Review: The Lone Ranger

"The Lone Ranger" is a bit of a train wreck. You've probably heard that one before. This $200+ million blockbuster failed to gain any traction. Maybe the hero is just too old for us young 'uns to remember. Maybe people actually listen to critics these days. I'd bet on the former. The first two hours were a chugging, stuttering, anachronistic mess with enough technical errors that I really had to wonder how they managed to spend $200 million on a horse walking through the desert. That being said, the place that they pretended was Texas was pretty beautiful. The music was off the mark. The editing clearly left out a few scenes that were incongruously strung back together with flashforward scenes. Essentially, for two hours they trained a camera on Johnny Depp and told him to act like Bugs Bunny with Armie Hammer (is that his real name?!) as his Daffy. Hi, ho! Silver! And then Jerry Bruckheimer shows up for the last half hour and is all like, "What up bitches?! This partay be trippin'! What ya'll need is some massive explosions and omgwtf stunts up in here!" Not in those words, of course, but in the way an old Jewish producer would say it. (Oi'vey! Such Mensches!) (You know that guy has a degree in psychology so he knows what people like - explosions). Anyway, that last half really does play out like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, with the William Tell Overture and everything. It's an enjoyable half hour but it's debatable whether it makes up for the first 2 hours. One lone star out of five. You've probably heard that one, too. Oh, fine, I'll be nice. There were two rangers, so it can have two stars. But one of them gets shot.

Review: Seven Psychopaths

It's hard to focus my thoughts surrounding "Seven Psychopaths." If a movie can be self-deprecating, this is it. Constantly toying with the fourth wall, narrating itself, it takes so many shots at itself that it becomes hard to take it seriously. But then maybe that's the point. This is not, after all, your average shoot 'em up. It has that British habit of employing a number of seemingly unconnected scenes and then bringing them together to form something resembling a cohesive story. If you enjoy "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" or "Snatch," you may also enjoy this one. Though clever, it doesn't quite have the same addictive dialogue. That is not to say that Christopher Walken's best deadpan performance in years or Sam Rockwell's slightly over the top performance aren't memorable. You get noire, shoot 'em up, buddy comedy, crime, European art house psychological suspense... the list goes on. Yet it still leaves you feeling like there could have been a little more. 5/7 (psychopaths).

Douche on the Street #27 - B. Goody, This is Your Life

You're a douche for many reasons but I pick this particular episode to proclaim the epic extent of it but it shows... well, just what a douche you are.

 

We had gone grocery shopping earlier that day. A few hours later I went to grab an ice cream sandwich from the freezer that I and my partner had picked up. There was already one missing. Now let's take a moment to do some math, here. Don't worry, this is kindergarten stuff. Even you could, in theory, manage to keep up. There were four ice cream sandwiches in the box. The box belonged to two of us. Keeping up equality means there are... come on, you can do it.... yes! two ice cream sandwiches each. Good job! Now, there were four of us living in the house. The ice cream did not belong to two of you. I asked my partner if she'd had one already and she, with no reason to lie since she was perfectly entitled to two of them anyway, denied it. Your partner, who I wouldn't trust further than I could throw her (and I'd be hard pressed to even knock her over) also denied it. However, in this case I believed her because I didn't know her to be a thief and crossing her off the suspect list left only you, a known thief with a history of eating my food, a habitual liar and all around douchebag.

You denied it. You fucking denied it. Worse, YOU ACCUSED ME OF STEALING MY OWN FUCKING FOOD. Are you retarded? Wait, I know the answer to that already. I've seen you lie, cheat, steal, neglect a wife, neglect a child, blame absolutely anybody but yourself, ogle my partner's tits in front of me and your wife, enter without knocking, leave the dishes you were supposed to do for someone else and claim you had done them when they were clearly still sitting in the sink, dump Cheerios down the sink to clog up the drain - daily, never once take the garbage out, buy yourself video games and pornography when you can't afford to feed your kid, suffer from foot in mouth disease on an hourly basis... But because you accuse me of stealing my own food, man, are you ever an epic douche.

 

Also, you laugh at everything that isn't even funny, especially yourself, like some kind of deranged woodpecker with a concussion. What the fuck is that?

Douche on the Street #26

You rolled into the drive through and without prompting ask "Can you make me a sandwich?" Not a specific kind of sandwich, just any old sandwich, I guess. Not a please or a thank you or a would you be so kind as to.

Granted this is the funniest douche I've encountered, but since you're just rude, you're still a douche.

Tragedy Revisited

In memory of Stacey Murphy, Kate Beal and David Lemay.

My mother sat on the edge of my bed a little earlier than normal to wake me up. She placed a hand on my hip as I snuggled against the cold of the morning. “Kate? That girl you go to school with?” She looked at me expectantly. I returned it with grudging acknowledgment. “There was an accident early this morning. Her family was driving home. A truck slipped on the ice.” A pause in which all life and nothing at all hung counterbalanced. “She died, honey.”

