GREATEST. POSTER. EVER.

I found this on CHUD.COM and it just tickles me to no end.  There are so many ways that this French poster for the horribly titled Wolverine spin-off movie is terrible, not the least of which being that it reminds audiences of the Hugh Jackman's other public persona, the all-singing, all-dancing, Tony-winning owner of a huge ackman.  

Anyway, this is too funny to ignore.  Please, leave comments with what YOU think angsty Logan is screaming in this candidly captured moment.  I call dibs on:

"STELLA!  STELLA!"

MY APOLOGIES, NEGLECTED DUDDITS (and reader).

This 24-hours in a day bullshit is the bullshit.  I have to work five days a week and go to school.  Most days that eats up 8 hours.  I want to be able to read more books, enjoy the occasional video game, and be sociable with my local group of hooligans, ne'rdowells and (insert your favorite pejorative here!)s.  Each of those could take up a few hours a day.  But what I desperately need to to do is watch many, many more movies and write pithy reviews of each for this here blagosphere.  And that takes up at least two hours a day to watch.  The writing part I'm still working the kinks out on...

So yes.  Fuck the 24-hour day and its fascist restrictions on those of us with numerous time-consuming hobbies.  This is the gentrification of my day, leaving only enough time for work and some (but not all) bodily functions.

Anyway, I've seen a ton of movies of late, reviews of (some of) which may or may not be coming down the pipeline in the semi-near future.  Yes, that was a particularly definitive sentence.   In the mean time, here are some single sentence reviews of what I've seen to whet your appetite for whatever monstrosities of bad prose I concoct for the full review.

CORALINE - I loved it for being the kind of kid's movie people don't make anymore (scary, thoughtful and intense), but was often bored by its fairly dull protagonist and protracted running time.  Still, the production design was gorgeous and the 3D is used better here than ever before.

NICK & NORA'S INFINITE PLAYLIST - if I was 15 and either gay or a girl, I'd have loved this movie.  Not being any of those things, however, means it was a marginally enjoyable collection of teen movie cliches, an off-screen fingerbang, and another great Michael Cera performance.

ZACK & MIRI MAKE A PORNO - Kevin Smith aping Judd Apatow does nothing for me.  Nor do Smith's trademark obvious Star Wars jokes or on-screen anal leakage.  

W. - Not the return to form for Oliver Stone that I'd hoped for, but not the cluster fuck train wreck that I expected either.  Josh Brolin is amazing as Bush in this surprisingly sympathetic look at the now-former President.  

FROZEN RIVER - This movie gives the repressed filmmaker inside me hope.  Made on an incredibly modest budget, this terrific drama is going to get national acclaim when Melissa Leo wins the Best Actress Oscar in a few weeks.  

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA - Aside from the black cast and sharp visuals, there's nothing about this movie that would hint that Spike Lee was involved.  Dull, drawn out and uninteresting.  I turned it off an hour in.  

TRANSSIBERIAN - Features the rare good post-2000 Ben Kingsley performance.  Also, is a terrific thriller.  

LAKEVIEW TERRACE - Features the rare good Sam Jackson performance.  Also, is a terrific thriller.  

ROCK-N-ROLL - The British gangster movie from Guy Ritchie, which means it's just like the last British gangster movie from Guy Ritchie: clever, funny and convoluted.  Also very enjoyable.  

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK - Charlie Kaufman unfiltered.  The biggest mind-fuck I've ever seen.  A beautiful movie.

MILK - An efficient script, tight direction and all-around stellar cast makes this a very good Oscar baiter.  Its timing makes it unforgettable.

DEFIANCE - So forgettable I had difficulty remember parts of it the day after.  Bland, predictable, familiar.  Daniel Craig and Liev Schrieber should be in better.

Thoughts?  Preferences?  Any particular review any body's dying to read?  PLEASE SOMEONE USE THE COMMENTS SECTION, I'M DESPERATE FOR FEEDBACK/ATTENTION.

