u/hangonsufi

The bright ice cream-and-candy colors of run-down dreams, the fairy tale false narratives of as-yet unrealized hopes, all this can be yours for $38 a night.

The sad destitution of human sacrifice zones that are the circles of purgatories and hells around the Happiest Places on Earth are traps with no releases, with no recognition for time served. You make the best of it, sometimes in the worst ways possible, then game over, make room for the next prisoner of circumstance.

Sometimes bad choices are all you get.

What if this Sister of Misery, Our Lady of Bum Luck, this wrecked Rapunzel just isn't a sympathetic character? If she's got one last coin for the fountain, one last candle to blow out, or if she spots a falling star that isn't on a collision course for the planet, she'd better pray for a moment of clarity to appreciate Bobby, the tolerant and patient manager of the purple place, the Magic Castle Inn and Suites.

Halley (with a long 'a', played by Bria Vinaite) is this unsympathetic character. Her daughter, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) is a virago, not really sympathetic but a fascinating creation of scary proportions by a child actor. “I can always tell when adults are about to cry,” Moonee tells a fellow ragamuffin, and Prince makes you believe her.

Bobby (Willem Dafoe) is sympathetic – to his last-chance denizens just trying to cling to the best circle of this Dantean world they can, for as long as they can. And film maker Sean Baker found the actor that actually looks like he could be Bobby's son, Jack – Caleb Landry Jones.

Nothing really happens, but somehow everything seems to happen, or to befall, the women and children in this film, mostly in the categories of no job, no money, no prospects, no home.

For $38 a night.

Rotten Tomatoes gave this film 79%, about 40% higher than I would have. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes. What do I know.

It's running time is as long as The Watchmen, by the way. However, actually more full frontal male nudity (McCaul Lombardi as white trash hottie Corey) than The Watchmen, so there's that.

American Honey is about a traveling band of teenage flotsam and jetsam ostensibly selling magazine subscriptions, with made-up hard luck stories, across “the heartland.”

“Newsstand sales of consumer magazines continued to decline in the beginning of 2016, according to the latest figures from MagNet, which tracks single-copy sales across the U.S. and Canada...The number of magazines distributed by wholesalers also dropped compared to last year.” - Erik Sass, MediaPost, June 6, 2016.

Bleak statistics; so is this the last press of the skins for these wandering wastrels?

Jake (Shia LaBeouf) (I've always thought it takes a lot of nerve to wear that name) (if you're a guy) (a stripper with a boa constrictor, maybe), in a pin-on braid, is the boy toy for Krystal (Riley Keough), the boss lady of this, er, enterprise.

Star (Sasha Lane). Oh yeah, plays the lead opposite LaBeouf.

I watched it because maybe I have a slender connection to the premise.

Long ago I drove a school bus during the day and worked a phone boiler room selling tickets to police and fire benefit shows at night. The shows were legit, but we didn't have to use our real names. There I learned how fast a dry Christmas tree will ignite when you throw lit matches at it. Wicked fast, in case you're wondering.

he year is 1965, the place is New Penzance Island, and the story is love, redemption and reclamation.

It is a Wes Anderson film that will make you laugh and cry, will make wish for the world where the Sam and Suzy in all of us is ascendant, and where that ascendancy triumphs because peoples' hearts are irrevocably good.

The prepubescents, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) meet-cute at an elaborate church production of the Great Flood story. Sam is a member of Scoutmaster Ward's (Edward Norton) Khaki Scouts in attendance at the play, but he grows restless and goes snooping about the vast old church. His prepubescent spidey sense leads him to the girls' dressing room, where the chicks are transforming into their bird characters. Suzy, with a bloody bandage on her arm from being hit by a mirror, is The Raven, the first bird sent out of the ark to find dry land.

Spoiler alert – the raven never returns.

Sam is an orphan, ping-ponging from Juvenile Refuges to foster homes after he loses his parents. Suzy lives with her three little brothers in a dollhouse home parented by two “counselors,” lawyers, played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand. Both children are misunderstood and outcast, driven from the Eden of hearth and home created for "good" boys and girls.

