Cinema Sideshow

If you meet the Buddha in the road, punch him in the face.

I've taken a long vacation from blogging, mostly because I sort of, I don't know ... ran out of words at some point. I'd been writing for a living, writing as a hobby,writing writing writing for about ten years, and eventually I felt all used up.

My sentences seemed recycled and lame. Nothing I had to say felt interesting, or necessary.

So I stopped. I started talking for a living, which was new and fresh and hurt my brain a little less. I missed writing, but not enough to get back to it. I had a novel under construction, and I kept poking at it just enough to keep the embers glowing. But, really, I was on an indefinite hiatus from writing.

But now I'm back here --though  not back here back here, since I've foresaken my six-plus-year LiveJournal account for this format -- because I'm pretty sure I'm going to need the outlet. I need to get back to writing for a living, and also need to put down words for my own sanity.

Background: Six months ago, my husband Patrick fell ill. He ended up in the hospital, no one knew what was wrong with him, he ended up losing a gallbladder and being diagnosed with high blood pressure, and after he was released it seemed like life would then go on as planned.

But things didn't go on. Patrick still felt tired all the time, and would become nauseated and vomit unexpectedly, and occasionally came down with headaches. He's underweight, and he looks haggard. His speech would occasionally get slurry. He feels cold most of the time, to the point of sometimes shivering in a 65-degree room.

Then, last week, he was admitted to OHSU with phenomenally high blood presure. They also found that his kidneys weren't working. They got the blood pressure under control, made appointments for him with doctors, and sent him home.

Which brings us to now.

Now: Today, Patrick had an appointment with a nephrologist -- a kidney doctor -- and got the basics on what lies ahead. He's lost 90 precent of his kidney function, and you don't come back from that. Once you hit that point, the kidneys are toast.

Patrick's going to have to start on dialysis. You can Google it for more information if you like, but the choice is essentially this: He can have three-times-a-week dialysis that lasts four hours each session at a clinic, or he can have do-it-yourself-at-home dialysis that he'll have to do every day, and that lasts from 4 to 8 hours.

He'll be doing this for the rest of his life, or until he's perhaps lucky enough to get a transplant.

There will be operations to put in ports/shunts/fistulas/whatever you call them.

There will be machines and bags of liquid and tubes and even more medications.

And there will be bills. Even more bills than the ones we already can't afford ... and right now, we don't know how he'll be able to keep working.

And I'm sitting here, like a jackass, blogging.

Because writing is what I do. I'm not writing this for sympathy, or offers of help, or for anyone to think that I'm troubled and brave. No, I'm writing this because, when things become overwhelming, I put stuff into words.

And I'm doing it because right now, this minute, I'm looking at a fork in the road that's going to change our life together, permanently, forever.

A few months ago, we were two painfully immature adults who loved geeky stuff, and movies, and each other, who were terrible with money, and who bickered over practically everything but then laughed, got over it, and moved on. We were a couple with no kids, a dog and a cat, a lot of in-jokes, and a future that we hadn't planned for at all but, you know, we'd figure something out and get our shit together eventually.

I guess we're still those people. Except now we're also people who have to talk to a social worker, and get Medicare, and deal with medical procedures and chronic illness and probably bankruptcy. We'll be on a list for a kidney transplant, and we'll go to classes on disease management.

Our lives changed during one conversation at 4:30 this afternoon, in an examination room with a very nice lady doctor who said it was okay that I started crying, she didn't mind.

I'm not prepared for any of this. I don't know how to be prepared for any of this. I'm grieving for Patrick, who was always the strong, hearty, never-sick one of us, as I watch him deal with illness and fear. And I'm terrified about so many other  things that I don't even know how to prioritize what to be terrified about first.

So I write about it. Because it's what I do. And because I know that I'm going to have a lot more days like this in my future, and that writing will keep me from sticking my head in an oven.

Today? Today kind of sucked.

The First Week, She Is Almost Over

I had intended to blog here every day during the first week of the Legion of News/Rick Emerson Show adventure, but I hadn't counted on the sheer exhaustion I would experience from focusing so fully on each day's work, then not getting enough sleep because my brain would keep me up every night with a million spinny thoughts.

I've been doing the show. I've been trying to sleep when it's dark outside. At one point, I went to see a movie for review purposes. Everything else is fuzzy. Sadly, I had to beg off doing the commentary for Cort and Fatboy's Independence Day screening because I barely got home tonight without crashing the car, my fatigue was so great. My sink is full of dirty dishes. My dog keeps making sad faces at me, because she's used to having me around.

This week, I've discussed, on air, the prescription meds I take, my low-brow dining habits, Nazi werewolves, serial killers, Al Gore's sex life, and Michael Jackson.

I have drunk five Visos, three Coke Zeros, and countless cups of coffee. I have eaten bagels, tuna sandwiches, cold pizza and Raisin Bran. 

There was the triumphant moment when we finally got paper towels in the restroom. That was ... magic.

