The Lonely Mountain

I don't have a lot of compulsions, at least that I'm aware of. I don't drink, smoke or gamble at all, so those aren't issues. My sex life is most definitely under control, evidence of which I can present on the spreadsheet I keep entitled "Sex Normality" wherein I measure and track things like numbers of partners (sorted alphabetically by name, age, race, Kinsey scale rating, pain tolerance [represented as a number 1 through 100, where 1 is a total absence of sensation and 100 is such a shock of excruciation it leads to blackout looping us all the way back to 1 again], gag-reflex sensitivity, rate of engorgement, average number of thrusts employed per entanglement and number of felonies [with subcategories for "charged with" and "named as complainant," naturally]), the dates of my last STD screenings, things like that. Same stuff everyone keeps track of probably.

I keep myself within myself. For the rare times when I don't, there's a team of very nice Israeli fellows who, for a very reasonable fee, I can hire to kidnap me off the street at an undetermined time and place, throw me in a van and drive me to a falling-down ranch house somewhere out near Indio where they tie me to an old radiator and hit me with phone books for four days. Some people use this for hostage training. I find it just kind of clears my head. Nothing re-sets the internal discipline like willing yourself to not die from dehydration and a slow kidney hemorrhage.

I think I've probably said before that my one trigger compulsion is the winter prestige movie release season. For some reason I have to run out and take in as many fancy award-type movies I can find in the period between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, when all the Oscar contenders are released. Since I'm also the type who often has no choice doesn't mind going to the movies alone, last year for example, this meant a couple of days when I would see three movies in one day. Not at home in front of my laptop, wearing a groove into my* Netflix account, I mean ass-in-seat theater-going. Often with long drives in between arthouse spots. And don't be fooled, there's more than one bag of Reese's Pieces happening along the way, too. I understand the risks to my health.

But for all my twitchy, obsessive need--pretty sure I'm the only American who watched Philomena on a big screen last year--I really didn't have any desire to go and see The Interview. It was going to come out on Christmas Day, you know, the hallmark of what is usually some pretty good shit. Seth Rogen is in it, who I tend to like. James Franco is in it, which is a totally separate thing about the movie that is also true. My two previous forays into fantasy murder of real-life dictators were two flawed (in their own ways) films that I nevertheless deeply personally love and respect in Team America: World Police and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. But eh... I guess the best way to sum it up was in the rhetorical question my lady-partner raised during a viewing of the trailer: do I really need to see more of Seth Rogen naked?

Rhetorical or otherwise, the answer there has to be holy Christ no.

Plus, with the other one, did you see that time he hosted the Oscars? Fuck James Franco.

The problem is that now I have to see it because Sony says I can't. That's some powerful-ass contrarianism. Factor in all the other things, the recycled plot, the naked Seth Rogen, that pretentious douche-nozzle J*mes Fr*nco, and still... I have to.

Otherwise the communist-terrorists win. Go see the movie that its own production studio hates. Jokes aside, this is literally terrorism: threatening people into behaving the way you want them to behave. And all without actually harming anyone, unless you count the slightly embarrassing revelation of the known-truth that Hollywood people are provincial, shallow and insecure.

Or, uh, keeping that in mind, it's a way to ensure Sony can make their money back with an insurance claim rather than risking it on the open market where they had already decided it would probably die?

Provincial, shallow and insecure, did I say? Provincial, shallow and insecure like a fox maybe. Except in this case not Fox, Sony.

And on top of that, interest in the movie has never, ever been higher.

See, this is a case where there is a benefit to caving to the whims of a distant, repulsive communist dictatorship, I guess. Maybe Obama knows what he's doing after all with this Cuba thing.


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*You never know who could be reading this. They seem to be cool with sharing, but everyone thought Napster was OK for a long time too until the lawsuits started.