Sam and Suzy exchange addresses and correspond; eventually they plan their escapes and their meeting in the meadow. Scout Sam is wilderness survival trained, Suzy has a different approach, like bringing her tiger tabby kitten in a fishing creel.

Included in the adults is Bruce Willis as the island's police captain Sharp. Willis, who's talents we have lost to a cruel debilitating disease, plays Sharp as a tender and gentle man surely hiding out from a harsh world that doesn't understand him, either.

The missing children must be found, and Social Services' Tilda Swinton muses to Captain Sharp and Scoutmaster Ward that Sam will probably be administered electric shock treatments once found. Incorrigible, don't you know.

It's an all-island effort just hours before a historic storm is headed for the region. Ward tries to mobilize the scouts as a non-violent rescue force, the boys quickly become Lord of the Flies armed vigilantes. Harvey Keitel is the Kurtz-eque Scout Commander Pierce who reprimands Ward and relieves him of his office when he appears to have lost his entire troop.

The tides turn for Muskrats Suzy and Sam (sorry) and they are escorted by their rescuers to (supply sergeant/chaplain?) Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) who has the power to marry them in a non-binding but emotionally and morally meaningful ceremony.

The storm makes landfall, lightening strikes, the wooden dam bursts, Social Services arrives by pontoon plane, the chase for the children still enjoined.

Eventually the storm moves out, much of the island has been clobbered, but the sparingly-used narrator (Bob Balaban) tells us that the crop yield the following year was the most abundant in island history.

No! No! Please tell me Sam and Suzy were not the human sacrifices to the heartless bloodthirsty Harvest Gods!

Dry your tears, for tho' weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.

Suzy and Sam are reunited with visiting rights in an age-appropriate way, Suzy back with her character-arc-experienced parents and Sam with Captain Sharp as his legal guardian.

OK, now you can cry.

Forgive me gods, it's been four days since my last confessional post:

I shamelessly reveled in Rorschach's gloating over filth and horror; sick, yet I begged him to tell me more.

I wallowed in lust for the two wantons, coupling like dark angels in the sky, a mockery of the divine glory.

Now, finally, I will plead for mercy for my most brazen, debased, impudent and impious infliction visited on your most precious gift, my immortal soul.

I'm talking about my fevered obsessions, not secret but carried on my sleeve, burned into my forehead: Elio and Oliver, Call Me By Your Name.

I know you are merciful, and listen to the cries of the oppressed. Allow me to advocate on my very human failings, allow me to move your omniscient heart to pity one so low as myself, your most wretched creation. But still, you made me, therefore I am deserving of an audience, of reclamation.

That's pretty overwrought, even for me, but I am ever importunate for indulgence.

I was perusing the Cult's past podcasts, and I found that a year ago this was the movie assignment.

Call Me By Your Name was also on my list forever, and it came into my life when I needed it most.

December 2025 marked the end of a very dark and ugly year for the world, with evil emanating and spreading from our version of Mount Doom. No doughty hobbit I, my only recourse was to seek refuge in a world of beauty and enchantment, of love's possibilities.

I watched, and I watched, and I watched every day, throughout the day, for the ensuing months. I found interviews, press junkets, compilations of clips set to Lana Del Rey; read the book and it's sequel, allowed myself to stop the world and melt with Armie Hammer as he read the source document to me in an audio book.

My friends did the emotional equivalent of patting me on the head.

I found Reddit, and joined my fellow ecstatic lovers in dervish-like devotion to our chosen gospels, our sutras, our recitations.

Is this blasphemy? If it is, I will absolve my fellow lovers and take the whole blame, take the surplice, take the penance, I'm sure I am the worst, the most abject; but I will never denounce or recant of my obsession for Elio and Oliver, for Call Me By Your Name.

So frigging overwrought. But you haven't heard my most depraved confession.

I cannot watch the end of this film. It is gratuitous heartbreak, it didn't have to end this way!

So, I rewrote the ending. 75,000 words and I'm still writing - yes, every day I write the book.

