Cinema Notes From All Over (Double-Wide Division)

CELLULOID-LAND, The Universe--We just watched a ten-year-old comedy called Sordid Lives and can't think of one reason you shouldn't too.
   Shot for next to nothing, based on a play of the same name, and billed as "A Black Comey About White Trash," it stars the extraordinary Bonnie Bedelia and, in an expanded cameo, Olivia Newton-John. 
   Packed with vivid performances, the film tells the story of the death of a matriarch of a poor but spunky Texas family. Her passing sparks all manner of family and small-town drama both madcap and solemn. 
   The film's main theme is the way it takes courage to to live one's own life, propriety be damned. The matriarch's grandson struggles to be honest about being gay; her son comes to grips with being a Tammy Wynette-obsessed cross-dresser. One of her daughters and a friend go on a Thelma-and-Louise-inspired tear, confronting the men who have in some way denied them agency. 
   Sordid Lives also limns the importance of family, no matter how non-functioning the brood might be; the claustrophobic nature of life among the lovably eccentric characters in a small town; and the odd ways that, in the end, love, truth, and a solid sense of spirituality trump life's complexities. 
   If this sounds a little earnest, that's our fault. Sordid Lives is a fun little comedy, camp beyond compare. Do yourself a favor and see it. And invite friends over. It's no fun to laugh alone. 
   (A side note: the movie contains gay themes and momentary full-frontal male nudity. If this is a problem for you, then why on earth are you reading First of All?)

Crime of the Century (Can You Hear Me Now? Division)

GORJ COUNTY, Romania--Police arrested a man here recently for attempted burglary after his intended victims discovered his presence in their home when his cellular telephone rang, a Dec. 27 AFP piece reports.
   The story neglects to mention the name of the man, who is eighteen. For the purposes of this post, then, the well-traveled and sophisticated First of All shall give him a name we assume to be typically Romanian: John Smith.  
  A police source in Gorj told AFP that Mr. Smith's victims, two neighbors in their seventies, "were resting on their bed when [Mr. Smith's] phone rang." The couple deduced that someone else was in the room, a task made easier by the fact that, as the police source noted, "they have no phone." 
   This couple shows a perspicacity First of All likes to think is native to all Romanians. Mr. Smith, on the other hand, displays a spectacular level of criminal folly. One wonders at his ringtone; was it, perhaps, the theme from The Three Stooges?

   Gorj is a Romanian county with a population of a few hundred thousand. Its main industries produce mining equipment, glass, wood, mechanical components and textiles. (This according to Wikipedia, the source of all information of dubious provenance.) There is also a vibrant food and beverage industry, aka hotels and tourism, aka partying.
   That Mr. Smith evidently was unable--or unwilling--to find gainful employment in any of these fields, and instead turned to crime, un-silenced cellphone in hand, fair baffles the mind. 
   This is Mr. Smith's second arrest for attempted burglary. He faces seven years in prison. 
   Seven years in prison because he neglected to silence his phone? First of All is not convinced that this is sufficient penalty. It would be perfectly apt punishment for those who do not silence theirs in movie theaters. But for a young man embarking upon what he hopes is a lucrative career in criminal enterprises, yet who forgets to silence his phone, seven years is not enough. Better would be a life sentence of hard labor, by which we mean being forced to text friends until his thumbs fell off.  
   Mr. Smith's foolhardiness affirms the truism that they just don't make 'em like they used to. The burglars of yore would be aghast. 
   

Cinema Notes From All Over (Deceit of the Crime Division)

CELLULOIDLAND, The Universe - I Love You Philip Morris is not, alas, a film about a shrinking sect of smokers with a passionate fealty to a large tobacco conglomerate who rebelliously use machetes to hack off the hands of the antismoking fanatics who fan those hands in front of their own scrunched-up noses to signal their disdain for cigarettes, cigarette smoke, free will, responsible choice, and anything else that gets in the way of their desire to dictate to others how they should live.  
   Instead, it is a romantic comedy-drama (a "comma"?) about a pair of gay guys. Steven Russell, played by Jim Carrey, is an incorrigible con man. Phillip Morris, played by Ewan MacGregor, is a trusting Southern soul. The two meet and fall in love in prison, where each is serving time for something or other. (Who, in the end, cares why they're behind bars? Life is short; we're all going to die someday. Tracking details of this or that movie's plot is, you might agree, simply too exhausting.) 

