MMMMMM. My wife just gave me a great head pressing.
I enjoy having my head pressed. My wife enjoys being the presser. She gets to focus all her rage against my skull, and I get pleasure from it. The more she presses the better it feels, and I start to chuckle, and that makes her frustrated that she doesn't have the strength to crush my skull like she wants to and so she presses even harder and starts using books and elbows, and it makes me laugh even more, until I'm in heaven.
Some say this is a sign of autism, but I'm pretty in touch with my emotions, and I recently had my myelin sheathing tested at one of those parking lot kiosks made out of old Fotomats, and that came back good, so I don't think that's the case. Most likely, it is a very common desire to have one's head pressed, but a lot people have reservations or are afraid to ask someone. You're missing out.
I saw "Shooter" starring Marky Mark Wahlbhergh yesterday. It confirms my evolving notion that Hollywood producers aren't as much left wing as they are maniacally infantile in their conspiracy-drenched politics.
Marky Mark plays a Timothy McVeigh; a good Timothy McVeigh. An ex-military sniper for the Team Called America who is, naturally, omnipotent.
His infinite skills have not faded after living for three years in Appalachia, with his dog, in a cabin that has great broadband service. He has no paunch, no psychological or dental problems, no addictions or deadly habits, no run-ins with the law, hundreds of thousands of dollars in disposable cash and a sterling credit score. Just like all the retired special forces vets you know. He knows how to shoot a melon from a mile away, he can hotwire a car, he can teach surgery to a hot redneck chick while keeping his urge to bone her at bay, and he fears nothing.
He is urged by military representative, Danny Glover, who has braces on his teeth and a voice that sounds like he was kicked in the throat while fighting a wino for a cheese sandwich, to come back from minding his own business and not harming others, so...follow along... he can help plan a presidential assassination during a public ceremony welcoming an African dignitary. Why would a government want to do that? Well, then the government can learn how the REAL killers think through the eyes of the best retired sniper in the business and then catch them in the act.
This is plausible if you believe that presidential PR ceremonies held in open public places are too important to be cancelled, postponed, or even moved indoors by the imminent threat of the assassination of the free world's leader. Wahlberg's character, the subtly named Bob Swagger, does believe this, and accepts the government's plea for help, never bothering to question why they need him if they already know about the assassination plot, and how only the elaborate guesswork of a bitter ex-military hermit can bring justice. Omnipotence has it's limits, I suppose.
Surprisingly, he's really being setup as the patsy in an assassination of the visiting dignitary from Africa for reasons still unclear 24 hours after viewing the film. It's Hollywood's Razor on display after that. The exact opposite of the principle called Occam's Razor which states that, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." Occam's razor "slices" away the solutions until only the one with the least assumptions remains.
Hollywood's Razor postulates that "the more complex the assumptions, of which there is no evidence to support their existence, the more likely an explanation for what unfolds on the screen can be found among them." It's more like a dull switchblade, yet this postulation has found itself quite a foothold in our real politics to the point that an engorged Al Gore is considered to be on the vanguard of climate science by talking like a 7-year old girl playing with her Cabbage Patch Kid.
"Planet has a fever."
"Do you know what it takes to make a shot [from beyond a mile]? Everything comes into play that far. Humidity, elevation, temperature, wind, spin drift..." says Wahlberg's character at the outset of the film.
Interesting, yet ignored by the conspiracy-minded writers who also want to have it so that the unpredictable waves brought about by the zillions of social and business transactions which occur daily amongst the regular people have very little influence on the long shot schemes that evil military personnel and their southern Republican co-conspirators hatch in order to bully poor innocent countries of the UN into giving up control of the world. It's as if there are no elections, blogging, or 24 hour news channels in this government-in-a-vacuum.
Maybe the producers just feel that these institutions don't matter despite raising large sums of cash in their leisure time to sway elections and opinion toward someone who they think can control the cost of medicine and people who waste energy.
Then the creatives behind "Shooter" heap on all their earnest talking points about Abu Ghraib, the military, big oil, money in politics, WMDs, and gun control. It all makes sense to someone, but not me. This is the KFC Famous Bowl of politics.
It's only an important movie to the type of people who think they are getting the shaft when a CEO makes more money than them. Or people who think that trans-fats are put in food for population control. Helpless. It's the new Homeless.
Marky Mark decides to kill almost everyone, as I would if everyone around me was a lying traitor who made little behavioral sense.
Lately, the fun in watching sloppy technical thrillers such as these, is trying to count how many Google searches went into making the film. In one scene in "Shooter," Marky Mark makes his own antibiotics and injects them with a homemade IV--all from a list of items purchased at CVS--to help him recover from the bullet wounds in his shoulder and abdomen, cleaned, scraped and sewn shut by the hot redneck chick to whom he taught surgery before dinner. He's at full speed the next day after a solid 8 hours of sleep.
"Good job of Googling, writers," I thought. I said that 8 more times during the movie.
In another scene, the writers spare themselves a lot of wasteful writing time and just have the characters do the Google searches themselves. That's one of the emerging cliches of modern cinema. Characters Who Google Their Way Out Of Situations. It reminds me of the Chuck Jones animations where the characters would break the 4th wall and ask Chuck, or whichever hand was sitting at the drawing table at the time, to erase someone from a scene to avoid a difficulty. It was a clever device once and remains employed because it appeals to the millions of movie-goers who secretly dream of being invisible.
I give "Shooter" 2 out of 4 yarmulkes.