“Good,” I whispered, “I hate her.”

Once my mother had reprimanded me, clothed me, fed me Cheerios on the couch in front of Inspector Gadget with my Roadrunner blanket and shipped me out the door to school, I stood in the cold January air, my breath floating up in a cloud to a clear blue sky that held no warmth. My brown Sorels nudged at the black pavement and slid further than expected. The roads were icy. I thought of her family’s car – a light blue sedan I imagined – sliding into place in the space beneath an 18 wheeler like I had seen in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation which I had seen on TV that Christmas break. It was comedic. But then the bumper went under the wheels and it was no longer comedic. The vision in my head was far too graphic for an eight year old to have come up with on his own. I could pick out each piece of flying glass, the blackened shards of metal scattered along the skid marks on the road. Yet I studiously avoided entering into the car. I knew what was there without imagining it. I sighed to myself and walked slowly to school, expecting some kind of memorial to pace out the day. I don’t think it was until a few hours into the day that the teacher found out. She must have recorded her as absent, couriered it off to the office where some secretary in a dark panelled office tried to track down the missing girl, somehow crossing paths with the police who would solemnly inform her as their duty before shuffling quietly off to some other official business. When the teacher found out, she pulled out the board games to keep our minds off it. I won a wordless game of checkers.

The accident kept replaying itself in my head. I felt ashamed of my words that morning. I began to doubt myself, finding my heart in some dark windowless place. Had I hated her? She had teased me, that was true. I thought maybe in some prepubescent way that maybe I had actually loved her, a love that I wouldn’t admit to her or myself. Not even to my mother, my mother who knew so much more than me. Kate had teased me but in some way she had until that point in my life been the only decent competitor, a worthy opponent. She had challenged me in a way no other person had.

I had nightmares of the crash over and over again that night and for several nights afterward. But spring came and the trees bloomed green and shady over my house at the end of a dead end street. In the ever-widening sphere of a young child’s life, Kate’s life was forgotten for many years.

Intermission

The Mississippi River, down by Blue Bell, is muddy and shallow. A bluff amongst the trees before the bend is a favourite spot for fishermen during the day and teenagers with bottles and nothing better to do at night. Sycamores and oaks toss leafy shadows over the white tips of tiny waves. It smelled of clay and souring berries. The spring runoff drained through on an April afternoon. What they were doing there, I don’t know. Even at that age we all knew it was foolish to go swimming there that time of year. The water was cold and the undercurrent strong even in the shallow parts. I was told she died saving her sister from that undercurrent. I have trouble distinguishing her tanned skin from umber of the water and stone, her head dipping under the water, dark locks plastered about her face, somehow getting her younger sister to shore but unable to save herself.

I never had any strong feelings about Stacey one way or the other. But I wonder about her sister sometimes, how she coped with that. If this was an after school special she would have either turned to drugs or God.  But this isn’t after school or even very special. She, like so many others, has mustered the courage to carry on one way or another, carried downstream by a current no one can fight.

There is a plaque in the berry bushes at the end of the single lane bridge that leads to Blue Bell, a public memorial for a person few remember. For a time, Stacey’s life, too, was forgotten.

Second Intermission

Pierre stalked the halls of the complex looking for his victims. He killed four and wounded another with his Remington before turning it on himself. His ghost continues to hunt between the busses in the garages and the desks in the office.

I called the daughter of one of his victims – a sometimes regular of our small group of friends, loved by at least four of us – the next day. Her mother answered in a steady but absent voice. She was out for a walk to clear her head. I don’t think I even offered my condolences to his wife. Maybe I was rude, maybe I was in shock.

She came in as I talked to her mother. We talked and I offered my shoulder to cry on but the call ended with me feeling she hadn’t been relieved with my thoughts and that my thoughts hadn’t been relieved by offering them. I stood looking out on the empty highway with a dry throat listening to the dropped signal tone on the phone. It was still chilly that April so I put on a coat to go for a walk and clear my head.

She and her brother and mother made the front page of the papers across the country in a picture taken at the televised memorial, the most attractive and impassioned of the victims’ families, I guess. She read a poem she wrote for her father. I kept the clippings from the papers in a folder hidden in my bottom drawer with diaries full of teenage love and angst.

This was Canada. This didn’t happen here. Not to us. Not to people we knew. A few weeks later, Columbine happened. Sense went out the window. We were almost done our victory lap of high school, two months away from the rest of our lives. That day our lives were behind us.

I haven’t kept in touch since then. The world sends us on different paths through life though those paths will occasionally cross. When they do, there will be this distance, I fear. A distance that for many years I had forgot.