I knew something was amiss when, a week before its release date, I finally saw a trailer for Olympus Has Fallen. Given how much I keep up with movies, how had I heard not one thing about this movie? I pondered this question until  I finally saw the movie and then I understood everything.

This movie is just really something else in the pantheon of terribleness. Rather than get into it I will say it is one of the most gratuitously violent movies I have ever seen. There is lots of murder in the name of patriotism and it is bloody.

I will tell you about one terrible scene. At one point, the movie cuts to a picture of the treasury department and in the corner, we see Treasury Department, 10:15 am, only…there's no scene. They immediately then cut to a scene at the White House. It was SO FUNNY. The overall attitude throughout this movie was “fuck editing.”

I will also note that Olympus Has Fallen marks the return of our first black president, Morgan Freeman.

NEVER FORGET! (Deep Impact was such a great movie, right?)

The good news is that there's a similar movie coming out this summer called White House Down, starring my man Channing Tatum so it's all good.

Speaking of my man Channing, I saw G.I. Joe: Retaliation which was exactly what it was supposed to be–ridiculous, action packed, and pretty. I LOVED it.

When the movie opens, a small unit of Joes are in North Korea. If you hadn't noticed, North Korea is now the go-to villain in movies (see: Olympus Has Fallen, Red Dawn remake, etc). There's some lame banter meant to establish character that actually establishes nothing. Roadblock, played by The Rock and his astonishingly large, triangular head, dons these magic gloves that allow him to use a flame of sorts to cut through a chain link fence. It's such overkill when clearly a pair of wire cutters would have done the job just as easily. I mean, BRO!

Also hanging out are Duke (CHANNING), Lady Jaye, Flint, and some rando little Joe.  They rush into this base or something to grab a defector and then they head back to the US but not before the rando Joe raises the GI Joe flag. It makes no sense but you can take comfort in knowing that very little about this movie makes sense.

Back in the States, we hear a lot of mission talk only to see Channing and The Rock playing some kind of masculine war video game in a well-appointed Craftsman home. Channing is terrible at the game and that's supposed to be funny. HA HA HA! Then we see two little girls, The Rock's children. They are adorable. They wrestle with Channing and then disappear. What are their names? Who is their mother? What kind of father is Roadblock? We will never, ever know. What we do know is that now, something is at stake—la familia! 

On the news, there's something about Pakistan and an assassinated president. Cut to the Pentagon, where people look tense and whatnot. The president of the US is taking advice from his team about what to do and he decides to be bold! Send the Joes in! 'MERICA!

In some stock footage from every single movie about elite fighting units, the Joes are in the back of plane, preparing to rumble. There's more banter to develop character and it's shoddy screenwriting so I stopped paying attention. Then Roadblock gives a motivational speech to the troops, calling on that most inspirational of all speakers, Jay-Z. Everyone is really motivated after that.

For whatever reason, Snake Eyes is missing but Roadblock assures us that if he's not there, he has a damn good reason because Snake Eyes is solid. It's adorable how this movie tries to have a little plot. This is the first evidence of such.

The Joes descend into Pakistan, infiltrate this one building, and find the warhead. There is lots of shooting, parkour, and incredible athleticism. There is an extreme fetish for weaponry with lingering shots of gun barrels, crisp shooting sound effects, and the clink of bullets raining everywhere. The director gives the distinct impression that he would like to fuck a gun.

Channing's neck remains exceptional.

After, the Joes disarm the warhead and wait in the middle of the desert for extraction. Channing and The Rock continue to male bond in a vaguely homophobic yet homoerotic way. I very much wanted them to have sex on screen but it was not meant to be. It will later tonight in my dreams, though.

Suddenly, we see a tiny electronic drone, and there's an attack on the GI Joe camp. Then the worst thing possible happens. Brace yourselves. Channing dies.

I will give you a moment.

I'll be honest. I was going to walk out. The whole POINT of this movie is Channing. I persevered but for the next 90 minutes I kept foolishly thinking, “Maybe he's not really dead. Maybe he is soap opera dead.” I kept waiting and waiting for Dat Neck to rise again but it was for naught. There was no Easter miracle to be had and the movie is lesser for it.

Roadblock, Lady Jaye, and Flint jump into a well, and then together, with TEAMWORK, they climb out of the well and they are sad but they are going to avenge their brothers! Rather than concern itself with logic or sense, the movie shows them humping across the desert to some kind of installation and Roadblock says, “We're going home.” Now, this is a curiously correlative statement. How, exactly, are they going to get from a desert in Pakistan to “home” just by looking at this random installation? As you ponder the answer to this question, just know that the next time we see these three musketeers, they will be back in the United States wearing a fresh set of clothes, looking well-rested.

Somewhere in what used to be East Germany, there's an underground prison. These armed guys bring in what looks like Snake Eyes but OOPS, no, it is Storm Shadow. The prison guy, one of those character actors who is in lots of movies, is very very proud of the prison and like most psychopaths in movies, loves to hear the sound of his own voice. He talks a lot of shit which lets you know he's going to die very soon.

Storm Shadow is put

in a vat of water next to Destro and Cobra Commander and then he makes his heart stop, just like James Bond does in Die Another Day, and as they try to revive him, he uses his ninja ways, gets free, releases Cobra Commander, and kills the prison warden and everyone else on site. Destro gets to stay in his water cell, though and Cobra Commander is real snotty about it.

Storm Shadow is injured so he's sent to the “mountains” to be fixed with robots and ancient ninja secrets. I'm not even joking about this.

As an aside, new millenium movie rule, action scenes must be scored with dub step.

On U.S. soil, Roadblock, Jaye, and Flint stroll up to the “hood,” which, again, movie rule, is where you have to go when you need help. This brotha starts jaw jacking Roadblock but then they hug it out because they're old friends. You have literally seen this scene in ten different movies. Remember XXX: State of the Union? YUP.

Anyway.

Roadblock's old friend sets them up in an abandoned rec center where Roadblock used to beat people up in the boxing ring before he enlisted with the Joes. This is what they refer to in the trade as backstory. The place is dusty and run down but magically, the musketeers set up a really advanced looking computer system after the camera pans to a box of ancient computer parts.

This contrivance is deeply embarrassing for the movie. Let us speak of it no more. The musketeers send out a signal in case any other Joes are alive and looking for the team. I guess that message reads, “Come to the hood, in America City.”

Meanwhile in Tokyo, on the movie set of Asia City (like Mensah Demary's Africa City only Asian), RZA (LOLWUT) is Blind Master and he's talking some talk about something or other. It's such a bizarre indulgence.  It's not very clear. Anyway, Snake Eyes and a new sidekick, Jinx, are there and they are going to go and get Storm Shadow to see if they can figure out what the hell is going on now that the Joes have been decimated.

They go to the “mountain” on a different stretch of Asia City, with the accompanying vaguely Kung Fu-ish score and there's a bunch of awesome stuff involving ninjas on mountains and throwing around Storm Shadow in a body bag and zip lines and it's amazing and ridiculous and the point of movies. I was THRILLED, literally on the edge of my seat, clapping like a freak.

Back in the presence of RZA, we learn it was Zartan who killed the beloved master of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow so the frenemies decide to temporarily become BFFs again in order to save the day.

Oh a bit earlier, Storm Shadow basically has a limitless supply of throwing stars and LOL, Snake Eyes shoots them. So great.

In Washington, Zartan is pretending to be the president and amusing himself by torturing the real president. There's a quip about waterboarding. Oooh! Edgy! Somewhere, Bigelow frowns. Also, Cobra Commander is developing a weapons system called Zeus. Just another day in the global domination neighborhood.

The Joes decide they need to get on the inside of the White House because the president doesn't seem like himself. They do what people do in EVERY MOVIE. They put the gorgeous woman out on the street as bait. Dressed in running clothes, her perfect abdomen bared, Lady Jaye manages to get the attention of the White House chief of staff who, in the real world has secret service protection but who in this movie is just chilling on the street after a poker game. The Joes take him into the car and tell him to put Jaye using an alias on a guest list for a thing. She is then used as bait AGAIN, this time in a gorgeous red dress.

She smiles coyly at the president and snags some hair from his shirt and puts it in a magical tube of lipstick and LOL, how do I say this, the magical lipstick tests the DNA which identifies the president as Zartan who is, apparently, in some kind of DNA database. Really? REALLY?

The plan is to attack a summit between the world's 8 atomic powers where the fake president is going crazy firing bombs and such. There's a hilarious little scene where every leader from the other 7 countries whips out their bomb briefcase. Want to know how the prop master decided to identify which case belonged to which country?

Flag stickers. Again, embarrassing.

The Joes realize they need help so they check in on the first Joe, Bruce Willis, OF COURSE. Bruce Willis is in all the movies. He gives them more weapons because his house is basically an armory. There's some mild sexism involving Jaye who he keeps calling Brenda but it's ok because in the end, he respects her fighting skillz. They still need a little more help so they decide to call on Bruce Willis's old crew. At this point, I GUFFAWED.

Why?

Well. Where have we seen this before? Oh Hasbro!

Remember that one time, on Battleship, where they put a decommissioned battleship back into service and had a bunch of retired old navy guys help crew the ship?

That happened AGAIN, only it was a land assault in the GI Joe movie and there was like .33 seconds of camera time for the side of one elder soldier's face after Roadblock gives the gang a motivational speech and tells the old guys he's honored to fight with them. I love when movies borrow from one another. They also borrowed some Transformers sound effects, just FYI.

Battle, battle, battle, threats, satellite weapons systems, bad guys all die go boom boom boom, heroes save the day, get medals and promotions, etc.

To recap: Channing Tatum can retaliate all over me in any way he wants.

This will probably be the longest blog post in the world. Feel free to jump around to the parts that interest you.

An Administrative Note

All Rumpus essay submissions should be directed to therumpus.submittable.com. You don’t need to e-mail me to ask if I might be interested in reading an essay on a given subject, etc. Simply submit a finished essay and I will respond within a month. I don’t know what I’m going to like. I try to stay as open as I can to a diverse range of topics and writing styles. If after 30 days, you haven’t received a response, please do query.

A Question

When did anything over 1,000 words begin a “longread”? 5,000 words isn’t a longread either.

Recent Writings

A literary flyover at Tin House.

In Mid American Review 33.1, I have an essay where I reconsider the 1962 National Book Awards and to find out my winner, well, you have to read the essay.

I have an essay in Ninth Letter 9.2 about competitive Scrabble which I play, like a boss.

I was on NPR talking about using Twitter while watching TV. My parents are REAL proud. All their hard work is totes paying off.

Break All the Way Down is a top fiction longread of 2012.

I shared my 11 Favorite Small Press Reads at HTMLGIANT.

I wrote about Django Unchained for Buzzfeed and read some comments that just…. chilled my soul so I stopped that right quick.

An Upcoming Project

I am editing the next edition of the Love Letter Collection. Guidelines are here. What is the Love Letter Collection?

The Love Letter Collection is a collection of anonymous love letters submitted by the public since 2001. Letters are selected three times a year by the project director and guest editors including writers, artists, musicians and critics. The collection has been featured in the Times of India, Psychology Today, the Wall Street Journal and BBC radio.

You can submit a letter you’ve sent or received, or a letter you’d like to send but can’t. The love can be a fantasy love, unrequited love, impossible love, naive love, hopeful love, frustrated love, obsessed love, new love, old love or lost love. If accepted, your letter will be archived on the website as part of searchable database.

 

I Am Judging a Contest

Pinch is holding a contest with $1,000 prizes in each category. I am judging fiction. You should enter. Plz ignore the worst picture of me ever taken.

Randomly

This one time (2013), during the BCS championship game, the announcers started talking, like pervs, about the QB’s girlfriend and she got 100,000 followers on Twitter overnight.

They are renovating the movie theater in Savoy, about 45 miles from here. Here’s how they are currently listing the movies:

My friend and I went to the movies last week and when we saw this we just laughed and laughed. I took several pictures. CLICK CLICK CLICK!

Also, there is this:

MOVIES MOVIES MOVIES

Silver Linings Playbook was good but not nearly as great as the hype. The actors were all fantastic. I enjoyed the movie and thought it was an interesting, but incomplete interpretation of the book. The Best Picture Oscar nomination is… misguided.

Let’s talk about what really matters–Lincoln and Les Miserables.

I didn’t expect to like Lincoln and ended up loving it. Steven Spielberg is maddening in that way, how he always makes these long, ponderous movies that scream, THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT MOVIE, but he’s so damn good at what he does you forgive him this self-importance. One of the things I didn’t realize about Lincoln is that it is hilarious. I laughed so much and not at the movie but with the movie. Lincoln is, hands down, the strongest script of a movie I’ve seen in recent years. Tony Kushner, who is so brilliant (CAROLINE OR CHANGE!!!), really outdid himself with this screenplay.

Everything about this movie was well done–directing, production, acting–people earned their paychecks.

The

cast is bananas. Everyone and their mama is in this movie including Tommy Lee Jones, S Epatha Merkerson (I was like Lieutenant Van Buren, what up?!), Hannah’s boyfriend from GIRLS, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Daniel Day Lewis (so fine, always), Sally Field, Lukas Haas (?!), Nurse Jeanie Boulet from ER, the mom from Transformers Julie White who is just so great with comedic timing and delivery, David Strathairn, or as I like to call him, that one guy who is in all the movies, that guy from Pushing Daisies, Lane from Mad Men, the janitor guy from Contagion, that kid who played the boy who was homeschooled and only ate nuts and grains and then shot his baby brother on that one episode of Law & Order SVU, the rosy cheeked doorman who tried to kill himself in Tower Heist, the guy who played that cop in Jack Reacher, Hal Holbrook and a bunch of other people who give you that “hey it’s that guy,” feeling.  I applaud the casting director.

Even though I know how it all turned out, I didn’t know a great deal about what it took to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln was a crafty fellow. I also felt a real sense of suspense. Despite some familiarity with the Constitution, I still kept wondering, “How is this going to end?” I was impressed that Spielberg could elicit this response with history that is so well known. He should maybe teach some classes to everyone else who has the nerve to make movies.

Abraham Lincoln loved a good shawl. Seriously, half the time, he was wearing a shawl and looking cozy.

Heterosexual men held hands! There were at least two scenes where men held hands to support each other, or because something important was happening. I loved it.

Lincoln loved to tell a good story and it drove the people around him crazy. No matter the circumstance, he would launch into a meandering story that always ended up in a place of charming wisdom.

Some white people REALLY did not want slavery to end and they were really comfortable talking about why.

War has always been brutal.

There’s a really smart moment in the movie when Spader’s character is trying to bribe a Democrat to vote for the 13th amendment and he chases him off with his gun, and has to go through the ceremony of loading a gun with powder and a bullet the way they had to in the 1800s. It reminded me that when the Constitution was written, guns were not nearly what they are today.

It is really eye-opening to see that people during this time were truly offended by the idea of equality. It feels like we havent come very far but in some ways, we have. There was a great moment where someone was pontificating about where abandoning slavery would leave that ended with the horrifying possibility that women might vote. Oh, history!

Congress has always been a hot mess.

The N-word was only used like 5 or 6 times and it WORKED because sometimes, less is more. The word’s usage was jarring. It felt realistic and appropriate. It revealed the cultural attitudes of the time. It wasn’t gratuitous. Now, this movie is an entirely different genre than Django Unchained, but…. Tarantino could take a couple notes.

Spielberg borrowed some ideas from his work in Amistad. I see you, Spielberg. I know your oeuvre.

