James Franco and Danny McBride engage in a pedantic argument over the proper etiquettes of masturbating in someone else’s house.

Pfffft Hahaha! It’s spit-your-drink-out funny!

In another scene, Jonah Hill is possessed by a demon and his friends are forced to perform an exorcism but end up lighting him on fire instead. Channing Tatum becomes McBride’s bitch  and mad props to Tatum for having the balls to tuck in his balls for that scene.  Oh yeah, and Michael Cera plays a coke-snorting asshole in a jacket.

Who would have guessed, in a million years, that Michael Cera would play a coke-snorting asshole in a jacket? That’s exactly what is so god damn brilliant about this movie. It completely dispenses with any form of convention. At first you think all the actors play themselves but when Jonah Hill goes full on fruity with a strange  Mr. Rogers-type persona, you don’t know what to think.

Michael Cera’s Stupid Asshole in a Jacket persona is perhaps the funniest because it creates this odd sort of cognitive dissonance when you realize Cera is playing a character contradictory to his typecast. We’re used to seeing Cera as a mild-mannered, quirky  and endearing boyish figure. But in “This is The End,” he snorts coke and slaps Rihanna in the ass. Comedy gold! I found this sparkling gem on the IMDB page.

Initially Michael Cera wasn’t really slapping Rihanna’s butt, but rather making the motion and stopping right before touching her. As a result, the scene wasn’t working on camera because it looked too fake. Eventually Cera asked Rihanna if he could really slap her butt, she said yes but on the condition that she be allowed to really smack him across the face each time. Cera agreed.

Ha! By far the funniest sentence in that paragraph is the last: Cera agreed.

“This is The End” is a satire of everything:  the Hollywood lifestyle, the Apocalypse genre, the dick joke genre … shit, even religion! At one point, the characters come to the realization that they are in the biblical End Times and everything they are experiencing is foretold in the book of Revelation. This leads to a curious discussion about God. At some point in the very cheeky discussion, the actors stumble into the doctrine of the trinity. In an attempt to better explain the concept of God being three in one, James Franco makes the analogy that God is “like Neapolitan Ice Cream.”

Neapolitan Ice Cream. I fucking lost my shit.

The movie takes a lot of passes at religion but in a very smart, subtle way. It certainly doesn’t take any potty shots. Writers Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg don’t make fun of End Times Christian theology by explicitly telling us how absurd it is. Instead, you whisper this is so absurd to yourself when you watch an almost literal interpretation of the book of Revelation play out.

Okay, so, bad guys go to Hell, good guys go to Heaven. Sounds good in theory, but what about the logistics? Is there some kind of threshold of good deeds you need to cross before you can be beamed up? And what are you going to do when you get there? Surely if it’s any fun it will have roller coasters and weed… The movies explores those ideas and I think those ideas are at the core of its utter hilarity.

Also, Michael Cera snorting coke and slapping Rihanna in the ass. Nobody saw that coming!

I don’t normally write positive reviews. I find it easy to describe why I hate something, but when I love something, I don’t have words for it. I pretty much just stare, dumbstruck.

We all know what should have happened, what ought to have happened, according to modern television tropes. According to pretty much every TV show plot ever. What should have happened is that the Starks, the good guys, kill the Lannisters, the bad guys. Then Robb takes the throne to avenge his father’s death, yada yada yada. That should have happened. And yet that would have been completely forgettable.

What did happen, though, was … Holy fuck, completely unforgettable.

It was just another happy Westeros wedding, with wine, dancing and general festivities. Until the instruments begin ominously playing “The Rains Of Castamere.” … Until that dastardly look Lord Bolton gives Cat, just before she realizes… just before

STAB! STAB! STAB!

Fuck! I lost my shit. That scene was perfect. Good drama is like a good back stabbing: completely unexpected and cuts you deep. Or should I say, hehe, in Talisa’s case, front stabbing (*commence slow clapping*).

Willie Nelson (aka Hogwart’s disgruntled janitor) captured a lot of the nuances of cruelty in that scene, like taking a swag from his wine glass while watching the Starks’ butchering. I mean, who does that? Only a Frey. And the utterly helpless look on Robb’s face… That look said it all. Sometimes, the good guys lose.

Oh but it was just perfect. I won’t forget it.  Everyone at work is talking about it. Hell, the whole country is talking about it. Amazing how fictional events can sometimes have more of an effect on society than real, actual events. “The Rains of Castamere” is sort of like my generation’s version of the JFK assassination. I know it’s not real but, it feels real and that’s got to count for something.

