The Last Witness

This is a story of a piece of furniture, a couch to be exact. It was multicolored, contained more than one stain and, at the end, had springs sticking straight out through the back and into the wall. That's how it found itself in my garage for a couple years, and at the dump this weekend.

Let's back up to the summer of my junior year of college. I meet this girl, much to the distress of the girl I was dating at the time. This girl was grown up at a time when I was not, and for some reason, interested in spending time with me. One night, I got a call from this girl telling me she wanted to talk to me at her house. I had never been to her house, and in a long walk to my car, during which I turned around three times, I eventually found my way to her duplex. And we sat on her couch.

We talked about our situation and how we wanted to be together. And after a while of pacing around her house, during which I turned around more times than I cared to count, I sat down on the couch and kissed her. One of my favorite topics when I write (especially the short ficlets I've talked about on this blog) is the moment when people get together. I find that exercise fascinating, and while I might come off like a cheap romance writer, I think the dynamics of people taking a step into something, especially if they've known it's coming for a long time, is ripe with possibility. I also really like the topic because I suck so bad at that moment. I don't have one witty, interesting or good story about that moment, except on that couch. Please forgive me, but I'm going to keep it private as the girl I kissed on that couch is now my wife of 8 years.

There's much more to that story that I also don't care to discuss, but I soon got to know that couch very well. I remember one Saturday a couple months after we'd gotten together, we woke up at noon, ordered pizza and sat around watching a Daria marathon on MTV until dinner time when we decided maybe we should get out of the house. Then we didn't.

That couch survived a few trips - from college to the trailer we moved in when first married, to the new house we now live in, but the spring sticking out of the back and scratching the wall did it in and it sat in the garage for a good two years. Mice got into it and by the time we cleaned the garage this weekend in a 10-hour whirlwind of trips to the dump, grisly discoveries involving vermin and heavy lifting which left vertebra in places vertebra should not be, it was out of the garage and in the dump.

The couch was the second heaviest thing we moved, and I managed to get it end over end into a pile of debris. I hadn't given what that couch had meant to me a second thought until, as we drove away, my wife said simply "bye old friend," to the couch.

Oh yeah. That couch is where my family started.

And now its in the dump, replaced by a formerly white couch where my dogs have shredded one part of one cushion and where stains from markers and squash baby food will never come out. It's not a matter of needing to move on, it's a matter of remembering a place where you used to be, acknowledging it and feeling the weight of time at bit. It feels like an eternity ago and yesterday. The emotions are still vivid as hell - the fear, the excitement, the fear, the arousal, the fear, the spinning of the head, the fear.

That couch was where my family started.

Bye, old friend.

My Own Fail Find

I sent this to my new favorite site, failblog.org, and haven't heard back from the yet. I find it pretty funny.

The funny thing about this was I can totally see why this odd label was created. I spotted this at a book sale a couple weeks back, where surplus books from libraries are gathered in one place for folks to ravage. I found a 90 page pulp novel where Sherlock Holmes teams up with Tarzan.

But a few of the labels contained literary brick a brack (in fact, the entire thing seemed as if it were organized by someone with a cursory grasp on the language and the Dewey Decimal System) that was somewhat hard to label, hence the UFOs lumped in with the sciences. It's still funny,though.

Pretty Pretty

At the Minnesota Institute of Science, they had an exhibit on light and color which featured a bunch of colored strings hanging in a shadowy space. It's not a hard thing to make a pretty picture out of.

It's pretty enough, I think, to earn a limerick in its honor:

Oh tightly wound pieces of string

With colors that jump, pop and sing

The kids come and look

Instead of reading a book

And I'm not sure they learn anything.

Thank you.

My Ficlet Evolution

I know some of you don't go to Ficlets a lot, but it's a cool site full of pretty cool folks. The premise is people show up and write stories of an amazingly restrictive lenght, I think just over 1,000 key strokes. It's confining yet liberating at the same time.

Anyways, tonight inspiration hit and I wrote a three part story I was kind of proud of. Here it is without the pain of linking over to Ficlets.com. Which you should.

Monkey Versus Robot Part 1

They say monkeys have no memories. They are wrong.

Monkey remembered the sound his mother made as the robot drug her off into the jungle 8 years ago. Her eyes pleaded with him to run, while expressing the fear of the pain that was to come. She knew her fur would soon be ripped from her hide. The Monkey never forgot that sound, never forgot that look.

