Marley & Me

Diversithinky™ 101, Romantic comedies: White men in romantic comedies apologize for their manhood, and are bottomless fonts of unrequited emotional support for the white woman / love interest. White women in romantic comedies usually spend the entire film secure atop a pedestal of moral invulnerability, tossing down scraps of approval to their less evolved boyfriends / husbands.

Marley & Me is no exception to this RC-PC paradigm; but there is an accretion to it: A dog! I rented the movie because I am temporarily sans husband (business trip) and I thought maybe this would have some redeeming qualities, since there is a dog in it. Dogs are symbolic of loyalty and unconditional love, and are therefore hard to work into a liberal plotline. But I was wrrrrrrrrooooonnnng.

Owen Wilson and Whatsherface (Jennifer Aniston) run down a snowy street in Michigan, in their wedding clothes, because their car broke down on the way home from their nuptials. Wilson proceeds to verbally piss himself with adulation for his new bride, and Aniston receives it like a peacock, suggesting that Wilson was her second choice for a husband (she was joking, but remember; the woman is the guarantor, and the man must be brought to heel at even the vaguest hint of a power struggle). Then she says they have to move somewhere warmer. Bingo, a hit to traditional White America! Who needs those stinking Rockwell postcard Christmases when there are warmer (hint: tanner) places to be? Segue to an old beater arriving in Southern Florida. Huh? Who the flugaloo would want to live in Southern Florida? (Diversithinky ™ people, that’s who.)

Wilson goes into an interview at the local paper (both he and Aniston are writers), and we are told that Aniston already has her job at the Post. Because there was never any doubt about the future of Ms. Perfection, only for Mr. Scruffy. Add another dig at Whitebread America from the interviewing boss, and I couldn’t watch anymore of the twaddle. Sorry Marley, but your owners are douche-monkeys.

Nick and Norahs Infinite Hate of Jesus

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is an example of the odd spotlight on Judaism recently. Norah is a Jew who goes to a Catholic girl’s school. She is best friends with a girl who gets drunk every weekend; Norah cleans up her puke and enables her self-destructive behavior. Norah’s nemesis is a clique-queen who makes sniping references to her Jewishness, as if this was the normal behavior of non-Jew folk . They are competing for the same guy, and of course Norah wins because she is nicer and the other girl is a shallow horror. The guy they are vying for is the only hetero in a three-”man”-band that has yet to find the right name; the sodomites spend a noticeable part of the movie dishing up obscene ideas, but it is the Jewish heroine who comes up with the best one! Norah’s drunk friend gets lost because of a misunderstanding and ends up calling Norah from a street corner. “I’ve found Jesus!” she slurs, looking up at a man with long hair and a robe. We see he is on a smoke-break; turns out he is a performer in a year-round Christmas-themed sodomite cabaret! Awesome, dude! We don’t really have to hear about Jesus after all. Saving our souls would have been so lame.

One thing (we are told) that is holding Norah back is that she has never had an orgasm. She has this to say to her guy (Nick) right before they do something we are supposed to think is beautiful (but which I found to be disgusting):

NORAH: That reminds me of this part of Judaism that I really like. It’s called Tikkun Olam. It says that the world is broken into pieces and it’s everybody’s job to find them and put them back together again.

NICK: Well maybe we’re the pieces, you know, maybe we’re not supposed to find the pieces, maybe we are the pieces.

Author Michael Hoffman has this to say about Tikkun olam:

[2] Tikkun olam, “repair of Creation.” This Kabbalistic phrase is often mistranslated as “repair of the world,” suggesting the correction of man’s folly, which is an admirable aspiration. In fact, it denotes the diabolic conceit of correcting God’s supposedly “imperfect” Creation by the intervention of human brain power, specifically rabbinic, in order to render it perfect.

Nick and Norah was based on a book co-written by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.

How often do you hear actors say “Jesus Christ” as an expletive onscreen? Next time you watch an R-rated movie give yourself a quarter for every time it happens, and then take a quarter away every time you hear Moses maligned. When you are finished you might as well put it in an envelope and send it to Hollywood (make sure to include postage!).

Role Models

Stupid fart-porn fraught with serendipitous comedy, “Role Models” follows two callow jerks who sell an energy drink called Monster (just like the real energy drink called Monster!). Paul Rudd’s character Danny is a cynical jerk, Seann William Scott’s character (let’s call him Stiffler) is a happy jerk. But in this world where monsters sell “nuclear horse piss” to teenagers in the throes of puberty, being happy means being horny.

