Your Growing Malaise Quizo Update

You ever have one of those stretches where everything lands in that grey, squishy space between right and wrong? Where things aren’t “oh my god this is awesome!” but they aren’t “oh my god this is terrible!” either, they’re just sort of “oh my… uh… yeah… so, that happened.” I’m sure we’ve all been there a time or two, had periods where everything is just comfortably mediocre, where our life events are like buying a new shirt and then getting home and realizing it’s half a size too big and taking the tags off and wearing it anyway. On the great sine wave of life we’ve all had times like these, those times between the highs and lows where things just hover around zero for a while. And for the most part we shrug these things off because, hey, that’s life. You take the good, you take the bad.

That is, if you’re most people.

You ever have one of those stretches where everything is mediocrity and squishy greyness and you overreact to it so outrageously, so vehemently, that you actually cause dangerous spikes in OTHER people’s blood pressure?

Let’s take a look back at this past weekend, shall we?

Friday – “this is a criminal waste of valuable resources.”

I normally play poker on Friday nights. This is a good thing. I legitimately enjoy the company of the people I play poker with, and it forces me to interact socially with other humans, which, I’m not going to lie to you, is something that given the choice I would probably opt out of in general. This past Friday I did not play poker for two reasons. The first was that it was raining.

Now, before we get carried away here, let me invoke the words of the great John Sullivan concerning rain: “it’s just rain, I’m not gonna melt.” No, my mortal fear of driving at night in the rain comes from long, long ago, back in the ancient mists of forgotten time when I, for a fleeting moment, was a student at Lehigh University. For some reason I was at a book signing at a Borders on Lancaster Pike and I had to drive back to Bethlehem in my old car – dubbed The Millenium Falcon by my friends not just because we were giant nerds but because as my then-roommate put it, “it’s big, it’s fast, and it breaks down at the worst possible times” - in the middle of the night on an unlit highway in a furious rainstorm and the only tape in the car was a collection of JG Thirlwell remixes of “The Downward Spiral.”

Suffice it to say, folks, that this is what we in the theatre call “EXCEEDINGLY BAD.” I got back to my dorm quite literally shaking with fright and nerves, and ever since the idea of driving at night in the rain has caused a fear reaction in me similar to what gazelles must feel when they hear that first lion’s roar out on the savannah.

Now I HAVE driven under these conditions – just not happily – but the weather was only half of why I didn’t go out. The other half of why I didn’t play poker on Friday night was because the expansion pack for World of Warcraft had come out the night before and I, in a remarkable combination of self-aggrandizement and stupidity, decided that the confluence of release date and weather was God’s way of telling me to stay home and play WoW on Friday night. So I did. Until about midnight, when I suddenly stopped playing, looked at my monitor, and said, “what the fuck am I doing?” This began a brutal series of self-recrimination wherein I spent a solid ten minutes chastising myself with thoughts like, “what the hell is wrong with me, I should have gone to the poker game, this is dumb, I don’t even like this game that much anymore, I’m certainly not very GOOD at it, there are a billion other things I could be doing with my time, I hate the world,” etc etc. Eventually I calmed myself down by firing up FIFA 09 on my 360, dialing the difficulty all the way down to the easiest level, and pounding on some Korean team with Chelsea (final score 14-1). I’ve said many times that you can play World of Warcraft or you can play video games, and I think I may have finally chosen the latter.

Saturday – “I guess Tosca isn’t for everyone.”

After some comical shenanigans involving birthday parties, air fresheners, and his fluid concept of time, Nick and I made it up to see Quantum of Solace on Saturday night.

Yeah.

