Emotional Rescue (From Graboids)

I'm a barista these days and that's how I maintain a dim connection with living people outside myself. One such living person was a young, heavily tattooed man entertaining a young woman on the couch in our shop, using his ipad to show trailers for movies he thought were messed up or "must sees".  Having worked in a video store for nearly a decade I'm always curious as to other peoples conceptions of messed up movies.


He tells me about Dear Zachary  and says that i'm not to read any information about it before going in. I tell him that's no problem and I avoid trailers and reviews so I'm almost always surprised with whatever I'm watching. Trying to experience art in a vacuum is fairly satisfying, especially in the social media screaming match that so much culture is publicly digested in today.

Between you me and the 100 or so other page views this blog has received so far (yeah, nbd, whatevs, you know) I had a rough type of day, emotionally speaking. When I was thinking about what movie to watch tonight, I remembered the customer's recommendation and put on Dear Zachary thinking, "Alright, a messed up movie will make me feel better."

When I worked at the aforementioned video store years ago I would endorse Cabin Fever by telling people, "It's a great movie to watch when you really want to see the worst thing ever happen to a bunch of upper middle class, attractive young white kids." I wanted a messed up movie tonight that wasn't going to make me feel any real type of emotions, I wanted shock horror or some twisted french mindfuck, not a gripping and sad true crime documentary.

I had my doubts raised concerning Dear Zachary when MSNBC showed up in the credits. I thought "Oh well this isn't going to be a Miike type disturbing movie, is it?" (God, I can even remember the guy saying, "I wish I could be there when you watch it." I can't believe I recommended A Serbian Film back to him! If he thought a true crime documentary was "the most messed up movie ever"...) I paused the film after about 5 minutes because I realized that this was about something bad that happened to someone good. I then looked up what the film was actually about. (Which you can find out for yourself if you follow my first link, or you can try going into it blind)

After a brief twitter back and forth it became clear to me that part of the "messed upedness" of Zachary was going to be the experience of getting close to the subject of the doc through his friends and families stories, before reaching a point of real life horror and then being an emotional mess afterwards. So despite my public admission to the opposite, I turned it off for the night, vowing to watch it again when I was in a steelier condition.

But what was I to watch? Thankfully it turns out I've been sitting on a copy of Tremors  that I never found the right time to watch. So I watched Tremors. For the first time. And it was pretty much exactly what I needed to distract myself from painful, real human emotions and lose myself in the charming redneckitude of Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon as they shoot at the ground and really yuk it up along with the dad from Family Ties and Reba flipping McEntire.

Tremors was a fun monster movie and maybe it was something to do with watching a cowboy movie from the days before Brokeback Mountain jokes existed, or watching people react with horror to something that they can't immediately record on a phone and upload to friendster (what?), but it played like a tight little studio creature feature/early 90s time capsule.

I took like 2 pages of Tremors notes while I was watching it but in all honesty I think that the entry is more interesting without it, though, I could be wrong, so I'll leave some of them in the comments so we can count this as being real cultural commentary of the modern and marketable kind.

-louie-