More Fun with Fun

So, I finally got around to seeing "Palindromes," the latest film from Todd Solondz. I'm not sure why I waited so long, seeing as Solondz is the one director whose work means anything to me, now that Kubrick is dead and Woody Allen is, at best, in a down period. I guess part of the reason is that Solondz has yet to make a great movie. And, while it's better than "Storytelling," "Palindromes" does leave a lot to be desired; it's not an especially funny movie, except, perhaps, for the Mama Sunshine section of the movie, and those laughs come largely at the expense of disabled children (and there's a pretty good chance that I only laughed because I am a horrible person). The Dr. Dan song, accompanied by Dr. Dan's fantastic dancing, deserve special attention, as well.

After watching it, I went back and read Roger Ebert's review. I don't know how much Roger Ebert's opinions mean to me, but I respect them, more or less. He made some good points on this one, but for some reason he seemed to think the movie was basically about abortion, which I think is way the fuck off the mark. He also seemed to think that each actor portraying Aviva (the film's major artifice is that the central character is played by a half dozen or so different actors) is supposed to represent an entirely different life, which I think is also extremely inaccurate, and I think I would have thought so even without Mark Wiener's big speech toward the end, in which he rather pointedly says that no matter how much a person may change on the outside and how a much a person may think he or she has changed on the inside, we're always the same, utterly devoid of genuine free will (of course, using his own argument, it's merely his genetic programming that leads him to think that way, which gets all too circular if you think about it for more than a few seconds).

Anyway, all high-falutin' criticism aside, at the end of the day, there are few things more enjoyable than a nice, cold glass of Hawaiian Punch. Try it for yourself if you don't believe me. Cookies, also, are sadly given short shrift in this age of summer lambics, soy cheeses, televised celebrity dance-offs, and specialty vodkas. As always, I blame MTV, which I call, "Empty TV," because I'm a jerk.

Oh, also, I'm apparently being sued by Comcast. More on that at a later date.