Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Is Terrible

I could only stomach about 40 minutes of it. Hopefully it was less than that.

Somewhere in Hollywood, probably on every computer associated with movie production, is a Microsoft Word document describing how straight, white, conservative, male characters can be portrayed. Three Billboards had the full range of them. There was the abusive ex-husband, the bigot cop, the incompetent sheriff who covered up for the bigot and maybe someone else. My mind is blanking on the rest because after 30-40 minutes, I wanted to puke. I'm sure there was a plucky, gay dude somewhere in the film, just to give the homophobes in the audience the finger. If not, expect protests at the Oscar. Whatever. In the movie, when the racist cop arrested the black woman for possession of marijuana, I left the room to do something more rewarding like pouring sand into my eyes.

It's so mind-numbingly boring. The plots are irrelevant when the characters are all the same. The interactions that make up the movie are so predictable that the narrative arc becomes secondary to the fact that you can see all of the dialog a mile away.

I dunno, maybe one of the dudes had a redemption. If so, it's the same redemption people like me always have. We become more like them, because that's what redemption is.

If anyone ever made a movie from the true story of my life, the studio would be burned to the ground by enraged progressives protesting the sheer "hate" of the thing. As I tried to watch Three Billboards, I thought about that. I watched the non-me characters and put some of the ones from my life in their places. I guess that's why I quit watching. It was all so much rubbish.

On a related note, sperm counts are dropping.

Researchers from Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Jerusalem announced this week that sperm count in men residing in developed countries has dropped by a whopping 50 percent over the past 40 years.

Now there's a shock.

By way of contrast, here's Away All Boats, a second-string, Navy, war movie from 1956. It's not scintillating, but it has men doing man things, behaving and speaking like men. It couldn't be made today.