Tag Archives: self indulgent

The Land of Broken Boys

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“We live in a land of broken toys.”

“Broken boys?”

“Toys, broken toys.”

“What’s this? Who’s a broken toy?”

“You. Me. Everyone.”

“Why broken toys? What’s that?”

“You know, from the Rudolph the Reindeer movie.”

“That’s the Land of Forgotten Toys. Not Broken Toys.”

“Forgotten, broken. Same thing.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Well, we’re broken, right? Played with and fucked up.”

“You’re speaking gibberish.”

“We believed in something when we were small. And now that’s all gone.”

“Believed in what?”

“What our parents told us.”

“All my dad ever taught me was to shut the fuck up.”

Easy Prey

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The horror lies within your imagination. Nowhere else. Sleep and you’re easy prey.

Run, run, run, but it’s right there with you. The darkness of being mauled and eaten comes from within because we know what that is.

We do it to every living thing and pretend we don’t. Anything but that. That’s what we say.

Thanks for What?

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Leaders never lead. Communicators are never on Communication Committees. If she says, “I am the most loyal person”, you know she isn’t. If he says, “I am wise”, he is the opposite. “My door is always open”, and it never is.

As broad and simple as it sounds, it’s really an ugly thing, the reason for the missiles and executions, the world going to hell all around us. Hope remains the thing. Thanks for nothing.

Slovenly Self-Deceiving Blobs

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Anyone who still has any faith in humanity is an idiot. There might have been a chance a hundred years back, but that parlay has been lost.

If it isn’t a war, it’s politics. If it isn’t environmental collapse, it’s pure fucking ignorance. In the end, it wasn’t complicated. We just had to do the work. And we didn’t. We sucked instead.

And so the devolution is on. Slovenly self-deceit wins. The blobs will now stare at each other on their screens and not even remember how to say hello. Or goodbye.

Ari Aster’s Mommy Issues

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Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid tries to be Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche but ends up more Darren Aronofsky’s Mother, an exhausting and unintelligible portrayal of deep psychological damage. There is some very good stuff, including then many 180-degree pans, the match-cut transitions, the blue paint overdose scene and the fantastic animated sequence.

But there is much more of the very bad stuff – countless scenes tediously rendered – and very stupid stuff too, including the inane finale and, yes, the penis monster.

After the stellar work of Hereditary ($10 million budget) and Midsommar ($9 million), this is what Aster does with $25 million? Yikes. What’s next? Courtside seats for the Knicks?

“The Whale” Needs More Eating

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There’s been chatter – both negative and positive – around Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. While Brendan Fraser’s performance as the whale-sized man, Charlie, has been praised, the fat-shaming inherent in the story has been reviled. Neither claim is worth much discussion. The real issue with this film is how painfully the stakes for Charlie are established – heart pain while he watches porn – and maintained – more heart pain without the porn – until the climax where he pigs out like a crazy man.

Chowing doubly down

The film would actually have been improved with more of the gross eating scenes. It would at least have been a relief from the clunky story of Charlie reconnecting with his angry teenaged daughter. The only thing worth noting about this film’s narrative is an essay the daughter wrote about Moby Dick proclaiming that the excessive descriptions of the whale are only there to distract the reader from the author’s sad life. And so, yes, gross-eating = whale. And that’s about it.