Shit, Actually

by Lindy West

  THIS IS HOW AMERICA BECAME A HOTSPOT OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC.

  Because my generation was raised to believe not just that safety is for dweebs but that it’s EVIL! Maverick is a full psycho and would definitely be at the “reopen America” protests because he wants the RIGHT to get his b-hole waxed even if he isn’t actually GOING to go get his b-hole waxed and even though he knows that many thousands more marginalized and high-risk people will die and many b-hole waxing businesses will ultimately fail because you cannot sustain an economy on a handful of slobbering fascists who feel the need, the need for a Jamba Juice. Goose alludes to some dark past involving Maverick’s dad, who was also a fighter pilot: “Every time we go up there, it’s like you’re flyin’ against a ghost.” And I’m sorry, but that is not an excuse! Go to therapy! You can be in a men’s group with Snape!

  After several days of doing heavy sex innuendo during class, the civilian contractor invites Maverick over for dinner at 5:00 p.m. But before dinner, it’s………beach volleyball time!

  This is the famous volleyball scene, where all the guys—Goose, Maverick, Iceman, Pickle, Scabby, Shredder, Splinter, Bebop, Rocksteady, Dave, and Cornholio—oil up and spike the hogskin for a few days. Ohhhhhh, do I ever I wish I were that volleyball! Yeah, hit me with the tops of both of your wrists, boys! Unghhhh!

  Maverick is late to dinner because he volleyballed too hard-core, but when he tells her he’s “just gonna take a quick shower” (it’s HER HOUSE!), she’s like, “No, I’m hungry, and I prefer you very wet from volleyball on my furniture.” A parrot watches. They decide to date even though she’s his teacher and, let’s be honest, reads…fifteen years older? Which, to be clear, is only because Tom Cruise looks a full Dennis the Menace twelve here.

  In class, Charlie uses one of Maverick’s dumb maneuvers as an example of what NOT to do while flying a plane, so he flounces off angrily to his motorbikey. She tries to explain to him that she’s still gotta be his teacher, but he’s like VROOM VROOM VROOM away into the twilight! She chases him in her car, and they jeopardize many lives. When she finally catches up, she insists, “My review of your flight performance was right on,” (YES), but then admits that she sees some real genius in his flying but she couldn’t say that in there because she’s afraid that they’ll see that she’s falling for him. UGH! ET TU, CHARLIE!?

  Indeed, it is incredibly inappropriate, and as we have just seen, dangerous, that you are falling for your student! You already can’t give him necessary and valid feedback on his flying because of his lacy-crispy-wafer-thin ego! This is bad!

  Then they do it. Sex.

  Another day, another flying exercise where Maverick abandons his wingman to chase individual glory because he thinks he’s the only person who matters. Maverick and Goose feel the need, the need for speed, but I wish they would feel the need for weed and maybe take a nap once in a while?

  Iceman once again confronts Maverick for being dangerous and foolish and is once again correct.

  Goose’s wife, Meg Ryan, comes to town and they all have a great party and get wasted and Goose plays “Great Balls of Fire” on the piano. Meg Ryan tells Charlie all about Maverick’s many previous erotique lovers, but assures her that he is extremely hot for teacher now and, yes, don’t worry, you should definitely trust that guy! He’s absolutely not the exact floor model of a dude who would fat-shame you while you’re pregnant and then bang your couples counselor because he’s a “super-feeler.” For sure marry this unhinged tween!

  It’s the next day. They’re out flying again. Something goes wrong. (I forget.) Maverick and Goose start to crash. They have to eject. But Goose’s hatch thingy doesn’t detach properly and he blasts straight into the dome exactly like a goose flying into a plate glass window! They parachute into the sea, but Maverick can tell that Goose already died. It was Goose’s last honk.

  If only he had stuck to boogie-woogie piano.

  Maverick is really sad. Meg Ryan tells him, “God, he loved flying with you, Maverick…He’d have flown anyway without you. He’d have hated it, but he’d have done it.” What? Why would he have done it if he hated it? What???

  Maverick flies bad now. He’s scared. He blames himself for Goose’s death. He fights with his new partner. All the while, the wretched villain, Iceman, looks on with an expression that says, “How can we build some more productive teamwork strategies?”

  Iceman approaches Maverick, just to twist the knife: “I’m sorry about Goose. Everybody liked him.” Curse you, Iceman! From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!

  The villain of this movie literally only says kind and responsible things the entire time.