 

   

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA was on my radar for a long time before I finally watched it the other day; having finally seen it, I regret the delay.  Woody Allen's latest is a great little picture about love, romance, culture and sex.  About that last part - for a movie that was hyped out of Cannes predominantly on the presence of red-hot sapphic action between Scarjo and PeeCruz, there's a shocking lack of sex in the film.  What's there works and works well, but still.  Art-house hype machine, you've deceived me yet again.  Anyway, review.  Plot and characters, right?  

Two college grads, the titular Vicky and Cristina (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson), are vacationing in Barcelona when artist/Lothario Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) offers to take them away for a weekend of sightseeing, fine dining, local music and red hot bedroom action.  Throw his batshit-crazy ex-wife (Oscar-nominated Penelope Cruz*) into the mix and you've got a sexy recipe for disaster... or a recipe for sexy disaster.  

The cast is all around terrific.  Hall in particular was fantastic as the Woody Allen-type character, seemingly very comfortable with Woody's trademark nervous sarcasm coming out of her mouth.  Miss Scarj, who I've grown less and less interested in over the years, acquitted herself nicely in the less-interesting Cristina role.  Outshining them both are their Spanish co-stars.  Bardem makes you (almost) forget his roaring rampage of shoe-checking in Texas with effortless charm and surprising sincerity, while Cruz's Maria Elana is convincingly unstable.  Their scenes together are the best in the whole picture.

Despite its stellar cast, VCB manages to remain a small picture in scope and feeling and is the better for it.  Woody seems more interested in the characters than actually involved with them.  VCB easily could've been a devastating emotional drama, but instead the grand emotional moments are played subdued and the audience is left feeling at arm's length from the whole affair - this is a good thing.  The movie is thoughtful and curious it is about relationships - not to show to us, but to explore with us.  It isn't your typical romantic drama/comedy (thank gods for that), but it is a typical Woody Allen romance.        

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is now available on DVD.

*Pronounced "Peen-ah-low-p Cr-uh-zz"

OSCAR SNUB! Where's DARK KNIGHT'S nomination for "Super Best Picture of All Time" ?!

(That, by the way, is the last of the snark I'll throw Batman's way.  Today.  In this post.*)

It's that time of a year again, when movie geeks like yours truly gather round excitedly and debate which of their favorites from the last year got snubbed, robbed or treated right, and when the rest of America wonders where their favorite movies are on the list at all.  Flash-forward two months, when The People accept the Academy's choices as cannon and people like me rip their hair out.  ANYWAY.  My thoughts on the nominations that interest me, and my stunning indifference (expressed through silence) about those that don't.  

BEST PICTURE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

No surprises here.  I've seen all but THE READER, and unless that thing knocks me on my ass, SLUMDOG is certainly the best of these five.  (My thoughts on these four coming soon, I swear).

BEST DIRECTOR
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
Stephen Daldry, The Reader
Gus Van Sant, Milk

Much the same.  Ron Howard more than adequately Ron Howards his way through the paint-by-numbers FROST/NIXON, just as Gus Van Sant could've been asleep at the helm and still made a decent movie out of MILK's formulaic script (he was fact awake, and made a pretty good movie out of it).  Despite my love of Fincher, my affection for BENJAMIN BUTTON has dwindled since I saw it and, more importantly, since I've thought about it.  That said, Fincher tricked me into thinking that BUTTON'S a great movie - it's not - and that's a work of directing wizardry.  Still, though, Danny Boyle should take this one home.

Best Actor - Mickey Roarke in THE WRESTLER.  That's all, let's go home.

Best Actress - What the shit?  Somehow I haven't seen ANY of the films with a best actress nomination.  I gots to get on that.

While Best Supporting Actor will undoubtedly go to Heath Ledger (who creepily died a year ago today), I gotta love the Academy for nominating Robert Downey, Jr. for TROPIC THUNDER.  His performance was a fucking trip in the movie, sure, but the nomination is more of a recognition of how awesome he was in '08 - and how sad it is the guy won't ever get nominated for IRON MAN.  That's right, I said it.  Discuss.

Best Original Screenplay - Fucking aye right, IN BRUGES!  I was so afraid this movie was going to get forgotten come Oscar time, especially in a category like this one where it really deserves.  Good job, Oscars.  

I love the Best Animated Feature category.  They should just be honest and call it the Best Pixar Film and not give it out on Pixar's off years.  All WALL-E.

