"Breakfast at Tiffany's": Boys Only Want Love If It's Torture

A quintessential work in the canon of anti-feminist cinema, Breakfast at Tiffany’s openly ponders whether modern women and men can merely be best friends without the burden of binding commitment.

Avengers: Age of Terminator

“The city’s flying, we’re fighting a robot army, I have a bow and arrow – nothing makes sense.” ~ Hawkeye on Avengers: Age of Ultron

It’s hard to find a single starting point where Marvel’s latest hero-stuffed behemoth goes straight downhill, but one of its biggest foils is that it just doesn’t make any sense.  Whether judged as a standalone story or a continuation of its forerunners, Avengers: Age of Extinction is an incoherent and occasionally chaotic sequel in which beloved characters act oddly with no clear motivation, scenes cut in the most inconvenient of locations, and one struggles to form the slightest emotional attachment to any of the urban scenery that’s wrecked by countless dispensable Iron Man drones.  Sure, Cap and Thor still have some cool combo moves, Tony Stark is never short of sarcastic quips, and there are a lot of pretty explosions to gawk at, but good special effects are par for the course in 21st century action movies, and Avengers 2 fails to develop on the first film in any way besides throwing new characters into the plot and hoping we care at all about their growth from bad to sort of good.

Given that a lot of Marvel fanatics actually care about these crossover movies and rather wouldn’t inadvertently spoil the entire plot for themselves (while reading as much about it as they can online), I’ll issue a rare, up-front caveat that this is not the review these people are looking for.  Spoilers abound.  With that said, Avengers 2 doesn’t have nearly the concentration of Avengers 1, and by the twenty minute mark it’s already lost its understanding of at least three main characters.  The movie opens with an attack on the bad guys’ compound in some snowy forest that’s designed to introduce the Russian twins – “enhanced” supervillains endowed with super-speed and hallucination-generating/force-pushing/robot-crushing/eye-glowing powers – as well as to set up a running joke about Captain America’s prudishness that all the Avengers appear to think is hilarious.  Iron Man naturally infiltrates the fortress first and finds Loki’s scepter waiting underneath one of the gigantic alien fish things from the first movie; one might fall into the trap of thinking said fish thing will be reanimated to impact the plot at some later point, but it’s only a giant red herring baited to deceive us by the Scarlet Witch, i.e. director Joss Whedon, not Elizabeth Olson, who hasn’t a drop of ginger blood inside her.

The real Scarlet Witch

If the airborne Chitauri battering ram has any bearing on the story, it’s in convincing Tony Stark that he needs to invest in a planetary, A.I.-based shield against future alien invasions.  Why Stark, inventor of the Jericho missile, textbook playboy billionaire narcissist, and firsthand witness of the monumental atrocities man is capable of committing against himself, suddenly acts so keen on thwarting the extraterrestrial conquest of people he can’t stand to begin with is a question best left to Whedon himself, though it’ll have to pass for a plot starter since S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury presumably already learned the “Man wasn’t made to meddle” lesson from last year’s Winter Soldier.  At any rate, Stark and Bruce Banner concoct the brilliant scheme of creating a super-A.I. through merging JARVIS’ intelligence with whatever power resides in Loki’s stick.  The result is Ultron, a malicious, appropriately sardonic, wisecracking robot voiced by that guy from the “Blacklist” show who’s probably stoked to be starring in a quality, high-profile program for once in a long while.

After crashing the Avengers’ party at Stark Towers and spouting off some epic-sounding, made-for-trailer nonsense about strings, Ultron escapes through the internet, starts building an army of mindless slaves, and dedicates himself to the extinction of the human race, because evolution only comes through trial and tribulation, or something.  If this sounds like a story that you’ve seen before, it’s probably because you have seen it before, just as recently as last year in that Johnny Depp movie called Transcendence.  Except you haven’t seen Transcendence.  Forget I mentioned it.  Notwithstanding that movie we shall not name, Ultron simply isn’t a very original villain, borrowing extensively from the Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol baddies who want to strengthen humanity by nuking the lot of them, the misguided computer in I, Robot that thinks mankind can’t be trusted with its own survival, and many other murderous machines from cinema that were created for good but twisted their programmed purpose into effecting unimaginable evil.