I have battled printer issues, we've had technical problems, I've doubted my voice, my talent, my intelligence and my sanity. 

I've received amazing e-mails and messages from listeners offering compliments and support. I haven't done anything drastically wrong yet. The shows have been bumpy, a little uneven, but it's not bad. Some of it has been (dare I say it?) really, really good.

I'm having a great time.

.

Tomorrow the Circus Comes to Town

For some time now, this blog has been a repository for the occasional link/reprint of film reviews, the even more occasional original post, and a gatherer of a whole lot of Internet dust. (What does Internet dust consist of, anyway? Digital mites? The epithelial shavings of decaying 1s and 0s?)

But new life adventures and career mishaps are on the horizon -- tomorrow marks the start of my daily radio blatherings with Mr. Rick Emerson via Legion of News and The Rick Emerson Show. My schedule, my focus, and the entire foundation of my existence will be anchored to a midday appointment every Monday through Friday in a small room in SE Portland. Everything is about to change, in ways I'm only vaguely able to comprehend.

This important, world-changing turn of events requires blogging! This all must be chronicled! And look ... this Cinema Sideshow thing's sitting right here. So shall it be.

The work process with Rick has, so far, been pretty straightforward (although, given our separate and mutual neuroses, it's been both wildly random and OCD-appropriately obsessive.) Once we established that we were, indeed, doing something together, we had to figure out:

1. What it is, exactly, that we're doing.
2. Where we'd do it.
3. How we could make any money off of it.
4. What we needed as far as space, equipment, and other outside help.
5. When we'd start.
6. Whether anyone would actually listen.

... and, from there, the details piled up. Content, of course -- what we'd talk about, and when. And guests -- who do we want? And how do we deal with the goddamn trains going by every ten minutes right outside the studio window?

Other highlights of the working-with-Rick process include:

 Rick telling me that we all have to bring our own chairs for use in the studio. Then, after I complained that only he and I had brought in chairs, he said that he hadn't insisted on it, that it was just a suggestion.

Our  coining of the term "milk-packing district" to describe the neighborhood where we are now located.

The discovery that the shared restroom in our small office building has a shower. If this were a movie, that detail would be some sort of foreshadowing for something important in the future. Such as ... murder!

Rick's purchase of a queen-sized egg-crate foam pad to muffle sound coming and going through the studio door, but not having the proper tools to cut it to size, so we now have a giant, floppy mattress pad attached to the door with a slit cut in it to access the door handle.

Rick coming back from a Viso run, forgetting about the big, floppy mattress pad, and scaring himself when he opened the door.

Putting on headphones and firing up the mics, then talking to each other through them even though we're sitting right across from each other. Also sending each other e-mail from across the room. 

Doing a run-through, and finding it surprisingly easy to slip into "show mode" even though no one was actually listening.

I'm heading back over to the studio in about an hour, and we'll go over a number of last-minute details, do another run-through, and pray that nothing goes wrong tomorrow. I'm keyed up as hell -- my butterflies have butterflies. And their butterflies have baseball bats. Yikes.

Review: Furry Vengeance

This review originally appeared at Cinematical.

Oh, Brendan Fraser. I have now watched yet another film in which you engage in slapstick with CGI animals. Granted, Furry Vengeance isn't even the low point of your career. But it's still -- CGI animals? Again?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to explain that I am deeply, heart-breakingly in love with Brendan Fraser. This affair, which exists entirely in my own mind but has never blossomed into full-blown stalking, has been going on for a long, long time, despite the fact that most of his films are pedestrian DVD fodder.

If you're confused by my passion for the star of Monkeybone and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, I would suggest that you run immediately to Netflix or your nearest video store, and watch Gods and Monsters with Fraser and Sir Ian McKellan. Or The Quiet American with Fraser and Sir Michael Caine. Or the odd, charming little indie flick Still Breathing, which didn't have knights in the cast, although Celeste Holm played Fraser's grandmother.

In each of these films, Brendan Fraser showed that he's capable of being an A-list movie star and an accomplished actor. He's also handsome as sin, affable, self-deprecating, and wildly charismatic. Yeah, I'm biased, what with him being my imaginary movie boyfriend and all. But I'm still right.

In Furry Vengeance, however, Fraser merely serves as mugging, gibbering foil to a bunch of angry animals who do terrible things to him. Sometimes, movies of this nature are quite funny -- Gore Verbinski's Mouse Hunt comes to mind -- but usually they are not. This one isn't.

Fraser plays an employee of a developer who intends to raze a forest to build a community of "green" homes. The animals who live in the forest, led by a wily raccoon, are preternaturally intelligent, understand what's at stake, and decide to fight back. Thus, Fraser finds himself locked in his car with spraying skunks (several times), conked on the head, nearly drowned, bitten in the crotch, stung by bees, and other wacky outrages. Naturally, his wife (Brooke Shields) and teenage son (Matt Prokop) think he's going mad. And, naturally, he ends up in zany, humiliating situations in front of his boss. And, naturally, he eventually comes to see the animals' point of view -- although it could really be a case of Stockholm syndrome, considering all that they put him through.