Tommy Lee Jones’s face has been through LIFE. Brother looks haggard.

You would never in your life see a woman this haggard looking in a movie. Hate the game, though, not the player. He was exceptional in this movie.

Sally Field has still got it. She just wouldn’t quit. She BROUGHT IT to her role. I was delighted. She and Abe had quite the tense little relationship.

Their youngest son kept showing up at the strangest times. It was pretty distracting. I kept thinking, “Why isn’t that kid being told to behave?” Their older son played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt was pretty angsty, wanting to fight for his country. His earnestness was a bit much at times but he looked good doing it so that’s okay.

My primary issue with this movie, and unfortunately, it’s a significant one, is how incidental black people were to the narrative. I’ve seen the counterargument that this movie focused on a very specific time period, but that narrow focus was a CHOICE. Valorizing all the white people for deciding it was probably bad to no longer own human beings, was a CHOICE. When black people were featured, they were stock characters like Humble Maid and Happy Black Butler and Righteous Militant Brotha. They also had magical negro properties, always there to help some white person get a little closer to doing the right thing. It gets old that these are the narrow, selective stories being told about this country’s racial history.

I’m a musicals nerd so I was very excited for the latest adaption of Les Miserables. From the outset, let me say I loved this movie, too. For the most part, it was really well done. I have lots to say but I thoroughly enjoyed myself and look forward to seeing the movie again.

It seriously took all my self control and then some not to break into song. I know the soundtrack by heart. I wore the album OUT when I was a kid. I’ve seen the show on Broadway and in Boston. I’ve seen the anniversary concerts. I have about ten different versions of Les MIz, from around the world. This is serious business. I hope some theater offers a singalong at some point. I will surely be doing this when the DVD is released.

Victor Hugo wrote such a dark book, though. There is so little joy to be found. I was weeping for about the last hour of the movie. My soul was in anguish. Jean Valjean!

When the movie opens, life is miserable for prisoners doing hard labor, trying to pull a big ship. It’s wet and cold and did I say miserable? One of these prisoners is 24601, Jean Valjean, played by Hugh Jackman who is basically a Swiss Army knife. He is so useful in so many different ways, particularly in my fantasies.

Before we really get into this, let’s talk about how every single major number was filmed the exact same way. I made an infographic:

YUP.

As the prisoners head back after a long day’s work, Javert (Russell Crowe) decides to fuck with Jean Valjean a little and makes him pick up this huge mast. It’s all very phallic. Jean Valjean is basically, “Whatevs.” He doesn’t look like much but he is very strong.

Shortly thereafter, Valjean is released from prison but he’s given papers that mark him, for life, as a prisoner, even though all he ever did was steal some bread for his sister’s child. Justice was brutal way way back in the day. He wanders the French countryside, in misery, and is shunned at every turn. Finally, a priest takes pity on him and gives him food. Cravenly desperate, JVJ steals away in the middle of the night with a bunch of the church’s silver. The police catch him and bring him back to the church and the priest says he gave JVJ all that silver and JVJ has an AHA moment.

Even though he is wretched, God has shown him mercy so he dedicates his life to doing good.

Fast forward some years (this movie LOVES doing that), and some women are toiling in a factory. Odd thing though. They are supposed to be in France but most have a cockney accent. It’s like the cast of Oliver decided to just stroll over to Les Miz and join in on the misery. One of these working ladies is Fantine (Anne Hathaway). DID YOU KNOW SHE STARVED HERSELF FOR HER ART ON THIN OATMEAL WAFERS AND GRUEL? Anyway, she has this letter about her daughter and a woman snatches it and they tease her and the dirty foreman wants to know what’s going on and all of this is accompanied by a song.

Suddenly JVJ appears and wants to know what the fighting is all about. “This is a factory, not a circus!” He’s now the mayor of his town and a reputable businessman, okay? He can’t have ladies fighting on the factory floor. JVJ sees Javert heading to his office so he leaves the foreman to deal with the ladies. The foreman is a dick so he fires Fantine and it only gets worse from there.

In his office, JVJ is kind of panicking because Javert once told him he’d never forget his face. Javert was wrong because he doesn’t recognize JV. He just tells him he’s now stationed in the town.

Here is the facial expression Crowe Javert makes throughout the entire movie:

This guy was just terrible from the beginning to the end of the movie. He was either trying too hard or not trying hard enough, I cannot be sure, but every time he was on screen, it was agony and that’s saying something given that the whole movie is about misery.

Fantine is having a rough go of it without work. She sells her hair. She sells her teeth. Eventually, she sells her body, all while singing about how she used to dream that she’d meet a kind man and live happily ever after and then life fucked all that up.

This is Anne acting her ass off (literally), and looking super emo for Vogue. Like Lincoln, Fantine enjoys a good shawl.

Here is Anne demanding her goddamned Oscar:

One of the stranger directorial choices was the literal darkness of this movie. Throughout this sequence, I kept wanting to apply a brightening filter from Photoshop. I couldn’t see a damn thing and kept thinking, “Aren’t movies made to be seen?”

Anyway, things happen and Javert is about to make trouble for Fantine when JVJ comes to the rescue and takes her to the hospital because it’s totally his fault that she has become as wretched as he once was.

Not much later JVJ shows off his amazing man strength by lifting a cart off a man and Javert is there and suddenly, HE has an AHA moment. JVJ! At last! When Javert questions him, JVJ brushes it off. Then some man is arrested who is supposed to be JVJ and JVJ is wracked with guilt because he wants to be a good man and he wants to be free and he doesn’t know what to do. So. Much. Angst.

At Fantine’s bedside, as she lays dying, JVJ promises he will care for her daughter like his very one child. Anne makes her last bid for an Oscar and won’t be seen for about three hours.

Javert shows up and there is a bit of a confrontation, (this is one of my favorite songs when Russel Crowe is not involved). They sing their hearts out or at least JVJ does while Javert is shamed for being unable to sing the role.Worry not. He has his go-to facial expression to rely upon. JVJ begs for mercy, for a few days to go save this poor woman’s child Cosette. He’s the only one! Javert is unmoved but JVJ has his way.

Cosette played by someone who looks suspiciously like a Fanning but isn’t, is basically in indentured servitude to some really shady French people with cockney accents–the Thenardiers played by notorious overactor Sascha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter. They play the Thenardiers all wrong. At times, they are really almost unwatchable. I also don’t understand their costuming and make up. They looked like mawkish clowns which isn’t quite what V. Hugo was going for. The choice was just overly indulgent and absurd.

We meet Cosette singing a song about her dreams (like mother, like daughter) and see just how miserable her life. Do you see a pattern here? The Thenardiers sing about how sleazy they are. I felt a desperate urge to bathe and disinfect them. This was a rough scene to get through. Also, their inn is filthy. I cannot stop thinking about it.

JVJ shows up and offers to buy Cosette (?!). There’s some song and dance to get more money and when he leaves with the child, who is just so happy to be out of that filthy inn she goes along without a word of protest, the Thenardiers are pissed because they think they could have gotten more money.

JVJ is also not opposed to a shawl.  It is the year of the shawl!

Fast forward through time once more and Cosette is now 18 or so and played by that girl from Big Love and that shiteous movie Gone, Amanda Seyfried who is good enough as Cosette. Mostly she stares at the camera wide-eyed, with her lips slightly parted. She knows she’s not going to be considered for an Oscar so she doesn’t over exert herself. I respect that choice.

Anyway, things are rough in Paris. People are hungry. The royals and wealthy have no mercy for the people. There are rumblings of revolution. Things never change! We learn all about this in, you guessed it, a song!

Meanwhile, Javert has a bit of an emotional crisis as he considers his nemesis JVJ who still remains just beyond his grasp. As he mopes about outside and looks up at the sky, he SINGS! The original Broadway Javert probably wanted to stab himself in the eye when he saw what Crowe did with this song, but it is what it is.

JVJ and Cosette are living a very quiet life of charity and good, feeding the hungry, etc. One afternoon, Cosette spies this guy, Marius, sporting a 1800s Bieber haircut. They look at each other for approx. 24 seconds and are instantly in love! That’s how it works.

This guy also works in the Crowe style of monoface.

Before Marius can get Cosette’s digits, she disappears. Back at revolutionary headquarters or, as we call it, a bar, Marius’s friends are talking about the impending revolution. Marius moons about Cosette. He tries to explain, through song as if there were any other way, that if they had been there, they would have known what a big deal it is that he’s in love but Enjolras, the leader of these student revolutionaries tells him to get his priorities in check.

In a big group number, everyone sings about how the people are going to rise up. It’s Occupy Paris, 1832 Style!

At home, where her father is furiously planning their departure because Javert has ONCE AGAIN reared his ugly head, Cosette is singing about her life which has been good but a bit confusing what with being sold into child slavery and then bought by another man who keeps her sequestered and doing good works. She muses about Marius wondering if he’s thinking about her and because they don’t have cellphones she can’t text him, “r u thinking abt me?”

JVJ tells her she just have to accept things but he loves her blah blah blah, and then there’s this Marius who is just as in love. His eyes are open as Matthew Crawley might say. And then there’s a bit of a twist. Eponine, daughter of the rotten Thenardiers (what a ridiculous coincidence, right?), is in love with Marius who only sees her as a friend. It’s the oldest story in the book, literally.

When I was younger, I was Team Eponine all the way. She was so tragic with her unrequited love (“and now I’m all alone again” and so on). I could not get enough of her tragic life. I WAS Eponine, loving all these people I couldn’t have. You should have seen me singing this song to myself as a means of trying to heal my sad little heart. Ugh. I would never be a teenager again, not for anything.

The young woman who played Eponine in the movie was good enough but she did not make me feel Eponine in my soul the way one is supposed to feel Eponine.

A barricade is built out of various household furniture items as if that can stop the French Army. Oh, how strong the hope of the young and righteous.

The action picks up at this point. Javert pretends to be a revolutionary and promises to get information on the enemy’s attack. When he returns, adorable little Gavroche (cockney accent), calls him out for the Liar he is.

JVJ realizes Cosette is in love with Marius and decides to do what he can to save the boy. When he shows up, he asks the revolutionaries to let him take care of Javert. He gives Javert his freedom and Javert cannot bear owing his life to this man he has spent most of his life hunting. Javert, drama queen extraordinaire, throws himself into a swirling pit of water. It should be a sad moment but mostly there is a sense of relief because we will no longer have to endure Crowe’s flat singing and monoface.

Eventually there’s a battle, mostly one-sided. Lots of young men die. Eponine dies in Marius’s arms, singing about how the rain now falling cannot possibly hurt her because she’s in his loving embrace. Quelle tristesse! Marius is injured and JVJ uses his amazing strength to carry the boy to safety, through the sewers of Paris. It’s really a repulsive situation but also heroic because JVJ is the man. He sings what is probably my favorite song of the show, “Bring Him Home,” and Jackman serves the song quite well. Fine. I admit it. I cried anew.

After the melée, women scrub the streets of the blood of young men and Marius realizes he’s the only man left standing. He is wracked with guilt but he’s alive and with Cosette and they’re probs going to live happily ever after so all’s well that ends well!

JVJ is somehow sickly now even though it’s not clear how or why. At the wedding, he tells Marius his dark secret that he used to be JVJ, a prisoner, (this isn’t really that dark a secret at all and that kind of makes the entire story annoying and predicated on nonsense). It’s all the singing that makes us go along with it.

JVJ runs away, skipping out on his daughter’s wedding. Cosette is almost beside herself but because she’s about to marry this guy she barely knows, she goes through with the ceremony. As an aside, it’s hilarious that earlier in the movie, we learn Marius is a rich kid who is playing at revolutionary when his uncle tells Marius he has shamed the family and so on, and at the end of the movie, Marius runs right back to his rich family. BRO!

At the reception, the Thenardiers show up and try to blackmail the newlyweds because they have this ring they took of JVJ in the sewer when he was carrying Marius, who they assumed was dead. Marius recognizes his ring and realizes JVJ saves his life.

The young couple run to a convent where they find JVJ who has aged about a decade in 5 minutes, sitting in a chair by the fire. The end is completely muddled and distractingly divergent from the musical. Fantine shows up to lead JVJ to heaven and Cosette cries and that’s pretty much the end of the movie.

Given the movie’s length, it’s bizarre how rushed the ending felt, an afterthought, as if the director thought, “Oh shit, I better end this thing.” No matter. I and most of the people in the theater had been openly sobbing for the past hour. It was a relief that the misery finally ended with a bit of peace.

This is a long blog post. I better end this thing.

Really, most of the action is on my Tumblr these days but worry not, I saw the worst movie of the year and I’m going to tell you ALL about it.

I guess I should catch you up on some things first bec

Cause guys, MAYBE I HAVE TWO BOOKS COMING OUT. My novel, an Untamed State will be published by Grove/Atlantic in 2014 and my essay collection, Bad Feminist, will be published by Harper Perennial. I am going to lobby really hard for French Flaps.

I have been absolutely staggered by the outpouring of support and well-wishes this weekend. It’s just so great to feel so… well, loved, really, or at least, liked and respected. I’ve read all your comments and e-mails! I am trying to reply to all of them. So many people have said, “long time coming,” and “well-deserved” and so many other truly flattering things. I don’t know that this kind of thing is ever deserved but I hope I can live up to such kindness and respect. I am going to try very hard. Thank you for reading and writing and being. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And also, there is some other stuff in the works I will hopefully tell you about soon.

Meanwhile:

REVIEW IN NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Here are some pictures because I tracked down copies of the Sunday New York Times in this little town! I bought three copies. They were $6 each which, ouch.

Yes, it’s silly. I also have some screenshots verifying the popularity of the review, online, at various points during the weekend. You don’t need to tell me about my lameness. I’m way ahead of you. I know.

EGO BOOSTING MENTION IN THE IRISH TIMES

I READ A LOT IN 2012

ESSAY IN ISSUE 57 of BITCH

TINY HARDCORE BLURB IN NYLON

MILLIONS YEAR IN READING

Okay, I am tired of capslock now and also, myself.

If you are in the Midwest, consider coming to Lions in Winter, on 1/25 and 1/26. You can hear Jaimy Gordon read on 1/25 and attend craft lectures with Randa Jarrar, Eduardo C. Corral, and TIna May Hall on 1/26, followed by an editor’s panel and then a reading with these three lovely writers. There are other things going on too. Check it out, here.

xTx has a new book coming out called Billie the Bull. I’ve read it and I love it and I encourage you to love it, too. How could you not?

Birds of a Lesser Paradise is out in paperback. I loved this book so I am telling you this.

I also read the most unexpectedly great book this week–Panorama City, by Antoine Wilson. I say unexpectedly because I knew nothing about the book going in so it was all a lovely surprise. The narrator, Oppen Porter is really unique and this is a sophisticated book that does some smart stuff with narration, reliability, and voice. I don’t think I’ve read anything like this. There are also these gorgeously long sentences that go on and on and man, I am hypnotized by this book, just hypnotized. I’m re-reading it as we speak.

Can we talk about the Trojan vibrator commercials? Is it really that serious? The way those commercials make it seem like this cheap, shitty vibrator you can buy at Walgreens vastly improves a couple’s sex life makes me weep. Is the bar that low? Get yourself to Good Vibrations or Babes in Toyland and really blow your sex life open.

TREAT YO SELF. 