To its credit, Avengers 2 doesn’t just rehash the message of teamwork that permeated Avengers 1 and it clearly wants to say something about “man creating the thing he dreads”, which is a strong, unexplored idea in an era when politicians manufacture actual crises on the daily in response to hypothetical crises that our great, great, great grandkids may someday have to address.  It’s just a shame that the movie loses that theme in too many hectic battles and that the characters responsible for giving life to Ultron never express any remorse for making the very life-threatening thing they dread.  There’s a general lack of manifest consequences and regret in Avengers 2 that may have been shaved off for the director’s cut on DVD: e.g. Banner mopes to Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, about the world finally seeing the Hulk as the rage-fueled wrecking ball he is, but we don’t actually see this fear for ourselves, only getting to take his word for it. Along the same line, there seems to be an anti-Avengers movement of sorts brewing at the beginning of the movie in the tradition of The Incredibles or Watchmen, but Whedon never revisits this aspect of the universe he’s building, nor does he attempt to create reconciliation between Stark and the twins, who lost their parents to one of Stark’s weapons but inexplicably abandon their thirst for vengeance and team up with their blood nemesis when they discover that Ultron plans to kill them together with the rest of the human race.  Avengers 2 is so desperate to stuff every preexisting character into the framework – even minor ones like Falcon or Steve Roger’s girlfriend for just a scene – that it inevitably overstretches itself and leaves its mass of supporting characters dangling in strings of a negligent editor’s design.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t flow naturally from the movie’s precursors. For one, Whedon wants us to believe there’s this ongoing romantic tension between Banner and Romanoff even though the last film set no precedent for this attraction, Scarlett Johannson is fifteen years younger than Mark Ruffalo and way out of his league, and Black Widow has already seemed to have a thing going with either Captain America or Hawkeye.  “It’s just like Budapest all over.”  “You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

Granted that she and Hulk are both social outcast types who view themselves as cold, sterile monsters capable only of killing and destruction, but is there anything forecasting their romance in the Marvel lore beyond that possible bonding ground?  Halfway through the movie we get to meet Hawkeye’s formerly nonexistent wife and kids, because apparently he wasn’t sophisticated enough a character as the lone wolf marksman with a mysterious past.  It sure makes Scarlett’s choice a lot easier.

Nick Fury might have entered at one point and most everyone in the theater applauded to see yet another familiar face, though his five-minute presence would be as disposable in the long run as the Stan Lee cameo, the one or two shots featuring War Machine, and the random Asian scientist they added for whatever reason.  Thor seems fairly detached from all the proceedings, going off on a separate adventure entirely and rejoining the fray every now and then to force-lightning something.  Quicksilver’s only reason for being in the movie is to make some cool slow-motion sequences and die at the end in a barrage of gunfire that should realistically blow him to pieces but merely stains his costume with a lot of red spots; his sacrificial demise is about as moving as Jazz’s in the first Transformers.  Hence the only truly important heroes we’re left with are Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, Captain A-swearica, and this new purple guy “Vision”, who shows up as the wise and noble counterpart to Ultron, talks with the voice of JARVIS, and dramatically hands Thor’s hammer back to him in one of Whedon’s most squandered ideas for a scene. What could have been a subtle and potent symbol of Vision’s worthiness to wield the power of Thor comes across as shallow and forced because we’ve only known the character for a brief three minutes, there’s no proof of his goodness aside from his own testimony, and the other actors try too hard to sell the drama by putting on looks of shock and awe.

