You know, if you’re going to name your movie Epic, you’re kind of giving yourself a lot to live up to. But not as much as if you’re setting out to make a gender-neutral animated movie.

Which there’s very little percentage in actually doing. Every kid you know will see every Toy Story and Ice Age and Madagascar movie that gets plunked down in front of him or her. And if the girls in the audience aren’t thrilled that Jessie and Ellie and Gloria are on the back burner, well, their parents’ money spends just as well. Meanwhile, there aren’t that many boys in that demographic who won’t avoid an Arietty or Brave or even Tangled like a pink Barbie Dream House. So it’s actually pretty admirable that Blue Sky has gone to the trouble of making an animated action-adventure movie with a female protagonist and a hippy-dippy natural world setting. Something that will appeal to both, in other words. Even more admirably, they seem to have pulled it off.

There are some great action set pieces here, from vertiginous flying sequences to huge (relatively) battles to a nice exploration of what a heist scene is like when the thieves are centimeters tall. But it also doesn't skimp on the relationships that hold it all together, with a screenplay that leaves the obvious unsaid verbally and facial character animation that rivals Pixar. Yeah, I said it.

Yes, some of the jokes are corny and there's a lot that's never explained and/or doesn't hold up to analysis, but your daughters will love it and so will your sons.

I took M. Edium to see Epic the evening of his last day of school, so for him it probably benefited somewhat from the residual euphoria he was experienced. What a cruel irony, then, that later that night Trash made me go see The Purge.

You know the concept: a near-future America has solved all its problems by the simple expedient of suspending all laws for one night a year, up to and including those against murder. By a remarkable coincidence, the events of The Purge take place on that very night, which I guess is good because otherwise it would have been even more boring.

I don't disagree with those who have lamented that this fertile, high-concept idea ended up as a cheap home-invasion story. In fact, the movie it reminded me the most of was 2011's In Time, which showed a world where time was literally money, and if you ran out of it you died on the spot. Both movies present an alternate world that could serve as a fascinating thought experiment, if only for undergrads to sit around their dorm rooms going "what if?" Both premises are highly unlikely, if only because society would never grant the universal buy-in they'd require. Both situations offer the allegorical opportunity to say something thought-provoking about the way society treats its lower classes as disposable. And both movies MESSED IT ALL UP.

At least In Time was more ambitious, sending its Bonnie & Clyde protagonists on a temporal Robin Hood crusade that led them all over the place and brought them in contact with every manner of characters who would spring up in a time-based economy. The Purge confines the action to one house. In fact, for that reason, it probably would have worked better as a play, because it is a crap movie.

Ethan Hawke, arguably our generation's most punchable leading man, plays a character who seems to have the early potential to be interesting. He and his family don't participate in the Purge themselves, but he's still morally complicit because he supports it, argues its benefits to his kids, and even makes his living off it, selling high-end (yet ultimately useless) security systems that in this otherwise crime-free utopia are only needed one night a year. When circumstances seem poised to force him to become an active citizen in Purge Nation, it should get good. Instead he just turns into a poor man's John McClane, stalking his own darkened house with the contents of his gun safe.

And oh, what crushing, grinding poverty that aforementioned poor man endures. I don't expect a cozy, smug, suburban alpha-douche like Hawke's James Sandin to possess any tactical training, but who waits politely for the conclusion of a florid speech from the armed bad guy announcing his intent to kill you, when everyone knows you shoot that bad guy in the face in midsentence? Who responds to the forced entry of an armed, murderous gang by scattering his family all over the house?

But then look who he's facing off against. Except for one, all of the invaders enter the home wearing masks. To hide their identities? During the commission of crimes they won't be prosecuted for? Against people they don't expect to survive? Or is it because when you enter a darkened, unfamiliar house to kill people defending their own turf, you want your vision to be as limited as possible?

In fact, all of the invaders' actions seem calculated to creep out the audience rather than accomplish any actual Purging. Ooh, there's the missus, stealing quietly down the hall, unaware that a masked killer is right behind her! But he'd rather be all motionless and creepy for our benefit rather than increase his own chances for survival by shooting an armed defender in the back when he has the chance.

Which is the problem with The Purge: nobody behaves the way a person would actually behave in most of the circumstances presented throughout the movie. But maybe that's the point of the Purge: a society that would get behind it clearly has no sense of self-preservation left anyway.

And I paid good money to see it, so look who's talking.

