Pearl Harbor

To those of you who wished me well as I recovered from my fall down the stairs, thank you. For those of you sluts who switched your allegiance to the Arvada Tavern Harelip faster than a liquored-up bridesmaid drops her panties; fuck you. Here I am, recuperating from a nasty fall, and all you fucking care about is, "Oh, poor me, who's going to write something to preoccupy me from my shitty desk job this Monday morning?"

For the three of you who care, I'm fine. The bruises healed, and I can walk again if I don't put any pressure on my toes. In fact, I was fine last weekend, but I didn't have any God damn electricity in the apartment. Our breakers are all screwed and my cheap-ass landlord won't pay to repair it. He says I busted it up so I have to fix it. What a load of crap. I remember getting sort of drunk one night and I remember being mad at the electric company because I was thinking about this bitchy guy who chewed me out for always paying the bill late, and I sort of recall going to get my tools to teach them a lesson. But that doesn't mean I busted up the electrical panel.

Actually, I do remember taking a hammer to it, but admitting that to the landlord will only make him right. Fuck the man, and to hell with anyone who tries to keep us down by making us pay for his problems. If my landlord doesn't want his electrical panel busted up, he shouldn't put it in my apartment.

But I'm back, and just in time to have my eyes gouged out by the obnoxious spectacle of Pearl Harbor. What a steaming, rah-rah pile of crap. I mean, it's annoying enough listening to some insecure asshole who has to keep patting himself on the back for something he did years ago. But, It's about a billion times worse being around people who have to pay Hollywood to slap them on the back, and that's what this is. It's those greedy fuckers in Los Angeles saying "Show us how patriotic you are by giving us your money." Calculated, cold-hearted horseshit.

I'm about as patriotic as the Harelip, who showed her national pride last Memorial Day by flashing her tits at the cops and trying to stick a burning sparkler up her nose. I don't need national pride to make me feel good about myself, and I never will so long as beer is legal. But if I did I wouldn't be so fucking stupid as to think that this movie really had a message beyond the lazy absolutism that America is great, and the implication that the Japanese are emotionless villains who wear funny underwear.

While the "America is fucking great" story is a big part of Pearl Harbor, the main plot is a love triangle starring Ben "I Still Suck" Affleck, Kate "I Suck Too" Beckinsale, and Josh "I don't Suck as Bad" Hartnett. The movie gets points for writing dialog that perfectly matches the actors: stiff as a blue corpse in the river. But, holy fuck, are these people boring. Who gives a rat's red ass if two models from an "American Male" catalog are in love with a bony model from "Abercrombie and Fitch"?

Pearl Harbor is three hours long, and it's time that would be better spent on the toilet, dripping hot diarrhea until your bowels feel twisted and tight like a wrung-out dishtowel. I think director Michael Bay went into this thing thinking he needed to make an epic. He didn't think "I need to make a good movie," or "I have a story to tell." He went in with the idea of "Pearl Harbor" and "epic". But to pad this fucker out to epic proportions, he subjects us to two hours of Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale acting out the most timid of scenes from Norman Rockwell paintings. Seriously, that's what the goal is here: a superficial, phony feel-good view of America. It's dreamy, soft-lit nostalgia for cowards afraid to look at the real past.

Hartnett and Affleck play pilots with the personalities and complexity of sidekicks in a comic strip from the back of a Capt'n Crunch box. There is some nonsense about Affleck being dyslexic, but as typical of Hollywood, it amounts to nothing. Beckinsale is part of a fleet of wholsesomely attractive nurses in white. Affleck and Beckinsale love each other, they send each other love letters, Affleck is shot down and thought to be dead. Oh, shit! He's not dead, but now Hartnett and Beckinsale love each other. What will happen? Who cares? Beckinsale needs a big dick inside to straighten her out, not a couple of boys with skulls as thick as Russian novels.

With uncanny skill, Affleck once again inhabits space without being matter. He's as stiff as they come, and in many scenes, you can see what a bad actor does when he's trying too hard: he squints-a lot. Hartnett might be a better actor, and I'm sure the girls think his beady eyes and tiny mouth are dreamy, but writer Randall Wallace asks him to vomit up dialog as foul and clumped as the hair-trap in a YWCA bathroom. Beckinsale looks kind of pretty, but the kind of pretty you see in sweater catalogs, not the kind of pretty that looks like she would give you a good blowjob, or even like sex. And all she does in Pearl Harbor is get dewy-eyed about Affleck and model vintage clothes. I'd rather spend two hours getting my ass kicked by the teenagers who break bottles in the Conoco parking lot. Just by busting glass they prove to have more personality.

But let's talk about the fucking bullshit war part. First, this movie is attracting a lot of old people who might be WWII veterans, or maybe they are so old and fucking senile that they just think they are. Either way, they haven't been to a movie theater in years and have forgotten that they need to behave themselves. Some old timer behind me was hacking on the same phlegm ball the entire movie. Imagine, three fucking hours of hearing some old guy moving around some platelets of snot. Another guy down the aisle was about to die of tuberculosis, and he coughed his raspy cough the entire second half of the movie. He also loudly said, "That the way it was" after every fucking scene, which I seriously doubt unless he was boning Beckinsale 60 years ago. Gentlemen, get the fuck out of the theater if you can't shut up. I don't care if you personally won WWII, this movie is not a tribute and it's not really patriotic. It's just a shitty Disney movie that is exploiting the emotions of simpletons like you. They didn't make this movie to honor you, they made it to drain your wallet. And as such, you don't have a right to be so annoying. Then, there are the numbnuts who applaud at the end. What the fuck? Are you so roused up that you want to go back to war with Japan?

The war scenes do look pretty, probably as pretty as war can look. They aren't scary, they're like a very expensive fireworks show, all meant to make you say "Ooo," and "Aaah." I still can't figure out how Bay did it, but he makes sinking ships and drowning soldiers look like a calendar you'd buy at Hallmark, and he works hard to up the quotient of young men in underwear. Part of the problem is the over-the-top score that swells and bleeds like a malignant tumor under the surface of the movie. It's always there, you can feel it, and you know it's bad.

But what gets my fucking goat and chokes it is the knee-jerk patriotism of this dung-heap. Bay and Wallace wear patriotism like it's a protective cloak and it makes them immune to the rules for making a movie tolerable. So, they can be lazy and show the Japanese as an efficient killing machine. Sure, they probably think they are being even-handed about the land of the rising sun, but if they are, why is the audience supposed to root every time an American calls a Japanese "son of a bitch" or "bastard"? Why are they portrayed as people who think only of war, and why is no soldier ever sad to kill them? I don't know the answer, but I do know that Bay uses the Japanese as agit-props to fire us up. Disney would be thrilled if audiences applauded when they die.

It's a fucking shame. If our country is so fucking great, why do we spend so much time revising history and barfing it back up in sugar-coated form for the dumb masses? Why are we so hellbent on retelling our past in black and white, with us always winning and being the good guys? Are Americans so insecure we need Hollywood to reassure us with this pap?

Yes. One Finger for Pearl Harbor. And for the English readers, shut your gob if your knee-jerk reaction is to write to tell me that indeed Americans do suck. The only people more pathetic than patriotic Americans are the lowly limeys who take every opportunity to bitch about us because it's easier than facing the reality of their own crumbling empire. You guys are a broken record.