Portrait of a man at peace with the boss phrasing of the graffiti he just left.

Wanna know how I got these (O)scars?…

Joaquin Phoenix is unpredictable, funny, disturbing, and when you meet him, he might just kill you. In JOKER, he won the 2020 Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Actor… But was he really acting?

JOKER, like STEPHEN KING’S IT, shows clowns for what they really are: insecure, unbalanced, traumatized sociopaths. Again, was Joaquin Phoenix even acting?

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joaquin Phoenix in JOKER, a movie that follows—no, wait… Joaquin Phoenix plays Ben Affleck in JOKER, a movie—no… Joaquin Phoenix is Arthur Fleck (i.e. A. Fleck!?) in JOKER, a movie that follows the origin of Batman’s sauciest nemesis, yet tells us nothing about the origin of Batman’s sauciest nemesis! Movie Maniacs, if you thought JOKER would solidify canon on Bill Finger’s most unhinged arch-villain, you’re in for a Joker-like conundrum. We never do figure out whether the tales of Arthur Fleck’s childhood are true, or the rantings of a disturbed woman, or the coverup of a rich man.

Arthur works as a clown for an agency in Gotham, a city seething with discontent; no jobs, filthy streets, citizens walking a tightrope of subsistence and destitution, crime rampant. And for the first time, a movie about crime isn’t satisfied with showing thugs robbing grocery stores as a shorthand for “crime,” instead, clearly links the policies of politicians (taking away healthcare, corporate corruption, etc.) to the people suffering on the streets, showing how the upper classes cause the rise in lower class crime.

Arthur visits his therapist and laments, “It’s getting crazy out there.” Now I don’t usually like the term “out there” to represent society, because it’s too amorphous, but in this movie, writer Scott Silver and co-writer/director Todd Phillips show all those small things that gradually wear you down to bare wire, brought about by the rich tweaking society so that the wealth runs uphill to them.

The moviemakers have crafted an homage to that classic 1988 Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke, in which The Joker sneers, “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy,” then goes about trying to make that bad day happen for his protagonists. JOKER uses Dinah Washington’s song What A Diff’rence A Day Made to imply the same concept, then goes about making that bad day happen to Arthur himself, to drive him over the edge into Joker. The villain in 80 years of comicbooks is the protagonist here. There are other allusions to Killing Joke: Arthur trying to break into the world of standup comedy; and the Alan Moore-penned line, “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.”

Arthur lives with his old mother Penny (Frances Conroy). The intimacy in their relationship raises the hairs a little (as we see him bathe her, and waltz with her); she is at that advanced age that makes her feeble of mind and body, so we are on the cusp of being heartened and disturbed with Arthur’s care. He uncovers something secret she wrote to the billionaire who owns Gotham, Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen, who was in DARK KNIGHT RISES as a congressman); something about “your son” needing help… Stealing his mother’s records from Arkham State Hospital (back before it was Arkham Asylum), Arthur discovers she suffered from “delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder” (same condition as Dumbo Donald!)… So… is Arthur the son of Thomas Wayne? Which would make him Bruce Wayne’s half-brother?! Or is Penny Fleck hallucinating?…

From outside the high locked gate of Wayne Manor, Arthur cajoles a young boy to come closer – until a fit young man named Alfred drives Arthur off the property, while telling the boy, “Get inside, Bruce!” — Did we just see what we thought we saw? The first meeting of The Joker and Batman? We did! We did taw a puddy tat!

Zazie Beetz (DEADPOOL 2) is the girl next door, whom Arthur starts a tentative relationship with. But again – did we just see what we thought we saw?

Comparison with Heath Ledger’s cataclysmic clown prince is inevitable; like Heath, Phoenix puts his everything into this character, not only frying his body mass to play this sinewed, literally twisted, agonized outcast, he also adopts a timid mien, replete with twitches and stutters and a stoop-shouldered, sunken-chested carriage. Adding to Arthur’s insecurity, he has a condition where he laughs uncontrollably (mainly during times of anxiety), and Phoenix has made this Tourette-cackle his very own flesh-crawling thing.

Mark Hamill’s cartoon Joker might possess the best unbalanced guffaw, but Phoenix’s painful unbidden yowls send chills up our spines. When privileged yachtniks bully Arthur on the train, we see terror on his face, not just because he knows his incongruous laughter will make them mock him more fiercely, but that his jowls seem to ache as they contort his face against his wishes.

And when Arthur attends a comedy show to take notes (following his dream to be a standup comedian) he forces laughs which are decidedly vapid when he spies other people laughing around him – meaning he can’t actually laugh at funny, only cackles uncontrollably at pain. What a performance! And when Arthur actually embraces his destiny and shoots his oppressors – note the subtle foley effect of the ringing in his ears! – that cackle while he’s crying inconsolably!…

Uh… Heath Who?…

Portrait of a man trying (and failing) to look as disturbed as Jay Leno’s chin.

Let’s talk THE KING OF COMEDY. Rupert Pupkin is here, playing Robert De Niro. He wanted to be just like Jerry Lewis, and now he’s got his own show! De Niro is Murray Franklin, a smarmy unfunny vanilla talk show host (so basically, ‘a talk show host’), whose national show Arthur desires to perform on, so much so that he fantasizes he is singled out by Murray in the audience and brought onstage.

Much of this movie flirts with fantasy, so subtlely that some theories suggest this whole movie is taking place in Arthur’s head. We have to believe there is some bedrock “reality” to this tale, otherwise what’s the point in having a plot or throughline if it’s merely one step above Patrick Duffy in the shower?

We imagine De Niro must bear some modicum of respect for Phoenix, for morphing his body in a way similar to that of De Niro’s in RAGING BULL (1980). Phoenix is shriveled here, but just last year, he was bulked up for YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (for which he won Best Actor at Cannes).

Arthur’s admiration of Murray turns to bile when Murray shows a clip of Arthur at an open mic night, trying to squeeze out his jokes between gales of pain-laughing, with Murray mocking him, calling him “a Joker.” Thus, Arthur decides then and there he wants to be just like Robert De Niro in TAXI DRIVER and kill a buncha fools.

The meta threatens to eat us alive.

JOKER is set in 1981, but it feels like earlier (with its street dressing, its fashions, Thomas Wayne at a screening of Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES), but then the writers make a giant sociological mistake that makes it seem like today.

