The Casual Vacancy

I was reading reviews on Goodreads, and came across the following:

 

I’ve Got Nothin’

Okay, so…. we both know that I should be inspired and I’m supposed to write something awesome right now.

Unfortunately, the inspirawesome has abandoned me for a bit and I’ve got nothin’

Therefore, you are about to read another ten-minute freewrite.

Commence!

I can’t handle ‘R’ rated movies that I’ve never seen before. I used to think it was because of the sex. I’m particularly visual for a girl, I made out with boys kind of a lot when I was 19, and movie sex is pretty hot.Girls might act like we never struggle with lust (and I guess maybe other girls don’t struggle with it), but my heart goes some horrible horrible places when I watch certain movies.

So… where is this coming from?

Eucalyptus Biscuit, Musician Lisa, and I decided to rent a movie the other night, so we picked out a couple of chick flicks. Number 1 was Love and Other Drugs – Rated R. Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhall. The other was a Rachel McAdams and Harrison Ford thingy, but I can’t remember what it’s called. Not rated R.

We started out with Love and Other Drugs.

Beyond the fact that the characters had pretty much no redeemable qualities (both of them just wanted to sleep with and seduce everyone in sight), we definitely saw naked breast (yep… I used the word breast). The naked breast appeared about 30 minutes in, I’d say, and about fifteen minutes after that, there was some serious sex happening. At first, I just turned my head away and stared at Musician Lisa. Generally speaking, my strategy at moments like this is to find the next most conservative viewer in the room, and stare at him/her to gauge when I can look back at the screen. However, Lisa’s face didn’t get better very quickly, so after 45 seconds of looking at her, I decided to go and fill up my water until the sex was over. From the kitchen, I heard some “Oh. oh. OH,” coming from Lisa, so I walked back in and suggested that I would need to go to bed if anything remotely like that was on the screen again.

We did that awkward thing where we all tried to be respectful of everyone else’s reactions to the movie, then we put the other movie on.

Last night, no one was home, but I’d napped all day after only 3 hrs of sleep the night before, and I wanted to rent some movies. I got Stranger Than Fiction – WIll Ferrel, Dustin Hoffman, and a bunch of other awesome actors, a serious movie about mental health, and 127 Hours.

127 Hours is about Aron Ralston. He’s the guy who got his hand stuck under a rock for 6 days, then had to cut it off. The movie is rated R, but I really wanted to see it because I was pretty obsessed with Ralston when everything went down. I watched the Dateline special, and even read the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place. I’m one of those dumb people who goes hiking alone, runs late at night without any pepper spray, and never tells people where I’m going. So I viewed Ralston’s story as educational for the time in the near future when I’ll probably get myself stuck in a similar situation.

So, I put the movie in and felt really annoyed about the incongruencies with the book.

I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty bored for a lot of the time, because it’s just this guy sitting in a canyon with his arm stuck under a rock. There isn’t a whole lot of entertainment there.

Then, he drank his pee, and I had to look away.

Then, he stabbed his arm pretty hard-core and air came out (it was decomposing still attached to his body).

Then, he broke his arm.

Then, he went to work slicing the flesh off.

And I had to cover my eyes for like 5 minutes.

I knew it was a movie about a guy cutting his arm off… but I’m not convinced they needed to show so much blood. It made my stomach hurt, and the whole time I was like, “Maybe it isn’t just the sex that I can’t handle watching. Maybe I should turn this off. Why am I such a wimp?”

A while ago, a group of my friends went to see Adjustment Bureau and I embarrassingly jumped at one point that was scary (I think it was a car crash). Luckily, only Shasta noticed. Also, though, there was a part I did the same thing in when we were watching Tangled.

Tangled!

I mean, come on. It’s a movie for 5-yr-old girls! Why am I so ridiculously impacted by film? Then, Shasta and I went to see Hanna… and I was fine.

It’s impossible to even predict my reactions to films.

Dah!

The ten minutes was up like 8 minutes ago.

Bye.