If THE DARK KNIGHT wins Best Cinematography or Best Editing, I might shit.  With RAGE.  Read why.  

It's a shame that Oscar-baiter BENJAMIN BUTTON had such spectacular and seamless make-up effects, because it'll likely steal HELLBOY II's much-deserved (and only) nomination.  

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Alexandre Desplat 
Defiance, James Newton Howard 
Milk, Danny Elfman 
Slumdog Millionaire, A.R. Rahman 
WALL-E, Thomas Newman

Woah.  The one (other) category where DARK KNIGHT seemed to be a shoe-in was Best Original Score - and it got completely shut out.  BENJAMIN BUTTON, WALL-E and SLUMDOG all had terrific scores (with SLUMDOG's being my favorite), though I can't say that I remember much of any music from either MILK or DEFIANCE.  Really, one of the few categories where ol' Batman was truly deserving of all the hype and it gets no love?  Kinda sad.  

All in all, I'm more or less "meh" about the nominations this year.  I don't hold with some of the naysayers who call 08 a step down from the movie-stellar 07, but I just don't see the movies I loved reflected in the nominations enough to make me care.  However, I wasn't expecting too much in the way of nominations for them, either.  Net game, I just don't care this year.  Hey who wants to skip getting drinking watching the Oscars this year and instead get drunk doing something else?  

*Actually a  lie.

REVIEW: SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is a movie I can't believe anyone paid money to produce and distribute.  That was a compliment -  Charlie Kaufman's latest (and his first as director) is so aggressively intellectual and so completely unapologetic about it that I'm stunned any financiers or distributors had the stones to think it was commercially viable.  Thank gods they did, though, because the movie is unabashedly brilliant... I think.

The problem with trying to review a movie like SYNECDOCHE* is that, well, I don't quite get it.  Yet.  I hope yet - this film is so goddamn dense with characters, imagery and jarringly abstract narrative that it should take multiple viewings to get only the most rudimentary grip on what happens within.  And that's not even touching the thematic content.  The movie has a philosophical outlook that's either just barely optimistic or crushingly nihilistic (I'm leaning toward the former, though mostly because the latter would hurt my soul too much).  Kaufman's movie is a heady examination of some pretty profound themes, but he really makes you work to figure out what the hell he's trying to say.  Which I have not done yet.  Yet!   

In emphasizing what a colossal mindfuck SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is, I might be giving the impression that it's a cold movie for the intellect to ponder and dissect.  Not true - like Kaufman's other films, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the narrative headgames, but there is a gigantic heart at the center of this movie.  Actually, I take that back.  There's a gigantic heart that the center of his others, ETERNAL SUNSHINE especially; SYNECDOCHE has a raw nerve at its core and it hurts like a motherfucker.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character, a playwright, describes theater as like getting punched in the mouth, or love.  That hideous paraphrase clutters the point, which is that to him theater is the purest representation of emotional truth distilled to its highest potency.  That's not a bad description of emotion in the movie itself.  Every feeling is expressed in a razor-sharp, essential form.  Even if you don't know what's necessarily going on in the movie plot-wise, you'll feel what you're supposed to be feeling.  

There's an emotional gut punch in the last few scenes of the movie that I embarrassingly missed - I knew it was there but failed to connect because I was stuck trying to figure out the film's labyrinthine construction.  Not that SYNECDOCHE is a puzzle movie (it really isn't, despite being endlessly puzzling) but its willfully fluid boundaries between reality, fantasy and time make it easy to get lost in the plot's convolutions and miss out on the film's emotional journey.

I realize I haven't said much of what the movie's about.  Honestly, the plot isn't an easy one to summarize, nor is it one I'd want to.  This is the rare movie that never ceases to surprise and I'd hate to ruin that discovery for anyone interested in experiencing it.  Which should be everyone.  Let me be plain: I loved SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, even though I know I didn't quite get it.  If you enjoyed Kaufman's previous films, you owe it to yourself to witness his 12th-level intellect unfiltered onscreen for the first time.

*You can rest assured that every time I typed this word over the course of this review, I failed - not unlike how most of the people in line at the box office failed to pronounce it.  ZING!

