Film Two Horrible Things at Once
posted by on May 16 at 17:22 PM
Last night, I settled in to watch Right At Your Door, a movie that I read a memorably positive review of about a year back. It’s set in Los Angeles, just after an unidentified group of terrorists set off a series of dirty bombs. When I was a kid, I was simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to nuclear holocaust-type books and movies, especially the ‘realistic’ kind, with nuclear winter and rotting body parts. Based on a couple of reviews, I was expecting that sort of thing.
What I got was a movie where the husband spends the first twenty minutes risking his life to find his wife in a L.A. consumed by fear and martial law. This is pretty much what I was hoping for. A cheap B-movie about survival in a disaster area. But then the man gives up on his search and, at the first urging of Homeland Security, duct-tapes himself inside his house. Then his wife comes home and he won’t let her in the house because she might be contaminated and then she’d contaminate him and so he’d die. So they spend most of the rest of the movie talking through duct-taped windows, while his wife slowly starts coughing more and more because the dirty bombs are some sort of biological weapon or something. There’s also a little boy named Timmy.
About half an hour in, I completely lost interest. My girlfriend, acknowledging that the movie was completely horrible, wanted to keep watching it. So I decided to read the new issue of Esquire.
I don’t usually read Esquire, but this issue of Esquire has a cover story on Barack Obama by Charles P. Pierce. I’ve become obsessed with reading glowing media portraits of Barack Obama. But I started reading this piece, titled The Cynic and Senator Obama, and it’s one of the worst pieces of magazine writing I’ve ever read. The writer refers to himself as “the cynic” all through the piece. The cynic experiences car trouble. The cynic is cynical because he’s never had someone to believe in before. Here are five sentences from near the beginning:
There is one point in the stump speech, however, that catches the cynic up short every time. It comes near to the end, when Obama talks about cynics. Obama says that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. The cynic thinks he’s wrong. The cynic doesn’t think he’s wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else.
It is unreadable. It’s barely skimmable. It’s atrocious.
So I turned by attention back to the atrocious movie. The man and wife are still talking through plastic. But then, near the end, because it’s time for the movie to end, there is a twist so bad, so completely unbelievable, that it would’ve been more emotionally honest if everyone in the movie just stopped, looked directly at the camera, and shouted “TWIST!” in unison. Plus, I think the whole goddamned movie ripped off this post-nuclear-apocalypse episode of The Twilight Zone that I saw in the late eighties. I looked at the movie. I blinked. I looked at the magazine. I blinked again. I was surrounded by awful, awful things.
I hope that your weekend is better than this, is all I’m saying. Hell, I hope my weekend is better than this.
It sounds like a dumb article, but are you being honest with yourself that you don't like it cuz it's bad writing, or because it is slightly (or more) critical of the Whiz Kid?
Will you tell us the twist? I'm kinda hoping that it is that Homeland Security screwed the guy and contaminated the plastic and duct tape in his home, so he is the one that dies in a government experiment, while his wife lives.
@1: I'm not sure if it's critical of him or not, honestly. And I don't mind reading critical assessments of Obama. I prefer them, because I'm not into hagiography. This piece violates like every rule of good writing, and not in an I'm-so-good-I'm-flaunting-the-rules kind of way, either.
@2: Okay.
SPOILER WARNING:
Duct-taping himself inside his own house made the evil bacteria multiply even faster inside his home. So he poisoned himself to death by following the urgings of Homeland Security. His wife lives and he dies.
Get it? By making himself safe, he totally killed himself? Because it's, like, a metaphor for post-9/11 America or some shit.
I love you, Paul.
@3 -- What about faghagiography? That would be the uncritical worship of zaftig chicks who want to fuck guys who fuck guys.
I appreciate your balanced response, BTW. I wasn't trying to be too big an asshole.
And I am happy that Mr. Poe loves you.
Thanks, I wanted to know the twist, too. It's not like any of us are watching that movie, right?
Jon, that movie was 96 miles of suck. Paul didn't spoil a thing. He told you what you need to know.
Word.
If these are the worst things that happened to you in a day, I think you're doing pretty well.
How pompous of you to want to read in a movie theater.
Wow, love the ending. That is so deep. Thanks for telling us THE TWIST. Instead of dying bc he was trying to protect himself, he should have died bc he was a greedy ass selfish bastard who really didn't love anyone but himself. I hope that the boy lived.
I've had those moments when you realize everything around you sucks. The best cure is usually to get up and out. It will distract you for awhile anyway. Happy weekend!
I don't think I'd want to survive a big kill-off, what with the smell, and the dead bodies, and all the unattended machines and all.
Unless it were like some sort of "Godspell"-esque kill-off, where there were no smelly bodies, everything still worked, and I could snoop around people's stuff. Then I'd be all over it. I'd move into the Presidential Suite at the Westin, raid the minibar, and live out my days in a place with bad soap-opera decor, and killer views.
Your hint for the day, Paul: don't pick up any issue of Esquire printed after 1969 or thereabouts.
I actually dug that Esquire piece.
It had a perspective I hadn't heard: Before we can come together as a nation, like Obama (and many others before him...his "one nation" message is by no means original) has talked about, we need to have some kind of pathos, some sort of acknowledgement of what's transpired over the last 8 years.
There has to be some communal understanding of how fucked up things have become, what sort of bad decisions we've made. Not just our leaders...US. All of us. As a nation. To try and just blindly move on without that validating moment of understanding and recognition is to doom us all to repeating those same mistakes.
It's a valid point...or at least something to think about. Maybe the writing bothers you, but given your level of revulsion, I have to think your issue is not about the writing. It's about that sentiment he's talking about, of needing to recognize the truly bad decisions we've made as an electorate.
I think it's worth pointing out, and I'm glad Pierce did it.
my gf and i rented that a month or two ago. you should be thankful you had the esquire, no matter how bad you think it was.
fuck that movie.
Esquire was always sold as a men's magazine (without the girlie pictures except for Vargas and Petty in the 40s), but it also had an indisputable reputation as a magazine of literary noteworthiness. It featured new Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer, for instance. Capote's Answered Prayers first appeared in its pages.
I used to subscribe, but hadn't in years. I was at some airport newsstand a couple of years ago and picked up a copy. I was pretty shocked at what Esquire had become - another gum-popping slave to pop culture.
"unreadable and unskimmable", writers who drop their own names in every piece they write. apt descriptions of the stranger, don't you think? ah, esquire. not to worry, paul, you'll be there soon.
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