I woke up the other day and thought, “No one will ever want me again,” and I was feeling really quite sorry for myself. I havent’ been single for like a desperate amount of time, not even 6 months, but I wouldn’t mind a little romance and wooing. Anyway, I was feeling very sorry for myself (I’m hideous, unloveable, I’m going to die alone, etc.) so I decided the smartest thing to do would be to go see a chick flick so I might feel better about love. I wasn’t in my right mind. Movies, these days, are where love goes to die.

Chick flick is also a stupid phrase. We can admit that. But whatever. I saw Playing for Keeps, which was just an utter piece of shit but not in any sort of endearing or redeemable way. At several points, I nearly walked out. This movie was a pox. Agony. It pains me to even think upon it. The movie is so terrible, that most of it is an excruciating blur of bad acting, bad set dressing, bad costumes, bad directing, bad producing, and a bad script. I hope I forget about this movie soon. I am tired of having it in my brain.

Here are the movies I have seen this year. I’m not ashamed, but keeping it real, most of these movies are trash. That is to say, when I say Playing For Keeps, was terrible and the worst, you need some context.

Our Idiot Brother
The Darkest Hour
Bad Teacher
Contraband
Haywire
The Grey
The Vow
Man on a Ledge
Acts of Valor
John Carter
Hunger Games
Game Change
The Lucky One
Lockout
Mirror, Mirror
Water for Elephants
The Five-Year Engagement
Larry Crowne
One Day
The Avengers
Battleship
Safe House
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Cutting Edge (about 11 times)
The Dictator
School Daze
Prometheus
Green Lantern
MAGIC MIKE
Amazing Spiderman
Dark Knight Rises
Total Recall
Step Up Revolution
Bourne Legacy
Hope Springs
All the Lifetime Movies
Expendables 2
Premium Rush
The Words
Bachelorette
Melancholia
Taken 2
The Descendants
Alex Cross
Good Deeds
Gone
Skyfall
Breaking Dawn Part 2
Red Dawn
Goon
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Red Tails
Polish Wedding
Playing for Keeps

Very few of these movies were good. We Need to Talk About Kevin was just so indulgent and annoying. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, made me want to shoot myself. Alex Cross? I mean. AND STILL, Playing for Keeps  was the worst. THE WORST. It was like all the worst movies of the year had a genetically mutated alien baby and then named it Renesmee.

First of all, everyone looked terrible. Plastic surgery has just gone way, way too far. I know we’re not supposed to say that but Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jessica Biel have the same face even though they are different people. Catherine is gorgeous but man, she was stretched. Jessica just looked so not good and also stretched. It was like they ran out of make up before every single one of her scenes. And she always looked really tired, red eyes, the works. It made no sense. Was she going through a rough time during the filming? What happened here?! She is a pretty woman. I don’t understand.

So, when the movie begins, we get a vigorous montage of Gerald Butler as soccer star. There are lots of thighlights. And then, we are in present day. Butler has lots of debts, and is filming himself sportcasting in a suit coat, tie, and boxers or the uniform of freelancers, everywhere. He lives in a guest house and has a son and ex-wife, Biel. This movie made me long for the G. Butler of 300. SPARTA! Let’s refresh our memories:

Butler looks nothing like that in this movie. At all. Hold on to this beautiful memory because a beautiful memory is all we have left.

Butler hasn’t been a very good father, blah blah blah. Biel, Butler’s baby mama, is shacking up, as my mother might say, with a man she’s soon to marry. We see Biel’s fiance for approx. 2.4 minutes throughout the ENTIRE MOVIE. Please note the decimal point. He mostly just says things like, “Hi.” His performance was so affectless, so stultifying, he was demonstrating, in each scene, the lack of fucks he was giving about the movie. They could have used a Roomba for his role for all the good he did. I got really irate about it by the end of the movie. This movie was offensively bad.

The kid was fine, I guess. He wasn’t a very good actor but he didn’t embarrass himself the way the adults did. I bet he spent each day on set thinking, “You people are a disgrace to the profession.”

So one day, Butler is playing daddy and he takes his son to soccer practice and the coach is incompetent and always jabbering on his phone and Butler can’t have this so before long he’s showing the kids some moves and then all the parents ask him to be the coach of the soccer team, which he reluctantly agrees to do.

There’s this ridiculous subplot involving his landlord, an Indian guy, who is the only person of color in the movie. He has about 7 lines, none of them interesting. It’s just a weird, sad situation. I can’t even talk about it anymore.

Dennis Quaid is in this movie as one of the soccer dads. His wife is Uma Thurman, who, incidentally, shares a face with Biel and Zeta-Jones. She cries out of her ears is what I am saying. It was upsetting to look at her and that’s a shame because again, she has always been lovely. Thanks, society, for making women do evil unto their faces. Thanks a lot.

Quaid looked TERRIBLE–bloated, hair just tragic, red face, haggard but not like hot haggard. And his acting, was atrocious. My god. I am nauseous thinking about it.

This is what hot haggard looks like:

Mmmm.

We won’t talk about what Robert did to his face.

Also, this is how a fine ass man ages naturally:

That’s why he gets to play God. Speaking of Morgan Freeman.

So, Quaid is this gregarious asshole who is rich and loves to throw his money around. He’s a cheater, and he doesn’t trust his wife and she’s a desperate housewife who tries to seduce Butler but he considers Quaid his friend and so he declines. Does this sound incoherent? Well, welcome to this horrible, evil, horrible movie. Nothing made sense. Not one scene in the movie felt like it was organically connected to any other scene in the movie. There was NO PLOT. There was no acting. This was a spiteful movie. I have been spited.

Butler is trying to be a good man and all the soccer mom/desperate housewives are literally throwing themselves at him because you know, that’s what we’d like to believe about modern married women, just so unsatisfied and so lacking in self-esteem that they’d consider this d-bag deadbeat a catch. One of the women, the insanely talented and underappreciated Judy Greer, is always crying because she’s freshly divorced. Eventually she dries her tears with Butler’s penis and that sorts her out for the most part.

Things happen involving soccer, a wedding dress fitting, a romantic proposal, a fight, etc etc etc etc. None of it makes sense. None of it is written, acted, or directed well.

There’s this other plot about Butler trying to get a job as a sportscaster. CZJ, one of the soccer moms, is a former sportscaster herself and she offers to help Butler “film a demo,” with his penis. And then he gets the job but turns it down to stay with his family and Biel dumps her fiance and the happy family is reunited. JUST LIKE THAT. She just forgives him for all his trespasses and takes up with this unemployed has been. Also, she doesn’t bother acting in this movie. She just blandly recites her lines at various points when she feels like hey, maybe I should say something here. She and Butler are completely lacking in chemistry. I am having a more passionate affair with my Peeta cutout.

Here is Peeta working out on our yoga ball. That’s right. He stays in shape for me. No, I don’t have curtains after 2.5 years in my apartment.

Honestly, there’s nothing much I can say about this movie. I can’t be witty because the movie was so terrible it is beneath wit. It is beneath… the gross stuff on the bottom of my shoes after going to the public bathroom at a major sporting event. This is an abomination of the highest order. Straight to Video movies have more dignity to them. I am quite scarred by the experience of seeing this movie. I need to cleanse my filmic palate immediately.

To summarize: Playing For Keeps is terrible, horrible, sexist, lame, derivative, the worst movie of the year, depressing, pathetic, sad, tragic, and terrible.

Red Dawn was one of the movies my brothers and I loved most when we were younger. There was nothing like punctuating the air around us with a hearty Wolverines, and a fist thrown to the sky. Red Dawn, originally released in

1984, starred the likes of Patrick Swayze (DONT YOU PUT BABY IN A CORNER), Jennifer Grey (LIKE I SAID), Charlie Sheen (no casting is perfect), C Thomas Howell (Soul Man remains one of my favorite movies), Lea Thompson (She is some kind of wonderful), Powers Booth, Henry Dean Stanton, I mean, everyone was in this damn thing.  Red Dawn was also a product of its time–a Cold War dystopian fantasy about a Soviet invasion in the heart of America, the red menace trying to destroy the American Way, our democracy, everything we hold dear. It was a problematic movie but something about the earnestness of Red Dawn, worked. We rooted for the Wolverines, these everyday American kids turned into guerillas, defending their homeland, their way of life, their friends and loved ones.

Still, FUCK YEAH AMERICA! movies like these are borne of xenophobia, of this celebration of American exceptionalism, and generally work to make people more paranoid than they already are about an alternate reality where the United States is no longer the most powerful country in the world, or, you know, just like everyone else.

The remake of Red Dawn has been in the works for quite some time. I remember reading an article a couple years back about how the movie was shelved because the original new enemy was the Chinese and the Chinese government didn’t appreciate that or some such. Where there’s a will, there’s a way so now the villains are the North Koreans because that’s the only nationality it is still publicly acceptable to hate or rise against without creating an international incident. I use the term “acceptable” very, very loosely here.

I should just tell you, from the start, that this movie is terrible in a way that feels almost deliberate. It’s as if the producers said, what cast can we assemble that will do the worst possible job with a shoddy script and lazy production? Then they found that cast and put them into the movie. I suppose we should congratulate them. The cast is an odd smattering of people who look vaguely familiar even though you can’t quite place why.

My beloved Peeta is in this movie, thankfully, but so is Connor Cruise, Tom Cruise’s son and let me tell you, this kid has two famous acting parents and learned not one thing from them. In the history of legacy nepotistic casting, this may go down as the most spectacular failure of all time. It is painful to see him on the screen. He seems to have no facial muscles and speaks in a monotone, totally lacking affect. It’s so disturbing. Also, put some grease in that boy’s hair and get him some Jergens. There’s no need for him to be ashy.

Here is the facial expression Cruise makes throughout:

Excruciating.

One of the things this remake lacks, and the list is long, is the earnestness of the original, the aw shucks, we’re just small town folks tone. There was also a lot less condescension in the original. This is a movie that was dumbed down in ways designed to insult the audience from the first moment to the last. There are countless plot threads that are simply abandoned when the movie grows bored with them. The directing is… shameful and largely nonexistent. It is hard to find much that is redeemable in this movie and given that I just saw Breaking Dawn Deux, that is saying something.

During the opening credits of Red Dawn, there is a montage revealing the troubled state of the world–wars everywhere, economies floundering, North Koreans causing trouble and on and on.

Red Dawn 2012 is set in the Pacific Northwest, Spokane, Washington. Why did they veer from the original? Who knows. Jed, played by Thor, is very attractive and thank goodness, because having him to look at makes a very dull, stupid movie, moderately bearable. Also, Peeta.

So, Jed is a Marine, on leave. And of course he’s a Marine, because what better way to exemplify patriotism than to bring a town’s favored son home from the war which is, in this alternate reality, still going on in Iraq.

The movie opens at a football game where Jed’s younger brother Matt, played by a kid who is one of the worst actors I’ve seen this year, is the quarterback. A lot of Matt’s acting range involves modulating his voice. I AM SAD SO I WILL SPEAK LOW! He is also a face actor of the highest order and you know how I feel about that.

The cinematography is frenetic as if by shaking the camera, we’ll forget that this is a terrible way to open the movie. It doesn’t work. Jed is on the sidelines watching, looking solemn, with a sharp military haircut. Their father is a cop and is also on the sidelines, and for the next few minutes, we see some pointless football sequences and learn that Matt is not a team player. His selfishness loses the team the game.

No worries, though. There are literally no consequences.  After the game, Matt’s cheerleader girlfriend Erica, played by Isabel Lucas, pulls up in her car, and they head off to the bar to party. High schoolers are totally welcome in bars in Spokane. They can even drink, in public, without incident. Isabel Lucas was in the second Transformers movie and her acting has gotten worse which, if you remember that shit show, did not seem possible. She has about four lines throughout the movie, appears unhealthily gaunt, her eyes sunken in, and even her hair doesn’t look healthy. Be the size you want, and don’t hate the player hate the game but, my goodness, Hollywood, intervene on some of these young women. Goddamn.

At the bar, we meet Toni who is pretty enough and sassy and knows how to use her sexuality. She talks up Jed and we learn he is home for a few weeks before being redeployed. Their families used to go camping together when they were children though Jed hardly remembers. There’s some mild flirtation and then she goes off to join Erica and Matt.

This movie parts from the original in the strangest, strangest ways. In the original, Erica and Toni were sisters. Why change that? There’s no reason for it! Before the party can really get going, there’s a blackout, so everyone heads home. In the morning, there’s rumbling and Matt runs outside. There are planes overhead, some exploding and lots of parachutes floating toward the once safe streets of Spokane. Jed comes running out and they get in their DODGE RAM GODDAMNIT and look for their father, who directs them to their cabin in the woods. It’s supposed to be an emotional scene but it’s just bland and ridiculous. As they’re heading out of town, Peeta and Connor jump in the back and a couple other cars follow and we meet the main villain, the gorgeous Captain Cho, though IMDB says he is Captain Lo. All we ever learn about the captain is that he is angry because there’s no plot or character development for anyone. It’s such a waste. This man is fine.

At the cabin, the boys forage for supplies and it’s lame and one of the boys, Pete, I think, tries to challenge Jed’s authority and Jed dismisses him handily. Some other kids pull up–a black guy and two Latinos and I only say it this way because that’s the way the casting director clearly approached this, like, well, this is the 2000s, so we better make the cast more diverse. They’re actually some of the stronger actors in the movie but they are eventually sacrificed so the white heroes can live and so it goes.

Pete, scorned, comes back with the North Koreans, and Connor’s dad, the mayor, and the Eckert boys’ dad, are there. The mayor implores the boys to come out. The Eckert father takes the megaphone and tells the boys they have to make tough choices but that they should do what he would do and kill the “piece of shit next to him.”

And here we see why this movie was doomed to fail. The remake is reminiscent of the original but in the most annoying ways. One of the pivotal moments of the original Red Dawn is the father, in the internment camp, grabbing the fence and shouting, “Boys. Avenge me! Avenge meeeee,” his voice going hoarse, so impassioned is he in his plea to his beloved sons.

As an aside, have you read Elena Passarello’s essay collection about the voice as instrument, among other things, called Let Me Clear My Throat? It’s wonderful. In it, she has an essay about Marlon Brando’s STELLA scream in the film version of A Street Car Named Desire, and she deconstructs the scream, the emotion in it, and it is fascinating to see how she thinks through the importance of voice.

In the remake, the vaguely familiar rendition of this moment carries no pathos, it doesn’t carry the intensity and emotion of the father’s plea in the original, the movie lacks voice.

And then, in the remake, the father is shot in the head while Jed holds his brother down.

At this point, the movie enters full, “We give not one solitary fuck” mode. There’s a voice over and montage sequence eerily like an episode of Burn Notice, with Michael Westen telling us what we need to do to be like an amazing spy, only this time, the subject is how to become a militia in three minutes or less so if you do see this movie, take notes, just in case. Jed gives a motivational speech about freedom and country and so on.

Look at that face acting.

They have to train! They have to learn to function as a unit! And this movie has the saddest little training scenes you ever did see.

Now, there’s a long history of training scenes in movies so if you’d like to see one done well, you might look at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or really any other movie where a David needs to overcome a Goliath. The Red Dawn remake scene went something like this, only it was terrible:

Finally, after a few minutes of training, this band of boys and girls, with only one experienced soldier, they’re ready to take the enemy down. They begin a series of incursions into Spokane to defeat the enemy because, ‘MERICA! They have allies and seem to be able to come and go as they please. The original continues to echo wanly but there’s no heart in any of it, no sincerity. However flawed the original may be, it was, at the very least, sincere.