Danny hates his job and proposes to his girlfriend, the company lawyer, in a fit of pique that can only be explained by plot necessity. Beth (played by Elizabeth Banks) begins the process of dumping her boyfriend of seven years, evincing no real outrage at receiving such a crap proposal. Feminine women would have been in some small way incensed at being cheated out of their fairy tale moment. But Banks’s Beth doesn’t exist in the feminine, and our subconscious mind takes note of it, and of all the women in the movie who look like females but behave like males.

Danny and Stiffler proceed to their speaking engagement, where Danny is supposed to tell the teens to stay off drugs and drink Monster. Danny gives a truncated “I live in a van, down by the river!!” speech, afterwards grappling with a tow truck driver who is about to impound his horned Monster vehicle. A predictable sight-gag follows. Segue to Beth’s office where Danny and Stiffler are informed that the only way to avoid jail is to put in 150 hours of community service.

Enter Jane Lynch, the foul winking woman from the Christopher Guest mockumovies, as her typical spotted-past-cleaned-up-present character Gayle, founder of Sturdy Wings, a questionable place to send your child after school.

Gayle frequently tells Danny and Stiffler not to “bullshit a bullshitter” and introduces them to their respective charges, dorky LARPer Augie Farks (Christopher Mintz-Plasse of McLovin fame) and jive-talkin’ Mini-me-mofo Ronnie Shields (Bobb’e J. Thompson).

Danny and Stiffler then go through what could almost be called a montage of trying to get to know the children, who exhibit the modern maladies of their races; Augie has retreated into a fantasy world of D&D sorcery, while Ronnie physically acts out and spews racial commentary.

What Danny eventually teaches Augie is what Augie teaches Danny; just be yourself no matter how objectively stupid it is! What Stiffler teaches Ronnie is that it’s okay to be a debauched womanizer as long as you’re responsible about it!

Stiffler also has a thing for KISS, which figures prominently in the final moments of the farce, for Augie creates a new group within his fantasy world, featuring himself, Danny, Stiffler and Ronnie dressed as the members of KISS.

The final moral of the story is illustrated thusly: Danny sings KISS’s ballad “Beth” to Beth Banks’s Beth and lets her know they don’t have to get married, they can just be together like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.

Monsters fornicating fondly. Drink up Stiffler!

Watchmen

A retro-revisionist alternate-reality based on the graphic novel of an occultist and all we got was a god-man with a blue penis? This is a joke!

 

“Watchmen” is about how we live in a garbage-soup world where the bad always permeates the good, making the good seem meaningless and absurd. Inexplicably, humans are assumed to have a “nature” that is unchangeable, and therefore we must be lied to and kept in a manipulated state for our own “good” (i.e. corporeal continuation). Though the god-man with the blue penis discovers near the end of the story that life is a miracle, the audience was not in awe along with him at the occasion of his wonderment. The thing that made him amazed was blah, blah, blah. It illustrates beautifully why we can make convincing art, movies, and books about Hell but our best conception of Heaven is a cloud.

 

Long ago (in the real world) there came into the Garden a swindler with a lie. He said “Hey Eve, eat the fruit and you’ll be just like God.” Like, you’ll know things, man! Eve ate it and she didn’t get any answers, and now the story from the Controllers (who are themselves controlled by the swindler with the lie) is that “Man can never know anything with certitude. Therefore abortion, divorce, drugs, etc. Go ye and be confused!” And that is what this movie is full of: moral evasion and acquiescence. But don’t be fooled; there are answers and there is certitude, it just comes from God. And God, unlike Dr. Bluedude, is one hell of a dresser.

World’s Dumbest Criminals, Daredevils, etc.

The tagline to this series is “Stupid has never been funnier.” But the joke is on you, the sleeping American. The point of the show is to:

1. Make you ponder how much smarter you would be at crime.

2. Reinforce moral relativism.

Subliminal 1: I tell my husband (who has taped the whole series on our dish recorder) that the producers/creators/writers/whomever are trying to get us to imagine ourselves committing better crimes; he scoffs and we continue watching a man on grainy late-night surveillance video break into a convenience store and steal a bunch of lottery tickets. Husband says, “That would be the last thing I would steal…” because apparently he said they have serial numbers or barcodes and can therefore be tracked as stolen. Wife says, “Do you see what you’re doing?”

