Single White Female; Scrambled Eggs and Bacon

Single White Female (1992)

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Had I seen this before: No

I came into this film knowing two things about it: someone steals a haircut and someone else gets a high heel to the face. And I have to say, all the connecting tissue was pretty much exactly what I, a connoisseur of the Golden Era of Lifetime movies, was expecting it to be. My teen years were made-for-TV-movie central. I was well aware of The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. I watched Mother, May I Sleep with Danger on its first run. There was a (horrible, not that murder isn't generally horrible, but truly so sad and pointless) murder at my high school and they made a TV movie of it so quickly that they couldn't air it in our local market because they hadn't had the trial yet so we had to watch it on a VHS tape that someone's dad recorded while on a business trip out of town. (I realize that sounds ghoulish now but we were teenagers and it was easier then to hold both "I am upset by what happened to my classmate" and "Hey look that's the fast-food chicken place I drive by all the time" in my head at once.) And as a person who quit drinking many years ago I have a long-running fear that someone will knock me unconscious and inject vodka into my bloodstream as part of an effort to frame me for some horrible thing because that once happened to a lady in a TV-movie, the name of which is forever lost to time. 

So those are my bona fides and trust me when I say: this is a TV-movie with a real-movie cast. You got your big-city early-90s woman and her disappointing boyfriend. You got your sexual harasser client threatening her fledgling career. You got your non-threatening gay friend upstairs whose only personality is "helpful" (played by Frank from Succession!). You got your Chekov's conveniently-placed screwdriver. You got your cute puppy that you have to spend the whole movie worrying about due to stressful music cues. (Well....not the whole movie.) You got your villain sitting in a dark room saying "Where the hell have you been" before dramatically switching on a lamp. You got your shoebox full of extremely easy-to-piece-together dark secrets from the past. 

The star of this movie, to me, is the extremely distinctive bright red bowl cut sported by Bridget Fonda and then eventually by Jennifer Jason Leigh as well. The film probably doesn't work if Fonda's character has hair that is even remotely common, because JJL's decision to precisely mimic it cannot be interpreted as a reasonable style choice--it has to immediately register as the result of obvious psychopathy. "I would like to be a redhead, but also a mushroom," it says. Additionally, the combination of artificially bright hair and brown lipstick reminded me that I was safely ensconced in the warm bosom of the early to mid 1990s, where I belong. 

It's good that our main character (the hair) is so iconic because the other characters are a little hard to get behind. I do think Bridget Fonda and Steven Webber (the eventual recipient of the impaling-high-heel) probably belonged together just based on the weakness of their excuses when they're up to no good. (Bridget Fonda gets caught rifling through JJL's things: "I didn't know you were home." Steven Webber gets caught sleeping with his ex: "She's very depressed.") JJL does have some good creepy villainous scenes but her weird childhood hangup doesn't really track. ("Identical twins are never really identical," sure, okay, I'm with you, "there's always one that's prettier" uhhhhh I could not tell most twins apart if my life depended on it.) Stephen Tobolowsky is effective as a dude who you immediately know is going to be a problem, but the movie did make me worry that the ending was going to be a Jurassic Park situation where the attempted rapist (T-rex) comes in to take out the psycho stalker (raptors) and save the day. Fortunately that wasn't how it played out, but the almost-hero moment he gets is still tough. The other residents in this beautiful classy apartment building are also amusingly awful, just based on the fact that slightly loud rock music causes everyone in the building, including security, to spring into action within minutes, but a screaming fight to the death including slamming elevators doors and gunshots doesn't draw any response at all. Those are bad neighbors! I think the neighbors might be the real bad guys here!

Line I repeated quietly to myself: None, because the dialogue in this is just...perfunctory. It's not great and it's not really bad enough to be fun. You would think there would be more campiness, based on the lunacy of the movie as a whole, but I guess the hair is really sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I did chuckle when one of the prospective roommates gasped in dismay at the presence of a kitchen: "Oh, God, a kitchen." Godspeed rejected roommate, I hope you found that kitchen-free apartment you were looking for. I have been led to believe that in New York, anything is possible!