He used that look to become stronger and faster than any other monkey. He had that look in his mind when he destroyed BoBo, breaking his skull open with a rock to become the leader of their tribe. The look inspired him to swing further in search of the infernal machine that haunted his dreams.

And at last, he had found the machine alone and unmoving in the jungle. None of The Monkey’s tribe had been strong enough to follow. It was he alone that would fight. He alone that would destroy.

He was strong, broad chested and fast. He could kill the machine.

His battle cry was long and shrill. The robot stirred. The Monkey’s life had built to this moment.

Monkey Versus Robot Part 2

They say robots have no memories. They are wrong.

The robot remembered each and every monkey crushed by his mechanical hands. He remembered their cries as he strangled them, remembered their desperate attemps to claw and scratch. He remembered their faces, stored deep in his memory banks and kept for further replay.

Ever since a lightning strike had given him a semblance of awareness, the robot hated monkeys. They were filthy, they were unpredictable, they threw their own poo at the robot. They needed to be destroyed.

The robot worked methodically, clearing monkeys from the north, then the south. He would kill those who attacked quickly, drag the women off for a slower death and then return for children not smart enough to run. One kill had been particularly memorable, as a child had watched the robot pull the clawing mother into the underbrush.

All scans indicated that monkey had returned and wanted to fight. It mattered little to the robot. If you have killed one monkey, you’ve killed them all.

Monkey Versus Robot Part 3

After 10 minute of battle, both The Monkey and The Robot were facing defeat.

The Monkey’s left paw was smashed and unusable, making escape through vines impossible. His left leg gushed blood from a perfectly circular wound in his lower thigh. His left cheek featured a bruise with an alarming radius, but he felt strong and capable.

The Robot was equally damaged, his right arm gone as The Monkey had ripped it off and beaten him with it. The Robot had not anticipated that The Monkey would use weapons, and had been ill prepared. Still, he had landed some crushing blows to The Monkey, and his power level remained high.

As the two rushed at each other again, The Monkey bellowing, The Robot silent, a strange but unmistakable sound in the underbrush struck fear into the hearts of the two warriors. They looked skyward, as if willing the battle to go a different way.

But neither warrior, no matter how skilled or bent on revenge or thirsty for blood or oil, was any match for the giant right foot of Godzilla.

Why I'm Not Jesus

In church today, the focus was on the story in the gospel where Jesus tells his disciples the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jesus said (and I'm paraphrasing):

"Wheat is growing some place, yeah, and there are weeds growing too. A slave, which isn't cool but a reality at this day and time, tells his master, 'master, look at all these weeds. You wants me to pull them?' And the master says 'no, don't do that because it will hurt the wheat. We'll wait until harvest and then burn the weeds and put the wheat in the barn. Cool?' And the slave said 'whatever you say, my agricultural overlord.'"

Again, I'm paraphrasing. But then the Bible drops this fun little nugget, and this is actual scripture.

"The disciples asked Jesus to explain the parable. And Jesus said to them 'what, are you fucking stupid?'

Ok, that last part was not scripture, but it's what was going through my head in neon letters. The parable is about as clear cut as could possibly be - evil and good will grow together until God's divine judgement. Jesus couldn't have been any more clear unless he had said "evil and good will grow together until God's divine judgement" and then what would he say to the crowd for the next hour?

It's like if I were to tell a story today about a chicken who, after watching a fire destroy the farm's barn, started evesdropping on other chickens to make sure they wouldn't burn down anything else. Then that chicken was hated by about every other animal on the farm and left in disgrace for another ranch in Midland, Texas. What might I be talking about?

I guess we'll never know the context and whether or not the disciples had never been exposed to the idea of a parable or if they were oggling some of the hot women in the audience (or men. If you've got 12 guys following Jesus chances are good one is gay). But either way, it struck me as delightfully thick in a book about illumination.

My Thoughts on The Dark Knight

Writing a review of "The Dark Knight" is somewhat pointless given the glowing hyperbole flowing from the keyboards of nearly every movie critic on the planet. Instead, a mere 25 minutes after walking out of the theater, I have a few thoughts on the film.

On the relationship to "Batman Begins" - The flick sort of dispenses with the first film early on. The Scarecrow is locked up in the first 10 minutes, the Batman As Ninja thing is all but gone and very little is referred to. With a few tweaks this could very well have been the first film in the Batman reboot, but this divorce from the first movie doesn't hurt the film as a whole.

