Emotional Wreckage and Actual Wreckage: A Corner Turned...

Like just about anyone that grew up in the 80's, John Hughes "Rite-du-passage" films had a tendency to jam its way onto HBO and the various Ted Turner Networks on an almost endless loop. And if you were watching TV back then, you probably saw what many consider his magnum-opus, Ferris Beuller's Day Off. The title character, played by the immortal Matthew Broderick, had one of the best closing lines of a film ever, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." That never quite resonated with me as it has with many others, I prefer another line from that movie in the deepness and meaning of life areas, but I'll work that in a little later. 

I probably needed to find better role models in those days.
Still, the world is a shittier place without him in it.

Anyway, Ferris' quote is still pretty pertinent especially in regards to the last year and a half or so of my life. Life moves pretty fast, other things move pretty fast too, and if you don't look for it, it'll definitely hit you and hit you hard. I don't think it's any secret that for the better part of the last twenty years, I've kinda dealt with some depression issues. It didn't really manifest itself in anything too typical, like that refusal to get out of bed type of stuff people typically experience. For me it had a little more to do with just plain not caring enough about myself to not engage in pretty self-destructive behavior. During the Dorm Days, it meant I would hammer ALL THE BOOZE, eat ALL THE FOOD, excel at all the things college had to offer that weren't really all that important to actual academic pursuits. Let's just say my studies suffered a bit. Post college, the booze and food were still there, but now I had to keep a roof over my head as well, so I threw myself into work. I did it all to such a degree that well, I didn't leave a ton of time to myself. I had a fun job that I wasn't having any fun doing, my personal relationships kinda suffered. I was miserable. Then I turned 37. 

37?!

I discovered that 37 is a magical age. Kids, when you turn 37, every single, solitary bad decision you've ever made arrives on your doorstep to collect its bill. I was always a big guy, but I put on a ton of weight, really fast. I started to forget stuff, probably because of all the brain cells I annihilated back in college. I stopped going to concerts, or even going out at all. Christ, usually the only reason I'd leave my house was to go to work so I would have a house to come home to. I couldn't even sleep longer than an hour at a time, and I'd wake up in places other than where I'd fall asleep. SCARY SHIT! What was I doing? Who knows? I felt like shit all the time and looked even worse. Something had to change. 

It's hard to put a finger on a catalyst. I think the root was when I reconnected with an old friend on that Instagram app. Our lives had gone on vastly divergent paths and something about her creativity and zeal for life hit a button in my brain and got me thinking about the old, better days. That's the type of person I wanted to be again. Right around then, after a particularly shitty night of drinking alone and feeling sorry for myself, I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the disgusting thing staring back at me. It was time. I decided that I wanted to live instead of die. 

Also a bad idea to get me wet or feed my ass after midnight.

I made a few changes. I got some help. Started getting some counseling to work through the garbage in my head, and the big one, I bit the bullet and got my guts rearranged. SIPS Duodenal Switch it's called. It wasn't cheap, but as the surgeon told me, "No natural method is going to help you and you are going to die. This is the only way to take it off and keep it off." Basically, they cut about 80% of my stomach out, and re-arranged my intestines so I hardly absorb any fat. This is what they call a two-pronged approach to losing weight. You can't eat very much, and what you do eat barely gets absorbed. It works as long as you follow the rules. Cut as many carbs as possible, focus on protein and smearing butter on virtually everything because you need to eat a ton of fat in order to make the giant handfuls of specialty vitamins I have to take every day for the rest of my life to work. Exercise like a fiend and get a gallon of blood drained out for nutrient level testing every six months are just a couple others. Also, stay sober for a year and change or your liver will shut down. 

Not exactly the picture of health. But I'm much better now.

Kind of a pain in the ass, but I've followed the rules so far and seen the results. 250 lbs down and I'm getting pretty close to just getting the rest cut off me. I look like a fucking war-crime naked, but my clothes fit a lot better, hell, I recently raided my closet down home and am fitting back into my old high-school gear! CORDUROY AND SWEATER VESTS FOR MILES! I can run for ten minutes without stopping where I couldn't run ten seconds before. I still can't hit the ball out of my own shadow, but I can play 36 holes without wanting to die for the first time since college. Oh yeah, golf is fun again, work is fun again, life in general is fun again. Actually, I can't really say "again," because I don't think it ever really was for me. 

