Tag Archives: fighting

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?

Movie Review: Pacific Rim

Throughout the entirety of Pacific Rim, all I could think about was stuff like, wow, this is such an awesome movie. It keeps getting better and better. Not once am I finding myself even remotely bored. I cannot wait to go home and write about how much I loved this movie.

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And I did love the movie. But I saw it with my wife and the first thing she said upon exiting the theater was, “Wow, that was dumb.” How could we have arrived at two dramatically differing opinions after sitting next to each other for the exact same two and a half hours? Worse, why couldn’t I really mount a defense?

Because, look, I know when I’m defending movies that shouldn’t be defended. Like when I write about how much I loved Iron Man 3 or Thor, yeah, it’s probably because I’ve spent over fifty percent of my life reading comic books, that it’d have to be a really bad comic book movie for me to admit that I didn’t at some level at least enjoy a little bit what I just saw.

Like Daredevil, or Spider Man 3. Go ahead and start throwing eggs, I know that I’m broaching a very sensitive subject here, but were those movies really that bad? I haven’t watched them in a while, but I remember enjoying them. I liked the first Hulk movie. I always default back to the twelve year old me growing up on Long Island, no Internet, no cable TV, I used to get a thrill just from watching Fantastic Four cartoons on Sunday mornings. Never in my wildest imagination would I picture myself as an adult presented with dozens upon dozens of full-length comic book motion pictures featuring B-list superheroes.

I’m getting a little sidetracked from Pacific Rim, yes, but this is all adding up to a huge disclaimer, that in an attempt to review movies, I’m trying to go for an unbiased reaction after having seen one. I don’t know what the opening weekend numbers are, and I’ve yet to read any professional reviewers. I just want to go see a movie, and try as best I can to call it like I see it.

But it’s often the case that something cool like this will come out, a superhero movie, or in this case, a robots vs. alien monsters movie, and I can already picture exactly how the naysayers will react, similar to how my wife put it, that it was dumb. That it was just a bunch of fight scenes linked together by a pretty cheap plot.

And yeah, I guess, if you want to get all cynical and scientific about the movie, I suppose there really isn’t a whole lot more to it than that, alien monsters invade the earth through a portal deep in the Pacific. In response, we build a bunch of rock-em, sock-em robots to beat them all up.

But whatever, those feelings I was experiencing in that theater were real. It was pure joy. And I’ve sat through movies that should have been catered to me, like the new Superman, and I’ve been put to sleep. There was seriously no down time in the fun and excitement here. The score was a movie length fight song. The battle scenes were pure chaotic euphoria.

Did I mention that the pilots of the robots have to link their minds via something called a neural handshake? And that’s not like a colloquialism, the scientists say stuff like, “Neural handshake complete.” That’s what I’m looking for in a big action robot movie, people maintaining a straight face while talking about a neural handshake. The side characters, the almost unnecessary plots and asides and conveniently placed toilets that made up the caulk to this movie’s tiles, everything was fun, ridiculous, everything was insane.

And it’s a good concept. When was the last time we’ve had a really crazy monster movie? All I can think of are the old Godzilla films from decades ago. I know that the series has been rebooted several times in recent years, but nothing sticks, because everything tries too hard to be serious, to depict a modern world where big monsters wreak havoc.

This isn’t that world. It’s just further enough in the future to where the world resembles the one we live in, but all of the backstory is explained in the first ten or fifteen minutes, so everything is alien, fresh, reminiscent of the real but not even close to anything we’d be able to mistake for reality.

It’s just, my heart is still pumping, there’s still a surplus of adrenaline coursing through my veins. I really did love this movie. It’s fun, it’s pretense-free, they laid out some very simple rules that guide the course of the film and they rarely stray from the formula. It works. It’s pure hyper energy, it’s like an amusement park, one built entirely out of crazy roller coasters, and there are no lines, and they just let you keep riding everything over and over again for as long as you want. For like two and a half hours, anyway.