An alcoholic is always between dicks…

Alco-bollocks Anonymous.

Hey, Alcoholics, Do you really want to be portrayed this way? Not only having to go through the physical pain of withdrawal, the humiliation of prostrating yourself in front of snide voyeurs, the loss of income, respect and friendship, now you also have to endure 28 DAYS representing your rehabilitation as kindergarten for grownups with mental disorders. So, uh, you love watching soap operas and not having sex and chanting slogans like incognizant dummies? This movie tells me so. You don’t like it, take it up with Columbia Pictures…

Sandra Bullock is having way too much of a good time to be a good christian. She’s fun drunk Gwen, and along with fun-drunk boyfriend Jasper (Dominic West), she ruins sister Elizabeth Perkins‘s wedding with her douchey dancing and falling into the cake and stealing the limousine and have we hit rock bottom yet? Well, maybe in real life; but in cinema, we’ve just hit the first ten minutes of Teen Movie.

Sentenced to 28 days in rehab or jail, Gwen chooses that option that we’d all choose because we’re exploiting the system that considers alcoholism a disease.

If you know the first thing about rehab centers – not just those under the AA banner – you’ll know that each of them operates under a different set of rules, condescendingly looking down on other centers’ protocols. Oops! Gwen gets one of those centers that confiscates your meds (as if to spite her); ulp! It’s one of the God-is-Great places; oh, and they chant (“ho ho ho – alcohol has got to go!” “keep your whiskey sours – we are blah blah higher powers”) and – shit! – this is one of those toilet-cleaning places.

Other members include Alan Tudyk (an especially zealous member, who can’t seem to decide what accent he wants to use), Reni Santoni (being Dirty Harry’s partner will land you here), Mike O’Malley (who wants to bullock Sandy). And a Meet Cute with the love interest for the sake of swoony girlies – it’s AA – Alcoholic Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen, this close to the release of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, looking like man meat about to be jumped by groupies. Or orcs.).

A solid performance from Steve Buscemi as the counselor, serious as a relapse. He gives Gwen books – “literature about your disease,” which means it really isn’t “literature” in the common usage of the word, if it considers alcoholism a disease. (Let’s get this straight, Alcoholics: nowhere in any medical literature – real literature – will you find alcohol listed as a “disease”; the only “disease” associated with alcoholism is when your liver catches on fire – then you’ve got liver disease.) He relates a story to his “group” about waking on a sidewalk covered in blood, and I realized… You people just loooove these vicarious war stories, don’t you? It’s sob-story paradise; it’s voyeur delight; it’s reality TV, every lick-your-lips mishap and outrageous party turd in the swimming pool. Soak it up, Spongebob.

Of course, Jasper is shown as irresponsible so that Gwen can make out with Aragorn in good conscience. Which she does. But what if Jasper wasn’t irresponsible? What if he was 9-to-5, and helping her recover, and going straight himself? Well, let’s see… Jasper visits one day, proposes marriage, and says he’ll go straight for her. There is no indication this is just a ruse or a lark. (It’s probably impossible to adhere to, but that’s not the point – his intention is sincere.) What does Gwen do? “I can’t stand this ‘straighten up and fly right’ shit!” Then what DO you want? If you can’t stand it when your man goes straight, and if you can’t stand it for yourself, would you prefer jail? Oh, no thanks, unlike AA and all its Jesus talk, jail is real. As soon as Sandy says that line, this depressing propaganda turns into contradictory dungbeetle. No surprise. AA thrives on contradictions. Here’s a good one: “Only God has the power to get you straight” – but apparently he didn’t have the power to keep you sober in the first place.

Jasper keeps telling her she’s fine, that she’s just in a rut, that she’s not an “alcoholic” – but she keeps denying his positive claims! Waitaminute! Isn’t it one of this cult’s tenets that chanting “Ho ho ho – liquor’s gotta go!” enables you to stay off the liquor? By that logic, shouldn’t repeatedly telling her, “You’re fine you’re fine you’re fine” make her well? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to append the dickhead rhyming word: “hine hine hine – you’re fine you’re fine you’re fine.” Are we feeling good about ourselves yet, goshdarnit?