The most impressive thing about Furry Vengeance, which is grindingly unfunny throughout its painful, sluggish 92 minutes, is that so many genuinely funny people signed on to be a part of it. Rob Riggle opens the film as Fraser's predecessor, run off the road by the forest denizens after he flings a lit cigar out the window of his SUV; Ken Jeong (Community's Senor Chang) is Fraser's boss, and The Office's Angela Kinsey is Jeong's assistant; Samantha Bee (The Daily Show) has a few lines as a teacher who works with Shields; and Toby Huss (Reno 911!, King of the Hill) is an officious security guard. At various points in the film, each of these actors was required to look off camera and shout, "Oh no!" or ask, "What now?" or both, so that those lines could be spliced in between shots of weasels and crows doing all those terrible things to Brendan Fraser. It had to be the easiest paycheck they've ever earned.

To be fair, the eco-friendly message that ripping up forests to build more houses is, you know, bad for nature may be new to some of the kids that this family-friendly comedy is targeting (as part of the film's marketing, a Furry Vengeance-loaded study guide about animal habitats was made available for free to teachers), but it takes a back seat to the physical comedy and lame sight gags. And for a movie with a lefty-liberal message, what's with all the stereotypes? The Hispanic foreman of Fraser's work crew is an only mildly unfortunate choice, but when Fraser's clothes are stolen and he dresses in his wife's pink sweat suit while carrying a rainbow umbrella? That's offensive in its nudge-nudge implicit gay-bashing, and embarrassing for everyone.

Fraser looks puffy and run-down in Furry Vengeance, as if he'd deliberately decided to slough off on the gym and eat a few extra cupcakes for the role. Maybe he thought it would bring more depth and realism to his performance. Despite that, and the badness of this film, and the badness of most of his movies in general, I still love him. But man ... he makes it really hard sometimes.

Review: The Losers

Somebody has to say this: Stupid is not a virtue. It's not an admirable quality in a person, and it's not an admirable selling point for a movie, no matter how many people open their wallets for films about trucks that turn into robots, or teenagers being tortured while on vacation, or once-respectable actors being sodomized by bears during ill-advised camping trips. Yes, there's fun to be had from movies that aim at the lowest common denominator. But don't fool yourself -- if you revel in entertainment that deliberately sets out to appeal to people of limited intellect, you're either a) slumming, or b) genuinely stupid yourself.

The Losers makes it clear from the start that it doesn't intend to be anything but drool-inducingly moronic, with a wink-and-a-nod to the dumbest audience members. Hey, this movie is for you, Guy Who Thinks That You Should Turn Your Brain Off When You Watch Movies, it says. Let's see just how stupid we can make this!  Which it then does, for 98 painful minutes, each set-up and "plot" twist more incoherent and uncaring of logic than the last.

Directed with a psychotic disregard for quality film-making by Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) and seemingly written by Peter Berg (The Rundown, Hancock) and James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) during a weekend of paint-huffing and chugging contests, The Losers is about a group of black ops-ish super-soldiers who go after an Evil Guy they don't like, killing people and blowing stuff up along the way. They dislike the Evil Guy because, despite being black ops-ish super-soldiers who have no qualms about shooting, knifing and blowing up any number of random people at the drop of a hat, the Evil Guy brought kids into the picture, and that's over the line. So they try to save the kids. But they don't. And then they get blamed for the kids' deaths. So, naturally, they go after the Evil Guy.

The Evil Guy -- whose name is Max, and is played by Jason Patric -- is a mysterious multi-billionaire who was, presumably, running the operation, even though it was a CIA op. So is Max in the CIA? Or is he so insanely wealthy that the CIA does jobs for him? We never find out, because the movie doesn't tell us.

But then, the movie doesn't bother to tell us a lot of things and, after the initial set-up, virtually nothing makes any sense beyond "GOOD GUYS WANT HURT BAD GUYS BOOM STAB KA-BANG EEK!"  White and Berg and Vanderbilt believe that all the audience wants is to see men running around with weapons, and so that's all, in effect, that they give us. Scenes take place in warehouses and on top of construction cranes without any reason given for the characters to be there. People threaten each other with knives and guns even though they haven't done anything to warrant it. And throughout, the actual plot itself is so capriciously vague as to create the feeling that you must have missed something, even though you've been devoting the same concentration to figuring it out that you'd invest in understanding the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

The main characters in The Losers are as follows:

Clay  (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) - the one with a perpetual two-day growth of beard stubble.

Jensen  (Chris Evans) -- the "funny" one.

Roque  (Idris Elba) -- the grumpy one who thinks this is all a bad idea.

Pooch  (Columbus Short) -- the one who wants to get back to his pregnant wife.

Cougar  (Óscar Jaenada) -- the one wearing a hat.

...and that's the extent of the character development.