Who films open mic acts in 1981?

Laughing like nobody’s glistening.

This most outlandish plot point is the catalyst for Arthur’s violent denouement. Which means the film’s climax was predicated on a concatenation of events that could not possibly have existed in 1981. Let’s say someone does film open mics in dive bars (to eke out new talent), why are they sending this particular performance to Murray’s show? There’s no hook  – just some guy bombing hard. Why would Murray ever bother to broadcast it on a national TV show? And if he does broadcast it, why mock this obvious nobody? Why was Murray punching down to these subterranean levels? Was there no other news of the day to make jokes about? Except this novice who had not yet honed his craft? Any host who allows this unfiltered dreck on his show deserves a bullet to the head.

THIS IS 1981. When your dad had maybe bought a VCR but was at least 2 years away from buying a VHS video camera. This is not the sick social media climate of the 2010s (where everyone films everything Just To Watch The World Burn). So which fanatic with a portable video camera is filming Arthur? Or is it Murray’s crew, scouting open mics with their broadcast cameras? And if so, why rail on a reject?

It’s like the writers are so immersed in the spineless cancel culture of modern times that they can’t conceive of a time when people had better things to do than bully strangers on video. The tragedy is that modern audiences don’t even see this plot point as a misstep, because they too cannot conceive of a simpler time when wasting videotape on such mundane nothingness would have been the height of reckless stupidity. Nowadays this kind of dunderheaded idiocy is called the United States presidency.

Dancing like nobody knows you’ve killed anyone.

They look like the stairs from THE EXORCIST (in Washington DC, Prospect and 36^th), but they’re in The Bronx (Anderson Ave and West 167^th). And they’re One Big Metaphor. Arthur ascends this massive flight of stairs on his way home every night, stooped shoulders, head bowed, like the workers in METROPOLIS rising from the Depths with no hope. Denouement: Arthur is Joker, in full makeup and costume, Gary Glitter song on soundtrack (a controversy in itself), as he dances devil-may-care down the same stairs. He fluidly moves in an arrogant flourish, willfully, joyously embracing his Dante-esque descent into madness.

Arthur strides through the train station, smoking, looking more like Ledger with every step. Why? Because all through the movie, his gait has been gimped and cowed, except when dressed as a clown or dancing. Now, he has embraced his demons and cast off all doubt. And for the first time in society’s glare, he holds his back straight, purposeful – and STRIDES. His shooting of the yachtniks at this very station cast him as a mysterious vigilante hero for the downtrodden. Since he was witnessed in clown makeup during the incident, his copycat admirers adopt identical clown masks when rioting against the derision of the Top 1% in the film’s catastrophic climax. Movie now resembles V FOR VENDETTA in more ways than one – the sea of masks, worn for the same reason – to rebel against the hubris of the upper class.

JOKER resonates because it hits the raw nerve of America’s class struggle, bubbling under for decades, brought into the daylight with the Wall Street crash of 2008, and continuing to the present with the sneering 1% becoming more openly contemptuous of the lower classes as time passes.

Who knew that a Batman villain – the clown – would become the perfect icon for the lower classes? We came to realize the Wall Streeters’ attitude towards us when those avaricious, hubristic one-percenters continued to brazenly embezzle America’s money after being bailed out by American citizens! The filmmakers tapped into this synergy, with Thomas Wayne condemning the rioters as “clowns”….

… and in real life, actor Alec Baldwin (coincidentally, originally slated to play Thomas Wayne, and a staple on SNL playing Dumbo Donald), voiced his opinion of the Felicity Huffman jailing (for buying her daughter’s way into college), “The demonization of wealth in this country is mind-blowing!” Don’t be coy now, Alec! It’s not the demonization of wealth per se, it’s the indignation that the working class feels toward the attitude of the wealthy, who, like Thomas Wayne, look down their noses at those less fortunate as “clowns.” Mitt Romney, 2012 presidential contender, went a long way to perpetuating this indignation, implying it was somehow a choice to be poor. Until in 2016, Dumbo Donald exploited his perceived wealth to wholly undermine not only the working class, but democracy itself: ignoring subpoenas, embezzling, kidnapping, money-laundering, obstructing justice, buying judges, committing treason, violating every oath his office is beholden to, from the Emoluments Clause to Protecting the American people from all enemies foreign and domestic – he being the biggest domestic threat of all… and was protected from legal consequences by the wealthy. Thus, wealth has become synonymous with corruption. By their very actions, the wealthy call the working class “clowns” every single second of every day without actually saying the word.

Portrait of a man who likes himself just fine.

Made for $70 million, JOKER shows us what superhero films could be: devoid of outlandish special effects, with an R-rating, no cavalcade of bootylicious stars wearing enhanced pajamas, yet still a compelling and award-winning tentpole movie (Oscars, Globes, BAFTAs), and on its way to grossing $1 billion.

And it doesn’t even have to be canon!

JOKER brilliantly tap-dances across 80 years of comicbook canon, yet never mires its foot in anything other than ambiguity.

For example, the film gives us that massive Easter Egg of Arthur trespassing on the Wayne Estate, coming across a young Master Bruce – a boy that looks about 12 years old. Arthur can definitely pass for 42, so let’s say they have a clean 30-year difference in ages. So when Batman is 29 (as per the classic Silver Age comics from the Jim Aparo/Dick Giordano era), Joker should be 59, yet both he and Batman look around the same age in those panels. This movie would offer no clarification for our misty memories.

Another tap dance: amidst the climactic riots, Thomas Wayne, his wife and their son leave a cinema, avoiding the melee in the streets by turning down an alley. A rioter in a clown mask follows them… (Remember Tim Burton’s BATMAN said explicitly it was The Joker himself that killed Bruce’s parents? Well, this movie accounts for the clown visage due to the Joker fever in the streets!) But in this infamous scenario, the motive of the mugger here is not just simple robbery, as it has been played out a thousand times in the past. In Thomas Wayne’s family, the mugger sees his malefactors – the 1%! – those piranhas responsible for his downcast role in society, and further, how they are blithely trying to avoid getting their feet dirty on the class struggle erupting around them, by sneaking down an alley. Thus he follows. To enact a small class victory. Pearls are snatched and go flying. Screams. Gunshots. The man and woman fall. The boy is spattered with blood. And now we see a compelling reason for Bruce to be spared – the mugger saw no reason to kill the boy for the sins of his father… Gee, I hope that kid isn’t too traumatized and grows up to be a well-adjusted young man…

As well as the old school lilt of Dinah’s song, JOKER also utilizes two songs made famous by Sinatra – Send In The Clowns (and I find it striking that in this movie about class struggle, the opening line is, “Isn’t it rich…”), and That’s Life, because this movie is truly about the life of Joaquin Phoenix.

