Shit, Actually

by Lindy West

  A magic ladder appears (“the Rose Suchak Ladder Company”—LINEMOUTH) and Tim Allen and son discover that there’s a herd of fucking caribou hitched to a fancy sled on top of their house. The two regard the caribou herd as one might look at an unusual mushroom, or some poorly written microwave instructions. Like, “Huh.” They are just not that weirded out by it.

  Charlie, being an idiot child, wants to hop in the sleigh and let the reindeer drag them off the roof to their deaths—“Are you gonna put on the suit like the card said? I wanna go too!”—but Tim Allen says no. “YOU NEVER DO WHAT I WANT TO DO!” Charlie laments. YEAH. JUDGE REINHOLD ALWAYS LETS ME PUT ON A DEAD MAN’S CLOTHES AND RIDE A DEER.

  Then this inexplicable exchange happens:

  Tim Allen: Stay away from those reindeer! You don’t know where they’ve been! They all look like they’ve got key lime disease!

  Reindeer: FAAAAAARRRTT.

  And then this:

  Tim Allen (standing next to Santa’s sleigh): There’s no such thing as Santa’s sleigh!

  Charlie: What about the reindeer? These are Santa’s reindeer, aren’t they?

  Tim Allen: I hope not!

  How high are you guys right now.

  Tim Allen, who still is not wearing pants, agrees that they can sit in the sleigh for a sec, but then accidentally says the magic words, “Let’s go!” and the reindeer gallop off the roof and start flying around. (Not the most practical magic words, IMO. It’s like having ooh as your safe word.) The frigid December air begins to pimple his naked thighs, so he finally, begrudgingly, puts on Santa’s enormous pants. NOW IT’S ON. The reindeer drag him, screaming, from house to house, and at each stop Santa’s magic sack sucks Tim Allen down the chimney and squeezes him out like a big red turd. Occasionally, he encounters a precocious child sleeping near the Christmas tree, and they exchange “hilarious” banter:

  Child: You’re supposed to drink the milk.

  Tim Allen: I am lactose intolerant.

  Again, if this ever happened even once in history, WE WOULD KNOW ABOUT IT because there would be a police report and many screams.

  Oh, ugh, and then Tim Allen does his horrible caveman catchphrase thing in the form of a “ho ho ho,” which sucked my soul out of my mouth like a haunted cat. Then the reindeer ditch them in a frozen wasteland, which turns out to be the North Pole. Tim Allen is mad perplexed by being at the North Pole (like, waaaaaaaay more freaked out than he was about visiting every house in the world in a magic sled) until David Krumholz shows up and is like, “Yo. I am a sarcastic elf. Here’s a snow globe.”

  Krumholz explains that Tim Allen is now required to be Santa Claus because of the “Santa Clause,” a line of fine print on Santa’s business card requiring anyone who puts on Santa’s pants to abandon his life, career, and home, and just permanently be Santa until death because “children hold the spirit of Christmas inside their hearts” or something. I’m sorry, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD TIM ALLEN BE REQUIRED TO BE SANTA CLAUS. You don’t fucking own Tim Allen, David Krumholz! Also, aren’t you guys sad about the fact that the last Santa Claus—a living, breathing man with whom you presumably worked for many decades, if not centuries—just fell off a roof and died, alone, in the snow? What is wrong with you people? Can someone at least go collect the body?

  Tim Allen, somehow, still doesn’t believe this is happening. He wakes up in his own bed the next morning, acting like, “Oh yeah, this all seems back to normal. Yeah, I’m wearing another man’s silken pajamas, but I probably just bought them in a turk-fume-induced fugue. No big.” Charlie, on the other hand, can’t keep his dang mouth shut. When his mom picks him up, he’s all, “Oh yeah, we totally went to this elf party, and flew a few deer, and, oh yeah, Dad’s Santa now.” In an even less sensical plot development, the mom hears that and goes, “OH MY GOD, THIS IS LITERALLY CHILD ABUSE.” So she and Judge Reinhold begin scheming to get custody taken away from Tim Allen. For “pretending” to be Santa Claus. To his six-year-old child.