Now, Oliver has a last name, a personal history, a family history. And Elio and Oliver live in a world where their love is triumphant, a sweet light in the darkness, I won't settle, can't settle for less.

Maybe I am defiant of absolution, maybe I would rather commit these erotic excesses than endure the “moral” scrubbing to be “cleansed” of life-giving lust, maybe the secrets of the universe are in each violated peach, the forbidden fruits of joy. Maybe it's hubris to write my own hope in the face of a world's despair, but maybe I'm not the only one.

There is no such thing as a hopeless romantic; we are the most hopeful holy fools you will ever meet.

A Spielberg film is usually a story about humans; humans in unusual, frightening, strange, magical, difficult, unimaginable, extreme situations and how they are affected by these situations, how they react, and how they triumph. And there is ACTION! CHASES! DARING SAVES!

So if you haven't seen Disclosure Day, let me tell you it is not a space invaders, alien attack, ET takeover film. Not a Day The Earth Stood Still film. Nor is a congressional hearing given The X Files treatment. It is an engrossing and compelling tale about humans wresting with The Truth. It is about humans who want to suppress, control, or reveal The Truth.

There is a shadowy organization, headed by Scanlon (Colin Firth), that wants to suppress and control the alien tech. Some hand-size rods were crash retrieval booty, and Scanlon is “diving” into their power like Newt drifted with the Kaiju. He keeps at it until he gets better at, and this time eyes go spice blue.

Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, im - not very - ho carries the film) is a Kansas City, MO, TV weather-caster, a childhood abductee who starts speaking and understanding some very foreign languages.

Dr. Dan Kellner (Josh O'Connor) has all the flash drives with all 70+ years of government files on all the famous and lesser known UFO cases. He served time for cyber crimes and was recruited upon release by a disclosure group headed by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). Kellner is also a child abductee.

The story opens with a world on the brink of war with North Korea. People are shown panic shopping and evacuating their towns. What could possibly be bigger news that would turn the world from war to wonder? Outrunning Scanlon and getting The Truth to air is the point of the movie.

There is a car vs train action scene that is almost Indy Jones worthy.

There are some Big Questions asked, like did God create beings on other worlds and does he love them, too? And, will we make gods out of the aliens?

Surprisingly disappointing effects are the NHEs and the animals that they chose to present themselves as. Sad, very sad. I'm watching a series, Surviving Earth, about various extinction events, and I'm buying the gorgonopsids. We know what this guy can do, too bad he didn't.

Hoo boy. I think some of you guys punked me on this one, just because I said I was getting soft for Wes Anderson and posted a dewy-eyed review of The French Dispatch on this sub.

LingonberryGlum2356 (lingonberry pancakes was already taken?)( Sorry, bratty, but for all you nihilists our there) has watched it thrice and it keeps getting better every time (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice...); tree_or_up's fave Lynch film (uh, Blue Velvet?).

Of course I wanna see a Lynch flick I haven't seen. So I voted for it. Like leaves72, was looking forward to it. I'm thinking could be Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway.

Maybe Lynch is referring to some wasteland of our interiority, not the graceless bustling commercial, industrial, track housing, freeway girded region of So Cal grandiosely named the Inland Empire. Yeah! How Lynchian!

It has the touches we thrill to in the Lynch experience: A tense unsettling ambient soundtrack aurally signaling that something is...off...wrong...even dangerous; the old furniture, the worn rooms; the people who are reacting to things around them in subtle or blatantly dis-associative ways, the deep pore closeups; the ambiguity, oh the ambiguity, we live for it.

It still had the absurdities that made me laugh out loud, for instance: One of Laura Dern's characters, who seems took a recent right hook to the kisser, admits,”I screwed a couple of guys for drinks, no big deal.” And it wasn't nervous laughter, so I have no excuse.

It takes a lot of money to make a film - you hire lots of people, there's lot of expensive equipment, you need lots lawyers, everyone has to eat – a lot. All in the name of entertainment. So when you get your hands on that kind of lots of money...

Even when a sassy young lady flashed her nice ta-tas, I checked the time.