Is it under two hours: Yes

In conclusion: I basically used this film as an almost two-hour meditation on gratitude surrounding the fact that I am not currently in a position in my life to be seeking an adult stranger as a roommate. Very positive experience. Feeling grounded and calm. 

Perfect Scrambled Eggs from The Food Network

Heddy is a very bad roommate in many crucial ways, but she does make a nice-looking breakfast spread. I made a slightly less nice-looking breakfast spread because for some reason Alton Brown wanted me to melt the butter on high heat and it got all burnt and gross and my eggs were gray. What the hell, man? Low heat for eggs! Low heat. I'm pretty sure Alton would also be a very annoying roommate.

Up next: A summer hiatus while my family and I go look at a large hole

The Batman; Cappuccino Mousse

The Batman (2022)

Director: Matt Reeves

Had I seen this before: No

Ahhhhh, welcome back to Gotham City! There have been some subtle changes around town since my last post. It's now permanently nighttime, and also raining, and the ratio of men to women is 5000:1, and for some reason the Imperial March is playing very slowly in the background all the time. I actually approve of that last bit, for the record. Oh, and also: everyone is some degree of absolutely miserable, on a despair-spectrum ranging from Commissioner Lieutenant Gordon (hangdog, confused, seemingly unqualified for his job) to Selina Kyle (orphaned, wrathful) to Bruce Wayne (orphaned, sad) and The Riddler (orphaned, insane). It's so great to be back here with all our friends!

As soon as we opened on the creepy POV of a creep who is breathing creepily and creeping around in the rainy darkness, I made a decision: for the next three hours (three human hours!) I would be co-existing with a film that is not pitched at me in any way, and the best tactic would be to just accept that and stay alert for small things that brought me even the tiniest amount of joy. And I do not think it is any kind of exaggeration to say that the fact that I found several such things is a shining testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. To borrow a phrase from a different DC Comics property, I was not locked in the TV room with it. It was locked in the TV room with me. And my positive attitude.

First, credit where credit is due: I have to admit that the movie is pretty good about lampshading how inescapably goofy it is that this grown weirdo wearing a bat costume is just stomping around all over crime scenes. When one of the cops (correctly!!!!!!!!) complains to Lt. Gordon about Batman interfering with the chain of evidence, Jeffrey Wright (who plays Lt. Gordon like he's about to get hit with a spotlight and bust out Mr. Cellophane at any moment) kind of shrugs helplessly and says "He's wearing gloves." That's funny! On purpose!

Many other things amused me, although the degree to which they were meant to is up for debate (as always, spoilers abound): 

My favorite through-line of the film: the way Lt. Gordon is shocked, shocked and hurt, every time he discovers that one of his fellow cops is crooked, even though this happens about 27 times. 

My favorite instance of another character telling Batman he is an idiot: when The Penguin (played by Colin Ferrell, wearing the hollowed-out body of a character actor as a skin suit) makes fun of him for not knowing that it should be la rata, not el rata. 

My favorite proof that there are too many bird-adjacent things happening in this universe: they offer up at least half a dozen possibilities that fit the riddle "a rat with wings" and now I can't even remember which of them was the correct answer. 

My favorite line reading, hands down, please give him five Oscars: the deadpan way RPattz lobs "You gotta lotta cats" at Zoë Kravitz.

My favorite indication that The World's Greatest Detective is struggling: when he spray paints his evidence board on the floor and the clue "The sins of my father" is followed by two carefully spray-painted question marks. He really doesn't know what that means!!

My favorite scene that no amount of lampshading could keep from being completely hilarious to me: an adult man in his little bat outfit grimly perp-walking John Turturro through a building and all of the actual law enforcement just moving respectfully out of their way.

My favorite interpretation of the Ralph Wiggum "I'm helping" meme: Batman driving the wrong way down the highway at like 100 mph. At least it seems like that happened? I do not really pay attention to action sequences.

But you know what? By the time they entered the creepy abandoned asylum, the movie had mostly worn me down and I basically rubbed my hands together in an "okay, now we're talking" fashion. And it only took 91 minutes to get there!