The Wolverines manage to find this underground lair that somehow has most everything they need and they are are largely successful in making mischief for the North Koreans. There’s a deer hunting scene and in the only cheeky nod to the original, Peeta has to drink the deer’s blood and then Jed asks how it tastes and he and Matt laugh because they say they’ve never done that shit.

Why were there no cameos from actors in the original? Seriously, why was this remake such a clusterfuck?

Anyway, they come up with a plan to ambush Captain Cho during an event and it’s all very convoluted only it’s a set up! And conveniently, Matt sees his girlfriend, Erica, in a bus being taken to the internment camp so he breaks ranks, puts his “unit” at risk, and manages to save his girlfriend. One of the boys is shot during the confusion and when Matt and Erica return to their homebase, Jed lays into his brother and Matt disappears for a few days etc etc etc. Other things happen and so on.

The North Koreans manage to find their location. How? WHO KNOWS?! Nothing in this movie ever makes sense, the director clearly enamored by moronic obfuscation. The Wolverines hideout is bombed and the rest of the people

of color, save for Connor Cruise, are killed. The youth are undeterred, however. They stay in the woods where they are found by three old soldiers from the Free America Army or some such, who are lead by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Denny from Grey’s Anatomy). These soldiers, conveniently, need the help of the Wolverines who are so rag tag at this point it’s hilarious given that the soldiers are somehow fully equipped. At the end of the movie, I shit you not, the soldiers get into a helicopter and fly away so, put a pin in that for now.

The Wolverines + old soldiers determine that to get a leg up on the North Koreans, they need to get this box that is some kind of communication device. This is half-ass explained as well. They come up with a half-ass plan that involves, hand to God, following some “wires” into the police compound where the North Koreans are hunkered down. Half asses everywhere.

OH! Speaking of communication devices, cell phones in this movie have unlimited battery power even though there’s no electricity. One cell phone just works and works and works (for pictures). Their cars also never run out of gas or stop functioning even though they are beat to hell. Magic or lazy bullshit? You choose!

Anyway, this band of misfits gets into the headquarters and find the box and there is fighting and all but it is a blur of profound incoherence. At one point, Jed is fighting and is magically in his father’s office. He presses a code and a gun pops out and he kills Captain Cho. Just like that! My soul died at this point. As Jed is walking out, he rips the captain’s name tag off the door and reveals his father’s name. Blah blah blah. One of the old soldiers dies “valiantly.” At the end, they all rendezvous in the apartment building across the way to celebrate with beer. From whence came the beer? DO NOT ASK!

In the one great moment in this movie, that is well directed and well-acted and shocking and sad, a sniper kills Jed just as he’s about to get frisky with Toni (they’ve been simmering sexually for the duration, only in an anemic way). Toni is bereft and hysterical but Matt realizes he’s the “quarterback” and mans up and becomes a team player, circle of life. They get to a station wagon and escape. Once out of the city, they stop in the middle of the road and get out. Matt wants to know how they were found, There’s some stupid discussion. Suddenly, Peeta remembers that Connor was cut while running away from the North Koreans. He wasn’t cut though! He was injected with some kind of tracking device. OH, all the laughs, friends, all the laughs. The Wolverines hand Connor a gun and are all, peace out and good luck, dude. The last person of color is finally out of the way, but the white children will live on, Amen.

The kids drive the old soldiers to their helicopter that’s just chilling out in an empty field (WHUT?) and JDM/Denny says, “You’ve done enough, you can come with us,” but Matt is going to fight and so are the rest of the Wolverines who have survived.

In the final scene, he stands before new recruits, giving them the same speech his brother gave them at the beginning of the movie.

Hmmmmm. Where have we seen this before? They stole this scene, SHOT FOR SHOT, from one of the best movies ever, Starship Troopers.

At the beginning of Starship Troopers, there’s this scene.

Then, toward the end, when Johnny Rico (LOL) becomes the new lieutenant, he gives the same speech to new recruits.

The filmmakers of Red Dawn felt no compunction about stealing this scene for their purposes. A boy becomes a man! America overcomes-ish!

I wish I had something truly funny to say about this movie but it was not even funny bad. It was just lousy in a deeply uninspiring way and it is sad because I love the original so much. It’s also weird how the remake people thought they could just have some kids shout Wolverines every 10 minutes or so and call this movie Red Dawn.

Also, never forget:

1984 knows what’s up.

WOLVERINES!

Hollywood hates us.

Hello, friends and strangers!

I have two short fictions in the new issue of The Normal School, and the issue looks great. It’s also the fifth anniversary issue and one that focuses on FIlm

and Music though my stories are neither about film nor music. Subscribe, perhaps!

I also have fiction up at Hobart. I wrote about famous men and xTx wrote about famous women and we mashed it all together.

Last but not least, I guest-edited the November fiction for Guernica, with fiction from Jennine Capò Crucet, Brad Green, Delaney Nolan, Saeed Jones, Ruben Quesada and myself. Get started, here, with my introductory essay.

I was watching this commercial other day and after, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I kept thinking, “If a man proposed to me in Kay Jewelers, I’d kick him in the nuts and say, ‘You don’t know me at all.’”

Then I would check out the quality of the diamond, just keeping it real.

The only thing that mattered this weekend was Breaking Dawn 2: Dawn, Completely Broken. I saw this movie and I will see it again but let us be clear from the outset. This movie is terrible. It makes Breaking Dawn 1: The Breaking of the Headboard, look like an Oscar contender. Like, say, Contagion, this is a movie where nothing happens., nothing at all. Of all the trilogies movie producers have shamelessly expanded into quartets, this is the most shameless. This one is offensively shameless. Breaking Dawn should have been one movie, period.

The best part about this movie, other than the two hours of nothingness, was the audience. People lost their shit. There was screaming, shrieking, gasping, and, at the end, applause. We went through something together, okay? It was a journey, however, that began and ended in the same place—utter stupidity.

When we last saw Edward and Bella, we learned that vampires! They ejaculate! Bella was pregnant and had a horrible pregnancy, all to make a big point about the sanctity of life, which given recent events in Dublin, is even more offensive than it was last year. Edward bit Bella a C-section. I repeat. He performed an oral C-section on his wife, ate his baby right out of the womb, and then killed her which was the only way to save her. Just go along

with it.

Part 2 opens with Bella, waking up, her senses immediately heightened now that she is one of the undead. Sounds are crisper, colors brighter, smells stronger. Let’s all die! When she opens her eyes, there’s Edward staring at her like the creepy stalker he is prone to being. He smiles at her and she immediately wants to meet her daughter, Renesmee given that she died for that baby, but Edward says she needs to hunt first because babies are so delicious.

Here is the latest in modern hunting wear, and you can pick it up at your local mall.

This movie is so…. bad that they only half-ass most of the plot points including Bella’s supposed thirst for human blood which we barely see. Stewart conveys intense vampiric thirst by deepening her scowl. Great acting, all around.

So, Edward and Bella go on a romantic romp through the forest to kill animals. True love. Bella is incredibly strong as a new vampire and once they are far from the beaten path, Bella suddenly smells tasty human and shoots across a gorge or something to eat a hiker. As I write this it feels so unbelievable but this is something that happened. She begins clawing her way up that mountain like the mountain ain’t shit. I couldn’t control myself. The CGI was TERRIBLE. I laughed and laughed, and my eyes watered and we were like five minutes into the movie.

Edward talks Bella off the ledge and they return to the forest where she wrestles with a mountain lion and drinks its blood.

All the LOLs, right?

Back at the house, Edward and Bella casually stroll up and there’s Jacob. Cue ladies in the audience gasping even though he’s not attractive and he was wearing a shirt. He tells Bella she looks like herself and she makes a crack about how he stinks. She makes to go meet her daughter, the baby she killed herself having, and Jacob is all, well, let’s test it out first and Bella looks at him like, “Motherfucker, what are you smoking?”

As she holds her half human, half vampire baby, Jacob is watching like the codependent stalker he has become. After a few minutes, he says, “I think that’s enough,” and Bella wants to know W T F is going on. You can’t really fault her. Jacob is really overstepping. Like Charlie Murphy says, he is a habitual line stepper. Jacob carefully breaks the news that he has imprinted with the unforunately named Renesmee and Bella goes BALLISTIC. Edward loves every moment of it as Bella starts kicking Jacob’s ass all over the place and Jacob is desperately trying to explain that it’s not his fault he’s in love with an infant. That’s when I realized, oh dear, this movie is an apologia for pedophilia. Because pedophiles just can’t help themselves, you know?

This reminds me of that Gawker piece on pedophilia that made me so mad I started an essay and it devolved into !@K*(JNjn WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? @*#UH*H@$YU *@$, so that’s just hanging out on my hard drive.

Anyway. Jacob explains that the reason Bella was so drawn to him during his pregnancy is that he had basically imprinted with the fetus. And why not? If you’re going to commit to a shit show, fucking commit.

Bella tells Jacob he best stay away from her daughter and he says, “You know I can’t do that,” and it really heightens the creepiness of this imprinting business. This is all based on a book that millions of young people have read, just so we’re clear.

Now, these rocket scientists need to come up with a story for Charlie, Bella’s dad, because she is so different (but not really), and she’s cold and has no heart beat, etc. They decide to devastate the man by telling him Bella died in child birth or something ridiculous. I was so disconcerted by the stupidity I couldn’t focus for a minute. I mean, you expect US to believe vampires and werewolves are real but you can’t tell Charlie? In addition to lying to Charlie, Bella and Edward also have to leave because she can’t be dead and strolling around the Pacific Northwest at the same time. Jacob, predictably, freaks out. But it’s not his fault. He can’t help that he’s in love with a baby. It’s a wolf thing, deal with it.

Jacob is sent to deliver this sad message but instead, he shows Charlie he’s a werewolf, by undressing in a truly funny scene and morphing into a wolf. Ladies went nuts when the shirt came off and fine, that body, DEM ABS!

Let’s refresh our memories:

Now do some penance for ogling that young man. He’s jailbait.

Now that his secret is out, Jacob takes Charlie over the the Cullen manor and Bella tells Charlie he has to be on a need to know basis about what happened to her but she’s fine. It’s just so…stupid. It was one of those things where a writer is like, “Well, at this point, they’ll swallow anything.” Then the young lovers introduce Renesmee as their adopted daughter but Charlie is a cop and also has a brain. He says, “She has your eyes,” and it’s pretty clear he knows Bella, YOU ARE THE MOTHER!

Charlie lets it go and marvels at his granddaughter and its all very sweet.

The Cullens give Edward and Bella their own house nearby and Edward and Bella finally get down to it. Now, during this scene and many others, you cannot help but wonder, “Where is Renesmee?” The casualness with which they parent is bizarre. Not once do you really feel like they are the actual parents of the wonder child.

Anyway, Bella and Edward finally have sex again and it is as awkward as you might expect–hazy glamour shots and deep eye staring and shitty music and NO HEADBOARD BREAKING. I was so pissed. The headboard breaking scene in Breaking Dawn 1 is one of the best things I’ve ever seen and so I thought now that they were both vampires, they’d bring the house down or combust and none of that happened. Cockblockers.

Somewhere in all this nonsense, Bella talks about how she was always meant to be a vampire. She’s also excited that they don’t need to eat, sleep, or rest so they can just bone all the time. Sadly, she tells and does not show. There’s only one interesting sex scene in this movie and it is not interesting.

Time passes and Renesmee is aging rapidly, too rapidly, the Cullens fear, because what if she prematurely ages herself into death like in the movie Jack? Somewhere in there, Bella arm wrestles with one of the indistinct Cullens and wins.

GIRL POWER!

One day, Bella, Jacob (so fucking gross), and Renesmee (that name!!!), are playing in the snow. Renesmee is catching snowflakes because, get this, SHE CAN FLY! One of the Cullen’s “cousins” just happens to be standing on a nearby cliff, misunderstands what she sees, and rushes off to Italy to warn the Vulturi that a vampire law has been broken. There can be no vampire children, you see, because they cannot control their urges and therefore they threaten the vampiric secret. Way back in ye olde medieval times, the Vulturi killed a child vampire and the woman who turned him and thought herself his mother, and that mother was also the tattle-tale’s (Irina, I think) mother.

Now, this flashback scene, like most of the scenes in this movie was blatantly cribbed from another movie. Here they copied, kind of shot for shot, a scene from Underworld. The most hilarious part is that the set decoration was tragic. I was embarrassed for the movie. I could go into the field behind my apartment and find some hay and sticks and make a more convincing medieval village.

Alice with her magic power of being able to see the future exactly when her vision is needed (CONVENIENT), foretells of bad things and so the Cullens come up with another ridiculous plan. Maybe if they reach out to all their vampire friends around the world, they can bring them to Forks, show them that Renesmee is a half-human child, and testify on their behalf to the Vulturi. Their great idea was to get their friends to vouch for them. This is essentially the movie’s entire “plot.”

Like I said, nothing at all happens.

In so many movies, we see a series of scenes where different groups unite to fight the power. Where have we seen this before?

This is where the movie starts engaging in some really egregious cultural appropriation and essentialism. Various Cullens travel the world and eventually 18 vampires have assembled. There are Middle Eastern vampires (cue vaguely Middle Eastern sounding music), two women from the Amazon, an Irish family, an Alaskan family, these Greek vampires, a couple scraggly English guys, and the most hilarious part is how they’re mostly all dressed in the kinds of costumes you might find in a children’s coloring book about “People from Around the World.”

Classy, and educational!

YUP!

These ladies, by the by, spend the entire movie in their Amazon outfits. Because vampires don’t feel the cold! I was cold for them. That theater was freezing.

I couldn’t stop thinking about these guys during the meet the global vampires sequence:

One by one, these global vampires meet and fall in love with Renesmee, and Jacob, is of course, antsy. He just wants to be alone with Rensmee, who is now like 7 or so. Nothing fucked up there, right?

Alice and Jasper, for some reason, disappear, leaving a note telling Bella to get Renesmee to safety by the time the first snowfall sticks, or something along those lines. The page is torn from Merchant of Venice. Bella is hanging out in her house, flirting with Edward after they put Renesmee to bed and it’s like they might get down right there but Edward goes to draw Bella a bath and suddenly she realizes Alice is sending her a message. Bella finds a copy of Merchant of Venice in her bookcase, turns to the missing page, and sees a

note from Alice to meet J. Jenks.

Guess who plays J. Jenks?

The next day, Bella and Jacob (who is seriously ALWAYS around) take Renesmee to Charlie’s where he and his girlfriend are decorating the Christmas tree. Bella then drives to Seattle to meet with J. Jenks who gives her passports and documents for Jacob and Renesmee and Bella realizes she might be separated from her daughter because Alice doesn’t see Edward and Bella in their child’s future. Sad. Or we’re supposed to believe this moment is sad and we can’t because alas, Stewart is not the strongest actor in this trilogy-ish. (I actually don’t mind Stewart and have found her to be talented in certain roles. This is just not one of those roles.) She looked great, though. Respect.

Let’s take a step back. One of the most infuriating, disturbing things about the entire Twilight series is the damaging message it sends about young women and relationships with men. Edward is condescending and smothering and co-dependent. In the first three movies, he’s always making decisions for Bella and completely stripping her of her autonomy. Now, in the fourth movie, she is granted some independence but the damage has already been done and whatever autonomy she gains is cancelled out by this absurd imprinting concept which is designed to teach young girls that true love is a desperate need for another person that is biologically hardwired. True love is forever. True love is completely obsessive. And on and on it goes and young girls buy into this nonsense and get into terrible romantic situations because this is what they are told love is.

