(Here's a blog entry that I wrote almost two weeks ago and never posted until now. And here's a jimmy joke about your mama that you might not like. I heard she was the Frisco dyke.)
Back in the day, I went to see everything and I gladly drove all over the city and paid the $10+ for a ticket. But now I pretty much have to keep it local, and even then I still feel like I need to justify that $5-7 on a ticket by writing something about it afterwards. Which is why I've felt like shit for not writing about the last two movies I watched over the weekend; Push and Knowing. Laziness was a big reason, but so was that fucking piece-of-shit Shortcut to Happiness movie I was already due to write about.
I went to the ghetto drive-in to watch a double feature of the above-mentioned movies, but this time I went on a Saturday night. I've already written about having no problems going to the drive-in alone, but I've never gone alone on a peak weekend evening either. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the more couples and families around me, the more alone I was going to feel and I should've been ready for that. But I wasn't, it took a while to adjust. It took me from the street entrance to the inside of the drive-in to get over it. That doesn't sound like much, but because it was a Saturday night, it took me 25 minutes to cover that distance. Four lines of cars were sticking out of the entrance and into the street, creating a traffic situation. You'd think it was the Mexico/U.S. border the way it looked, and considering the majority of the racial makeup of the patrons, it might as well have been.
If you go to a drive-in theater by yourself, you arouse both heavy suspicion and pity. It's the policy of this particular drive-in to do a car check, and I was used to that from previous lone treks to this establishment. What I wasn't ready for was being surrounded by so many other vehicles that were filled with people. Again, one never feels more alone than when surrounded by couples and groups. I rolled down the windows low enough for only the guard to be able to look in, and not my fellow moviegoers. That's right, I live my life assuming that I'm so fucking important that people have to watch me. I know.
I was 25-30 minutes late for the first movie, Knowing, which was okay with me because they were going to replay it after the second one. But that left me with about an hour-and-a-half to kill, because I wanted to watch Knowing from the beginning. I can't watch a movie late and then catch up to what I missed later. I just can't. I'm sorry -- about my life and about not being able to watch movies well into the running time. So I changed the radio station to the Monsters vs. Aliens frequency, turned to my left, and watched about a half-hour of that. It was all right. I then switched it over to Fast & Furious and watched that for a while.
Eventually I decided to take a walk around the drive-in and soak in the atmosphere. I'm glad I did, because for some reason I really got a kick out of walking by the different sections, all packed with cars with the soundtrack blaring out of the open windows, or from boomboxes placed outside with the lawnchair crowd. I didn't feel so alone during this part. What's that line in Clerks? One character says something like "You hate people" and the other guy responds with "But I love gatherings"? Well, it felt kinda like that.
I enjoyed watching the different kinds of people watching the movie. Lots of families, lots of couples, and many groups of friends. Many brought their own food (as did I -- homemade popcorn mixed with olive oil and salt) but I also saw a lot of people coming out of the snack bar with treats. What I didn't understand was the occasional person stepping out with pizza from the snack bar. Snack bar pizza can't be that good, can it? Maybe I'm wrong. But I'm sure a $5 pizza sneaked in from Little Caesars is even better, right? I don't know.
I went into the snack bar and actually fuckin' enjoyed watching the lines of people as they snaked around the rails, waiting to purchase their popcorn, soda, candy, nachos, and that goddamn pizza. I liked the sounds of the popping and the whirr of the soda machines as the refrigeration kicked in, combined with the noisy din of the crowd. I'm such a teenage girl with this movie magic bullshit. It's enough to make a motherfucker think about getting a girlfriend. Then the motherfucker remembers the horrible past relationships he had and decides Fuck That! Better to die alone. That reminds me; a wise man (and decent comic) once said that the choice to get married or stay single was really a choice of either wanting to die annoyed or die lonely. One day, this wise man stepped into his shower, put a gun into his mouth and blew his fucking brains out. It's like he knew those were fucked up choices, so he decided to create his own third option.