Then there's Zoe Saldana as Aisha, who picks up Clay after catching his attention at a cockfight in Colombia. They go to his hotel room; he figures out she has a hidden agenda. She then, for no conceivable reason, tries to kick the crap out of him, they beat each other up, accidentally set the hotel room on fire, then leave. Down on the street, not a scratch on either of them, they proceed to discuss Aisha's proposal that they join forces against Max. Could they have discussed this without the fisticuffs? Of course. But that would have made sense.

Saldana's character is female for only two reasons -- so that she can fall into bed with Clay (even though like everything else in the movie there's no logical set-up for it) and so that Sylvain White can aim his camera at her ass. White is obsessed with women's butts, framing shots around the booties of female extras in crowd scenes and shooting Saldana walking out of the room whenever possible. In one scene, an underwear-clad Saldana is thrown away from the camera by an explosion, during which White not only positions the camera at spread-eagle crotch level, but also adds the magical CGI effect of hundreds of shards of broken mirror reflecting Saldana's ass. Because for Sylvain White, one ass is not enough when you can offer a hundred asses!  Whee!

Compounding the ass-laden mess he's made, White also seems to have only a rudimentary idea of how to shoot a film. Characters walk toward the camera and their faces blur out of focus. One scene, that one high up on the construction crane or whatever it was (it's never established what it is or why the characters are standing on it), is staged to best present the awesome location ... while White's composition manages to cut off the top of Jason Patric's head for the duration of the scene. So it's not only stupidly written, it's shot like White walked away to do tequila shots with Berg and Vanderbilt, and handed the reins to a brain-damaged orangatan.

As mentioned before, there is some entertainment to be found in stupid. But movies like The Losers are so uncaringly stupid, so ineptly made and patently marketed toward people of limited intellectual capacity, that they're insulting. If The Losers was a person, you'd want to kick in the crotch. And it would deserve it.

LOST Returns This Week: Nothing is Irreversible

It took long enough, but LOST returns this week for its final season. When last we saw the intrepid castaways, Juliet was broken and bleeding in a hole, bashing at an incendiary device that would set off a nuclear explosion, destroy everything, knock the out-of-whack time jumps for a loop and, fingers crossed, set everything to rights. The last moment was a blinding flash of white as presumably the island and everyone on it were ka-boomed to smithereens.

The opening four minutes of the LOST season premiere were leaked this week and, naturally, found its way to YouTube (you can watch it here). The clip was sent out to a lucky handful of contest winners by ABC as part of a promotional package that included a bottle with a note inside (which read, "NOTHING'S IRREVERSIBLE") and a Dharma Initiative turnkey that opened to reveal a flash drive with the video.

The first couple of minutes are a recap of Juliet's crying and bashing, followed by the flash. And then ... what happened next.

(Needless to say, the following is a spoiler.)

It would seem, at first glance, that the plan worked -- the explosion "reset" time, and put everyone back on the plane before the crash. It begins as with the crash scene in the first episode, with Jack looking out the plane window, getting a drink or three from the flight attendant, sharing a moment with Rose across the aisle, and then ... the plane starts to shake. Except this time, it doesn't break in half. The voice of the pilot (J.J. Abrams regular Greg Grunberg) comes over the intercom to assure the passengers that there was some turbulence, but everything's fine. 

So the plan worked! Everything's back the way it was before! Right?

Maybe. The thing is, while the scene is a mirror of the first scene in Episode One, there are some differences. To whit:

Where's the wing?  In Episode 1, Jack's view out the window is of the wing. In the reboot, no wing is visible, indicating that he's sitting in a different seat on the plane;

One bottle, not two. Jack's dialogue with the flight attendant starts the same as in Episode 1 ("So how's the drink?" "Uh, it's good." "That's not a very strong response," "Well, it's not a very strong drink").   In the original episode, she hands him two more bottles, he slips one into his jacket pocket, then pours the other into his glass. This time, she only gives him one. You may recall that the first time around, Jack used the second bottle of alcohol to clean his wound on the island before Kate stitched him up;

Jack don't care about no steenking rules no more.  After the attendant gives Jack the vodka, she says, "Don't tell anyone." In the first episode, Jack responds, "It'll be our secret." Now, he jokes, "This, of course, breaks some FAA regulation." His time on the island has made Jack a rebel! And, understandably, not fond of secrets;

Less gulping, no Charlie.  In Episode One, Jack guzzles his drink, then gets out of his seat as Charlie rushes by in the aisle, chased by flight attendants. In the new clip, Jack remains seated, begins to sip his drink, but it's jostled by turbulence and he puts it back down, and Charlie doesn't appear;

Role reversal.  Most telling, after the first spot of turbulence the dialogue and dynamic between Jack and Rose switches. In the original episode, Jack looks over at a terrified Rose and says, "It's normal," to which she responds that her husband always says that "the planes want to stay in the air." In the reboot, Jack's shaken by the turbulence, fastens his seatbelt, and a very calm Rose says,"It's normal" to him.

Hmm.