On Heath Ledger's Joker - Well, everything you've heard is true. It's a great performance. It's one of those rare performances where writer, director and actor all "get" what's going on and move in the same direction. It's the same sort of thing we saw with Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark in Iron Man, all pistons fire and the character flies off the screen. I fell officially in love with the character the second time he told the story about how he got his facial scars, and the movie so underplayed this pivotal point in the character's psyche that it was hard not to love. He's flushed out, fully explored but not inaccessible and Ledger is pitch perfect in this film. The Joker was truly frightening and this version perpetrated my favorite magic trick, probably ever filmed.

On the film's flaws - Christopher Nolan still can't stage a coherent action sequence to save his life and Batman continues to swallow actors whole. It's not that the acting is bad (it's not), but what the character calls for is so empty, which is kind of the point, that you can lose an actor inside it. If it wasn't for his almost annoying snarl, Christian Bale would have been swallowed up. The movie also didn't "click" in a few places, meaning while the acting all movies in the same direction all the plot points do not. Some pieces of the movie feel random. It's not a perfect film by any means.

On social relevance - However, what "The Dark Knight" does better than any other movie of its post 9/11 brethren is create relevant social allegory and tie it into the story as a whole. The Joker is a terrorist, plain and simple, though a genius terrorist in white face. The idea of symbols and their relevance, what revenge does to "nobility" and what fear can do to bring out the good in people - it's all relevant without slapping you in the face, which is a tall order for a comic book movie. Most effective is what happens when you cross lines, and how you can't go back.

On guts - Oh how people die in this film. Major people. People whose names are above the title. I turned to my wife about 2/3 of the way through the movie and said "The Joker's going to win, isn't he?" and in a big way he does. That's not so much as a spoiler as it is a conversation after the film. This movie goes directions that would scare major studios out of their $3,000 suits. The film's biggest praise, aside from the acting, need to go to the Nolan brothers and David Goyer for pushing these ideas and characters in directions they normally could not go. As a result, this flick plays more like a crime thriller than a superhero movie, and it's unique in that way.

On Aaron Eckhardt - This movie would not work without Aaron Eckhard as Harvey Dent. It just would not. It's easily a roll that plays strongly on his natural acting strengths, and he is the rock in which "The Dark Knight" builds its church. Ledger is flashy and fun and scary, Eckhard is absolutely necessary.

In Conclusion - Great stuff. "I'm not crazy, I'm just ahead of the curve," is my new favorite saying. The scene with Tim "Tiny" Lister actually moved me. I was tense and enthralled through the entire thing. Great stuff.

Pictures!

I figured out how to get the pictures off my phone, so I'll be posting a bunch of them in the next few days.

For starters, here's my dog snuggling up to a beer bottle. If that's not high comedy, I don't know what is.

Books, for Good Or Bad

The family and I attended a mass book sale this weekend, and ended up walking away with a shopping bag full of kids books for basically the price of hauling them away. It's splendid, to have the freedom to buy books you otherwise wouldn't give a second glance to, but it's a pleasure that's not without its risks.

Going through the stack this evening, the oldest kid hands me a book. Being four and unable to read (though she's darn close. We can't spell things around her anymore without her getting wise), she plops in my lap and hands me a book. It's called "My World Turned Upside Down" and had a kid hanging from a jungle gym on the cover. OK. I open the page and read "After my father died, I felt like my world had been turned upside down."

Next.

Luckily, she wasn't too hot on the idea, so we went with a book called "Christmas in July." Pretty safe, right? I thought so too until page 5, where Santa lost his pants and ended up a beggar on the street, begging for pants. Santa versus homelessness, vagrancy and public indecency!

Next.

Then we went to a book called "Herman the Worm" based on the popular camp song. As many of you will recall, when Herman gets bigger you ask, in a loud voice (this is key), "Herman, Baby, what happened?" But you really yell it. She caught onto that pretty fast. Then he burps and gets smaller. The kid asked me if that meant he threw up, then proceeded to make gagging noises up until dinner time.

Next.

Finally we landed on The Emperor's New Clothes. Yes, public nudity was involved but I figured it was a pretty good story. I like the lesson. She wasn't' interested.

Next time I'm reading the books before throwing them in a bag.

