Scriptreader Investigates: Nic Cage…Fucking With Me?
November 18, 2008
Up until about five years ago, i felt like I could at least partly understand what Nic Cage was doing. First (1981-1986) he was doing the parts he could get–movies that needed handsome young kids, movies his uncle made, etc . Then (1987-1992) he was doing weird shit he liked –usually because it allowed him to do a weird voice or accent.
Then (1992-1995), he was trying to be a capital A Actor, either through lead roles in potential hit films, or through roles in movies that would allow him to finally win an Oscar. Then (1995-2002) he had accomplished both of those things and so realized he’d like to be rich and look cool and handsome and young and hairy-headed in movies and did only movies that could give him those things (it’s easy to feel this way when you’ve just fallen madly in love with handsome, persuasive Jerry Bruckheimer…he is such a DREAMBOAT!). Then (2002-2004) he was like, “Fuck. I better do a few good movies in between these bad blockbuster movies so that I don’t wind up in strictly treasure hunter kid movies someday.”
But lately, even though ostensibly he’s still running that pattern, I have no idea what is going through his head because the quality of the scripts he’s picking has gone to total opposite extremes. It’s either really good or godawful with very little of the middle ground that often is the intimate friend of the blockbuster actor who still wants respect. I’ve become aware of this at this late stage mostly because I just saw Ghost Rider and I can’t believe anybody famous would ever consent to do that to themselves any more than I would consent to be sold into a prostitution ring so dastardly that all my previous romances would retroactively be tainted and declared prostitution even if they were beautiful and pure. But even with that ridiculous movie and Bangkok Dangerous and National Treasure 2, and even despite the craziness that is going on with his hair and teeth and face which are now colluding to make him look, basically, like a skeleton with a coonskin
cap on its head and even with the fact that his new “acting” is often just a caricature of old, good acting that he’s done, he still gets offered very good projects all the time. I have read three of the scripts he’s slated to star in or has just finished shooting, and they range from Wibberleys bad to very good.
So I guess, yes, my confusion arises partly from the fact that really good people keep hiring him, which is more about them than it is about what he’s thinking. But on the other hand he will show up for a good movie and often do a good job. So that tells me that a) he is still able to act and b) he can distinguish between the good movies, where he actually acts, and the bad, bad movies where he is simply a parody of his former self, making the Nic Cage of Wild At Heart and Raising Arizona cry out of embarrassment at seeing the same style applied to a Disney movie about finding a solid golden Mayan temple inside of Mt. Rushmore in order to prove one’s great great grandfather didn’t help kill Lincoln(<–actually a movie plot. no shitting!).
So my question is, is he actually smart enough to take crappy B material that is, because of the way Hollywood is run right now, being produced as blockbuster A films, and, through talent and smarts, still managing to get himself hired onto real movies? Or does he simply say yes to anyone who meets his quote and some of the people who do happen to be making good movies?
My feeling is that he’s doing all of this to fuck with me. Because unlike, say, Eddie Murphy, I really can’t ever write him off. I watched him scream and turn into a flaming skeleton for five minutes and thought “How is this guy still working in anything but B Disney movies?” all the while knowing that he’s about to be in knowing a script i’ve read a few times and liked (i hear the movie isn’t perfect, but still, it’s a good project that many people would love to be on). Basically, the lower he sinks, and the more bad movies I see him in, the more certain I feel that I will still be forced to take him seriously in good movies and give the fact that he’s attached to scripts I read some kind of positive weight, even if they’re really good and all I can see when I imagine him in them is a flaming, screaming skull with weird plugs.
I want answers. Nicholas Cage: Are you fucking with me? If so, is it because of that thing that happened at Luques? Because I didn’t mean it and i believe i apologized at the time and it really did look like a ladies room. Please let me know.

Do you know why the Cage’d hair clings?
What you must do in order to “make it” in Hollywood:
November 3, 2008
VOTE!
If that’s not enough incentive, here’s a picture of someone else who would be made very happy if you exercised your most important right as an American:

(Back with an actual blog next week, I hope.)
I like movies about politics and Emile Hirsch (still) sucks.