Having harped on Ultron’s faults for more than two pages now, I still can’t in good conscience discourage any of its target viewers from going to see it.  If you’re looking for a twisty, intelligent, well-focused story, you’re better off just re-watching The Winter Soldier, which had much superior action to boot, and even the simple band of five in Guardians of the Galaxy exhibited clearer character progression than these smaller-scale guardians, but if all you want to see is a bunch of professional badarses smashing hundreds of robots to pieces for the greater good of humanity and cracking jokes about it in the process, Avengers 2 will probably satisfy that desire.  I could nitpick about the camera being more herky-jerky and close-up than in the first film, but by and large the action is very impressively staged and Whedon still throws in a couple long spinning shots that are obvious throwbacks to the greatness of Avengers 1.  I also appreciated many of the comedic visuals sown throughout the lighter moments, such as Thor boasting in the industrial base of how he’s impervious to the witch’s enchantments while the camera smoothly pans left to a totally out-of-place Asgardian hall.  Even though I didn’t buy the spontaneity of their relationship, I liked Black Widow pushing Banner off the cliff because she “needed the other guy”, I liked the eerie Black Swan-reminiscent glimpses into Black Widow’s past, I liked that Jeremy Renner had the gall to call Black Widow a “slut” in an interview, and I liked that so many people blew up on Renner for describing a nonexistent character with arguably slutty characteristics as a slut, because apparently you just can’t call anybody a slut or a whore anymore because that’s sexist against women according to people who aren’t sexists at all.

Overall I enjoyed myself at Avengers: Age of Extinction, but as my friend laconically summed the movie up, it’s just the same damn thing all over.  If you’re 17 or older, go watch Ex Machina instead.  If you’re not 17 or older, get someone who is to watch Ex Machina with you and he’ll thank you for it later.  Full review of that forthcoming.

Trailer Reviews

Ant-Man – Unsurprisingly looks just as pathetic as its title would imply.  “Is it too late to change the name?” Um, yes it is, Paul Rudd.

Fant4stic – On the one hand, I really liked Miles Teller in Whiplash.  On the other hand, the story looks terribly generic, blue-screen backdrops are strewn all over the place, and no one wants another Fantastic Four movie.

San Andreas – Appropriately enough, a trailer about a CGI city falling apart priming me for another movie about CGI cities falling apart.

Jurassic Park 4 – Why is the T.Rex’s head always out of frame?  Why is Star Lord riding a motorcycle through the jungle alongside the friendly velociraptors?  Why was this even made?

Mission Impossible 5? – The motorcycle chase scenes look pretty cool, but we already saw those in the second movie, and the hand-to-hand fight scenes just seem so oooordinary to me after experiencing both Raid movies and Ip Man, but that’s the price you pay for watching foreign action films.  What is Alec Baldwin doing here?

Aloha – Actually an Ex Machina trailer, because the Avengers crowd would have no interest in seeing this whatsoever.  I had to watch this a couple times to figure out what’s going on.  Bradley Cooper works for the Air Force, I think, and he has Emma Stone in his back pocket but still wants to reunite with his ex Rachel McAdams, who broke up with him because he was a “workaholic” and was starring in way too many movies.  John Krasinski and Danny McBride probably provide comic relief, Alec Baldwin yells at people just like in real life, Cameron Crowe directs, and Bill Murray is a wise and elderly speaker of truths about life. It’ll probably try to make us cry.

No Escape – Owen Wilson and his family go to an unspecified Asian country to reboot their lives and land themselves right in the thick of a warzone.  Lots of people will get shot by military-style assault weapons of war in this tonally strange action-disaster-drama movie hybrid from Progressive producer Harvey Weinstein.

I’ll See You In My Dreams – If you liked The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, you’ll love I’ll See You In My Dreams.

My Obligatory Thoughts on the Obligatory Mockingjay Part 1

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 isn’t a movie I’d review under ordinary circumstances, not because of any terribly insulting aspect in its execution but because MJ1 is an inherently insulting movie, one that shouldn’t even exist and only proves time and time again the inadvisability of its own existence. But being as I’ve already reviewed the first two installments of this rapidly aging trilogy, it seems premature to quit now, so I’ll persevere for yourguysez sakes.

