Hmm... I remain unconvinced. All I got from your post was that you have a crush on Josh Brolin and you seem to think it's okay to eat things out of the toilet... Or were you just listing things that you think you have in common with my dog? Charles Barkley (or as my neighbors call him, "The Round Mound of Rehound"), sometimes eats stuff out of the toilet, but he doesn't actually like Josh Brolin that much... It was just coincidence that he was licking the screen that one time when you walked in on me watching that American Gangster DVD featurette.
Why do you keep insisting in your posts that you didn't like this movie when you keep sending me these texts waxing on about how great it was? I want to focus on this part of last-night's segment of your serialized dissertation, when you were discussing the impeccability of the time-travel aspects of the film, "...where most ofther [sic] time travel movies are so completely reckless in their depcition [sic] of the lasting effects of actions carried out in THe past... as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. men in black 3 makes sure it gets everything right, down to the letter".
I thought that phrase about killing time and injuring eternity was so strange for you to use, and then I realized I'd heard it before, in Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Do you really think it was necessary to invoke Thoreau to make a point about this silly little movie? And the time-travel plot is so dry in it anyway. I don't know what you liked so much about it. I will admit that Michael Stuhlbarg's character, Griffin, is one of the more interesting ones in the film, but his schtick got old pretty quickly, especially once I realized that it wasn't really going anywhere. For those who haven't seen the film, or who fell asleep, Griffin holds the arcnet that J and K are looking for, and is a being who is aware of every timeline in existence, though he is perpetually unsure which timeline is actually playing out "presently." It's an interesting idea, I'll admit, to see someone aware of every detail of every potential outcome to a situation, but for me it also trivialized everything I was watching and might have even unwrapped itself in the end.
Griffin floats through every scene with an almost apathetic nonchalance, pointing out what might happen, depending on which timeline they're in at the "moment." But the rest of the characters, as well as Barry Sonnenfeld in his direction, make everything that's happening seem so imperative, like it matters, even after we're told that a timeline does exist in which K dies, another in which the world blows up, etc. This begs the question, why does it matter what I'm watching? In the universe of the film nothing essentially matters... If J saves K and they get the arcnet up, I guess that's cool, but it still leaves open the idea that in a parallel universe, K died, and the Bocclorettians (or whatever they're called) invade Earth and take over, so the suspense of the film is basically which timeline Sonnenfeld is going to show me. It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, only I don't actually get to choose the adventure. Instead I watch the least interesting version of the potential story contained within the pages. I can't believe you loved the time-travel so much. It just seemed like it created a silly rule that didn't really hold up under any scrutiny, and everyone just went with it. To also quote your friend, Henry, and his book, Walden, that you like so much, "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." What do you have to say for yourself? And please don't pretend like you didn't say any of this.
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