October 28, 2008
I can’t really think of a script reading blog today. I have election fever and it is blocking my brain from other activities. But here’s something:
With a week left until the big day, I have noticed a lot of people listing movies about elections and presidential politics, but, surprisingly, i have not yet seen a list that has all five of my favorite movies on the subject. So here they are, listed (in my opinion) from the least to the most cynical:
1.) Dave (1993)
2.) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
3.) All the President’s Men (1976)
4.) Primary Colors (1998)
5.) Bob Roberts(1992)
I am kind of embarassed to admit that if I had to pick a president from among the politicians in these movies, I would go with Dave Kovick…the everyman who knows nothing about the office. Jack Stanton (thinly veiled Bill Clinton) of Primary Colors is my second choice and Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff Smith is third. He should probably be first but I have an ambivalent relationship with naivete. Even his. I would not vote for Nixon or Bob Roberts, but if I were a member of the academy of crazy eyes arts and sciences, I would vote for Jack Black’s Bob Roberts character for craziest eyes EVER.
In related news, Emile Hirsch (aka the man of zero faces), has succeeded in making the only celebrity voting PSA that has ever made me want to not vote out of spite.

Scary Blog: Your Barbarella Costume’s Days Are Numbered
October 21, 2008
Just wanted to let you know that if you, like me, have been thinking about being Barbarella for the past 2 Halloweens only to settle on something easier because finding metal capes and black body stockings that aren’t super porny is too much work, get your mofo shit together TODAY. This is our year. The last year.

I’m saying this not because Barbarella costumes could provide a groovy feminist counterpoint to Sarah Palin costumes, perhaps dispensing sex pills like candy at adult parties while Sarah Palin hoards all the chocolate coins and morning after pills so as to save you from yourself. They could, but I’m really saying this because I have read the Robert Rodriguez Barbarella and it is slated to come out next year (it’s possible this project is dead, but i have had it come through my company again recently and there are counter-rumors and i’m not taking any chances).
If you enjoyed the tone and spirit of the original film, I can tell you that this Barbarella is going to disappoint you. On the other hand, it will delight teenage boys who have never seen the ‘68 version but who have recently learned to masturbate, and who will likely make it a success and talk it up, which will in turn cause teenage girls to dress up on subsequent Halloweens as Rose McGowan or whoever replaces her in the title role, thus draining the steamy, jacuzzi-sized tub of fun that was the orignal/the idea of dressing like Jane Fonda in it, down to a few tepid inches.
Look, in terms of structure and dialog and such, this script wasn’t terrible or anything. And I don’t begrudge a guy wanting to remake this movie and neither does Dino de Laurentis, who produced the original and is producing this new version. But I do think that 79 year-old de Laurentis’s judgement is less sound than that of 39 year-old de Laurentis. And I do think that it’s a huge mistake to make Barbarella into a big budget, exploitation-action hybrid with so much girl on girl action, topless lady fighting and other such straight-up, male-only fantasy material in it. This version -to me at least- read like a space-themed issue of the Fredericks of Hollywood catalog, with none of the playfully strange sexiness –exciting and appealing to both men and women–of the original, unless you consider it playful to be hit in the head with a two-by-four of Sin City-style f-ing. I would prefer to just cut out the middle man and watch Showtime after dark than this remake, and I wish Rodriguez would look elsewhere for a presold property. Like maybe in Russ Meyer’s catalog, which was booby, but honestly so. Camp and the sexual ambiguity and strange power dynamics represented by a dude with angel wings are not bad, stupid things to be cast off because we’re so modern and this ain’t your grandaddy’s sexy movie. Far more retrograde is only showing me women named Jessica riding electric bulls all the time.
So I’ve got my chainmail bodice and as I have mentioned on previous occasions, my hair is already awesome (and in Barbarella style). I advise those of you who want to enact this fantasy while it’s still tinged with empowerment and not strictly pandering*, get on the stick. Except if you know me personally and we are going to be hanging out on Halloween and you is stealing my idea. Because then i will fucking cut you. Or take a picture with you. Whichever.
*Obviously a little pandering will be involved. I’m not made of stone.
An Open Letter to the Makers of “Quarantine”
October 14, 2008
To Whom It May Concern:
What will it take to convince you that I have been reached by your ad campaign and know that you have a film that came out this weekend? I have seen banner ads on practically every website I visit, all my social networking sites, the billboards on sunset and everywhere else, my radio and, i believe, the bottom of some friends’ hotmail emails. I don’t even really watch commercials because I have a DVR, but you have saturated the shows i watch with ads to such an extent that the few times in recent memory that i’ve left the room or taken a call or started talking to the person sitting next to me when a show went to commercial, your ad has always been the first thing to come up.
