HopkinsCinemAddicts

Get Your S*** Together, Girls

    A lot of people have been talking about her, the girl with the fat arm tattoo.  But Lena Dunham is more than just a person who should always wear sleeves; she is a very endearing woman with a pretty awful vision of the lives of young women in New York.  Her new HBO series Girls is neither terrible nor excellent, and really neither good nor bad.  Three episodes have aired so far, and while plot points have emerged, nothing has really happened.  Even with the issues of financial instability, job hunts, abortion, dead-end relationships and the occasional horrifying sexual partner pervading each episode, I as a viewer have not really been fazed by any of it because the eponymous girls haven't been fazed either.

    All these "not really" qualifiers point to the show's great weakness: all four girls seem to be stagnating in a muddy puddle of drab furniture, unflattering clothes and profoundly unsatisfying professional, romantic and sexual lives.  These girls are languishing in apartments they deem too impermanent and transitional to decorate; they are entertaining the whims and inappropriate behavior of their first bosses to much too great an extent; they are pseudo-pursuing or passively staying in relationships that do worse than just fail to satisfy them--they further diminish what little joie de vivre these particular girls can occasionally muster.  Yet they seem to believe they are self-possessed, independent, worthwhile young women who have inexplicably been thrown into situations they can only sigh and shrug their way through.  They do not pursue opportunities, they let themselves be led. They never demand anything, never even show an interest in making their desires known.  They graduated from college, hopped in their car and followed the traffic towards the road to adulthood; but then their tire blew out.  No one can figure out how to use the jack, none of their contemporaries is stopping to help and none of the girls had the foresight, the capital or even just the autonomy to become a member of AAA.

    These girls fail to entertain me because they themselves do not actually do anything (entertaining or otherwise)--things happen to them and they barely react, they merely acquiesce.  There is no private torture of the dependent, the confused, the hopeless; there is no public outrage of the oppressed, the overzealous, the aggressive; there is only the blank-faced displeasure of the unmotivated, the uninterested, the utterly passionless.

    It infuriates me to hear female critics call this show an affront to womankind, because I believe we should not allow these girls to represent womankind.  They certainly do not represent the kind of women who deserve immense respect and appreciation.  If you allow yourself to be sexually subjugated time and time again and continue to pursue your subjugator, that is entirely your fault.  Men, particularly awful men, do not have absolute power over how women are treated; women have to command respect and never stop.  The onus is on the woman to demand proper treatment, and every time the choice is hers to discard, punish or educate the wrongdoer who treats her poorly.  We are not natural victims, and we should put no faith in women who act as if they are.  We don't go back to some jerk's apartment day after day, playing into his perverse desires and indulging in the wrongheaded but popular notion that all men are terrible.  There are countless situations in which being a woman works against you, but this is not one of them.

    On another character's note, you don't stay with the effete and overly wholesome boyfriend you can no longer stand and with whom you have terrible sex just because you have been together for four years.  To revisit the driving metaphor: you actually have to try to free your wheel from a rut, you can't just sit in your car with your head in your hands and wait out the rest of your life.  So, as I said, Girls, get your s*** together. There are plenty of women who have.

 

Many thanks to Lucy Bucknell for the above image and for the chance to write this blog.

Call Me Crazy

    Since I saw it last June, I have considered and reconsidered Carey Mulligan’s performance in the stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly (which, I admit, I still have not seen).  I think about this performance on a weekly basis, at least.  She portrayed a woman railing unsuccessfully against family disconnect and symptoms of schizophrenia and manic depression.  She did it so beautifully and completely that I wonder why most cinematic representations of crumbling sanity can leave so much insight and nuance to be desired—but some, of course, do not.  While I could attribute Mulligan’s superiority to her ingenuity, or to the particular intimacy and immediacy afforded by the stage, having her tear-stained face eight feet in front of mine boosted the efficacy of her portrayal only so much.  The real force of her performance lay in the dichotomy of terror and secrecy: alone onstage, Mulligan’s Karin revealed sheer horror at the prospect of succumbing to insanity; surrounded by her husband, brother and father, she desperately tried to foster a sense of lighthearted family fun while trying to hide the mounting mental illness that all three men already suspect she has.  She was dealing with one of the most terrifying fates I can imagine, and she was dealing with it in secret while trying to maintain her family.  Along with the prowess of the performance, this particular pickle calls to mind two of my favorite psychologically tortured heroes in film: the somber, suffering Curtis in Take Shelter and the eponymous misfit martyr in Donnie Darko.