It’s not exactly AA, but it’s close enough, and we know that anyone who creates this sort of quasi-preachy media has been shredded through the AA machine a few times. Good for you, director Betty Thomas and writer Susannah Grant – you kicked your habit, you “got sober” for a few months to schlep this message movie into being. I’m happy for you. But you know, your group didn’t do it. God didn’t do it. YOU did. And you weren’t “cured.” You just stopped drinking.

And why can’t you accept that you were solely to blame for your transgressions? Why do you take revenge on all “sober” people by painting them in your movie as nitpickers and anal retentive pricks that have no sense of humor? Y’know, if someone fell into your wedding cake or peed in your punch, I’d like to see YOU try to retain a sense of humor. Why is every drunk in this movie an intrinsically ethical, decent person? Why are they portrayed as poor little fragile pusses not responsible for their actions?

O’Malley’s doughy guy character is constantly coming onto Gwen. Does she reciprocate? Does she even consider not treating him like an infant, with that snide snigger every time he flirts with her? Matter of fact, everything he says is placed in the “creep” bin; not one person in the film or in the audience takes this guy’s overtures seriously! Why? Because we’ve been conditioned by assholic Hollywood convention to believe that doughy guys just don’t mate. Their genes are going to die out soon, to be replaced by genes from Dominic West and Viggo Mortensen. This lesson is paid forward, backward and sideways into every single Hollywood movie.

Pity no one gleans the real lessons this film has to offer. Example: Gwen’s roommate (Azura Skye) overdoses the day before she is scheduled to leave. Lesson? Proof that the program doesn’t work for everyone, just those who are strong enough to kick their addiction. And if rehab only works for the strong, it means the weak will always relapse, which means they’re wasting everyone’s time. Why don’t we let their “diseased” genes die out so as not to multiply into the human species? Ignore lesson. Continue doing what you’re doing, i.e. drinking or not drinking… makes no difference…

END

Sufferin’ Surgeons!

Many times THE DOCTOR crouches about to pounce on intrinsic deficiencies beclouding medical bureaucracy, then shies away at almost every opportunity.

Imperious and detached doctor MacKee (the remarkable William Hurt) is diagnosed with cancer and is somehow thrown in amongst the rabble (i.e. average hospital patients) instead of being given preferential treatment for being a surgeon. Amongst the afflicted low-class masses MacKee undergoes the same tribulations all the rest of us go through every single time we are humiliated into being a patient at the hands of god-minded doctors – things like not being able to find his files, being patronized, being made to fill out forms, being made to wait (you know, be “patient”). He realizes how out-of-touch he is with his own hospital and its dehumanizing protocols. However, his ultimately smooth operation and recovery tempers the humiliating difficulties he was made to suffer, so I’m not buying the movie’s resolution, where he retains the horrors of patient-dom fresh in his mind and makes efforts to palliate them.

Also, he’s a doctor. Read as financially stable. His wallet is completely unaffected, thereby negating whole chains of effects that compound problems between patients, their afflictions and hospitals.

Second act enters Chick Flick mode when MacKee’s marriage falters (with Christine Lahti – who does a great “sad smile” – playing the troubled wife more as a device than a real person) and he leans on fellow patient (pert, young and pale Elizabeth Perkins) for psychological support. Platonically. Doubt this faux-romance would have flared up had Perkins been 58 and slightly paunchy.

The disdain that the black hole vortex of the medical profession piles on us non-medical civilians cannot be assuaged by this shallow fantasy, which ends with MacKee reconciling his marriage (after his platonic pillar dies) and then forcing his med students to pretend patienthood for 72 hours to experience patient humiliation.

Though addressing the problem from the wrong end, it is a nice sentiment. But I doubt any of those wealthy surgeons who consider themselves god will ever feel our merely human unaffordable pain.

END

A Muddle-Headed Miracle.

WARNING TO DIABETICS: The syrup content of MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET is so high that the surgeon general advises not to watch it, for danger of inducing diabetic neuropathy and gastroparesis.