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M. Ovie Reviews: May Movies

Obviously I’m pretty behind on reviewing the movies I saw last month, it now being this month and all. So I figured it would be better to do capsule reviews of what I saw in May in all one post rather than a full review of each of them, which I think we all know was never going to happen anyway. Better partial than never, right?

Iron Man 3

Here’s the thing: the comic-book title is The Invincible Iron Man, which makes it a little tricky to come up with the Credible Threat that every action hero needs to face. The first movie solved this by having Tony Stark spending a lot of time and effort getting to the point where he can be sucked through a jet engine and suffer no injuries that couldn’t be healed by a little Bondo. In the second movie, Tony’s greatest threat was from within. Boring. Here, however, events conspire (with Tony, it must be said) to hurl him time zones away from home with a broken suit and no resources, not to mention a whole new, much less boring existential crisis. In short, dude is in a position to take himself a really thorough vincing.

But here’s the great thing. If Captain America’s challenge to him in The Avengers -- "Take away the suit and what are you?" -- remains hanging in the air, despite how effectively Tony batted it away with a verbal response, then this movie is a case study in how actions speak louder. Turns out that even without the suit, Tony's still kind of a badass. 42 suits? Forget about it.

Not to mention, probably the most underrated area of his genius is in usability, because damn.

Kon-Tiki

Based on a true story about one of the most amazing, remarkable, brave, spectacularly stupid feats of exploration ever undertaken. In 1947, Swedish anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl set out to prove that French Polynesia was initially colonized by Aztecs from Peru, who floated across five thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean on a balsa-wood raft -- by attempting to do the same thing. Most people who know enough about the story to bother seeing this movie already know how that turned out, but that doesn't stop the final reel from being as tense as that of this movie's spiritual sibling, Apollo 13. This isn't an especially talky film, for two likely reasons. One is that it was filmed simultaneously in two languages, so who would want to double an excess of dialogue? And the second is that six Scandinavian dudes, even confined to a tiny space for more than three months, much of which time is spent lounging around in boxer briefs, aren't going to get all that chatty anyway. Heyerdahl's persistent hope and optimism is probably intended as a beacon of leadership, but it starts to come off as infuriating as he insists that what they're attempting succeeded before. Well, maybe, but probably not every time. After all, nobody's ever been able to get an exact replica of the Wright Flyer off the ground, Sunshine.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

People seem to either like ST:ID or get pissed off by it. Here's how you know which one you'll be before you see it. Do you already know who Carol Marcus is? If not, you'll probably like it. If so, it'll probably piss you off, at least during the parts you're not busy liking it.

I have a whole separate, unresolvable issue with Star Trek movies anyway, which is that Star Trek is supposed to be a weekly series, not a big, overblown, two-hour-plus event that blasts onto screens at intervals of multiple years. I'm never as invested in the captain (with the exception of Benjamin Sisko) as I am in the whole ensemble, and the limitations of a movie series by necessity squeezes out any stories that don't center on the top of the chain of command. Like. I want to know more about Sulu, and all he ever gets is a moment or two. Not to mention the movies can't take on a plot that isn't about the very survival of Earth, the Federation, or humanity itself, because when they attempt that we end up with Star Trek: Insurrection and nobody's happy.

That said, this is a big, loud, dumb, fun movie. I've seen a lot of remarks that it's not a true Star Trek movie, as though such a narrowly defined thing actually exists any more. You never see people complaining about something not being a true Doctor Who episode these days, do you? That's because there are lots of definitions, and now we have a new one for Star Trek. It may not be as much of a reboot as a remix, with old elements like Tribbles and Klingons and references to Harry Mudd thrown into a blender with some 24. Yes, 24, and not just because Peter Weller is in it.

That's because both the once-and-future Fox series and ST:ID explore what happens when an open democracy faces devastating terror attacks and responds by becoming violently, self-justifyingly paranoid. That, I've decided is what the title refers to. The refreshing thing is that ST:ID seems to be arguing the opposite side. When Spock is urgently trying to talk Kirk out of a pragmatic but "morally wrong" course of action, one can easily picture Kiefer Sutherland thumping Zachary Quinto on the head and stuffing him in a supply cabinet before doing what he wants anyway. Just like I'm sure he wanted to when ZQ was on the show during Season Three.