    In the best movie of last year, Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, Michael Shannon just nails it.  (It is such an unbelievable, potent, poignant film and was so inexcusably overlooked by critics and moviegoers alike that I have trouble approaching it objectively, or at least analytically, while maintaining my self-appointed post as the film’s liaison to the world.)  Shannon’s Curtis, a quiet blue-collar man, suffers from vivid nightmares of natural disasters and manmade violence that signal the end of the world.  He becomes obsessed with fear, both of the potential apocalypse and of his genetic predisposition for schizophrenia; but which fear is greater?  Would he rather his visions of the violent end of the world were true, or his self-diagnosis of mental illness was? Unwilling to rule out either theory, Curtis keeps his visions to himself for a time and even sacrifices his job and his family's savings to build a storm shelter in the backyard.  After an especially extreme night terror, he is forced to explain his psyche to his wife (Jessica Chastain), who proves to be a more devoted and supportive companion than he or I expected. Once she knows his secret, however, the film takes a turn: Curtis is no longer alone in his fears, no longer hiding his visions and all their implications, no longer protecting his family from himself; and while his fears have not abated much by the time he agrees to seek treatment at a mental hospital, he has a rational, determined partner with whom to share the awful burden of potential insanity.  In the end, there is no clear answer and certainly no happy one--do we pray for his sanity, and therefore the end of the world, or do we preserve Earth and sacrifice Curtis to an institution?

    Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko hinges on a similarly secret terror, but in a considerably different context: within a financially secure family, a presumably paranoid schizophrenic teenager alternately rejects and obeys Frank, the "imaginary" man in the rabbit suit who appears to him with projections for the end of the world. Donnie escapes death, floods his school, defaces its mascot statue, finds a girlfriend, burns down the house of the local inspirational speaker/closeted child pornographer, grasps the "philosophy of time travel," shoots his girlfriend's accidental killer and dies all in the span of the 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds Frank said it would take for the world to end (action-packed, no?).  He mentions Frank and the pending apocalypse to his psychiatrist (Katharine Ross) only when hypnotized, and he merely hints at his visions to his girlfriend (Jena Malone).  His family knows he is on medication, and from his psychiatrist his parents learn he is showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia; but he never tells them anything himself.  Even when his young sister catches him having an acrimonious conversation with the invisible Frank in the bathroom, he responds, "I'm just taking my pills, Sam."  He keeps his secret because he believes he is losing his mind at the same time as he believes he and everyone else has only four weeks to live.  For Donnie, what would be the point of sharing his troubles?  If he is insane, he wants no one to know the extent of it.  If the world must end, why worry everyone? He remains almost entirely isolated from the people he knows and the society they comprise, and this emotional solitude leads him to believe there is some credible truth to the apocalyptic visions that seem to spring from madness.  Though his greatest fear is dying alone, it is his choice to live alone that eventually does him in.

Many thanks to Creative Commons and Flickr member Roger Mommaerts for the above image.

And My Nominees for Best Sound Editing Are…

    Jorma Taccone's MacGruber:  This movie is grossly underappreciated in so many categories of filmmaking, but maybe most of all for its soundtrack.  As MacGruber (a mulleted Will Forte) loads his beloved Benji-box portable car radio into his red Miata, he changes the station from Rock 98.1 to Soft 87.3.  A most halting transition ensues, switching from "Heavy Soul" by The Black Keys (film and television's premiere band for he's-just-too-damn-cool songs) to the desperate vocal straining of Toto's satisfyingly atrocious "Rosanna" and then to the exclamatory saxophone riff in Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street."  This trifecta runs the risk of making the audience laugh too loudly to hear anything for the next thirty seconds of the film.  Sound Editor: Sean Garnhart

