Skip to main content
Tag

patton oswalt

Review: The Descendants, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Young Adult

By Cinema and Reviews

The Descendants posterI really enjoyed Alexander Payne’s The Descendants – at least while I was watch­ing it. Some films will do that to you, though. They push all sorts of groovy but­tons while you are in the room but they dimin­ish as you re-examine them. Connections that you thought were there turn out to be illus­ory, a series of sat­is­fy­ing emo­tion­al moments don’t cohere into some­thing com­plete and you real­ise that you were enjoy­ing it so much you wished it into some­thing profound.

I blame Clooney. He’s such a watch­able pres­ence, always com­bin­ing that Cary Grant movie star-ness with an under­ly­ing emo­tion­al frailty. His char­ac­ters carry that square-jawed aspir­a­tion­al male solid­ity but rarely do they actu­ally know what is going on or what to do. He spe­cial­ises in people who are mak­ing it up as they go along and that has tre­mend­ous appeal – if George Clooney doesn’t know what he’s doing then none of us do.

Read More

Patton Oswalt on alcohol and flying

By Asides and Food & Drink

And while we are on the sub­ject of drink­ing, here’s Patton Oswalt:

Southwest Airlines.
No more. I’m done. That’s it.
“Ladies and gen­tle­men, there’s a pas­sanger with a young child who would like to be able to sit with her. As we are a very crowded flight, if there are two pas­sen­gers who’d be will­ing to move so they could sit together –”
“Ma’am? We’ll move.”
“That was so nice of you guys. I can offer you free alco­hol­ic bever­ages for the dur­a­tion of the flight.”
The two guys who moved (FOR THE ENTIRE THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTE FLIGHT): “Aw yeah! Fuck yeah, ma-hun! Free booze! Par-tay! (etc. etc.)
Everyone else (FOR THE ENTIRE THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTE FLIGHT): “What the FUCK?! Why’nint that cunt SAY we’d get free fuck­ing drinks?! No fair! Bullshit!”
If you’re HAPPY about get­ting free beer and cheap blen­ded whis­key for thirty-eight minutes, or SAD about NOT get­ting free beer and cheap blen­ded whis­key for thirty-eight minutes, you need to die. In a plane crash. And I get to fuck your eyes while we’re crashing.

Once upon a time I might have been one of those people and now, I think, I see them all the time.