Sorry, lingonberry & tree, I had to bail at somewhere around 2 hours into the 3 hour film. But I did stick around for The Locomotion dance, still really dig that oldie.

The Straight Story. Don't wait, leaves72, tomorrow is promised to no one.

I think the rabbits are from a Lynch short, and he obviously felt they made sense here.

Saturday evening, June 13, this stunning film will be screened at the Palm Springs Cultural Center's Camelot Theater.

We're so lucky to have this wonderful independent movie house in our community. I hope everyone appreciates their independent and art house neighborhood treasures!

Maybe I'm just becoming a nicer person; after all, I let Romy and Michelle steal my cynical, cranky film snob heart. But now I'm really softening up for Wes Anderson again. Are they related? I think they have to be; you can't be that insufferable overweening film bore for long once you open yourself to this gentle genius who paints on film, who writes dialog for poetry lovers, who charms mortal actors into outrageous subtleties and sublimities as they ensemble and disassemble.

What is the cupid's arrow of my current besottedness? The French Dispatch.

A couple - three? - weeks back, Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme was submitted for our approval. Ya know, you get busy, a bright shiny object or two, a 5-day UFO confab, a story about hickeys you just can't stop writing – but I did! I finished it! I ticked through a couple in my stack (Roger Dodger, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) then The French Dispatch popped up.

I was already getting nicer because I had recently watched Asteroid City and really liked it.

AND RUSHMORE IS ABSOLUTELY ONE OF MY FAVORITE FILMS EVER!!!

But, and I'm pretty sure this is a minority opinion resulting from my cataloged character ...idiosyncrasies, I kinda considered Anderson's next film, The Royal Tenenbaums, as his Barton Fink. That's where he lost me, and I became that over-snobbing weeny.

I saw that The French Dispatch (hereafter referred to as TFD) had some male actors I will watch in just about anything for at least awhile: Timothee Chalamet, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Adrian Brody. Plus Tilda Swinton, for whom I think the jury may be out.

If Anderson and/or Chalamet reads this, please work together again.

The film, set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blase, starts and ends with the death of the editor of TFD, played so well by alum Bill Murray, who did not chew any scenery. In between are four delightfully unique feature stories of charming beauty filmed with stunning color palettes and luminous black and white, moving through tableaus that defy gravity, or switch scenes like a View-Master, or fidget with surprise after surprise.

Those who are already Anderson-nice will know all the alums, so feel free to point them out amongst yourselves.

Owen Wilson, The Cycling Reporter, gives a two-wheel tour of the town's historic districts.

Benicio Del Toro (Rosenthaler) is in prison for a double homicide with a butcher's tool for which he says one had it coming and the other was in self defense. He's painting his muse, Simone, the lovely young prison guard, as therapy. Adrian Brody is a shady art dealer who promotes (pimps?) Rosenthaler's work. Actually, a Master's thesis could be written about this segment, but I'm fagged out after that hickey story.

Timothee Chalamet is Zefferelli, a charismatic student revolutionary leader and muse/lover to TFD staff writer Krementz (Frances McDormand). Another thesis, but instead I will just watch this segment a few more times because I've fallen in love with it. Swoon.

Jeffrey Wright is a writer with a typographic memory who also spent a few days in Enuui-sur-Blase's prison. This is a riotous rollick about the kidnapping of a kid, and the police station's enigmatic chef. It's an obvious connection, right? I mean, you see it, too? Damn, it's so good! So good!

All throughout, the dialog is clever, and funny (“The Children Are Grumpy” is the student revolutionaries' battle cry) (whom Krementz calls “the pimple cream and wet dream” contingent) (see why I'm a-swoon?) and insightful and worthy of so much repeat.

Even (the voice of) Jarvis Crocker gets back in the Anderson mix.

Sorry for my dizzying confessional, er review. I just felt so nice.

I've been going to Contact in the Desert almost every year since the first one came to Joshua Tree in 2014, where I lived for many years. The early Contacts were more Ancient Aliens roadshows – I was in super-fan heaven! In fact, I was a reporter for the local papers and got to cover it with press access.

