Yearly Archives: 2013

Movie Review: The Conjuring

I saw the trailer for The Conjuring early last spring, you know the one I’m talking about, with the hide and seek, the clap, clap. Whatever movie this preview was opening for wasn’t even scary, and so I found myself totally unprepared for the terror that I was about to experience. Sure, and without giving too much away, the essence of that scene is mostly shock, or as they refer to it in that South Park episode, being startled.

But that’s exactly what you go to a horror movie to feel. A good one, anyway. The Conjuring is definitely a good horror movie. I felt like I was clinging to the sides of my seat the entire time, the sides of my seat, the bottom, I’d grab onto any part of the movie theater seat and clench my hands, my arms, everything, and I’d realize that it wasn’t really helping me manage the terror. So I’d shift, I’d grab something else. I wound up spending most of the movie sitting there with my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, exercising basically every muscle in my body.

So you get the picture, I was scared, I liked it. But why does this movie work where so many horror films fall flat? It’s all about pace, especially with a movie like this that doesn’t really stray too far from the time tested forms of the genre. There are creaky stairs, doors opening and closing by themselves, there was definitely a lot of stuff that we’ve already scene before.

But the pacing was perfect. It’s the kind of very slow, things-slightly-start-to-go-wrong mentality, an ominous build up that lets you know something very sinister is going on. That’s easy enough, at least, they made me scared during that trailer. But how would this idea play out for an entire movie?

We all know that there are going to be things popping out at you, lots of slow camera shots that just beg to be interrupted by a scary ghost-lady close-up, but at what point to you sit back and go, OK, this isn’t scary anymore? A lot of times whatever is being used as a plot gets too convoluted, like maybe they’ll look in the history books and figure out the origins of the paranormal activity, and they’ll have to return an amulet or something to set a certain spirit to rest.

So to me, the perfect horror movie never lets you go. Even as whatever is going on is brought to a climax, you’re still sitting there in your seat trying to find that magical position that might make the fear somewhat more bearable. That’s what this movie achieves. You’re never comfortable.

There’s a little side-story opening, involving a doll, which almost made me check out ten minutes into the film. Then we dive right into this family moving into this house somewhere in New England. It looks like it might have started falling apart a hundred years ago. They don’t waste time on too much backstory, and it’s not one of these things where only one person can tell there’s something wrong here.

And equally as important, there’s also not that one idiot character that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, remains firm in his or her conviction that there’s absolutely nothing going on here.

Oh yeah, and it’s in the seventies. I’m telling you, the seventies are fucking scary. So are the sixties. The eighties are just this big neon joke and the nineties, well, I grew up in the nineties, so to me, it’s all a little too familiar. And go ahead trying to make a horror movie set in the present. Whenever I get scared in my house, I turn on all of my TVs, my lights, and I start streaming as much music and video from the Internet at the same time. There’s too much distraction in our modern world to get really scared of anything.

But the seventies, man, you’ve got a problem with ghosts? You can’t just send an email to some random ghost hunters you found on the Internet. No, you have to stalk them at some college hours away where they happen to be giving a lecture. And what if you need emergency clearance from the Vatican for a last minute exorcism? Sorry pal, we’ll see if we can’t get in touch with Rome tomorrow morning. And by the way, that call’s going to be expensive, so we’re going to need a deposit.

Also, the kids say stuff like groovy, and far out. Yup, that’s pretty much how I imagine the seventies, no cell phones, lots of creepy black and white TV static, groovy. I’m terrified.

The Conjuring is fantastically scary. Seriously, I’m still shaking. And no, nothing especially new happened, no envelopes were pushed or anything like that. It’s just a very well put together horror film. It’s like a really catchy summer pop song that the entire world gets stuck in its head. No, there’s nothing especially revolutionary going on here, but something’s been tapped, something universal, and it’s been executed almost flawlessly.

A semester at sea

When I was in college I spent a semester at sea. I thought it would launch me into the fields of like marine biology and aquatics and stuff. I imagined myself really learning the nuts and bolts of life out on the open ocean, but it wasn’t anything like I had expected. Nothing I could have read or studied would have helped prepare me for the challenges of living on a boat.

