Sunday, March 14, 2010

Poop Journal, Vol. 1

Two poops before 9, yet again. That seems to be a trend lately. The first comes on with alacrity and force, about two sips into my first cup of coffee. It's always a big, solid dark one, a strong, forceful leader, the Tony Soprano of the day's poops. The second is less intense, but still insistent, and tends to be lighter and more scattered in form. More of a Christopher Moltisanti, if you will.

Two poops before 9 a.m. always makes me wonder, though. That seems excessive. Is it something I'm eating? Do some foods yield a lot more waste product than others? If so, they should find out what foods yield very little poop material and feed it to cats. Then I'd have to change the litterbox less often.

I'd be very interested in poop research. I mean, I know scientists will study owl poop (which they charmingly call "owl pellets") and other animal poops ("bolus" seems to be the euphemism), but I wonder how many study human poop (and what their euphemism would be). I suppose a lot of connections are made between human poop and diseases, but I'm more interested in questions like "Why does it sometimes come out in one solid chunk sometimes and other times come out as a lot of little pieces?" "Why does it sometimes take about 40 wipes to get all the poop residue out and sometimes take just a couple?" That latter question is especially pressing for me personally -- because of the large amount of pooping and the concomitant amount of wiping I do daily, the ol' asshole can get pretty raw. It's not uncommon to see little blood spots on the toilet paper. Not good. My lifelong dream is to have a bidet and just skip the whole wiping process entirely.

I wonder if I might reach in farther than most people when wiping, though. It's not like I do it for fun of course -- I have to get that stuff out. I always have to make conscious effort to relax my asshole as much as possible and then really reach in far to get to some sort of inner layer. I think of it like trying to brush a shark's inner row of teeth. I don't know if that's true for everybody, or if maybe I have an unsually complex and layered asshole.

I also find that anything but the best toilet paper tends to break apart in mid-wipe, resulting in poop residue on my finger, which is of course very unpleasant. So nowadays I shell out for the top-of-the-line stuff, the toilet paper made of advanced polymers and equipped with special blue bristles for those hard-to-reach places.

Congratulations! You made it to the end of a very disgusting post. You win $1. To claim your prize, carefully print the words "poop journal read in full!" on a 3X5 card and send it to:

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Monday, March 8, 2010

"The Hurt Locker" = "Lethal Weapon" Goes to Iraq!

I saw "The Hurt Locker" the day before the Oscars, and assumed it would be my favorite Best Picture nominee. It certainly seemed like the award represented a battle between Overrated Big-Budget Special-Effects-Laden Family Drama ("Avatar") and Scrappy, Meaningful, Edgy Indie That Smart People Prefer ("The Hurt Locker"). When those type of struggles arise, I'm usually 100% on the side of the indie, because my identity is very much wrapped up in being the smart person. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that "The Hurt Locker" sucked.

There were some good points. It was well-directed. It had a lot of great individual scenes involving bomb defusing and such. There was good detail about what that's really like. The problem was that the script sucked.

There was no plot, and the characters were one-note. The main character was this white guy who came in on an established unit and Played By His Own Rules. Yes, He Did Things His Way, was very irrevent, made bad-ass offhand quips, endangered everyone needlessly with pointless bravado, and wouldn't you know it? He always turned out to be right in the end!

Then on the sidelines, you have the black dude. He was always saying things like "Sir, don't you want the protective suit?!" "Sir, we have to get going -- we don't have much time!" "Come back here or I'm going to have to report you to the principal!" (OK, he didn't say that one. But I wouldn't have been surprised if he had.) Basically, he was the cautious, rule-bound one, the one who was actually following well-established protocols that I'm betting are there for a very good reason -- and he was always wrong in the end. He quickly became nothing but a foil for White Guy's preternatural super-awesomeness.

It's basically just the "Lethal Weapon" formula transported to bomb-disposal units in Iraq. You have the wild-ass white guy who runs on instinct, rules be damned. And then you have the cautious black dude being dragged along, muttering "I'm getting too old for this shit!" White guy's always right, but we love the black dude anyway, because he's so adorable, the way he approaches things in a sane, rational way that doesn't threaten everyone's lives! Aww, look at him try! He'll never be as good as the white guy, but maybe he can learn a thing or two by basking in his glow!

Even the non-bomb-disposal scenes only existed to reinforce this dynamic. They get drunk in one scene, and of course it's the black guy who passes out and has to be dragged to his bed. In the end (which I'm going to ruin for you, because there's not much to ruin anyway), White Guy and Black Guy have a heart-to-heart, which basically just involves Black Guy tearfully asking White Guy, "How come you're so awesome?" White Guy doesn't really answer, but I was yelling at the TV "Because this is a simple-minded hero-worship-fest, with no real characters or plot!"

Then White Guy went back to his boring family stateside, and nothing much happened, beyond White Guy realizing that he has to go back to Iraq. So that's it then -- that's all he is, a perfectly perfect bomb disposal machine. Yes, I get that would be really hard to adjust to normal life after such a dangerous year. But he doesn't really go through any sort of struggle to come to his conclusion to return. The whole sequence only reinforces that he's not so much a character as a cliche.