So what do these changes mean? Obviously, all is not exactly as it was for the passengers of Oceanic 815 -- this may not even be Flight 815 any more, although Rose and Jack are dressed the same as they were the first time 'round. (John Locke is seated behind Rose in the first episode, but the bald man in the sports shirt behind her in the new clip is definitely a double -- however, it's unlikely that it's anything more sinister than that Terry O'Quinn wasn't required to come in to work for a half-second shot of the plane being jostled.)

One thing's certain: Even if they don't remember their experiences on the island, they're not the same people they were before. The bomb may (or may not) have reset the timeline, but the Oceanic survivors have still been changed by what they've seen and done -- Jack's less confident, yet seems to have control over his drinking; Rose, who chose to stay on the island with Bernard when given the option of escape, is more centered and assured. This could mean that Charlie, in the "new" reset timeline, isn't a junkie anymore! Except that he died, and Dominic Monaghan's moved on to other projects so ... how the hell will they deal with that?

It's also possible that we'll be hit with this being Jack's dream before he wakes up, back on the island after the 'splosion (ABC's promos make it clear that we'll still be seeing a lot of jungle-based action) which would suck mightily. And it doesn't even begin to address the number of early-show plot points that you just know won't be resolved by show's end, like Walt's ability to conjure things with his mind and why the Others snatched him. In the show's overall story arc, Walt was forgotten pretty darn quick. But hey, so long as they explain Richard Alpert and the four-toed statue, I won't be too disappointed.

ALSO:  If you live in the Portland, Ore. area, check out LOST at the Bagdad Theater every Tuesday. Free admission, beer and pizza and Tater Tots for sale, and a theater full of crazy LOST fans. It'll be the best way to say goodbye to the show.

 
 

Hey, Look. It's a Post on Cinema Sideshow!

I don't make New Year's resolutions. And like every other blogger who starts a post with those words, I'm about to tell you all of the things that I'm changing now that the new year has started. But they aren't resolutions. Oh, no. That would be too ... plan-ish. Resolutions require commitment and effort! Plus, one usually slacks on them by mid-February anyway, so what's the point? Screw that. I certainly don't need a special date on the calendar to flake on my promises -- I can do that any time.

But this year, the turn of the page coincides with a few changes that were happening organically anyway, so the time seemed right to suck it up, walk the walk, etcetera, and clean house. To, in the words of the poet Lawrence del Cable Guy, "git 'r done." Most notably in the area of my chosen career, which suffered this past year from what I can only describe as a miniature nervous work-related breakdown.

I won't bore you (or embarrass myself) with the details of why, exactly, I lost my shit so spectacularly this past year. But 2009 was a year for me in which, simultaneously, terrible, stressful things and amazing, life-changing things happened. My response was to spend as much time curled up in a ball as possible, riding out the storm and fulfilling the bare minimum of my responsibilities. 

Writing became difficult. I stopped posting to my LiveJournal blog entirely, the novel on which I was working was shoved into a box untouched, and writing film reviews felt like I was building brick walls while wearing mittens and a blindfold. And trust me, underperforming did nothing to help my anxiety levels, which led to more curling-into-a-ball ... shampoo, rinse, repeat.

But that seems to be over. The clouds have parted, and I believe I see a glimmer of sun shining on the horizon. Oh, a sea bird has just flown over, landing just above my shoulder with a leafy twig captured in his beak! If he doesn't crap on my shoes, we can take this as a good sign.

In no particular order, here are a few things that this change in the weather brings:

A rebirth, and new look, for this blog.  Cinema Sideshow was conceived as a clearing house for all of my film writing elsewhere, offered in one handy location. But I was haphazard about updating and, with the both underperformance and a lack of pride in what I was writing, the site lay fallow. You'll notice the last post was in August. Meanwhile, I've still held onto the domain, which seems rather silly if I don't intend to use it. So this will now be my primary blog, where you'll find links to my writing, updates on my weekly Ham-Fisted Radio podcast, and all sort of other effluvia that jumble out from my head onto the keyboard. Plus, it has a nifty, clean new theme that feels pretty spiffy. So there's that.

A better tracking of the movies I see throughout the year.  This is probably of no interest to you whatsoever, but at the end of each year I envy the film critics who are anal enough to use a spreadsheet and chart all the movies they screen, because when they have to do their end-of-the-year lists they have all that data at their fingertips. My method, conversely, has been to surf other people's lists and go back over my filed reviews to try and remember what, exactly, I saw and what I thought about it, then cobble a list together in a typically half-assed manner. Inevitably, I end up forgetting something awesome (or horrible), and feeling like a failure. So this year, I'm keeping track. Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea how to create a spreadsheet and no desire to learn, and my Internet searches for the sort of thing I need comes up with a lot of Excel apps to catalog ones DVDs, but little else. The best I could find was some other guy's spreadsheet already filled out with movies, which I downloaded and can use if I go through and delete all 1800+ entries that are already logged there. Unsurprisingly, I haven't done that yet. But hey, it's the beginning of the year, and so far I've only seen one film in a theater. I have plenty of time to make a mess of this plan.