So I almost died, managed to bounce back, and then last April, I almost died again! This time, instead of slowly murdering myself over a twenty year span, I almost took the easy way out. BIG OL' CAR CRASH! Driving out to the mighty Rose Park for a little round of golf one morning, I approached an intersection right by my house. I was hanging a left as the light turned yellow. It's a fairly high speed street, but I thought the truck that was approaching was slowing down for the red. I was wrong. Dude gunned it instead and two vehicles can't occupy the same space at once. They estimated he was going sixty but I don't remember much of the actual impact. Just the spin as my Dodge Charger pirouetted a couple times around in the intersection and I got punched by every single airbag in the car. 

All that's left.

I sat there for a moment. The radio was still playing "Problems" by the Sex Pistols. I looked down and wiggled my toes. My fingers were still there too. I tried to shift the car into park, but the knob wouldn't budge. "Shit" I thought, "the transmission is fucked." I was probably a little concussed. There probably wasn't a transmission left. The door was popped open so I unbuckled the belt and swung my legs out. Traffic was piling up and I was so supercharged with adrenaline, I felt like I could've dragged the car off the road myself at least until I saw the front-end or rather the lack of one. Surprised at how uninjured I was (maybe I'm bulletproof), I jogged over to the other guy to make sure he was all right. He was all right, the only damage his truck incurred was a missing bumper. As I went back to my car to start emptying it out and get my paperwork for the cops I realized that I most definitely wasn't bulletproof. My ribs were jacked up and I was in shock. The tow-truck dragged the husk of my beloved Charger off the road, I collected my citation from the police for failure-to-yield and went home. 

My mother came over to take me to the doctor, and as I painfully sat in my easy chair, something weird happened, I just started laughing. My mom and sister looked at me horrified. Maybe I am a little nuts, because that was really the only reaction that felt right at the moment. Despite all my best efforts, both self-inflicted and accidental, I was still here. For reasons I can't even perceive I was still here even though I shouldn't be. For some reason, I found that hilarious. At least until all that laughing tightened up my ribs and tears started pouring out. GODDAMN THAT HURT.

So I'm still alive, and from now on, I take absolutely NOTHING for granted anymore because nobody knows exactly when their ticket is gonna get punched. And I'm bound and determined to live my best life from now on. Whatever that is. I'm going to do it. The problem is, I don't have any idea what that means. For the first time in my life that I can recall, I like myself. I've got confidence that I've never really had. My job is satisfying. I've got great pals and my relationships with my family are as good as ever. As that other main character (and who some have theorized is the actual main character) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Cameron Frye said, "I am not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I'm going to take a stand. I'm going to defend it. Right or wrong, I'm going to defend it." 

"And the times have changed my friend
I'll be here to the bitter end
With a guitar in my hand, I stand a little taller
And I've been to hell and back
I ain't falling off this track
From the back to the front page
From the gutter to the stage"

But something is still missing. And I need to figure out what that is.

So, I'm gonna hit the road for awhile. Just me, and my thoughts. Sure, I'm going to be seeing some old friends, revisiting the past and figuring out how I got to this point, along the way. But I have a feeling the next couple weeks and this trip I'm taking might bring a little clarity to my head. I'm going to try to mix in a few dispatches from the road for you folks, and even if I don't find what I'm looking for, at least I'll have some good memories and a few awesome sights to share. Anyway, thanks for indulging my ass on this story. I promise to go back to telling dumbass college stories, inane commentaries and reviews of shitty movies again soon. 

Golf Monster Movie Madness: 2012 Sundance Reviews Part 1

Welcome to Hollywood folks!  The 2012 Sundance Film Festival blew through Salt Lick, Park City and Ogden of all places last week, bringing with it swarms of Ugg boots, extra long lines at the coffee house and a traffic nightmare in Park City (more than five cars on the road). It also brought our first decent snowstorm of the year. This resulted in plenty of extra time off for your humble Golf Monster to watch a metric shitload of independent films, some of which, might wind up at a multiplex near you in the next year.

When the dust cleared, my buddy VodkaRob and I saw seven feature films and two shorts, nearly doubling the number of films we saw last year. The films ran the gamut from straight up horror to abstract art-house fare, with a wacky documentary thrown in for good measure. Since we saw so many, I'm going to split my reviews up into two or three parts to make them a little easier to digest. I'll give a little review and rate it for you. Hopefully ya'll get the chance to see some of these down the road. As always, THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!