I got back in to watch Push, and it was very entertaining. Some movies just scream Saturday Night, and this was one of them. Push is about a bunch of psychic motherfuckers with motherfuckin' psychic powers. Some can move objects with their minds, some can see the future, some can detect other motherfuckers, etc. One of those evil secret shadowy government agencies you see in movies is doing deadly experiments on them, trying to find one that they can make The Ultimate Weapon out of or something. I don't know, it's been a week since I watched this shit. The black dude from Blood Diamond ("You love SOCCER!") is the leader of the evil men in -- ahem -- black and he's got mind controlling powers too, so you know eventually someone in this movie is going to have to bring it to himself to throw down psychically with him in a psychic throwdown. That's just how it works.
The challenger in question is played by some white guy who was in Sunshine. He's been hiding out in Hong Kong since his father (a psychic motherfucker as well) was killed by Black Dude from Blood Diamond. Maybe "hiding out" is the wrong term, since he's found by three other psychic motherfuckers within five minutes; two of them work for the evil G-Men, and the other is played by Dakota Fanning. Fanning's power is that she can see the future, and as soon as she gets a vision she draws it in crayons on a sketch book for others to see. Both parties have come to White Guy from Sunshine for their own reasons. The G-Men want to know if he has come into contact with a runaway psychic motherfucker played by the hot chick from 10,000 B.C., and Fanning wants the White Guy to help her on some kind of mission to find a case filled with money even though the mission will end with both of them dead. No bullshit; she even drew it on her sketch book, colorful likenesses of the both of them with X's over their eyes and their tongues protruding from their mouths.
The rest of the movie is pretty much a chase scene; Both White Guy from Sunshine and Dakota Fanning are either chasing or being chased. They go running after the money, running after Hot Chick from 10,000 B.C., running away from Black Dude from Blood Diamond and his G-Men, and running away from some Chinese psychic motherfuckers with the motherfuckin' psychic ability to scream so loud that you bleed out and die. Push is a fun mixture of The Fury and X-Men, and I had a good time with it. It definitely plays well in a drive-in theater, that's for sure.
The second movie was Knowing with Nicolas Cage. I remember an interview with Cage way back in the day for some magazine, and he was talking about how he always looked older than his age. And yet I can't remember my multiplication tables, how about that? Anyway, that shit is still going strong because the dude looks like he's in his fifties, even though he's only 45. The hair plugs don't help either. Here, he plays an astrophysics professor who has discovered that an old letter written completely in numbers has somehow been able to predict major world disasters for the past 50 years. This fuckin' letter even tells you where it will happen and how many will die.
There are only 3 disasters left in the letter, and one of them comes true in front of Cage's face -- a plane crashes through gridlock traffic and bursts into flames. Cage reacts by doing what any other human being WOULDN'T do and runs towards the flaming wreckage. What follows is a pretty disturbing scene; it's all done in one take and we watch as victims from the crash run around burning to death. This movie is PG-13, but there's some pretty harsh imagery in this flick. I looked this movie up on the IMDB afterwards and there are comments by people that were as shaken up as I was by some of this shit, but there are also just as many who laughed and said it looked goofy and fake. I don't know, the drive-in version was a little dim and I was watching this through my windshield, but it certainly looked convincing to me. I think it's just the idea that even though this is a movie, you JUST FUCKING KNOW people died EXACTLY like this in real life plane crashes. These poor motherfuckers burned and died long painful deaths, crying in pain, crying out for their God or Gods to help them, and most likely dying with friends or family beside them.
So now that Cage knows that this letter is real, that leaves only two more disasters and the rest of the movie is about Cage trying to convince the people around him. This shit has been out for a while now, so you probably know where it's heading, but I'm going to go ahead and devote the rest of the "review" to some big spoilers and if you don't want to read them, go ahead and leave after the next paragraph. It's cool, I won't hate on you. If anything, I've done the same thing on other movie sites when given the opportunity. It's just that there's some stuff I'd really want to get into and I can't without giving the shit away. So here's the non-spoiler ending to this blog entry:
Knowing can get slow at parts, but overall I liked the movie. It's from the director of Dark City and I Robot , but in order of quality I'd put Knowing squarely between those two. I had a nice time at the drive-in, Hooray for Hollywood, Movies are Magical, I'll see you at the snack bar, and all that other bullshit. The End.
SPOILERS LIKE A MUTHA FOLLOW:
Ok, if you've seen the movie or hit up the plot synopsis over at Wikipedia, then you already know what this movie is about and I can continue. Good.
