Sunday, April 13, 2008

street kings was fucking awesome

Warren Theaters in Moore, Oklahoma, is the single best theater I've ever been to in my life. All-digital. All-THX. $7 for the poor seating, $12 for the balcony. I paid the $12. You walk in and it's like a fucking Joel Schumacher version of a '50s movie theater. Batman Forever and shit. Neon lights and a million-dollar marble floor. Nice attendants in monkey suits tore our tickets.

Jimmy and I ascended the stairs to the balcony area. A life size Yoda sat on the bar. I got a 32 oz. mug of Bud Light. I was set. The walls have classic movie shit all over them: King Kong, Star Wars, etc. Between the bathrooms there's a huge signed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade poster.

The place cost $32 million, and it looks it.

The balcony area in the actual auditorium is fucking class. Eight pairs of seats across and four rows deep, with enough room between rows so the motherfuckers behind you can stretch out without kicking the back of your chair. You can order off the menu sitting at the table in front of you. All you have to do is press the red call button. If you're cold, by the way, this other little button will warm your chair up. The padding is straight NASA. Plush as fuck.

It's about a ten-minute drive from my house. I'm going to see everything there.

The picture is fucking gorgeous. The sound is immense. And it helps that the movie we saw was tits, also.

"Street Kings" is the fucking shit. It's directed by David Ayer, who wrote "Training Day" and "Harsh Times". This flick almost pulls him out of the shit for co-writing "The Fast and the Furious" and "touching up" "SWAT". I understand, dude, you had to get paid. But I still have a chip on my shoulder about "Dark Blue". Because that was Ellroy, and your screenplay fucked it up, bad. But it was Kurt Russell and that guy who gets butcher knifed in Gangs of New York's fault, too. Goddamn they were bad in that movie. So basically at this point I'm willing to say that you're cool. You're on shaky ground, though.

The original screenplay for "Street Kings" is by James Ellroy, whose nuts most of you know I will ride, much like a cowboy, into the sunset. It was "touched up" by a couple Hollywood monkeys, but the Ellroy comes through, cheese and all.

The action is well shot in a kind of Hype Williams, "Belly" kind of way. I dug it. Lots of blood.

Keanu Reeves does alright. He's a "racist" cop who dresses kind of like an anime nerd. It's bizarre, him being part Chinese and whatnot, spitting the vile, racist, extremely Ellroy dialogue at the beginning, and then having some Koreans kick his ass and call him "white-boy". Then after the first fifteen minutes, he doesn't say or do anything racist at all. Weird.

The rest of the actors are fucking top notch. Common is great, Hugh Laurie is great, and Forest Whitaker is great. I feel like a scene between those last two can perfectly sum up the tone of the movie. Laurie and Whitaker hate each other. Laurie's trying to get dirt on Reeves cause he doesn't play by the rules, and Reeves is on Whitaker's Vice squad. It's kind of like a kid lighting a school on fire, and the kid's mom comes and yells at the principal for punishing her baby.

Anyway, here's how the scene goes:

Forest Whitaker: (walks into Laurie's office) Hey, motherfucker.

Hugh Laurie: Fuck you.

FW: (close up) I got somethin' for you.

HL: Fuuuck you.

FW: (takes his balls out and slaps them on Laurie's desk) What do you think of that, motherfucker?

HL: Eat shit. (takes his balls out and palms them and kind of shrugs. his balls are massive)

FW: Those are some pretty big balls, motherfucker.

HL: Go to hell.

FW: Oh, yeah? Go to hell? (FW begins pissing all over Laurie's office) I'm gonna piss on your blinds, bitch. I'm pissing in your fern right now. Cheap fake shit. Watering your plants, bitch.

HL: (begins pissing on Keanu Reeves) I'm pissing on your butt-boy. Your left ear looks like a Dorito that got left out in the rain.

(Keanu Reeves begins drinking heavily)

KR: We are all so hard-boiled.

(they stop pissing)

FW: I'll see you in hell.

HL: I'll fuck your mother in hell.

Whitaker and Reeves leave. Laurie straightens his tie and calls for a hooker, preferably one who's addicted to crack.

If that doesn't get you hard, I don't know what will. Go see it.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

drunk ramble

Today Rios left for an adventure in New Orleans. I'm missing out on V-day, and all the things that go along with it: fierceness, rampant militant lesbianism, Salma Hayek, pregnant Jessica Alba (she's SPAWNING), and Common.

Leaving me at home. With pooch.

I dropped Rios off at her friend's house in Elgin. Went to visit Mom then realized I'd left the door locked at home, meaning Jimmy couldn't get in because he lost his key. This meant a drive back to Norman. So now I'm here, and lonely.

Lonely?

Yes, lonely. For the first time in a long time, I feel lonely.

Perhaps you'd like a beer?

No, I couldn't.

C'mon. It's Bud Light. It'll love you. You don't even have to deal with excess calories.