Look, I believe in love. When I am in love, I am all the way in–silly letters, pet names, sexual favors, extravagant baking, whatever. I am very into all of it and have learned how to be a pretty great girlfriend at this point. But I try not to lose my independence or my backbone. I try because for a long time I did sacrifice these things for “love” and guess what? I always ended up the loser, in terrible relationships. It is just not healthy to suggest that imprinting or stalking or codependency is romantic. It’s unhealthy. It means that your partner has no interests outside of you. I’m interesting but I’m not THAT interesting. If you date me, you are going to need a hobby because clearly, I have lots of hobbies and I can’t sit around staring at you while movies like this are being made. If your man (or woman), can’t be apart from you ever? SOMETHING IS WRONG.

Okay, forgive my rant, but come on. We can do better by young people.

When she returns to Cullen Manor, Bella is distracted but doesn’t tell anyone she will soon have to send her daughter away with a pedophile. She writes Renesmee a note professing her immense love and packs a backpack with the passports and a bunch of money, just in case.

There are some mind-numbing sequences where Bella practices her superpower which is that she is shielded from the effects of other vampiric powers. She also tries to shield others and on and on with some “funny” scenes involving Edward getting electrocuted from a sizzle vampire.

It went a little something like this:

Things happen I can’t remember and then it’s time for the showdown, during which I basically could not stop laughing and I had to hide my face in my shirt.

The Vulturi arrive and we learn that this is all an elaborate plot for Aro, the Head Vulturi, to pull Alice into his lair. He likes to collect vampires who have exciting powers. Look, we all need hobbies. No judgment. This is the mysteirous reason Alice and Jasper ran away. The contrivances, they pile up around us and we can only stare, sadly.

So they’re on a frozen lake, which is also blatantly stolen from any number of movies including King Arthur (underrated). On one side, the Vulturi and on the other, Team Cullen and Assorted Global Vampires.

There’s a lot of blabbity blabbity but they prove Renesmee is half human. Bella uses her superpower to protect Edward. Etc etc etc.

Suddenly, Alice comes strolling out of the woods with Jasper, like it’s a lovely ice picnic. She walks right up to Aro, and lets him see the future which he can do by touching her or something. I frankly don’t get how all this works. Suddenly, she pulls her hand away and says, “You’ve made up your mind, no matter what you see,” and then, IT IS ON! Vampire showdown.

Forgive me for not remembering the exact sequence of events but Alice or Jasper, can’t remember which loses their head (the only way to kill a vampire) and then Father Cullen flips out and he and Aro run toward each other like they’re going to body joust and Aro comes away victorious with Father Cullen’s head. This is when, I shit you not, I started to worry about the emotional stability of the people in the audience. Girls started SOBBING. I was like, holy shit, this is so anthropological. They did not stop sobbing for the next ten minutes or so. It was awkward for me because I was giggling. The visuals were just terrible and lazy and terrible. The entire ethos of this movie was clearly, “It doesn’t matter what we put on the screen. We’re going to be rich, regardless.”

There is one exception–the wardrobe department, minus the global vampire problems, was on point. Bella’s outfits were fantastic.

Now all of the Cullens and Friends are revved up so they start running toward the Vulturi. Bella throws Renesmee up on Jacob who is in wolf form and sends them away, psychically telling him, “Take care of my daughter.” Nothing uncomfortable there, nope. Jacob runs away with the child, encountering various calamities but persevering. That’s how wolves roll.

Meanwhile, back on the lake, wolves are also in on the fun and BATTLE ON! Vampire body parts everywhere.

At one point, Edward uses Bella as a weapon in a hilarious hilarious scene. Oh, you don’t believe me? Mofos, please.

This GIF, forever and ever and ever. That’s teamwork, goddamnit.

Anyway the battle goes on and on. The losses mount up on both sides including that creepy little Dakota Fanning vampirette.

Then, like in any movie with a battle on the ice, someone on the Cullen side starts pounding the ice until it breaks and then the earth opens up. Vampires start falling into the crevice, and yadda yadda.

MOVIE RULE: If a battle happens on ice, that ice is going to get broken at some point and people are going to die. Write that down.

The Vulturi realize they might lose this thing and then, read no further if you don’t want to be spoiled forever but….

We suddenly see that it was all a vision. That whole battle, all the sad deaths, were just Alice’s vision. That’s the “twist” all the previews keep talking about. Shoddy stuff, friends. Shoddy stuff.

Aro is stunned and backs off quietly.

The audience LOST IT AGAIN which was awesome. This one girl shouted, “I cried for nothing.” I mean, she was fucking outraged but also relieved. So so great. Bless her heart.

Then, out of the woods, come two people from the Brazilian jungle and one of them is a half human, half vampire. Apparently, they age into maturity in seven years and then live forever. They eat food and drink blood, so you know, best of both worlds. Aro is temporarily appeased and the Vulturi disappear back to Italy. Bella and Edward are really happy they get to be parents, literally, forever, which I don’t think anyone would really want so you know this is all BS.

Then they flash forward to the future and ugh, so gross, but they show Jacob and Renesmee as a couple, meeting up with Edward and Bella. I was just so repulsed. Poor Renesmee never had a chance, first with that name, and then imprinted Jacob.

Finally, we end up where Edward and Bella’s great romance started, in a field, surrounded by purple flowers. Whatever.

This movie should have been called Breaking Dawn 2: YOLOBTOIFALOCTWH or You Only Live Once But That Once Is Forever And Lots of Creepy Things Will Happen.

You see what I’m willing to do for you?

I wrote about revelation and the Internet and memoir and more. I have an essay, Bad Feminist, in the Fall 2012 issue of VQR.

a>. They also put it online!

Here I will say something vague about this thing that happened that has forced me to think about this other thing ALL DAY and which will probably be on my mind for the foreseeable future, which has left me in, not a pleasant mood which generally leads to bad decision making. This is me saying, in advance, I will probably make some bad decisions this weekend. Planning is everything! Every time I try to direct my attention elsewhere, I come back to these moments, these claustrophobic moments in a corner and then I get irritated. At my age! God. Irritating. Yeah, vague is irritating, too. I’m sorry.

Also, I blog more at my Tumblr but I haven’t forgotten about this space.

And my feet are cold. And I’m frustrated about a hundred different things. Also, Internet dating scares me.

Several weeks ago, I received a frantic phone call from my middle brother and his seventeen year old. They wanted me to explain The Words which they had just seen. My nephew said, “Worst movie in the world.” My brother was simply bewildered. Now, my brothers are the smartest men I know so I was really surprised that J just didn’t get it. Two days later, a friend and I were sitting at the 7:30 screening of The Words, and I was excited. What could possibly have happened in this movie to make my brother and nephew so disconcerted? I had to know.

First, we need to talk about how Bradley Cooper loves playing writers. This is his second turn as a writer in two years. What kind of writer will he be next? That’s an important question here. So, I saw The Words, and thought for sure I’d be able to offer my brother an easy explanation of the movie, thereby establishing my intellectual superiority. I honestly don’t really know what happened in the movie. I didn’t get it. The score was so overwrought and overbearing. The script tried too hard to be serious. I resent having seen the movie at all.

Instead, let’s talk about Alex Cross starring Tyler Perry and Matthew Fox. I saw an early screening last night. I was all alone in the theatre so that was pretty awesome and speaks fairly accurately to how this movie will do in theaters.

I hate Tyler Perry. He has a very large head but that’s not why I hate him. I hate Madea and his terrible movies and his formula where successful black people are more often than not the kind who are evil and forget where they come from. I hate that only God will fix everything. Everything he does is grounded in evil.

I will say one positive thing about Perry. He runs the only (I think) black production studio in the country and you know, I respect that. I will say one nice thing about this movie–the wife was age appropriate and a sister. It was nice to see black love on the big screen. (I worked hard to find that positive.)

Alex Cross is one of those movies that should never have been made. It was terrible in a way that will be difficult to approximate with mere words. Only one person in this movie could act and he was on screen for about two minutes. To be fair, the source material was flawed. Alex Cross is a product of James Patterson. Now, I’ve read a few Patterson books. I’ve got no shame. I loved Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls. I enjoyed the first book in the series about the professional women who solve mysteries together. Alex Cross is utter shit, though—the book, not the character.

Tyler Perry cannot act. When he’s not wearing his Madea drag, his acting is so uncomfortable–wooden and stiff and schlocky—and there is the distraction of his head. And the way he talks. And the way he moves. It’s all terrible. I don’t really understand how he got this part.

Women do not fare well in this movie. They suffer and suffer and then suffer some more to drive the plot forward. It’s really a disgrace how disposable women are in this movie.

At the beginning of Alex Cross there’s some “running” given that Tyler Perry’s version of running is lumbering and awkward to watch and he captures a bad guy, a serial rapist, and saves the victim who he assures is safe, will be okay. How does he know that? She’s just been raped. Maybe things are going to be rough for a while. I’m just saying.

Then Alex is in a prison, playing chess with a young woman who is taking the fall for her criminal uncle. What’s going on in this scene? Who knows.

At police headquarters, the other principal detectives for the duration are Edward Burns (dude, what happened to the career?) and Rachel Nichols who was briefly on Criminal Minds. There’s some banter between Burns and Nichols as if they hate each other. That’s movie code for, “We are going to fuck, later.”

Alex Cross goes home to his loving nuclear family–two kids, wife, nice house in Detroit. His mother (Cicely Tyson) also lives with them, which is always great for a marriage. After some touching family moments, he’s in his home office with his wife who has some news to share. She tells him he’s never going to guess so he pulls this super sly profiler move and based on his amazing powers of observation (and especially his sense of smell), he deduces what his wife had for breakfast, that she spilled latte foam on her blouse etc etc. Then he says, “And I know you just printed out a sonogram.” She’s shocked and then he’s shocked because he didn’t realize the sonogram was of their baby. Wifey’s pregnant. That’s movie code for, “She’s going to die and two lives will be lost instead of one.”

Matthew Fox has emerged from the island of LOST and this mofo has been through some things. He looks… rough. I

am fairly certain he has completely lost his mind based on his performance in this movie. He overacts his way through the movie, chewing scenery, spitting it out, and chewing it up again. He absolutely approached this movie with the attitude, “I have not one single fuck to give.”

Exhibit A:

There is A LOT going on there. Dehydration, much? We can’t even get into the tattoos but they’re… interesting.

Fox is in his car, a Cadillac, and gets a phone call from a mystery caller vaguely referring to a “her” which is movie code for PLZ ASSASSINATE!

The most adorable part of this scene is how there’s this like ten second Glamour Shot of the car before the scene even happens. Cars are from Detroit. Get it? PRODUCT PLACEMENT! Here’s the car, though not from that scene. I’m mostly showing you this photo to really impart just how batshit Fox is in this movie. Look at his crazy eyes. This guy is going to fuck you up.

Chills.

Fox shows up at an underground fight club, nattily dressed in a suit. Some brothers are running the show and they are like, “Who is this skinny white boy?” He bets $10K on himself, The Butcher of Sligo, and gets into the ring with a big, beefy, Eastern European looking fellow. In the audience, a beautiful Asian woman is watching along with many others. Their bloodlust is palpable! Fox tells the dude not to mess with his face or he’ll never fight again.

Never forget:

They two men fight and it’s like UFC but without fine ass GSP who, goddamn, is just so fine.

BLESSINGS AND PRAISE, AMEN!

Anyway, Fox eventually wins and for good measure, after his opponent has tapped out, he breaks the guy’s arm in an armbar (see: I have brothers). Hot Asian Lady is super impressed so she invites Fox back to her fancy house, Her bodyguards are downstairs cooking dinner. Upstairs in her bedroom she stretches out on her bed and says something like, “The ultimate war, is surrender.” Fox orders her to remove her stockings and he binds her to the bed for sexy times. But wait! There’s more! He asks if she’s enjoying herself and she whispers sultrily, “Yes,” and he says, “I can’t have that.” Then he injects her with a mysterious substance and mutters to himself as he opens his torture tool kit.

Have you noticed how every movie and television show involving torture shows the torturer slowly opening some case, often leatherbound, with lots of vicious looking implements. My question is: where does one acquire this? The criminal often narrates as they open their kit. They test implements, poking sharp objects with the tips of their fingers. This happens without fail. If I was being tortured, and not for fun, I’d just say, “Please shut up and get to it. Boring me is more painful than jabbing that thing in my eye.”

The next time we see Hot Asian Lady, she is dead, has been tortured to death.This is why we put women in movies, isn’t it? To desecrate them! Cross gets a phone call in the middle of the night. He then calls his partner, Burns who is nailing Nichols (LIKE! I! SAID!). Their relationship is secret because of “rules.” Burns tells Cross to pick him up at a nearby corner and then Cross is all, “You need to stop fucking Monica. You put us in danger, her in danger, my family in danger.” Wait. What? Burns says he maybe loves her.

At the crime scene, it’s time to get down to police business. Burns thinks multiple shooters were involved but Cross says, ominously, “This is the work of one man.”

Cross hunches down and deduces everything. Fox snipped off one finger so Hot Asian Lady would tell him her laptop password. He cut off the other nine fingers for fun. He also left behind a charcoal drawing.

Should we talk about Perry’s facial hair situation? Maybe not? Okay.

Back at the police headquarters, through some absurd machinations, Cross figures out the next target–the COO of a big company. They rush down there and the head of security, is JASPER JAX! From General Hospital. I whispered, “Shut the fuck up,” and for a moment, I was awestruck. Jax gets about three lines and they’re all stupid.

Suddenly something happens with water pressure in a water feature, where water is featured, and this is somehow a harbinger of DOOM. Jasper Jax finally lets Cross, Burns, and Nichols enter the building. Upstairs, a strange German man with a flat, shiny face and Bob’s Big Boy hair is petulant and arrogant. This is the most secure building in the world, he says. Such a declaration is movie code for, “The fortress is about to be breached.”

German Guy hits a button and a steel wall comes down separating Burns from Nichols. Burns is on the German side of the border, OH MY! Now, here is how cheap the sets are. Burns bangs on this supposedly steel, reinforced door, and it shakes like it’s made out of aluminum. I died laughing, just died.

When I resurrected myself, Matthew Fox was wearing a nice little spandex outfit and chilling in a tube of water with some scuba gear. Then he had an underwater sparkle torch thing (whatever that tool is called) and he cuts himself a hole and enters the supposedly impenetrable fortess. He begins tiptoeing around, looking crazy and breathing weird. Cross and Nichols roam the halls, guns lazily pointed. There are fights and twice, percussion grenades go off. Everyone lives but Fox gets away, not before being clipped by Burns who forced the German to raise the steel shield.

God, this movie sucked.

Burns is worried Fox is going to come after them but Cross assures Burns that Fox is single minded and disciplined and is going to go after the German, who worked with Hot Asian Lady and also this other guy, Mercier, who we haven’t met yet. We meet him a bit later and it’s Jean Reno, looking a bit puffy. How he went from The Professional to Alex Cross is one of the saddest Hollywood trajectories ever. Mercier has donated a lot of money to revitalize Detroit but it’s so incoherently discussed that you think it’s just a stupid detail.

Fox returns to his houseboat and fixes his boo boo with a soldering iron or something. It’s disturbing. He does these crazy pull ups and mutters to himself and his eyes are terrifying. At times I had to look away. It was like he was trying to bore into my soul.

