Let's Rave On: Chapter 4: Two out of Three out of Four

***4*** Two out of Three out of Four

Okay, so two girls remained on my list. In the few days since I began this small list (only three, really!) I had grown tired of figuring everything out. I so badly just wanted to go out again and fail and add to it, to explode my list of problems into several myriads until I couldn’t handle it anymore. Some days I’m such a masochist.

But if Nanowrimo taught me anything, it’s that quitters never win and winners have a lot of editing to do. Melissa was done. It was Denise’s turn now. I grabbed a bag of Doritos, tossed on the Final Fantasy Advent Children soundtrack, and grabbed some couch.

Denise was a blind date my friend Sara put me through. It’s not her fault, Sara’s or Denise’s, because they’re both very nice and only mean the absolute best. The problem, it seemed, was Serenity. That stupid awesome movie.

Serenity is a movie that does it’s absolute best to mix Star Wars with the Lonestar channel. It’s a movie set in the future, but with a civilization of people that only have enough resources to build saloons and six shooters. The main characters are a band of thieves/heroes out for bounty and freedom from da man. As well, prostitutes are pretty much the most respected people in the universe and everyone speaks fluent Cantonese. Premise-wise, this is the greatest action film ever made.

Sara tells me all about Denise over MSN, because this is how her and I and the millions (and millions) of Rock fans talk, even though she probably hates the Rock.

All I Want Is Everything says: So, who is this girl?

My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms says: Just a friend of mine from Toronto. We went to high school together. She’s a photography major and talks cute.

All I Want Is Everything says: How does one talk cute?

My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms says: Kyle, there’s lots of ways to talk cute.

All I Want Is Everything says: I know, I know, but is it like Laura Prepon’s style of talking cute or Mila Kunis’ style of talking cute?

My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms says: You know, there are other shows on the air.

So ANYWAYS, Denise and I meet up at this candy store across the street from the theatre. Candy stores are the greatest places to meet someone only if a) they aren’t on a psycho fad diet and b) they appreciate irony. Denise is on A and has never even heard the concept of B.

“Candy is stupid,” She says as we pass a Buzz Lightyear action figure “and I don’t get all the toys. What’s with the toys?”

“It’s supposed to signify a time when all the problems we had in the world was that mom didn’t get us that Flash action figure we wanted for our birthday,” I said. It got absolutely no reaction.

So we crossed the street and got in line. I’d spent three minutes with this girl and could tell there was going to be no connection, so I jumped into the one thing we had in common for the evening.

“So, did you watch the series at all?” I was talking about Firefly, the ill-fated Fox series the movie was based on.

“Are you kidding?” She asked, “Firefly was my life. You know, before those bastards at Fox took it away from me.”

I’d experienced this sort of particular case of geekdom before, what some might call whedonesque or whedonism or whedonosity (the idol worship of all things touched by the grace of the almighty Joss Whedon, natch) and knew pretty much how to handle the regular sort of breed. But the way Denise growled when she said ‘Fox’ made me step back one.

To be perfectly frank, Serenity is pretty awesome, and in only one instance is completely lame (the new character they introduced for the movie is way too Duex Ex Machina for mine (and Sara’s) tastes). The rest of the flick shoots it up as easily the best action film I’ve seen since The Rock. Oh, by the way, if you were wondering just how neurotic I can get, here’s a great example (and if you weren’t, skip down a bit). I already know that someone reading this has made the mathematical equation of “Well, if he liked that shitty Sean Connery movie, then his taste in movies must be pretty f*cking weak, so Serenity must really blow”. The thing is, The Rock was a f*cking amazing movie for purely pragmatic reasons, and because of that is regularly panned because the general Populus doesn’t like movies for pragmatic reasons. If someone were to blueprint all the elements that make a great action flick, it would go something like this.