   The film is sweet and mildly enjoyable, excepting a scene which for First of All sabotaged the whole thing. 
   In it, Mr. Russell appears to be dying of AIDS. In a wrenching phone call, Mr. Morris, though angry with Mr. Russell for other reasons, sobs wildly when he learns of his lover's illness. For those of us who lost friends to AIDS in the eighties and nineties, the scene is a knife to the heart. 
   Later, it is revealed that Mr. Russell's "illness" was faked. It is another con, one that allows Mr. Russell, posing as a lawyer, to try to spring Mr. Morris from prison. 
   (Oops. Did we spoil the film for you? So sorry.)
   For the AIDS scene to work, the audience must feel Mr. Morris' agony. So the film tricks us in the same way that Mr. Russell tricks Mr. Morris. When the con is exposed we feel Mr. Morris' rage--he slaps Mr. Russell's face--and his exasperation with Mr. Russell's iniquitous duplicity. 
   First of All understands this filmic conceit. You know what? First of All does not care. It is a terrible manipulation of the audience. We found ourselves weeping at Mr. Morris' pain; we recalled our own in the same kinds of situations. So for the illness to be exposed as fake--well, for hours after leaving the theater we boiled at the film's aggressive guile. 
   In fairness, we note that the film is based on true events. Perhaps Mr. Russell's AIDS con did, in fact, happen.
   Still.   


   A side note: Mr. Morris and Mr. Russell's relationship does not last. In this sense theirs is no different from many nongay couplings. Love, sad to say, does not conquer all. Gays and lesbians eager to marry, in prison our out, need take note.
   
   

Crime of the Century (Waste Case Division)

GREELEY, Colo., Sept. 15, 2010 - "If you're trying to escape from police, you might want to take a hint from Adam Segura, who learned an important lesson Thursday: Don't steal a police car, especially if you're drunk."
   This eminently reasonable advice appears in the lede of an non-bylined Sept. 11 story posted on the Web site of the Greeley Tribune, the newspaper of record in Greeley, Colo., a township of 98,596 people located forty-nine miles north-northeast of Denver. (This according to Wikipedia, the site containing the scribblings both of fact-loving obsessives and of, well, liars. The population figure comes from 2006 Census Bureau estimates, so we can assume it is correct. Then again, it appears on Wikipedia, so who knows?)
   It all began last Thursday at one in the afternoon, as so many things do. A Greeley police officer with the likably anonymous name of Craig Miller stopped Mr. Segura, who is thirty-two, for allegedly driving 62 mph in a 55 mph zone. In chatting with Mr. Segura, Officer Miller, as the mysterious Tribune reporter puts it, "noticed signs of drinking including glassy eyes, an odor of alcohol on [Mr.] Segura's breath and slurred speech."
   While these symptoms may indicate drinking to excess, they also could be the result of a love-partner conversation gone wrong. After one of those, any sane man would want to hit the road for a bit and might presently find himself driving as fast as he is thinking. So it's difficult to say whether Mr. Segura was, in fact, drunk, because... oh, wait.
   "'The defendant [Mr. Segura] also admitted to officer Miller that he'd drank alcochol,' according to [an] affadavit," according to the Tribune. Is it nitpicky to point out that the affadavit should read, "admitted to officer Miller that he'd drunk alcohol"? (Emphasis mine.) Perhaps so; often, officers of the law are simply too busy, what with catching criminals and so forth, to toy with the niceties of correct grammar.
   Officer Miller quite sensibly handcuffed Mr. Segura's hands behind his back, and then placed him in the back seat of an unmarked police car. He then buckled Mr. Segura's seat belt. (Safety first, even for miscreants.)