  Maverick decides he’s going to drop out of TOPGUN, and, oh no? It’s hard to care about the loss of one insubordinate and only slightly above-average pilot when I have no idea who the navy is actually fighting or what’s at stake. Are we in a war? What do fighter pilots actually DO? Am I just supposed to be sad abstractly at the squandering of a great plane-flying talent? Because I’m not. Charlie takes a job in Washington and moves away. Maverick goes to see Viper and gets the classified scoop on his dead dad. I didn’t pay attention to what it was. Viper tells him, “You’re a lot like he was, only better, and worse.” (Thanks?)

  It’s TOPGUN graduation day. Maverick shows up super late like an asshole and basically misses it. Iceman wins number-one top gun, AS HE SHOULD, and then all of a sudden there’s some sort of…enemy…plane…situation…! I don’t know what the story line of this movie is!

  They have to do a real fighter plane mission like big boys. Maverick gets assigned to fly with Merlin, replacing Goose, and I gotta say I think it’s really nice that they let you have a friend go in the plane with you! Not sure how Merlin’s big pointy hat is going to fit inside his helmet but NOT! MY! PURVIEW! Iceman expresses some concerns to Viper about letting Maverick pilot a $30 million murder plane right now, and even that is totally reasonable! Maverick has fucked up every single fucking thing, his best friend just died, and he couldn’t even show up on time to graduation!

  Viper sends Maverick out anyway, and they beat the bad guys (?) (or bad girls—women can be bad!) because Maverick finally learned ONE FUCKING THING, which is not to leave his wingman. Honk honk. Then, at the end, he buzzes the tower again and makes the tower man spill his coffee AGAIN! That’s what you get for stealing Merlin’s tower!!!!!

  Iceman and Maverick have a tender moment, and then Charlie comes back from DC to be Little Miss Mrs. Maverick. Then Maverick emotionally drops Goose’s necklace into the ocean at the end, and in conclusion, I just have to say, FUCK YOU, MAN!! GIVE THAT TO HIS KID!!!!!!!

  If they recut Top Gun with Maverick edited out, it would be a gorgeous short film about sunsets and friendship. Petition to recut real life with all Mavericks edited out.

  RATING: 5/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

  Footnotes

  1 Paradoxically, I do think that Tom Cruise is an excellent movie star, and I enjoy his movies!

  2 ALSO ICEMAN’S HAIR.

  Fabrizio’s Last Meatball

  I don’t remember a lot of specifics about watching Titanic in theaters in 1997, but I was fifteen years old, which means my two primary concerns in life were 1) locating romance, and 2) not dying in a nautical catastrophe. So I think we can safely assume that I fucking loved that movie. I watched Titanic again on TV with my sister a few years later, making sure to switch it off right before the whole iceberg thingy (stressful!)—a strategy that turns the movie into a pleasant romp about two teenagers who take a perfectly safe boat ride and then bang in a horseless carriage. The end. Charming! Watching Titanic for a third time, for the purposes of this essay, I cannot imagine what I was thinking that second time around. I could not wait to get to the second half and watch all these motherfuckers drown.

  Titanic is three hours and fourteen minutes long, which—fun fact—is longer than the actual journey of the Titanic (this is not a fact). It is sooooo ballsy to just ass
ume people will watch your movie for three hours and fourteen minutes! Especially when everyone already knows exactly what happens in the end (spoiler: the boat is Keyser Söze). Sorry, Epcot Center, I’mma let you finish, but James Cameron’s balls are like the giantest balls of all time. It would take three hours and fourteen minutes just to walk around the circumference of James Cameron’s balls.

  Anyway, here’s what happens in Titanic. In case you forgot, it is terrible:

  It starts out on a modern-times submarine. Bill Paxton is snooping around on the ocean floor trying to find a big necklace to impress Britney Spears. James Cameron himself has literally done this, and Paxton’s character is clearly Cameron’s idea of what a cool person is like—he does stuff like wear male earrings and say “sayonara” in a sarcastic voice. Awww yeeeeah. Pretty cool. Bill Paxton finds this old safe in the ocean, expecting it to be full of Titanic diamonds, but instead it’s just an old doodle of some boobs. Total rip-off!…OR IS IT?

  An old lady recognizes her boob-doodle on the news and goes to visit Bill Paxton on James Cameron’s rock-and-roll treasure boat, where they make her watch a gruesome CGI reenactment of the Titanic sinking (I believe the working title is Hey, Granny, Fuck Your PTSD). Then she tells her story, which is extremely not pertinent to treasure-hunting, unless by treasure you mean three hours of nonsense, garbage, terror, death, and Italian stereotypes.