Because …

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I gave up childish things.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11.

(And believe it or not, I’ve misused scripture in worse ways. During my college years I justified drinking with Mathew 4:4, “Man cannot live on bread alone!” And in keeping with the wisdom of King Solomon, I abstained from all labor under the sun because “vanity of vanities, all is vanity! What profit has a man from all his labor In which he toils under the sun?” I knew my catechisms.)

Nowadays  I wouldn’t call myself a skeptic, atheist or anything like that. I still believe in a lot of things. A lot of crazy, far-out things too. I’ve also seen some crazy, far-out things (as if that counts for anything). But I have learned to be distrustful of the things I believe and even the things I have seen. Because I have been wrong before (read: because I have been Christian before), I will always be suspicious of my beliefs. I am distrustful of them. I am wary of my own personal biases. I would not die for them. I would not kill for them. I do not look down on others who do not believe the same things I do. I do not accuse others of committing a crime, worthy of eternal punishment, for not drawing the same conclusions I have about God (or lack thereof), our origin, destination, etc..

Because genuine belief or disbelief does not equate to sinfulness or wrongdoing. “Credulity is not a crime.” Your willingness to believe something says nothing of your virtues as a person or the quality of your soul. It is just that simple.

Sure I could choose to believe that the Bible was the inspired word of God. It would be easy. I could also choose to believe in countless other books written by countless other people, all pouting the same thing, that theirs is The One True Religion, that, when you die, you go one place really great if you followed all the rules and procedures correctly, or one place really bad if you didn’t. Too bad if you were born in a Muslim country or, from the perspective of the Muslims, too bad if you were born in a Christian country. Too bad if you made the mistake of believing in the wrong thing during your lifetime. It’s off to the eternal soup with you… And that soup is hot.

Well, that could be true – any number of religious dogmas could be true. Theologians use a lot of smart-sounding words and arguments after all, there’s the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument and I hear they’ve even got a teleological one. But there is one argument which defeats them all, and it is not taught at seminaries, or any religious institution for that matter. I’m speaking of the argument of Common Sense.

The Common Sense Argument says that God didn’t give us free will so he could command us to use it the way he wants us to. That God didn’t do the most honorable, glorious act ever by sending his only son to die for us to save us from … himself. That voice inside your head which Christians believe is The Holy Spirit? That’s actually your conscience speaking. Your conscience, not to be confused with certain members of THE ALMIGHTY GODHEAD.

And regular, plain ol’ heathen folk have consciences too. We’ve all got magical voices in our heads. Alright, none of us are perfect. The very word human implies flawed, hence why we say things like I’m only human.  We’re only human but we are at least better than the evil, worthless hellbound pukes popularly depicted by The Bible and other great works of fiction. Everyone struggles to do the right thing, just as much as they struggle to do the wrong thing. We’re not good or evil. We’re both. Isn’t that fairly obvious?

I also despise the Christian tenant that this life is a meaningless speck of dust in comparison to eternity, so we might as well just give it all up to Jesus. And that a temporary existence without God would be tragic and meaningless so … heck! Might as well just give it all up to Jesus!

Could it be that one day I will die and everything I did and all memory of my life will eventually be forgotten? That might be true. But nothing can change the fact that I was once alive, that I was here, that I lived and did things, that I happened. Whether I can or cannot be remembered has no bearing on the fact that I happened.  I actually happened dammit and that’s enough for me. It has significance. So I am not intimidated by the thought that there might not be a God or an afterlife. At least not intimidated enough to break my ass on an old wooden pew for an hour every week.  I can find more worthwhile things to do with my time on Sunday morning like sleeping or reading or making waffles.

Besides, I am not convinced death is the end. We are all born with that same intuition which refuses to comprehend non-existence, which tells us there is  more. I believe there is something hiding behind the curtain. I could be wrong.

And if  it turns out the Christians got it right, I doubt I’ll be eligible to pluck on harps in the clouds with the flying  naked babies for the rest of eternity. I would be a hypocrite to not admit that I might be wrong. Erroneous is a more fitting word because wrong implies wrongdoing, but if the Christians got it right, I’m going to hell for sure. God will boil my ass. Forever! Along with pretty much everyone. Though, honestly, I wouldn’t see the point in any of that (Christians cite something something er uh FOR THE GLORY OF GOD! something something something). Still, I am not afraid. I’m okay with that. That’s a risk I’m willing to take (which, coincidentally, is the same thing I’ve told myself before making my best life choices). I’ll take my chances with pretty much everyone.