Line I repeated quietly gruffly to myself more than once, and then again just now: "You gotta lotta cats"

Is it under two hours: I'm pretty sure the back-to-back John Turturro/Andy Serkis exposition scenes comprise almost two hours by themselves

In conclusion: Despite all my rage I am still just el rata in a cage.

Cappuccino Mousse from Betty Crocker

In what I can only hope is an intentional homage to the film Breathless, the only sustenance in this three hour movie is one (1) glass of milk and one (1) abandoned cup of coffee. Clearly everyone in Gotham is too emo to eat. I, on the other hand, being a huge fan of taking in calories and converting them into energy, upgraded The Riddler's carefully be-calling-carded cappuccino into a delightfully filling cup of mousse. 

I don't know if The Riddler has a catchphrase, but I assume it's something along the lines of "Do you get it? Tee hee hee!" It's also possible that I'm mixing up The Riddler and The CryptKeeper. 

Up next: Finding a roommate is hard

Batman; Crab Legs

Batman (1966)

Director: Leslie H. Martinson

Had I seen this before: Yes, many years ago at an Alamo Drafthouse screening that included a Q&A with Adam West and Burt Ward and I believe there was also a replica of the Batmobile parked out front

For the past couple of months, every time I've talked with my friend Alex about what I've been watching or should try to watch next, she has consistently offered up The Batman. Now, as far as I know, Alex has not seen The Batman nor does she have any specific enthusiasm for superhero movies. I am starting to wonder if she is perhaps on the Warner Bros payroll, employed to make extremely small, targeted recommendations around town. Or maybe it's just a newish movie that she has heard of. Anyway, The Batman is three hours long and looks boring and doesn't seem to have any colors in it, so I instead watched Batman, which is under two hours long and contains bat-branded shark repellant and boasts what I believe may be every color ever captured on film.

Just for the record, my personal bat-preference is Keaton/Burton, as I find the balance of comic book silliness, engaging action, and world-building aesthetic there the most entertaining. Also, Batman Returns is a Christmas movie which gives me a reason to rewatch it with some frequency. Generally speaking, I have no use for any of the following words in conjunction with comic books: gritty, wrenching, nihilist, angry, grim, we live in a society, etc. Some brooding is acceptable. I do not need comic villains to put me in mind of real-life serial killers. I do need them to be amusingly inept at recognizing Bruce Wayne behind his mask. Bonus points if the actor's face paint is applied over an obvious mustache. All of which is to say, if I had to lean one way or the other on the silly/serious superhero spectrum, I'm going West every time.

The 1966 Batman movie is just a slightly stretched-out version of the 60s Batman TV series: absurd, self-aware, antic, surprisingly horny. The amount of time Robin and Alfred spend talking around the propriety of watching surveillance footage of Batman hooking up with an in-disguise Catwoman in this movie that was definitely made for children is...I dunno, I'm going to say commendable. Batman spends about half of the movie in the Austin Powers Danger Zone of Randiness, basically drooling at the very idea of Lee Meriwether's Catwoman-as-Russian-journalist-character. I don't know why it doesn't irritate me when he does it, except maybe that it's a comedy and it's also the exact result Catwoman is trying to achieve in her job as an undercover agent, being the only one of the four featured supervillains who is competently fulfilling her duties re: evil agenda.

Speaking of the villains, one of the best things about this movie is their lair, which in this case is on a submarine. First of all, the aforementioned colors are outstanding--this cartoonish version of 1966 is incredibly vibrant and peppy. I also love that, just like in the Bat Cave, everything is labeled and on-brand. Catwoman's little electronic transmitter is shaped like a cat. The Penguin's version of a jet pack is a flying, rideable umbrella. The doors to what I assume are their sleeping quarters are all decorated, like in a freshman dorm. The personal branding in this film is so strong, it's like a bunch of influencers living together as roommates, sharing a nefarious plan for world domination. It's basically what I assume the show Hype House is about.