Considering its intellectually enfeebled target audience, MJ1 opens the only way it could, with an expository refresher assuming that viewers don’t recall what happened in the last act.  Katniss wakes up in bed breathing heavily and giving herself vocal reminders of her situation and identity, because of PTSD, or something.  In any case, this is our first glimpse of an emotionally weaker and generally grumpier Katniss who will break down screaming and crying on several occasions because she’s just so hungry for the bread boy Peeta, who’s been captured by President Snow and very obviously coerced into discouraging rebellion against the Capitol.  Gale returns in as bland a form as ever; if there was any romance in the movie, I must have missed it.  There’s certainly none of the humor that made Hunger Games 1 or 2 halfway enjoyable in their first halves, with comic relief Effie Trinket deprived of her ostentatious makeup and personality, Haymitch largely reduced to the part of an assistant community-mobilizing strategerist, and the loveably loathsome entertainer Caesar Flickerman now having nothing better than to do than slow-jamming the news in a series of dull propaganda interviews with Peeta.

If you’ve already read the book like a responsible member of American society, then you’ll know that The Hunger Games Part 3 Part 1 doesn’t actually have any Hunger Games in it, which wouldn’t be a problem if the writer (Danny Strong of such exalted made-for-TV titles as Game Change and Empire) at least incorporated some external conflict in the narrative, but this he doesn’t do because there’s no feasible way to split up Mockingjay in a way that maintains suspense and action across both halves.  All the violence in Part 1 consists of Katniss flying to a hospital in a poorly rendered sci-fi jet, shooting down two somewhat better rendered jets, and giving an inspirational battle speech to the camera that will become the sound bite of the brewing revolution.  “If we burn, you burn with us!”  I don’t remember if that was a line from the book or not, though I’m not convinced it matters one way or another.  It’s just irredeemably, irreparably cheesy. Apart from this brief spurt of excitement, an unduly segment of the movie focuses on people walking somewhere or looking at something without speaking.  Long pauses between lines unnecessarily draw out the movie’s runtime and there are far too many scenes of characters in transit to the next scene.  Towards the end the movie pulls out the really crappy, now overused ploy of showing several events simultaneously and inadvertently gutting the tension in each.  The rebels are using a broadcast message by surviving tribute Finnick O’Dair as a diversion to help a special ops team recover Peeta (whom we’re told Snow has brainwashed into making a murder effort on the mockingjay, despite the utter implausibility of that actually working), and Finnick is speaking candidly of how the elites sold his body following the games, but the movie doesn’t give its audience room to dwell on this because it’s frantically cutting back and forth between three ongoing scenes, none of them very intriguing from a film standpoint.

Mockingjay wouldn’t be as insulting a movie if the writer actually fit a justifiable amount of action into the plot, but there’s basically one major event in the whole of MJ1 that’s forecast from miles away.  Katniss mopes and groans about Plutarch and the other conspirators leaving Peeta to the Capitol’s mercy, saying she won’t be the rebellion’s icon until they get him back, which of course they eventually do, but not before a bunch of random confrontations and political banter that happens in between and no one will remember afterwards.  I hate to belabor a point that others have made a million times already, but there really is no artistic or other conceivable reason for MJ1’s existence aside from the obvious financial boon Lionsgate stood to gain from its release.  Go and add another Progressive victory to your end-of-year report, Lionsgate.  First you boldly took on Homo-phobia in science-fiction literature, now you’re educating the public about the consequences of Corporate Greed.