Let me tell you which of the ads i’m referring to: The Ad. The only ad you seem to run with the only footage you seem to have. She’s in a dark room, she doesn’t know what’s happening and there’s something scary behind her that grabs her. I get it. Mocku-Docu-creature-Blair-Cloverfield-”i’m really scared” Project. I understand your product, what it does and how i can obtain it. You have earned your money today. Now, when was the last time you treated yourself to a long lunch? What’s that? You’re not hungry? Rats.
Let me just throw this idea out: What if I signed a waiver that guaranteed you that I knew what your movie was called and when it was opening? Would that absolve me of my obligation to think about your movie when doing work, in my car, relaxing, trying to compose a thought, etc?
Not biting? Ok…what if I promised to bring in two other people to sign the form, and then they promised to bring two in and so on and so on? Would that make the offer more attractive to you?
No, huh? OK, final offer: I get a tattoo of the name of your movie and 10/10/08 on the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, so that every time i shake hands with someone they are made aware that you have a movie that you would like us all to see. In exchange I get to live in a world that doesn’t revolve around the girl in the room talking to the camera and then getting yanked away from the camera. Deal? Let me know.
Respectfully,
Cecelia Script Reader, President, Consumers Against Faulty Eyewear*

*Bonus Reader Quiz! For those few of you reading this who aren’t part of the thousands-strong marketing team for Quarantine, this consumer group name was taken from a movie about summer fun. Can you name this move? The only prize as of right now is my respect, but if i can cut a deal with the Quarantine people i might be able to get you out of your ad watching responsibilities as well, so send in those answers!
DeforMALity in Horror: One More Thing that Skeeves me Out.
October 7, 2008
Read a script today in which the terrifying killer is fought off by his would-be victims, who know he is a neat freak and cleverly upset his porcelain knickknack collection so as to make him lose his shit.
This is not the first time that OCD or other hospital-corners fixations have been attached to bad people in movies to make them seem creepier. Actually, by my count it’s the 7001st time. Far fewer are the times that the homicidal maniac is a big old slob, which would seem more likely since homocide is such a big job it would seem to preclude thorough housekeeping.
In the same family for me are scripts in which the killers have some physical deformity. I read Wrong Turn back when it was looking for funding, and remember distinctly that the mountain men in it were described as being huge and hideous because of generations of inbreeding. Kind of taking a page from Deliverance’s backwoodsy book without actually reading that book, which is about some tiny, feeble banjo-playing people.
And it’s not just inbreeding. I’ve read lots of other stories involving a mentally or physcially disordered killer, including a script where the killer is afflicted with albinism and I was supposed to be scared by him touching the the creamy white skin of some kidnapped girl with his own…creamy white skin.
I guess it’s possible that being afflicted with a physical deformity could make you more likely to want to kill other people in ridiculous ways. And i definitely agree that people with mental disorders lend themselves to horror since there have been killers with such disorders in real life.
Still, I don’t like it. Unless it’s done very well, this sort of thing makes me go all cringey.
When you present a killer as having some sort of deformity or impairment, once i get past your lingering shots of their stump hand or pink eyes, lovingly grotesqued up by Rick Baker if you’re lucky, I still find them way less terrifying than other, less deformo characters. Possibly this is because I have hospital corners tendencies myself, but mostly I think it’s because it’s so easy and convenient to distance ourselves from the scary stuff by lumping it under the heading of “different,” or “not like anyone i know,” and there’s no heading that says that better than a physical or mental deformity. On the other hand, Ted Bundy has me practically peeing my pants when I hear his name because he looks like everyone and his smile only looks creepy when you know he used it to kill.
So unless a writer creates a very specific psychosis for their villain based on his or her deformity, i’m almost always going to respond better to a story with a good-looking killer with all his fingers and toes. And anyway, do albinos and inbreeders and *sharp intake of breath* very neat people really need yet another reason for people to look at them like they have the plague?
I should close with the caveat that all of the above doesn’t apply to the mentally retarded. I think they are aching to be stood next to the albinos and the OCD-havers as the next slasher to do some crazy, evil crimes. Am I right? I mean, these people have been confined to a portrait of innocent and good-temperedness for long enough! Probably because the people who make movies about mentally retarded characters are Oscar hounds and they know that horror movies with non-retarded physical or mentally disordered characters is a thankless labor of love, not a fucking accolade party. Case in point, where’s this guy’s oscar?

He acted his inbred heart out for you for NOTHING!
(It’s a sin to shoot a mockingbird, you know.)
The Dog Ate My Blog.