No acting.

END

“And I will terrorize you until—wait, stop laughing–“

Justice, Tween Dream Style.

Can a demon really be scary if it has a name and speaks English? And sounds like Willem Dafoe? I mean, really, if a demon terrorized me with that voice that sounds like he’s biting a teacup in half, first thing I’d do is laugh. Then – maybe terrorized.

I’ve always said, entities that you cannot communicate with are infinitely scarier. Think: lion. Though it is of this world, and built with the same DNA as we cucumbers, there is no way you can “reason” your way out of being destroyed by a lion, in a manner much more horrific than being dragged to hell. You will watch your own intestines explode out of your midriff as it swipes its claws across your torso, and you will be conscious as you watch your innards being consumed, while falling into circulatory shock as your blood finds no pressure to pump against, due to your opened arteries. See? Miles more terrifying than a demon with glowing eyes, whose body type is quite humanoid except for the spikes on his back, using an American vernacular with a propensity for laughing at your discomfiture in all the right places, i.e. we are familiar with his speech patterns and with the guffawing villain trope, so the demon is not presenting anything “alien” to our senses; also, he corrects you in the pronunciation of his name, so there’s some kind of ego there as well, which means, if you can exploit those weaknesses, you’re home free…

So movies like DEATH NOTE lose me from the outset, with that baseline concept of making a supposedly otherworldly being quite worldly and tangible and comprehensible. But onward…

The demon is Ryuk (pronounced “Ree-yook” as per Ryuk himself, voiced by Dafoe), and he appears to womanly college boy Light Turner (Nat Wollf), after bequeathing him a book, in which you can write someone’s name and the manner of their death, and it will come to pass. What Light does with this power is the interesting progression of the story; how he first keeps it straightforward and small – killing his bullies at school, then the murderer of his mother – then progressing to worldwide vigilante, honored, feared and maligned around the globe. With a tenacious detective on his trail…

Mia (Margaret Qualley, Andie MacDowell’s daughter) is the hot college chick whom Light brings into his confidence, because – hot college chick. Mia being one of the cool crowd, the only way Light can cross her panty line is to show her how the Death Note works (because cool chicks love bad guys). Whereupon they join forces and vow to “change the world” by killing dictators and renowned criminals, in a swirling montage of creative deaths, and creative angles of them having sex without us seeing anything.

Light and Mia adopt a Japanese vigilante name, Kira (“justice”), and make their victims scrawl it near their final resting places, and before they can have censored sex a second time, their vigilante movement has attained worldwide acclaim, with copycat vigilantes adorning their kills with “Kira” graffiti, muddying the waters for all the police trying to track the original vigilantes.

Mia finds a website where people post names of people they want killed, and Light rightfully retorts they can’t kill people based on social media whining. And Mia plots to take the book for herself…

A mysterious man named L (LaKeith Stanfield, GET OUT) and his liege Watari (Paul Nakauchi) work with the police to track Kira, bringing a higher level of acting to this teen screamer. Looks a little incongruous, especially when non-binary mediocre actor Wollf faces off with the intense Stanfield. Light’s detective father (Shea Whigham) has no clue, although gives a good performance in a “No Small Roles” manner.

Since it has been ascertained Kira needs to see their victim’s faces to kill them, L wears a constant scarf around his lower face. And I cannot understand his reasoning in removing the scarf after he discovers who Kira is. Isn’t this the exact time you should wear the scarf?

From a manga magazine called Shonen Jump, the story (by Tsugumi Ôba and Takeshi Obata) is an intriguing fantasy, so I question the decision to have the demon portrayed in a manner that is regarded as “scary. If the story holds up well, making the demon frightening only detracts from the tale, because after our heroes are initially startled by Ryuk (where Light literally screams like a girl), they are passé about his appearances, and if no one else can see him, well, what’s the point of being all spiky and black and heavy metal trousers? The heavy cost of the demon-suit (worn by Jason Liles) could have been spared, and it would have served the same story purpose had Ryuk been represented as a dimly-lit guy in a trenchcoat – or maybe even just Willem Dafoe! Pretty scary even without special effects!

Apparently, the characters do not follow the traits of the source material. Paulina Florast writes: “Light is supposed to be super smart and charming not the stereotypical white emo character.” And Addcond5: “L shouldn’t be hosting speeches, he’s antisocial and awkward, that’s like his whole character, he would never make a speech.”

Adding to the incongruity, a contrived chase sequence rips out of nowhere, complete with 80’s synthesizer soundtrack and L sliding across cars like Riggs in LETHAL WEAPON.

In one respect DEATH NOTE is a commentary on trying to do the right thing and not being able to, no matter your moral compass. In another respect – look at that goofy demon! Movie makes good use of source music (opening with Australian Crawl’s Reckless and INXS’s Don’t Change – some Aussie nostalgia for me! – and ending on a powerfully contextual The Power Of Love by Air Supply), and there are many plot twists to keep you seat-edged until the final frames. On the other hand, that demon costume is incongruous to the point of distraction, robbing the good performances of their gravitas and making the mediocre performances look laughable.

In the end, movie is posing the question: Who would YOU write in the book (besides the obvious Justin Beiber, Dumbo Donald and Vanilla Ice)?

END

First Maudlin Man.

That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for Mankind.
— Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11, June 1969.

FIRST MAN is a strange piece of dramatic fiction. Not a biopic; not a historical document. Following Neil Armstrong on his pioneering Apollo 11 Moon landing, instead of a science-driven, or politics-driven docudrama, movie attempts to find an emotional center for its protagonist – an emotional center which probably doesn’t exist.

Based loosely on the book by James R. Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (Simon & Schuster, 2012), screenplayed by Josh Singer (THE POST) and directed by Damien Chazelle (LA LA LAND), FIRST MAN is two movies in one: The first is a masterpiece of technical wonder and stunning production values, leaving us agog at the all-new visuals of Apollo; the second movie swings into intimate airspace by focusing on one man’s perception. In essence, the movie itself reflects what Armstrong’s catchphrase was meant to convey – the majesty of Mankind’s achievements alongside the veracity of being one fragile man.