At least the acting’s OK.  Jennifer Lawrence is once again good as Katniss except in the parts where the director desperately wants us to think she’s an inspiring voice for revolution.  Perhaps it wasn’t a great idea to show Lawrence playing a character poorly playing another character before showing Lawrence actually playing her character poorly. The filmmakers cut Julianne Moore egregiously short, only allowing her to pour a smidgeon of her natural odiousness into the part of District 13’s leader Coin, though we’ll probably get to see a lot more of that in Part 2.  In the meantime one can always watch Magnolia for Moore at her most shrewish.  Speaking of Magnolia, Philip Seymour Hoffman really just showed up for work, which is pretty damn disappointing from a guy we all made such a fuss over just for dying.  Possibly to compensate for the series’ steadily aging cast (no new batch of tributes in this installment), the filmmakers made up or significantly augmented a minor character called Cressida so as to get Natalie Dormer into the picture, but this addition probably marred the film’s reception more than anything, bitterly reminding audiences of all the wonderful Game of Thrones clips they could be watching instead of Mockingjay, for which Ms. Dormer has inexplicably opted to shave one side of her head and tattoo a vineyard in its place.  One could hardly blame the viewer for pulling out his phone mid-film and doing an image search for Dormer in her better, pre-Hunger Shaves days – not that I would ever do that myself.  I’m a professional critic who takes his unpaid work very seriously and would never, ever consciously distract himself with the visage of a fair woman…

… That being said, with M.J.One I may have made an exception.

Natalie Dormer’s unattractive haircut

Final verdict: I’d rather be watching GOT (which I really can’t afford to as it’s $35 on Blu-ray – #&%! you, HBO).

"Best" Movies of the Year Part 1 (Inherent Vice, Gone Girl)

In which I systematically (but relatively succinctly, all flaws considered) do my best to rip apart the major contenders, that I actually saw this year, for last night’s most irrelevant awards show on the planet and for all the other similar vanity fairs that don’t manage against all odds to stay on television.  Part 2 will include critiques of American Sniper, Boyhood, and Birdman as well as my own obligatory end-of-year favorites, so you all can freely deride me for thinking Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was a better movie than The Imitation Game.

Third Circle Vices

The cover of the possibly illegitimately obtained advance casing for Inherent Vice promoted it “for my consideration” this ensuing awards season.  Being one of the internet’s most auspicious undocumented critics of film, politics, and the idiots who shape them, I accepted the call of duty against my preconceived biases and ended up considering it wholly unworthy of any awards save maybe those for talking in an engaging manner and altering one’s appearance for the sake of portraying a character.  If you’re the kind of casual entertainment seeker who believes a well-constructed film doesn’t need anything more than recognizable stars dressing up in makeup and behaving eccentrically for the camera, or if you’re the kind of conceited hipster theoretician who likes digging around for allegorical profundities where no apparent meaning exists in the first place, then Inherent Vice will surely fulfill all your expectations.  But what a sad culture we’ve devolved into that dressing up and talking funny alone have become instant qualifiers of high art.

Attempting to summarize the plot of Inherent Vice is an innately futile endeavor, as it was never meant to be followed in the first place and exists primarily as an excuse to herd heavily made-up celebrities into an overstuffed pet project wherein characters will enter and depart from the picture in the same scene.  Cult director Paul Thomas Anderson starts us on a triple-headed missing person/murder case led by a hairy pothead Joaquin Phoenix, who will travel all over Los Angeles talking to various people and further entangling the narrative’s mystery with a deluge of names and places and enterprises we’ll never get to know in much detail because Phoenix’s encounters with these leads also consists purely of talking about other leads; so the cycle continues until he’s eventually reunited with his girlfriend Shasta, who spends what feels like an eternity sharing garbled whispers with him that’d be indecipherable enough even if her breasts weren’t exposed the duration of the unbearably long shot, climaxing in unbearably discomforting and unattractive wordplay – I mean intercourse.  It’s not quite porn, but it’s not great storytelling either – just one of the elements of a really impotent and unfocused movie.