The other best thing about this movie is how thoroughly, gleefully nonsensical all the riddles and riddle-solving processes are. Having watched and read many somber detective stories wherein someone solves a clue that's a bit of a stretch and makes me think "...huh, I guess so?" it is very gratifying to see Adam West's mock-serious expression as The World's Greatest Detective goes to work on questions like "What weighs six ounces, sits in a tree, and is very dangerous?" (A sparrow with a machine gun.) As much as this running gag tickled me, it seemed to frustrate my more literal-minded viewing partner, who for some reason reacted with an exasperated sigh at the perfectly reasonable "What has yellow skin and writes?" (A ball-point banana.)

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Bon voyage, Pussy"

Is it under two hours: Yes, as previously noted

In conclusion: If you have a chance to travel back in time and see this at the Alamo Drafthouse with your friends and a few beers and the stars in attendance, I strongly recommend that as probably the peak viewing experience for this film. Otherwise it's pretty fun but drags a bit in places and will likely only result in moderate approval from your resident 12-year-old.

Crab Legs with Garlic Butter from Dinner at the Zoo

The best scene in the movie involves Batman running around a pier, trying to safely dispose of a very large, very fake-looking bomb without hurting any innocent bystanders. Said bystanders are, of course, everywhere he turns, some more intransigently locked into place than others. Two such immoveable objects are the women shown enjoying their meal of what I think are crab legs, to the extend that they cannot even be bothered to look over at a frantically shouting Batman.

I wanted a dinner that good.

Then I remembered that in my personal experience, crustaceans are the undefeated champions of not being worth the money or effort. Sorry to the crab lovers out there but I'm certain I could dip much less expensive things in garlic butter and achieve the same effect. But I do think that the bomb scene is probably worth three minutes of your time, and I still relate strongly to the women who are trying to enjoy their lunch, I just have to mentally substitute a giant plate of nachos to fully empathize.

Up next: Okay I lied I also watched The Batman

The Truman Show; Macaroni and Mococoa

The Truman Show (1998)

Director: Ron Howard Peter Weir

Had I seen this before: Yes, when it first came out

First of all, I had a very disorienting Mandela Effect situation with this movie wherein I was absolutely certain that Ron Howard directed it (Ron Howard narrator voice: "I did not") up until the end credits, which informed me that Peter Weir directed it. Master and Commander himself! Fortunately, I was able to solve this mystery very quickly by investigating Ron Howard's director credits and discovering therein Edtv. I have not actually seen Edtv, but I know that it came out one year later with a close enough premise to be confusing. I would say that my brain is thus vindicated but here is where I have to confess that my certainty that Ron Howard directed The Truman Show was immediately replaced by a certainty that the reason I was confused was that Ron Howard directed The Majestic with Jim Carrey around the same time (Ron Howard narrator voice, exhausted by me: "Also no") but it turns out that was Frank Darabont!! What a ride. Anyway, the funny thing is, I spent several scenes thinking "this doesn't seem like Ron Howard's directing style," so...there you go. That's me, a person who is almost knowledgeable about film.

It seems like there's plenty of intelligent writing about this movie being prescient about society and technology and theology and consumerism and the concept of self out there, if you're into that sort of thing, but that's not really what I do here. What I offer is a more tossed-off, surface-level analysis with some unnecessary navel-gazing about how old I was when it came out (eighteen!) and a picture of food at the end. Anyway. I liked this movie better than I expected to on re-watch. It seems like it might be the kind of movie that has a lot of famous scenes or has become a cultural concept (see: The Bucket List, for example) but maybe isn't great as an actual piece of filmmaking. But I gotta say, this thing really grabs you and doesn't let go. It probably helps that I tend to respond favorably when a movie has a built-in game that is obvious from the beginning because I have an anxious brain and I crave structure. So in this case, the game is: Truman will slowly realize things are amiss and try to escape, and the television production holding him hostage will try to prevent that from happening. That's all there is to this setup, and the movie shows its cards very early--there's not really any mystery to us, the audience, about what's going on, but I was impressed by how fun a lot of that back-and-forth was. As someone who reads and watches a lot of stuff in the horror/thriller genre I sometimes forget that knowing more than the characters do can be just as much of a thrill as trying to figure out what's happening.