Both are excellent movies, but only one of them is relevant to the gargantuan feat of NASA and Neil Armstrong intercepting Earth’s satellite, while the other is an Imaginary Movie Arc that unnecessarily unearths painful emotions.

NASA = Need Another Stupid Airplane.

The dichotomy of the two-movie format starts immediately with the movie’s two opening scenes: First, we see Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) piloting an X-prototype aircraft (one of Chuck Yeager’s sound barrier smashers) over the Mojave Desert in 1961. We are in the aircraft’s claustrophobic embrace as it shudders fearfully, battering Armstrong in its quest to attain Mach speeds as it streaks up into low Earth orbit, shaking with fierce, skull-addling convulsions, and then — silence and serenity, as the aircraft kisses the gossamer boundary of sky and space, until – descending into shuddering, groaning metal, bouncing off the atmosphere in thunderous heat-rage… We are in the cockpit – there are no exterior views! – as Armstrong augurs in out of control, shaking, shaking, and is forced to eject, as we see our chute above us, and the plane falling away, erupting into the ground.

Like whiplash, the movie switches gears to a little girl (Karen Armstrong, Neil’s toddler) in the hospital. Quietude, solemnity, as she undergoes treatment for a brain tumor! Neil toys with her bracelet marked “KAREN,” leans his head on her, tries to speak with her, as she listlessly fades.

Movie has introduced us to its two diametric themes – radical pilot / heavyhearted father.

Karen dies. Armstrong, stone-faced, places her bracelet in a drawer and closes it.

From this point forward, at every opportunity, between the scenes of astronaut selection, rigorous training, launching the Saturn V, we flit back and forth with Armstrong and Karen in muted colors, silent, intimate, tragic.

The movie is implying that Armstrong’s clinical demeanor was brought about by this tragedy.

And that’s kinda insulting. Y’see, Armstrong was always the straightest of straight arrows, the squarest of squares. And that’s the most sought-after quality in test pilots. It allows them to perform in the direst of life-threatening situations, and to fight clear-headed out of death spirals with the most logical solutions. But movie implies Karen’s death drove Neil into that cold, unemotional place. Conversely, it says that he could never have attained his level of cold efficiency without that tragedy. And that’s a big bowl of Oceanus Procellarum.

Psychologists ask Armstrong what they think of his impending flight to the Moon. He comes across as ingenuous (seeing it solely as an exploratory mission, rather than an element of the Russian Cold War), “I think space exploration will allow us to see things that maybe we shoulda seen a long time ago, but haven’t been able to before.” They add, “We’re sorry about your daughter.” His reply: “Is there a question?”

Psyche: “Do you think it will have an effect?”
Armstrong: “I think it would be unreasonable to assume that it wouldn’t have some effect.”

Thus, the movie is doing its own psychoanalysis of Armstrong, and (erroneously) coming to the conclusion that he never allowed himself to get close to anyone after the loss of his daughter, for fear that he would lose them, or conversely, that they would lose him, and thus, keeping a distance seemed like the best answer, the logical solution.

Armstrong adopts this stoic, technician attitude even with his wife and kids, which is unintentionally blackly funny. Fully intending to leave for the Moon without even saying goodbye to his boys (remaining aloof), Armstrong is forced by wife Janet (Claire Foy) to explain the danger of the Moonshot to them. He sits blank-faced at the family dinner table, answering his sons’ questions. His eldest asks fearfully, “Do you think you’re coming back?” Armstrong’s answer is boilerplate talking point, as if he’s answering a reporter: “We have real confidence in the mission, and there are some risks, but we have every intention of coming back.” Sad, yes. But hilarious.

But consider, in real life, Armstrong may have been so close-mouthed because he was, in fact, burdened with the knowledge of the competition to beat the Russians to the most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile. It was Classified Top Secret, so the less he said the better. Yet no one in the movie – not one general or technician or civilian – mentions that space flight was about determining military dominance. None of this is Classified anymore – everyone knows the dick-measuring reasons – you can put them in your movie. The fact that FIRST MAN still avoids this subject means the moviemakers are trafficking in propaganda – ironically, exactly like the Russian government.

Someone says, “We’re gonna make so many developments that the Russians are gonna have to start from scratch!” But without showing us that the Russians had beat the Americans in every aspect of the Space Race to that point (first orbiting satellite – Sputnik; first man in space – Gagarin; first EVA – Leonov; first woman in space – Tereshkova), “the Russians” here may as well be a fictional James Bond villain.

Concerned Astronaut Face / Actual Astronaut

Maybe FIRST MAN did not highlight the Space Race because it would expose the brutality of NASA (which is always portrayed in film as heroic). The program’s greatest tragedy was Apollo 1 blowing up on the launch pad, killing three astronauts. There is a short scene showing minimal damage, but the fire was actually extensive and it psychologically affected the scores of techs and astronauts involved. For NASA to continue training and launches due to a Space Race with Russia, or worse, a weapons race with Russia – that would be heartless. In the context of exploration though, now they are brave hearts.

Director Chazelle actually goes where no man has gone before – he tells the story from the astronauts’ point of view. We are strapped inside the claustrophobic Apollo 11 capsule – we rarely see external views! – we hear metal bending, fuel explosions, infernal noise; monumental g-forces push at our chests, wordless scenes of bone-shaking power; we see the gimbals struggle against gravity on a white-hot pillar of fire and black smoke. All new footage of a real goddam Chariot of the Gods! The best launch scene in the history of movies to this point!… Through it all, the astronauts and NASA communicate in nonchalant jargon. This is why they were bred to be such chill cats, as exemplified by Armstrong; knowing they could die at any moment, yet with enough peace of mind to speak so casually when all around them is literally exploding.

Armstrong was chosen by chance. That’s represented well here: that any of the astronauts in the Program might have been the First Man. When Neil is asked, “When you learned that you were commander, were you overjoyed?” He replies, “I was pleased.”

Reporter: “If the flight is successful, you’ll go down in histo—“
Armstrong: “We’re planning on the flight being successful.”

Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) is at that presser, more personable than Neil, who, in a foreshadowing wink (to the movie audience), talks about taking his wife’s jewelry to the Moon. Familiar faces flit by, Jason Clarke as Ed White, Kyle Chandler as Deke Slayton, Patrick Fugit, Ciarin Hinds, Lukas Haas, Ethan Embry… but we hardly get to know anyone or their relationship to Armstrong. Liev’s half-brother, Pablo Schreiber, is Jim Lovell, a name we recognize because – Tom Hanks.

For my taste, movie spends too much time with the wives, who had nothing to do with the program except moral support for the astronauts, and simultaneous whining about their lot. In an Apollo documentary, one wife laments: “We didn’t marry astronauts.” True – they married test pilots, who were then chosen for a unique, insane, world-orbiting job that had just been invented. After they became astronauts, most would trade up for more cosmopolitan wives.

For the sake of including a scene that empowers women, anxiety-racked Janet Armstrong chews out NASA heads when Slayton tells her they have it under control: “You don’t have anything under control! You’re a buncha boys making models out of balsa wood!” Well, the fact that she had no clue what the men scientists and men physicists and men engineers were doing, and the fact they successfully flew three men to the Moon and returned them safely, means her tirade is demonstrably wrong. It’s one of those scenes meant to signify “strong wife” but (without the filmmakers or the audience realizing it) her ignorance comes across as stronger.

20 July 1969: “East of Tranquility Base here – the Eagle has landed.”

Armstrong descends the stairs, flubs his one line, then turns back to look at Earth. A true moment of clarity, isolation, in the soundless expanse of motionless space. He leaves the mission for a brief moment to stand above a crater. We are surprised to see Armstrong holding Karen’s bracelet in one gloved hand, Gosling acting the hell out of a man who can’t wipe away tears inside his helmet. He drops Karen’s bracelet into the crater, watches it tumble slowly into pitch darkness… What the hell was that?! That’s Hollywood’s idea of closure.

Did Neil Armstrong really go to the Moon just to throw his dead daughter’s bracelet into a crater? Of course not. (A similar incident is based in fact: Gene Cernan on Apollo 17 would write his little girl Tracy’s initials in the sand “TDC,” which will remain undisturbed for centuries, if not eternity.) Even Neil’s son denies that Neil dropped anything into a crater. I doubt Armstrong’s biographer would have included such a maudlin detail in his book, but think about it: the Hollywood people who wrote this bracelet throughline thought to give Neil Armstrong something to strive for OTHER THAN REACHING THE MOON. No wonder the rest of the world consider them a breed apart of wacko.

Due to that Imaginary Movie Arc, movie does not need to show the parades or accolades or the ubiquitous effect of the Moon landing on Earth culture, and we will not learn of Armstrong’s death in 2012. It ends abruptly with Armstrong in quarantine, Janet visiting; no words, their fingertips touching through the glass. A serene moment that signifies they’re gonna be okay. What is irksome is that the movie implies that Armstrong came back a changed man: he arced to acceptance of his daughter’s death, so, uh, does he now become bubbly and gregarious? Of course not. That’s why – for dramatic purposes – the filmmakers couldn’t show any more of his life. They had given him this agonizing mental crisis to work through and he had supposedly conquered it. They can’t show the nerd Armstrong still ensconced in his square, anti-social test pilot ethos. They also can’t show Neil, like every famous man, replacing his wife with a younger model in later years. That would ruin the throughline and the Imaginary Movie Arc.

So it seems that FIRST MAN succeeds in its technical brilliance of, in Kennedy’s immortal words, “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” But in its quest to find a meaning in Neil Armstrong’s life, it lost its way.

END

Ape-ocalypse Now…

Reboot. Gorilla style.

In a cold open, two pilots – an American and Japanese – crash-land on a deserted Pacific island. It is 1944. They try to kill each other, in a foot chase that leads to a mountain ledge. As they grapple, something… YUGE… rises from below. A gorilla! No, not just a gorilla – a GORIL-LIL-LIL-LIL-LA!

Opening Titles, scrolling through the years, showing watershed events – nuclear tests, Viet Nam, space race – to 1973.

An American scientist leads a military expedition to an island discovered by satellite photos, to beat the Russians there and discover its secrets – and is confronted by that same gorilla, who goes ape on their helicopters. All the extras die. The next move is up to the scientist and the military. To kill or not to kill this ancient beast…

KONG: SKULL ISLAND is APOCALYPSE NOW meets GODZILLA. For a very marketable reason. Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment are even now planning the Daikaiju Match of the Century – Kong Vs Godzilla! For that to happen, they had to make the 50-foot Kong of the past 84 years more GORIL-LIL-LIL-LIL-LA. To face the modern 350-foot GODZILL-LIL-LIL-LIL-LA. Not only is the ape’s size amped up to 100 feet, its role is modified to be more of a rampaging beast, a creature that ruled the Earth before Man; it is played like it might not be an ape at all but just a giant carnivorous creature with a hint of blond ambition… The stage is set…

… for Francis Ford Coppolla. Writers Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, save on man-hours, printing costs and originality, by simply copying and pasting Coppolla’s 1979 APOCALYPSE NOW, with Huey helicopters, loudmouth military grunts, obsessive military captains, a riverboat ride, wild machine-gun fire, napalm, wartime cinematography, and that same overused seventies soundtrack that hits all the Creedence and Jefferson Airplane beats. It worked for that big ape, Brando…

“Sir, I think we’ve found Marlon Brando.”

Starring Tom Hiddleston’s British Smug, Brie Larson’s Tight T-shirt, Samuel L. Jackson’s Shouting, Toby Kebbell’s Dog Tags, John Goodman (who doesn’t roll on Shabbas), Corey Hawkins Being Black and Nearby, Jason Mitchell Straight Outta Compton, John Ortiz as Welcome Back Kotter, and John C. Reilly as Sasquatch.

Jackson is Captain Insecure Dicksize, who, after his men are annihilated by Kong for invading Kong’s territory, obsesses over killing Kong. Like every American chickenhawk, he lays the blame of his troop’s death not on himself for invading, but on the party being invaded. “I know an enemy when I see it!” Uh, okay, but Kong is not your enemy, jarhead. YOU struck first, without warning, without permission. Movie shows us very explicitly that the only “monsters” on the island are the ones who arrived in Hueys. They even make Goodman’s scientist, Dr. Crackpot, a superficial monster whose parents were killed by Kong, which he regards as “something with no conscience, no reason.” Well, not really. The reason: you were encroaching on his territory.

