You guys, what even was this movie. First of all, am I the only person on earth who finds Channing Tatum to almost not even be a human person? He is like a big blob of flesh that makes vaguely tone-based sounds. He is less expressive than a fetus or someone in a coma, or my dog when he is sleeping. I do not understand why he is cast to deliver lines in plot-based films, but I guess that’s why I don’t make the big bucks.

“G.I. Joe” is perhaps the most incoherent, lumbering piece of shit ever created by Hollywood. I mean, obviously you know it’s not going to be good. But how could you be expected to think it could possibly be THAT not good?

this movie grossed 300 million dollars worldwide. I believe not even Mitt Romney makes that much in a year.

“G.I. Joe” is about how Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans (who spends a vast portion of the film falling down and saying things like “HUH?” and then falling down again with his eyes real wide, then later flies a hitherto-never-before-seen prototype of hybrid fighter jet INTO OUTER SPACE where he uses Celtic voice controls to intercept and destroy warheads directed at Moscow and the like. Then he ejects and floats down to land on the lawn of the White House) are marines or something, and they get saved from a disastrous mission by the “Joes,” apparently some sort of elite international fighting squad that spends the majority of their time playing with insane toys in this weird bunker underneath a pyramid in Egypt that is immediately destroyed in a fire fight with COBRA operatives. The Joes take CT and MW back to this top-secret lair immediately after meeting them, for some reason, and when CT asks general Dennis Quaid “what are the Joes,” Dennis Quaid literally says “Well you trusted me so now I’ll trust you” and then tells him the entire history and all the secrets of the Joes.

Joseph Gordon Levitt (!!) plays COBRA COMMANDER, if you can imagine. He got his face burned off in Iraq or something and blames Channing Tatum, who was engaged to his sister, who he (spoiler alert) later kidnaps and injects with nanobots (?) that turn her evil. Everyone in this movie is a complete sociopath. Also how tired are you of the movie trope where the new boy walks into a room, identifies which of the existing people in the room is female-gendered, then immediately goes up and asks to have sex with her, and the girl is like “you goof!” then later they fall in love??????

The President of the United States of America is played by Jonathan Pryce. This means the President of the U.S.A. is VERY BRITISH. This is never commented on.

The action sequences are just unwatchable blurs. At one point the Eiffel Tower falls down. In the (vain) effort to save the Eiffel Tower, the Joes kill approximately 500 innocent bystanders and destroy most of a Parisian office building. This is also never commented on.

A female character’s turn from good to evil is literally represented by her hair going from blonde to black. The other female character who is a science nerd who says she doesn’t believe in emotions is redeemed when Marlon Wayans helps her become more in touch with said emotions. This is done very literally, when, in the final scene, he asks her “how does that make you feel?” and she says “…emotional!” with a coy smile. AT LAST SHE IS A WOMAN

There are so many flashback sequences it is unreal. Baby Snake Eyes and Baby Storm Shadow fight each other in a Buddhist monastery for probably 45% of the film, luckily this was my favorite part.

after finishing the movie we looked up its production history and died laughing. This history begins in 1998 and at every step of the way is 100% obviously influenced by people on coke.

I forgot to tell you that the movie opens in 1641, with the torture of a Scottish rebel accused of plotting to overthrow Louis XIII. I’m such a commie pig it took me 15 minutes to realize the Scottish rebel was the BAD GUY, not a hero. He yells about how his rebellion won’t end with his death, but will continue with his sons, and their sons, and THEIR sons!!! Then the French put a burning hot iron mask on his head so all will know his shame. Flash forward to the present day and there is a bad Scottish man who makes nanobot warheads and is clearly the descendant of that 1641 guy. Already this is totally amazing but then later when somebody asks him what his first target will be he says it’s in France, and that he will teach them a lesson for what they did to his ancestor. I LAUGHED SO HARD. How completely fucking AWESOME would it be if some terrorist blew up the Eiffel Tower because FOUR HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER a French person had killed his ancestor? That is BADASS. Also if only someone would blow up the Eiffel Tower, shit is ugly as hell. I’d blow it up just to pay the French back for me having to read Of Grammatology in grad school.

