just bit players. Doesn't take Neil Degrasse Tyson to figure out how that's gonna work out -- and that's because he's too busy making a cameo in this film. I gotta say, I thought all of that worked but that could be because 9/11-style imagery mixed with a soon-to-be-smooshed dude praying to God to save his soul is gonna automatically give me a case of the Strong Emotions. (I don't think this film is gonna play very well in Pakistan at the moment either. Sigh.) Call it cheating, call it good filmmaking, but mostly I prefer to call it bad-taste ballsiness. This film? This Batman v Superman film? It's actually kinda fascinating.

For example, check out Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor, and then go nominate that dude for Best Supporting Actor or give him two in the back of the fucking head so he never does it again -- either way I'm fine with it. Because never have I felt like jumping at the screen and tearing it to shreds the way I felt while watching him, ruining my goddamn high, this fuck. His Luthor is an absolute shit of a human being in every goddamn way: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way his face will twitch. It got to where it was starting to hurt me watching him breathe.

His Lex Luthor is this super-rich kid with eccentricities upon eccentricities multiplied by many social anxieties and everybody puts up with it because he's a Master of the Universe. I guess that's why he has this hard-on for Superman, 'cause he's going on and on about how people see Supes as a God and this bothers him. Maybe the idea that someone could be on a higher plane than him really rubs Lex raw. So he disguises this player-hating as looking out for the world, because you can't have this being roaming around with the potential to burn it all down to the ground whenever/if ever he felt like it. That's why he has his people locate Kryptonite and that's why he tries to get Senator Holly Hunter to get with the idea of keeping Supes in check with the green shit. But in the end, he's setting up Supes and Bats to fight it out because Man Must Fight God, and if God Is Dead then ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz I really didn't care and plus I was too high to really pay attention to any scene that wasn't focused on the star of Enchanted.

Oh by the way, for those who've seen this film: didn't you think those Polaroids that Lex had of Martha Kent being held captive were a touch much? Poor Diane Lane, but I guess you take what they give ya. I mean, they were really freaky and looked like something out of some serial killer/rapist's collection. Again with the bad taste and insanity of the film -- and the filmmakers.

This may not be the most popular opinion, but I never felt so much hate towards any of the Marvel film villains, or any hate at all, compared with how I felt about Lex-Dog. So I'm giving DC the award for having the better bad guy in a comic book film. He was so cartoonishly evil and petty, he almost seemed like a real human being. In other words, Eisenberg's Luthor was absolutely Shkrelian.

There's a nightmare sequence where Batman is living in post-apocalyptic Wherever and he's searching for the last piece of Kryptonite or something, but it turns out to be a setup and suddenly he's surrounded by black-clad soldiers with Superman arm patches and they start beating the shit out of him -- and then! Then these winged devils or whatever the hell they were swoop in and start pulling bodies away and it's all so very insane.

It felt like something out of the most expensive Christian-exploitation movie never made (or if some billionaire asshole funded a film adaptation of a Jack Chick cartoon tract) where it's the near-future and the poor Christians are being hunted down for being down with G.O.D. (Happy Easter, btw) and they have to take the Mark of the Beast and they just got caught trying to smuggle The Last Bible In Existence, because all the bibles are being burned and crosses are being destroyed and then on television Dictator-For-Life Obama is talking about bringing our former enemies together and now abortions are mandatory (for men and women!) and our national flag is now the Islamic crescent moon & star and Oh My God The Poors Have Health Care! And the Homos Are Getting Married! And if only they let me keep my guns and my Jesus, this would've never happened!

By the way, The Poors Have Health Care! And the Homos Are Getting Married! sounds like the most fucked-up Andy Milligan film ever.

Speaking of fucked-up, there's also some disturbing undercurrents? and metaphors? or hidden messages? in this film. What I'm saying is that Lex's plan involves blowing up the Capitol Building in order to drum up more hate against Superman, and it got me thinking of the conspiracy theories about various False Flag operations like, well, like 9/11 and how it was done in order to justify going over to Fuckheadistan (thanks London Has Fallen!) and get that sweet sweet guzzleline, and I wondered if that was the purpose of Snyder and company or maybe I'm just falling into the stoner trap again, forgive me.