An Unmovable Force?

I've been saving this story for a few weeks, thinking that somehow it would come full circle. Today it did.

I was in Minneapolis a few weeks ago and had the chance to catch the "Star Wars" exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum. Basically there were a bunch of props from the movie (the original droids, Darth Vader's mask, etc.) some retrospectives and other attractions. It was an extra $8 past the admission, plus a 45-minute wait.

A bit of background: I've spent a good 20 years of my life in the firm spell of George Lucas' "Star Wars" movies. I saw Jedi 7 times when I was 7 (see how that worked), I watched the OT whenever I was sick during grade school and in college I ate Taco Bell until I puked collecting those damn disks that came with their value meals containing characters from "The Phantom Menace." Even after that turd was deposited (and yes, you could dig up my apologetic review in the pages of the Kearney Hub if you MUST, but I've since come to see the light), I made it to a midnight screening for each of the new trilogy. I might still defend "Revenge of the Sith" while damning the entire new trilogy if you get a beer or two in me. Then there's the LEGO Star Wars games, the Little People Millenium Falcon set...I own a shirt or two. If 1 is someone who's seen the movies and forgotten them and 10 is that guy in Michigan who changed his name to Obi-Wan Kenobi, I'm about a 3 or 4.

But somewhere along the line I made a decision: George Lucas had enough of my money. I think it was the glut of interviews I've read where he basically shows no regard for the people who love his property. His faux apathy borderlines on disgust as far as I can tell. It was cemented this year when he did an interview for the latest and lamest Indiana Jones movie, and said (and I'm paraphrasing), "people are going to hate it no matter what it is. It's only a movie!"

No long Internet rant needed. He just doesn't get my money anymore.

And, the Science Institute was my first real test: See the C3-PO used in one of my favorite movies of all time or save 8 bucks, $45 minutes and see the rest of the museum. The decision was surprisingly easy. Mr. Lucas didn't get any more of my money.

But the decision sort of bothered me because I hadn't drawn clear distinctions in my mind. Was Lucas simply banned from my wallet for being a hack who wasn't able to pull off a three movie ark while at the same time disrespecting those who made him famous, or was Star Wars dead to me on a whole? If Star Wars was dead, what about all that time we'd spent together? What about all the midnight screenings, the late night quotations, the times I was comforted when sick by the Imperial March? What about puberty being explained to me in terms of Luke Skywalker's maturation process or that time my girlfriend was over and we watched "The Empire Strikes Back" and...

No, it couldn't be "dead," could it? I decided to find out.

The best way to do this, I figured, was to filter out all the stuff that killed Star Wars for many movie goers, namely the shitty dialogue. The best way to do this, I've found, is to play this amazing little special feature that came with the soundtrack to "Revenge of the Sith." Basically its a series of 20 or so music videos covering the major themes of Star Wars (the Republic, the Empire, the Rebels, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, etc.) with visuals from the movies, dialogue nowhere to be found and John Williams beautiful theme heavy score playing over the top. I decided to give it a spin when I was jogging to see if I felt anything.

At the end of the 37 minutes and 24 seconds (4 miles on a speed of 6.4 miles per hour), I can say my worst fears on the subject were not realized. In fact, I think things are OK. I don't feel nothing when confronted with Star Wars imagery and a swelling score (on a different note, I'm kind of a bitch when it comes to a swelling score. It can make totally hollow or unearned emotion connect with me in some odd way. See the end of Dragonheart and tell me the score doesn't make that thing work. Anyway) but I don't feel great either. Any time the New Trilogy showed up, there was considerably less emotion. During a couple of scenes replayed to music, it seemed I had forgotten scenes from the New Trilogy. "Oh yeah," I said to myself. "There was a big Jedi battle at the end of "Attack of the Clones." The neural dent it made must have been very small.

But, Han Solo, Princess Leah and Luke Skywalker still do it for me, at least on a small emotional scale. I'm not saying Star Wars was ever like The Elephent Man in terms of emotional bombs, but what can I say? I have a history with those movies and I think that history is keeping me a fan for the time being. I'm not going to check out the new "Star Wars" movie coming out this summer (coincidentally, I felt nothing but dread at the LucasFilms logo that used to invoke such unabashed joy), and I have no plans to purchase anything Star Wars stuff for a while, but it's nice to know that initial connection is still there.

At least for now.