    Greg Mottola's Superbad:  If you ever DJ'd a party with your iPod in high school, this film will put your fancy feet playlist to irreparable shame.  Never has a party seemed more appealing than when my personal favorite, "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC & The Sunshine Band, comes on and every kid on the living room (dance)floor begins to get real funky.  Only slightly less appealing is the one-man party that usurps it, thrown by Officer Slater (Bill Hader) after he and his partner evacuate the living room in response to a noise complaint.  "Don't trust the police/ No justice no peace/ They got me/ Face down in the middle of the street," The Coup raps as Slater pops and locks to the anti-cop anthem "Pork and Beef."  Sound Editor: George Anderson

    Sam Mendes's American Beauty:  Composer Thomas Newman is a genius.  The man can do no wrong in my book.  (His association with Jarhead gives it so much credibility that I often forget the trailer was actually better than the film.)  His soundtrack for American Beauty rivals the eerie softness of David Shire's for The Conversation and the pretty self-referentiality of Cliff Martinez's for Drive, but his surpasses both of these because it is ultimately so heartbreaking, just like the film it supports.  For other sonic standouts from Thomas Newman, see: Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo, Erin Brockovich, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (a risky move, setting more scenes of a prison to more Thomas Newman compositions only five years after Shawshank's release--but director Frank Darabont's formula certainly works).  Sound Editor: Scott Martin Gershin

    David LaChapelle's Rize:  West coast "indie rap" phenom Flii Stylz recorded some of the most rousing and threatening hip hop ever rapped for this gorgeous documentary.  With track titles like "Break It On Down (Battlezone)," "Beaztly" and "Ready to Brawl" accompanying the film's furious and beautiful non-choreographed dances, how could you not want this soundtrack?  Every time I listen to "Get Krumped"--which is often--I replay the entire dance "battle" between Tight Eyez, Lil C and Dragon in my head and wish that a) teaching myself to krump had worked, and b) I could marry Tight Eyez.  Sound Editor: Christopher S. Aud

    Community, "Epidemiology" (Season 2, Episode 6): This episode continues a groundbreaking trend pioneered by Shaun of the Dead: zombie fights accompanied by bad 70's pop that is all the more hilarious because it is diegetic, accidentally lending goofy dance beats to scenes of violent commotion. What I wouldn't give to act out my own heroic scene of pugilism with classmates who've contracted an aggressive strain of Rabies from the toxic Army surplus taco meat served at the college Halloween party, provided I get to listen to "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" while I fight.  That's the power of ABBA.  Sound Editor: Ryan Young

    Very Honorable Mention for The O.C., "The Perfect Couple" (Season 1, Episode 10):  If I had had a makeout soundtrack as sultry yet lighthearted as this in high school... forget it, I still wouldn't have found a boyfriend.  This, my favorite episode of one of my favorite shows, is bookended by scenes of pretty adorable romance, beginning with Aqualung's "Strange & Beautiful" and ending triumphantly with "Breathe" by Leaves.  My affair with this episode started at 9 PM on Wednesday, November 12th 2003 and has been going strong ever since.  Sound Editor: Jeremy J. Gordon

 

Many thanks to Creative Commons for the above image.

Kenny's Power

    Eastbound & Down ends in two weeks.  On April 8th at 10:30 pm, the final "chapter"--not episode, chapter--of HBO's antiheroic saga of Kenny Powers will somehow just stop.  I am at once delighted to see how KP will turn failure into triumph one last time, and utterly crushed to see him drop the mic and walk off the stage forever.

    My fondest memory of Kenny dates back to the show's first season.  While employed as a middle school P.E. teacher (from my childhood experience, I cannot imagine a less respectable job) after falling from Major League Baseball grace, Kenny pops a pill of Ecstasy before chaperoning a school dance.  Sporting all black down to his signature cowboy boots, he pushes his way into a dance circle comprised solely of preteens and prepares to woo his long-lost high school girlfriend, now the middle school art teacher.  "Work, drugs," he demands calmly.  Then he dances.  Then he throws up. But damn if those drugs didn't work just like he told them to--I haven't seen a portly man move like that since Bluto floated up the stairs to the Dean's office in Animal House.

    This season, KP managed to sum himself up in one perfect admission when he said to his categorically apathetic college-age girlfriend, "You think I f***in' wanna hang out with my f***in' son?  Hell no, I'd much rather be doin' cocaine and watchin' the Saw DVDs in your dorm room with ya."  He's a ladies' man and a man's man; he's a lover and a fighter; in the words of Kenny Powers, Kenny Powers is "a god damn champion."