I swear I'll be finished taking the piss out of THE DARK KNIGHT some day...

The following is in response to Josh Tyler's Editorial Note To Awards Givers: Ignore The Dark Knight At Your Own Peril.  I posted this as a comment on the editorial, but since it hasn't gone live yet, I can only assume that they denied my democratic right to call their editor-in-chief an idiot on his own website.  Who knows, maybe it takes them a day or two to post something... In the meantime, though.

Tyler, your infantile little diatribe demonstrates the worst (and best) thing about the democratizing effect of the internet: everybody gets a say.  There's nothing you wrote here that isn't inherently flawed on even the most basic logical level, but I’m going to try to limit my response only to the most egregiously stupid things you’ve written. 

First of all, someone needs to set you straight on a concept you’ve clearly misunderstood, the function of the critic.  A critic has three jobs: be an expert in film (or at least more expert than their audience), watch movies, and report their opinions.  That expertise is why we seek their recommendation, NOT to get our opinions validated, our tastes reflected, or our (your) obsessive praise of a so-called "cultural phenomenon" justified.  Film critics (the real ones) tell us what’s good, mass appeal be damned.  

Sometimes the difference between “good” and popular creates a disparity between the critic and the public, but that’s not the indicator of irrelevance that people like you make it out to be.  The big difference between a critic’s top pick and the average movie-goer’s is that a critic sees hundreds of movies over the course of a year, while the average person sees maybe ten.  When these two groups make such sweeping statements as “best of the year,” whose is going to hold more weight?  My point is that when we seek a recommendation from a critic, someone who has seen so many more movies than we could possibly have the time to, we should expect the highest-achieving movie and not the highest-grossing. 

Does that mean that critics are out of touch?  Maybe, but sometimes that's part of their job description.  People don't need critics to tell them what they'll like - they already know what they like!  The most important function of the critic is to help advance cultural tastes by making us aware of better movies.  What you call championing pet films, I call the betterment of our national intelligence. 

As for awards, I’d think that someone who writes about movies for a living would’ve learned by now to completely disregard the Golden Globes.  You’re doing your readership a disservice by making the Globes out to be something that actually matters.  Even the Oscars, which are Nobels by comparison, don’t mean a damn thing.  Awards and nominations are political, signifying only how hard-fought a PR campaign was, not how good the movie was.  And if they award the “wrong” movie (as they always do), so what?  CITIZEN KANE was all but shut out at the Oscars and it’s still considered one of the greatest movies ever made.  So relax, man; if your movie finds an audience (and I think THE DARK KNIGHT has a fair chance of doing so), it’ll be remembered regardless of how many statues it takes home. 

Speaking of THE DARK KNIGHT… I get that you love it a lot, in probably a gawkish, fanboy sort of way that might be endearing if you weren't trying to cover it up with posturing indignation, but here’s the thing: when you make a grand statement defending a movie’s position in history, and that movie just happened to make a billion dollars worldwide, you look foolish.  If you were rallying support for a tragically under-seen and critically overlooked gem, I might understand.  But instead you appoint yourself the champion of not only the highest-grossing movie of the year, but also one of the best reviewed?!  What makes you think this movie needs defending? 

And that’s another thing: you admit that THE DARK KNIGHT is one of the best reviewed movies of the year, but then slam critics for failing to recognize it.  Did I properly illustrate the gaping incongruity in your statements here?  Critics DID review the movie very favorably, yet you’re still whining.  Just because it hasn’t made all of the critic’s ten-best lists** doesn’t mean it’s getting unfairly shut out; they just disagree with you.  That’s why we have more than one film critic in America – hell, that’s why most newspapers and movie sites employ more than one critic – because ultimately film criticism is a matter of taste. 

Maybe you should change jobs, Tyler, since your skills lie not in film criticism (or composing sound arguments) but in film prognostication.  Think of it!  You could corner the market on predicting what movies will become cultural landmarks, and you could do it without the burden of hindsight or taste!  Sarcasm aside, the movie ISN’T a cultural phenomenon; it just made a boatload of money.  Heath Ledger’s Joker, on the other hand, was a brilliant characterization that captured the imaginations of the movie-going public.  That said, I think the popularity of both the character and the movie are riding more on our nation’s fascination with celebrity death than the quality of either.      