Okay, fine.

Loneliness = taken care of.

Kahlua is in love with her Kong. It's a rubber toy in which I squeeze peanut butter paste. Special Kong-brand peanut butter, of course, to promote a healthy coat and teeth. She chews on it even when there's nothing in it. She wakes me up by dropping it on my face. It smells like a horny peanut's used condom.

I also bought her grown up dog food for the first time. She's growing up. Soon she'll be going to soccer practice and loading up my computer with porn and beating someone nearly to death and videotaping it and putting on Youtube.

Y'all hear about that? Google: 6 on 1, bitches, beating, teenager, youtube, crime.

You might find what I'm talking about.

It's stormy outside. Storms equal tornadoes, but you just learn to ignore it. It was raining this morning. I was sweeping in the back at Kirkland's where the rain hits the tin of our roof and gets loud. I'd pop the back door to check it out every once in a while. I like sweeping.

So I was back there and Bill O'Reilly is on. I like Bill O'Reilly, I think I've explained this before. I haven't seen his TV show in a long while, but on the radio O'Reilly is articulate and analytical, and doing his best to be unbiased (though he is).

His callers, however, are butt-fucking retarded.

"I heard that in college Michelle Obama wrote socialist papers."

"I heard that Barack Obama refuses to pledge allegiance to the United States of America."

"I saw Barack Obama on Oprah and he said he had Parkinson's."

And on and on. And O'Reilly debunks them and degrades all of them, all the time championing not necessarily Obama, but his own fairness.

Some of you may think that O'Reilly is using these callers to show his "true point of view." Or to just get these rumors radio play so that they disseminate regardless of fact. And there may be truth to that. O'Reilly knows that people will only hear what they want to, and many people will take this woman's statement, "Barack Obama will not pledge allegiance to the flag", and run with it. But at the same time there's that Dennett quote: "There's nothing I hate more than a poor argument for a stance I hold dear" or something. A part of me thinks O'Reilly is not only trying to quell some of the more ridiculous rumors, he's also sending a subliminal message: I'm a conservative, but I'm not one of these people.

Or he's doing a little bit of all of that. That's probably it.

Hola, senor. Somos los cervezas de Easter que tu se olvido. Tome una bebida. Permaneceremos contigo y te haremos no solo.

Oh, Coronas. How could I forget you? Donde estan mis limons?

Is there a better Spanish word for lonely?

A lady came into Kirkland's the other day. Didn't speak ANY English. So I was going to tell her about our backdoor pickup, because she had a lot of bags.

And I choked. No words came out. I just started signing like an idiot. She said, "Sorry, my ingles is no good." And Tiffany was like, "Choke."

As soon as she left I thought of a million things I could have said. I said them over and over in my head, burning them into my memory. I won't choke next time.

I need some real world Spanish. Entiendo mas que yo hablo.

I did the same shit when I lived in Germany. Three years I lived there. Picked up a lot of German. NEVER SPOKE IT. Too scared. Cold feet. Erschrocken.

Fuck.

Maybe I should move to Mexico City. Force myself to speak the shit.

Tapout clothes are gay. If you don't fight, don't wear Tapout. Don't put the decal on your car. Don't get your Tapout hoodie. You're sending a message with that shit. You know it, and I know it, so let's cut the "I'm just a UFC fan" horse shit. Same with the Fox racing gear, people. All of you don't own bikes, or race. So quit frontin'. If you are fat as fuck or skinny and weak, you are not using Tapout gear except in this one occasion.

If you're a badass, however, you can wear whateverthefuck.

Has anyone made a Tappedthat hoodie yet? In the Tapout letters? You know that shit's coming. Or the Jesus version? Like how they took the Orange County choppers logo and put Jesus shit on it? It doesn't have to make sense. It can just say "Prayer" in the Tapout letters and people will buy it.

There's something about driving in the rain with the wipers going and your lights reflecting off the puddles and the frame of your car rattling at 90 mph that makes you want to listen to an angry Evangelical preacher on the radio. When the light glows under a storm cloud and illuminates the sky and there's a pissed-off white man screaming about hell-fire in radio-voice over the sound of the storm, it just gives you this fear. This awesome apocalyptic fear that makes you feel badass just being there to feel it.

I heard this chick preacher on the radio. I was scanning and I stopped because you don't hear it every day. She was preaching about shopping. She said something like, "I was shopping with this lady friend of mine, and we were in a mall, and we passed a store, and she said, 'I could never shop there.' Ladies, am I right? Have you been there? I couldn't help but think, why couldn't this woman turn this into something faith-positive? Why couldn't she say, "I could shop in that store any day I wanted to, but I choose not to today.'"

I laughed until I cried. Kahlua sat dutifully next to me and stared out the window and I scanned until I found a preacher screaming about dying women in Africa and Bertrand Russell.

It's really getting going out there. Goodnight.