Better writing, with a stronger voice. Smarter, too.  I came to a realization about why writing about movies had become difficult this past year. It was, I now understand, the end result of a long, long period in which my reviews were first whittled down by space restrictions, then dumbed down by editorial restrictions, and then required to be cute-funny-clever for entertainment purposes. At the risk of sounding waaaaay too full of myself, I was like one of those Sea World dolphins who get bored with balancing balls on their noses and jumping through hoops because they aren't getting enough intellectual stimulation ... but they still have to keep balancing and jumping anyway, so they do it listlessly, without any enthusiasm**. Add to that the Internet chorus of "you suck," and "fuck you," and "you have no business writing about movies" when I'd write about anything more challenging than casting news for the new Green Lantern movie, and I stopped feeling joy at tippy-typing away about film. The cure for this, I think, is to just not give a rat's ass what anyone thinks anymore, write whatever I like, and hope for the best. That may seem like the obvious solution to anyone who doesn't get paid to write for a living, but I've been balancing on other people's balls for so long that I've forgotten how to swim free on the high seas. And yes, you can giggle at the idea of my balancing on other people's ball. It would be hard not to, really.

So that's pretty much it. There are a few other things that I'm changing, like eating less sugar and wearing slippers more often, reading more and learning how to cook a wider variety of vegetables. But the important things are the work things. Everything else will probably take care of itself. But as the captain of this tugboat, I'm the only one who can steer it into the harbor. Which reminds me -- I'm also going to try and use fewer similes this year. I have a real problem with overusing them, I think.

**  I almost went with a comparison to circus elephants who become enraged at being poked with sticks and forced to do stupid tricks, then ultimately go on a killing rampage and trample the people in the stands. But that would have been a bit overdramatic. Plus, I have body issues and don't want to compare myself to an elephant.

First, They Came For Those Who'd Never Seen 'Rent,' and I Said Nothing.

When Cinematical's editorial team suggested that the staff write pieces on the topic "Movies I'll Never See," it didn't strike me as especially controversial. I mean, everyone has personal tastes, preferences and prejudices, and we all avoid certain films for one reason or another. Am I right?

Well, maybe I'm not. If the over 100 comments on my resulting piece about never having seen Schindler's List are any gauge, there are a lot of people who will happily watch any movie, by any director, on any subject, at any time. And still more who think that film critics are obligated to see every movie ever made. A number of commenters strongly (and oh, I do mean strongly) feel that a true movie lover won't form an opinion about a film without seeing at least some of it -- although the amount of time one is required to spend before forming that opinion varies from 20 minutes to an hour.

It would seem that I hit a nerve. That wasn't my intention, really. But it inspired a lot readers to take to their keyboards.

My sin was in choosing Schindler's List as the movie that I don't think I'll ever see. In retrospect, it's an obvious hot-button choice. And I did expect to get a few angry comments. What I didn't expect was the outpouring of vitriol that followed. Granted, I could have picked something more universally agreeable, but I figured that writing about how I've never seen White Chicks or Ernest Scared Stupid was a little like saying that I'd managed to avoid contracting gonorrhea -- I mean, what response could there be to that other than, "Good for you?"

It's certainly not the only movie I've missed over my ten years of film criticism -- and if you honestly believe that film critics have seen every "important" film ever released, you live in a fantasy world. For one thing, when would we have the time? Have you seen every movie by Kurasawa, Godard, Wenders, Wyler, Kubrick and Cukor? I mean, every single one? How about Nicholas Ray, John Schlesinger, Fritz Lang, and Raoul Walsh? I've seen a lot of their movies, maybe even most of them, but certainly not all. And, admit it -- neither have you.

To be honest, what bothers me more than the flames (I mean, I shared my opinion and the public certainly gets to share theirs, even if that opinion is "Dawn Taylor's an idiot") are the comments that take me to task for things I didn't actually write. Yes, I said I'd never seen Lawrence of Arabia -- but I also said that I'd like to see it someday, so how am I getting slagged for refusing to see it? And, obviously, I know that Lawrence isn't 43 hours long. Then again, the consensus is that I'm an idiot, so I guess it stands to reason that I might think that. Pardon me, whilst I drool on my shirt.

But most importantly, I never said that I hated Schindler's List. I explained, in the spirit of the assignment I was given, why I'd never seen it, and why I never would. Sure, I said that I had a pre-formed opinion about that little girl's red coat. But I thought I made it clear that it was, indeed, an opinion formed having never seen the movie. There was no malice intended. Only a movie-goer who has never, not even once, avoided a movie -- or, for that matter, decided that a film is holy-crap-awesome-must-be-there-opening-weekend -- after seeing the trailer or an ad on TV has earned the right to criticize someone for coming to a conclusion about a movie before seeing it.

