Puerto Ricans love to sneak some food into a movie theater. When my mother was growing up in Spanish Harlem, folks used to put a whole pizza or even a turkey into a baby carriage, cover it up with a blanket, and stroll that shit right in. Years later, my mom rationalizes breaking the rules with the fact that her snacks are healthier than anything you can buy at the theater. My aunt and I just like to feel naughty. And we're cheap.
As a veteran food sneak: Here's a tip from me to you. Be careful with Qdoba burritos in the theater. Seems like a great idea, right? Well, it is if you want to find sticky rice encrusted to the ass of your jeans afterwards. I removed the foil because it was making so much noise, and a ton of shit fell out. No worries, Guy Behind Me. Nothing pervy going on here. I'm just picking fallen black beans and grains of rice out of my crotch. I could barely enjoy it worried as I was about the sound and the smell.
Instead, sneak this:
Homemade popcorn. Obvious.
If you're at Woodland - guac and chips from the Tex-Mex restaurant nearby; Godiva chocolates
Knapp - Crackerjack, Café Solace comfort cookies, and Ben & Jerry's from Meijer (Just make sure you can eat an entire pint or have someone to share it with. A half-pint of soupy, melted ice cream will totally blow your cover)
Men seem to have picked up the generally erroneous belief that women have orgasms every time they have sex and that to bring a woman to orgasm all you need to do is thrust lustily for about five minutes while moaning excitedly. I can only assume they are getting this information from movies.
Now. If men can learn this from movies and possibly porn, how come they're not learning about kissing from movies? I'm not even talking about romantic comedies. Kissing in action movies is pretty good, and everybody knows men love action movies. Men in movies are good kissers. They hold the head, a personal favourite, and kiss passionately without being overly tonguey and wet. James McAvoy, of course, looks like an ideal kisser.
You never see a lot of saliva in movies. Excepting that one kiss in the Matrix. So why is it that there are still men that bathe your entire face with their tongue? It's like they're dogs on a really thirsty day trying to lap up that last drop of water from their doggie bowl. They pull away looking so proud of themselves.
I feel like as a g-rad community we need to address this problem. I think everyone should write about some of their best and worst kisses. What made them great, what made them awful. I'll get the ball rolling with Filipe at Cambridge House...
For years Filipe was totally unattracted to me. I was his sister's frumpy, crazy roommate. Then one day he realized that I wasn't "hamburger after all, but really good steak!" A comparison to beef is not lost on me: I was more attracted to him than even, especially because he liked me against his will.
He didn't trust us alone together, so we went out. I wore pink pants and cute sandals. He felt short. We sat in a dark wooden booth. Leaning into our cosmopolitan and beer, our faces got close. We were having a conversation about how we weren't going to kiss when he started touching my collarbone. He slipped his hand under my hair behind my neck and pulled me closer to him. I was totally kissing before I knew I was kissing!!! Sneaky! Yay!!
The best kisses are the ones that keep going, at the bar, on the way to the car, in the car, I think we might have even pulled over to kiss. Or for me to pee outside the hospital. Unsure.
Key lessons: collarbone, smooth neck move, if at all possible be Brazilian
OK. I'm exhausted. I haven't been this tired since the season seven stretch of my three month Star Trek marathon. Since my last post generated about James McAvoy generated such a buzz, I decided I would watch all his recent movies (went ahead and skipped Dune) and then do a (n obscenely long) follow up post, complete with footnotes. I watched Starter for Ten (thanks for the recommendation, readers!!!), Last King of Scotland, State of Play, and Rory O'Shea Was Here. Unfortunately, I also went to see Wanted.
STARTER FOR TEN
So, so good.1 I love, love, loved this movie! James McAvoy is so eager and adorable. You agonize over his every social faux pas, and rejoice in every geeky triumph. As a long-time lover of geeks (no, seriously), I so have a soft spot for the i-never-realized-how-good-looking-i-actually-am smart guys.
There is so much in this movie that rings true about college idealism and that freshman social learning curve. There are so many great details--from scammy roommates to the guy that's given up toilet paper for environmental reasons--that just take you back. (Shotgun, anyone?)
LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
All I can say is, don't watch this before bed. I did, and I totally regretted it. It's violent, but it's the steadily mounting tension that really gets you wound up. James (I'm tired of typing "McAvoy". We're officially on a first name basis.) in all his cute-bottomed-rosy-faced Scottishness, is the perfect foil for Forest Whitaker's exuberant and volatile Idi Amin. The tension starts visually: there's the obvious physical contrast between their size, colouring, and carriage. James's personality - dominated by roguish charm and frank immaturity - somehow makes the revelation of Amin's crazy all the more jarring. From the beginning you know everything you love about James McAvoy will be his undoing (well, you do if your friend Bridie movie storied2 you the whole thing during your workout). Passion, idealism, and optimism are the flip sides of impulsivity, ill-informed decisions, and misplaced trust. James is just so damned likable though, you keep wanting to rescue him from his coquettish3, over-confident self.