Inherent Vice isn’t nearly as bad as PTA’s previous endeavor Magnolia, but then how could it be?  With Magnolia Anderson had already hit the bottom of the barrel in terms of self-indulgent, pseudo-provocative drivel geared squarely towards college film students who would slavishly fawn over its extravagant incomprehensibility, mistaking it for genius.  I’ll concede that Inherent Vice even has some fleeting moments of truly funny dark comedy, as when Josh Brolin simulates having sex with his fingers and carefully spells the action out for our unkempt hero in case he was too daft to process the image.  Or there’s the sign in the sordid massage parlor advertising either a “good old-fashioned f&#!” for $25 or “two girl f&#!” for $50, which is gross but nonetheless humorously pointed.  Depressing though it is to admit, Anderson is at his highest when his laughs are their lowest or weirdest.  At one point Phoenix creeps across half the frame in what looks like stealthy slow-motion before dropping the ruse and just crossing the rest at normal speed.  This is good filmmaking.

The same just can’t be said of the whole, which Anderson largely composes of single shots of people drowning his devotees in names and places and plot details the vast majority of viewers won’t be mentally able to process.  None of the characters are developed enough for us to care about them; some, like Martin Short’s cokehead, seem to have no reason for being there aside from injecting a little more star power into the framework and keeping us awake with the vain expectation that they’ll say something funny.  PTA makes smoking look really cool, over and over again, but that’s about the only cinematic feat he and his photographers accomplish.

The movie closes with a scene of Brolin’s “Bigfoot” nonchalantly eating a joint and downing a plate of weed as if it’s a salad, all while Phoenix stares on aghast at his breathtaking waste of fine narcotics.  Perhaps this is PTA’s subliminally symbolic way of showing us just how high on himself he was when extracting Inherent Vice from “the city dump that was his memory”.  If you liked Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream, then you probably won’t like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.  If you didn’t like watching Requiem For A Dream, then you probably exhibited a perfectly natural reaction to the film’s disorienting editing techniques and horrifying images of drug addiction.  You also probably won’t like Inherent Vice.

Judgment: Gluttony of the self, lust, and violence against time.  But mostly gluttony of the self.  “A drug councilor trying to talk kids into sensible drug use.”

Why is Neil Patrick Harris playing a heterosexual?

Gone Girl has had the good success of inciting one of two visceral responses among moviegoers, dividing them squarely into the men who will nod approvingly at every misdeed the villainess carries out, muttering, “Ah, women,” to each other with viral cynicism, and the New Feminist crybabies who will shake their heads in phony outrage at the same events, muttering, “Ah, ignorance.”  Excluded from the scope of conversation are the few who have had the good sense to analyze Gone Girl and mutter, “Ah, a completely unrealistic, laughably shallow perversion of logic designed to emotionally manipulate me by barraging me with shock images and one contrived WTF moment after another.”  Because that’s what Gone Girl is at its core.  It doesn’t have anything to say about the human race and everything it tries to say about the inner viciousness of womankind is predicated on a one-dimensional caricature who frames husbands, fakes kidnappings, and slashes throats without any discernible purpose.  The movie doesn’t offer any reason for its own existence save to scare insecure single men out of pursuing the “Amy”s of the world, who may or may not be lurking in reality but would certainly be more interesting to watch at work than the real Amy – that is the fake one.

This is where I might outline the plot, but since the movie is based on a bestselling novel, I think it suffices to say the story’s pretty much crap.  After all, one has to look in some pretty obscure places today to find a book of legitimate literary worth, and anything that makes it to the big screen tends to begin as some kind of overhyped, media-sponsored fluff.  In any case, Ben Affleck plays the husband and Rosamund Pike portrays his off-kilter, borderline psychopathic wife Amy.  I’ll admit I only walked in on the latter half the night I saw it, though I was able to gather most of the preceding plot points just from dialogue and… yeah, it’s a really easy movie to follow overall, which is probably why so many people fell head over heels for it.  Everyone gushes about the numerous twists dotting the narrative, but you’d have to redefine “twist” in order to call Gone Girl remotely loopy as a story.  Nothing that happens in the film really forces you to reevaluate anything you saw earlier, as opposed to director David Fincher’s magnum opus Fight Club, which is so meticulously edited and written to continually reward viewers for rewinding and watching the first few acts again.  Gone Girl, in contrast, simply marches along to its inevitable, Postmodernist non-conclusion, never astonishing even when striking us with ridiculous, Tarantino-esque depictions of bloodshed.