  “You’ve got more important things to worry about,” Tim Allen quips to Judge Reinhold. “Like where you’re going to get more sweaters after the circus pulls out of town.” What does this joke mean? What is this circus that sells sweaters? How many sweaters does Judge Reinhold require? How quickly does Judge Reinhold wear his sweaters out? Why does Judge Reinhold get his sweaters at the circus? What is it about Judge Reinhold’s sweaters that indicates they are cirque-related? If Judge Reinhold needed a new sweater, why couldn’t he just purchase one at a regular store? Or wait for another circus to come to town? If there is one thing to be said for The Santa Clause, it’s that it asks more questions than it answers.

  The next morning, Tim Allen awakes with a fart. AND A BEARD. The Santa Clause, apparently some sort of perverse yuletide virus, has entered its Jiminy Glick phase. No matter how much he shaves and dyes his hair and runs on the treadmill and attempts to eat a salad for lunch instead of eight crème brûlées, his body always bloops back into a fat blond goober. Plus, fat Tim Allen suddenly hates corporate toy ideas like planned obsolescence and success! He is becoming pathologically fun.

  So, Tim Allen just keeps getting fatter and jollier, the ex-wife gets SO MAD about Tim Allen’s magic beard that she exiles him from Charlie’s soccer game, and Judge Reinhold just keeps saying, “You’re taking this Santa thing a little too far,” over and over again like a broken robot. Eventually, Tim Allen’s custody gets revoked by an even shittier judge (WEARING RED AND BEING FAT IS NOT A SAFETY ISSUE), so he does the only logical thing—he kidnaps Charlie and runs away, leading state and local police (and possibly federal agents) on what was no doubt a monumentally expensive manhunt.

  Meanwhile, Judge Reinhold and the ex-wife reminisce about when they stopped believing in Santa Claus like normal humans:

  Ex-Wife: I was Charlie’s age. I wrote Santa a letter every week that year. Okay. Maybe not every week, but…Boy I really wanted a Mystery Date game. Do you remember those? No, of course you don’t. No one does. I don’t even think they make them anymore, but…Well, anyway, Christmas morning came and oh I got dozens of presents, I got everything. Except Mystery Date. [CRIES.]

  Judge Reinhold: I was three. And it was an Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle. Christmas came, no Weenie Whistle. That’s when I stopped believing.

  Ex-Wife [weeping]: You were three?

  Judge Reinhold: Yeah.

  Yo, man, I don’t want to fart on your parade here, but a whistle is not a good toy.

  As the manhunt continues, Tim Allen and Charlie head to the North Pole because it’s time to deliver some presents! (Wait, has it been a year?) For some reason, the elves let Charlie design some new features on Santa’s sleigh—because that’s really who you want engineering your aeronautical devices. Inspecting the new features, Tim Allen points at two pewter goblets sitting on a small shelf. “What’s this?” he asks.

  “CD!” Charlie replies.

  “Compact disc! Nice!”

  “No, it’s a cookie cocoa dispenser!”

  HOW DID YOU THINK THAT WAS A COMPACT DISC PLAYER WHEN IT IS CLEARLY TWO GOBLETS? I HATE EVERYONE IN THIS MOVIE SO MUCH.

  As they get ready to take off, Tim Allen sighs, “How could I do this without you, Charlie?” And Charlie sasses, “You couldn’t.” Um, pretty sure he could. He can do magic and he has a child army.

  Upon returning to civilization, Tim Allen immediately gets ambushed by a bunch of cops and has to get rescued by these sort of Navy SEALs but the elf version. “We’re your worst nightmare. Elves with attitude.” You are correct, movie. That phrase is literally my worst nightmare.

  Eventually, Tim Allen proves to Judge Reinhold and his ex-wife that he really is Santa Claus, so she burns the custody papers and for some reason the cops are like, “Eh, bygones,” about the multimillion-dollar search and rescue operation, and Judge Reinhold gets his Weenie Whistle and can FINALLY stop crying, and then Charlie tells Judge Reinhold, “I think I’m going to go into the family business.”


  I’m going to push my dad off a roof and steal his magic clothes.

  And then it’s over.

  I think my feelings about The Santa Clause can best be summed by this (100 percent true) sentence: it took me literally an entire day to get through this ninety-minute movie because I kept getting pleasantly distracted by YouTube videos of farmers lancing cow abscesses. Happy holidays!

  RATING: 2/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

  Men Yelling Men Yelling Men Yelling

  Look. Is The Rock a perfect movie? No. But is it a perfect movie? Maybe!