Like, for example, I thought that there’d be like a big disembarking, like a “Bon voyage!” type of farewell. But no, they kept us in this stupid inflatable room on campus inside the Olympic sized swimming pool for two days straight. “What’s the point of this?” we all asked, “When do we get to go out to sea?”

The faculty explained that they were giving us a couple of days in a controlled environment to develop our sea legs. I told them that this was unnecessary, that I’d been on a boat several times. I was lying, of course, but come on, people have been travelling on boats for forever. Do you think that the pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic were forced to sit on some glorified pool toy for two days straight?

The worst part was that the swim team still had practice. The inflatable only took up like three lanes, so we had to just sit there and watch them all staring at us like this was the stupidest thing anybody could have ever decided to come to college and actually pay to do.

I was just about to give up, thinking about all of the regular classes that I’d have to sign up for after I backed out of the whole semester at sea, but one of my classmates, or shipmates, or potential shipmates, he backed out. I thought to myself, what a wimp, I can’t believe he quit. And then I realized how ridiculous I sounded, criticizing this guy for a decision that I was just about to make, so I doubled down on my commitment. I was going to earn those sea legs.

We finally made it to the boat and everything was just, again, not at all how I had imagined it to be, certainly nothing like the brochures from the student center made it out to be. I was pretty sure I’d have a roommate. One roommate. Not three. And I hesitate to even call them roommates, because it was hardly a room that we were forced to share.

These guys were a bunch of total nerds. Everybody had the same pair of knee high rubber boots from the first day, I was like, “Guys, what did your moms all go shopping at the same boat store?” and I turned to the first mate, he was checking us all in, and that guy was a huge nerd too, he hadn’t even cracked a smile. One of the nerds was like, “These are the boots they told us to buy. You don’t have any?”

And I don’t know how it was possible that I was accepted into this program, how they let me sit on that tube in the pool for two days, but nobody sent me like a checklist of stuff to buy. “They sent it to our campus email,” one of the dorks said, but I didn’t even bother replying, I never set up my campus email. I was still using my AOL email at the time, I’m not going to bother sharing my old screen name, but it was something lame, childish, you know, I can say that looking back now. Fine, it was SpleenHarvester6834. I don’t know. I thought it was badass at the time. I think I just saw the Hellraiser movies or something.

So I was totally underprepared without the waterproof shoes. But that’s OK, because I bought this pack of novelty eye patches and pirate swords from a party goods store. “Come on mateys!” I passed around the plastic trinkets, nobody took any, what a bunch of weirdoes, seriously, you’re going to spend a whole three months on a boat out on the open ocean and you don’t want to have even the slightest bit of fun?

And that’s what it was, three months of no fun, of performing a bunch of boring calculations. All of the ship’s work was mostly done automatically and, I guess reading the brochures would have helped, but it was all just lab work, just pointing stuff at the sky and taking seawater samples and eating this disgusting packaged food. I didn’t have a cell phone yet, so it didn’t matter that there wasn’t any service, but no TV, just a deck of cards that I brought that got wet with sea spray almost immediately after I busted them out.

I didn’t do anything, not that it mattered, you pay the price for a semester at sea and you don’t do any work, apparently the price tag has an included C+ minimum grade. I’ve never since spoken to any of my shipmates. It’s like, you know when Facebook came out and all of the sudden you start reconnecting with kids you went to Kindergarten with? There was nothing from any of those guys. Maybe they’re all back at sea, back at the open water, who knows, bunch of nerds, I bet you they have no idea what Facebook is. Still, I always find it strange that there’s basically no digital record I ever even boarded the ship.

The absolute worst part was, while I didn’t have any seasickness at all while on board, as soon as I touched dry land again, I started to feel the waves. After a couple of weeks I went to the doctor and he diagnosed me with Phantom Wave Syndrome, something about the brain and waves and, I have no idea, but everything’s always a little wobbly. I asked him, besides medication, is there any relief? “Well,” he told me, “You could always get back out there, back out to sea, I’m sure you wouldn’t feel anything if you were back on a boat.”

But fuck that, fuck the sea, fuck marine biology. I put my heart and soul into the water and it just sank, like it was encased in a cement defibrillator, a whole big vast ocean of nothing.