Les Mayfield (ENCINO MAN) directs this remake of the 1947 “classic,” about a Coles store Santa who claims to be “Kris Kringle” (Richard Attenborough), and is taken to court charged with assault (the “Santa” impersonator whom Kris replaced at Coles provoked Kris into assaulting him), whereby the assault charge is forgotten and the case instead turns to “whether Santa Claus is real.” And we wonder why there are so many innocent people in jail…

Elf Poffy, child slave to Klaus Kringlehoffen.

Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) is responsible for hiring Kris at Coles, with a cynic daughter, Susan (Mara Wilson), who ironically doesn’t believe in Santa. Not until all her outlandish wishes are granted, at least. Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDermott) is the hunk next door who helps Kris win in court and helps himself to finding Dorey.

Like a straightjacketed epileptic, this film bashes itself against hundreds of paradoxes, in frothing attempts at taking one step forward (in its high-end production value and A-list acting) and then three or four steps backwards into the mouth of Hell (with its thigh-numbing sentiments of goodness and niceness and the utility of believing in figments as reality). MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET is one of those well-intentioned, “dangerous” movies – the type over-popularized in the last two decades by brain-damaging fare like the HOME ALONE’s and the CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN’s, which purport to wholesome family entertainment, whilst insidiously intimating that intelligence and reason are only for fools.

The greatest paradox faced by any Santa-Is-Real film is that in the film’s world, it is always taken for granted that Santa DOES exist and that parents do not believe in him. But if he actually exists, it is not a question of “belief” – it is a case of “evidence.” All it takes is one christmas morning and a cluster of unidentified presents under the christian-killed tree and – question of veracity solved! Therefore, in these movies, if the parents are, in fact, buying all the presents, there are two possibilities: either Santa does exist and is not visiting anyone, or Santa doesn’t exist, which is why you parents had to buy all the crap under the tree. Occam’s Razor tells us to go with the simpler of the two possibilities.

Yet through the course of this film, all the humbugs and doubting parents in Kris’s jolly wake gradually get overtaken by some kind of delusion (sometimes called “the christmas spirit” in pagan texts), and are cajoled into “believing” in Santa, for the sake of, we are told, “a lie that draws a smile, rather than a truth that draws a tear.” Yes, turn away from Truth. Truth is bad. Better to delude yourself that Mercury in retrograde is the cause of your lost wealth, rather than betting it all on a card game. Better to believe in astrology, rather than facing the truth that you are a DIMWITTED MORON STEERING YOUR SPECIES INTO EVOLUTIONARY OBLIVION.

Sir Attenborough makes for a perfect visual representation of the mythical, peeping-tom, child-watcher Klaus (render as much Nazi inflection as you see fit), ably supported by intentionally-retarded performances by Perkins, McDermott, James Remar as an attorney, Robert Prosky as a judge and young Mara Wilson, playing her usual seven-going-on-forty, precocious, mouthy brat. (Why “intentionally-retarded”? Well, the longest anyone would ever have to wait to establish whether Santa existed or not is 364 days. In MIRACLE, the wait is only a few days, yet the filmmakers conveniently avoid the issue by neglecting to tell viewers whether any presents mysteriously appeared under trees.)

The fact that this movie astoundingly retains as its central theme the conundrum that any semi-intelligent dolphin could decipher as unutterably imbecilic, illustrates perfectly the reason why mercy killings exist. This movie almost cries out for humanity to beat it over the head to put it out of its misery.

Before his arrest, Kris – in his naïve goodheartedness – was advising Coles patrons of better bargains at other stores. Immediately, Coles management jumps on the marketing ploy: “If we don’t have it, we’ll find it for you.” Now, as altruistic as this may sound, the corporate heads realize the reverse-psychology is garnering more business! With the public embracing Coles as helpful, their rival department store seethes with lost-business fury! Conveniently located across the street, the rival store is managed by a game Joss Ackland (playing the same evil overlord he perfected in LETHAL WEAPON 2 and BILL AND TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY), who goes after the person responsible for the campaign to discredit him. No, not someone in the Coles marketing department, nosiree; in his tactical wisdom, he goes after the bottom rung employee, the Coles Santa Claus.

