We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Balderdash

SO THE HOLIDAYS have now concluded with no major casualties. What we have here, for those of you unfamiliar with the extended Bobo family rituals, is meat pie with white cheese, two fried eggs, salt, pepper, mustard and ketchup. The meat pie is my mother-in-law's creation, spiced ground beef and turkey baked in a pie crust. Almost everyone in the family has their own particular way of topping their portion, and we all eat WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much of it from Christmas morning all the way through New Year's day. This year I had the genius breakthrough that I could, in fact, have this for lunch with beer, and thus the addition of Sam Adams' Boston Lager. Sheer genius.

The same can be said-- could be said, with reservations-- about the season's movie. The first truly free evening we had together, we put this in, with the result that we spent the first two thirds of it, say the first hour and change, wondering why in the hell anybody would want us to watch this.

This is a phenomenon know as The Shield Effect. Very early in the first season of this critically acclaimed series, Doc Nagel and I found ourselves discussing it, as we had both taken a slant at watching the pilot episode, and both had failed. We agreed that the acting was superlative, the plot thick, the characters rich, even the camera work was nicely done, but we just failed to stick it out. (I had, in fact, failed twice, once on the pilot's premier night and a second time during an encore presentation some days later.) We found it hard to take, not because of the ethical questions involved, not wholly because some of the characters were slimy or unpleasant-- Michael Chiklis' character, in particular, came off as someone you just wouldn't want to be around, although we both understood he was supposed to become redeemable somehow somewhere in the future. We were trying, and failing, to put our collective finger on why the thing had us so cheesed off, and then the Doc nailed it.

"Why would someone want me to watch this?"

Yeah, we understand that the morality play requires the construction of it's moral plane, but seriously: how dirty do require me to feel in the process? And what kind of creeps are these people for making me want to feel creepy and crappy on the path to wisdom?

The same kind of logic applies here. Excellent acting, beautifully assembled story, high satire, yeah yeah yeah. But there were many elements that were just . . . Why do these people want me to sit through this? In the lower third, during the resolution, a great number of those elements got cancelled out, and in the end it was a pretty satisfying film, but it was a long, hard slog getting there. Slog we did though. After the credits rolled, as I popped the thing out of the DVD player, the Wifey summed up her veiwing experience thusly: "Burn After Viewing." I reconciled my opinion later that night, on further contemplation, but the Wifey was just not willing to be any more forgiving. She was glad to say she watched it, but she figures those bastards now owe her another No Country for Old Men.*

*By those bastards I suppose I mean the Coen brothers. Tommy Lee Jones wasn't anywhere near this thing. Nor was Cormac McCarthy, so far as I know. This has to be the most useless asterisked notation ever. I mean, it's right there. What, do I think you're blind?