Cross takes his wife out to dinner when Fox calls. He’s wearing a Bluetooth headset, totally bringing that back and he’s watching Cross, who has been talking to his wife about profiling with the FBI and leaving Detroit, from a sniper’s perch. Words are exchanged and Fox says the same drab bullshit crazy people say in the movies when they want attention. It’s such a shoddy script, I am literally embarrassed for this movie. While they are chatting, Cross’s wife, Maria, is seated. When Cross realizes Fox is there, watching, he also realizes what’s about to happen. He runs and tries to save his wife but she’s shot in the shoulder. She whispers, “The baby,” as she fades away.

Let’s unpack the bullshit.

1. A shoulder wound shouldn’t kill her.
2. Her life is somehow more precious because she’s pregnant.
3. Women are easily sacrificed.
4. Pregnant women always die. (Though, according to some conservative, “modern technology” has put an end to this problem. Wish I had gotten that memo earlier!)

Moving on. Earlier, Fox paid a visit to Monica, injected her with the magic drug, and tortured her to death too. Brutal shit. Burns finds Cross in the hospital chapel. They are both broken men who have lost their women. Women are disposable. Men are heroes! Write that down.

Cross goes home and gets serious as HELL. He goes down to his basement, wearing a vest and pants, arms sort of flabby and bare. No judgment. It just doesn’t make the scene as serious as we’re supposed to take it. He saws off a shotgun and packs a bag with weapons because he means BUSINESS. On his way out of the house, he has some strong words with his mother who says he’s going to compromise his soul and he says he’s not going to let that man hurt one more person he loves. Then he sends Mama and the kids to a safehouse. Remember this.

Cross and Burns go rogue and pay a visit to Giancarlo Esposito, the only person who acts well in this movie and the uncle of the girl who was in prison at the beginning of the movie playing chess with Alex Cross. They’re in some kind of car museum, and Cadillac is again heavily featured. They learn who is making Fox’s magic drug and then they eventually figure out that Fox is going to try and kill Mercier so they lock down the block.This all happens in about five minutes because they are Very Good Detectives.

Fox is on the train, being teased by three young men. He kills two of them and shoots another one in the knee because bullying is wrong. Then he opens the doors, hangs up this curtain road, whips out a grenade launcher, blows up the line of Cadillacs, one of which Mercier is conveniently emerging from and goes on his merry way after killing the guy he kneecapped. Cross and Burns use ONSTAR LOL to triangulate Fox’s location, at the old Michigan Theater, which is now a parking garage. There, they have a battle royale. Cross wins.

This is angry Alex Cross:

But wait. There’s more, STILL. Back at the police station, Cross and Burns basically Skype seeing Mercier get arrested in some South Asian country. Turns out Mercier hired Fox to take out his CFO and COO because he had embezzled from the company and something to do with the money he had promised to Detroit and blah blah blah. Cross gets his revenge even though all the women are still dead.

Cross goes home where there’s a For Sale sign in the yard even though he’s been gone for two days max. Everything is

packed in boxes even though Mama and the kids have been at the safe house and Cross has been at work. Manage your goddamned timeline, how about that? The movie is offering one final FUCK YOU to the audience with this shit. This movie was a disgrace to bad movies. Expendables 2 is giving this movie the stank side eye and saying, “How DARE you?”

I got Booktsalked.

Frank Hinton’s Action, Figure is now available for purchase. Paperbacks ship at the end of

the month or in early September. E-book is available now.

I have little rejection to speak of because I haven’t sent much work out lately. Oh yes, I submitted a solicited story but they didn’t like the ending I think, said it was clichéd but I am not sure I agree. I thought I did but then I re-read the story and still liked it. I took the story to my amazing writing group and they gave me feedback and they are always honest with their feedback, no undue praise, and they didn’t see the cliché so who the hell knows what happens now.

I’ve been working on things including a new novel, some short stories, some essays I’m poking at. A new semester has started. There are new babies and they are squeezable. I’ve also been reading a lot.

So many good books, so little time but Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars was absolutely outstanding. i love poems with a real narrative quality and these poems had that. The real showstopper of the collection is, “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected,” a poem where murder victims write postcards to their killers from American landmarks. There’s so much…. intelligence in this poem and commentary that doesn’t feel like commentary and as I read it, violence is an American landmark as much as, say, the St. Louis Arch. I was also impressed by Life on Mars that blends science and memory and family and love and even current events. In the second section, Smith writes of the father who kept his daughter in the basement for years, made her bear his children and it is comprised of four of the tightest, most searing stanzas of poetry you ever will read. And of course, there is the language in every poem, the way she shapes words into these glorious moments. At the end of Eggs Norwegian, “the man/Who, too, by now has dropped even the idea of fetch—/Will push you against a tree and ease his leg between/Your legs as his industrious tongue whispers/Convincingly into your mouth.”

I mean! So great. If you want to read an outstanding poetry collection, do check out Life on Mars. I know I got to it way way later than everyone else but you know, at least I got to it.

I also read Leigh Stein’s Dispatch From the Future. I

became familiar with her work after reading The Fallback Plan. Dispatch From the Future is a also a strong poetry collection and again, I enjoyed the narrative quality of the poems, and the insouciant moments. Stein has a real ear for tone in her poetry and if you enjoy popular culture, you will enjoy how she weaves references to Rebecca DeMornay and Facebook and Banksy. She also brings mythology into several poems and it is interesting to see how Stein weaves those myths through her poems. One of my favorite lines comes in Epistolaphobia—”And sometimes we put ourselves in danger/because our fathers betroth us to murderers.” The book is worth checking out.

Love, In Theory, is a forthcoming short story collection from E.J. Levy. Each story is about love but it’s also about human nature and the ways people fail each other. The first story, “The Best Way Not to Freeze,” has really stayed with me. A woman in her early thirties is alone, broke because she’s an adjunct, and goes to a outdoor sporting goods store to rent a pair of hiking books for a class she will be taking. There she meets a man, Ben, and they start dating. She particularly enjoys how he’s always teaching her useful things about the outdoors. “She craved useful information, and he had it.” The story has an interesting tension throughout where you know something isn’t quite right but their relationship is shown as a fairly good one so you keep wondering what’s going on and then you realize things aren’t going to end well for our narrator. The only thing that bothered me about this story was how it tried to make 33 seem old. Maybe it’s because I’m 37 but the story worked hard to make it seem like the narrator didn’t have much time left and it was odd. This a small thing and the rest o the story is very well crafted. I also enjoyed “Theory of Enlightenment,” about a woman who goes to an ashram to try, she thinks, to win her boyfriend back when he decides to follow his bliss and she realizes he’s not coming back. In “Gravity,” a man has returned home for his sister’s second wedding. He left his lover at home and is uncomfortably negotiating all unresolved issues among his family. In all the stories in Love, In Theory, you can see Levy’s careful writing. There is rarely a word out of place, and each story offers a new meditation, if you will, on the nature of love without giving in to cliché. This is a smart, smart book. The only thing I wanted from this book was a little less care, a little more rawness, a little more heart. In a short story collection that is, at least in part about love, I want to see a bit more messiness that better approximates the true nature of love.

A really interesting book I read is Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women, out in October. It’s a slim novel, told in vignettes, about a woman, Lizzie, her time in a psych ward, what drove her there, and what drives her back. The cheap car mechanic narrative is fragmented and at times you’re not sure what’s going on but there is a quiet intensity threaded throughout the novel, this ominous energy that lurks, leaving you to wonder when everything will crack open. Promising Young Women also explores this matter of prettiness. As she recalls her childhood, Lizzie says, “‘You look so pretty,’ one or another said. This is what people say to little girls. This is not the only way we learn that pretty matters, but it is one way.” There’s a lot going on in this book about love, mental illness, fear, being a young woman, but also about being seen. In college, Lizzie meets Dread and he will lead her down a dark path but of their first encounter she says, “I was so happy to have found him, or to have been found,” and there is this sense, throughout the book that what Lizzie wants more than anything is to continue being found, being seen. You are left wondering, more than once, what she will do to be found or seen again.

Molly Ringwald’s book When It Happens To You. I read it. It has some lovely moments. On the whole, though, I did not care for the book at all. I wanted more from it, a much stronger editorial hand, more originality and unexpected choices, stronger language and, honestly, I wanted it to feel more like a novel. This is one of those short story collections they try to make a novel. The stories are absolutely connected but not in a way I found terribly satisfying. In one of the stories, this man is visiting his sister who has a deadbeat boyfriend and later the man will be involved with Greta, one of the two main characters but I kept thinking, “What is this story doing?” It felt like it didn’t quite belong. There is a story I did rather enjoy, “My Olivia,” about a single mother whose young son Oliver wants to be Olivia. Though there were some missteps, there was a tenderness to that story, and Marina, the mother, was one of the more interesting characters in the book. I gave this one three stars on Goodreads but man! I am the only one who doesn’t care for this book I think.

I can’t stop thinking about Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. The way that book deals with the body, the intensity of young women, the sensuality of relationships between young women, the power of ambition. I want to have a little book club about this book because I am having ALL THE FEELINGS.

I was loving Don Winslow’s Savages until I got to the ending, which was terrible and made me very angry. Let us not speak of it further. Okay, let’s speak of it a little further. It was a cop out non ending. And after such a wonderful book with a really unique, sexy narrative style. I want to ask him to write me a new ending so I can sleep better.

Anyway.

I was depressed for a really long time, like the past three years and I was mourning something I am still mourning but I’m coming out of the darkest part of it. Sometimes I feel guilty when I have a moment of pride or a flush of happiness, like, it’s too soon to feel that, or maybe it’s undeserved but I’m going to have an essay, Bad Feminist, in the fall issue of Virginia Quarterly Review and I don’t know why but this is something that feels good and so I wanted to share that.

I saw Expendables 2: The Botox Batallion Rides Again. I will have to just make a list of observations about this ludicrous movie because I am saving my recapping energy for seeing Premium Rush tomorrow. There will be bike jokes.

• This movie glorifies violence in a truly disturbing way. It is gleeful in the way it desecrates the human body–there’s exploding flesh, blood everywhere, and a grotesque display of weaponry. I don’t put much stock in the connection between violent movies and video games and the kind of violence we see in mass shootings and so on but…. man, sometimes I think there has to be an effect. The way Expendables just shamelessly indulges in the idea that murder is absolutely fine if you’re killing for the right reason or if you have the biggest gun is… it’s weird. I love seeing action movies and I am even find with excessive violence so for me to think, “This is a bit much,” please know, the movie was a bit much.
• Terry Crews drives me crazy. I just cannot with him.
• I have spent a lot of time trying to calculate the Botox budget for this movie. I’d say about 37%. The old men are stretched beyond belief, faces tight.
• Van Damme has still got it. He was kind of hot if you like an older, Botoxed version of his old hot self. Also JCV can still do a roundhouse kick. He is in fine, fine shape if you know what I’m saying. Dat. Ass.
• Arnold is balding and he is the worst offender of the Botox Battalion. And yes, there’s an I’ll be back joke and a you always say you’re going to be back joke. Horse, beaten deader than dead.
• Poor horsie.
• The bullet supply was, at times, self-regenerating. Other times, an actor would shout, “I’m out,” to indicate an ammo shortage and create dramatic tension. LOL!
• Gale is in this movie but he’s a dirty blond. He’s also not long for this world. We hates Gale!
• Chuck Norris! Still working! When he strutted onto the screen, I was like, Walker Texas Ranger! What up!? Look how goddamned serious Chuck is about his craft. Hero.
• YUP
• Bruce Willis looks the best and maybe hasn’t used fillers in his face. My dad refers to Bruce WIllis as “my guy.” Total bromance there.
• At one point, there’s in some vague Eastern Bloc country or some such and the slot machine in the bar (?!?!?) is an American machine that takes American dollars in a country that does not use American currency. I laughed until I choked.
• Movie rule: if a helicopter is involved in a movie, someone’s going to get chopped up by the rear rotor.
• At one point, they were talking about plutonium quantities, because, I mean, who doesn’t talk about that, and they straight up skipped back and forth between metric and English systems of measurement. I was so thrilled by the laziness. Van Damme, swear to god, said, “I already have an offer for $4 million dollars for a kilo of plutonium. It only takes 6 pounds to make a bomb. Imagine what we’ll be able to do with a ton.” Wait, what? Math is fundamental.
• I saw the movie a week ago and still remember the line. Classic.
• C’est quoi le plot?
• At the outset of the movie, it’s boys and their toys. They have these vehicles with pithy catch phrases on them that aren’t pithy or catch phrases. Then after their mission, they just… leave all that expensive equipment behind but then they’re flying in a shitty old airplane? What?
• Jet Li is in the movie for like 2 minutes. Do not blink or go to the bathroom or you will miss him.
• Look, if there’s an accessory that can be decorated with a skull, that’s going to happen.
• Lots of boring man talk.
• Ou sont les femmes? Charisma Carpenter, Strathan’s love interest, is on screen for about 30 seconds and then she calls him on his phone and he answers in the middle of a mission, and Sly is scowly and disapproving, because you know, women folk! Always with the yapping and being worthless and blah blah blah.
• There’s this hot Asian woman who is a magical computer/combat lady and Sly is all, NO WOMEN IN OUR CLUBHOUSE, but she has to go on the mission and then she’s part of the team but a LADY so they have to “protect” her. Anyway, she clearly wants to have lots of sex with Sly. I sort of get it. They’re in the Eastern Bloc country hiding out in this old fake American town and Dolph Lundgren is gross and says, “I could go for some Chinese,” which is terrible (his face is not looking good either) and a little racist and then the hot lady eye fucks Sly Stallone and says, “I’m in the mood for Italian.” More choke laughter from me.
• GET
• IT
• GIRL.
• There’s actually quite a bit of casual racism in the movie but that’s to be expected.
• Sly has lots of moments where he is having FEELINGS! REGRETS!
• 
• 
• Sad, sad sly. (I am very sorry to hear of his son’s passing, though, which for the record happened after this movie was filmed. I would never be mean like that.)
• Team Peeta forever. I have watched Hunger Games on DVD and Amazon Instant an embarrassing number of times since midnight last Friday but that’s what’s up. I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!
• Can you believe Dolph Lundgren was once Drago in the best Rocky movie, Rocky IV? I liked how shiny and waxed he was. He and Brigitte Nielsen just did not weather the storm well.
• Fuck yeah, America! Fuck yeah, guns! Fuck yeah, killing things! Fuck yeah, steroids!
• Seriously, that steroid budget wasn’t small either.
• It’s like… they’re not even trying.
• Something about the phallic symbolism of very large guns.

Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love dance movies which I feel are the highest expression of cinematic joy. I have seen all four Step Up movies now and honestly, I feel like these movies and I are on a journey and that journey is amazi

ng. Step Up is the movie that introduced me to my hot neck boyfriend Channing “DAT NECK” Tatum and the series has only gotten better (worse) with each installment.

First, you need to know that the women behind me in the theater love dance movies too, and not only that, they’ve seen every episode of ABDC and So You Think You Can Dance? They were very enthusiastic, whooping and hollering and shaking and shrieking and it made the movie that much better.

Step Up Revolution (3D!!!!) is life changing. It is basically OCCUPY DANCE MOVIE but with scantily clad ladies.

I shall not waste time by talking about the “acting” because these are dancers and the acting was so stiff and monotone that I couldn’t help but think,

“Bless your hearts, each and every one of you.” This movie is not about acting. THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT THE DANCE! Dance is everything.

Other notes:

• The 3D is bullshit and basically nonexistent.
• The only recognizable actor within the traditional understanding of acting as something where a person tries to bring emotional cadence to a role, was Peter Gallagher.
• It’s great this franchise exists so former cast members of So You Think You Can Dance can still find work.
• The budget for the movie was approx. $4.23
• Plot? LOLOLOL
• Dubstep is featured heavily.

