Deep Blue Hero Stuff
Today, I saw a guy things recently ended with who began the conversation, “I’m not sure if we’re still talking,” which really bothered me because there’s absolutely no drama there so then I had to put extra effort into acting like everything was absolutely fantastic, my life was absolutely fantastic, and I was absolutely indifferent to any tension. It was quite the acrobatic feat. I was coolly friendly with a soupçon of bitchiness as I mentally reviewed my hair and outfit. Thank god I was wearing both a new shirt and new jeans. After our skirmish (which was totally just a polite, pleasant conversation but in my head, SKIRMISH), I mentally high-fived myself for deciding to dress well for work today and high-fived myself again for not doing anything foolish as I stared down a long weekend with very few plans.
I’m on 24/7 technical support call with my parents. I don’t even fight it anymore. Today my brother called me and said, “I just spent 30 minutes trying to get our mother to text me a phone number. Please help.” In addition to that, this week I have addressed Skype installation, printer issues, Flickr issues, and so on. Today my dad e-mailed me a letter and said, “Professionalize this.” I had no idea what that meant. The letter was fine, well written, mechanically sound so I called and said, “Please explain ‘professionalize this.’” He said, “Make it look nice.” I was like oh, right. I popped the letter into a nice template because explaining how to find templates himself would have been… a Project. I sent him back the letter and you would have thought I had, I don’t know, invented a new element. Dude was way into it and impressed. How did you do this, he asked. I said, copy/paste and he said “Aha,” almost reverently as if copy/paste was an abbreviation for something far more mystical.
Last Friday I went to see one of the shittiest movies I’ve ever seen—Premium Rush. This movie, how can I explain this, is one of those movies where Hollywood’s contempt for moviegoers is plain to see. Frankly, this movie was hostile. This movie, with every single frame said, “I hate that you are sitting there staring at me.”
I had high hopes for Premium Rush because I thought it would be awesome like the classic 80s film Quicksilver starring Jami Gertz and Kevin Bacon who becomes a bike messenger in San Fran. There’s a scene in the movie where he’s riding his ten speed around his apartment and I was pretty young when I saw Quicksilver for the first time so the movie imprinted and I decided when I grew up, three things needed to happen:
- Marry Kevin Bacon
- Bike around my brightly lit loft apartment while my husband Kevin Bacon watches.
- Festoon my apartment with bowls of M & Ms because my mom didn’t allow us to eat junk food.
Not one of those dreams have come true but Quicksilver is still a great movie. Premium Rush is medical waste.
The villain in this movie is an overactor of the highest order. He makes Jim Carrey look sedate. It’s like this movie was trying to be an action movie, a LIFE IS THE BIKE movie, and a vaudeville comedy all in one— a Frankenmovie.
Most of the movie takes place on bicycles and let me tell you after about twenty minutes of watching Joseph Gordon Leavitt and the rest of the obscure-ish cast pedal their asses off, the thrill of their amazing bodies is gone. Don’t get me wrong—finely sculpted man and woman flesh is on display throughout the movie but it’s not even worth it.
The plot zig zags back and forth through time incoherently. There’s this bad cop (worst fucking actor ever), with gambling debts who is trying to hijack a young Asian woman’s money. The young Asian woman has given her money, in the form of a card with a smiley face (hand to God) to JGL who has an hour to deliver it to some place in Chinatown, because, get this, she wants to buy her son and mother passage to America. There’s so so much that’s wrong in all this that I won’t waste our time getting into it. Just know this is basically the whole movie with a half-assed romantic subplot and a half-assed obsession with bike messenger culture. The bike is everything that’s all you need to know.
My point is, I am watching Armageddon for the 111th time. I know all the words and I am gleefully reciting them. I am at home, alone, on a Friday night wearing an outfit I wouldn’t let anyone ever see, with a raging sinus infection. This is to say, I am probably at my most appealing—totally Kevin Bacon’s loss.