I figured it was going to be an End of the World scenario, but I didn't know about the Noah's Ark type of shit that was going to happen with the kids. I liked how the movie has it both ways; it's vague enough for people on the IMDB to argue about who the "strangers" were. There are those who believe they're angels and that this is God cleansing the Earth with fire (instead of water like the first time he had enough with people's bullshit), and there are those who believe the "strangers" are aliens wanting to give humans another chance by saving only the children. It allows you to bring your own beliefs to the party and take from the film whatever you want to take from it. Of course you get those assholes from both sides who complain and hate the movie because it's pro-Jesus or pro-Aliens and they don't want any of that shit and I say fuck these party poopers. Fuck 'em in their party poopin' asses.
One of the last scenes fucked me up, but not in a Boo Hoo tears kind of way. No, more in that way where you're just quiet and kind of depressed. I'm talking about Nicolas Cage's final scene, where he decides to go see his estranged minister father before the end. He arrives at the house, and there's his father along with his mother and sister. They're sitting on the couch, watching the final news reports, waiting for the solar flare to arrive and burn the Earth to a crisp and end all life. His father goes up to Cage and says something like "Don't worry, son. This isn't the end" and Cage nods and says "I know". Then the whole family gets into a group hug just as the fire engulfs them and destroys everything.
You see, I was a kid during the '80s and I remember that whole Cold War shit. That already made a motherfucker worry, but then I made the dumbass mistake of once watching The Day After on television. I was eight years old when I saw that shit and I spent a good few years worried about nuclear missiles dropping on us and vaporizing our miserable asses. It got to the point to where I got obsessed with that shit. I had to go down the street to catch the bus to elementary school with the other kids, and I somehow got it in my head that if nuclear war was going to happen, it would happen in the morning. That meant that many a time I would hear the sounds of an aircraft flying through the air and secretly freak out inside, thinking it was a fuckin' ICBM coming down like a Johnny Cash Sunday morning. I was a fuckin' kid, man! I shouldn't have that shit on my mind, I should be thinking of fuckin' Thundercats or girls with cooties or something! WHAT THE FUCK, MAN? It's a good thing I wasn't a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I'd probably have taken Daddy's shotgun and give it The Final Blowjob rather than risk being around for that shit.
I had all these fuckin' Doomsday scenarios in my young head. Back then, I was as much of a night owl as I am now, so one of the many horrible nuclear armaggeddon scenarios I got in my head (inspired by a late night showing of the movie Miracle Mile) was "what if I was up watching T.V. one night and a news bulletin came in basically saying the bombs are dropping and we have thirty minutes to live?". I actually had the shrunken balls to ask my mother that; I asked her what if I was up late one night watching T.V. and suddenly I saw that shit on the news? Should I wake her and Dad up so they can be awake for the End? She said Yes, that way we can all be together when we go. That's a stupid answer, Mom, but I still love you, I told her. Then she'd get mad and tell me we weren't going to Disneyland and then I'd shit my underoos and start bawling.
Anyway, that final shot of Cage and his family embracing as everything explodes into fire around them reminded me of that. That was exactly how I envisioned it happening when I was a kid -- we'd all be hugging like a bunch of fruits. Loving your family with all of your heart is so fucking gay, and I wish I wasn't such a faggot sometimes. I wish I didn't feel the same way now as I did then about how I'd handle the End of the World. I wish I could be one of the many red-blooded males who answered the What Would You Do If The World Was Ending question with "I'd get fuckin' wasted and then I find a hot piece of ass and get jiggy with all three inputs before the bombs drop, baby! I'M A MAN!"
But no, I'm the asshole who wants to be with his family before he dies. You know who else wanted to be with his family before he died? Hennesey from Biloxi Blues. And you know what became of Hennesey in Biloxi Blues? He got sentenced to do hard time in Leavenworth because he was caught HAVING SEX WITH ANOTHER MAN on the base. Exactly. You know what? Fuck you, Neil Simon. Fuck you and fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck Mike Nichols, while we're at it. Not in a literal sense, though. I may want to die with my family, but I'm not a fuckin' Hennessey either. I'm more like Arnold Epstein. But then Eugene Jerome wrote in his journal that he thought Epstein was gay. Fuck, I can't win with you motherfuckers! This is bullshit! BULLSHIT!!!!
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