    With ambition as unstoppable as the soundtrack that accompanies him, KP has suffered through, run away from and finally returned to face a slew of potentially career- and life-ending struggles since we met him in 2009.  And why have we been with him from the very beginning?  Because he is unbelievably entertaining. He says the most ridiculous things so often and just keeps talking until there are no more boundaries for him to cross; we have no choice but to accept how beautifully hilarious he is and forget the decorum we use to direct our own speech.  He amuses, yet inspires us with perfectly serious and accidentally revealing monologues.  He endears himself to us with the occasional poignant plea for the simple human necessities of companionship and a sense of belonging. He is at once a martyr for absurd humor and a touching failure of a train wreck whom we are shocked to care about.  He is a figure unlike any other on television: always foul, often wrong but sometimes right, Kenny Powers is the low-class American wannabe who gets by--just barely--because of his heart.

    I will be very sad to say goodbye to KP, to the raucous laughs and the Schadenfreude his misfortune and mess-ups afforded.  Perhaps I'll find a new hero to follow each week, but for now I pledge allegiance to Kenny Powers and leave you with his words rather than mine:

"In closing, I'd like to give big ups to God, Buddha, L. Ron, whoever.  Hell, maybe I just need to thank me.  If there's one thing I've learned through all my adventures and conquests, it's that some people are just wired for success.  I had no choice when it came to being great.  I just am great.  I'm not trying to sound cocky or full of myself, but Kenny Powers has a sneaking suspicion that no matter what comes his way he will always be great.  Because that's just the way s*** works sometimes.  This has been based on a true story.  The motherf***in' end."

 

Hooked from the Start

    "There's a hundred thousand streets in this city."

    The black screen fades into a shot of a marked-up map of downtown Los Angeles.  Standing before the window, a man in an enviable white racing jacket embroidered with a yellow scorpion speaks calmly into the phone.  A flashing pink light punctuates the darkness outside the window where his reflection is blurred by double pane glass.  As he ends the call, the television silently announces Toronto is beating the Lakers at halftime.  He picks up an enormous duffel bag and sets off into the night. A quiet beat emerges, barely distinguishable in the background.  I'm intrigued.

    The cinematography in the next scene is so beautifully suited to the plot, I can't help thinking Nicholas Winding Refn directed the film just so he could set up this one shot.  From the passenger seat foot well, a slightly canted low-angle shot shows the character dubbed "Driver" as the light from a streetlamp slowly illuminates, then conceals his beautiful face gazing intently out over the road.  By this point, I would be fine with the entire film taking place inside cars just to see what ingenious new shots the director and cinematographer came up with.  I'm engaged.

    After an appearance by Bryan Cranston, a near-botched armed robbery getaway and some expert use of headlights as light sources comes a car chase that is tenser yet more subdued than any I've seen.  Driver masterfully evades the police on three separate occasions, but each scene of evasion involves only one police vehicle at a time (a car, a helicopter, then another car).  Swapping impossible cast-of-thousands action sequences for improbable feats by a single skilled driver, the scene constructs a nuanced chase more focused on the movements of Driver's face than those of his car.  I'm enthralled.

    A radio sportscast of the Laker game, voiceovers from the police dispatch unit and that old dependable backbeat comprise the three-part soundtrack during the chase.  Each strain could correspond to a different aspect of Driver: cautious and informed, he attends to the police radio for each new development in the search for his car; talented and capable, he executes every turn to sportscasters' praise and cheers from the Laker game; ambitious and confident, he completes the job, supported all the while by the steady backbeat.  I'm obsessed.

    What do I know about Driver by the film's ten minute mark?  First off, his eyes are pretty uneven, so I'm predisposed to like him because my eyes are pretty uneven, too.  He is certainly stellar behind the wheel.   He has a great jacket.  He also has the status and the gall to enforce a strict schedule on a disorganized underworld.  He speaks with threatening conviction to criminal clients; armed robbers trust him with the success of their heist and the possibility of their incarceration; he saunters past the policeman who are following the car he's just abandoned.  But Driver's power and mystique are not what make this opening quite so striking.  It is something far simpler, requiring neither analysis nor cinematic frame of reference, that led me to watch the first ten minutes a full four times before letting the movie play through: it is just so damn cool.  And many great movies don't have even a hint of that precious, elusive cool factor.