Idiocy soars.

As evidenced when Perkins, recanting on her brain, poses the question to the Coles board of directors when they are considering ceasing Kris’s “ploy” of recommending other stores, “What do we care about? Profit?” Well – YES, you jackass! Why are you working here? Charity? And the only reason she convinces them to retain Kris is because of the PROFITS they are seeing!

Kris tells Dorey, “If you can’t accept anything on faith, then you’re doomed for a life dominated by doubt.” Yes, but Kris, if you use the scientific method of observation, skepticism, theory, experiment, amassing evidence, replacing outmoded knowledge with updated facts, a cohesive picture of what you doubted will come into focus. And we wonder why America, in the 2000s bows down to a megalomaniac who cannot separate church from state (at a base level, this means he cannot separate fact from fiction – exactly this movie’s problem!); we wonder why science is taking a backseat to pseudoscience; we wonder why it is so easy to sell people an ab-roller that “takes pounds off” their fugly gunts without any effort expended on their part, yet who cannot be convinced that proteins, carbohydrates, fats and sugars in correct amounts can winnow away that same fat.

The miracle is that, for all its vaunted intelligence, the human race has degenerated to this credulous, gullible, mongoloid state.

Treat others with respect. Be humane. Be courteous. Love. Sex (as in verb). Let live. These are universal truths, built into our genetic framework, in order to perpetuate procreation of our species. There are those who maintain the movie’s aspirations to goodheartedness and the “spirit of christmas” should not be belittled. They are right – the SENTIMENTS should be upheld. But why couch these truths in the filth of mysticism and hypocrisy, in the framework of paradoxical fictions that insult the truly inspiring, knowledge-seeking mind?

Claus affirms, “I’m a symbol to suppress the hateful tendencies that rule a major part of our lives.” Firstly, if “hateful tendencies,” as you so pessimistically put it, Klaus, “ruled our lives,” homo sapiens would have been excised from the pathway of evolution eons ago. Our adherence to social structure and reciprocal altruism is what has kept us alive. That being said, if modern day humans are so braindead that they require an effigy to represent faux-spirituality and faux-goodness (whether it be Santa, Jesus, Thor, Buddha, or Tom Cruise), we’ve put ourselves on the pathway out of evolutionary selection. Give it fifty-thousand years. The roaches would thank us – if we were not already below their contempt.

The grandest malarkey of all is that the case for or against Kris Kringle – a phantasm to begin with – is decided on the grounds of another phantasm. Bryan, Kris’s attorney, highlights the fact that American money is inscribed with the words, “In God We Trust.” On the strength of this vague indeterminacy, the judge rationalizes that one fiction is as good as another and rules that Santa Claus does, in fact, exist.

Piling insult upon insult on the viewer, Klaus then tells the prosecuting attorney (J.T. Walsh), “I hope you removed that antenna because I tore my pants on it last year.” This must mean that Klaus left anonymous presents at the attorney’s house. Evidence! So the only reason Walsh refutes Santa’s existence must be either short term memory loss or retardation. Choose one, movie.

As we gag in disbelief at the level of insanity attained in the movie’s last ten minutes, we remember Sarah’s Christmas wish – “a house, a brother, a dad” – anything else, like 40 acres and a mule, you little snot? And just to make our heads explode: Bryan and Dorey suddenly wed at movie’s end, both advised of work bonuses (which accounts for Dorey’s chunky wedding ring), and then take possession of a mansion mysteriously bequeathed to them. And if the movie is to comply to all the wishes of the whining spoiled bitch at its heart, I suppose Dorey has a bun up the duff as well.

This makes Susan very happy, because that’s what happiness is all about – having lots of money and a house that is fully paid for, living in a family with great-looking people with great hair, because those are the most loving and sincere of all humans. And if you believe in a fiction hard enough, you will win your court case.

I wish for some insulin.

END