Quartet

With Trash being done traveling for a while, and me being between shows for a while, she's been insisting on having me go see movies some nights even when there's nothing I want to see. Hence Quartet. Here is a redemptive, feel-good tale set in a British nursing home for retired musicians. The cast is headed by Maggie Smith, who for the first time in her long and celebrated career gets to step in front of a movie camera with her actual hairstyle. As you can imagine, there are lots of fragile, wrinkly people drifting about at all times in various states of battiness, and there's so little happening that we spend the first half of the film just waiting for one of them to keel over. Instead, when Maggie Smith shows up, her arrival completes the foursome who decades before gave a triumphant performance of Rigoletto, and the rest of the movie is spent overcoming the entirely tedious obstacles that prevent them from doing a reprise. The most obvious obstacle is, of course, the fact that it's impossible to imagine any of the four (Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, and Billy Connolly fake-aged to look like the current John Cleese) ever having been opera singers, let alone now. So the end is of course a giant cheat, and then we have to see the credits that show photos of all the aged, frail, wizened supporting players in the glory days of their energetic, vital, balls-out youth. Which in most cases were taken after I was out of high school. Yep, it seems I'm one generation younger than people in nursing homes. The only comfort was in imagining the director's deceptively youthful presence behind the camera: Dustin Hoffman (75).

The Sapphires

As for why I saw this, see above re: Quartet. It's easy to imagine The Sapphires as an abortive attempt at a star-making vehicle for Chris O'Dowd that never really got rolling, the problem being that if there's anyone not ready for a starring vehicle, it's Chris O'Dowd. It's set in 1968 Australia and Vietnam and is centered around a singing group composed of four Aboriginal relatives, so you can imagine there's plenty of social and racial injustice to really dig into. Think an antipodean The Commitments if the trailer had been set to the strains of "For What It's Worth." Well, in terms of how this movie tackles the heavy issues, the music's quite good.

Iron Man 3

Saw it again on May 31. Still holds up, mostly.

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I’ve walked out of three movies in my life. The first was The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and her Lover. I would have stayed, but at some point Trash had enough and I left with her. Not that I minded much; it never bothered me enough to go back and see the rest.

The second one was just a few years ago. Chao took me to see a movie called Audition at a midnight showing at the Uptown. I had stuffed myself to the uvula at a Brazilian steakhouse earlier that evening, and some time after this sad, intimate living-room drama veered irrevocably into Japanese torture porn, I pretty much passed out in my seat for a few seconds. Which was in the front row of the balcony. Looking back, I’m kind of surprised I made it out of there alive.

Tonight I walked out of Evil Dead.

I’ve been looking forward to this movie for months, if not a year. I loved the original, both as the scariest movie I’d ever seen as of junior high and as the camp classic I saw it as in my thirties. My personal hero Bruce Campbell had been talking it up on his Twitter feed, a friend of a friend did an uncredited pass on the screenplay, and I’m uncool enough to love a good remake. It was win-win.

I invited a couple of friends to go with me tonight, knowing Trash was going to want no piece of this. But then neither did they. Instead Bitter and Febrifge and I went to dinner, called it an early night, and I got home in time to go catch a late showing on my own. Mistake.

Not because I mind going to movies alone, because obviously I don’t. It’s just not a good movie. Or maybe it is; it’s just not for me.

Call me a wuss if you want. It’s not that I was scared; I had no investment in or concern for any of these asshole characters and didn’t give a shit what happened to a single miserable one of them. Plus I knew all the main beats the story was hitting from the original and pretty much where it was going from here, and I was just…grossed out. I realized that sitting through this movie was going to be a straight-up feat of endurance, and for what? Maybe it was the huge dinner again (Mexican this time) combined with my traditional Coke Icee, but when I started feeling physically ill, I asked myself, why am I here? What am I trying to prove? I wasn’t having any fun, and I didn’t want to get sick, so I left. Fuck it.

Sorry, Bruce. Sorry, FOAF. My friends were right. We didn’t need this shit.

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Man, am I behind on movies this year. I'm also behind on reviewing them. Or, I should say, it. Given all the TV I've been covering for TWoP since January, there hasn't been much time to get out to the theater. I really miss Icees.

But I have managed to see one movie in 2013, and I apologize that I'm just now getting around to reviewing it. As you may know, I'm something of a fan of zombie stories, which I gobble up like the brains of the living. So I knew I was going to see Warm Bodies, even if I wasn't all that excited about it.