Moving “down the hill” a few years later, I found Contact was in my new Coachella Valley 'hood. While there were still some well-known TV “stars” (Ben Hansen, Marc D'Antonio, Daniel Sheehan, Richard Dolan) this year, the emphasis was much different and different from what I expected.

I expected a lot about disclosure, AI, and the missing scientists, researchers, government people, etc. This year the emphasis was on consciousness, the nature of reality (stuff I really like anyway) and DMT (haven't tried). Also, there were live podcast panels, again, the aforementioned emphasis.

Over the five days of approx. 40 events a day/night, usually 7 happening in each time slot, you're really just grasping at the elephant in the dark. The many panels I attended were of smart, thoughtful people sharing their insights and experiences intelligently, and light on the drug-speak, about reality, our consciousness, and UFO/ET/paranormal experiences.

Here are some panels I attended: The Infinite Within: Where Thought Becomes Form; Psychedelic Gateways: Entities, Realms, and the Expanded Mind; Glitches in the Matrix: Questioning the Nature of Reality.

Whitley Strieber's lecture titled “The Disappearances: Why They Are Happening and What It Means,” was rambling- about what? dunno - and with 30 mins to go an audience member shouted, “Get to the topic!”

Richard Dolan gave a live Zoom 90-minute non-stop wound-up presentation on disclosure, and he was adamant that disclosure would not be from any world government, but would come from the ETs when and how THEY are ready, that they are controlling disclosure.

Probably the last of the OGs was there – Jacques Valle. He and Paul Hynek (son of) (and DMT enthusiast) did a presentation together of the two families' long history together. Really nice, lots of pix.

I got a chance to tell Vallee that, earlier this year, my local art house theater screened a recent French film, Valensole 1965. The film tells the story of a famous UFO incident in a lavender field near the village of Valensole, France. An actor portrayed Vallee in the film, tall, thin, long black hair. Vallee grabbed my hand and held it tightly as told me he indeed spent three days in the village interviewing people and investigating the incident before being rescued from a lengthy selfie session. I tend to eschew them myself, not judging.

Included are two photos, one of the late Erich von Daniken (I did get my first American edition hardback Chariots – from a library book sale! - autographed, not above that) (please don't judge) at the Joshua Tree Contact, and one of Jacques Valle preparing for his talk with Hynek, Close Encounters of the Family Kind: The Hynek and Vallee Legacy.

Good to meet a few of you at Contact! Antenna put away until next year.

After enjoying The Quiet Earth, I decided to stay Down-Under. I opted for the OG, Mad Max. I always think of Road Warrior as the first Mad Max movie, but the $zillion franchise had its humble beginnings here.

I imagine writer/director George Miller and writer James McCausland sitting around one afternoon, brainstorming, How can we break into the American movie market? Can't be with some high-falutin Clockwork Orange frippery with sex and violence that makes people feel dumb because they don't get it. How about a film about a lawless desolate frontier, with souped up muscle cars, a psycho motorcycle gang, and a lightly supervised highway patrol? And let's nudge it just “a few years from now,” so we can do anything because no one knows what's gonna happen a few years from now. Add some big explosions and vehicular mayhem so no one feels dumb.

Yeah, it worked! And for a budget of $350,000, it made $100 million worldwide. (Mel got a check for ten G's.)

But it plays more like an ensemble piece. Officer Max Rockatansky (Gibson) of the Main Force Patrol is not a dominant or very charismatic character, except he looks good in the MFP leathers; the bikers are scenery-chewers, Max's partner, Jim Goose (Steve Bilsey) projects a masculine swagger to his humanity, looks good in the leathers; and their captain, Fifi (Roger Ward), is a big teddy bear in a rhinestone necklace.

The MFPs takes down Nightrider, a “terminal crazy” in a hot beater. The biker gang descends on a little whistle stop outpost to collect his coffin. The fuzz will pay for this.