Then later the Scottish guy is like “hey G.I. Joe eat lead!” but instead somebody throws burning hot something-or-other on him and his face is all fucked up, then Joseph Gordon Levitt injects nanobots into his brain that turn his whole head into this sort of liquidy silver material. And then, honest to god, the Scottish guy goes, “OOF. I HAVE FINALLY TAKEN MY PLACE IN THE LINE OF MCCLELLAN.”

In conclusion this movie was awesome. I can’t wait to see what kind of angry comments I get on this entry. I am expecting it to be beyond-Cheaper-by-the-Dozen territory (“OMG u sux & r dumb, the ppl who made that movie worked rilly hard on it!!!!!!!!”) and even possibly beyond my joke-entry about In-N-Out burger, the comments of which are filled by hysterically angry people debating whether or not I am gay, and encouraging me to die horribly.

After Variety had reported that G.I. Joe became a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity,[54] there were reports of outrages over Paramount’s alleged attempt to change the origin of G.I. Joe Team.[55] Hasbro responded in its G.I. Joe site claiming it was not changing what the G.I. Joe brand is about, and the name “G.I. Joe” will always be synonymous with bravery and heroism. Instead, it would be a modern telling of the “G.I. Joe vs. Cobra” storyline, based out of the “Pit” as they were throughout the 1980s comic book series.

?!

I’ve seen so many movies, but I keep forgetting to blog about them. So, MINI REVIEWS! GO!

MONEYBALL

I liked it a lot! Everyone said it was boring but I found it riveting, and I even cried, TWICE. I hate all sports and think people who cry about them are stupid, so I consider this a major feat of filmmaking, to make me care about Honenberger’s or whatever home run that time he was so scared about the A’s winning 20 games in a row or something. Very sad the A’s did not go on to win the World Series. Turns out professional sports players are really brutalized and emotionally traumatized by the fucked up system they work within, just like the rest of us except with more money involved, and more tens of thousands of people booing right in your face! Andy from Parks and Rec was REALLY GOOD! Whole film intercut with flashbacks to a young Brad Pitt’s slow and inexorable crushing at the hands of major league baseball. This tactic was extremely effective and made me sad, everyone constantly reminding him that he could’ve gone to Stanford on a full scholarship, too bad he totally blew his life and is a failure now. So sad! Later realized Brad Pitt’s character still was making literally millions of dollars every year.

Conclusion: I have always loved Brad Pitt and thought he was kind of a tremendous actor, and I am gratified every time he continues proving me right. Jonah Hill was also good.

Next up!

TOM CRUISE IS A MANIAC:

MI4, THE REVENGE, THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL

We went to the St. John’s cinema and got pizza and beer and sat in a completely packed house and watched this movie and once again I was surprised by how riveting it was. It was just so relentless and harrowing. There’s so much action, and so much Apple product placement, and Simon Pegg makes so many hilarious jokes, and there’s the requisite “we have to put on fancy dress and seduce a wealthy man at a fancy socialite party” scene, and there’s the requisite insane technology like this car that has google maps EMBEDDED IN THE WINDSHIELD, and you see Paula Patton’s boobs in a corset, and Sawyer from Lost dies in the first 2 minutes of the film but luckily he was wearing a computer for a contact lens so they know stuff about it, and then Tom Cruise jumps on a train with Jeremy Renner and later it turns out Jeremy Renner thought he killed Tom Cruise’s wife but it turns out he didn’t and the film closes with a creepy scene of Tom Cruise spying on his still-alive wife as she gets fish and chips with her medical colleagues.

There’s one scene where people in the audience ACTUALLY SCREAMED, and one of the people screaming was me! “NO! DON’T DO IT TOM CRUISE IT’S TOO HIGH!!!!” He jumps off the top of the highest building in the world, some stupid thing in Dubai, and he flies out in an arc and you can see his body outlined against the impossible-far-below-rest-of-the-city, and it’s like, bananas. Later I found out via a lost bet with Claire that TOM CRUISE LITERALLY DID THAT STUNT. I can’t believe this was allowed! What if that’s how Tom Cruise died? That would be AMAZING.

Conclusion: Tom Cruise is a maniac who believes he can’t die.