The real best film of the year, by the way, was "Up in the Air." Or maybe "Up," which I didn't see, but probably got immediately disqualified in most people's minds because it doesn't fit the profile of a best picture (i.e., it's animated). I think most voters didn't even really consider either movie. I think they got caught by the Big-Budget Special Effects-Fest vs. Edgy Indie dichotomy, picked their sides, and that was that. It's a shame.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Movie Reviews: Movies I Haven't Seen

The problem with movies is that typically, you can't form an opinion on them unless you've seen them. But to see them takes time and money, which you'd rather not waste if you're pretty sure they're going to be awful. So I prefer to judge movies based on the ads. Easier, cheaper, more fun.

I watched a lot of Olympics, so I can recite verbatim pretty much any of the 6 or so ads they had playing over and over throughout. Two were for movies: "Cop-Out" and ... uh ... I forget the other one.

"Cop-Out"

My immediate reaction to this one was simply "Are you fucking kidding me?" So wait, you have the hard-as-nails white cop, played by Bruce Willis, and his wild-ass black partner, played by Tracy Morgan. And they may be, shall we say, buddies? These cops? Ergo, they are buddy-cops? It's so cliche it's almost genius. Is this a parody? The ads didn't make it seem like it was. I'm going to proceed assuming that it isn't.

Assuming that this is a straight exploitation of the buddy-cop formula, the name is the real beauty part. Like most bad movie titles, it's devised to be as easy to remember as possible: It's a well-worn phrase in the English language, and it has "cop" in it so you can easily associate with that one cop movie with the funny black guy. That's all par for the course -- the great part is that the phrase "cop-out" actually means "evading any sort of effort!!!" It's as if the movie is telling us "Hey, we realize we're not even trying here. We're just pushing some crap through the system to make a buck. You know it, and we know it, so let's just get this over with." Next we're going to see a movie about employees of the New York subway system called "Token Effort." Or a movie about a guy making a crappy movie called "I Hope This Movie Covers Expenses in the First Weekend and Gets Some Overseas Business Because It Sure Won't Have Legs."

My brother-in-law always talked about writing a buddy-cop movie, and allowing himself same exact amount of time to make the movie that the movie would run. So, basically, you could improv an entire movie in two hours. I think someone stole that idea for "Cop-Out."

I'm still not sure it's not a parody. If it is, my review could change dramatically. In fact, it would be my favorite movie ever if it turned out to be written by the writers of "The Onion" and it actually killed off Tracy Morgan in the first few minutes, replacing him with another gruff, white loner cop. Maybe have this new partner also played by Bruce Willis, except with a mustache. Bruce and Bruce II would hit it off immediately, and spend the rest of the movie at a bar. Then they fall for each other and spend the final half hour making love. Of all the actors in the world, I think Bruce Willis would be the perfect choice for a character who spends the whole movie making love to himself.

There would be so many ways to screw with the audience on this one. Why don't more filmmakers do that? I would. I would make a movie in which, after an hour of a typical plot about the CIA or a wacky family's Christmas celebration or whatever, the entire world explodes for no reason, and the last hour is just a long shot of empty space.

Or better: Maybe a period piece in which well-mannered and overdressed people sit in an English manor, and nothing much happens at all. Several plot lines get started ("Wait, Mr. Noseworthy has rudely failed to appear for our morning constitution around the garden!"), only to have them immediately resolved in an anti-climactic way ("Oh, actually, Mr. Noseworthy's waiting outside for you." "Oh, never mind then.") It goes on and on like that for an hour, and then suddenly Boba Fett bursts in through a window and starts shooting everyone. Then Rambo bursts out of a kitchen door and starts shooting Boba Fett and his army of Oompa-Loompas. Eventually Rambo gets pinned down, and as Boba levels his gun at Rambo's face, he makes a long and dumb speech about Rambo killing his aunt or something. Then he says "OK, Rambo, say your prayers," and suddenly, at the last second, Peter O'Toole appears and shoots Boba in the back with a bazooka. It turns out he was Mr. Noseworthy the whole time! Close-up on O'Toole, who says, dramatically, "I'm ready for my walk around the garden!" Fade to credits. Thunderous applause.

Anyway, that's all besides the point. "Cop-Out" looks excruciatingly bad, and though I love Tracy Morgan and think he should be in every movie, I would rather chop off my own balls and eat them than see "Cop-Out."

"The Other Movie"

Uhh ... I still can't remember what the other movie was that I saw ads for constantly during the Olympics. You guys watched the Olympics -- what was it?

P.S.: I looked it up and "Cop-Out" is indeed meant to be tongue-in-cheek. But how far in cheek, really? The gags in the ads really don't look very tongue-in-cheek; they look like they were cut straight out of "48 Hours." The alleged tongue-in-cheekness may itself by a cop-out enabling them to lazily run through an easy formula and still save some face.

But regardless, the clincher is that it was directed by Kevin Smith, the worst, most smug, most painfully unfunny director in history. That clinches it: I would happily chop of my balls and both my legs, gouge out my eyes, and carve out my still-beating heart so I could use my last dying moments to eat them all raw rather than see "Cop-Out."