Goose is ambushed and trapped in his car, which the gang incinerates with him in it. He makes it to the infirmary, but when Max sees what's under the sheets is what's left of his partner he wants to quit the force. He's afraid if he spends anymore time in “the rat circus” that is the open road patrol, he'll turn into one of them, the terminal crazies.

Capt. Fifi says take a trip to the country with the wife and kid for a few weeks, cool off. How do you think that's gonna go? Think the bikers will come looking for them?

Just let me make this observment: It's surprising that their toddler boy, Scrog, has made it this far. We see him playing with daddy's gun, he's left in the house alone, he's left in the woods alone, he's often an after-thought, like oh wait, isn't there a little kid in the story?

The bikers run down the wife and kid, “the kid is D.O.A.” says a nurse and the doctors claim the wife will make it despite massive internal injuries and lots of broken bones. Uh, no.

Max gets back in his leathers, grabs his piece and takes an interceptor without authorization. But he makes sure the bikers die gruesome deaths, and who's gonna feel dumb about that, huh?

And thus the template is set for Road Warrior, et cetera, in continuum.

Those who are born think about dying. We the born know it's coming, few know the time, place or method and even then they don't like it. So we fantasize death to defang it, to defrock it's terrible majesty, to whistle past its witching-hour graveyard.

The earth is a born thing, cobbled together of weird dust and gases, spinning and wobbling in space until...it won't. Until it dies.

We are born things on a born thing. All things must pass.

When? How? Why, Dammit?

These questions are part of the theological inquiry called Eschatology, The End Times.

Me? I'm just gonna write about an old sci-fi movie I watched last night as my way to deal with the eschatological. And be banging my head to tunes played very loud in my alcove work station. Jesus and Mary Chain? That's my eschatology, baby.

The Quiet Earth is about something created for the common good that goes very wrong. It's adapted from a book I haven't read, but I'm thinking of Nikola Tesla's earth energy grid project that his capitalist financial backer quashed because, free energy for everyone? Hell no! But Project Flashlight is such a joint project between the Yanks and the Down-unders.

Film opens with a molten yellow sun rising in an orange sky over a red ocean, sea birds wheeling and crying in the July dawn. Where I live it's called summer, but we're in New Zealand so it's...my January? (Just because I'm confused doesn't mean you have to be.)

And there's a beautiful, well-arranged piece written by John Charles and performed by the NZ Symphony Orchestra.

Zac Hobson, a nicely built guy who sleeps in the buff, wakes for his job at the installation with the big satellite radar dish thingy on top. He's in Project Flashlight. But at 6:12am something blasts light, and there's a shake and a shimmer. And just like that, all the people, animals and bugs are gone.

It's as Zac has feared, a “malfunction with devastating results” from “a project of such phenomenal destructive potential.”

The Last Man On Earth trope runs through the scenarios. I like the one where he goes into a cathedral, still wearing a lady's slip he scored in a posh closet, with a rifle, and is yelling for God to show Himself. “Where are you? If you don't come out I'll shoot the kid!” and he points the rifle at at a plaster Christ on a cross. Blam, blam, blam! Got your eschatology right here!

Then, what plot device happens next? A girl? No! A pretty girl? No! That would be too obvious – YA THINK?

And I'm done spelling eschatology.

So Zac and JoAnn cavort, explore, make the best of, really, not a bad situation once you get over the eerie quiet and the uncertainty. Zac is noticing the sun is oscillating and will soon collapse; “the unit value of an electron has changed, operating between new values” he can't measure. “The fabric of the universe has not only altered but is highly unstable.”

Speaking of unstable...

A third person, a strapping handsome Polynesian (?) bloke, Api, turns up. Turns out the three survivors have something in common – they all technically died at the moment of the Project Flashlight incident: JoAnn was blowdrying her long lush curly red locks and was electrocuted; Api was fighting over a woman and her husband drowned him; Zac took a bunch of meds before bed.

Zac thinks he can interrupt the coming disaster by driving a double truck trailer loaded with explosives into his facility before the final oscillation.

Big badda boom.

What? You want to know how it ends? Don't we all...