Next up:

EVERYTHING MUST GO

Good! Sad! I like Will Ferrell. I like Will Ferrell in a more serious role. The pathos of comedians. Comedians having more sadness than normal people. Nice little film, nothing to write home about. Monologues about drunk fathers.

On a related note:

BIG FAN

I really liked Big Fan. Patton Oswalt was so good again with the pathos. He plays a really dumb man who loves a football team and whose whole life consists of working in a parking garage and spending 8 hours composing the perfect thing to say later that night when he calls in to a local sports talk radio show. He composes these long rants that are really plain and kind of lame and then delivers them with passion and then that’s all he needs in his life to be happy. Then one night he and his friend Kevin Corrigan come across the big star player for the team they like, and they very innocently and stupidly follow him around in their car, and watch him go do what is clearly a drug deal but they don’t get it, they’re so dumb and naive, they’re like “maybe that’s his house” even though it’s this terrifying shack in the middle of a terrible part of town, and this guy is a millionaire football player, etc. They follow him to a fancy nightclub they somehow get into and then they go to say hi to him, and it’s awkward but kind of nice, with the player and his friends sort of affectionately making fun of them, etc. Then Oswalt mentions the drug deal and the player beats the shit out of him and he ends up in the hospital. His family wants him to sue, but he won’t sue, because he loves his team. Crazy crazy crazy climactic scene. Highly Recommended!

Conclusion: On the special features you can watch Kevin Corrigan tell a LITERALLY AMAZING story about meeting Robert DeNiro when he was 16.

Related!

YOUNG ADULT

I hated Juno so much. I hated it so much more than you even believe you hated it. I hate it so much I dream about how much I hated it. Yet the preview for Diablo Cody’s new movie, Young Adult, had me at hello…and it didn’t let go! I loved it!

I went to see it with Steve and we agreed that it hit a little too close to home. Theron is basically our age and is a huge loser. It’s like who even is she. She has no life, no career, no friends, she’s still beautiful but it’s this pathetic clung-to beauty where she has like eight huge bags full of products and clip-on hair she has to wrangle before she can leave the house. She was the mean pretty girl in high school (this is decidedly not the part that hit close to home for us) and thinks she majorly triumphed over everyone by moving from small town Minnesota to large city Minnesota, but we see her life and it is FUCKING EMO. Passed out fully clothed face down on the bed with reality TV blaring in the background. Hungover constantly, chugging diet coke. She’s got this crappy little yapping dog. It turns out she’s the ghost writer for a formerly-popular series of young adult novels about a mean pretty girl in high school. Her name’s not even on the books! And now the series is being canceled, and who even is this Theron character? she’s just nobody. So she goes back to her hometown with the intention of stealing her high school boyfriend from his amazing wife and new baby. It’s so painful to watch, such an obvious train wreck. The mean pretty girl insinuating herself back into the lives of people who bid her good riddance in the 90’s. The opening credits are set to her listening to a Teenage Fanclub song on a mixtape in her car. MY GOD IT’S LIKE THEY’VE KNOWN ME ALL MY LIFE. I mean, the plot of the film did not hit close to home, exactly, it’s more just the exploration of this aging person who doesn’t know what to do with her life.

Anyway back in the hometown she meets Patton Oswalt, who was the fat kid in her class who got beat up by jocks who thought he was gay, and now he has brain damage and is permanently crippled. Theron is stoked to remember him: “You’re the hate crime guy! Wow, I totally remember that!” They develop an unlikely but somehow really believable friendship based on him telling her how disgusting she is and her basically hanging out with him because he’s the only person lonely enough to put up with her, also she is hot. The whole time I was dreading what I felt was the only possible ending to the film, which would be the “we all learned a little something” redemption narrative where, like, Patton Oswalt shares his wisdom and she realizes he’s the man she loves and she goes on to be a better person and etc. Let me just say that that is wonderfully, amazingly, not at all what happens. I can not remember a film whose ending I have been more delighted by.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! I love Charlize Theron, what an amazing weird dude. She grew up in South Africa, she’s descended from famous Boer historical figures, she’s seven or eight feet tall I think, and when she was a kid she watched her mother kill her father in self defense.