When the movie begins, we’re on Collins Boulevard (I think) in Miami. There are all these shiny cars and suspicious looking pretty people. It’s kind of like this:

Only, there are palm trees and it’s day time and the cars looked like this:

This woman, we’ll call her DJ for the rest of the movie because she’s a DJ, is pulling a suitcase that she opens up et VOILA! She has a whole double iPad deejaying rig set up in that bad boy with some nice product placement for Beats headphones. (I use Beats, too, and honestly, they’re worth every penny.)

These two guys, Hero and BFF, are in a car. Hero says, “Are you ready?” BFF grins and says, “Are you serious?” and suddenly, a bunch of beautiful, fit people in young people’s clothing jump out of cars, jump ONTO the cars, and start dancing. On the cars. I’m old so I kept thinking, “Mmmm. That’s going to cost a lot to fix.”

The dancing throughout the movie is simply amazing. The way these kids move their bodies defies imagination at times. There is some rapid booty shaking that, frankly, impresses me.

These guys in one of those glass delivery trucks jump out and carry three pieces of glass to the middle of the road and Silent Face Tattoo Guy starts spray painting something. On the glass. In the middle of the dancing. In the middle of the afternoon. That is stopping traffic.

A piragua guy we’ll call Videographer, is filming the entire dance.

When the cars started dancing, I simply started laughing so hard, I cried because I realized I was about to have a transcendental movie experience.

This is exactly what it looked like:

After all the dancing is done, the gang disperses and the three panes of glass are beautifully spray painted with The Mob!!!

Three of the dancers run to work at the Dimont hotel where they are waiters. The man’s always gotta keep a dancer down. As they’re straightening their ties, this preppy asshole with shellacked hair, we’ll call him Chip (Clearly I don’t remember anyone’s names from the movie because the names just don’t matter. THIS IS ABOUT DANCE!!!) Chip is the new manager and he quickly lets the boys know there’s a new sheriff in town. There are customers waiting to eat that shitty hotel food.

At the end of their shift, they change back into street clothes and get ready to head to the beach club of the hotel to dance. There’s a sign that says, “No employees allowed in the beach club,” so BFF tears the sign down and says, “What sign?” He’s a rebel.

The beach club is what you’d expect–scantily clad women with ultra tight bodies and the men who love them, all drinking and grinding to overproduced, oversynthesized music without discernible lyrics. There’s a girl at the bar, we’ll call her Poor Little Rich Girl or PLRG for short. She wants a drink but the bartender is flirting with some skank so she just hops behind the bar to prepare herself a drink. Hero sidles up to the bar for a beer and they banter and then he says he’s going to dance and they go to the dance sand. He says something like, “Well, start moving and make me look good,” so SHE DOES! I think she’s doing it sarcastically but not really.

Then they really go at it and as is necessary in a dance movie, a crowd develops around them and it’s fucking time for a dance battle. They totally go at it more, with intensity, the kind that will require Ben Gay later if you’re over 30. By the end of the dance, they are down in the sand, grinding on each other, and rubbing sand all over their bodies. I was, wiping my eyes at this point because I was so happy. I also thought, “They’re going to have sand in crevices, later.”

That evening, Hero and BFF and the rest of The Mob gather at the salsa club that’s one of their main hangouts and they talk about how amazing their flash mob was because it’s 2001 when flash mobs were… still a thing. We learn that they’re trying to win $100,000 by being the first YouTube channel to get 10,000,000 hits. The gang strategizes about their next Mob.

Yes, Step Up Revolution is a quest movie.

In the morning, Hero is woken up by a child, his niece, and he does a dance move for her. In the kitchen, Hero’s sister basically tells him to get his life together and stop dreaming of the dance because he asks her if she watched his Mob video. Sister tells Hero her friend has an opening in the Management Training Program and he should apply but he’s a dancer, and management can’t hold him down.

Have you noticed how in every movie where someone has a dream, the alternative to the dream is management training?

At work, all the employees are being blabbed to by Peter Gallagher, who is the corporate overlord who has just bought the hotel. BFF runs in late and is immediately fired because there is no tardiness at the Dimont hotel.

Unremarkable things happen.

Out by the pool, Hero is waiting tables and Gallagher and PLRG are having a tense father daughter breakfast. Oh snap! She’s not really the bartender! There’s some lame flirting. Later he runs into PLRG dancing to an acoustic song. FEELINGS! Hero watches and after more banter he invites her to an event, tells her to dress nice. Obvi, they will be madly in love in about 7 minutes.

More unremarkable things and furious planning at the Mob Clubhouse, which is featured in some fashion, in every Step Up movie–a place where dancers can just dance. Concrete is always involved as are elaborate electronics that beg the question, how are you affording a. this amazing space and b. all these electronics.

PLRG auditions for the Winwood Dance Company and guess who’s the director of the company? LOLOL! Mia Michaels. My TV and movie worlds collided. Truth time: I clapped at this point and I wasn’t alone in doing so.

Look, PLRG just wants to dance and her rich daddy doesn’t understand. That’s her entire character arc.

There’s a fancy art opening at an art gallery in downtown Miami. The Mob infiltrates. PLRG shows up looking nice and Hero is wearing a suit and they look each other up and down. PLRG’s dress is a coochie cutter. All the dresses in the movie are. It’s really just, those poor girls’ vaginas–no protection from the elements.

The lights go out. DJ starts playing some music. People come out of paintings. Oh snap. Trompe l’oeil! Then, there’s another room, these gorgeous white silky installations hanging from the ceiling and four ballerinas with light tubes in their tutus start dancing. It is all, truly, amazing.

The choreography and dance design are simply flawless in the movie. I will give credit where credit is due. I clapped again. I was SO into it.

After the entire dance, which is incredible, and the art patrons are giddy with having been part of a moment, there’s this light projected outside the theater that says, “The Mob.”

This video gets a lot of hits. PLRG finds Hero the next day and demands to be part of the Mob. Hero takes her to meet the gang and introduces everyone and their roles in the gang. BFF is not into it at first but eventually, everyone becomes friendly and they start planning their next dance incursion. BFF throws down a gauntlet. PLRG has to lead the next dance off! Oooooh! Burn!

Unremarkable things happen.

We’re at a restaurant that kind of looks like that crazy, ultra modern restaurant in American Psycho that I cannot find a picture of. This will have to do.

PLRG and Hero are escorted to their table. We see the rest of the Mob getting in place. Hero and PLRG put on masks. Swear to God.

And I was like, wait. Are we about to get Black Swan up in here?

I was ready for that. Alas. Instead, they did another dance number, etc etc etc. This is all you need to know:

At the end of the Mob, the artist guy has made a The Mob sculpture. Out of silverware.

Yup. Best movie ever.

After, flushed with excitement, the gang all go to the salsa club homebase to dance their excitement off. If you know your dance movies, you’ll know EXACTLY where they stole this, “outsider learns about how the other half lives,” motif from.

Hero and PLRG sneak off and they get into his crappy little boat and he shows her another side of Miami. They make out a little, just enough to stay PG.

In the morning, we hear a loud blaring as a big ferry passes them by. The young lovers have fallen asleep together in the boat.

Back at the club, the lovers flush with kissing and sleeping in a boat all night, find all their friends still there, even though it’s morning, looking pitiful. Crisis! Gallagher, the corporate evildoer, plans on building on the waterfront. He’s buying up the property to build a new hotel and condos and whatever. The Mob doesn’t know who PLRG’s daddy is so she runs off to try and convince him to not destroy her boyfriend’s home but he basically pats her on the head and says, “You worry about dancing and I’ll worry about being an asshole.”

Things happen.

The Mob decides to create some social justice. From here on out, there are literally lines about how dancing is how people can be seen and heard and can make a difference and again, you know, bless their hearts. The next mob incursion happens at a corporate tower where Gallagher’s men and the city council are meeting. A fire alarm is pulled and then there’s this AMAZING dance number in the lobby.

This is involved:

YUP.

Outside the building, there’s this huge robot with an open brief case that says like, We’re Not For Sale. Amazing.

Hero and PLRG go to the beach to practice dancing on the water’s edge, straight up biting from the only water dancing movie in LIFE that matters.

Biters.

More things happen. BFF finds out PLRG is PLRG and gets mad. There’s a gala and Hero is working and PLRG is being a good daughter. Suddenly, there’s a video on the screen of PLRG talking about her greedy daddy and then all these scary looking guys in all black with gas masks enter the scene and do another incredible dance.

The jig is up! Secrets are out! Friendships are damaged! Young love is torn asunder! BFF and Hero are arrested then bailed out. PLRG is in the doghouse with daddy. She fucks up her dance audition to become a permanent member of Winwood Dance Company. Hero and BFF fight then make up. Etc etc etc. It all leads up to the end dance for freedom. Or just to dance and BE HEARD!

The final dance is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

There are sparks.

There’s also crunk booty shaking, robotics, dance moves I couldn’t name if I tried, and trampolines, and then these guys like run down a ramp attached to bungee cords.

There’s a guest appearance from Moose (either you know what this is or you don’t).

There are some cops who are really dancers.

The dance is SO amazing, Gallagher decides to work with the community to keep it vibrant, let everyone stay in their homes and businesses, and still build his hotel. Then, Hero and PLRG dance for life and for love.

We know where they got this idea from.

I wrote all this to tell you that all great dance movies owe everything to the one dance movie to rule them all, Dirty Dancing.

When it was all over, I dried my tears of joy and sat there in the darkened theater for a long time. I just didn’t want the moment to end.

(Feel free to ask me about Sweet Valley Confidential: The Sweet Life, “Episodes 1-5″ because I’ve read them ALL and am dying for Episode 6 to be released at the end of the month. Shit is going down in Sweet Valley and everyone’s a

hot mess.

First thing’s first. My friend and co-editor at PANK, M. Bartley Seigel, has a book coming out this month called This Is What They Say. It is gritty, soulful prose p

oetry. I warmly encourage you to buy this book, read it, love it, talk about it, love it.

So…. THIS HAPPENED. And this. And THE HAIRPIN! I recapped The Bachelorette finale and was so disappointed that poor Arie was brokenhearted. Then I cleansed my palate by watching Bachelor Pad.

I participated in Michael Martone’s Winesburg, IN project for Booth Magazine and wrote a story about Tara Jenkins and I wrote an essay about coming out and privacy and so on for The Rumpus. I wrote an essay for Salon about Jonah Lehrer, hubris, and genius. I crowdsourced a list, a highly incomplete list, of writers of color.

Yes, I am writing a response to Silverman’s essay at Slate that’s more my way of thinking through what criticism should be. You should, though, read Michelle Dean’s impeccable response in the meantime.

I have clearly not been sleeping. I’m going a little nuts but whatever.

I finally went to see Dark Knight Rises and largely found it bloated, ponderous, interminable, indulgent, and terrible. That movie was just terrible. Talk about never ending story. I certainly enjoyed moments and found the ending quite satisfying and a nice set up for future installments but getting there was, at times, pure misery. As I watched the movie, I kept thinking, “Why does Christopher Nolan hate me? How can I make him stop?” I am writing an essay about the movie and the fetish for strength that rises out of broken places and so on. Sometimes, people are broken

at the broken places. Can’t that be okay?

Let’s talk about Bane, though. It’s criminal to hide Tom Hardy’s beautiful face save for that one glorious scene where we could see his pretty. The other problem was that I only understood 37% of his dialogue which made the movie, at points, nearly unwatchable. Someone needs to reign Nolan in. Dude is totally out of control.

Remember Red Dawn? WOLVERINES? Fuck Yeah America?!!! Well, a remake has been planned for years and then the project was shelved because the enemy was the Chinese and I don’t know, there were some political/financial considerations. Now, finally, three years after the movie wrapped, the villains are the North Koreans. Thor plays Jed and he looks goooood. I mean, he’s no Patrick Swayze but he’ll do in a pinch. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the old military guy who helps the young’uns. Anyway the movie is coming out on Thanksgiving, so let’s start planning our field trip right now.

NEVER FORGET!

What really matters, though, is Total Recall. I loved the original. Arnold is fascinating and the movie had a woman with three breasts which is also excellent. I loved the Mars setting and the action and it was just so enjoyable. I was pretty bummed when I heard that the reboot was going to take place in a different setting but I was willing to give the movie a chance because I give all movies a chance and because Colin Farrell is very attractive and so is Kate Beckinsale who is, for some reason, one of my favorite actresses.

As an aside, this ongoing drama between KStew and RPatz actually makes me like her.

The Total Recall remake is quite, quite good—ludicrous as movies these days are wont to be but well paced, competently acted and directed, and the movie looks amazing. I am not sure what the final budget was but you see it on the screen, and I am guessing at least $200 million was spent. There were times when I was literally holding my breath, on the edge of my seat. Total Recall is an utterly delightful way to spend two hours.

The movie opens with writing on the screen. This is a sure sign a screenplay is week because the movie needs you to understand a lot of backstory real fast rather than telling the story while telling the story.

As you might expect, the backstory provided is kind of… anemic but still hilariously elaborate. As usual in Future Movies, some bad things have happened because humans are terrible and most of the planet is uninhabitable for reasons that are vaguely described as human-originated mutually assured destruction. There are only two cities left on opposite ends of the world–United Federation of Britain and The Colony which is basically like Australia. Connecting the two countries is LOL, seriously, a fancy elevator called The Fall, that runs through the earth’s core. This was the first time I laughed really hard. Then I thought about the amazing (terrible) movie, The Core, starring Aaron Eckhardt and Hilary Swank and was really happy.

The rich folks live in the UFB and the poors live in The Colony and head over to UFB to do the work they don’t want to do. Wonder where they got that idea! It’s great when movies make social commentary.

When Total Recall begins, there’s some action taking place–Colin Farrell aka Doug Quaid and Jessica Biel are trapped in a room and then he’s caught by this Future Taser gun that wraps people in a band of lights that looks exactly like this:

Jessica Biel is where you might expect, dangling from a window while Colin holds onto her and then he begs her to let go. He says, I will find you and she lets go and falls into some conveniently located water just below.

Then, we see a delectable set of pectoral muscles. They are round and juicy. I very much wanted to squeeze them. Colin wakes up with a start. Poor baby has had a bad dream and needs some comfort. Fortunately, his hot wife Kate Beckinsale is there to comfort him. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do it with her mouth like a good wife would. They talk about married boring stuff and how life maybe hasn’t turned out the way they want. You know how it is. She’s called into work. We’re not clear what her job is but it’s something like Future Paramedic.

Colin hangs out drinking coffee, bare-chested and wearing some sexy pajama pants slung around his hips so we can see those tapered to his thigh man muscles.

Here’s what you need to know about The Colony. It’s a combination of Venice, Italy, the favelas in Rio, and Kowloon’s Walled City floating in midair. Also, it rains ALL THE TIME. There is seriously not one scene in The Colony where rain is not involved.

Colin gets ready for work and goes to The Fall where he meets up with his BFF, Bokeem Woodbine. Yes, for real, Bokeem is working again. Colin is suffering from some real existential angst and tries to talk about it with his BFF but Bokeem is all, YOLO! This is what it is. They sit in their seats and they’re strapped in just like a roller coaster. Colin starts reading because he’s very sensitive and intellectual. Bokeem is just chilling.

The good news is that the trip to UFB only takes 17 minutes and during the journey, polarity is reversed and you get to float a little. Future!