BLACK ROCK
Starring:  Katie Aselton, Kate Bosworth, Lake Bell, Jay Paulson, Anslem Richardson, Will Bouvier

Directed by: Katie Aselton

DAMMIT! I hate it when I build something up to be better than it actually ends up being. Only to have it disappoint. When tickets first went on sale to the general public, this one was completely sold out. VodkaRob and I are huge fans of the incredibly raunchy FX show The League, about a bunch of whackaloons that play fantasy football and bust each other's balls. It's a lot funnier than that particular description would make you think, trust me. Anyway, Black Rock was written and directed by two of that show's stars, Katie Aselton and her husband Mark Duplass, who also happen to the two of the standard-bearers of the "mumblecore" indie film movement, so this was definitely a hot ticket. I decided that we had to see this flick, so I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:00AM the day of the show to be at the ticket office when it opened at 8:00 for a shot at some "last chance" tickets that typically get opened up that day. Evidently, half of this town had the same idea because the line snaked its way throughout the Trolley Square mall. Awesome, I love lines. After a solid three hour wait, I managed to snag two of the last tickets to the show. This ought to be good!

The line to get in to the theater stretched all the way to the end of the block by the time VodkaRob and I arrived. A bunch of us huddled in the cold around the quarter-inch speaker on my phone to listen to the Giants overtime win in the NFC Championship. We finally got into the building at about 8:30 and managed to find a couple seats. Sadly, and this is a first for pretty much every screening I've attended in the last eight years, this particular screening wasn't attended by any of the stars or crew. As I was saying last week, the unique thing about Sundance is the chance to interact with the director and stars. It wouldn't be our first disappointment of the night.

Despite the hoopla surrounding this flick (it was the first major film purchased at the festival this year), it fell pretty flat. The film follows three childhood friends as they reunite in their early 30's for a camping trip to an isolated island off the coast of Maine. Kate Bosworth's character, Sara, brings her old friends Abby (Aselton) and Lou (Bell) together for the first time since the latter two had a major falling out. It felt like they were trying for character development, but the sheer bitchiness of the characters did nothing to make me feel any real empathy towards them. They come across three dudes on the supposedly deserted island and proceed to get shitfaced drunk with them. That's when things get a little uncomfortable and a little rapey with Abby and one of the guys. When she accidentally kills the guy in self defense, his buddies force the ladies into a war of attrition to escape the island.

The movie kinda sucked, so here's a picture of Katie Aselton in a Brian Urlacher jersey to dull the pain.

In reading some interviews, Aselton and Duplass admitted that they wrote the screenplay in "about sixteen hours," and it definitely showed. The whole story felt rushed, the line delivery was wooden and stiff, and what little action there was seemed drawn out and a bit unrealistic. It didn't seem like anyone in this movie really gave a shit, let alone respected the "thriller" genre at all. I really wanted to like this movie, but in the end, it just wasn't very good. Still, it wasn't as bad as The Oregonian.  ~ Rating:  4 Sacko Bowls out of 10

V/H/S
Starring: Calvin Reeder, Lane Hughes, Adam Wingard, basically a bunch of people you've never heard of.

Directed by:  David Bruckner, Glen McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Ti West, Adam Wingard, Radio Silence (A group of four dudes known for horror shorts on youtube)

A lot has been made in recent years about the "found footage" style of filmmaking. And there's something to be said for movies that can provide the scares of a big-budget horror flick and shoot it on cameras that you can pick up at your local hi-fi shop (do they even have those anymore?). Something about it makes it seem a little more real. And that can be pretty scary stuff. Say what you will about The Blair Witch Project, but they made it for something like ten bucks and scared a good chunk of its audience at the time SHITLESS. It also made millions of dollars despite the small original investment. It was pretty much the most profitable movie since Deep Throat back in the 70's. Others have tried to repeat that formula, and have mostly failed. And there's even been a few big-budget versions such as Cloverfield, and even Paranormal Activity, but rarely are they scary or thrilling, and mostly people just complain about the shaky camera work. That's not to say V/H/S doesn't have plenty of that, but it also has a shitload of genuine scares, thrills and fucked up imagery. That makes this the next great American horror anthology in the tradition of Creepshow, Tales From The Crypt, and Tales From The Darkside.

The film features five shorts loosely held together by a wraparound story. That story features a group of five guys that make mayhem videos and upload them to the internet. "What's a mayhem video?" you may ask. Well it's pretty much what the name implies, they tape themselves breaking into houses, smashing shit up, harassing pedestrians, you name it. Why anyone would want to watch that shit is beyond me. Oh wait, Jackass made millions at the theater, so yeah, I guess there's an audience for that. Anyway, they are hired by an unknown benefactor to break into this shifty looking house and steal a single VHS tape. They aren't told what is on the tape, only that "they'll know it when they see it." When they arrive at the house they find a dead body sitting in a chair, surrounded by static-y televisions, VCR's and hundreds of tapes. Logic would dictate that you grab a garbage bag, stuff all the tapes in it and get the hell outta dodge, but then again, it's plotholes like that that make the wraparound story the weakest part of the anthology in most cases. So they start watching tapes and they get progressively more jacked up the more they watch.