Conclusion: I now desperately want to know what the mean pretty girls from my own high school are up to. The hell of it is, I bet they are all still just mean, pretty, and rich, as they always were. I bet they are happy. THOSE BITCHES

Unrelated:

JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING

Holy shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wow.

I rented this film on impulse, having heard nothing about it, because the movie place attached to my gym was repping it really hard. Much like when I watched “In Bruges” because Netflix accidentally sent it to me, the extremely half-assed nature of my film choosing made it even more triumphant when “Hanna” turned out to be SO AWESOME.

The film opens on a tiny young girl in some sort of Arctic wilderness, swathed in furs and calmly aiming a big ol’ arrow at a big ol’ caribou guy. The girl (played by creepy/amazing/beautiful Irish actress Saoirse Ronan) brings down the caribou and is busily pulling out his guts when suddenly a bearded Eric Bana looms up behind her and goes “YOU’RE DEAD.” Then they have a crazy fist fight where she’s knocking him over and strangling him and stuff! But ultimately he overpowers her, then stands over her and tells her to get the meat back home, stat.

First of all, what? Second of all, I don’t think a 13 year old girl could literally overpower Eric Bana, right? Thirdly, who are these people.

Luckily these questions are swiftly answered with vague references to the girl pulling 300 pounds of meat home on a sled, thus proving that she is “getting stronger” and is “almost ready.” She’s some kind of robot person or genetically-engineered superstar? And Eric Bana is her father! And they live in a weird hut in the snow and she’s über-well-trained in what appears to be everything from math to geography to world languages to Judo to shooting guns with terrifying accuracy. And Bana just tries to kill her all day, and she has to fight him off, and then at night he reads to her from encyclopedias and tells her to translate stuff into eighteen different languages. It turns out that Bana is a badass CIA agent who went rogue 13 years ago and took his infant daughter into hiding with him. The details are dim but don’t worry all will be eventually made clear. He has taught his daughter that their arch nemesis–the woman who killed the girl’s mother, which was the event that sent Bana rogue–is this woman played by Cate Blanchett, who is another badass terrifying CIA agent. Apparently she has some sort of psychotic perverted maternal instinct driving her to hunt Bana and the kid down like dogs. We meet father and daughter right on the cusp of the daughter becoming a woman, which in this film is signified not by her getting her period and caring about boys but rather by her deciding she is ready to kill her mother’s killer. Bana pulls out a weird blinking button and says when she pushes it, Cate Blanchett will know where she is, and “Will not stop until one of you is dead.” Hanna’s like “lets do this,” and pushes the button, and then the movie gets SO CRAZY!!!

Bana suddenly shaves and is wearing a suit and is like “goodbye,” and just goes, like, walking off into the arctic wilderness, after making Hanna memorize the address in Germany where they’ll meet once she’s done killing Cate Blanchett. Hanna’s so stoked to see the world! She waits in the house until insane numbers of Navy SEALS show up to nab her. She kills most of them but is finally captured. Hooray! Her ticket back to civilization!

She wakes up in some sort of terrifying CIA blackout prison and immediately tricks everybody and gets a gun and kills a bunch more people and then just calmly escapes, all the while a disturbingly STOKED Cate Blanchett watches it on TV and is like “HELL YEAH, THAT’S MY GIRL!” What is going on?

Chase scene with tiny barefoot 13 year old waif evading huge groups of stampeding marines, all of whom are confusingly terrified of her. What do they know that we don’t? Yes, she is apparently an unearthly badass but still.

She pops up in the middle of Morocco or something (fucking black ops shit! FUCK YOU) and hitches a secret ride by hanging onto the underside of a Hummer, which carries her across a vast desert. Then she starts walking, and suddenly gets to a road where she meets what Gary describes as “a real little girl.” The movie gets even more awesome! Contrasting Hanna with a regular girl her own age is delightful and a crucial bit of levity in this otherwise unstoppably badass murder rampage film. This little girl uses slang that confuses Hanna, and is disappointed when Hanna turns out not to be from Sri Lanka, like MIA. The girl’s parents are hippies and they give Hanna a ride. Hanna is seeing the world! Unfortunately a crew of deeply psychotic CIA henchmen are following her! So many crazy fight scenes are about to happen!