Same goes if, on the off chance, the Qur’an isn’t a load of horseshit. If the Muslims win the come one, come all Dice Roll for Eternal Destiny, I doubt Allah will be rewarding me 72 virgins, especially since I just called his holy book a load of horseshit (and I would add that the prophet Muhammad is a NINNY, but that’s as far as I’ll go because I value the area of flesh and bone that connects my head to my shoulders). If the Hindus got it right then I guess I don’t have too much to worry about. Unless I’m reborn as a malformed Aardvark or something. Maybe I’ll be reborn as a cow? I think I’m moo material. I’d also settle for a moose (Cool!) Nirvana? (Awesome!) But no matter what happens, I’m sticking with my guns.

I’ll pull a Marcus Aurelius (or whoever it was) and take comfort in the fact that If there really is a God and he’s a double-o God, a good God, then he will understand why I have chosen the path that I have chosen.

Yeah but I’d like to make some and find out for myself just to be sure.

“Looks can be deceiving”

… and so can personalities. Idiot.

Come to think of it, looks aren’t at all deceiving in comparison to personalities. If you’re ugly, you’re ugly. If you’re fat, you’re fat.  There’s no hiding it. But if you’re an evil, treacherous, lying conniving bitch, there’s plenty of ways to hide it. It’s a magical thing I like to call the makeup of personality.

“If life give you lemons, make lemonade.”

Let’s face it. When life chucks you a bag full of lemons, the last thing you want to do is make lemonade. Lemon squeezing is tough work. Sometimes the lemon juice gets in your eyes. Forget lemons. I much prefer it when life pours me a straight glass of lemonade. Or Whiskey.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

First off, what picture are we talking about and what words are we talking about? The truth is in the details. Somehow I don’t think a picture of some old grandpa’s ass crack holds a candle to 1,000 words of William Freaking Shakespeare. Now if it’s Stephenie Meyer we’re talking about, I don’t think her writing holds a candle to a picture of some old grandpa’s ass crack. So you see, it would be difficult to find a picture that was worth exactly one thousand words. Unless of course you took a picture of a thousand words … wow, that’s metaphysical.

“There’s no I in team”

But there’s an an M and do you know what M stand for?? ME!

“Think outside the box”

The very fact that you are repeating that cliché means you have failed, utterly, in your own attempt to “think outside the box.” The very meaning of the idiom contradicts its usage…

“Don’t think outside the box. Don’t think inside the box. Think about the box.”

I made that one up working at the ol’ box factory. I told all my coworkers. I thought it was very clever. To this day I continue to use it as an amusing anecdote in conversations… No one has laughed at it yet but I remain hopeful.

People do not argue in this paradise of mine. Instead, if they disagree, the tradition is to give each other chocolate. Yes, chocolate. And they don’t have to go to the store and buy the chocolate. Instead, they need only say the word and Katie Perry swoops down from the sky in a giant cloud of cotton candy and showers the hardy disagreers with bars of chocolate. She is just like the guys on clouds in the original Mario Brothers except she throws chocolate bars, not hammers, and she is much prettier than 16 bit turtles in technicolor.

Oranges, tangerines and clementines grow from the trees, except they are shaped and peeled like bananas. Bananas are much easier to hold and peal than any member of the citrus fruit family…

IZ is there too, strumming his ukelele, on a ledge, that place where trouble melts like lemon drops, high above the chimney tops. Kids bounce on his belly, like a giant waterbed.

And muffins. Yes. Have I mentioned muffins? They’re everywhere. As far as the eye can see. Covering the shiny hilltops. They come in all different shapes and sizes. All different flavors too. There is one flavor that I particularly like: the happiness flavor. Have you ever tasted a happiness flavored muffin before?

You will never know happiness till you have.

I just came back from Michaels to stock up on candles in case the power goes. Note: I am a grown man of twenty three, capable of growing sideburns and a full moustache. So you can imagine that I wasn’t exactly overjoyed by the prospect of walking into Michaels for the sole purpose of purchasing scented candles. But it turns out they had quite the selection: Sparkling Pine, Buttercream, Apple Cinnamon, Cranberry Chutney… I found myself browsing the candle aisles for an unmasculine period of time. They come in all sorts of shapes and themes … Fall candles, Halloween candles, Christmas candles. Jesus, I spent the better part of an hour sniffing candles. I think that there is such a thing as Candle Crazy. Full grown men of twenty three are not immune. Now I know why they have entire stores, like Yankee Candle, dedicated to candles. People get Candle Crazy!