Crackpot tells Dicksize his organization is after Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms (MUTOs, which ties it to GODZILLA 2014, where the winged monsters were called MUTOs – a stupid name, because once you find them, and classify them – huzzah! Massive Identified Terrestrial Organisms.) “The Castle Bravo tests were not nuclear tests – they were trying to kill something.” (Almost the same dialogue in GODZILLA, describing the Bikini Atoll tests.) His token black assistant pipes up about his Hollow Earth Theory, which has turned out to be true. No one cares. Not even the black demo he’s here for.

The wonderful rounded hills of Skull Island.

Crackpot wants evidence to take back to civilization. Shouldn’t the focus then, be more on T-shirt taking pics, rather than Dicksize’s vendetta? That’s when we realize even the filmmakers have lost the plot: When we see a graveyard filled with giant bones of dead apes (Kong’s parents), T-shirt says “I’ve taken enough pictures of mass graves to recognize one.” Yeah, well, how about taking a picture of THIS one? Because – evidence.

We see her snapping pics, but of all the wrong things. That picture of a giant footprint might be a tiny hamster’s without showing a canteen or person’s foot next to it for scale. Or how about this? At least all the male scientists back home can get a perfect idea of size if you place your D-cup rack next to it.

Hiddleston the tracker is introduced like Wolverine in a bar fight. Then we never see him use any skills again for the rest of the movie, except looking like Thor’s brother. Movie tries to flesh out his character with talk about his father in the RAF mounting an attack from which he never returned (but we’re just wondering when he’s going to mount an attack on T-shirt’s nicely-rounded Hamburger Hills). Other futile attempts at characterization also fall flat, like Dicksize being a career military man, left rudderless when assigned leave, and then creaming his camo when assigned the Skull Island mission. We recognize each of these characters from bullet points in the Selling Your Hollywood Screenplay Manual:

• the girl who befriends the monster
• the jock who befriends the girl
• the fanatic general
• the nervy company man who is eaten first
• the token black dude
• the token Asian chick
• the loon who lives with the natives…

John C. Reilly is the bearded loon, who turns out to be the pilot from the cold open. He’s the Dennis Hopper in this Ape-ocalypse, and the only character well-rounded enough for a poignant post-credits resolution. Providing exposition on the ape (“Kong is king around here; god to these people”), and the “skull-crawlers” (“I never said that name out loud before, it sounds stupid now that I think about it”) – giant iguana-like monsters that are genuinely scary, taking the place of the tyrannosaurs in any given Kong adventure. Why? Because of Kong’s new SIZE; he needs bigger foes. Everything is giant – oxen, spiders, stick insects, squid – except for the human roles. Outstanding production values save KONG from the B-movie pile, but the vapid characters drift it back.

I love the smell of ape-harm in the morning.

For once, the great ape is not played by Andy Serkis in mocap; Toby Kebbell and Terry Notary don the motion-capture suit (veterans of playing apes in the modern PLANET OF THE APES saga), and find the connective tissue between all the Kongs:

He tries to rip apart the monster’s jaws (like KONG 1933), he walks upright (like KONG 1976), he is seamless, wondrous CGI (like KONG 2005). And his “realism” sells this film. We do not doubt any more that what is onscreen is absolutely in the environment. I like the way Kong just wanders around and appears here, appears there, unhurried. As I always complain in JURASSIC PARK movies, we never get to see the dinosaurs just being themselves before the Running and Screaming starts. It’s nice to see Kong stop to get a drink.

When T-shirt finds an ox trapped under a helicopter and tries to save it, Kong is there to help. He looks down upon her magnificent push-up bra, ponders on his animal attraction, then strides away. (But Kong is a carnivore – those incisors didn’t evolve for herbivorous diet – wouldn’t he EAT the ox? Instead, we only see him eating a squid when it attacks him. As in every movie that anthropomorphizes animals (MADAGASCAR, ZOOTOPIA), mammals don’t eat mammals – but feast on fish. Unless you’re in NEMO, fish are no higher than plants in Hollywood’s hierarchy.)

The scant connection between blond and ape is downplayed here, because of the extended universe the studios intend to tread. If Kong fell in love – he would have to die. The theme will never more be “beauty and the beast.” Kong is necessarily beauty (of nature) and beast (of destruction) all in one.

That’s what happens when you do it gorilla style.

END

Too Furious To Act.

FAST & FURIOUS is a dark horse in the F&F canon. This 4^th film in the franchise is the least involving, as two men go after the same drug lord from different angles – one from the law, one from the street. Filled with pointless vignettes and exhilarating-yet-idiotic street racing, I lost interest as soon as my chicken pot pie was ready.

Movie starts with a heart-stopping robbery of a semi-trailer full of gas by Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his gang of car-thugs. What is this – MAD MAX?! We see Han (Sung Kang) driving alongside Dom (waitaminute! Didn’t he die in the last film? Onward), and Dom’s girl Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) pulling off a daring uncoupling of a trailer before a fantastic crash with Pretty Orange Explosions. F&F4 is not pulling any punches when it comes to action. Or silliness.

We meet detective Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) in a foot chase, pursuing one of those Mexican dudes that always plays a gangbanger. (Is this Walker’s introduction to Parkour in BRICK MANSIONS?) Cut to generic scene of O’Conner being cussed out by his police superiors for being too pretty to risk his face in a foot chase or something…

After veering into a ditch in the third movie, TOKYO DRIFT, writer Chris Morgan and director Justin Lin steer the franchise back onto the road with this entry, by bringing back our man-crushes (Diesel and Walker) and their attendant hangers-on.

We’re in the Dominican Republic and Dom voices his fears to Letty that it’s getting dangerous and the Man might catch him soon – the theme of the movie.

Riding on cars with boys.

Dom gets a call. Letty is dead. Wha-? That was sudden. Very nonchalant kill-off of a major character in the series. No death scene, no background on it, and even when it becomes clear why she died, the sudden vacuum of Letty’s presence seems forced.

Dom examines Letty’s death site and knows who killed her by examining skid marks [dirty comment withheld out of respect for the dead].