  Just describing the plot of The Rock is a lush, lip-smacking thrill, like a piece of bacon that is all fatty rind, like a bowl of Lucky Charms that is all marshmallows—so many elements that could each, alone, be too much, here combined into one film that somehow works, one great, baroque cinnamon roll that is all the middle of the cinnamon roll, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, a duck-billed platypus, a place beyond decadence, foie gras on your burger, everything you want and nothing you don’t and then some more. Nicolas Cage, an unchained freak; Sean Connery, virtuosically hammy; Ed Harris, a haunted prince going down with his ship; antihero vs. antihero vs. antihero vs. the president; and gruesome chemical weapons and a heist and a mutiny and a double mutiny and family drama and Alcatraz and mine carts and fighter jets and flames and a rock, stalwart against the sea.

  All that, but with none of the septic irony, the relentless self-conscious hedging, that infects so much of our lives these days. The Rock does not take one single moment to look you in the eye and say, yes, we know this is a little silly, we are sorry, please know we are cool—there’s no need! The Rock believes in itself, it commits, it is happy to be fun. Coolness is a deadly neurotoxin. Inject The Rock into your heart.

  In The Rock, Nicolas Cage is some kind of…gas expert? (same, LOL) who works for the FBI…de-gasifying…stuff…that the FBI finds that has gas on it. We meet him in an underground gas lab where he is examining a plastic baby. Suddenly, the baby starts leaking gas, which really surprises everyone, though you’d assume they expected something like that since they’re having a gas scientist dissect the baby inside an airtight glass cube? Oops, the gassy baby is also a bomb. Nic Cage, rapidly corroding, sums up the situation efficiently: “Okay, I’ve got some bad news and some really bad news. The bad news is that the gas is corrosive and it’s eating our suits. The really bad news is that there’s enough C-4 explosive and poison gas to blow the whole chamber and kill everybody in the building.”

  Like, I just, I’m so grateful for this movie.

  Later that night, finally relaxing at home with his hot woman, having narrowly escaped being melted at work, Nicolas Cage finds out his girlfriend is pregnant and demanding marriage. It’s a lot for one day! That’s why I forgive him for saying, “Whoa, okay, marriage police, pull over!”

  Meanwhile, Ed Harris and his friends are on a tour of Alcatraz, probably just having fun, right? NEGATORY. GET READY. Ed Harris is a retired general in the Marines, maybe the best general ever, who’s fed up because his boys didn’t get any recognition or military pensions after they died doing clandestine black ops. “These men died for their country, and they weren’t even given a goddamn military burial!” Yeah, man, that’s fucked up! Ed Harris wants their sacrifices publicly acknowledged by the US government, and he wants each of their families to get $1 million. Seems reasonable!

  And the ONLY WAY TO DO THAT, obviously, is to steal some rockets armed with deadly VX poison gas, take over the prison-turned-tourist-island Alcatraz with a band of rude, crude mercenary dudes, and threaten to vaporize San Francisco unless you receive $100 million out of a secret government slush fund within three days! TRULY THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO GET UNCLE SAM’S ATTENTION, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE A FAMOUS GENERAL WHO LITERALLY KNOWS THE PRESIDENT. Toxic friends will say, “Call a newspaper maybe,” but it’s Scorpio season, okay? Cut unsupportive snakes from your life, honey!

  Ed and friends set up shop in the ’Traz. They lock all the tourists into the cells as hostages, install “anti-motion trembler device[s]” so nobody can sneak up on them from the basement, and rally around Ed for a little pep talk. “Couple hundred years ago,” Ed tells them, “a couple guys named Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were branded as traitors by the British. Now they’re called patriots.” Wow, man, makes u think.

  Then Ed sends a Zoom invite to the US government (triggering, TBH) and relays his demands via video chat: “I have choked on these lies for my entire career. But here and now, THE LIES STOP.”

  (Seriously, though, what was this crystal-clear 1996 video phone? The closest thing to an actual video call in 1996 would have been for Ed Harris to take a bunch of pictures of his Nokia screen while he was playing snake, develop the film at the mall, staple the pics into a flip-book, and mail it to the Capitol in an envelope that he licked with his mouth because they didn’t even have the peel-off kind yet. Give The Rock a freaking retroactive Nobel for future-predicting already!!!)

  The government officials are not sure what to do here. On the one hand, Ed Harris is a famous hero, and they agree that he does make a good point about how much they blow. On the other hand, he is doing a very bad terrorism right now, and they are against that except when it’s them doing it in other countries.

