TiptOes

I now believe in God.

It didn't take a miracle, or intimidation, or seeing any sort of light for the love of the Higher Power to blossom within me. Sometimes we go through something so terrible that we can only in hindsight see which forces were working with or against us. Sometimes the Higher Powers cast a protective shroud upon us not to shelter us from opening our eyes to new experience, but to protect us against unnecessary pain, suffering, and strife. The conceptual grasp on the tried-and-true realization that some things do, in fact, trump curiosity is something of which we mortals need to be reminded-- by stern reprimand of others who have gone before us, or through patterns of intended synchronicity or "omens". Only then are our eyes truly opened to the sheer fact that there is no retroactive transgression of what we have already seen. Thus, we can not "un-see" anything. There is no real-life equivalent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. No Vanilla Sky. No Men in Black.

This is why I never saw Two Girls, One Cup. Normally, I can stay a step above curiosity by employing measures to represent my best interests long-term. When someone excitedly runs over with a picture of a woman fucking a donkey, I don't look at it. I don't ever want to look at it, for I don't ever have a need for that imagery -- on purpose or on accident. At no point will seeing a real image of said woman fucking said donkey ever have more of a meaningful purpose to me than how I can imagine a woman might look fucking an imaginary donkey. No, sir, I can learn from my past mistakes; I realize the irreversibility of taking that leap.

This is why I am ashamed, horrified, and saddened that I missed the obvious clues trying to keep me away from a little thing called Tiptoes. I'm usually better than this. When a woman who is deemed by every social code ever enacted as "off-limits" spends all night flirting with you and careening over your lap like a drunken flag in the wind, let it end there-- as a memory. Likewise, when you see the trailerfor Tiptoes, do not pursue the movie. For the love of the God that tried to protect me, do not see the movie.

It all started when Tony brought over a DVD, which he took out of the sleeve and put in my face. It had a homemade label on it that appeared to be a headline and newspaper clipping detailing the "Dwarf Tossing Championships".

"Does your DVD player play AVIs?" He asked, spacing out the last few words as he glanced at my DVD player and realized that it was not even from this milennium. Strike one.

The DVD player did not play AVIs. We decided to run to Micro Center and get some adapter cables to make it possible for my laptop to play the AVI through my HDMI port. I picked up a mini-display to DVI adapter, and a DVI to HDMI cable. When we returned home to find that the laptop did not have a mini-display port we were left with way more acronyms than solutions. Strike two.

We decided to just watch it on the 13" laptop screen. Everything was going smoothly until the sound of the dog gnawing on rawhide drowned out any dialogue. If we could only have seen the end at the beginning. Strike three.

"We're going to have to watch this at my house." Tony said, staring blankly at the screen.

This is when Tiptoes turned from a movie into a god-damned mission. New couch, new TV, new acronyms. It's go time. So both of us merely blinked when the movie began and the sound was nearly seven seconds off from the actors' mouths moving. Strike 4. We got the sound back on.........inEspanol. Strike 5. Yet we still forged on. It looked as though we were going to have to watch the movie from his laptop, routed to the TV screen. It took about ten minutes to find the cable and another ten minutes to get sound and video to play nice with each other. Nearing Strike SIX, Tiptoeswas happening.

There are no words or clever metaphors that could begin to explain what it is like to sit uncomfortably through this movie. By the time it was over, I felt as though I had been drafted for the war, fought it, lost a leg, lost my buddies, returned home to find my wife cheating on me with my brother, pregnant with his baby, endured a three-year long bout with post-traumatic stress disorder, got on the wagon, got back off the wagon, and spent the night cold and naked in an alley puddle for no good reason. It's almost like the equivalent of going out to eat at Applebee's, and instead of being there for 45 minutes, you end up being there for so long that you feel not only that you should, but that it is your obligationto write a letter to corporate demanding a part of your life back and a $50 gift card just won't cover it.

There is absolutely no explanation for this movie, and there are no reparations for it. It is Two Girls, One Cup-esque in nature, in that I would actually prefer watching people's reactions to this video moreso than I could ever enjoy the video itself. However, it's not just another bad movie. It's an overwhelmingly bad movie that is packed full of A-list actors, some of whom fuck midgets repeatedly throughout, and some of whom are normal sized actors that were cast as midgets. The only explanation that I can muster is that there is one person in the world, a person with a picture of an orgy depicting Kate Beckinsale giving Gary Oldham a Blumpkin while Matthew Mcconaughey, David Alan Grier and a French midget literally form a French Sandwich while Patricia Arquette does blow in the corner by the toilet, and they all agreed they were willing to do whatever it took to keep that picture buried forever. The first ten minutes could be renamed "Matthew McConaughey's Package" and the rest of it could be renamed "What the Fuck".

You might want to -- but don't.