Picture Monday: MY WRATH IS TOTAL!!!

Again, I go back to the idea of who designs, prepares and manufactures pieces like this? I don't know, but if anyone can explain to my why this is aesthetically appealing (or, for that matter, why those "tree nymph" faces you can put on a tree are aesthetically appealing) please let me know.

Other than that, does this give off a wrathful feeling to anyone else?

A Cinematic Misunderstanding

A couple statistics from the "Get Smart" movie I finally got around to seeing this afternoon.

Number of times Steve Carell directly quotes Don Adams: 4

Number of times Anne Hathaway shows her underwear: 3

Number of lines Terrence Stamp has: 20 or so

Number of lines deserving an actor of Terrence Stamp's stature: 0

Number of kicks/slaps/paintball pellets to the nuts: 5

Number of staples to the head: 2

Number of fat jokes: Lost count

and finally...

Number of people Steve Carell kills: 5

Huh? Yeah. Steve Carrell guns down four people and sets another character on fire before a train hits him. Is it just me, or is this a major misunderstanding of the basic premise of the movie?

No one says action and comedy is easy, and all in all "Get Smart" was a decently entertaining if extremely light weight piece of summer fare. But the first time Maxwell Smart draws his gun and SHOOTS A GUY, I was a little shocked. I didn't know this movie was prepared to go that far, but that's the thing - it's not. It doesn't push any spy conventions, doesn't go anywhere unexpected or do anything to threaten the goofy aesthetic except have Steve Carrell casually gun down some bad guys. Given he spends the first fourth of the movie trying to get his superiors to understand "bad is what they do, not who they are" concerning their enemies, the movie betrays itself with a hero murdering in the line of duty.

It makes me think that audiences don't give that sort of thing a second thought.

Rotten Wish Fulfillment

I'm about 20 minutes out from seeing the movie "Wanted" and can't get a certain bitter taste out of my mouth.

A word about the movie: As a brain dead piece of summer entertainment, you could do a lot worse. The action "kicks ass" as it were, completely with flipping cars, bullets that travel in a round pattern and Morgan Freeman as an assassin. James McAvoy proves an extremely capable lead and Angelina Jolie is monosyllabic and shows her butt (I'd prefer she had more dialogue and her butt more screen time, frankly). Like I said, you could do worse.

But there was an element to the film that, the more I think about it, I find flat out despicable. The movie opens with a quick introduction to the life of Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), an office droan whose boss yells at him, whose girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend and who thinks about how he can't "feel anything" all the time. He calls himself a loser, a nothing, a nobody. Then he's recruited by a fraternity of assassins (except for Jolie who cannot be in a frat, can she?) and begins extensive assassin training and begins shooting a bunch of people.

Wesley is involved in an initial shoot out before he decides to leave his life as an office droan and undertake killing people in the name of a magic loom that spits the names of people who need to be killed "in the name of fate" in binary code (that's the plot, I swear to God). After the shoot out he goes back to his office and feels "different." His vulgar boss, whose girth is played for laughs, pushes him to the breaking point where he swears at her and informs her everyone would feel sorry for her if only she were nicer to them. Instead they hate her. His best friend, the one who's boning Wesley's girlfriend, goes in for a high five only to be smashed in the face with Wes's keyboard. Letters fly off the keyboard and spell "Fuck You" with one of the man's tooth substituting for the second "u." Attention to detail and all that.

In the context of the movie as a hypstylized fantasy about shooting people, it's completely in line with the rest of the movie. Things started to go south for me when folks in the crowd started to cheer the in-office violence. A couple people whooped. The dude in front of me (the one with his baseball cap on backward) stood up and pumped his fist like his inner monologue had FINALLY been expressed in celluloid, like the director had reached into his soul and expressed his deepest longing.

I have to admit, I grinned. Like I said, in context it fits in a movie where you flip your car in order to shoot a guy through his sunroof or where a curved bullet goes in a circle and kills half a dozen people on its flight. But no one cheered any of those scened. They cheered the use of violence to deal with something they could relate to (betrayal, office boredom, a feeling of powerlessness).

I was ready to let it go until the last scene in the movie where Wesley provides a voice over as a bullet flies an impossible distance through his best friend's energy drink can, through the hole in his boss's doughnut and into the head of the big bad guy. He says "this is me taking control of my destiny. What the fuck have you done lately?"