   Mr. Segura, showing the ingenuity that often, oddly, is the hallmark of those in the grip of an alcoholic blackout, managed to maneuver his hands, still locked in the handcuffs, around in front of him. He unbuckled the seat belt and climbed into the front seat of the car, unobserved by Officer Miller, who was busy chatting with (or, in police parlance, "questioning") a woman in Mr. Segura's car.
   To the no doubt great surprise of Officer Miller, a backup officer, and possibly the woman in Mr. Segura's vehicle and Mr. Segura himself, Mr. Segura zoomed off in the cop car. Officers chased him down U.S. 34 for roughly a mile, at which point Mr. Segura inexplicably stopped.
   The Tribune neglects to say whether Mr. Segura activated the car's siren, which would have been, like, totally awesome. The Trib does report that Mr. Segura was stopped near the entrance to the Greeley Mall, so it is possible that Mr. Segura had more important things on his pickled brain than blasting sirens, such as stopping at Hot Topic and buying his girlfriend a Tartan skirt and a skull-embossed black t-shirt.
   Mr. Segura is now in the Weld County jail and faces no fewer than twelve charges, which really kind of puts him in the drunken-police-car-stealing hall of fame. Charges include aggravated motor vehicle theft, escape, vehicular eluding (a lovely locution), speeding, no proof of insurance, resisting arrest, obstruction of a police officer, two counts of driving under the influence (he blew a .26, three times the legal limit), and three counts of being a habitual traffic offender.
   This last suggests that this is not the first time Mr. Segura has engaged in vehicular shenanigans (including eluding?). Some people simply aren't meant to drink; others aren't meant to drive; still others aren't meant to drink and drive, lest they wind up in the clink with the book t'rown at 'em.

Crime of the Century (Emergency Ride Divison)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Plainly, Quandria Bailey is a woman of monumental resourcefulness, a fact that evidently escaped New Haven authorities recently, if an April 25 report on the Web site of WSFB-TV Eyewitness News 3 is credible, and why wouldn't it be? A station with that many letters and numbers and words in its name must do its homework. 
  Ms. Bailey, who is twenty-eight, apparently was having trouble getting to Meridian, the town in which she lives, from the Van Dome Night Club, at 102 Hamilton Street, in New Haven, late one night, and so, showing remarkable ingenuity, she phoned 911 and asked for a ride home. 
   (We do not know which night it was, because the report on the WSFB Web site does not say. This is an appalling journalistic oversight for which the many-named, -numbered and -lettered station should be roundly rebuked. Is it really that difficult to report fully and factually? The answer for First of All, who worked at a mainstream daily for some years, is yes indeed; we made so many errors that we should have been fired countless times. This is why we now write a blog in which, with a disquieting lack of empathy, we decry others' fallible reporting. We are, in short, idiots. Rather, an idiot - who is rather an idiot.)
  That Ms. Bailey called 911 not once but six times suggests that emergency operators were, figuratively if not literally, asleep at the switch. If someone called to ask you for a ride home, wouldn't you give her one? After all, being stuck outside of a night club on an early morning unnamed by WSFB is, in essence, torturous. By that point in the party, one just wants to return home, soak one's feet, and lose oneself in serial episodes of, say, "Whale Wars." 
  Alas, New Haven police, as police will, saw things differently. They arrested Ms. Bailey on six counts of misuse of the emergency 911 system, according to the by-now suspect reporting on the WSFB site. She was sprung from the can after posting a thousand dollars in bail, and is slated to appear in court on May 5. 
  Incidentally, the Van Dome nightclub (WSFB calls it "Vandome"; really, the mainstream media are just coming apart at the seams), according to its Web site (which we would link here, except that links keep disappearing from this blog, something that those, and we mean this with love, motherfuckers at Google are going to get an earful about), boasts theme nights that include "In Those Jeans (The $500 Blue Jean Party)," a Thursday night party sensibly called "Thursday Nights (Music by DJ Cocoa Chanelle)," and "Reggaeton Fridays," as well as performances by various no-doubt skilled DJs. 