  Ed makes it real simple: “You alert the media, I launch the gas. You refuse payment, I launch the gas. You send payment, I launch the gas. You launch the gas, I launch the gas. You pay the gas, I launch the pay. You gas the gas, I am the gas.”

  VX gas is really bad, it turns out—“one teaspoon of this hits the floor, it’s lethal to one hundred feet”—and, bad news, Ed has a BUNCH of teaspoons. The VX gas comes in these lime-green bath beads and you know as soon as you see them that someone is getting FUCKED UP by one later. There’s only one weapon that burns hot enough to destroy VX: “Thermite plasma…but it’s still in the test phase.” Well, great.

  YOU KNOW WHAT, I’D SAY JUST GIVE HIM THE $100 MILLION, BUDDIES. I’D DO THAT OVER POTENTIALLY LIQUEFYING SAN FRANCISCO. He doesn’t even want the money from the taxpayers—he wants it from the slush fund! That’s what a slush fund is for! It’s literally where the term came from: if Ed Harris comes and says he’s gonna turn all the people into slush, then you fund him!

  Instead, though, the government decides to give it one college try to stop Ed Harris’s chemicals: “Who is your best chemical/biological man?”

  Well, he’s fucking.

  Nicolas Cage and his girlfriend are having sex among one thousand burning candles in his extremely flammable rooftop shack to celebrate their pregnancy. She has put her hair in pigtails for the occasion, so Nicolas Cage says, “Oh yeah, pigtails are naughty. Naw-tayyy!!!”

  Have either of these people had sex before?

  His phone rings, and he picks up.

  I feel like in the ’90s people were always answering the phone while they were having sex. I remember watching movies as a kid and thinking, like, three out of four adults were probably secretly having sex when you talked to them on the phone! Honestly, I’m still not sure this isn’t true! It puts me constantly on edge! This is why I only text!

  Nic’s boss tells him he has to come in for an emergency gas assignment, so he’s like, “I gotta go!” and runs off the edge of the roof. (I mean, you could just finish having sex—it’ll take like two minutes.)

  Back at the government, the government is trying to figure out how exactly they’re supposed to break into Alcatraz when, famously, no one has ever broken out.

  Unless…maybe someone HAS! Wow, this is the best plot of any movie!

  FBI director James Womack (John Spencer! My president!) is like, “No no no no no no no no no no no no no, HE DOES NOT EXIST!” and the other government guys are like, “Bad news, we know he does exist, and his name is Sean Connery, and he escaped from Alcatraz and he alone knows its secrets, and we know you know he’s moldering in a secret prison right now, James Womack! Go get him!” And James Womack is like, “We can’t ri
sk letting him out. He’s a professional escape artist!” which, respectfully, is kind of the point, sir?

  Sean Connery was a British spy who got put in Alcatraz for stealing a microfilm with all of the US government’s dirtiest secrets, such as who shot JFK and what aliens’ butts look like, which is why they hated it so much when he escaped. As soon as they caught him again, they put him in a secret dungeon and pretended he never existed—“This man has no identity, not in the United States or Great Britain, he does not exist”—so he could never tell anyone about the aliens’ butts ever again!!! But now they need him to team up with Nicolas Cage and break INTO Azkaban and save San Francisco. Tell me another way! There isn’t one! Experts say!

  They bring Nicolas Cage in to see if he’s the gas king of their dreams, and quiz him on VX gas: “It’s very, very horrible, sir. It’s one of those things we wish we could disinvent.” (That’s what I say about my husband’s socks, right, ladies?) Nic passes the test, so they take him to the interrogation room, where they’re trying to convince Sean Connery to join the team in exchange for a pardon.

  Unfortunately, the FBI sent some bozo agent in to persuade Connery, but when Connery tries to tell him a sly fable about why he doesn’t trust the FBI, this guy doesn’t even know who Archimedes is! Dumbass! But Nicolas Cage knows about Archimedes! Behind the one-way glass, in the other room, he starts yelling out the answers like Hermione in Potions. The king put Archimedes in prison! James the First! James the First! Essence of Myrtlap!

  Womack perks up, like, “Whoa, this guy does chemical weapons AND he watches the History Channel?!? A double threat!” On a hunch, he sends Cage in there to finish the negotiation. On his way out, the bozo agent tosses Sean Connery a quarter, sarcastically, breaking the first rule of FBI: Never give Sean Connery a quarter! You’ll see why! (It doesn’t really go anywhere, though!)