October 1, 2008
Back next week. In the meantime, anyone wanna discuss Spike Lee? Specifically, his reaction to Italians getting angry about Miracle At St. Anna’s revisionist history take on a massacre of Italian civilians in WWII, which the film blames on partisan collaboration with the Nazis, which in real life probably didn’t happen.
I read this script and thought that the reaction of James McBride, who wrote the movie, was about right. It is shitty to have your story told by other people. However, what he wrote was a fictionalized version of events that was more like a 40’s war movie about group soldier dynamics than it was a factually accurate docudrama, so he took some liberties.
But Spike Lee had to be all Fuck You, I am not apologizing and you should get used to the fact that you guys don’t know everything and this could have happened in Italy during the war. This is too bad in my opinion. Missed opportunity. To not be the Spike Lee who sues Spike TV and to instead be the Spike Lee who tells great stories. Like some magical, mystical, thread-spinning black man.
The Worst Script I Ever Read
September 23, 2008
It had everything you want a bad script to have to be the kind of bad that at least entertains (since you have to read it either way). It was wonderful in its awfulness, and reading it, I could feel the universe opening in front of me with infinite possibilities for badness and goodness since, if someone could think of something this ridiculous, someone out there on the other end of the bad/good spectrum probably has the capacity to think of a peace bomb or a racism vaccine or something else wondrous. Infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters. One of them made Shakespeare’s plays and now one of them has made a screenplay with this logline:
Alien monsters (I won’t specify further since, though bad, this is nonetheless someone’s intellectual property, but picture something all big and overblown like you’re supposed to get in creature horror) invade a Nazi concentration camp and the prisoners and guards have to put aside their differences and fight the REAL enemy.
You realize, of course, that this means that there are people out there who think there’s something scarier than the fucking holocaust.
“I can haz Obersturmbannführer?”
Another Oscar Season, Another White Guy Who Knows a Black Guy
September 16, 2008
As you may recall, I’m a woman. If you saw the cover art on the latest Newsweek, you know that this means I’m mainly concerned with boobies and babies and shopping and, occasionally, V.P. and Prez (not Perez, but we girls like him, too!) candidates, so long as they have vaginas. Amiright, ladies? (God I wish I had some chocolate right now. For my PMS!!) But, very occasionally, I also remember that I’m white. Like when I see previews for surefire Oscar contender The Soloist and am reminded that I’m supposed to need stories of black people to be filtered through the perspective of a white outsider. Because the alternative just isn’t white enough for me.
This happens in a few ways in movies.
Films like Cry Freedom and The Last King of Scotland are ostensibly about famous black men, yet the protagonists are actually white men who knew them or are created to know them within the film. Films like Blood Diamond, The Constant Gardener and the abysmal Beyond Borders are all ostensibly about the problems of Africa and Africans, but to greater and lesser extent are really just white love stories set against a black backdrop. And I’m not even really counting stories like The Green Mile, in which a magical, mystical or otherwise talented black person helps and is marveled at by the whites around them, because those movies deserve their own discussion. And when I googled “movies about magical black people” just now I found out that Spike Lee already started this discussion years ago and I’m way behind the curve in bringing it up now.
Anyway, back to the first two categories, where I have probably read an additional 30-40 scripts that fit the bill of black stories as filtered through white characters or a backdrop for white melodrama. Pretty much every major, non-white leader who is well-known in the United States has a biopic or two floating around. Mandela, Medgar Evers, you name it. And if my experience is at all representative, about 50% of these are told through the eyes of a white dude who knew the person of color, rather than the person him or herself. Yeah, a lot of these films and scripts are still pretty good. And yeah, a lot of the real people really did have important relationships with white people –in the case of The Soloist and a few others, that white person wrote the book on which the film is based, making it hard to leave them out. And yeah, sometimes the outraged perspective of an outsider who has never been the victim of racism or other injustice is a great way to make the struggles of the black character hit home with a white audience. Yeah. I get it. There are reasons for doing this other than just that the writers want to appeal to me as a (fellow) white person.
What I’m saying is that I don’t care. No matter how many good reasons there might be for an individual film to be presented through white eyes, it still seems like the proportion of those films to films that are seen primarily through the eyes of the actual black person who is the film’s subject matter (Malcolm X, Ray or Ali, for example) is too high. It makes me feel like the makers of these films don’t think I will go and see these films if there’s not a white guy up there to translate for me.