While Brian tries to find a drug lord named Braga (John Ortiz), Dom searches for the same Braga, as those were his skid marks at Letty’s death site. See how the plot is bringing the brahs back together?

Brian goes Peeping Tom on Mia (Jordana Brewster, playing Dom’s sister again, and looking too luscious for words), and lunch dates her, telling her how much of an indecisive pussy he is, because he “doesn’t know” why he let Dom go in the first movie. “I lied to you. I lied to Dom. That’s what I do best. That’s why they recruited me” – Wait, are you implying you’re a good actor?! Bwohahahahaha! Look, we all know why you want to stay on Dom’s good side: so that when you fuel-inject Mia, Dom won’t pound you with those brick biceps.

Jordana Brewster: Too Fast Too Glorious

But through a misunderstanding, Brian gets pounded anyway – lucky boy! We can hear bones breaking, but when he walks away, Brian’s pretty face is as flawless as ever.

The key line, which is the basis for Brian’s motivation. Mia tells him, “Maybe you’re not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you’re the bad guy pretending to be the good guy.” This gives Brian license to be Dom’s bottom bitch car-thug in the next three F&F sequels, without any pangs of conscience – for himself or the audience. But there is a flaw to this thinking – because so-called “bad guys” don’t consider themselves bad guys. In their minds, they’re the good guys. Hell, even in this movie, YOU are rooting for the stars, taking it for granted they are “good guys” – but they’re NOT.

The big race meet. Girls in high heels and hardly any clothes, dancing incognizantly to music with different beats for each girl it would seem. Here comes statuesque Gal Gadot as Gisele. She’s Braga’s bottom bitch, who gives her number to Dom because she wants him to pound her like he pounds Brian.

Both Dom and Brian are here to infiltrate Braga’s cartel. So while Braga wants to find the fastest mule to ferry his drugs across the Mexican border, Dom and Brian are just sensually racing each other.

So I guess this is the best way to ferry drugs across the border – roar through the night like assholes with no mufflers at 80 mph in musclecars through decrepit tunnels.

In the contrived conclusion, where Braga is forcibly driven back across the border through the tunnels – even though there is no extradition from Mexico and Brian was out of his jurisdiction but who cares? – Dom rescues Brian’s life (now they’re even again! Such bro love!) and accedes to being caught because “I ain’t running any more.” (In that vernacular, shouldn’t that be, “I ain’t running NO more?”) Whatever. The court system struggles to find an orange jumpsuit two sizes too small for Dom, so that his deltoids will look swoll, and they transport him aboard one of those armored busses that can be flipped over really easily during an escape attempt.

Cliffhanger, as three muscle cars descend on the bus. Dom looks out the window, sees Brian in one of the cars, and gets an erection…

END

The plane in Spain falls mainly on the Liam.

A particular set of thrills.

An air marshal must stop a mysterious texting terrorist carrying out his threats to kill one person every 20 minutes. And sending poo emojis.

The airplane thriller NON-STOP is, in fact, non-stop thrills, with Liam Neeson plying his intensity as air marshal Bill Marks (basically a reprise of his role as Bryan Mills, special forces juggernaut in the TAKEN series… Hmm, Bill Marks? Bryan Mills? Coincidence that the names sound so familiar? I don’t think so!). Jaume Collet-Serra directs, with the efficiency that creates a lean backstory for the ex-alcoholic Marks in a few frames. Like a poo emoji.

Onboard this transatlantic, non-stop flight from New York to London, Marks receives a text on his secure line that someone is going to die in 20 minutes, unless 150 million dollars is transferred to a certain account number. The texter claims he is onboard the plane, proving it by making real time comments about Marks’ futile search for him.

On a plane full of passengers, everyone is a suspect. Is it the sultry stewardess (Michelle Dockery, with one of those faces where you can see her little-girl-face beneath the cute spinner adult she has grown into), the friendly redhead Jen in the seat beside him (Julianne Moore, looking more lubricious the older she gets. Is it ME, or HER?), the New York cop (Corey Stoll – hooray!), the muslim doctor (Omar Metwally, with a great sad, somber face), the geeky Bowen (Scoot McNairy), the attorney Wheeler (Frank Deal), or any one of the scores of passengers with Red Herring stamped on their butts?

Marks breaks protocol by contacting his secondary air marshal Hammond (Anson Mount, who wishes he was Eric Roberts), but neither Hammond, nor Marks’ boss on the phone, nor the pilot (Linus Roche) believe the terrorist can pull off his threat in this closed environment. Until someone dies. Exactly 20 minutes from the time Marks set his watch to the threat.

And it was Marks who did the killing!

NON-STOP is like one of those time travel movies where you try to stop an event from happening and it happens anyway – despite your intervention – through another set of insane serendipitous circumstances.

The tension keeps ratcheting, even with texts being the mode of communication. (It is interesting how moviemakers have integrated text into modern storytelling; that gutless device that allows people to say things they can’t say to your face, which, ironically, gets people into the same amount of trouble for its narrow spectrum of communication.) Another person dies. It is discovered the terrorist’s account number is in Marks’ name! His boss on the phone begins to doubt his sanity, his female confidants (Jen and Cutie) start to take offense at his accusations, the air force sends out two fighter jets to escort the 747 to the nearest landing; the pilot is instructed to take Marks’ gun and badge away – until he too dies mysteriously, leaving the co-pilot (Jason Butler Harner) to navigate between the two fighter jets, sweating through his epaulets.

Marks begins to wonder: Is he in a blackout state? Is he, in fact, responsible for these deaths and an impending terrorist act? In essence, he himself becomes a suspect! Will his “particular set of skills” get him out of this one?

Production values are excellent; the storytelling is creative, with twists and turns snaking through the narrative, with fast-paced action and Liam just eating up the tragic action hero role he has become accustomed to in modern American cinema. In the final telling, NON-STOP bows to a few too many filmic conventions that seem pulled from the asses of studio executives (“yeh, make him an alcoholic with a dead daughter”; “yeh he hooks up with the chick in the end” etc.), to keep it airtight, but is well worth the excitement during the Neeson-tastic journey.

END

Couldn’t find the silver lining.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is a teachable moment in filmic history. They showed us how to cure bipolar disease. You just need to get laid!