I saw this maybe a year ago. The earliest adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and stars (hand over heart, you know the drill)Vincent Price. Filmed in Italy, mostly Italian cast and crew, released in U.S, by (ta DA!) American International Pictures.

I thought it was a pretty good flick, some nice camera and lighting by Franco Delli Colli. Matheson, already a big name in science fiction, horror, mystery & suspense, helped write the screenplay but released under assumed name Logan Swanson, because he took the check but not the blame, as he saw it.

I finished the book, said I would. Why am I so disappointed? Why did he write this book? Why did Gore Vidal call it “Inspired. A wonderfully comic novel.” (Really? Burr?! Lincoln?! United States of Amnesia!?)

If only you could hear HOW LOUD I'm cranking Arcade Fire right now, face in the speakers, Memorex guy died, bathe me, wash my psyche Win Butler. The sonic cleanse.

Gore, you're dead now, too, but maybe you got asked at whatever gates you ended up at,

“Did you read the book?”

I was devastated when Bob died in SLC Punk (I deplore gratuitous grief - hear that, Andre Aciman?) but Lauren gets pregnant, pretty sure it's Sean's, let's get married, they drive around doing drugs and drinking, getting sallow and skinny. BUT I DIDN'T CARE! Because they didn't care. Is terminating a pregnancy just a throw-away shorthand for, like, insert Momentous Life Event here?

I know so many of you read the book and cherish it, watch and watch the movie and go there - I have those - but my alienation isn't because I wasn't in college during this time, (or in college ever). I did live through the '80s and remember them well. But this narrow slice of the ne'er do well-off? The '80's Gatsby? (god I hate that book.) I know Ellis is our modern Voice of his Generation, and I do urge people to read him over Fitzgerald.

An author - or film maker – should be able to take you from your milieu into their world, whether it's mythic Camden College or Middle Earth. Roger Avary at least gave us a fully realized Rupert in the genius of Clifton Collins, Jr. and the deliciously sloppy Dick of Russell Sams.

I didn't laugh at anything in the book. I didn't feel like underlining anything in this (library) book because I thought it was insightful, a pithy turn of phrase, eternal truth expressed eloquently, brilliant, clever or otherwise light-bulby.

I liked Victor's European Vacation in the book like I liked it in the film, will find the full doc. Glamorama's on my nightstand. I was turned on by a Redditor to the Carrot Top commentary https://www.avclub.com/gji-carrot-top-rules-of-attraction-dvd-commentary

I never found out what the Rules of Attraction are. A secret Mr. Vidal took to his grave?

PS: I would watch Rules of Attraction on an endless loop for a month rather than watch any 15 minutes ever again of Citizen Kane (god I hate that movie). At least I can get some Dick.

Some old bones, a badge, a bauble and a bullet turn up in an abandoned army shooting range in a Texas border town; a town with a history of graft and violence, prejudice and exploitation, and secrets – boy howdy, there are secrets.

Sam Deeds (the most unlikely leading man Chris Cooper) comes back to his hometown of Frontera. The son of legendary local hero, Sheriff Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), Sam is the new sheriff, “Sheriff Junior,” but he settles in like old wine poured into an old skin. Many of the same people are still there, older but being continuously shuffled like a deck of cards through the small town system. And still in Frontera is Sam's high school love, Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Pena).

Back in Buddy Deeds' day, the most feared bad guy was Sheriff Charlie Wade (the late Kris Kristofferson). He exacted payoffs and favors from local politicians, business and enterprises (like backroom poker games) at the point of gun, or the heel of his boot.

One night in a busy cantina, Buddy faced off with Wade over his refusal to pick up a collection for him. Buddy didn't budge, and now everybody saw that bad blood just a-boilin' and a-spoilin' for a showdown. “You're a dead man,” Wade tells Deeds.

But it's Wade who goes missing, and whose body was never found.

The discovery of the buried remains in the desert happens on Sam's watch. Now he has an interesting forensics puzzle to solve, and a personal labyrinth to the revelation of his own buried history.