  It is possible that New Haven 911 operators knew this, and therefore it was, for them, an act of kindness to refuse Ms. Bailey a ride. Why, they were probably thinking, would anyone want to leave such a blazing hot spot before it had gone cold for the night?

Crime of the Century (A Tale of One Nutty Chair Divison)

PROCTOR, Minn. - One day about a year and a half ago, a man named Dennis LeRoy Anderson, of Proctor, demonstrated that he is wildly creative, exceptionally mechanically gifted, and possessed of a perhaps overenthusiastic and potentially detrimental passion for beer. 

  Mr. Anderson, who runs a professional auto shop at his home, designed and outfitted a recliner - the type of comfy chair you see in front of televisions in better homes and trailers - with a converted lawnmower motor, headlights, a steering wheel, a stereo, cup holders and a National Hot Road Association sticker on its headrest. The chair could travel as fast as twenty miles per hour. 

  That accounts for Mr. Anderson's creative and mechanical gifts. His love of beer manifested, or perhaps over-manifested, on the day and evening of August. 31, 2008. 

  After enjoying a number of beers at home - the exact tally is left unstated in an October 30, 2009 Minneapolis Star-Tribune report - Mr. Anderson drove his chair to a bar called the Keyboard Lounge, located at 224 North 3rd Avenue, in Proctor. (View the bar's exterior here.)  

  There he consumed more beer. His total, he later told police, was "eight or nine" that day. His blood alcohol content, police would learn, after administering a field sobriety test, was .29. That's more than three times the legal limit for driving in Minnesota. 
  Mr. Anderson was blissfully unaware of this fact - or, evidently, of any others - when, presently, he left the Keyboard Lounge and settled into his motorized chair. Presumably, the goal of puttering home somewhere floated in his be-fogged noggin. 
  Alas, things don't always turn out as we might hope. Mr. Anderson promptly crashed the chair into a Dodge Intrepid parked nearby. 

   When police arrived, Mr. Anderson was treated for minor injuries and given the sobriety test, during which, Deputy Police Chief Troy Foucault told the Star-Trib, he "failed everything." To add insult to intoxication, it turned out that Mr. Anderson's driver's license had already been revoked for a prior drunk-driving conviction. 

  Police took Mr. Anderson, who is sixty-one, to the station and threw him in the pokey. At trial he was sentenced to one hundred and eighty days in jail and fined $2,000. The jail time and half the fine were stayed contingent on his serving a two-year probation with various conditions.

  Here now we leave the tale of Mr. Anderson in order to follow the captivatingly byzantine one of the chair. Proctor police impounded it when they arrested Mr. Anderson. It was then to be sold at a police auction, the proceeds from which would benefit the department.

  Foucault, the deputy police chief, characterized the chair to the Star-Tribune as being "quite decked out," and said "quite a few people" had called about it. He joked that he even might bid on it, except for the fact that "I have kids who would take it out and drive it on the street." 
  This seems just the kind of things kids should be encouraged to do, providing that the cups in the chair's holders contain, say, Coca-Cola or, at the extreme, Red Bull rather than beer, because beer can so fully harsh a magic mushroom high. 

  It is not tangential to point out that, in its lede, the Star-Trib called the chair a La-Z-Boy. This is important because, as the paper reported in a November 3, 2009 followup, a five-day eBay auction, undertaken by the Proctor police force, pushed the asking price of the chair, listed as a La-Z-Boy, to roughly $40,000, and drew national media attention.

  A mere eleven hours before the auction's deadline, the La-Z-Boy company faxed a complaint to the Proctor police chief, a man charmingly named Walter Wobig. The company, citing copyright concerns, protested the use of the its name in the eBay listing, inasmuch as the chair that Mr. Anderson had modified was not, in fact, a La-Z-Boy recliner. 