Well, I haven't saved the world from an evil syndicate of killers, but I've resisted the urge to punch people I disagree with on a fairly regular basis, so lets call it a wash.

Here's my problem - people responded to fixing a situation they relate to with violence instead of any of the other guilty pleasures in the movie. I remember when I saw "Knocked Up" people cheered when Seth Rogan finally stood up to Leslie Mann's nosy sister, who was trying to force him out of the delivery room. That was an instance where a man took control of a situation and firmly (but with great vulgarity) asserted himself. He didn't knock her teeth out. I love that scene in the flick and I clapped when I first saw it in the theater. I was the only one. Maybe if he's punched her in the boob...

The thing is we WANT to be violent. It's in our DNA to resolve things by hitting them, and it's why society has created laws saying if you do that, you go to jail. That's something we've always contended with. But I've noticed this sort of post Office Space hatred for the day to day work we all do that is rooted both in entitlement and ego. If someone gives us shit over the course of our day, as happens to absolutely everybody, we've gone from fantasizing about destroying the copier to kicking some ass. It's on the Internet in major proportions. It's spoken aloud in bars after work. And now guys are standing up and cheering when it happens in our pop entertainment.

Part of it stems from ego but another part stems from the awful corporate cultures cultivated in this country. When it's made clear to you that you're either expendable or not appreciated you feel powerless and when you feel powerless you want revenge on those who have the power. That's as human as dwelling in houses.

But it's a shift toward violence as a solution in the name of sophistication that bothers me - it's the worker saying I'm brilliant and misunderstood and deserve to be treated like royalty and if not I reserve the right to fucking kill you. That's the mentality that manifested in that reaction to the first 20 minutes of "Wanted." It's ego to a massive degree, and if research and trends are holding true it's going to get worse before it gets better. I just hope, for the sake of keyboards and dentists everywhere, we have less hitting and more, I don't know, talking.

A Gem Uncovered

I ended up working just shy of 12 hours today, so as the fireworks pop basically right outside my window, I had no desire to go see them. My skin is crispy and my brain is fried and I wanted to veg on something decent but not too challenging. I picked "In Bruges," which I had wanted to see for a long time and never got around to.

What a fooking brilliant movie.

I use "fooking" because In Bruges is about an Englishman (Brendan Gleeson) and an Irishman (Colin Ferrell) who both kill people for a living and both affect accent so thick they darn near drown in them. After a hit goes horribly wrong they are sent to Bruge, a tourist enclave in Belgium and told to lay low. Gleeson loves it. Ferrell is too itchy to appreciate anything much less the quaint charms of an old city. Plots twist, women and dwarfs are involved and what was meant to be a casual movie watching experience turned into full throttle yelling at the screen.

In Bruges is absurdest to a high degree...maybe absurdest isn't the right word for the first two acts. How about gleefully strange. Example: Ferrell meets a drug dealer and they go out on a date. Just when things begin to get thematically heavy, the Irishman blurts out "oy, they're shooting midgets over there," or something like it. Turns out there's a movie set with a dwarf on it and it's his favorite thing in Bruges. Like everything else, it turns out to be essential to the plot.

Speaking of the plot, this sucker gets very twisty without ever once for a second betraying characters. I guess that's what's most enjoyable about the movie - the way it ties everything together but never strays from the characters it loves.

It's not often I come across a gem like this anymore, as my movie going has dropped off considerably in the past few years. Even though I'm fried and am not articulating it well, this movie is fantastic and worth the view. Maybe more than one.

He's a Good Guy. Congratulations.

So my sister Katie is getting married next year.

The news broke last week as I was driving back from Minneapolis where I had been at a conference. I was in the middle of a conversation about the philosophic mission of museums when my dad called and broke the news. To call me "taken aback" doesn't cover it. I was floored.

A little bit of background is necessary, so please indulge me. My sister and I are five years apart and sometimes it feels like a generation. I think she's agree that we're not overly close for a number of reasons - mainly me being a jerk for large parts of my teens. I never really "took her under my wing" so to speak, because I'm just now realizing I didn't have wings back then and am just now grown them. We never really fought, but never really shared, you know? I always got the feeling that if I weren't her brother, she wouldn't have hung out with me.

I'll site one example and move on - in Junior High I got the crap beat out of me a bit (just like a lot of people) and got bitter and hateful toward certain groups at a young age. At one point when I was ranting about something (I forget what) she cut me off with "when did you start hating people." It said "I'm sad for you" and "shut the hell up" all at once and she was exactly right. But that's kind of where we were.

