A Sandwich Never Tasted So Bad

No such luck drinking beer and burning stuff in Dewey's back yard last night--the little one got sick, so we couldn't go. But we did do the next best thing (if you ignore about a thousand other possibilities, that is)--go see a movie in Sandwich.

The Ring has its pluses, and if I get my computer back this week, hopefully I'll have time to write a review (now that I'm not slugging away through literary criticism, that is). But Sandwich itself deserves immediate mention.

First of all, Susan (whom I had the distinct pleasure of talking to yesterday, and Susan, baby, I know you're lurking, so don't pretend you aren't blushing with pride over that one, and make sure your damned e-mail goes through this time) mentioned to me she'd taught there all last year, even after my dire warnings (which I don't remember giving and rarely heed myself, so who am I to talk?). Susan had intimated that the phrase "keeping it in the family" took on dire overtones in this quaint little village, and a first impression of its citizens did not tend to disprove such a theory. Kim and I sat in the front row at the local multiplex, and within two minutes of having gotten settled, we were surrounded on the other three sides by gabbing, rude, and generally shitheaded teenagers.

Siskel and Ebert these kids were not. Shit, I would have been satisfied with Roeper and Rutiger. For example, in one tension-inspiring scene, the heroine approaches a closed door with some kind of liquid trailing out of it. "Blood," one of these degenerates muttered behind me. "It's gotta be blood."

"She's gonna step in it!" his girlfriend squealed, to which there were several gasps of astonishment at this leap in reasoning. I shoveled more popcorn in my mouth to try and drown out the noise of ten brains coming to a grinding halt, but Kim wasn't having any of it--she hissed several words at them, and those words were not Happy Birthday.

Then, the heroine gets closer, and we see that there's no red tint. "Oh, it's not blood," another one of them announces, to which the others grunt assent. Oh man, if I didn't have a critic to point these things out to me, I don't know what I would do...

The heroine flings the door open, and we see a genuinely freaky sequence of shots: a staccato of black and white images, bodies, severed fingers, insects and other unsettling juxtapositions of the serene with the out of place (courtesy of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, who didn't attempt anything like this in turkies like Surviving the Game or Kalifornia--could it be more screenwriter-inspired?). Since none of these Last Picture Show casting rejects had their Ritalin this morning, this of course sent them into a frenzy, and I heard one of them remark several times over, "This is a really fuckin' creepy movie." Just what we needed. More local insight.

What I wanted to do was turn around and say, "Your observations are fascinating. They really are. But I can't possibly stay on such an abstract level of analysis, so if you could just, you know, keep your firm grasp of the obvious down to a gentle murmur inside your head--which, by the way, is called thinking--I really would appreciate it."

But sarcasm never goes over well with these rubes. I know from experience. So what wound up escaping after all was: "Shut up! Christ!" (I've been pretty good about not taking the Lord's name in vain lately, but this time it slipped out. I like to think of it as a call for help, though--as in, "Help me, oh Lord, before I remember that your commandments only direct us not to kill humans.")

Still, there was an acceptable level of silence throughout the rest of the movie. Maybe I've learned a few tricks after all.

I can say, with some justifiable pride, that relatively few of my students would have behaved in such a manner, and those that would have most likely would not have been wearing Varsity letterman jackets and sporting "I'm a Fuckin' Honors Student" bumper stickers. So maybe geography plays a part after all.

Either that, or radium levels in the water.