This movie also contains primo James McAvoy sex. I am not gonna lie. That sex scene in the cave room is totally hot. Way hotter than Atonement, y'all. Probably because it's so, so illicit and ill-advised. I want to scream "Don't do it, James McAvoy and Idi Amin's wife! Clearly, this will not end well!" Though, let's face facts... The threat of a painful death at the hands of my crazed dictator-husband probably wouldn't stop me from fucking James against a rock wall either. (Hey, where the heck was that place?)
WANTED Speaking of a slow and painful death... Wanted. Dear God. I want that two hours of my life back. Until Wanted, there have only been two occasions where I have actually hated a movie so much that I wanted to get up and leave the theater.4
Repetitively boring violence, Angelina's Grotesque Mouth, and the soundtrack are just the tip of the iceberg of things to hate about Wanted. (About thirty minutes in, I was already thinking "If I have to see one more person get shot in the head...") The most irritating thing about this movie is the quasi-morality used to rationalize violence. We just love to watch a flawed-yet-sexy hero dole out vigilante justice to avenge some sort of heinous crime against a child or a long-lost parent.5 Wanted cleverly incorporates both child and long lost parent, making James's final march of fury all the more justifiable.
Wanted also suffers from a complete dearth of creativity with names. Best example: the Loom of Fate. Seriously, someone got paid to come up with the Loom of Fate. Main characters also have generic names like "Fox" and "the Repairman" instead of cool weaver-assassin names (Weft? Shuttle?). (Aside: Why are all the looms making linen? Was that a pool on top of that train?)
The movie does have a few surprise twists. I, for one, didn't see that "Luke, I am your father" moment coming. However, it ends predictably... You guessed it! A bunch of folks get shot in the head.
Other random thing: I, personally, don't love James's American accent in Wanted or Penelope. Both these films attempted to suspend my disbelief to such an extent that having James be Scottish - even for a bullshit reason like boarding school or a Scottish mother - wouldn't have been the most implausible thing in the movie. Seriously. Loom of Fate, people. (Aside: Am I mistaken, or does he put on an English accent in Becoming Jane? Do people from Limerick not sound Irish? Is this in my last James McAvoy post?)
STATE OF PLAY
State of Play is a should- (not quite must) see BBC miniseries, particularly for anyone playing a round of Six Degrees of Random British Actors. (Aside: Also helpful for this game would be Love Actually, Harry Potter, and [Branagh's] Hamlet, which together feature every British actor ever.) It's about a group of investigative journalists who break a story about someone in Parliament or something. The plot's more convoluted than a damn novella, but it's totally engrossing. "The Repairman" from Wanted is in State of Play with James, as is Bill Nighy and his female co-star from Girl in the Café. James is totally charming and adorable in all his cockiness playing Bill Nighy's son. Sadly, James is more of an accessory in this series. He does have some very good smiles and cute tops though.
RORY O'SHEA WAS HERE
This was the last James McAvoy movie I watched. It features that girl from I Capture the Castle (which also involves Bill Nighy?). Such a good movie. James McAvoy plays Rory O'Shea--a foul-mouthed spikey-haired kid in a wheelchair. He's the only person who can understand what Michael is saying through his speech impediment. The whole movie is so utterly bittersweet. Think Beaches or Steel Magnolias.
So that's it, I think. Oh wait, just kidding! Bright Young Things. Surprisingly dull considering it's all about beautiful rich people partying and doing drugs in 20s (? too lazy to fact check...) Britain. Maybe that's the point. I don't know. Compared to a film like Metropolitan, where characters are totally intriguing, at times even likable, despite their useless lives and banal conversation, and I think Bright Young Things could've been better. Also, James offs himself (puts his head in the oven... how does that even work?) not halfway through, so there's really no point after that. I give it a resounding "eh".
So as I finished up this blog post, I started to wonder, "Is it normal to devote this much time and thought to an actor? Do I have a problem?" And then I found this...
1. Starter for Ten is a fine specimen of the boco or "boy romantic comedy" subgenre. Bocos differ from rocos in that they feature a male main character who, after a series humourous adventures caused by penis-induced stupidity, finally realizes that the hottest one isn't always the best one. High Fidelity is classic boco.
2. Movie story is a game invented for car trips where you tell someone the story of a movie they probably weren't going to see anyway. I flatter myself that I am quite good at movie story, having storied Bridie on all seven seasons of Sex and the City and the movie in under 45 minutes.
3. Yeah. Let's start using this to describe men.
4. The other two movies were Sin City and Man on Fire.
5. This quasi-morality of the vengeance myth irks me because it presupposes a simplistic formula for quantifying the value of human life. Children top the hierarchy of human worth, and women, good people, and bad men follow in descending order. It assuages viewers' suspicions that they might just enjoy violence for violence's sake. Hmm... not sure where that came from... Anyway...