THE DARK KNIGHT isn’t going to change the face of cinema as we know it.  In fact, aside from popularizing the use of IMAX cameras in action movies, I can’t see it having much of an impact on movie-making at all.  Any impact it does have, of course, won’t be comparable to the huge influence STAR WARS had on Hollywood - for the record, that influence was a bad one.  (Regarding STAR WARS and ANNIE HALL at the Oscars, by the way: one of them had sharp dialogue, a terrific cast, a memorable screen romance, and a brilliant director with his finger on the pulse of the culture at the time.  The other one was STAR WARS.  That year, the Oscars got it right.)  

As for THE DARK KNIGHT itself, I can’t say that I share your enthusiasm for the movie, or for the prospect of it becoming the “new mold from which all future movies will be poured.”  But to dispute you point for point on the movie’s qualities at the end of a post defending pluralism would be hypocritical of me, though I have to ask: will the future movies forged in the great mold of THE DARK KNIGHT also be structurally retarded with a nonsensical plot and a tin-ear for dialogue?  

Great site, by the way.

 

*In case you were pondering a retort to that remark, NO, that isn't true of you, unless your site's readership is made up of eight-year-olds.  And from the other comments I’ve read, it isn’t.

** Also, I like how you conveniently ignored DARK KNIGHT’S runner-up win for the LA Critics’ Best Picture – a prize Nolan & Co. came in second to yet another pretentious independent movie that nobody saw: WALL-E.  Yup, you sure are right about that critical bias against box office heavies.

WHY SO SERIOUS? or, How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love THE DARK KNIGHT

Another quick one, though this time lacking the A.D.D. that I'm now convinced I have - actually going to see a doctor for it, too!  Hope they accept my humble admission of mental dysfunction and don't just write me off as a smooth talkin' drug-seeker.  Anyway...

Last night I briefly hit upon a topic that's been bugging me ever since THE DARK KNIGHT came out to absurdly-high critical praise and popular adoration - actually, rewind it back; it's been bugging me since before the movie even came out, when people were handicapping the odds of Heath, based solely on his terrific, scene stealing performance in the movie's trailer, winning a posthumous Oscar: completely irrational love for what is ultimately only a Batman movie.*

Okay, lemme put my thing down.  THE DARK KNIGHT is a good movie.  It's terribly entertaining and endlessly exciting, to the point of being draining.  The movie has some memorable action and is a more realistic and timely treatment of superhero characters than audiences have seen previously.  There are some great (and not so great) performances in the movie, including of course the genuinely brilliant turn by Heath Ledger that would be regarded as an instant screen classic if he were still alive today... and that's all.  Yet apparently here I diverge with much of the rest of America, both the public and the critics.  

The movie's now out on DVD, and if you're under 25 and came into my store to get it, you're probably one of the throngs who've excitedly told me that it's either A. the best movie of the year, B. the best movie you've ever seen, or C. the best movie of all time.**  So there's that.  Then the LA Film Critics Association named THE DARK KNIGHT it's runner-up for best picture of the year, second to WALL-E, a slightly less dubious choice.  While these are only representative of one age bracket and one critics group, they're in line with the overall response to the film: it's rated 98% fresh on RottenTomatoes.com, which means critics all but universally thought it was good, and it made seven and a half gagillion*** dollars at the box office, which means the public ate that shit up.  

Why, you might ask, does a good movie's extraordinary success and popularity bother me so?  Certainly it's not because I'm a cantankerous fucker who likes to hate on what's in.  Most certainly not!  Yeah, so I'm in the minority thinking that THE DARK KNIGHT'S not as hot as e'rebody else does.  Get over it, right?

It wouldn't bug me as much (though certainly it would still bug me) if I didn't think that people are gonna wake up in five years and go, "eww, what was I thinking?"  Critics especially, but real people, too.  And that's just with the hype-praise level at it's current; I can only imagine the kind of cultural morning after we'll have if the movie wins a fucking Oscar.   

