Movie Review: "Soul Surfer" Gets 4 1/2 Stars

Out of 100,000,000 stars.  The absolute worst movies get 1 star.  The best movies get 100,000,000 stars.  I give this movie 4 1/2 stars. I guess I'm not the target audience.  I'm not sure who is the target audience--maybe really, really, really fucking lame people.  What is amazing about this "film" is how quickly you end up rooting for the shark.  My biggest disappointment was that the shark never came back and killed everyone.  It was the only chance of saving the movie.  And please tell me, what in Sam Holy Hell is Dennis Quaid doing?  He is on heroin, right?  Dennis Quaid has to be feeding a silverback gorilla of a heroin addiction.  It is the only way to explain why he continues to agree to these powerfully shitty movies.  It can't be that he reads the script and says, "Sign me up!".  Dennis, we can get you the help you need.  But the first step is to recognize that you need help.  There was at least one winner in this movie--Helen Hunt's body.  Way to keep it together Helen.  Obviously your career is fucked if you are starring in this movie and you're serious about it.  But at least you've taken care of what you can control.  Kudos for that.  As far as the biggest loser in this movie--and it isn't Dennis Quaid because he can't control himself or this path of unwatchable Disneyesque movies he's starring in because he is a known commodity--is undoubtedly Carrie Underwood.  What a virtuoso performance!  Wait, does "virtuoso" mean "A performance so utterly horrifying that you grabbed a poker from your log fire and immediately smote your own eyes out and could never experience a Carrie Underwood generated boner again in your life"?  If so, then this was a virtuoso performance.  Please, for the love of credibility, can we all agree that Carrie is never in another movie so long as she lives.  Jenna Jameson could have given a far more believable effort.  You have to respect that her Christian Crusader gang she was in charge of maintained that the protagonist's arm being ripped off by a shark was "Part of God's plan".  I have never, and I will never understand this line of reasoning.  Why would God make something horrifically awful happen to you, in order for some other result down the road?  Is he that sadistic?  Is he the guy from "Saw"?  If I was trying to do some big things in my life, and hired a career coach, and he said "First step, we need to paint your arm with chum and have you stick it in this tank full of bull sharks.  After this, we'll change the world, I promise."  I would tell that guy to get fucked so fast you wouldn't even see it.  How can you fall for this shit?  "God needed me to have my spine severed in a freak muskie fishing accident so that I could then see my purpose in life, which is to teach disabled children how to fish."  Makes perfect fucking sense, roll with it brah.  But back to my point...Carrie Underwood, just focus on being cute and performing terrible music.  You couldn't act your way out of a Mary Kate and Ashley film. 

Life is a Zero-Sum Game

I will not attempt to torture the reader or myself with the full explanation of what a zero-sum game is. This was a particularly painful epoch in my past during my Economics major training. My professor was an in-the-closet homosexual, and also a sadist, who took out his frustrations of not being able to live freely and happily as a gay man on the students who paid him to teach them. It was not teaching, it was sadistic torture. So in layman's terms, a zero-sum game is that in which gains are offset exactly by losses, and nothing is created or destroyed. As I crossed from the west side of LaSalle Street to the east side at Adams, where my building is located, I was accosted as I am most mornings by a local vagrant. I don't know his name, but I think I know his game. He is white, has a long ponytail (which I suspect is a George Carlin-like "skullet") flowing from beneath a military beret. He usually wears combat fatigues. His face looks like someone put a brush fire out on it with a pitchfork. And also, his legs are both amputated at the knee. He tries to play the wounded Vietnam veteran who has fallen on hard times angle. I don't personally buy it, but if he can get away with it, then kudos to him. I speculate his amputations are more likely the result of shooting smack into his toes one too many times, then ignoring the stench of gangrene in his lower extremities as he chased the dragon through Honolee. But if he wants to tell people he lost the legs 50 clicks up the Danang, I'm not going to stop him. Some sample greetings (and these are real) that I have received from him are as follows:
"Good morning, have a great day sir"
"Hummnnnnaaa farfffallffffelll mmmiiinnnnggggeeeennie"
(and my personal favorite) "You're all a bunch of fucking CUNTS!"
So you never know what you are going to get. As I pass him most days I think, "I am glad I'm not that dude". Today I decided that line of thinking is erroneous. I have a warm home, a wife, a dog, regular meals. But I also have payments to make, schedules to keep. Oh, and I walk into a building each morning to sit at an ugly desk and whore myself out for 8 hours of soul-crushing white collar labor for people who don't care if I fuck off and die on my way home tonight. Meanwhile Ron Kovic out there in the wheelchair doesn't have steady meals, unlikely has a warm home or a wife. But you know what? He doesn't have to pay shit. No one squeezes his soul through a cheese cloth each day so that someone he's never met can make more money than 1,000,000 people together would not have need for. He's out there doing whatever the fuck he wants all day, and all he has to do is figure out how to get high every 12 hours or so. So I guess you could tell him that I have a comfortable condo and a car and a designer mutt. But he might, very fairly, fire back "At what cost?". Touche Ron Kovic, touche. And now I know, it all evens out. For my seeming glut of comfort in domesticity, he has an equal but opposite overabundance of freedom. And this is why life is a zero-sum game.