I was fully prepared to give Mr. Ron Howard ("Please leave me alone") credit for making the absolute darkest movie with a PG rating that I can imagine--a truly harrowing existential crisis featuring some nauseating ethical breaches and the deepest betrayal and despair imaginable, all of which the MPAA is fine with as long as no one sees any boobs. But credit, of course, is to Weir (and also to screenwriter Andrew Niccol, since apparently Weir actually lightened it up a lot): this is really heavy stuff wearing a colorful comedy costume and the fact that it mostly works tonally is a neat trick. It also avoids seeming dated because the fictional world that Truman lives in is itself out of time--an ambiguously midcentury sitcom-style suburbia whose "perfection" provides its own menacing sheen.

Obviously the performances are crucial to making this story work. Carrey threads the needle as a man preposterously forged by a wholly unnatural environment who nevertheless has a real, vulnerable human soul on the inside. Laura Linney is so funny and maddening as the actress playing his wife who must not only keep Truman in-bounds but also constantly shill various commercial products to the invisible cameras all around her. The running gag of Noah Emmerich's character always showing up with a six pack of beer really got me and was also the hardest joke to explain to my 12-year-old, who does not have the depth of sitcom knowledge necessary to translate that character. Natascha McElhone has what I'm going to call a...confusing accent but a great face, and the great face reacting silently to what Truman is doing on screen is key. And it goes without saying that Ed Harris is believably terrifying. It is known.

Line I repeated quietly to myself Road sign I read out loud just like I do in real life: "Forest Fires, Extreme Danger"

Is it under two hours: Yes

In conclusion: This is a fun movie that goes down easy but can also really mess you up the second you think about any of the implications of the premise for more than a minute. A precarious achievement!

Classic Macaroni Salad from Foodie Crush and Starbucks Hot Cocoa mix Mococoa, all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua--no artificial sweeteners!

At one point Laura Linney's character comes downstairs to interrupt Truman in his search for answers about his father and his past, and when he irritatedly asks her what she needs she offers, "I made macaroni!" Frankly? A perfect response to someone who wants you to go away. 

Ergo, I made macaroni!

All I will say about this version of macaroni salad is that it seems like it would fit in very well in Seahaven.

Up next: Same bat time, same bat channel

Breathless; Deux Soufflés

Breathless (1960)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Had I seen this before: Yes, but I only remembered it as being about an annoying French guy trying to sleep with Jean Seberg

So as it turns out...this is mostly about an annoying French guy trying to sleep with Jean Seberg! I guess now that we've arrived at a Very Important Classic Film That Changed Everything it's time to issue my  disclaimer that I'm not true cinephile who is fluent in the academic language of film, I'm just a knucklehead who watches a lot of movies and occasionally tries to understand some film history and context. You will discover in my next post that I have a pretty hit-or-miss knowledge of directors, for example. So I try to mix quite a few older, often foreign, "important" things into my trashy American movie diet and sometimes I absolutely love those things and sometimes they are just not for me. I've beat my head against so many Ingmar Bergman films, I can't even tell you. Anyway, I recently watched a different Godard film and spent most of it feeling like I was in college again but in all the bad ways, so I thought I would try returning to the original hit and see if I could finally mine the elusive gem that is French New Wave. Or at the very least get some beauty shots of midcentury Parisian cuisine to replicate. Right?

Well...non. Unfortunately, all anyone consumes in this movie is cigarette smoke and the heady scent of their own bullshit. It's about a très disaffected young Parisian man and a string of inexplicably bad decisions that lead to his downfall over the course of one day and the fact that he sill somehow manages to spend about half of the film in full Pepé le Pew mode. It's not that I think the film is necessarily endorsing this particular approach to life--the very first line of the movie is "After all, I'm an asshole" so it's not like I wasn't warned! But I just found spending time with this guy almost unbearably tiresome. Even when I was a young person I was not really a "live fast die young leave a corpse with a smug expression and a cigarette hanging out of its mouth" kind of young person, and of course I have not in this current lifetime ever been French, so maybe that's why I struggled to connect with these characters. I guess lines like "I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy" might have resonated with 20-year-old Erica? She was a little bit melodramatic sensitive and poetic.