When they arrive on the other side of the world (LOLOL 17 minutes!!!), they go through security and have to show their papers. Not much has changed in the Future. Then they go to a factory where they build police robots. As they get ready for work, Colin mentions he might go to Rekall to get some awesome memories and Bokeem is all, “OH HELL NO, they mess with your mind, man!” Colin sighs. Sad Colin.

Colin is called to his boss’s office and learns he hasn’t gotten a promotion so his angst becomes even more profound.

You will want to rush the screen at this point to console Colin but sadly, the movie is not 3D. It won’t work. I tried.

Colin heads back to the assembly line, shouldering the white man’s burden. He’s training a new coworker, who tells him he should totes go to Rekall where he can get new, exciting memories so he can cope with his sad, sad life. When Colin gets home from work, he opens the refrigerator and takes out a Heineken which is still terrible in the future but in a much prettier, tapered bottle. When he closes the refrigerator, there’s a note from The Wife. She’s in bed, asleep. No sex for Colin. Sadddddddnesss.

Future apartments, and really all of The Colony, are made out of concrete. Invest in concrete, now! Furnishings are provided by IKEA.

Colin goes out, meets Bokeem for a drink, then he’s walking around and runs into a woman with three breasts and she’s all, HAAAAI but Colin is not interested. He asks where Rekall is and she points the way.

At Rekall, Colin is quickly ushered into the back where he is strapped and injected with things. They run a psychographic lie detector test on him because you can’t get a Rekall experience that mimics who you are in real life. Colin selects Secret Agent and settles in when suddenly, the lie detector goes off. The guy who’s running the show is Harold from Harold and Kumar only he has white hair. He gets really angry, and says, “You lied!” and Colin says, “I don’t have a mistress!” and Harold says, “You are a secret agent,” and Colin is so confused and keeps insisting he doesn’t know what’s up. It was kind of like this:

(This image is from an incredible episode of Star Trek: TNG when Picard is interrogated by the Cardassians and they keep trying to get him to say there are five lights but Picard is a boss and he shouts, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS! I work into conversations as often as possible.)

Suddenly, a bunch of robocops burst into Rekall and Colin does some gunkata and kills all of them.

If you are not familiar with gunkata, please see the movie Equilibrium.

Colin is very confused. What is going on??? He runs home and his wife is awake, looking frantic. On the news, it says someone killed 20 people at Rekall and Colin immediately starts blabbing. Dude cannot hold water. Kate hugs him, tries to make it better, and then, she’s trying to choke a bitch. Colin wrestles himself free and his confusion deepens and Kate explains, “Look, you’re not you and I’m not me and we are not we,” and she sassily says, “I give good wife.” They have a pretty major tussle. She is very, very determined. At one point, she does this, sliding across the concrete floor, back arched prettily:

If you enjoyed that move, worry not, she’ll do it several more times throughout the movie.

Colin manages to escape after more chasing and fighting. Suddenly, his hand lights up. Seriously, y’all, there is a phone in his hand. He tentatively answers it, while trying not to lose his shit completely.

The voice on the other end tells him to stick his hand on a glass surface and we see a video call appear and the mystery man explains what’s going on to Colin who is directed to a safety deposit box. He also tells Colin to get rid of the phone and Colin finally starts acting reasonable and says, “HOW???”

After the phone call, brace yourselves, Colin finds a dirty piece of glass on the ground in a wet, dirty place, cuts his hand open, and pulls out the phone. All I could think was, “That’s going to get infected,” and, “I hope he’s had his tetanus shot.”

A slacker is hanging out nearby and picks up the discarded phone that is remarkably devoid of blood. We do not bleed from the hand in the future, apparently.

Colin goes to the bank and finds his deposit box, biometrics are big in the future, finds passports and future devices he doesn’t understand. He watches a video from himself, and it totally freaks him out but he’s directed to an apartment in the UFB.

On the other end of the world, a woman who looks suspiciously like the head exploding woman in the original Total Recall walks through security. It’s a nice little nod to people who know the original movie well.

The Asian man following her is stopped and he’s asked to go through the scanner again. Suddenly, we realize, it’s Colin wearing a future hologram mask. Everything is mostly awesome in the future. There’s more gunkata absurd action and Kate is there full of anger and determination. She’s going to catch Colin because, well, it’s never explained, but she’s a super agent of some kind and she’s good at her job.

In the future, cars move along magnetic highways that are simply awesome. This was when I felt myself moving around in my seat because the action was really well done. Things happen and suddenly this woman pulls up in a Future Magnet Car, tells him to get in, it’s Jessica Biel who he remembers from his dream, so he does as he’s told. They start a long chase and we learn that Future Magnet Cars have steering wheels that can, with the push of a button, slide from the driver to the passenger who becomes the driver, circle of life.

At one point, they get into this like magnet car elevator and move to a different set of roads, way high in the sky, and it’s all just glorious. This is the point of action movies–to show incredible, future, highly implausible things that look very sexy.

Eventually, Jessica and Colin get away, but she’s unconscious so they go to his apartment. There’s a piano in the middle of the room, and he starts playing it when suddenly, one of the keys is off. People have been nagging him about a key for a while, so he remembers something from his safety deposit box, replaces the problematic key, and plays the song he was playing until another hologram appears and we learn the rest of the story.

Colin was an agent working for Cohagen (Bryan Cranston) who, it’s not terribly clear, but is kind of in charge of the UFB. Colin was trying to infiltrate the rebellion led by Bill Nighy (who clearly, Len Wiseman, the director loves because he also cast him in the Underworld movies) but then Colin met Jessica Biel and she used sex to turn him to the good side so now he’s a double agent but he was captured by Cohagen, they erased his memory because he knows a super long numerical code that can turn off the massive robot army Cohagen has been building because he plans to invade and take over The Colony because the rich folks are running out of space in the UFB. Same story, different century.

Jessica wakes up and says, “we shouldn’t have come here.” They head downstairs and in the lobby of his apartment building, they’re surrounded by police. Bokeem is there and says Colin is still at Rekall and that Jessica is lying and that Colin needs to shoot Jessica to wake up. Just outside the glass doors, Kate is wearing a wifely wrap, looking tearful. Bokeem says, see? Your wife is here. Kill the whore! Colin doesn’t know what to do. He’s so so confused! Quelle crise! After an interminable scene with lots of trash talk, Colin notices a single tear falling down Jessica’s face and he knows what to do. He kills his BFF!

Girl tears–not just for getting out of traffic tickets anymore.

They run back to the elevator and at this point, the movie careens back to absurdity as they play an elaborate game of life sized metal cube Jenga.

Chasing, fighting, Kate inexplicably full of rage. It was at this point, that i basically thought:

When they finally escape, Jessica and Colin head underground to a dusty, ancient subway where they are greeted by people with very intense dreadlocks. This means they are rebels. They get on the train, wind it up, an air lock activates and they head into the No Zone, which has, to this point, not once been mentioned. Turns out that beyond UFB and The Colony, there are No Zones, where the air is not breathable.

At their destination, Jessica and Colin put on masks and go to a building and once in the air lock, there is Bill Nighy who is going to retrieve the very long numerical code in Colin’s head. Bill asks Colin, “Why are you here?” but the way he intones the question, it’s clear he’s asking something existential and Colin says, “I want to remember,” and Bill gets all Yoda like and says something like, “The answer is in your heart.” It’s one of those infuriatingly vague things a therapist might tell you when you really just want to know, “Should I break up with my boyfriend, check yes or no?”

Colin gets strapped into a machine, and Bill delves into his mind through the magic of Future Technology. They quickly realize it’s a trap, and there are Cohagen and Kate, gloating because they’ve captured the rebel leader.

This was all part of Cohagen’s dastardly plan, to get to the rebel leader. Colin is brokenhearted. He tries to keep Nighy alive and fails. Dude was on camera for about 5 minutes. Them’s the breaks. Cohagen grabs Jessica and orders his men to put Hauser’s (Colin’s agent name before he was sent to The Colony as Quaid, wait what, nevermind) old memories back in him. As he’s being strapped into the chair, the guy from the video phone is there, and he cuts one of the wrist bindings loose.

Colin escapes with more gunkata. He is the best super agent in the history of super agents. Nothing can stop him!

There is chasing and so on, in The Fall as Cohagen, Jessica, Kate, Colin, and a massive army of robocops hurtle toward The Colony. Bombs go off. There’s a romantic reunion, more fighting, implausible heroism, Kate raging, and so on. After all these kerfuffles, it’s still raining in The Colony, and Colin is unconscious. He comes to in a

Future Ambulance. Jessica is by his side, caressing him. Suddenly, he looks at her hand, and there’s no scar. She is supposed to have a bullet hole scar in the palm of her hand from this one time, at band camp. Anyway, he realizes it’s Kate wearing a future mask. They fight some more and blah blah blah, it’s just so overdone at this point. It never makes sense why she is so hell bent on killing this guy. Good triumphs over evil. Love triumphs over hate. Colin and Jessica live happily ever after, recalled totally!

I received a personal rejection from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency for this funny thing I wrote about the Olympics. No idea where I will send it next but it was really amusing to write. I received a rejection from Milkweed Editions f

or my short story collection Strange Gods. It was a very lovely rejection. They enjoyed the manuscript but but but. Guys. I am having a…. crisis of confidence where books are concerned. I feel like everyone is passing me by even though I have two manuscripts done and two in progress. Like, nothing is happening.  I am frustrated. And you know, don’t cry for me. My writing life is really quite good but I am frustrated about a few things. I’ll get over it.

I’m recapping The Bachelorette. Here is this week’s recap. There was no use of the fantasy suites. I made some reading recommendations for Indiana Review. I’ve also started using my Tumblr more so you can check that out if you are interested. I’m not abandoning this blog, worry not. This Tuesday, I will have a short story in the Storyville App which is exciting and very futuristic. Oh and yeah, I wrote an essay about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes and so on. You may call me “angry blogger woman” from this point forward, or ABW for short.

On July 25, I’m going to be doing a panel at McNally Jackson bookstore in NYC about Fifty Shades of Grey, which I’m still rather obsessed with. It’s at 7 pm. You should go because my co-panelists are Erica Jong (!!!!), Melissa Febos (!!!!) and Daniel Bergner who I don’t know but is probably very smart. I’m likely to be Skyping in for the discussion and it will be an adventure.

Blabbity blabbity. This is my summer of angst but I will not bore you with it.

It’s taken years for me to really articulate this but I hate the show Everybody Loves Raymond. I hate every single thing about it and I feel a lot better just saying that. When I hear that guy’s voice I cringe. His facial features sometimes give the impression there is no bone structure beneath his face skin.

On Thursday, I spoke on an editor’s panel at a writer’s conference and it was a fun adventure. On the drive, I pulled off to get gas and saw these dudes just chillin’ at their little table. I was really impressed.

Yes, my windshield is a nightmare but car washing is one of those things I tend to think of as “man work,” so I don’t… really get involved with that sort of thing.

Yeah. I know.

After the conference, I went to the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, OH which you should definitely go see if you’re ever in the area.

The museum is in a really beautiful space and the signs are simply amazing.

The gift shop is very sad and needs work and they could use more like… information about the signs but on the whole, I was impressed by a really well curated set of signs. I took a great many photos but I was most charmed by Big Boy. Look how happy this mofo is and his outfit is super, super cute. That must be one delicious hamburger.

I love Target. I also love that there is a sign for Women’s Body Wash as opposed to Men’s Body Wash.

On one of my recent trips, we were stuck on the tarmac for ever and ever and ever and there were about a million planes in front of us and I looked out the window and realized, we were lucky because there were a million planes behind us.

I don’t know… it’s a metaphor for something.

I have a terrible stomach and right now I can only eat about three things that don’t make me very sick. One of those things is rice. One of those things is apples. One of those things is peanut butter. Anything else is questionable and that’s… awesome. I bought these apples and was so excited because I can eat the apples with peanut butter and not feel like dying and it’s the small victories right now. Yesterday, I cut open an apple and it was completely JACKED UP. It felt firm on the outside but it was browning and pulpy and completely wrong on the inside. This tiny rage started welling inside me because I was so hungry and so scared to eat but needed to put food in my body and I knew this ONE THING WAS SAFE. I cut open another apple and it was jacked too but I decided, “Fuck it. I am going to eat this jacked up apple,” and I did. This morning, I cut open another apple and it was new jack city. The tiny rage swelled. I threw the apple against the counter and totally lost it for a moment. I’m going to the grocery store tomorrow and I am going to cut the apples open right there because if I bring more jacked up apples home, I swear to God, it’s not going to end well for the apples. I’m going to be like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride, wanting the correct number of hotdog buns. I hope I do not end up in jail. If I do, plz bail me out.

I’m not really going to recap The Amazing Spiderman but I do have Thoughts about the movie. Like many, I do not understand why

the Spiderman franchise rebooted. I enjoyed the last Spiderman franchise though I wasn’t a superfan. Tobey Maguire is an odd actor. He’s competent but he lacks a certain charisma. I don’t care who he’s dating, is what I am saying. He also seems to carry an existential sadness, kind of like Toby Ziegler on The West Wing. It’s in his eyes. No matter what role he plays, his eyes betray the grayness of his soul. As such, I don’t particularly enjoy seeing him in movies. I don’t dislike him but when I see him, I feel a bit of dread. He brings me down.

Andrew Garfield is the new Spiderman and guess what? He’s awkward. Did you get that he’s awkward? Because he’s going to do everything awkward. There are scenes when he can barely stutter out half a word to increasingly belabor the point that he is awkward—awkward but super.

So, a new Spiderman, whatever. The movie was very pretty. I will give it that. I enjoyed myself but I also couldn’t help but think, over and over, “This is stupid.”

1. Gwen’s outfits. Really?

2. Making Peter and Gwen high school students simply doesn’t work because we’re supposed to believe that Gwen is some science genius in hot skirts by making her the head intern at Oscorp. It’s just ludicrous.

3. The big lizard is in the chemistry lab at the high school and the correct chemicals just happen to be out. He lifts up a few different things, sniffs them, finds what he’s looking for and smashes the beakers together to create a bomb. This is an actual thing that happened in an actual movie I paid money for. My friend and I could not stop laughing. It was hilarious.

4. At the end of the movie, Spidey is tired and injured and he needs to traverse a great many blocks. Conveniently, all the roof cranes in the city turn out so Spidey can web from crane to crane. Conveniently, every building between Spidey and Oscorp has a crane on top of it. What are the chances? Seriously.

5. Sally Field and Martin Sheen did great as Aunt Meg and Uncle Ben but anytime I hear the name Uncle Ben, I think:

6. Denis Leary is in the movie! He’s made quite a career for himself out of playing Cynical Older White Guy and he brings that same verve to this movie as Gwen’s father.

7. Kind of like the GI Joe cartoons, no one really dies. It’s quite magical.

8. One of the biggest problems with this movie is that there is no real villain. The so-called villain is too sympathetic, too human, and therefore there’s nothing to hate or to rally against. There’s not enough tension to make the movie interesting and so it remains mostly pretty, at times charming, and rarely does the movie strike any complex emotional notes that I would find more satisfying.

9. LOL–the machine that will magically spray the city with toxins.

10. Rando casting: C. Thomas Howell! Remember that one time he starred in Soul Man, a movie

where he acted in blackface? I love that movie. It would never ever be made in this day and age but real talk, it was pretty good.

11. Really, this movie underwhelmed me. I have nothing of substance to say about it which, I think, says a lot.