Two damaged people Meet Cute. They pretend to hate each other. By movie’s end, they love each other, which apparently means they’re not damaged anymore. Yay. All it took was sex.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is the single most overrated piece of romantic crap that I stepped in because other people were stepping in it and saying how nice it tasted through their shoes. Sure, gutterloads of frilly romcoms assault us weekly, but none so pretentious. Due to this movie’s plot revolving around bipolar disease, it acquires Oscar cred. And Oscar cred apparently connotes High Art, rather than Chick Flick bullshit. You lost me at White American Heterosexual Couple who should just screw and get it over with.

Mantoy Bradley Cooper is Patrick, bipolar, just out of hospital, lost his job, wife, house, moved back in with parents Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver. His temper is on a hair trigger, his meds intake erratic, his filters non-existent, as are his social skills. Manically believing that bettering himself by reading Hemingway and losing weight and looking for the “silver lining” in every situation will endear him to his adulterous ex-wife, he is painted as crazy. And he is. We all know crazy when we meet it, even if you euphemize it as “bipolar.” And Patrick is crazy. But – so the movie tells us – Patrick becomes Not Crazy after The Sex with Jennifer Lawrence.

Lawrence is Tiffany, recently widowed, and with such low self-esteem that she banged the whole office after her husband’s death, even the women. She says she doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore, but it’s a part of her that she accepts and likes. I like that part of her too. Wanna get a drink sometime, Jennifer? That raven hair, those dark, dark eyes; swiveling that sexy little botty during her dance routine. So cute, the way she keeps darting out from behind a tree, to jog with Patrick – “Hey–!” That kills me!  And those cheeks! I just wanna pinch em pinch em pinch em PINCH EM! And the ones on her face are pretty cute too.

Tiffany also has no filters, which she construes as “being truthful” (which is correct), is well-acquainted with meds, and is as socially inept as Patrick, yet though she was previously married to a cop in a stable loving relationship until his death, now she is attracted to loser Patrick. For no reason other than the script says so. He’s a bad catch (bipolar, no prospects, unpredictable, unreliable), so her stalking reaction to him must be because he’s hot. But is a character in an Oscar film allowed to be that shallow? Or are we meant to regard her irrational pursuit as True Love? Then it’s okay to be a stalker. Meg Ryan tells us so in FRENCH KISS (and every other execrable piece of dogshit that she calls romantic comedies). Or are we to assume that Tiffany is still obsessed with casual sex to satiate her demons when she tells Patrick, “You can fuck me if you keep the lights off”? And – by your own judgment – isn’t casual sex a Bad Thing?

I know why *I* love her – because I like casual sex and I like sluts. And those cheeks. But that’s not what MAINSTREAM SOCIETY likes. Is it? Do you? Then why do you like this character? Are you vicariously living your own wet dreams through her? Shut up, hypocrites!

It’s not that I dislike PLAYBOOK. The film is funny in odd places, and the performances from the stars are stellar, as can be expected. Even the B-players are all reliably solid: Paul Herman (BEANSIE from THE SOPRANOS) as De Niro’s compulsive gambling buddy, Julia Styles as Tiffany’s sister, Paul Ortiz as Julia’s henpecked husband, Chris Tucker as Patrick’s friend, another patient from the hospital, constantly trying to escape. The only miscasting seems to be Dash Mihok as a policeman, that turns up whenever and wherever he’s needed to quell disturbances (shyeh, when has that ever happened? I mean, this guy is on duty 24/7 keeping tabs on Patrick, whether it’s a family disturbance at 3am or a Sunday football game). But PLAYBOOK doesn’t go nearly deep enough to warrant its claim as a beacon and boon to bipolar people; that for those who feel alone or depressed, they can take heart that someone out there understands their predicament. Well, someone out there just might – but it ain’t the filmmakers of PLAYBOOK.

De Niro’s character is supposedly obsessive-compulsive, and arranges his remote controls and folds his hanky a certain way, and believes son Patrick is a good luck charm for his football team. That’s not Obesssive Compulsive Disorder – that’s arranging your remote controls and folding your hanky and being a superstitious clod. Try dating someone with OCD and then get back to me on your understanding of it.

Which leads us to: Do the filmmakers know what ‘bipolar’ really is? Writer-director David O. Russell (from the book by Matthew Quick) plays Patrick’s situation like a fish-out-of-water tale: Pat’s back from the hospital too soon and trying to fit in with normal society again. Wackiness ensues.

Telling tall tales and having a tripwire temper, and going to jail for petty disturbances and having a cop check in regularly doesn’t mean you’re bipolar. It means you’re a fuckup. But waitaminute, you say, that describes ME. But I’m not a “fuckup”… okay, let’s go with the euphemism… I’m BIPOLAR! Yay. Soooo socially acceptable.

Movie doesn’t go anywhere near deep enough to make us truly concerned or disturbed. It’s two sexy white kids with no debilitating physical deformities verbally sparring until they have sexual intercourse.

And here’s where the bipolar express really leaves the rails: final scene shows an idyllic Sunday afternoon at Patrick’s household, parents, friends, Patrick and Tiffany in a cutesy embrace; there is not one shred of indication that Patrick and Tiffany are in an ongoing battle with their ids, their antisocial personas. For all intents and purposes, the movie paints a rosy picture of everyone being normal. And why? Because Patrick and Tiffany are an item. So that’s all it takes? The movie spends two hours setting up bipolar and OCD and self-esteem issues as the obstacles that these youngsters must overcome to find each other, then in its final frames, it tells us those obstacles were easily curable if only the youngsters overcame the biggest obstacle – taking down each others’ panties. Cos apparently that cured not just them, but everyone acquainted with them!

But Tiffany has a problem so deep rooted that as soon as she believed Patrick was not with her psychologically, she turned to drink and a quick lay. She did this at THE most important moment of their lives up to that point. What’s to say she won’t do it again when she feels him drifting? And Patrick’s temper is supposedly so out of control that he can’t be trusted not to get into a fight at a football match. Both of them have no filters when we meet them. Are we to believe that they have now suddenly grown filters on their big mouths? If you rationalize that both their anti-social behaviors were only manifest because they were still seeking their soul-mates, that in itself is an argument against their supposed serious conditions of bipolarity. That way lies the kingdom of fuckup. Not clinical depression or bipolarity or obsession.

So you know those times when you hit the roof and throw things at the wall and one of your friends says, “Dude, you need to get laid.”

Turns out they’re right.

END