But I don't think the relentless misogyny would have resonated, even in the early 2000s when relentless misogyny was the style du jour. Sooooooo much of the runtime of this movie consists of the main character complaining about women and then calling Jean Seberg's character "mean" and "a coward" because she is not currently having sex with him. She is also sexually harassed by a big important author while trying to do her job as a journalist. And by a fellow journalist, come to think of it. And it doesn't seem like the movie thinks this is a problem, it's just evidence in the case that the main character is building that "Two things are important in life: for men, women; for women, money." And I know that I am currently even less receptive to, uh, men's very deep philosophical thoughts about what's wrong with women than usual, but it's like...I'm just so glad you're here to shake up the uptight establishment with your youthful energy and new ideas, young Frenchmen! I tip my hilariously oversized hand-rolled cigarette to you.

Fine, some things I appreciated: it obviously has a sense of style. The music, the aesthetic, let me check my notes here...ah yes, it just says "Paris 1960" with a bunch of little hearts drawn all around it. I would actually love to hang out in these cafés and apartments by myself or perhaps with some French people who do not insist on being so aggravating at every turn. I liked when the main character broke the fourth wall in the beginning. I liked when one character just fondled a model airplane for no reason while being questioned by police. I liked when Jean Seberg said "Qu'est-ce que c'est l'horoscope?" I wanted to cut off all my hair and wear flats and ride around in a Cadillac and look ennui-stricken for the duration. I kept feeling myself trying to generate good will for the characters just by siphoning off the pulsing energy of the setting.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Je suis fatigué. Très fatigué."

In conclusion: Am I supposed to be sad at the end? Amused? Angry? Is it because of my inferior female brain that I just could not summon any feelings at all about this man or his fate?

Chocolate Soufflé from Martha Stewart and Easy Spinach Soufflé from Allrecipes

As I mentioned before, no one in this film takes in any sustenance aside from a couple of gulps of milk near the end. Even when someone orders a coffee it is ignored and abandoned. These people, I swear. I therefore decided to honor the original French title, À bout de souffle, with a couple of breathy concoctions that I could stagger away from very dramatically.

So if I'm being honest, I figured that by doing one "real" soufflé and one "shortcut" soufflé, there was about a 5% chance that they would turn out equally light and airy and I would never again waste my time going through the proper egg-separating steps and a 95% chance that I would demonstrate exactly why it is not a waste of time to go through the proper egg-separating steps. Alas, l'horoscope de soufflé did not smile on us this day, mes amis.

Now, did I hedge my bets by making sure that the successful soufflé was the chocolate one, rather than the spinach one? And that the chocolate one was significantly larger? Oui, and I will not be taking further questions at this time.

Up next: Confirmation of my long-held suspicion that Ed Harris is secretly controlling everything around me

Point Break; Shrimp and Fries

Point Break (1991)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Had I seen this before: No

I spent a lot of this movie thinking about how 1991 is a sort of liminal space in my mind--it's both the weird half-lit hallway between the 80s and 90s and, for me personally, the weird half-lit hallway between elementary school and middle school. That means a lot of the more grown-up movies from this time period have fallen through the cracks for me because I was slightly too young to see them when they came out but was aware enough of their place in the culture that it never seemed necessary to circle back around to them. It also means the aesthetics of this movie are hard to nail down--some scenes feel very 80s-action-movie but there is a whiff of 90s in the air. For example, it's still the era of dudes just wearing full blue jeans to do beach activities. (See also: Top Gun, and I don't know if you remember but jeans were not thin and stretchy like they are now! They were thick and unforgiving! These pants were made to protect you on the cattle trail, gentlemen! One of many life choices depicted in this film that I will never understand.) But something about the way the bank robbery scenes are shot feel like they are moving the form into the future, and the Bodhi character is just one step ahead of the early-90s hippie revival trend. You can almost hear the strains of "Two Princes" somewhere in the atmosphere, the good doctors spinning us forward into the coming decade.