    So watch Drive as soon as you possibly can.  Film buffs and Ryan Gosling enthusiasts alike, rejoice!

ADDENDUM: I would like to mention a few more things I noticed about the film, but I don't know what to make of yet:

            ~ The Lakers ultimately win the game against Toronto--we hear it on the radio.  The film is set in Los Angeles, but Ryan Gosling is Canadian.  Hmm.

            ~ Driver wears a driving jacket and driving gloves for his illegal job.   He wears a seatbelt only in his personal + legal professional lives.

            ~ The only drink Driver and Irene ever share is water.

            ~ I love Carey Mulligan.

 

Many thanks to Creative Commons and Flickr member Canburak for the above image.

Airing Some Grievances

    Martin Scorsese does not know how to end a movie. This has been my belief for quite a while now, and I'm usually very careful about whom I say it to.  But it's time I explained.

    There is an expectation of finality when the end of a movie approaches--not a specific type of finality, but certainly a sense that the movie has indeed come to an end.  When the audience's hopes are dashed by an artlessly ambiguous final scene that is suddenly cut off by a black screen and the end credits, one may hear a theater-wide sigh of disappointment like the one I heard (and contributed to) after Martha Marcy May Marlene.  When the screen suddenly goes black after an artfully ambiguous final scene like that of the series finale of The Sopranos, audiences at home may hope their TVs have all broken at once.  But one is never completely unsure of whether a movie has ended--never, that is, unless you're watching a Martin Scorsese original.

    His early hit Taxi Driver in 1976 features a shattering let-down of a final scene after a most dramatic climax and successful denouement: Cybill Shepherd, playing Travis Bickle's (Robert DeNiro) former obsession Betsy, exits the backseat of his cab where she just spent an entire ride looking blank but pretty in the rear view mirror as both of them contributed sparsely to a conversation that went nowhere.  After a close-up of his very suddenly very intense right eye, Travis drives away, ignoring her attempt to pay him; she disappears into a town house as he drives clear down the street. Then, without cause or warning, the film enters a brief fast-motion period where Travis readjusts and stares intently into his rear view mirror--at what we're not sure, for neither Betsy nor the town house can be visible by then.  The credits begin to roll over tracking shots from the cab of New York City streets at night. So... what happened?

    Even Robbie Robertson's amazing face can't save The Last Waltz, Scorsese's 1978 concert-based documentary about The Band, from an unsatisfying ending during which they play the only weird, circus-y song in their repertoire as the camera zooms farther and farther away from them.  This final shot makes the musicians we have gotten to see at their absolute best, the guys we have gotten to know so well throughout the course of the film seem distant and unremarkable, for they appear confined and insignificant playing an aimless song on a dimly lit stage in the middle of an empty hall. The rest of the movie shows amazing live concert footage from the packed theater alongside close-ups of each Band member recounting absurd stories from the road, and we get a powerful sense of each musician's character, his feelings about his band mates, even the way he holds himself depending on the tone of the song he's playing.  But the ending nearly ruins all the film's hard work (I say "nearly" because nothing could hope to ruin their live performance of "Don't Do It").

    Goodfellas (1990): great movie, great performances, great monologues all around.  Excise the misplaced series of photos of Ray Liotta's gangster Henry Hill looking awkward outside his Witness Protection-provided house at the very end and we're in business.

    In his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Scorsese repeats his early mistake of placing the burden of complex communication on close-ups of eyes: we still don't know what these eyes are trying to say, we only know that this time they belong to Juliette Lewis rather than Robert DeNiro.  

    In 2006, Scorsese reinvented his style of endings with The Departed--and perhaps he shouldn't have.  Instead of seeing a few confusing seconds right at the end of the film, we must instead watch a clunky anvil of finality crash through the otherwise perfect final scene. Jack Nicholson's scene-chewing performance sets the bar for subtlety extremely low in this movie, but Scorsese's ending manages to drop it even further.  A shot of the just-murdered "rat" Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) lying dead on his living room floor pans up to show his expensive apartment's view of the golden dome of a nearby government building, a constant reminder and symbol of the political ladder he so desperately aspired to climb.  And on the railing of his balcony, crawling conspicuously across the shot of the gleaming dome, is... an actual rat.  Yikes.