The first short, titled "Amateur Night" features the tale of three frat bros doing shit bros do. There might've even been some icing involved. They get the idea to rig up a minicam into a pair of eyeglasses so that one of them can film the evening's exploits completely through his point of view without anyone being the wiser. They pick up a couple ladies at the bar and retire to a local motel where more drunken shennanigans and some sexytime ensues. Sadly the fellas don't realize until it's too late that one of their objects of affection for the evening isn't exactly human and she proceeds to absolutely WRECK THEIR SHIT. This section, along with the beginning of the wraparound story moved a bit slow, but when it hit, it hit HARD. So much so, that when our eyeglass camera wearing buddy suffers a pretty gruesome injury, at least one person at the screening bolted from the theater and hurled all over the lobby.  GOOD TIMES!

Yeesh!

After a brief interlude with the wraparound characters, our mayhem loving friends popped in the second tape, titled, "Second Honeymoon." This one featured a newlywed couple road-tripping through Arizona on their honeymoon and for whatever reason, they decided to videotape the whole thing. They film everything from hiking the grand canyon to your typical dude ranch and ghost town touristy shit. The husband even attempted to film a little sexytime back at the motel and as he's being rebuffed, there's a knock at the door. He answers, closes and locks the door and is clearly shaken. He's no longer "in the mood" so they decide to turn the camera off and go to bed. When the camera comes back on in the middle of the night, that's when shit got creepy. Creepy enough to get a collective gasp from the entire theater, and a "Jeezus Christ!" outta me. The twist in this story came straight outta left field, and yes, there was some more blood spilled.

We return to the wraparound story briefly and I noticed something was a little different about the room where they were watching these tapes. They then inserted the third tape titled "Tuesday The 17th" which featured more douchey college kids doing more douchey college kid things in the woods. Christ, I hope I wasn't like that when I was in college. *reads back through some of my "Dorm Days" stories* ahem, forget everything I just said. Anyway, these kids are romping through the woods, smoking grass, skinny dipping and telling scary stories and videotaping it all when they realize they aren't alone out there. But one of them seems to know a little more about what is going on than the others. Then the camera starts to flicker, and people start dying.

"The Strange Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger" was the penultimate short in this film and it might've been the most creative of the bunch. According to the director during the after-film Q&A, the entire segment was filmed and recorded with Skype. Pretty cool! This one features an attractive gal named Emily chatting over Skype with her boyfriend who is a couple states away in med-school. As their series of chats goes on, she starts hearing strange noises in her apartment. He can't see what's going on too clearly, but we can. HOLY SHIT CREEPY GHOST KID! For my money, there's nothing creepier than that! I clearly have issues. Anyway, the haunting continues as time goes on, and she starts developing these weird sores on her arm, and slipping more and more into crazytown. That's when things get even weirder, and like all the stories so far, there's a hint of a double-cross in there somewhere. This one was actually funny in parts and pretty chilling as well.

The wraparound story concludes in somewhat predictable fashion and finally we are treated to a final segment, titled "10-31-98." Directed by viral horror video sensations Radio Silence, who Ain't It Cool News described as the Broken Lizard of horror movies. This one follows a group of four guys on Halloween, 1998 (with one of them dressed as a nanny-cam) going to a party. Unfortunately, they take a wrong turn somewhere and end up at a giant house that seems empty, but all the doors are unlocked, and the lights are on. They roam throughout the house, thinking that they're going to stumble on a surprise party of sorts and instead stumble on what appears to be some kind of human sacrifice going on in the attic. At this point, the douchey guys decide to stop being douchey and start being heroes. And then all hell breaks loose. This Radio Silence group is going to do some great work down the road, as they created some pretty incredible effects on a shoestring budget. This flick ended on a high note and was pretty much my favorite horror film that I saw at the festival this year. This is one that definitely will see a wide release later this year. And then we can finally shovel some dirt on the found footage genre, because it's never going to be this good again.  ~ Rating:  8.5 Severed Limbs out of 10

This year, I'll review every film I see in the theater here on the blog and since this is America and we love lists, I'll rank them as time goes on.

The Golf Monster's 2012 End of the World Movie Rankings:
2. Black Rock
1. V/H/S

More Sundance reviews coming up in a couple days!