Let me just state in my typical hyperbolic fashion that the only thing worse than a bad movie is an okay movie that could have been great. And don’t misunderstand me – Quantum of Solace could have been great. It could have been really great. In fact, the way to have made it great is so simple I can hardly believe no one did it. All you needed to do was have someone walk up to Paul Haggis, who co-wrote the screenplay, and say, “look, Paul, we know you’re hot stuff now. You’ve got the Oscars and the money and whatnot and that’s great for you. It really is. We couldn’t be more proud. Fantastic. But, Paul, we’ve got to be honest with you, if you come anywhere near another James Bond script again we’re going to break every one of your fingers one by one with a ball peen hammer. I hate to put it that way but that’s really how we feel about it. Nothing personal, of course. We love your work. Love it. We’re big fans. Now if you could do us a huge favor and just fuck off and write another script about race relations or euthanasia or whatever social issue you just discovered this fucking week actually exists and leave the James Bond stuff to those of us who know what we’re doing, yeah, that would be just fantastic. Yes, fuck off, thanks. That’s a good lad.”

How do you go from such a tight, well-written, perfectly-constructed film like Casino Royale to the messy, spineless, occasional-flashes-of-brilliance-but-otherwise-incoherent Quantum of Solace? You hire Paul Haggis to do a rewrite. God, I hate that guy. I hate him so much. This isn’t a case like Die Another Day, which was just absolute garbage from beginning to end, this movie actually had a couple REALLY excellent bits in it. Daniel Craig and Judi Dench continue to be utterly fantastic – I would watch a 2-hour movie of just M and Bond talking about, like, life issues and stuff – and there are moments where the film transcends the typical Bond-movie glop that Haggis tries to drag it back into which keep it just barely in “real movie” territory. Because, let’s face it, even the best of the old Bond movies – and this is coming from someone RAISED on them – are really fucking stupid, and I’ll take an okay “real movie” with James Bond in it over a great “Bond movie” any day.

You know your movie has problems if Nick – who, though he is like a brother to me as much as anyone who I am not actually related to and who I would probably kill if offered enough money to do so and thus is really more like a half-brother or a distant cousin or something, has zero artistic or aesthetic sense whatsoever – asks after seeing it “why was that scene in the movie?” When people who have no knowledge of screenwriting WHATSOEVER can identify structural flaws in your screenplay that is when it is time to get a new writer.

Daniel Craig is still awesome, though.

Sunday – “Mike, this is a case of the terrible versus the pathetic.”

In a similar vein to the conclusion of my thoughts on Quantum of Solace, when my FATHER is summing up his thoughts on the Eagles game with an impression of the Comic Book Guy – “Worst. Football Game. EVER.” – your football team has SERIOUS FUCKING PROBLEMS. You can’t beat the Bengals in SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES of football? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? THE FUCKING BENGALS?

As an unabashed Donovan McNabb fan I will be the first to admit that he had what was probably his worst game since his rookie year yesterday. But, hey, here’s a thought – if D-Mac is having a bad day maybe we could, I don’t know, what’s the word for it, oh yes, RUN THE FOOTBALL! YOU HAVE BRIAN WESTBROOK! GIVE HIM THE FUCKING BALL!

The Eagles ran the ball 18 times yesterday. They threw it 58 times. You cannot play football this way. I don’t care if you have the worst running back in the NFL let alone the best whose talent is being wasted by that pass-happy fuck with the headset, you CANNOT BE A SUCCESSFUL TEAM PLAYING FOOTBALL LIKE THIS.

Merrill said it best, I think, when he opined about halfway through overtime, “if there was ever a game which neither team deserved to win, this is it.” If you are the Eagles and not only can you not beat a bunch of meatsacks like the Bengals but you actually come a hairsbreadth from LOSING to them a couple times, things have to change. That is it. The Eagles should have blown this team out by 30 points. Instead they tie, and only because Shayne Graham was the first kicker to miss a field goal against the Eagles in something like 800 years. You almost lost to the BENGALS.

Andy Reid has to go.

Monday – “Is it safe?”

I got word from Oprah’s yesterday on their choice of speed round topic and I have deemed it perfectly acceptable. Actually I think it’s kinda neat. I look forward to what I can do with it. So make sure to put a stop to them tonight, because though they get to pick a speed round after winning three times in a row, if they pull back-to-back three-peats everyone will have to address Palestra Jon as “El Jefe.” And no one wants that.

JLK