Oh, another thing about the Capitol Building scene; I saw a name plate for someone named "Sen. Purrington" and I decided that if I ever decide to get a cat, that's what I'm going to name it.

So what of the ultimate showdown? It was OK. Pretty much what I expected, with a couple cool gadget traps being used by Bats and Supes using his powers to punch him back about a couple miles. It's all technically awesome but I didn't really give that much of a care about who would win. All I could think about was the tagline to Alien vs. Predator: "Whoever wins...we lose."

You have the two comic book titans facing off against each other -- thankfully this time they're in an abandoned part of town, the better to lessen collateral damage -- and yet I was more into the scenes of Lois Lane walking around holding this Kryptonite-tipped spear and she looked awesome/adorable doing so. Where's that movie? Shit, I'll direct that spin-off, if they'll let me.

It's like Snyder read my ramblings about the last film and kept in mind that I really dug seeing The Triple A walking around with a space blaster thingamajig and thought "Hmm, how can I please ol' EFC with this one?" and he certainly did. So thanks, bro. See you at the gym tomorrow, where we'll bench press some heavy weight and laugh at the skinny flabby weaklings -- where's my high-five, broseph?

There are no stingers in this film, which I found out with my trusty RunPee app, which not only told me not to bother sticking around after the end credits, but also let me know that Kevin Costner's Pa Kent showed up to pep talk Clark while I was busying emptying the ol' bladder. So yeah, no stingers, but that's because there's a sequence late in the film that feels like all the stingers put together; this is where you see the rest of the Justice League like Aquaman, The Flash, some Black dude all chopped up and with wires sticking out of his body cavities looking like Murphy in Robocop 2, and Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman.

Almost forgot about her: Wonder Woman shows up to join in on the CGI-fighting shenanigans and it all looks good in a visual sense, and while the soundtrack was telling me DUDES! DUUUUUUDES! WONDER WOMAN IS HERE! SHE'S KICKING ASS WITH BATMAN AND SUPERMAN! AND SHE'S SMOOOOOOOKIN'! ISN'T THIS AWESOME! I nodded and said to no one "Hell yeah, this is awesome -- dipping the jalapenos that came with my nachos into the melted cheese was an excellent idea!" Don't laugh, lady and gentleman, these jalapenos went above and beyond the call of duty and I applaud whoever grew them and whoever was in charge of picking them for this movie theater establishment.

Say what you will, and I'm gonna say what I will: Zach Snyder is now an honest-to-goodness genuine auteur. Triple-feature this film, 300, and Sucker Punch and you'll know more about this guy than he probably even knows about himself. Among many things I learned from his two Superman movies is that Snyder's favorite Superman is the drunk & angry people-hating one that split from Clark Kent in Superman III, the one who will punch a hole into an oil tanker because Fuck The World.

Like I said earlier, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a fascinating film to experience. If you're too much of a comic book fan or love the older incarnations of Supes and/or Batman too much, maybe you should stay away. No, you should definitely stay away. But on its own, the movie does a good job taking a long time telling a simple story, but it's redeemed by the whacked-out style and perverse decisions that I can only describe as...well, I don't know how to put it succinctly (he says after spending numerous paragraphs going on and on and on). Is it a train wreck? Um, maybe -- but it's more like a train derailed by gigantic testicles. People are dead and the train is destroyed but wow, look at the big balls on that guy, I didn't know they made them that big! Not for nothing, but Snyder's production company is called "Cruel and Unusual Films" -- which is right on the goddamn money, Zachy.

So I liked the movie, but not for the reasons that your average Batman and/or Superman fan would want to like it, let's put it that way. As it is, my commitment to this particular galaxy in the DC universe is probably going to last as long as Amy Adams is involved. But what do I know? The kids seemed to bounce around like crazy during the BvS stuff, and fidgeted like mad during everything else.

In conclusion, I hope Soledad O'Brien made it out OK.