  Turns out, that old lady used to be Kate Winslet, and one time she rode a big boat named Titanic. But she wasn’t too happy about it! “It was the ship of dreams to everyone else,” she says. “To me, it was a slave ship, taking me back to America in chains.” Yes. Because generations of imprisonment, rape, and violently coerced labor are just like having to marry Billy Zane and live in a fur-lined bon-bon palace. (Also, it’s 1912 right now, which means that real slavery has only been over for like…fifty years? Maybe a little too soon for the flippant slavery metaphors?) She continues, “I saw my whole life as if I’d already lived it, an endless parade of parties and cotillions, yachts, and polo matches. Always the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter. I felt like I was standing at a great precipice, with no one to pull me back, no one who cared, or even noticed.” Nobody notices me! Everyone is so fake! My polo horse is the wrong color! As you can see, Kate Winslet’s life is just like slavery. She decides to just kill herself immediately so she doesn’t have to face another terrible, terrible cotillion.

  Luckily, along comes Leonardo “I Am Definitely Wearing Lipstick” DiCaprio, who is traveling to America with his friend Fabrizio (Human Olive Garden Commercial). Leonardo DiCaprio rescues her from suicide, and she repays him by letting her entire family treat him like human feces for the last few days of his life. Then they fall in love.

  Leonardo shows up at fancy dinner even though he is a stinky poor and Kate Winslet’s mom hates him: “My mother looked at him like an insect—a dangerous insect that must be squashed quickly.” After dinner, Leonardo says, “Time for me to go row with the other slaves!” Again with the slave thing. PLEASE READ A BOOK.

  In an act of defiance, Kate Winslet sneaks downstairs to party with the simple folk. And look who’s down there dancing a jig! “Aaaaaaaay! It’s-a me, Fabrizio!” Fabrizio treats everybody to all-you-can-eat breadsticks and then invents the Mafia. Can someone tell me why this movie wasn’t entirely about Fabrizio? At the very least, could I get a fan edit called Titanic 2: Fabrizio’s Quest? (It is a quest for lasagna.)

  Next there’s a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t involve Fabrizio at ALL, so I’m on strike. It’s the Celine Dion part (“I’m flying!”), the boob-sketching part, and the aforementioned banging part. All of it is incredibly awkward and boring. Then Theoden, King of Rohan, drives the boat into this big iceberg and the ocean starts coming inside the boat, where the people go.

  Bill Paxton interrupts the old lady’s endless fucking story and is like, “BOAT SCIENCE. EXPOSITION. BOAT SCIENCE,” for a while. Nobody cares, Bill!

  Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio run around the boat in circles for a long time holding hands. I think we’re supposed to admire Kate Winslet for having terrific moxie or something, but really all she does is yell about how no one can tell her what to do and then just does whatever Leonardo DiCaprio tells her to do. (Sometimes he tells her things like this: “You’re so stupid! Why did you do that? You’re so stupid, Rose!!!” and “SSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”)

  Fabrizio shows up (FINALLY) to tell them that they’re fucked because all the lifeboats are gone: “The boats-a! They’re all-a gone!” “Where’s your life jacket, Fabrizio?” Leonardo asks. “Ees-a okay!” says Fabrizio. “I’ve-a got this-a beeg ravioli! Abbondanza!” Then he drowns (oops).

  Fortunately for Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio turns out to be the world’s number-one expert in surviving ocean liner disasters—offering genius advice like, “We have to stay on the ship as long as possible! Come on!” Eventually, though, they end up in the ocean, where Kate Winslet sits on a board and cries. Leonardo makes one attempt to get on the board with her, but falls off, so he decides to just die instead. Kate Winslet is sad.

  Finally, even though she knew Bill Paxton was searching for the necklace, and he patiently listened to her stupid story (it’s like she writes erotic fan fiction about herself), that old lady just goes and drops it into the ocean at the end!!! Like, seriously, old lady? First of all, you’re a dick. Second of all, that necklace belongs in a museum. Third of all, you’re a dick! I wish Bill Paxton would drop YOU into the ocean at the end.

  The end.