    To be fair, I haven't yet seen his latest, Hugo, so I can't say whether Scorsese has learned anything in the last few years.  To its credit, Hugo did not win the award for best picture at the Oscars; that award is tainted for me, as no amount of elbow grease could ever polish away all that self-righteous Crash residue.

Let's Be Honest

        The March issue of Vanity Fair is calling Barry Levinson's Diner "the most influential movie of the last 30 years."  Maybe it is; personally, I find that The Sixth Sense was by far the most influential because it informed the majority of my fears of the dark as well as a truly excellent lyric in The Lonely Island's "J*** in My Pants."  While VF and I agree that Diner is so terrifically influential because of its realism, we diverge completely when it comes to choosing the scenes that illustrate this trait.  They choose the scenes of conversation between the six best friends in the Fells Point Diner.  I choose something simpler, more specific and, as it happens, very appropriate to the context of this blog.

        There is a scene halfway through the movie that, though very brief, allows all the virtues of Diner's overt quotidianness and subtle honesty to crystallize into a glittering little geode of relatability.  Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), the literal-minded, happily aimless, slightly adenoidal groom-to-be and Billy (Tim Daly), the unhappily aimless, romantic yet resilient grad student who has come home to be Eddie's best man, walk into a movie theater whose marquee reads "ANOTHER BERGMAN CLASSIC."  For anyone who feels like I do about The Seventh Seal, we suspect this might not be such a thrilling cinematic experience for the pair.  It will be especially bad for Eddie, who balks at all things evasive or amorphous--and whose side the audience is secretly encouraged to be on, from the opening scene in the diner with the roast beef sandwich to his ingeniously spastic dance with the oddly-shaped stripper late in the movie.

        A close-up in the theater shows Eddie and Billy in the audience, their faces lit by the bleak whiteness of the monochromatic Bergman classic.  With his eyes fixed on the screen, Eddie frowns--more out confusion than displeasure--and asks, "What am I watchin'? Movie just started, I don't know what's goin' on."

        "It's symbolic," Billy replies.

        "Who's that guy?"

        "That's Death walking on the beach."  Billy seems apathetic, but his face looks almost appreciative next to Eddie's 

        "I been to Atlantic City a hundred times, I never saw death walk on a beach."

        Yes!  Thank you!  To understate it immensely: Ingmar Bergman is not for everyone.  I love Max von Sydow and I love the occasional chainmail muscle tee, but come on.  I am sure many people in the Film Department and beyond would consider that an unenlightened remark, but I am also sure that a great many Diner viewers had the same reaction to this scene that I had.  But regardless of anyone's fondness for allegorical Swedish cinema, The Seventh Seal with all its symbolism is such a perfect foil because Diner is free of symbols--nothing in the movie is charged with meaning anything, it just is.  When we watch this movie, we watch people--Eddie, Billy, Boogie (a delicate pre-boxing, pre-reconstructive surgery Mickey Rourke), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Modell (Paul Reiser), the annoying old guy buying a TV (Herb Levinson, the writer/director's uncle)--just existing, to no particular end.  I don't know how I could aptly describe the plot while still doing justice to how engaging and satisfying Diner is.

        There is one other metacinematic touch that bolsters the movie's realism: the inspired character of Methan (Tait Ruppert, a local Baltimore kid), who appears only twice and says only quotations from Sweet Smell of Success.  As we're watching it, these expertly crafted lines delivered in a precise, intense monotone make the movie going on around the polished interjection seem all the more like real life. When we've finished it and, say, have a blog post to write, we realize how organic all the dialogue in Diner is.  However many moments in the movie were ad-libbed, there was still a script that captured what happens in conversation between guys and their friends, their parents, their girlfriends, their wives, even their useless, pretentious brothers like Fenwick's.  I feel as if I could saunter into the Fells Point Diner anytime and, as Shrevie says, "bullshit the entire night away" with those six lost soon-to-be-men.  I only wish I could.