Are Donkey Shows Real?

I was retelling a story last weekend that a friend told me about in college. His dad was an underwater welder and has seen catfish next to bridge supports in the Ohio River in deep pools of water that are large enough to swallow a human whole. They stay on the bottom their entire lives eating river scum and become gigantic due to never being caught. Pretty fucking terrifying, right? Well my brother informs me this is an urban legend. Apparently there are no catfish the size of blue whales at the bottom of the Ohio or Mississippi River. Who knows, maybe there are no underwater welders either. There should be, because it sounds pretty fucking cool. Using fire underneath water and all. I've told this story no less than 25 times in my life, fully believing this to be true. Honestly I wanted to stop the goddamned car and tell my brother he could walk his know-it-all fucking ass the rest of the way. My pride was pretty injured. No one likes being told they were duped, except for really stupid people. They seem to get a kick out of that shit. Watch the David Blaine street magic video sometime where he goes into the Cowboys locker room. He pulls one playground magic trick on Emmet Smith, who responds like a Neanderthal that was just shown fire for the first time. He had a ball with it. I'm no rocket-scientist, but I'm confident I could best Emmet in a knowledge bowl. Even if two of the categories were "Football" and "Emmet Smith's Life", I'm pretty sure I'd win. So my brother can fuck off with the too sly to be duped by the man-eating catfish story attitude.

Anyway, conceptually I think I understand how a donkey show works. A bunch of highly intoxicated and coked-up bikers, frat guys, traders and other upstanding members of a moralistic society (Luckily I was only a frat guy and a trader, but never a biker) gather in a poorly ventilated structure somewhere in the Baja peninsula, usually a quaint little suburb of Tijuana. They pay $50 or so a man and are allowed to drink Tecate from a cooler that was probably also recently used as a transport for a chopped-up drug runner named Paco whose family owed a little too much money to the local narco traficante. Once these social aberrations are all oiled up they probably play a little mariachi number, maybe fire a pistol. A shower curtain opens to a retarded donkey with, as you might guess, a donkey dick swinging between his legs. From a location you don't even want to know about stumbles in a woman fucked 6 ways to the weekend on booze, black tar heroin and ketamine. All the poppy plants in Afghanistan will not help this poor soul to forget the multiple nicotine-stained finger-blastings she received from her mom's boyfriends during her trailer park Christmases in Bakersfield, CA. She gives the donkey an HJ, maybe a short blowie, and then its go time. I do not know the logistics of a chick fucking an equine, to be honest with you. Once upon a time when I was about 15 we were hanging out somewhere and my friend Tony popped in a bestiality porn that he claimed he "Found" somewhere. Two chicks were in the process of fucking a horse. I made it through about 30 seconds of that, and then left the room and drank enough Cisco to kill the very horse I think I saw get fellated. Thankfully I no longer possess any memory of that event. Needless to say a chick crams a monstrous donkey cock into her holiest of holies, presumably the donkey gives the crowd a money-shot, and they in turn go wild. The bikers bike off to start some trouble in Belize. The traders head back to Wall Street to gamble away your kid's college fund. The frat guys drift into Tijuana to "Do some fucking bombs, bro!" The protagonist of the show goes back to wherever it is she came from to cook up the shot to end all shots and lays on the floor of her pimp's trailer as his homeboys run a train and visions of marrying Prince William of Great Britain dance through her head.

At least that is how I envisioned the spectacle. But this catfish wool that got pulled over my eyes has made me question even the sanctity of the donkey show. Say it ain't so, Joe. So can someone confirm, with irrefutable evidence, that they've been to a donkey show. Or am I an even bigger gullible asshole than I thought?

The Ryder Cup is Over, Now What the Fuck do I do?

Probably jump off a bridge or try and shoot my weight in black tar heroin. The Ryder Cup is over, America lost again, and now all I have is NFL football, college football, MLB playoffs, English Premier League soccer and the basketball season about to start. Who fucking cares? Nothing else can stiffen a dick like America's best privileged arrogant country club assholes versus Europe's best privileged arrogant country club assholes in a winner takes nothing contest of Lets Go Hit a Stationary Ball and Walk Slowly Behind It. The pageantry, the mystique, the raw athleticism, the complete and utter lack of comprehension of the theory of "team". If you give even one flying fuck about the Ryder Cup and root vehemently for the United States to win, then you probably also rooted for Judge Smails and Dr. Beeper to beat Danny Noonan and Ty Webb. So take your USA Ryder Cup hat, your horizontal striped polo shirt with the fill-in-the-blank dickhole golf tournament emblem on the chest, your golf tournament watching spikes, and go fuck yourself.