It makes me feel like I’m in the jury listening to the last big boy speech Matthew McConaughey ever made in a movie, at the end of A Time To Kill, where he tells me all about the terrible things done to my white daughter and then tells me to imagine that she’s black in order to drive home the point that raping little girls is wrong. But here’s the problem with that: I’m not a southern, heretofore racist juror, and while I wanted Samuel L. Jackson to be acquitted enough to believe that desperate times called for desperate, imagine-your-own-daughter-is-black, measures in that movie, outside of that movie, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the local news should only show me stories about black people’s problems if there’s a white person involved to convince me they matter. Because they do matter. Shove those stories about just black people down my throat, please. If I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to read stories about black people, please don’t pander to me. Because that just rewards my white narcissism and helps it hang on for another day.
I hear you saying “films are a business…box office…bringing in big audiences,” but I don’t care. I am pretty sure Nelson Mandela is of enough interest to all of us for his story to be told from his perspective, not from the perspectives of two separate white dudes who knew him in two separate scripts I have read.
And no matter how friendly Ali got with Howard Cosell, I’m still quite happy that his story wasn’t told by Cosell in the Michael Mann film. In that movie and in Malcolm X and in Hotel Rwanda, I get to see black characters wake up in their beds, interact with their families and be real people, rather than the distant, different, usually doomed, christlike figures that I already knew them as before coming to the film. Because no matter how amazing someone like Steve Biko is depicted as being in a movie like Cry Freedom, if his amazingness is always held away from me through the white character in a “look how wonderful this white journalist is for actually setting foot in a black household” way, I’m not really watching Steve Biko’s story. In other words, in these films the beholder is glorified as much as the beheld.
For all these reasons, the trailers for The Soloist make me cringe. I see Robert Downey Jr. running around telling unbelieving people how he’s actually best friends with Jamie Foxx’s homeless music prodigy character and then going and *gasp* sitting with that character on an actual dirty street and it doesn’t uplift me. Because I already think Robert Downey Jr. is wonderful. I don’t need a friendship with a black person to form invisible jazz hands around his angelic face, highlighting this fact for me.

“Look at me looking at this black guy who is extraordinary. I look at black guys. Honest to God I do. I am the central figure in this story about a black guy who gets looked at.”
A Meditation on Lazy Writing with a SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER!
September 9, 2008
Consensus from last week’s blog about using voiceover, flashbacks and phonecalls seems to be that they should be used when they add something that maybe only they can add to the script not just out of laziness because it’s easier to have some voice tell the audience what’s happening than to show it. Speaking of which, I recently re-watched one of the laziest movies ever…a little film called Legends of the Fall. So that we might discuss it, I have asked one of the film’s protagonists, the Julia Ormond Character, to recap the plot in case, as it was for me, you haven’t seen it since you were in high school. Take it away, Julia Ormond Character.
Hi Guys!! Here goes: I love Henry “Eliot from E.T.” Thomas with a girlishness that comes of never having experienced true, stupid passion. Now I am meeting his brother, Brad “Tristan Ludlow” Pitt. He is wild and untamed. I know this because he has long hair. He is also extremely romantic, passionate and sensitive. I know this because he has long hair. Oh crap. Henry Thomas is a naive hothead going to war. I am so sad. Hug me, Brad Pitt. I need to be comforted. Oh god. I am looking in your eyes and there is a fire burning next to us, so even though we’ve barely spoken two words to each other, obviously there is nothing we can do to keep from almost kissing…Fuuuuuuuck, man, your other brother caught us. I did NOT see that coming.
Off you all go to war. I stay here thinking about Henry Thomas with my head and you with my areas.
Oh shit. Henry Thomas is dead now. You go crazy with anger and scalp a lot of people in Germany because a wild beast roams your heart and you are untamed and they never made you cut your hair when you enlisted, so that’s still an issue. Now you are back and your older brother, Aidan “i represent the establishment/conformity/civilization in this movie” Quinn, wants to marry me but that’s out of the question, obviously, because he wants to live indoors, get a trim once in a while and be nice to me. I mean, like, what a turd!! Meanwhile, you weep for hours next to Henry Thomas’s grave because you are so sensitive that you will NEVER get over what happened to you. Because it happened to you and your pain and trauma is more valid than anyone else’s, mostly because your hair is longer than anyone else’s.
The other million veterans who are not as deep or sensitive as you are and tried to move past their shell-shock are fucking pussies. Let me hold you while you blubber like you’re the only one who ever has. Have premarital sex all over me until your hair gets all tangled in my hair.
