JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The nominees for Please shoot me, I can’t bear to contemplate the bleakness of human existence any longer are:

Up In The Air, the tragedy of our times, a very smart movie about a man who looks into his soul and finds only air miles. Painful because you may find yourself asking, “Am I that guy?” Casting George Clooney as the hollow man makes it even more tragic because one expects the beautiful to also be true and good.

I asked Jaime, “Did you watch Up In The Air on a plane and ask yourself if you were that guy?”

He said, “I did, but did not compare myself. I thought it was a solid movie, perfectly articulated. Not quite sure if I liked those slip-on black shoes of Clooney’s, haha.”

“What don’t you like about the shoes?”

“Nothing wrong with slip-ons. . .it’s just the five-second glimpse of his. . .They were ugly. Not in keeping with the sophisticated Clooney look. A man’s shoes tell you more about him than his suit or tie or shirt.”

I can’t believe he actually found something ugly about Clooney but he’s right, you know. A man can wear go-to-hell pants and a funny shirt, but he has to have good shoes. Ugly shoes on an empty shell, aaaaaaah.

The Road, in which Viggo Mortensen and son walk across the post-apocalyptic wasteland looking for food and shelter and avoiding roving bands of cannibals. Our lovely Viggo suffers unremittingly for two hours, and when he takes off all his clothes all we see are starving bones. With his beard and razor cheekbones Viggo seems to be playing Rogozhin, Raskolnikov, Shatov, all the Karamazovs, plus Rasputin (and he had a good Russian accent in Eastern Promises). This is the movie where the father teaches his young son how to kill himself to avoid any of the fates worse than death lurking behind every rock. It is based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, who specializes in these things.

The winner is The Road because it is so dire it makes Up In The Air look like a Marx Brothers sketch. Also, George belatedly realizes that his life is empty but Viggo suffers from the beginning and how can you not suffer along with him.

* * * * *

If you’ve been wondering what “hurt locker” means, here’s an explanation from Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus.

In The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Jonathan Lighter includes an extended entry for hurt in its military use, which he defines as “trouble or suffering, esp. deliberately or callously inflicted.” One common use of hurt that sprang up in the Vietnam era is in the phrase a world of hurt, “great trouble or suffering.” In “My First Day in Viet Nam Combat,” an Oct. 15, 1967 battle report in the Chicago Tribune, new recruit Russell Enlow wrote, “But now, as I drained the last drop from the fourth canteen, I realized what a world of hurt I would be in if that resupply chopper didn’t show.”

Vietnam was a breeding ground for other hurt phrases, such as in the hurt locker, in the hurt bag and in the hurt seat, all defined by Lighter as “in trouble or at a disadvantage; in bad shape.”