No Kingdom For Old Men

" There's Aliens In Our Midst...And They Bring Us Guacamole." *

I went out to White Flint Mall in the early part of the evening to get a little shopping done, and I thought I’d take in a movie. Normally I avoid White Flint for flicks. (small screens.) Iron Man had already started, and I knew Sex and the City would be a first weekend sellout, so I opted for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. From the opening action sequences, I thought, "Harrison Ford is going to need a hip replacement." Have we become a society that feels so inadequate that we need superhuman powers? In all of the previews I saw, Will Smith’s Hancock, Batman, even the animated Kung Fu Panda, there seems to be this overriding theme of needing to possess superpowers. Are we all feeling that ineffectual in our lives, or is this just summer movie madness 2008?

From the opening moments, I kept thinking “PeePaw Jones. Harrison Ford is way too old to be playing this role anymore.” I hated the computerized special effects. I was annoyed by the goofs and obvious inconsistencies. Oh. I see. You just scrub Indy down with an industrial broom and any residues from surviving a nuclear explosion are gone? The premise of him even surviving a nuclear blast was stupid. The digital countdown numbers which didn’t exist in 1957. The slip and slide in the nuclear front yard that didn’t exist until the 1960’s. Karen Allen’s hairstyle, which did exist in 1990, but not in 1957. And what lens did they use on her? It was so blurry, it looked like it was smeared in Vaseline. My friend Tony and I were discussing this later, and he said, “You would have thought it was Barbara Walters, that lens was so coated.”

"I Vant A Vax, Not A Shave!"

Cate Blanchett was made up impeccably, but under a hard pancake makeup and harder lens. You could see the pores in her cheeks, and what was with the facial fuzz? How much did Spielberg and Lucas spend on this film? Millions. And they can’t get her under a pot of hot wax and some muslin strips? That nasty Shia boy doing a direct rip off of Marlon Brando in The Wild One (a movie I have mentioned many a time on this blog.) Sacrilege. He certainly couldn't fill Brando's jeans, sneer or contempt for square 1957 America (and his motorcycle wasn’t even accurate. )

Accept No Substitutes

And the ants. African. Not South American. Duh. Tony added, "Ants? What the hell was with that monkey swinging??? The Aztec calendar on the floor of the temple? No.” I said, “John Hurt could have passed himself off as a Mayan artifact, but he’s been looking like that since Alien.” And Mutt is his son??? Try grandson, PeePaw. Your son would be forty. I told Tony it would have been more interesting if the film was PeePaw Jones and The Crystal Meth Lab. That’s when we let loose:

PeePaw Jones and the Search for Calista Flockhart’s Weight
PeePaw Jones and His Lost Sperm Count
PeePaw Jones and His Adventures in Colonoscopy
PeePaw Jones and The Early Bird Special
PeePaw Jones and His Erectile Dysfunction

Potatohead Jones and the Kingdom of Hasbro

Tony said, “When the Russians were in that warehouse of U.S. Military Intelligence, don’t you think they would have taken more than what they were looking for? For God sakes, it’s military intelligence artifacts. All of the stuff in there would have been worth something. When we glimpse the Ark earlier in other films? The Ark was stacked on top of boxes in the warehouse. In this movie it was on a lower shelf.”

Then we started up again:

PeePaw Jones and the Search For Kidney Stones
PeePaw Jones and the Ruins of His Face
PeePaw Jones Mystery of the Prostate

Tony added, “I thought at the end, “Wait a minute. They’d bury a flying saucer that could travel great distances to Earth, and then have all of those stupid traps?”

PeePaw Jones and the Search for His Dentures
PeePaw Jones and The Raid For His Next Hip Replacement
PeePaw Jones and the Lost Nap at Noon

I saw the saddest thing when I was leaving. All of these young girls, early twenties, all dressed up and waiting in the lobby in their groups, waiting to go in for the next showing of Sex and the City. Every single one of them had on a short dress with cleavage, bold prints, jewelry, and very high heels. They had on makeup. They had their hair done in au courant disarray, which is to say "styled to look unstyled," but they weren’t wearing Dior or Westwood or McQueen. Macy’s. The jewels not from Fred Leighton and Harry Winston. Claire’s or Forever 21. No Manolo’s or Choo's. DSW.

SJP And The Legend Of Zombie Hands

I found it odd these twenties were going to see women in their forties (and older) living out this fantasy. The gossip blogs have been vicious these past few weeks on Sarah Jessica Parker (SJP) in particular. There’s now a website called Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like a Horse, and that’s what it is: a website with side by side pictures of SJP and horses in similar poses.

As I exited, I saw another group of girls walking in, all done up and nowhere to go but a suburban mall; all going to see the fairy tale. There was a group of young men waiting to go into Dave and Buster’s right next to the theatre. Wrinkled polo shirts, crinkled shorts. Mussed….and not being bussed. I thought, “There’s something wrong here.”

This morning I was telling all of this to my friend Drew, while I was driving and on my way to do my errands, and when I told him about the young men at Dave and Buster’s he laughed and said, “Hell….that sounds like a better trade-off to me. Dave and Buster’s, getting drunk, and killing zombies.”

Kill the Brain. Kill the Zombie.

* I threw in a link to a punk group out of California called "The Twinkeyz" singing "There's Aliens In Our Midst." They've also got a My Space page: MySpace.com - the TWINKEYZ - Experimental / Punk / New Wave - www.myspace.com/twinkeyzusa