Meanwhile Eric Bana has somehow swum from the Arctic to Germany, where he crawls out of the water and promptly kills a bunch of policemen. I love these movies about these unearthly badasses. Beautifully-choreographed scenes of impossibly virtuosic fights, where the badass’s face doesn’t even change expression as he’s, like, doing instantaneous trigonometry in his mind to calculate what angle he has to break a dude’s arm at in order to use it to block a bullet from 20 feet away. Yes!

Oh man. I could go on and on. And this is only like the first 30 minutes of the film!!! And I didn’t even tell you the part where Hanna, after walking across the desert, shows up at some old man’s hotel, and he’s talking to her in English but finally she asks where she is, and he tells her, and then she starts speaking Arabic, and he’s like “you speak Arabic?” and she’s like “of course,” and then he turns on the TV and she goes “WHAT IS THAT?!” and he’s like “just some stupid show,” but we know she meant THE TELEVISION ITSELF, which she’s never even heard of! And he turns on a light and she’s like “is this…electricity?” and he’s like “yeah!” and she goes, “it was discovered by Benjamin Franklin” and he’s like “oh I don’t know. Some American probably.” It’s so good. It’s like Hanna understands the physics and the entire history of electricity but has never seen it before. Unfortunately that old man gets killed though (not by Hanna).

It’s so good. What a weird and well-made film. It looks great, sounds great, the acting is great, the story is great.

It’s about a young girl being a crazy badass. It’s got Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett, who are awesome. It turns the stale-ass old narrative of “Boy must kill father’s killer” into “Girl must kill mother’s killer, who is also an extraordinary badass woman.” It’s sad, it’s funny, it’s awesome, it’s beautifully shot, it has EXCELLENT SOUND DESIGN, unusually good sound design, and the score is by the Chemical Brothers.

GO SEE IT!!!!

Lindy West fanpage mode, again, I know, but I really could not resist, not at all, where she reviews Twilight based on like, an US weekly special edition tribute to the movie:

“Page 50: This is a very important page where we learn things about Taylor Lautner, a muscular child who middle-aged women enjoy masturbating to. Firstly, we learn that Taylor Lautner’s first starring role was as something called a “Sharkboy,” which is a shark with the face of a boy that middle-aged sharks enjoy masturbating to. I would like to press charges against the entire earth (also, I will be contacting King Triton in the name of sea-justice [SPEAKING OF KING TRITON, WHY ARE YOU SO ELDERLY BUT YOU HAVE THE PECS OF A SHARKBOY!?!?]). The second thing we learn about Taylor Lautner, Sharkboy of the Land™, is that his plan for Hollywood success is the “Tom Cruise model.” I look forward to his upcoming animatronic nuptials to Mimi Rogers.”

As the year draws slowly to a close and I find myself waking up earlier and earlier in some sort of sick perverted cycle I am helpless to stop, my mind turns to the films of yore that have made impressions upon my psyche as indelible as they are probably useless in terms of actual life survival.

Let us have a random list I wrote while waiting for it to be time to leave for work!

The First Movie That Actually Really Scared Me

My dad was a film critic, and as such I grew up with absolutely no censorship in terms of what movies I was allowed to watch. It was the 80’s, too, so people generally censored their kids less in all areas, thus I also read the entire canon of Stephen King books by the time I was 11 years old (famously writing a book review of “It” in 5th grade, which my dad published in his newspaper, in which I referred to the book as “garbage”). These, however, did not give me nightmares, for some reason, not even The Shining, and not even the film version of The Shining, which I saw at such an early age that I literally can’t even remember the first time I saw it, it’s like trying to remember the first PB&J you ever ate.

The first movie that actually really scared me is Charles Laughton’s tremendous magnum opus (can it be your magnum opus if it’s the only film you ever actually made? I think so. I think we could call Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell’s magnum opus, even though she never wrote another book. Also didn’t Harper Lee only write one book? Damn, those are some badass writing careers) NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, which I’ve written so much about and talked so much about that my collected utterances upon this film could fill every volume on the earth ever in history. It is truly the greatest movie that will ever be seen by mankind. Possibly that’s hyperbole but honestly I’M NOT SURE

Coming in a close second in this category is, oddly enough, Das Boot, which I watched at the same age and which haunted me with dreams of being buried alive. Still one of my favorite movies. “All you need is good people.”

