Her

Movie : Her
Drink : Corona and some sort of wine poured in the dark.




     This was by far the most frightening post-apocalyptic movie I have ever seen.  The future imagined as effeminate zombies roam the ultra clean streets in their ultra clean Goodwill finds, heads bent over tiny picture frame phones, oblivious to all external influence, except for maybe unisex clothing.  Seriously, why is everyone dressed like The Gap and Goodwill merged into the only clothing company on earth?
     When the main character , Theodore (of course not "Ted") isn't moping around at work at a job any normal person would have pooped on their desk and walked out on, he's moping at home.
His neighbors, who also shop at Gapwill, bicker with each other very calmly over whether a carefully ugly Amy Adams's documentary she's working on is any good.  It's something like forty minutes of just her mom sleeping.  Of course it's terrible, but in the future, much like today, ironically clothed hipsters seem incapable of telling someone that their sub-par projects, usually documentaries,  are crap.
     I'm not even going to really get into the premise of the whole human-operating system love triangle except to say that I think this whole film was maybe a pro-bullying message.  In the scene where Ted is starting to fall in love with his phone and his eyes are closed and she is telling him what to do and where to go and she tells him to spin around and he's in a public market twirling and twirling with eyes shut, head thrown back in laughter, pastel cardigan billowing out like a prom dress, I cant help but wonder if a normal guy with a pair of Wranglers and a Hanes T-shirt would have just gone up and slugged him, for his own good, and maybe told him to get a life.. would that have been such a bad thing?
     This movie had a few high points, like when Chris Pratt's character tells Ted that he admires him because he is like a man and a chick at the same time.  The sound of Scarlett Johanssen's voice.
     Oh, and best of all, the surprise twist ending where you find out that the title of the movie is referring, not to the voice of the operating system, but to Theodore.

Nebraska

Movie: Nebraska
Drink: Coors Light power hour



     For those of you that don't know,  a Power Hour is when you take a shot of beer every minute for an hour.  I calculated it in my head and figured out that an entire power hour would only be 5 beers.  True, not a small amount of drinking in an hour, but let's be honest, nothing I haven't done before without even knowing it.   By Minute 21, I knew I was in trouble.  There was something about the marking of each passing minute with the celebratory shooting of alcohol that slipped each minute of my life straight down my throat, into my stomach and towards my rectum that made me start to panic and worry about my 401k and my inevitable trek towards my 40th birthday and the fact that I could slip on some ice during this endless winter and I haven't signed up for Obamacare yet.
      I now realize that this was the perfect frame of mind in which to watch Nebraska.   A slow moving film that is slow in the way that the river you are floating on with a 30 pack of beer in one of those floating cooler things is slow.   You don't mind.
     The fact that the movie was shot in black and white usually tells me that the movie was found to be pretty lame in the editing studio and the production team was too tired to fix anything and thought the lack of color would draw some of the attention away from how lame the plot line was.  When I think back through my Coors infested short term memory, however,  I can't really imagine this movie being filmed any other way.  I would like to say that the stark beauty of the struggle of life can only be truly captured without color, but let's be honest.  Old people and the Great Plains just look better in black and white.
    I watched it with 2 other people and we all had our own interpretations of the family.  We hated the mom, liked the mom, hated the son, understood the son, rooted for the dad.  All for different reasons.  It seemed that each person filtered the characters through their experiences with their own families, recognized someone and felt a flicker of... annoyance? Guilt? Love?  Who knows.  I will say that it ended up as an argument about who had the craziest cousins.  I'm happy, or sad, to report that I lost.
   As  I sat sank down in the couch with another Coors wedged in between the cushions,  I saw my mom in the mom,  my dad in the dad, myself in the son trying to fix everything.  I had a thousand regrets, a thousand good memories, and one or two resolutions to be a better person, a better son, a better brother.
     I just hope I can remember that in the morning.