  Chief Wobig is to be forgiven for having listed the motorized chair as a La-Z-Boy. The brand is so well known that it has come to stand for all recliners, much as "Xerox" has for copiers and "Kleenex" for tissues. 
  In addition, the chief had been unduly influenced by the incorrect use of that brand name in the rash of media reports on the auction. This shows that the only people less adept at fact checking than police chiefs are reporters, an observation that does nothing to inspire a great deal of confidence in the condition of the ailing Fourth Estate. 
  In time, Chief Wobig had a cordial telephone conversation with a La-Z-Boy representative. That person asked the chief to ensure that the eventual buyer refrain from referring to the chair as a La-Z-Boy, and then wished him luck with the sale. 

  By that time, however, the listing had mysteriously disappeared from eBay. Did La-Z-Boy contact the online auction house and threaten it with legal action, such as, for example, sentencing eBay CEO John Donahoe to a forty-day La-Z-Boy recliner confinement and a force-feeding on Pabst Blue Ribbon, Cheetos and "Dog the Bounty Hunter?" Alas, we shall never know.

  Chief Wobig, unsuccessful in contacting eBay about the missing listing, re-listed the chair, once again setting the low bid at $500. The second auction also fell through. (Press reports are sketchy as to why.)

  All of which brings us to this month. An April 21 Associated Press story reported that a Duluth, Minn. resident - one of fifteen people competing for the chair in a Do-Bid.com auction ending April 18 - placed a winning bid of $3,700, an amount markedly lower than the $40,000 being batted about during the first eBay sale. 
  It is conceivable that the price suffered such a monumental drop because the chair is not a La-Z-Boy. It is more likely, however, that the feverish national attention of a year or so ago had so almost wholly waned that no one wanted to buy the goddamned thing. The public is a fickle mistress.

  There are lessons to be learned from this twisted tale, and they are as follows: 
  1. Corporations are psychotically protective of their brands, and woe betide he or she who uses one without permission. 
  2. Kids would not even entertain the idea of driving motorized chairs on the streets if there were a video game - one they could play in the comfort of their rumpus room - that featured such a chair, a totally awesome idea that First of All is, right this minute, in the process of copyrighting.
  3. If you are going get trashed and crash a motorized recliner, at least consider shaving so that you look nice in your mug shot. 

  

  

  

  

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Lesbian Boobies Division)

SWANSEA, Wales - A Swansea woman named Sharon Hancox, forty, spent her first night of wedded bliss in the slammer, but not for marrying her lesbian partner, Nicola Hutin, also forty. 
  Indeed, Swansea apparently is so sophisticated that a lesbian wedding occasions the batting of nary a local eye. 
 What troubled authorities, according to a March 23 report in Metro, a free United Kingdom weekly, forwarded to us by an Oxford, UK spy, is that immediately after the happy nuptials Ms. Hancox took it upon herself to drink eight pints of lager at the reception, held at a bar called Champers. Thereafter, she and her betrothed displayed a disquieting sort of aggression, or, in lay terms, acted like drunken idiots. 
  (In the United Kingdom, "champers" is short for champagne, although plainly Ms. Hancox is more of a lager kind of gal.)