  RATING: 3/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

  Dead Man’s Pants

  Ah, the holidays, when families (some families, possibly, maybe) gather ’round the hearth to enjoy the traditional Fudge Reinhold, the Peter Boyled Potatoes, the Tim Watermallen Salad, and watch Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause (may its celluloid never decay). It’s not the most important Christmas movie, nor the best Christmas movie, nor really a beloved Christmas movie, but it is technically a movie. And it’s the only movie that teaches us one of the lesser-known meanings of Christmas: that putting on a dead man’s pants constitutes a binding legal agreement to assume all his debts and obligations.

  We open at some dumb corporate party for poseurs. Peter Boyle, soulless toy king, is honoring Midwest marketing and distribution team Scott Calvin and Susan Perry for their work shilling some sort of hideous chauvinist ice witch called, “Do It All for You Dolly.” Susan gets only a few words into her acceptance speech when Scott (Tim Allen) interrupts because he has no time for thanking people like a woman, he ONLY HAS TIME FOR PROFITS. After high-fiving Johnson from Sales for incessantly pressing his boner against his secretary, Tim Allen bails on the party and vrooms off into the night.

  On his drive home, Tim Allen makes it clear that he does not give a fuck about holiday cheer. Eeeeew, a Christmas tree with a bear on it!?!? HORK. A children’s merry snowball fight? UGH, JUST EMBALM ME ALREADY. Fuck you, bell-ringing charity Santa! VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

  He’s late for his divorced dad weekend custody drop-off snide remark summit, but it’s NBD because he’s not really that into his dumb kid anyway. Exactly what Tim Allen’s character is into that makes him so single-mindedly disdainful of parenting, non-mute women, and holiday cheer is never revealed. This is a cinematic technique known as “not fucking bothering.” Tim Allen is hella mad at his ex-wife’s new husband, Neil (Judge Reinhold), for telling his kid, Charlie, that there’s no Santa Claus, even though there obviously isn’t. Judge Reinhold is a psychiatrist, and because this is the ’90s, Tim Allen’s character HATES PSYCHIATRISTS even more than he hates having a consistent and discernible personality. (As was scribed in the ancient texts: every movie from the ’90s must include equal parts lawyer jokes, hatred for psychiatrists, and your divorced parents getting back together.)

  The fact that Tim Allen only bothers to defend the wonders of childhood when it’s a convenient vehicle for dissing Judge Reinhold is not lost on Charlie, who clearly can’t stand be
ing around this asshole (#NOTTIMALLMEN). Tim Allen attempts to win Charlie’s love back by cooking him a phat Xmas turk, but he sets it on fire (BASICALLY IMPOSSIBLE) and has to spray it with a fire extinguisher for one hour. Instead, they go to Denny’s, which apparently has two sections: the Asian people section and the sad garbage dads who don’t know how to cook turkeys section. It is not hot.

  After dinner, they go home and Charlie badgers Tim Allen about the physics of reindeer flight for a while, and then Tim Allen reads “The Night Before Christmas” out loud, dad-style. This seems like a good time to mention the biggest Santa Claus loophole of all, by the way: setting aside the implausibility of flying deer and the impossibility of visiting every Christian household in a single night—if there were actually a Santa Claus, every Christmas morning parents would be like HOLY FUCK HOW DID ALL THESE PRESENTS GET INSIDE MY MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE OH MY GOD CALL 911 SHARON OH GOD KIDS RUN ACROSS THE STREET TO THE FERGUSONS’ RIGHT NOW THEY COULD STILL BE IN THE HOUSE. In other words, if there were a Santa Claus, we would know about it because there would be a Santa Claus.

  Anyhooz, suddenly, there’s a commotion on the roof! A clatter!

  “DAD, a clatter!!!”

  “Charlie, do you know how to call 911?”

  “Sure, 911!”

  (This movie calls that dialogue a “joke.”)

  Tim Allen runs outside in his underpants and discovers a fat old man clomping around on the roof. Distracted by Tim Allen’s shouts, the man slips and falls off the roof AND DIES. Right there on Tim Allen’s lawn. Tim Allen stands and stares at the man for several minutes, doing nothing. DUDE, YOU NEED TO CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE. EVEN BURGLARS DESERVE MEDICAL CARE. Instead, unperturbed by the fact that there is a rapidly rigor-mortifying grandfather in his yard, Tim Allen checks the man’s ID and it’s just a business card that says Santa on it. On the back: “If something should happen to me, put on my suit. The reindeer will know what to do.” So specific. Is it that dangerous being Santa? He sounds like a sexy DA who went undercover and got in too deep on SVU.