First things first

Prioritization, it’s one of the cornerstones of getting stuff done. Maybe it’s the only cornerstone. But I guess then you’d have to imagine everything that you’re getting done as being in the shape of a giant capital L. It doesn’t matter, I said the word cornerstone, I don’t know why really, why do I pick any word over another word? It’s all just some unoriginal way to say something unoriginal. I could have said bedrock, foundation, you know.

But I’m talking about getting your priorities in order. It’s essential, before committing to any task, to figure out what you’re going to do first, then what you’re going to do second, right? All the way until you’re finished. But even then, you’re hardly done prioritizing. Because that thing that you just prioritized, that’s just step one in a multi-stepped process which all culminates in everything that you do, your life.

And it’s why I can’t get anything done, I’m terrible at prioritization. I wake up in the morning and I try to just will myself to get things together. I sit straight up out of bed and I say, “First things first,” and I say it with meaning, hoping that that meaning will kind of launch me into the day, like I’ll intuitively know what I’m supposed to do next.

But, and I’ll take yesterday as an example, I woke up, I said, “First things first!” but then I started thinking, well, shouldn’t I have gotten out of bed first and then said first things first? Come on Rob! Get your priorities together. And so I decided I needed to reset the day, so I laid back down and told myself, fall asleep Rob, go to sleep and wake up again and you’ll have a clean slate, a brand new opportunity to really put things in order.

But I should have set a cell phone alarm. You know how it is when you first wake up, right? For me anyway, until I actually get out of bed, go downstairs, and have a cup of coffee, it’s not like I’m really awake, awake. What I mean is, until I have that caffeine pumping through my system, I could at any time hit my head to the pillow and resume sleeping as if I had never woken up in the first place.

Which is what happened, and this is just stupid, typical me not setting out my priorities in a prioritized fashion, I woke up to my alarm clock, I turned it off, there was the whole, “First things first!” followed by everything that I just talked about, and then I hit that pillow, I went back to sleep. The next thing I know I’m sort of waking up naturally, really almost groggy from what I’d soon discover after looking at the clock was way too much sleep. What time was it?

It was almost eleven thirty. Talk about not having my shit together. My dog was whimpering at the bottom of the stairs because he had to go to the bathroom, so I threw on some shorts and took him out, all the while squirming because I myself hadn’t even gone to the bathroom yet, and so I felt bad, I didn’t give him a chance to really get out there, to really sniff the ground or pick a spot, and it’s that whole thing about, priorities man, your plane’s going down, you make sure that oxygen mask is on you before you start helping out the little kid sitting next to you, in my case, the dog who just refused to go to the bathroom, and yeah, maybe I was pulling his chain a little too hard, but man did I have to pee, and it was this whole thing with me not having my keys in those pants, so, and I’m such an idiot, I tied him up front while I hopped the fence in the back. I couldn’t get into the house, but at least I could pee in the backyard, but as soon as I unzipped my fly I hear, “Rob! What the hell are you doing?” it’s my wife, I’m like, “Baby! What are you doing home?” and she’s like, “It’s Saturday! What the hell are you doing? Where’s the dog?” and I’m like, “He’s tied up out front!”

I’ll cut to the chase. She got up early, it was Saturday, I had just forgotten, I think I forgot to add keeping track of what day it is in that list of priorities, and she took the dog out already, that’s why he wasn’t peeing. It was almost lunchtime. “What if the neighbors see you?” she was screaming out the window, and I was like, “I don’t know, why don’t you scream a little louder and maybe they’ll look out back to see what’s going on!”

And I was starving. I wanted a bacon egg and cheese but it was almost lunchtime, and come on, what kind of a prioritizer am I supposed to be, eating breakfast for lunch, on a Saturday, I think I work on Saturdays, I should have checked my schedule, maybe that’s what all of those missed calls were. It’s about understanding the importance of getting up on time, returning phone calls, man, priorities, right? First things first.

Come on, one more third chance, please

I’m not asking for a second chance here, I’m asking for a third chance. Another third chance. How was I supposed to see that guy pulling out of his driveway? And why didn’t he stop? You know it takes two to tango, right? Well, I’m just saying, you’re backing out of your driveway, you give a little honk, a little, “Honk! Honk! I’m backing out here!” Nothing.