  First, Ms. Hutin exchanged punches with an inebriated woman. 
  (Metro repoter Joel Taylor writes that Ms. Hutin was in "a fight." Perhaps, then, we are embellishing slightly. It is an unfair generalization that fighting lesbians ipso facto throw punches, although it does create a pleasing mental image.) 
  A bar security man named David Jenkins broke up the fight, and asked the entire wedding party to leave the bar. 
  At that point, Ms. Hancox confronted Mr. Jenkins. Apparently a Champers regular, she accused Mr. Jenkins of having "attacked" her in the past. 
  "You assaulted me, you pulled my tits out two years ago," is the elegant way Ms. Hancox is reported to have put it. 
  She then allegedly pulled down her red dress top, exposing her mammaries. This could be considered a  service to boob-hounds the world over, but apparently is not the sort of thing that flies in Swansea. 
  As it happens, things didn't end there. Ms. Hutin lunged at Mr. Jenkins at about the same moment that Ms. Hancox swung her stiletto heel at him. Whatever else may be said about them, it seems safe to say that Ms. Hancox and Ms. Hutin sure know how to party. 
  Referring to the stiletto incident when speaking later to Swansea magistrates, and using the affectless language typical of verbal and written communication in the legal system, a prosecutor named Julie Sullivan said, "The heel made contact with his [Jenkins'] forehead and he felt blood running down his face." 
  Ms. Hancox admitted common assault and received a yearlong community-service order. She is also required to pay a costs totaling two hundred and fifty British pounds.
  Two things need to be noted. 
  First, Mr. Taylor's Metro report is admirably urbane: never once does he raise an eyebrow at the notion of a lesbian wedding. And the story's copyeditor must be applauded for creating this alluringly alliterative headline: "Bride bares breasts and bashes bouncer."

   Second, the holy institution of matrimony has expanded, at least in Swansea, to include so-called alternative couples. Ms. Hancox and Ms. Hutin are to be commended for showing that gays and lesbians are just like heterosexuals, at least when it comes to getting trashed at wedding receptions, attacking bouncers, and winding up in the can. 

  Gays and lesbians keen to marry need pay close attention. 


  On a side note, the name Swansea is unbearably charming. It conjures images of swans, the sea, and swans at sea, although were it the case that swans went to sea it is possible that seagulls ("gulls at sea"), furiously jealous of the beautiful airborne interlopers, would peck them to death.
  This would be a gruesome sight, but it might make a droll YouTube video. 
   Imagine our disenchantment, then, when we consulted Wikipedia - the lazy man's research resource -  and discovered that the town's name is pronounced SWON-zee, a sound closer to that of a sneeze than of a hissing sea and screaming mutilated swans. 

Crime of the Century (Wrong Address Division)

PORT CLINTON, Ohio - It is likely that we here in the United States of America will soon see the suspension of Saturday mail delivery by the U.S. Post Office. Indeed, in the not-too-distant future we may see the suspension of all mail service, because with the advance of global warming there may soon be no "snow nor rain" to challenge these couriers in effecting "swift completion of their rounds," so, really, what's the point? 
   Until that moment, the Post Office remains stickler-ish about details such as Zip codes, and well it should be; there are a lot of items to shove around the country, and Post Office employees have their hands full with all that on-the-job sorting, shelving and sleeping.
   This fact was learned the hard way by a man named Donald Dudrow III, of Toledo, Ohio. That Mr. Dudrow is a "III" suggests that Toledo quite possibly has been chock-a-block with Donald Dudrows for generations, an exceedingly pleasant thought. 
   This particular Donald Dudrow is a guest of the state of Ohio; he has taken up residence at the jail in Port Clinton (a town that, as of July, 2008, boasted 6,135 persons, presumably none of them Dudrows, "III" or otherwise). He is there on a probation violation, according to an Associated Press report published April 2. (Yes, April 2. Today is April 18. First of All is terribly, terribly behind in its reporting, for which it is terribly, terribly sorry). 
   Mr. Dudrow III had the not altogether bright idea to write a letter to his mother offering her meticulous instructions for how to sneak drugs to him in jail. 
   Alas, in addressing the envelope Mr. Dudrow included an incorrect Zip code. The detail-stickler-ish U. S. Post Office returned the letter to the jail, where corrections officers read it, as they do all incoming mail. 

   Mr. Dudrow III has been indicted on charges of attempted drug trafficking and trying to bring drugs into a correctional facility, according to the AP. 
   There is a moral to this story, and it is this: if you go to a U.S. Post Office branch, chances are there will be a sixty-person line and only one of the nine customer service windows open. This is enough to make anyone want to numb themselves with drugs, in or out of jail, correct Zip code or no.