Materials needed for making The Rock:
1x Good cop/Bad cop combo
1x Legitimately Bad-ass former convict used as hero
1x Strong villain with strong moral ground for his plight and genuine audience sympathy
4x Scenes in which nameless goons either steal equipment or blown away by stolen equipment
1x Threat of Nuclear War
1x Really hot chick in there for pretty much no reason

This is The Rock in a nutshell. And while time will tell (at least in my mind time has to tell) if Serenity is a better movie, but I’ll certainly put it up there. If you break it down though, you’ll see that it takes a completely different approach to the action genre, so it becomes almost a matter of personal stylistic preferences. Since it’s still in theaters, I won’t spoil it in any way, but I will break it down in the same way so you can at least pragmatically compare.

Materials needed for making Serenity:
1x Robin Hood
1x Little John
1x Ensemble cast of subtly complex hooligans who rob from the rich to feed the poor (mostly themselves)
1x Bastard villain with no sympathetic qualities (but really cool in the stylistic sense)
1x Perfectly happy couple in a Joss Whedon project (illegal in most universes)
1x Quasi-psychic hammer of plot

As soon as we leave the theatre I want to crack a Rocket Robin Hood joke, but she just goes right into the kind of spiel I expected after sitting next to her for two hours studying the screen the same way a congregation of devout Pentacostals will focus on the son of a preacher man.

“This whole situation is criminal,” She said, “Why wasn’t that theatre packed? Why are people going to see The Fog? Don’t they know it will be bad? Like, it’s pretty f*cking obvious, you know? I get so mad about these things.”

And so I had to say my point, because it was all I had to comment. “Well, you could say it’s advertising, or subtle messages in the popcorn, but when it comes down to it, people see what they see. You can’t say it has anything to do with whether a movie is good or not because everyone has their own opinion on that. You know what I mean?”

“No,” She said, “I don’t. You liked the movie, didn’t you? Wasn’t it just the greatest thing ever?”

“Sure, but that’s just us. Those people going to see The Fog might leave that movie thinking the same thing.”

“Those people are stupid,” she said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t agree with that. You’re not stupid for having an opinion. Especially on movies. I mean, is there anything less representative of a person’s character?”

“But this movie matters,” She said, “It’s not doing that well, and that doesn’t bode well for Joss.”

“Well,” I said, “That’s sort of tough shit for Joss, isn’t it?”

“I should start another fan club on the net,” She said, “You know, get a few more people to go.”

I would have called her f*cking nuts at that moment, but then I realized something Sara told me a few weeks ago about Serenity being pretty much completely promoted through word of mouth. The whole thing got me thinking, you know, about actual quality and how it’s all subjective and how democratic it is. If you were to take an online poll right now and ask folks on the internet what the best movie is at the theaters right now, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked to see Serenity pretty high on the list (and the only reason I don’t say it’ll be number 1 is because it’s getting to be Oscar season and a couple contenders are popping their heads around). But Serenity hasn’t even passed 20 million at the box office yet, and it’s been out nearly a month.

It also got me thinking of word of mouth advertising, and how much money everyone would save by just talking to people about things instead of listening to ads, because at least someone’s opinion isn’t going to profit from you buying into whatever they’re inadvertently selling. Regular people are never quite as biased as advertisements (unless it’s Whedonesque-style buzz, where the writer of the program has the infallibility insignia branded to his ass and can do pretty much no wrong according to his fan base).

I’m beginning to see my problem, especially since Denise caught a cab right outside the theatre and didn’t really say goodbye (she waved, but didn’t smile). It was at this moment I realized that I think on a completely different plane than everyone I knew. Well, everyone but one, but she seemed light years away at this moment. She seemed so far gone that I wanted to drink away the idea of ever seeing her again. It had ended badly. It was my fault, just like it was all those other times. I’d sabotaged the whole thing for all the reasons psychologists make a living off of. She thought the same way I thought. I didn’t feel smarter or dumber than anyone, just completely different. I found profound logic in things like liner notes and old Esquire magazines, but found things like classic philosophy “meaning of life” bullshit completely futile.

And that’s why I’d never really be happy with any woman (or any man for that matter). The kind of stuff they would worry about I would seem completely zen towards, and the things I’d worry about would piss them off to no end because it all seems so pointless. But she got me. She got my logic, and I got hers. But at this point, the most apologetic of apologies wouldn’t work. Nothing short of a miracle would.