Its basic chapters consist of Amy running away from Affleck, getting abducted by the pervy Neil Patrick Harris, who can’t really pass as a straight man, abusing herself to look as though she got raped, killing Neil Patrick Harris, returning to Affleck soaked in blood that neither she nor the hospital bothered to wash off, getting in the shower with fully naked Affleck (yes, it’s that “edgy”), and play-acting as if nothing ever happened betwixt them to warrant a permanent separation.  Meanwhile, on Affleck’s side of the story, the feds are hot on his back for murdering his disloyal, vanishing spouse, who’s apparently acquired celebrity status by writing illustrated kiddie books, and Tyler Perry is a wisecracking lawyer who shows up every now and then to fulfill the studio’s diversity requirement.  Tyler Perry thinks that Affleck should lie and play along with Amy’s games to minimize the sentence he’ll receive from the people who have no evidence against him whatsoever, while Affleck thinks his best defense is the truth.  The movie starts to present some 21st-century themes about hashtag activism, fake rape claims stemming from vanity or embarrassment, and how the American media exploits made-up local murder dramas to perpetually distract the population from real-world problems, but author-screenwriter Gillian Flynn sensationalizes the story to such a point that you can’t judge any of it rationally.

After all, nothing in the movie makes any logical sense and stupid decisions/plot holes abound for the convenience of propping up what’s essentially an unsalvageable, extended soap opera special.  Some have taken to the film’s defense by passing off everything that transpires in it as a fantasy of the woman, but what point is there then in watching it?  Fight Club is in many respects a fantastical film, featuring images, events, and characters that aren’t wholly rooted in “reality” as we’d see it, but one in which the nameless hero ultimately triumphs over his fantasies, joining hands with the world of the actual as he witnesses the work of his delusions crashing down around him.  Gone Girl has no such resolution, nor is it explicitly unfolding in a dreamlike state.  If you’re an insecure, probably douchey jock looking for nothing more than a fictional horror story that will feed your repressed terror of your wife or simply of the woman, then Gone Girl does an adequate job of making you tremble at the nonexistent Amy’s of the world.  If the movie succeeds in raising any sociopolitical question worth its run time, it’s why Progressive Hollywood creators who continually insist “gay is the new black” also continue casting gay people as straights and vice versa.  Would these same bastions of intercultural sensitivity cast a white man in the role of Jesse Owens or a black man in the role of Winston Churchill?  Why then do they think it any more acceptable to cast Neil Patrick Harris as a lascivious heterosexual male or Benedict Cumberbatch as a homosexual mathematician?  Isn’t a person’s sexuality just as integral to their identity and immutable as their skin color?  Or must we finally cut the bullcrap and concede the really simple truth that being a homosexual-American in 2015 isn’t nearly the ordeal that was being a Michigan-American in the 1960s?

Judgment: Wrath, heresy, seduction, lust, blood and gore, female playing traditionally male role, male exposing himself in traditionally female capacity, political correctness and gender equality in general.  Sixth circle.

I like this scene because it points out how shallow and meaningless the word “African-American” has become in our society.

The Garbage #1 – The M.R.S. degree and Non-Afrophobic Democrats

Excerpted from George’s undocumented and semi-autobiographical exposé Searching for Nuggets of Truth at an American University, which features groundbreaking and rare articles originally published in the Beatissima Garbage newspaper.

Beatissima tailors courses for newer, dumber generation.

Perhaps the biggest upset of the new year was the announcement that Beatissima University is considering adoption of another set of degrees prepared specifically to meet the evolving needs and (in)abilities of Millenials.  The proposed career paths have attra­cted derision and support respectively from students and the parents severely indebting themselves for their sake.