Some other things on which I was schooled by readers, both following my piece and after a commentary on the brouhaha by editor Scott Weinberg:

"Schindler's List should be seen. Period." This was echoed by many readers, even those who misspelled the name of the movie.

"These articles are doing a tremendous job in making me think that this writers for this site are not qualified for their jobs." Because, you know, people who write about movies for a living are required by law to see every movie, even if they don't want to. And god forbid, they aren't allowed to say they don't want to see something that's considered important.

"Instead of wasting time writing the article you could have been actually watching the movie." Except that the whole point of the series is that these are movies we don't want to see. You know, instead of writing that comment, you could have been pouring salt in your eye.

"You're just eager for controversy and attention." Yes, that's it. Because having a hundred fanboys tell me that I'm a moron is my idea of a good time.

"I only read Cinematical for movie news, and I don't care about your writers' opinions." Well then, for god's sake, start reading the trades, instead.

"You can't call yourself a movie critic and then say you won't see Schindler's List." I think a decade-long backlog of movie reviews pretty much proves that wrong. Of course, if we want to be literal, I could also call myself a neurosurgeon or a lion tamer if I like. It wouldn't be the truth, but I could still call myself that.

 Anyway. It now seems like I'll have to watch fucking Schindler's List. Because coming out of the closet on this particular film has unleashed such a firestorm of "OMG you have to see it IT'S IMPORTANT AND BRILLIANT YOU MORON" that I have no choice. A few months ago, I ended up finally watching Titanic for much the same reason ... and admitted that my preconceptions had been wrong. So now I'll have to do the same with this one. And then I'll write about it and, if everyone's right and I have a transcendent cinematic experience, I'll be forced to admit that I've been missing out on something really special.

But I will not watch Ernest Scared Stupid, no matter how many angry comments I get. A girl has to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

People Are Drooling Idiots: 'Transformers 2' Makes $60 Million in One Day

A few days ago, I wrote a review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for a new outlet. The piece was short, and didn't say anything that hasn't been covered by every other right-thinking critic in America (in other words, it's very loud, very long, and sucks). I thought it was going to be my premiere piece for the site, but now know that it's going into storage so I'll have a backlog of reviews already written when the site's overhaul is unveiled in July.

This is just as well, really. Since I wrote it, I've read far, far better reviews than mine. Mike Russell of the Oregonian called Tranformers 2 "a barely strung-together collection of visual ideas and set pieces, with some of the most hilariously stupid and generic dialogue ever financed by hundreds of millions of dollars." Roger Ebert said that it was "a horrible experience of unbearable length."

And over at the site io9.com, Charlie Jane Anders wrote a lengthy, awe-inspiring deconstruction insisting that the film's really a post-modern masterpiece, "like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane."

My review was not as good as any of these. Mainly because my own limited resources were unable to come up with the words to convey how aggressively wretched Transformers 2 actually is. It's so awful, it made me want to punch Michael Bay in the cock ... with Shia LaBeouf's face. And I kind of like Shia LaBeouf.

Now, today, comes the unsurprising news that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made a record-breaking $60 million on its first day in theaters. This, after almost every review tried to warn people that it's incomprehensible dreck, and that the sight of Megan Fox licking her lips in slo-mo is no trade-off for two-and-a-half hours of being bombarded by Michael Bay's obscenely expensive, ear-splittingly loud, stupidstupidstupid Monster of the Id on celluloid. They went to see it anyway. In droves.

Because most people, it turns out, are morons. Whenever that thought crosses my mind, and it does fairly often, I usually put it down to my admittedly curmudgeonly nature. But no, it's now official -- a very large swath of America is made up of drooling retards with enough leisure time and enough disposable income that they can throw it away on fucking terrible, ass-stupid, ridiculously long wastes of time even after they're warned not to do it. These are the people we're saving by passing seatbelt and helmet laws, by the way. And they breed. Also, this is why the rest of the world hates us.

Mike Judge's Idiocracy is becoming more and more prescient with each passing year. If the one-day landslide business for Transformers 2 is any indication, in a few generations Americans will live exclusively on fast food, all television will be reality shows in which people compete for prizes by kicking each other in the crotch, and movies will be three-hour extravaganzas consisting entirely of loud explosions, barely legal titties, and fart jokes.

The first two paragraphs of my inadequate Transformers 2 review, by the way, go like this:

In the old Looney Toons cartoons that I watched every Saturday morning, Foghorn Leghorn would torture his farm-dog nemesis by jamming a metal bucket on his head and then banging on it with a wooden spoon. I never knew what that felt like until Michael Bay did to me for two-and-a-half hours with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

At once a feature-length ad for the military, a soft-core Maxim spread featuring Megan Fox, and an extremely loud music video, Bay's second shot at turning the popular 80's toy/cartoon into an action flick is the sort of film that people suggest you "turn your brain off" to watch. It would be nice if that actually worked, but with Bay insisting that you pay attention to EVERY! LOUD! THING! that he throws at the screen, you can't even allow your mind to wander to, say, your grocery list, or what you had for dinner, the way you can with a normal bad movie.