Come on, you don’t really need brake lights. Hand signals are still perfectly acceptable. Why do you think they make you memorize them in driver’s ed? Because you don’t need brake lights. You don’t need turning signals. You stick your arm out of the window and it’s either up, down, or something else, I think it’s like if you point left, that’s left, if you point right, that’s a right turn, and then if you point down, or … wait, if you make a fist, but downward, then that’s braking.

It doesn’t matter, you can look them up online. But just let me borrow the car one more time. I’ll run some errands for you on the way back. Oooh, sorry, I’m coming back way too late to make a grocery store run. Yeah, I know that Key Food is open twenty-four hours, but, well, I can’t show my face in Key Food anymore. It’s not even the manager so much as it is the deli guy. We had this incident in the parking lot, but I’m telling you, I promise, it wasn’t with your car. It was somebody else’s car. And if that idiot manager would just hand over the surveillance tapes, I’m almost positive, no not almost positive, I’m positive positive that we’d have video proof that it was the deli guy’s fault. He should have been behind the counter anyway, what kind of hours are they keeping? That was like primetime sandwich hour.

But yeah, no Key Food. And I think Stop-and-Shop closes at midnight. Well yeah, I was planning on coming back at three. Well yeah, Trade Fair is open twenty-four hours, but there’s never anybody there at that time of night, you know, you have to walk in the exit, and the deli section isn’t open. Don’t you want cold cuts? It’ll just be easier to do one complete grocery store trip during regular business hours. Come on, just let me have the car, and then let me have it again tomorrow and I’ll do your errands, although I’m just saying … wait.

Wait, I’ll pay for gas for tonight, fine, but I’m not filling her up tomorrow if it’s just a regular run. And get off my case about the receipts, all right? Like if you say you want a pound of turkey, I’ll get you a pound of turkey, don’t worry about how much you think a pound of turkey at Trade Fair costs. Like I’m just saying, if I find it somewhere else for a little less, well … look, you weren’t planning on spending that much money on turkey anyway. It’s like, if you call up a delivery service and the guy says it’s going to be ten dollars, you’re paying ten dollars, right? You don’t have to ask for a receipt, right?

Well, I don’t know, I guess you could ask for a receipt. Well, like for example, if I find a coupon, right? Like if you want something and are willing to pay x amount of dollars, and I find the coupon, that’s my savings. You give money to me, I find coupon, right? Don’t you get it? Like find your own coupon.

Well I don’t have my own car, that’s why I’m here. Come on, mom always told me to share my stuff with you when we were little kids, don’t you think she’d want you to let me borrow the car? And what about those scratches from last month? Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of it? Yeah, well, it’s a similar shade of red. I don’t know why you insisted on buying red anyway, mister flashy over here. You know cops are more than ten times a likely to pull over a red car, right?

And that basically takes care of that first third chance I was talking about earlier. Fourth chance, third chance, whatever, sorry I’m not writing down every number that I ever come in contact with like you do. Do you need a receipt for this conversation? What are you, an accountant? I’m just saying, the cop pulled me over not because of my driving, but because of your fancy-pants red car. Maybe if it were gray, blue even, maybe he would have let it slide.

And nobody drives just the speed limit. And you should have reminded me where you keep the insurance. No, I don’t think it’s an obvious place, the glove compartment. Excuse me for not wanting to snoop around your personal glove compartments. And what if there was something in there that shouldn’t have been, a gun? I have no idea. I don’t know what your position is on weapons, on guns in the car. You’re a good guy and everything, but I don’t really know you. How well should I know you? What kind of a guy gives out a car and doesn’t think, oh yeah, here’s a little something you should know about registration, about insurance.

Just, I’m tired, yes or no, car or no car. No car? Fine. Can I get a ride? No? Well, if I’m in trouble later, will you pick me up? Well can I call you? I don’t know, maybe you’ll be in a better mood later. Just, mom, stay out of this all right? If you’re not going to help me out, just don’t say anything, because I thought at least you’d at least be on my side, it’s totally not fair, remember the time I was playing Nintendo, and I was on the last level of Super Mario World, and he comes down, he’s like, “Mom! I want to play too!” and you were like, “Let your brother play too!” I don’t care if that was twenty years ago! I never got back to that boss level. You could at least tell him to let me borrow his car. Well you don’t have to force him, but you don’t have to side with him either. You could’ve just said nothing. Didn’t you used to say something like that? About not having anything good to say so you don’t say anything? What the hell?