Subliminal 2: The comedians who present the smarty-pants commentary never decry anything that is done on the basis of whether it is wrong or not. On a criminal who stole money out of a tip jar, I believe it was that Leif Garrett person who said something like: “If you’re going to steal something don’t steal people’s tips, steal the money out of the register…” because it would hit the manager or the business owner or the insurance company, all of whom, we are supposed to infer, are deserving of said theft. And to underscore the relativism, Tonya Harding is a regular commenter on the show. Why is she deemed acceptable as a person to identify or agree with? She represents shame on a national level; a paper bag head covering should be mandatory for her when she leaves the house. But there she is, stinking up the screen, and we are supposed to laugh along and think nothing of it.

Foul and fair are one, the sewer is overflowing and running past our dinner tables; this is the condition we will wake up in, if we ever wake up at all.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

This was not a movie, it was an extended infomercial for consumer paralysis. I can’t even muster the interest to satirize or skewer this seasonless puddle of gruel. The only significance it offered was to instruct us yet again that white men are not supposed to excel at anything without being emasculated and uncercut to balance it out. What did the character excel at? Eh, nothing really, though when the “film” stopped playing I vaguely remember that he was supposed to have won the girl and defeated the bad guy. Paul Blart: Mall Cop gets no rating. Watch it or not. Who cares.

Eighty-Eight Minutes.

I didn’t get past the first scene in this movie! But I think it is instructive of a major formula in our entertainment culture: Sex=Death.

Movie opens with two Asian women embracing, one goes to bed, the other turns on a song by the Backstreet Boys (at a very loud volume) and proceeds to undress, starting a shower and calling the cat to get its dinner. Who turns on music loudly right before bed? Stupid bimbos in movies, that’s who! How else are we to set up the following act, where a serial killer climbs in through the fire escape without detection, attacks the bimbo, and hoists her up (via a pulley system he had in his torture pack) in her darkened living room without waking her roommate?

He runs a strange device (it looked like a combination of a mace and a pizza cutter) down her leg. This is the titillation part, where we are supposed to start imagining the pain he is going to inflict; she cries out and he uses some chemical, like chloroform, to incapacitate her again. He creates a surgical incision down the inside of her knee. At this point I turned off the television because I could see where this was headed… he was probably going to flay her.

Sex = torture = death: she was an attractive woman, and in this instance she added to the scene the element of sex. She was tortured, at least momentarily: the torture part is the opposite of what sex is supposed to produce, pleasure. The end result of sex is life (the baby); this is twisted into death in the Sex=Death formula.

Why put this this filth on film? One might argue that:

1. This heinous act establishes the level of evil we should expect from the killer; he does a really bad thing, therefore catching him is really important.
2. We have been inured to the disgusting, so the filmmaker has to reach even lower to impress us.
3. The filmmaker wants, or he believes that the public wants, to see a woman flayed by a sadistic fiend.

The first reasoning could have been met in a more tasteful way; the second and third are consequences of allowing our standards and barriers to be breached in the first place: filth builds upon filth. Or maybe it’s more sinister… maybe someone or some group wants to pollute our popular culture with sex and death. Perhaps it is to create a foundation of slime so pervasive the American mind will never be happy with “wholesome” again, because the novel and obscene will be the only things we find interesting.

If it is right we watch what we eat, we should be even more watchful of what we allow ourselves to see. You can get rid of a bad meal. You cannot get images out of your psyche once they are in there; they stay like scars, sometimes just a little scratch, sometimes a gaping hole punched in the subconscious for the rest of your life. Here are some movies that I wish I could scrub out of my head:

• Old Boy: Deflowering scene (with man thrusting like rabid jack-hammer while girl protests: “It hurts so much, but I will endure it for you!).
• The Messenger: Mercenary soldier impales peasant girl through stomach with sword, proceeds to brutally rape her as she dies.
• Fight Club: Violently violent violence! Beating scene so prolonged you feel you are being beaten yourself; the victim appears later on, face mutilated for life. Another scene treats us to a victim’s exploded skull, dead on table, brains hanging out. Add the vulgarity of sexuality expressed between anti-hero and girlfriend (there was a flavor of decay to their couplings) and you have Sex=Death.

I read the back of the movie box for 88 Minutes; there was nothing to tip me off to the graphic nature of the first scene. I suppose I will have to dispense with R-rated movies altogether now; it’s better than treating my mind like a septic tank. And no, I don’t care if the rest of the movie was good… if someone defecated in your soup would you fish it out and keep eating?