Let's just get this out of the way: Johnny Utah is an objectively funny name. I assume, since the character is a former football player, that it's a reference to Joe Montana? But before I actually saw this movie I had always assumed that Johnny Utah was like...an alias or a call sign or something. It's not! It's just this square FBI agent's name! Early in the movie you really get the full force of how funny it is when he says "The name's Johnny Utah!" and Lori Petty yells "Who cares!" Listen...I lol'd.

Speaking of Lori Petty, one problem with watching a movie thirty years after it came out is I have often already racked up some strong associations with various actors from their later work. So to me, Lori Petty is our other daughter...Dottie's sister. And I can't take John C. McGinley seriously as mean boss when he is already goofy boss. And most egregiously, Lee Tergesen, who plays a scary man ready to kill Dottie's sister, is 100% the cameraman from Wayne's World who doesn't say two or one. I cannot be scared of this man. But I think it sometimes works the other direction too, in the movie's favor. Coming into this in 1991 I might be tempted to think to myself Keanu is not good at acting, in this case. But now, older and wiser, I know that there is no good or bad, there is only Keanu. Like the many waves in this movie, you can only harness his energy and ride with it. And I did.

Overall the action here is a little too serious and too violent for my taste, but I did enjoy when it went fully over-the-top, which was fairly often--I like when it's just some bros wrestling while on fire, or in the ocean, or free-falling for like six minutes somehow. And when Lori Petty gets mad at Keanu she doesn't just yell at him, she walks into the room where he's sleeping and shoots the pillow next to his head. With a gun. Not to mention the chase scene wherein our ostensible hero fully drop-kicks a dog. Can you believe there was a dog-kicker in this movie and it wasn't Gary Busey? Obviously I am not condoning such behavior, but I usually zone out during chase scenes and let me tell you that snapped me right back to attention. Did he just kick a dog?? This is a film that makes CHOICES.

It's also very funny to me that these extremely competent bank robbers only get caught because one of them moons everybody on the way out the door and shows off a significant tan-line, and then a hair sample shows that they are all being mildly poisoned very specifically by the beach they frequent. Find the beach with the arsenic, says the FBI! This kind of thing plus Dana Scully and Clarice Starling are exactly why I wanted to be an FBI agent until like 1997.

Line I repeated quietly loudly to myself: "I am an EFF BEE EYE agent!"

Is it under two hours: Oooooooooh so close, 2 hrs 1 minute

In conclusion: I tried to determine whether I could tell that a woman made this movie, and I'm not sure I would have picked up on it if I hadn't already known--in some scenes there does seem to be an aura of "Men...why are they like this" but I might just be projecting. All they know is wear jeans on the beach, punch faces while surfing, rob banks, jump out of airplanes, eat hot chip and lie. I'm glad I've now seen this movie and I probably won't need to revisit it. What can I say but vaya con dios.

Baja Shrimp Loaded Fries from Potato Goodness

Look, if someone who looked like Keanu Reeves walked up to my beachside food shack and soulfully ordered shrimp and fries and then soulfully used a trauma from my past that he secretly looked up in my FBI file to manipulate me into teaching him to surf, I would teach him to surf. Even if his name was, improbably, Johnny Utah.

And I don't even like shrimp!

Up next: I wrestle to the staggering death with a classic of the French New Wave

Miss Congeniality; Forbidden Pizza

Miss Congeniality (2000)

Director: Donald Petrie

Had I seen this before: No

Okay. I was not going to write about this film. It's a movie that people seem to have fond memories of and there are a lot of iconic gags from it and it's not fun for me to roll in twenty years later and be like "that movie you liked a long time ago isn't good, FYI." Who cares? I like a lot of stuff from a long time ago that isn't good. But then I dropped taco sauce on a pillow while I was writing a different post and for a moment it made me feel like Agent Gracie Hart and, I dunno, I came back around to it. Because, like many flawed movies, it is sort of an interesting time capsule. It made me remember the six month stretch when everyone wore body glitter on their shoulders when they went out! And there is so much eating.

