I have no energy for a full-fledged entry detailing all of the events that have taken place since the beginning of Day Two, but I thought I would crank out a brief one to address a few points of note.
My vacation is nearly over as tomorrow (or today at this point) is my last full day here and I leave way too fucking early in the morning on Tuesday (the good part about the early morning flight is that, barring any other mishaps, I'll be back in VA fairly early), so soon I will be back to my computer and my broadband connection and as a result will be back to making regular updates.
While I was here I got tired of using my mom's old laptop for connecting to the Internet, as its overall sluggishness coupled with the slowness of the dial-up connection made even the most basic tasks a nightmare, so I said "Screw this" and bought my mom a new computer.
It's not top of the line (very far from it), but it at least makes it possible to do things on it in a reasonable amount of time.
Sure, she doesn't do all that much, but what she does do shouldn't take as long as it was taking on the old computer.
And while it hasn't sped up the actual connection, more RAM and a faster processor have dramatically reduced application and page loading times and increased her ISP's "acceleration" software's ability to compress and cache, which has sped up overall Internet performance.
Tonight I went to see Clerks II with my brother-in-law Dean.
After 10+ years of having "gone Hollywood," Kevin Smith wasn't quite able to recapture the essence of the original, but given the context of the movie that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Making the switch from seeing a day in the life of two twenty-something slackers stuck in dead end jobs to seeing a day in the live of the same two slackers who are now thirty-something and stuck in slightly different dead-end jobs helped to create a feeling of...well, if not progress at least lateral movement, added some new twists, yet managed to keep a comfortable familiarity.
Of course the best parts of the movie - which make up the majority of this movie just as they did in the original - are the conversations between Dante and Randal.
Sure, the "Star Wars" conversations are entertaining, but what I like are the unflinching (though sometimes flinch-inducing) conversations about sex. Why? Because they're exactly the sort of things that guys talk about and exactly the sort of things you don't hear in most movies (and when you do it usually rings hollow and is part of some horrible In The Company of Men style evil, misogynistic plot or something rather than a simple conversation between two friends).
A prime example this time around (and I love that Rosario Dawson, who for various reasons deserves, and will receive, a Threshold entry all her own, gets involved in it without being even slightly taken aback) is the conversation about A2M.
What is that, you ask? Well, I'm afraid that if you're unfamiliar with the concept, I'm not going to be the one to pop your cherry.
However, I will tell you a filthy, horrible, soul-destroying joke that is not suitable for anyone and is assured to send you straight to hell if you laugh and should only be read with extreme caution and which will follow shortly after this warning which you have to read before proceeding on to the joke so I don't want to catch any flak for telling it because you were warned, which will give you an idea of what A2M is, but if you don't want to read it because you want to avoid going to hell, have strong religious convictions or high moral standards of any sort, or are too much of a goddamn pussy to take a fucking joke, skip over the section that follows and is separated by a return and # symbols.
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Okay, all of the children and easily offended people gone? Good. Here's the joke.
Little Suzie runs home after school, bursts into the house, and excitedly proclaims, "Mommy, mommy! I'm in love with Billy!"
Her mother smiles indulgently and asks, "Oh? How do you know you're in love with Billy?"
Suzie responds, "Well, because first I sucked his dick and then I let him fuck me in the ass!"
Horrified, Suzie's mother responds, "Oh, Suzie, no! That's not love."
"If you'd let him fuck you in the ass, and then sucked his dick, that would be love."
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Okay, it's all clear now. You have successfully skipped past the horrible, wildly inappropriate joke.
Anyway, overall I enjoyed the movie a bit more than, say, Chasing Amy, but not quite so much as Mallrats or the original Clerks. For one thing on the negative side, despite the Silence of the Lambs allusion, which was hilarious and profoundly disturbing, Jay and Silent Bob just didn't shine in this one.
The random dance number scene also seemed forced and kind of tacked on and it made you wonder what the point was supposed to be, despite the funny(ish) payoff.
However, the best line in the movie came from Randal, a line that was, for me, a very personal example of why Kevin Smith's movies have a tendency to resonate with men of my generation.
The line in question?
"I hate everyone and I find most things stupid. Who would want to be friends with me?"
Sound like anyone we know?
In any case, I think it's time that I post this before it gets so long that the upload would take hours and crash for the night.
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