But as I remember the actual experience of watching the movie, I realize that the above is painfully weak. Honestly, having my head inside a metal bucket upon which someone is hammering with a spoon would be an improvement on watching Transformers 2. Comparatively, it might even be a pleasure. Because I left the theater actually feeling stupider for having watched it, as if exposure to two-and-a-half hours of maximum Bay-hem caused genuine brain damage. Had I checked, I might have found bits of soft, greyish-pink brain matter oozing from my ears as I staggered through the lobby, bumping into walls.

Which might, in fact, be Michael Bay's master plan. Perhaps he's found a way to literally make his target audience mentally retarded through repeat viewings of his films, thus assuring that they'll continue to enjoy his work even more as his career progresses. And maybe he figures that if he can make film critics into babbling, single-digit-I.Q. mongoloids as well, we'll all be unable to type, and then we can't review his movies anymore.

Well, I have news for you, Mr. Bay. This future retard isn't going to go along quietly. You can have my brain cells when you vacuum them from my cold, dead, Transformers-desiccated skull. After I punch you in the cock.

'The Proposal': Slightly Better Than You'd Expect, Until It Isn't.

The early portions of The Proposal, the by-the-numbers romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, are actually somewhat promising. Of course, by "promising," I mean that, despite being utterly predictable in absolutely every respect, the acting is decent, the writing competent, and the DP kept everything in focus most of the time. This may seem like faint praise, but given the state of the modern American rom-com, that places it head-and-shoulders above most of the genre.

The premise, of course, is as stale as a week-old bagel: Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a stern book editor who's going to be deported to her native Canada. She ropes her assistant, Andrew (Reynolds) into agreeing to marry her. Under pressure from a cartoonishly broad INS agent (the usually-much-better-than-this Denis O'Hare), the two jet off to spend the weekend with Andrew's family in Sitka, Alaska. The expected hijinks arising from his parents (Mary Steenbergen, Craig T. Nelson) and grandmother (Betty White) believing that they're a real couple ensue, as the plot chugs forward exactly as you'd expect.

Despite kicking off with what is, perhaps, the tiredest gag in the rom-com playbook (Reynolds fetches coffee for the boss, juggling two obviously empty cups until the time comes to bump into someone, then he covers his shirt with a cascade of latte), The Proposal does a fair job of delivering its weak goods in the first two acts. Much of this can be attributed to Reynolds, a grossly underrated comic talent who can deliver bad dialogue with such cocky finesse that one (almost) forgets that it's dreck. (As a side note, this is one of many reasons that the recent Wolverine failed utterly -- the filmmakers cast Reynolds in a role that ought to have taken full advantage of his snarky, whip-smart charm, then sewed up his lips after just a couple of lightning-short scenes.)

Bullock is fine, as she always is, and surprisingly doesn't milk humor out of falling down or tripping over something for a change. She does take a tumble off of a boat about halfway through the movie, but it's done less as a reason to laugh at her goofiness than as a transparent device to get Reynolds to put his arm around her. Her plastic-surgified face has relaxed a bit since her last film, which makes her look almost like a normal human again -- although not so much that we can ignore the 12-year age difference between her and Reynolds, an issue that the film never addresses.

But Bullock also has a way with dialogue, and when she dryly delivers a line like, "What am I allergic to? Peanuts. And the entire spectrum of human emotion" it elicits a genuine chuckle.

Somewhere around the two-thirds point in the film, however, it feels like everyone involved just sort of gave up. An intriguing character line with Andrew's father resenting him for leaving Alaska and the family business is pretty much dropped until film's end, when he just shrugs and decides that he doesn't mind anymore. Andrew's pretty, pleasant ex-girlfriend (Malin Ackerman) hangs around and then offers nothing to the story whatsover, and Steenbergen's mom is just that, The Mother, with little in the way of a developed character other than a perpetual smile and a few hugs.

Everything plunges sharply downhill with a pointless scene in which Bullock encounters White in the woods, dressed in a Native American outfit and dancing around a fire. This is supposed to be hilariously wacky, but with no set-up to explain why, exactly, the 90-year-old grandma would be wearing a headdress and chanting to the Indian gods, it merely comes off as exactly what it is -- a desperate attempt to wring comedy from an old lady, and an opportunity for Bullock to do a silly dance. Everything that follows from this point is similarly slipshod, until the movie limps to a sad, lame, stupid conclusion.

Two small moments that shine involve roles so small that they're almost cameos -- The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi as an editor summarily fired by Bullock, and Oscar Nuñez of The Office as an unlikely stripper at an impromptu bachelorette party. As with the presence of Reynolds, both actors elevate the slim material briefly, but they can't save a movie as poorly executed as this one.

[My seatmate for the screening, Mike Russell, shares his views in the Oregonian, kicking off with an observation that I chose to leave out of this review because I was already pretty wordy. But just so I can say, "Oh yeah, and this, too" -- read his review here.]