The April 25th thing is what lured me in. Year after year, the internet celebrates Miss Congeniality Day before I've even taken down my Rex Manning Day tree. And I love to be involved in stakes-free holiday celebrations! I figured that I was already aware of, conservatively, 90% of the successful jokes in the movie and it wouldn't hurt to see the bits that string them together. Unfortunately, the bits that string them together were crafted and executed in the accursed year 2000, when comedies were mean-spirited and that certain je ne sais quoi was actually just run-of-the-mill sexism.

Obviously I knew, based on the premise, that things would be a little dicey. The entire story is just Sandra Bullock being emphatically Not Like Other Girls, who are silly and superficial. And we're supposed to be on her side when she says that "harsher penalties for parole violators" is the one most important thing our society needs. The one most important thing! And I wasn't surprised at the running gay panic plot line between Benjamin Bratt and Michael Caine, although I was a little surprised at how over-the-top the reaction to one of the contestants using the word "lesbian" on stage was. It's easy to forget that being deathly afraid of the existence of gay people was just a solidly mainstream position in 2000.

But the thing that really got to me was how much certain jokes didn't make sense even accounting for movie comedy logic. To be clear, I understand this genre and the required suspension of disbelief involved in looking at Sandra Bullock and pretending she isn't obviously attractive. I don't mean that part. What I mean is, even if we accept the movie's premise that 1) being thin is beautiful and 2) many women pursue a severely restricted diet as the path to beautiful thinness, why doesn't anyone seem aware that Gracie 1) eats an arterially-concerning amount of junk food and 2) is just as thin as any other contestant there? Where are their eyeballs? They picked her for this job because she already looks conventionally "good" in a swimsuit, so clearly whatever she's been doing up to this point is working. Why are they yanking sandwiches out of her hands and giving her a celery stick? What part of Gracie's body are they proposing they remove fat from? Like, brush her hair, add some mascara, glitter up those shoulders, sure, but this insistence that she starve herself makes every character in this movie seem insane!

The film is also just generally unkind to its characters in a way that I think has fallen out of fashion in more modern comedies and it made me feel sort of bummed out the whole time. There are very talented actors selling these lines in a way that make them work--not just Sandy but Michael Caine and Candice Bergen and William Shatner, some real hall-of-famers. But if you just look at the dialogue as written, or scroll through the quotes page on IMDB, it's got a pretty unpleasant energy.

Line I repeated quietly to myself in a flawless Michael Caine: "It's all in the butt-ocks, don't I look prettyyyyy."

Is it under two hours: Yes

In conclusion: I want to reiterate that there's nothing wrong with liking this movie. I liked a lot of parts of this movie. Plus, one of my favorite Sandra Bullock movies is While You Were Sleeping, which has a deranged premise and some very questionable choices. I also recently talked up a movie that is pretty rough on its characters! I just found that coming to this one late resulted in a generally downbeat experience for me. And for the record: the April 25th bit is funny and no one here is mad at Heather Burns and I have no problem adding this observation to my personal calendar because I am a complex and nuanced thinker!

Pizza Crust from King Arthur Baking, with sausage, tomato, olives, and bell pepper

Food in this film is plentiful but also incredibly fraught. It's mostly used to cartoonishly distinguish Gracie from all the women around her--she's the hot lady who eats like a teenage boy, teehee, while the other hot ladies aren't cool enough to hide how much work it is to be hot, boooooo. So Sandra Bullock gets plenty of hammy (pun intended) eating scenes--a sloppy hamburger, some nonsense product placement from Starbucks, an entire pint of ice cream at the bar, a steak that she practically shoves in her face with her hands.

But the other women in this movie only eat once, and it is when Gracie finally breaks down their poor half-starved defenses with a hot pizza. You know the part in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion where they're making fun of Pretty Woman but then Michele suddenly gets emotional and says "I just get really happy when they finally let her shop"? That was me, with this movie. Sighing and eye-rolling but then...I just get really happy when they finally let them eat.

The dough needed more salt, but I figured this post was probably already salty enough.

Up next: Sandy's Speed co-star takes his own turn as a subculture-infiltrating FBI agent