I’m in a New York State of State

New York is the greatest city on Earth, that’s just a fact. And everybody knows it. Maybe there exist other great cities equal or superior to New York somewhere else in the universe, maybe on some futuristic planet, galaxies away, but I have no idea, I have no way of knowing if that’s true, and to be perfectly honest, I doubt it. Ask anybody from any other city, “Hey, you, what’s your favorite city?” don’t even bother sticking around to let them answer, because they’re going to say New York. You add up all of the other cities in the world, they don’t even come close to being one percent as great as the shittiest of city blocks in New York.

Like I said, everybody already knows this stuff, so I’m not going to spend any more time spelling it out. What a lot of people don’t know is that New York also happens to be the greatest state that has ever existed in this, or any other country. Yes, that includes provinces or whatever it is that other countries call their states. New York State is the greatest state there is.

And, yes, a lot of New York State’s greatness is due to the fact that our greatest city is New York City. So, right, that already gives New York State a ridiculous advantage. But there’s more than just NYC. There’s Albany, that’s our capital. And if you’re like me, you might be thinking to yourself, Albany? Really? Like maybe you’ve had to drive through or past Albany once, and you might have had to go to bathroom really bad and, yeah, you were running a little low on gas, but you just couldn’t get yourself to spend another minute there, that hopefully you’d have enough fuel to make it to Schenectady.

But therein lies Albany’s, and thus New York State’s, greatness. You see, I always look at inferior states, states like Massachusetts, or Georgia, when they were planning out their state hundreds of years ago, some genius legislator or state planner had the bright idea, “Hey guys, let’s make our biggest city the capital!” And that’s what you call putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Here in New York, we took all of the politics, all of the grimy, dirty business of state government, and we put it far away from our (and the world’s) greatest city. Let’s let New York be New York, (I’m talking about the city) and we’ll let the state legislators and assemblymen fight amongst themselves up in Albany. Because let’s face it, somebody’s got to gerrymander districts and dole out liquor licenses. Why pollute such a great, great city with such petty nonsense when we can remove it to somewhere two or three hours away?

New York State has so much more than just New York City. Like Niagara Falls. Or half of it anyway, I’m not sure what the Niagara Falls sharing agreement is with Canada. But we’ve got a border with Canada. We’ve got some other cities too, like Buffalo, and Rochester, and Binghamton. I’ve never been to Rochester or Binghamton, but Buffalo is awesome. Instead of Taco Bell, they have this chain called Mighty Taco. I don’t think they have Doritos Locos Tacos though.

And do you know what our state motto is? Excelsior! How cool is that? Do you know what excelsior means? It means, “Yes!” It means, “Let’s do it!” It means “We’re number one!” It means all of these things and more, basically it’s just a blanket word used to express any positive sentiment. I think about other states and their state mottos, and to be honest here, I don’t think I know any of them off of the top of my head. Wait, I just remembered, “Live free or die,” from what, New Hampshire? Vermont? It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, but it just doesn’t pack the same wallop as “Excelsior!”

I’m trying to think if I know of any other state mottos, but I think that’s it. Isn’t one of them like, “A great place to live!” or something like that? Like Maine? I have no idea. I’m getting bored just trying to think about all of these other states. More New York State. It’s the greatest. We’ve got like a hundred sports teams. We say hero instead of sub or hoagie. Whenever I go out of state and I order a sandwich, I always make it a point to say hero, and if somebody behind me orders a sub, I do a really dramatic laugh, like I point in their face, and if they say, “What the hell?” I’ll be like, “Ha, you called it a sub.”

It’s just the best, New York State. We’ve got the greatest city in the world housed inside the greatest state in the world located in the greatest region of the country, that country being the best country on the planet. Again, maybe there are some other cool planets out there, but based on the other planets that I know of, like Saturn or Mercury, Earth is definitely the absolute best.

Excelsior!