The most controversial of the revisions to Beatissima’s curricula is an accelerated, 24-unit major in Wifedom intended to supplement the equally inapplicable minor in Women’s and Having Sex Studies. Academic experts claim the program is meant to acknowledge the now indisputable reality that many women simply aren’t coming into college with the communication, workplace skills, and basic mental equipment to secure a high-paying job in the real world.

Director of admissions Sugar Colton explained to the Garbage staff that he’s “observed a lot of potential in the female first-years of class 2014.  I’m thrilled to see a new batch of world-changers committed to shining a light on women’s rights and contributions in the modern world.  Many of our top students have gone on to write for Tumblr and the Huffington Post.  A select few talented individuals have actually found positions at Fox News and CNN, and one of our theater majors even got a physically demanding role on HBO’s Girls.  I see potential in each and every one of our family, but some women have potential in different places than others.”

“I’ve observed a lot of… female first-years of Class 2014.” ~ Sugar Colton
(quote distorted for outrageousness and style)

Another Beatissima insider named Wayne Capcall put the matter more bluntly.  “69% of you Caligirls just aren’t cut out for the workplace, whether that be by alienating others with your Feminist droning, sounding dumb, or being generally, all-around stupid.  But I’m sure you’re a really nice person on the inside, and even if you aren’t, some idiot will probably marry you for your outside.”

Current and potential Beas have denounced the implications of the decision, calling it insulting to their identity and deeply regressive.  Valentine “Val” Hagel, a Junior Political Science major, tweeted in a series of messages, “Beatissima Housewife major reeks of misogyny. #its2015  Like, what kind of sexist, chauvinist pig do you have to be to suggest that women are good for nothing but, like, cooking and housekeeping and raising kids and stuff like that?  Big B prob thinks woman shouldn’t be allowed to vote or make decisions about their own bodies, did I mention this is misognist? #yesallwomen”

“69% of women are Feminist or stupid.” ~ Wayne Capcall
(quote fabricated for purposes of straw man)

Parents, however, have welcomed the addition of the program, noting it will save them a lot of money and put their daughters on a much faster track to financial independence and a respectable lifestyle.

One mother, Marge M. Acker, spoke candidly with the Garbage editor about the decision.  “I was calling up my girl Julia yesterday and asking her, ‘Have you found yourself a nice boyfriend yet?’

“She was like, ‘Mom,’ and I was all, ‘Just kidding,’ and then we laughed for a while and talked about how her studies were going.

“But seriously.”

Student activists recreate non-MLK-related display for MLK Day

In remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. and the impending demise of Oprah Winfrey’s and Michael Brown’s Oscar-nominated propaganda film “Selma”, the Racially Tolerant Caucasians of Beatissima Club held a peaceful and vaguely topical march-in at the CCB to advance the cause of African-Americans, African-English, and Kenyan immigrants in general.  Black teenagers were encouraged to join but leave their arms at home, while all participants were expected to put their hands up and refrain from breathing.

Apollo Guys, leader of the club and young founder of headline-winning firm Makedown, says of the march, “We didn’t ask to be born white, and we certainly didn’t ask to bring so much social injustice down on the heads of black people, Hispanics and/or Latinos, Muslims, or other races.  But we have to some extent or another created these ongoing problems and it’s our responsibility to set them straight – no heterosexism intended.”

Guys is acutely aware of the disadvantages ethnic minorities face at a school as white as Beatissima, one of which is that there are just fewer of them.  “My friend Theo is the only black guy in his upper-division computer science class,” he states.  “Can you imagine how hard that is for him?”

There’s also the pervasive presence of microaggressions on campus which make minorities feel excluded and different.  “Theo was walking down the stairs to the Fieldhouse once when someone going the opposite direction moved to the other side of the steps.  It’s insecure behavior like this that all racially nonbigoted whites at Beatissima need to actively work to check in themselves.”

Racially Tolerant Caucasians stand for a multitude of stock issues promoting the social, legal, and financial equality of African-Americans, including affirmative action, wealth redistribution, and increased funding for failing public schools.  For more information, visit their page at the Beatissima Inter-Club Council’s website.