This movie is also the first time I remember thinking about point-of-view in film, as it took me like seven weeks to comprehend that the film was about Germans, who had been “our enemies” in some massive war before I was born. How could the protagonists of the film, who I was rooting so hard for, be my enemies? I have hazy memories of many probably-hilarious conversations with my dad about this issue. “But why were they speaking German” etc.

The First Movie That Made Me Sob With Tears

The first movie I remember crying in was ET: THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL (this is the first time I’ve ever realized how funny that title is). Obviously this is easily the most generic answer a person of roughly my age could possibly give, but I am nothing if not a truth-teller (not true). I saw this in the theater and caused such a ruckus that my mother had to take me home before the movie ended. I have a really powerful memory of clinging to her like a monkey, facing backward in the theater, SCREAMING, which was not my usual M.O., and there were these two guys sitting behind us who looked really appalled. I am surprised by this memory, because obviously this was 1982 and I was barely 5 years old. Cinema trauma! We are the first generation to experience it! Unless you count turn-of-the-century people who were trapped in theaters after the old-timey nitrate film stock exploded and caught the building on fire.

I think this same year we saw a movie in a theater and it was called “Smokey the Cow-Horse,” which doesn’t seem possible, and there is a scene in the movie of a man beating a screaming horse with a chain, which, what the fuck was this movie and why did my parents take me to see it? And I cried so hard I collapsed on the stairs at our house, which were carpeted in this insane thick lime-green shag, and I lay there sobbing while my mom tried to explain why a man would beat a horse with a chain (“he was an unhappy person”). Obviously this is why I am now vegetarian.

Oddly enough I remember being pretty unimpressed by the famously-traumatic mother-murder scene in Bambi. Post age five the next movie I remember sobbing during was Gallipoli. This was probably only like 2 or 3 years after seeing ET. What a weird juxtaposition. “BUT WHY DID THEY SHOOT HIM? WHYYYYYYYYYY” “Because that’s what war is honey” “BUT WHY”

Still a good question!

The First Movie That Gave Me A Boner

Easy. ROADHOUSE!

It’s hard to say why, frankly, kind of.

I wasn’t even one of those insane Dirty Dancing fans. But something about Roadhouse really intrigued me. This is probably why today I am attracted only to incredibly muscular sweaty men with lustrous mullets. And why I love road houses so much.

The First Movie That Prompted An Awkwardly Philosophical Conversation About Sex With One Of My Parents

I had one of those moms who loved talking about sexual issues, to the point of embarrassing us when she would tell people that our horse had cancer “on his penis.” This, while true, was humiliating to middle school-aged kids and we begged her to stop saying it. “But it’s true!” she would protest, which was true. She also went through this weird period of talking about the gestational cycle of a cat, I guess prompted by our cat being pregnant. But it was like, okay, mom, we get it. The cat’s pregnant.

But the first time I remember an awkward convo with my dad was:

Cool Hand Luke, The Car Washing Scene!

“Why is she getting her dress all wet like that on purpose”
“Well, she’s tormenting the guys on the chain gang.”
“What do you mean”
“Well, she knows they haven’t seen a woman in a long time, and she knows they can’t do anything to her, so it excites her to show off for them like that.”
“What do you mean, ‘excites.'”
“……”
“She’s dumb.”

The First Comedy I Ever Felt Proprietary About, Like I Was The First Person To Really ‘Get’ Why It Was So Funny, And It Was Thus My Job To Tell Everyone I Met All About It In Great Detail

DOY!!!!!

The First Movie That Allowed Me To See That My Parents Could Actually Just Be Normal People With Their Own Complexes And Fears, Instead Of Weird Perfect Robots Who Knew Everything

Just an all-American family viewing of “Jaws” when I was 8 and my brother was 6. My mother famously kicked over the popcorn bowl in terror, and I knew then that I would die one day