Oh noes! You are still depressed? Sure I will wait for you for ten years while you become a sailor and kill exotic animals, have group sex with ladies of the orient (indicating empty, lonely sex, because that’s what Asian Women stand for, doi), and then cut some hearts out of some shit and rub the hearts on your face and weep while I sit in your dad’s house gathering dust on my vagina.
See? I totally, like, get you. Because of all the long talks we’ve had? Not so much. We don’t really say much to each other. It’s more the hair (see above) and the face and the fact that you won’t ever talk to me about anything (you’re so complicated) and wake up from your nightmares with a knife to my throat (hott!!1!). Would you like me to send you anything? My youth and vitality? A rubber band to tie your hair back? No? Really? You just like to let it hang free while you hunt and hump and tie bowline knots and it doesn’t get in your way? Mine totally does and all I do is sit around crying and looking pathetic and wondering what kind of accent your father, Anthony “not really from Montana” Hopkins, is doing. It changes, like, daily.
Wait, what now? You don’t want to stop fucking and hunting and come back and marry me? Ok. I said I would wait forever but I guess I will go and marry your brother (who has been waiting for me for like eight years because there are NO OTHER WOMEN in Montana –it’s like some last man, post-apocalypse movie up in here) and live in a big house with servants. It’s not like it’s is a fate worse than death, right? Oh, you’re back now and you have learned to tie your hair back in a ponytail (indicating demons conquered yet sensitivity intact)? I guess it is a fate worse than death. I’m going to blow my brains out to give you some fresh shit to cry about.
Cecilia here. I forgot Julia Ormond Character is not around for end of this film. Here’s an epilogue: Brad Pitt lives almost forever with his long hair and his ability get to the truth of a scene thanks to Stella Adler and a belief that he’s actually Marlon Brando. But then a bear kills him, which he apparently thinks is an awesome end to an awesome life of taking shit too seriously. An old Native American Guy who should have way better stuff to remember, like what happened to all the other Native American Guys, saves all his letters and talks about him all day every day around his campfire to no one in particular. I guess he just likes to run his mouth. The End.
Still can’t believe this is the film that made women weep from their vaginas for like six hours. My friend wanted to name her teenage pregnancy after Tristan “Brad Pitt” Ludlow, never realizing that Fabio from the cover of a romance novel is still Fabio no matter how much dramatic music James Horner puts behind him. When wardrobe and music stand in for actually showing something interesting and original or even a coherent explanation of why people are doing what they’re doing, that’s lazy. When hair=character, that’s lazy. When sex in Asia is a signifier for meaninglessness in the 1990’s, 50 years after it should be? LAY-ZEEE! Oh, and there’s a lazy voiceover, too. Fuck this movie. That’s right, I’m saying it. 13 years after anyone cares.

“Leave me alone. I am writing you a letter about all of the brooding i have been doing. Why yes, I do use Pantene.”






Oh shit. Henry Thomas is dead now. You go crazy with anger and scalp a lot of people in Germany because a wild beast roams your heart and you are untamed and they never made you cut your hair when you enlisted, so that’s still an issue. Now you are back and your older brother, Aidan “i represent the establishment/conformity/civilization in this movie” Quinn, wants to marry me but that’s out of the question, obviously, because he wants to live indoors, get a trim once in a while and be nice to me. I mean, like, what a turd!! Meanwhile, you weep for hours next to Henry Thomas’s grave because you are so sensitive that you will NEVER get over what happened to you. Because it happened to you and your pain and trauma is more valid than anyone else’s, mostly because your hair is longer than anyone else’s.
The other million veterans who are not as deep or sensitive as you are and tried to move past their shell-shock are fucking pussies. Let me hold you while you blubber like you’re the only one who ever has. Have premarital sex all over me until your hair gets all tangled in my hair.
See? I totally, like, get you. Because of all the long talks we’ve had? Not so much. We don’t really say much to each other. It’s more the hair (see above) and the face and the fact that you won’t ever talk to me about anything (you’re so complicated) and wake up from your nightmares with a knife to my throat (hott!!1!). Would you like me to send you anything? My youth and vitality? A rubber band to tie your hair back? No? Really? You just like to let it hang free while you hunt and hump and tie bowline knots and it doesn’t get in your way? Mine totally does and all I do is sit around crying and looking pathetic and wondering what kind of accent your father, Anthony “not really from Montana” Hopkins, is doing. It changes, like, daily.