You laugh but my room is now filled with the sweet aroma of Pumpernickel.

After Michaels, it was off to the book store to find something to read by candle light. I picked up “Sad Desk Salad,” a novel about the career of female celebrity gossip blogger. By God! It has just struck me now that the target audience of that book is almost exclusively women! And this after the candle shopping incident … I think I might be developing feminine tastes!

Excuse me as I do a few chin-ups, briefly check the sports section and practice loading my pump action.

Yeah so “Sad Desk Salad.” The title was what struck me. I know all about the sad desk salads working class women frequently subject themselves too. They’re especially tragic for middle-aged unmarried women. Or conspicuously unmarriageable women. Poor things. They’re so hopeful … eating their sad desk salads … I’ve had a few of those. It hurts even for single young men. Just who are we trying to stay fit for?

I myself have been single for twenty three years which, if you recall, is my precise age. But I think It could be worse. I could be single and fat. But I’m not fat, just single. That’s why I often go with the sad desk salad menu option. Stop laughing! Desk salads ought to have positive connotation. After all, if you’re eating salad, you’re staying healthy. And if you’re eating it at your desk, that means you have a career. Who cares if any of that sounds pathetic … The important thing is that I’m happy with who I am on the inside. Because … I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me!

I once considered myself a Music Pessimist. That is, I rarely enjoyed music. Listening to the radio became an exercise in eye rolling because “I Will Wait” by “Mumford and Sons” played on the radio eight times a day. Every day. That and the same Maroon 5 songs, “Some Nights” by (not so) “Fun” and all those Pink songs about being a tough rocker chick who doesn’t care what the world thinks, even though the world has to listen to what she thinks nearly every day in the top billboard charts, a million times over. It’s nauseating.

The record companies pay the radio stations to repetitively play shit so they can sell 6 million copies of Adel. I know this because I used to be a radio junkie. I’d scour the web, hoping to find a station that genuinely played variety. Through internet streaming, I tuned into dozens of radio stations all over the country: Houston, Chicago, L.A, New York, you name it, even stations in the U.K. I hoped to find The One, a station without mind-numbing repetition. But guess what? I’ve found that every station follows the same template. You can’t get true variety. It’s remarkable. ‘The One’ doesn’t exist, not here in Virginia, not in New York, not anywhere. Because to play music, the radio stations need to cater to the record companies, i.e. the people that actually own the music. And the record companies make money by selling 6 million copies of Adel every year. The best way to advertise Adel is to spam her singles on their network of puppet radio stations fifty times a day. So live DJs don’t even pick the songs anymore. Basically, it’s a fucking conspiracy.

And the only alternative to radio, really, is my ipod. But with that comes its own slew of chores: downloading the music (cha-ching), importing the music into itunes, pruning and organizing the library, transferring music to the ipod, backing up the itunes library, etc, etc. Then when my hard drive fails (usually about three times a year), I’d have to repeat the process all over again. I just don’t have time for that.

So I became a Music Pessimist.

The solution

I’ve concluded that ownership of thousands of songs in any format, digital or not, is completely impractical. That’s why I’ve decided to stream all of my music through a free service called “Spotify.” There’s no ownership involved, which removes a lot of the impracticalities. But although I don’t actually own the songs, the playlists and library that I create in my Spotify account will literally be saved forever. No need to back them up because I never downloaded the songs, it’s all streamed. In a way that provides something more permanent, more possessive than actual ownership. My library and playlists last forever, and I will always have access to them so long as I have access to the internet. But if I buy the CD, the odds are quite high that it will be scratched up and unusable within a year. Why pay for something you can’t keep when you can get it free and actually keep it? That’s my logic in now using Spotify for all my music needs. From my home computer, I can get the entire collected works of Bob Dylan instantly, on a whim, at the click of a button. And when I boot up my work computer: Bam, it’s all there. No file transfers. No downloading, all I need to do is sign into my spotify account using whatever (phone, computer, music player) from wherever.

Spotify gives me the ability to search for any song, any artist and instantly have access to titles… The quality of the music is better than radio and I can create my own radio stations based on preference within Spotify, sort of like Pandora sans the constant ads. And unlike Pandora, I can skip songs and play them as many times as I’d like. So it’s sort of a dream come true for me. Spotify. Try it out. In the digital age, the world needs a smarter way of listening to music.