Assuming that you follow and agree with me thus far... that's a pretty huge assumption to make at this point, isn't it?  Okay fine, here are my top reasons (briefly posited) for why the movie isn't nearly as good as most folks think it is:

• It's bloated.  You can easily cut two subplots and about 20 minutes of the movie without losing anything but length.  
• Like its predecessor, the movie features dialogue consisting mostly of characters explaining the themes and their symbolic roles.
• The central love story fails miserably due to lack of screen-and-script chemistry, while the rival love story flourishes due the presence of both.  
• Chris Nolan still can't shoot a fight, which is kind of important in a movie about a dude who beats the piss out of people in most of his scenes.
•  The script aims for a five-act structure, instead feels like a typical three-act with a fat ass that should've been a sequel.
• The big action finale (which is kind of a requirement in these kinds of movies) is a complete fizzle.****
• Any kind of scrutiny over the plot reveals gaping holes in both logic and motivation.
• Christian Bale sucks the life out of almost every scene he's in.

And still, despite all of these flaws, the combination of which should be fatal, the movie still works.  More so, I like it an awful lot, certainly more than I think it deserves, and it's among my favorite movies of the year.  Yet other people love it, a lot, and that shit rubs me raw.   So once again, assuming that you follow and agree with me thus far, why are people nutting over such a flawed film?  

Oh right.  'Cause of the dead guy.

As I wrote last night, there's a "bizarrely morbid loyalty" to Heath Ledger that not only prevents people from seeing, or wanting to see, the movie's flaws, but further enables and inspires them to say such absurd things as "it's the best movie ever made."  I say that the loyalty is bizarre because I honestly don't know where it came from.  What the hell movies of Heath Ledger's has a 15-year old making such bold proclamations seen?  I like A Knight's Tale and hear that 10 Things I Hate About You is pretty good, but I don't think those two performances are enough to endear Ledger to the young public so, and I feel like it's safe to assume that they haven't seen him deny Jake Gyllenhaal a reach-around, or that they'd have liked the movie if they had.  

But let's not limit this to the young.  I've had several adults tell me that Ledger gives his best performance as the Joker, but when asked admit to not having seen BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, NED KELLY, TWO HANDS, CANDY or I'M NOT THERE.  Shit, aside from the first and last, I haven't seen any of the movies on that list, but I'm not about to go and proclaim one of the guys performances his "best" without seeing his whole body of work.   

Why was there a period of national mourning after Ledger died?  Were people really upset to have to say goodbye to that good-looking dude from THE ORDER?  Were they upset that they'd no longer see his smiling face in (new) photos on the cover of US WEEKLY under some scandalous and humiliating headline?  I'm not saying that there weren't people who were genuinely upset that the guy died - he had a family after all  (though they were mostly forgotten while America grieved its fallen star) and genuine fans and admirers, among them a ton of gay people who valued the symbolism of his performance and nomination for BROKEBACK.  But these weren't the teeming masses who cried over their collector's editions of Entertainment Weekly while gossiping about the possible Olsen twin connection.     

And then THE DARK KNIGHT came out, and through the magic of the movies (and an 8-month post-production period), Heath was somehow back on screens, delighting us once more with another maladjusted hunk with a quirky voice.  And that tore the proverbial band-aid off the wound of our tragic loss, and the mourning began again, this time fused with that performance and that movie and that moment.  It was significant.  Like 9/11 for another generation, only sadder.  The movie helped America grieve, accept and let go, only further cementing its status as a titan of populist cinema and the greatest film moment of 2008.

...until a few years later, when everybody realizes that Batman's 3D-sonar-vision was really fucking lame, and that he sounded like a chain-smoking retard with difficulty enunciating.   

*Yes, that was only one sentence.  Yes, it is grammatically and puntuationally correct.  Yes, it took multiple drafts.      

**I'm guessing that "D. all of the above" is kind of assumed when one says something as all-encompassing as C, but then again the people who said "B" tend to think it's synonymous with "A."  Logic and reasoning are not their strong suits.

***Y'know, for as much as I like hyperbolically inflating the gross like that, it's somehow more shocking to cite the real number: $500+ million.  Or, the scarier way: half a fucking bil.  

****I can abide a fizzle-ending in IRON MAN for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that that movie didn't make me wait seven fucking hours to get to the end.