This solid film by John Sayles is constructed from the most fragile human stories of strained and estranged relationships, like between Sam and his legendary father; Sam and his ex-wife Bunny (Frances McDormand); Sam and his teenage love Pilar; bar owner Otis and his son, army Col. Delmore (Joe Morton). It also hangs in the tangled threads of truth and myth, memory and memory holes.

Sayles was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Lone Star (it went to Christopher McQuarrie for The Usual Suspects). The film moves fast with lots of clues and dead ends like a real crime scene, the characters are sharply drawn and knowable, the dialog has colorful, profound, and illuminating things being said in the language people really speak, the way people really talk.

The crumbling drive-in theater at the end of the film is the site of closure and a new beginning for Sam after a stunning reveal, and no, it's not the one about who killed Charlie Wade.

And here's another film where the credits role to a great gem of a recording: “I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart” by Patsy Montana. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAYwYscqXJQ

I snubbed this movie, I admit it and repent! I thought, Chick Flick, pass; I mean, that year: L.A. Confidential, Affliction, Lost Highway/Romy and Michele's High School Reunion?

Now, Romy and Michele's is my new Zoolander, my new A Night at the Roxbury, movies that I will always drop in on and laugh like it's the first time (sorry Devil Wears Prada, had to make room, but you have a sequel coming out next week, so boo-hoo not so much).

Here is a great cast deftly making a funny script by Robin Schiff (former Groundling) funnier, sure comedic direction by David Mirkin, whose Simpson episode, Deep Space Homer, plays on a screen in a scene.

High school besties Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) are not in the A Group of jocks and mean girls, or the B Group of theater and art kids, and not in the C Group of nerds. But they have each other. They are picked on by the As (Romy has a crush on the biggest A, if you get my meaning) and Michele is the throb for a lovelorn C (Alan Cumming).

Michele wears a squeaky medieval back brace through high school – yeah, that's insensitive, but it's such a funny gag! You laugh every time it squeaks! Yeah, yeah, haters gonna hate.

Then there's Janeane Garofolo, a nasty cross between the As (mean and vicious) and Cs (science nerd). I can't repeat much of her profane dialog, but with her delivery it is FUN-NEE! The venom! The vitriol! She's a walking acid bath!

The movie doesn't start in their Tucson high school, it starts with Romy and Michele 10 years hence happy with their lives living in an old walk-up on the Venice Beach, Calif. boardwalk. That's the first joke – Michele is unemployed and Romy is a service counter cashier at an auto dealership, and even in 1997 that apartment was $1,200/month and minimum wage was $5-$5.15/hour. And they go clubbing every night.

Garofolo's Heather comes to Romy's service desk, and mentions the 10-year reunion. Our girls start filling out the questionnaire and find that they've accomplished nada of note in 10 years. So Romy hits on a brilliant idea – tell everyone they are rich businesswomen because they invented Post-its. Michele came up with yellow.

So much funny, clever, well-acted, well-directed stuff goes on, I was laughing my head off and loud. I couldn't find any wasted space, DP Reynaldo Villalobos and editor David Finfer also deserve recognition for the bright palette and crisp pacing.

I don't want to blow the dream sequence, so show of hands - who's seen this film? Everybody but me? Ok, so how about that dream sequence where nerdy Michele-besotted Sandy Frink (Cumming) made a lot of money and got a new face and Michele is necking with him in his limo that just ran her over and she's called to the reunion stage to get a most-improved-life kind of award and she goes up and accepts in in her skirt and brassiere, explaining - “I couldn't find my top.” In lesser hands, this would be cringey, instead I was laughing my head off and loud.

In the end, all the meanies get their dead flowers and not in a dream sequence. Romy tells the head bitch she is “a bad person with an ugly heart.”

And there is a sweeping dance with R, M and Frink to “Time After Time,” again really funny (LMHOAL) and not cringey (the choreographer, Smith Wordes, had another film that year, the Edge). Frink spirits the threesome off in his private helicopter because he really invented something and got really rich, telling Michele there is one thing he still doesn't have - “Your own country?” Michele guesses. No, you adorable dingbat – You!

I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to Have A Romy and Michele Day!