But I think things have changed as we've both gotten out on our own. I think we like each other. I like her. She's beautiful and ambitious and more "adult" than I was at her age. She's got a really tough road going - job and school (and now engagement), but something inside me knows she's going to handle it. Somewhere out there, she found some pretty amazing strength and it doesn't take long to see it. She's no nonsense yet warm and I love her.

Flash forward to her getting married. I don't want to go too much into the topic of the guy she's marrying, other than to say he's a guy with his poop in a group. I like him, though I get the feeling he wouldn't hang out with me if he didn't desire my approval on some level. So it is. But not being the kind of brother who calls all the time, I guess I wasn't aware of how deep their relationship was.

But it's strange the feelings that come rushing over a big brother when his little sister gets engaged. For the first time in a long time I want to be protective. I want to sit her down and say "do you really want this" even though she's even tempered and smart and I'm positive she knows what she's doing. I wish I'd been more up front with her about how I messed up with women so she won't make the same mistakes. I want to tell her how great it is to have someone but how miserable it can be if you play it wrong. I want to tell her this commitment is one where pride swallowing is daily, and sacrifices can be great but the rewards greater.

I suddenly want to be the big brother I never have been for her. Ouch. I read that sentence back and my chest constricted, but it's the truth.

Then, there's happiness. Her wedding is going to be great. She's going to be beautiful. They'll be great together but she won't be one to back away from a challenge or a fight.

I'm so happy for her.

Movie Review: Hancock

There are a couple ways you can frame Will Smith's "Hancock." One way is to call it a mess of irredeemable proportions, a movie with so many half-baked ideas, so many different moods that fluctuate at a whim and so confused with its own identity that it dies a thousand deaths in its 135 minute run time.

If you're the type who comes to praise film instead of bury it, you could call it a bold move on all involved, a real risk that doesn't quite pay off, a well acted ensemble piece that suffers from a script that could of used another pass, a movie that tries so hard to please the audience you can see the veins bulging and hear the grunts.

"Hancock" is all these things, but not more. It's a whole lot of everything that equals a big nothing, unfortunately.

The premise: Will Smith is a superhero with amnesia named Hancock, who is an a-hole. The people he saves call him an a-hole. Children on the street call him an a-hole. Even his new friend Ray (Jason Bateman), a PR rep and "good guy" calls him an a-hole. Using broad comedic strokes, director Peter Berg spends the first 20 minutes of the flick making sure the audience feels the same way. Then, the first of many radical tonal shifts kicks in and it's established Hancock is an a-hole because he's lonely. He lives in a trailer a la Riggs from the Lethal Weapon movies. He drinks to kill the pain inside, you see.

Then it's back to the funny, as Ray persuades Hancock to go to prison for being an a-hole in order to rehabilitate his image while Ray's wife (Charlize Theron) looks at Hancock so long and hard that a neon sign flashing "THEY HAVE A HISTORY" every few seconds on the bottom of the screen would have been about as subtle. Hancock goes to jail house AA. He sticks one inmates head up another inmates a-hole. He stays in jail even though he could break out at any time. Ray's kid loves him and gives him a plastic dinosaur.

The third act I won't reveal other than to say THEY HAVE A HISTORY and that history has holes big enough make an average movie goer cringe. The tone shifts from a comedy superhero fight to actual heroics to sacrificial drama and ends with a good old fashioned axe murder played for laughs. Seriously.

I'm honestly not sure if "Hancock" wreaks of studio interference, star ego or what, but when the filmmakers can't commit to a tone, an audience can't commit to laughing or cheering for the hero or any emotion other than casual interest. It's amazing how this movie kills momentum. Whenever the laughs start to roll, the flick gets morose - whenever it builds dramatic intensity, there's a fart joke.

The shame of "Hancock" is if the flick had found a tone, most of the ingredients to deconstruct the superhero genre are right there on the screen, waiting for someone to come along and harness them. Smith gives it his all and Jason Bateman transplants his "Arrested Development" dry wit into the proceedings. He's good, but it doesn't help. Charlize Theron is hot and vapid. If they'd been on the same page, watch out.

But "Hancock" misses and misses big. The flick isn't without it's pleasures, but it's more of a mess than anything else.