The best part was the end, not the end part where batman pulls the ol’ take-the-bomb-out-with-ya-but-still-come-out-alive, I mean the end-end. The part where the screen goes blank, the credits roll and I stand up to leave. Everything before that was irritating, especially Alfred’s teary-eyed melodramatics:  “I raised you [dramatic pause] from the time you were a wee little boy [dramatic pause],” etc, etc.

Fill in the rest. It’s pretty much exactly the same thing Alfred said in the first and second. And that’s the thing about Old Man Love – you can’t over do it, even if you’re Michael Caine with a London accent. Especially if you’re Michael Caine with a London accent. I miss the classic portrayal of Alfred as the dutiful butler whose affection for Bruce Wayne was subtle and understated. That was the whole point, actually, of his formal butler relation to Wayne. Remove the ‘formal’ part and you just have a sniffling old whiny bastard.

I get that Bane is a cool badass villain – Tom Hardy’s been lifting weights and wears a respirator – that’s cool, in an old school darth vader sort of way. But what exactly was his motive for tearing Gotham apart? I’m confused. Was it because he spent his childhood in an underground prison somewhere in the middle east? Oh so he’s buddy-buddy with Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter. Surprise! But how does a career mercenary, somebody who kills for money, suddenly switch to an ideological-driven maniac? These questions are important to people with basic critical analysis skills.

Even overlooking that Bane throws batman into a highly escapable prison with HD TELEVISION, the movie’s sense of proportion and realism was so far out of focus that it could hardly be ignored. The idea that one man can bring an entire city to its knees is a comic book idea, and there’s nothing wrong with it in that context. But when you see it on the big screen with live actors, it appears strikingly ridiculous. In a big city, we’re talking about millions of people – that’s thousands of metro cops and I don’t care how much Karate Bane knows or how many protein shakes he consumes daily, just one swat team would nail his ass, along with all his mercenary cronies. Even more ridiculous was the part when the United States military was thwarted by Bane’s antics. Oh yeah, and the New York Stock Exchange.

I’m not asking that movies and fiction be realistic in the sense that they be similar to our own reality (i.e. the classical, colloquial definition of ‘realistic’). I’m only asking that they be realistic within their own context. Goblins and dragons make sense in a Harry Potter movie because the world of Harry Potter is one of goblins and dragons, the context allows for them. But when the context of a story poses to be similar to our own, like in Nolan’s Batman movies, the expectation is that the characters and objects within the story follow the same rules as our own reality. And in our own reality, you can’t walk into the New York Stock Exchange, in broad daylight, plug in a laptop and blow up the entire economy. Then escape on a motorcycle. Physical strength, in our reality, does not give you an advantage over cops or people with guns. That’s why it all appeared strikingly ridiculous. The Spiderman movies, in contrast, made sense in the context of their own world (which posed to be similar to our world) because the heroes and villains were not regular people, but ones with super powers (unlike Batman and Bane).

If all the cops were trapped underground, how the fuck did they survive without food for months? People brought them down food, eh? But If people brought them food, that would mean they had a passage for escape. Are legions of cops really going to toss down their hand guns and start throwing fists when confronted by an army of gun-totting mercenaries? Gaping plot holes like that ruin it for me. I am literally blasted out of the story and reminded that I am watching a movie. I am reminded that it is all just pretend, and Christian Bale looks quite ridiculous in that bat costume. The good movies don’t constantly remind me that it’s only a movie – they bring total absorption, I’m sucked in and I only snap out of it when the credits roll.

There aren’t a lot of good movies. I agree with Sturgeon’s law: 90 percent of everything is absolute shit.

I might have liked the movie a little, though, if I could hear what the characters were saying over the dramatic background music. Movie makers, especially Christopher Nolan, really need to lay off on the dramatic, ear-raping background music. I can’t hear myself think, let alone Anne Hathaway’s sensuous whisperings. And I’d really like to hear Anne Hathway’s sensuous whisperings, thank you very much.

Well, in conclusion you have another “Big and Loud” Hollywood blockbuster that the critics are just swooning over (in no way influenced by the millions spent by Warner Bros. on marketing and PR). Nolan is a good director with a proven track record (See: Inception, Batman Begins, Memento) but this bloated 2 and a half hour peace of shit didn’t pass in my book. There’s just too much going on, too much forced emotion, a lack of interesting characters and an utterly nonsensical plot. In other words, Total Shit.