I was wrong about Warm Bodies as it turns out. Not to not be excited about it, I was dead on there. No, what I mean is that I got the impression from the ads that the protagonist, R, is a living dude only pretending to be undead so he can blend in with the shambling hordes infesting the airport he's trapped in. That's because he's also the narrator of the film, and his lucid inner monologue belies the fact that he's actually as undead as the next zombie. It's just that his articulate, thoughtful mind is trapped in a decomposing meatsack that can occasionally produce the word "hungry," although we do see from his habitat that he retains some pretty impressive fine motor skills.

Every zombie story needs a mythology, including some aspect that departs from the usual conventions of the genre. In 28 Days Later it was their speed, in The Walking Dead it's the fact that the infection resides dormant in the living, in Shaun of the Dead it was their Britishness. Here, as in Coulson Whitehead's Zone One, there are two levels of undead. One is your basic slow-moving zombies, which don't look nearly as gross as other specimens from the genre and might even be mistaken for unwashed Goths; and the others are "skeletons" to which each of them is supposedly devolving. Basically CGI Deadites from Army of Darkness. It's not a bad setup for the story.

Unfortunately, it's not that good a story. I've seen Warm Bodies compared to Twilight but with zombies in place of vampires. Since all I know of Twilight is what I was unable to avoid absorbing through cultural osmosis, I can't really speak to that. But if it's an accurate comparison, I can see why a lot of people really hate Twilight.

It's probably not giving too much away to say that in a zomromcom, love will conquer all. Things end up working out pretty well for R, even if he never does remember the rest of his name (though an on-the-nose scene at the end of the second act gives a pretty clear indication of what it probably was). Admittedly, he goes through some shit to get there, so it's not totally unearned.

I think what I keep looking for in zombie stories is something that doesn't have a totally unsatisfying ending. They always leave me wanting more, hence my continued interest in The Walking Dead, which to date doesn't have an ending at all. As for the ending of Warm Bodies, all I can say is that I'm still looking.

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Awww, I thought it was cute. It did take me an embarassingly long time to realize that it's a zombie retelling of Romeo & Juliet, though.

By  yasmara, at March 25, 2013 at 1:42 PM  

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This is the 22nd Valentine's Day that Trash and I have been married. Our plans for the evening include me covering three hours of TV for TWoP and her having a work dinner with her boss before teaching a class. So clearly Valentine's Day isn't a big deal for us.

But in honor of the holiday, Trash had the idea of sharing some of our favorite pop songs that reflect the most effed-up perspectives on romance. And like I said, I have three hours of TV to do tonight, so this is going to be quick.

"Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes

Two reprehensible liars in a loveless relationship separately make clandestine plans to cheat on each other. This dark morality play careens inevitably to a Kafkaesque climax in which each of these human wastelands is subjected to the ultimate punishment: ending up with each other.

"All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You" by Heart

So many couples struggle with the heartbreak of infertility, and sink thousands of dollars into drastic treatments that sometimes don't work, and often lead to tragic effects like Gosselinism. Ann & Nancy Wilson propose an alternate solution: go out and get yourself impregnated by some random. This easy fix has the advantage of allowing one to avoid painful things like injections, medical tests, and conversations.

"To Be With You" by Mr. Big

"More Than Words" by Xtreme

Such sweet harmonies. Such a soothing melody. Such gentle guitar chords. All in the service of the message, "Shut up and let's have sex already."

"The Search is Over" by Survivor

Less on this list for the song than the video, which showed the lead singer daily getting out of the bed he shared with a woman, then spending his days looking for true love while she moped under the blankets on the soundstage they called home. Presumably he was holding out for a girl who actually got up once in a while, but by the end of the video exhaustion overtakes him as well and he decides to settle for her after all. Yay?

So happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Feel free to add your own twisted favorites in the comments. And enjoy the earworms.

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Holy buckets, "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" is the *worst*. It usually takes me a whole five-minute speech about venereal disease and weird marriage dynamics to say what you did in a paragraph.

Another "favorite" is "Sometimes When We Touch." I picture the singer as Gabe from the US version of "The Office."

By  Jessie Bylander, at February 15, 2013 at 7:31 AM  

Omg. I remember when I first actually paid attn to the lyrics of "all i want to do" (1990? 91?) and was gobsmacked how awful they were. The music is fine for their pop phase, but jesusgodno on the bareback sex with a hitchhiker.

By  ureallyannoyme, at February 18, 2013 at 6:07 PM  

So glad I'm not the only one who finds More Than Words dodgy as hell. Pretty, yes, but also really quite skeevy.

By  lsn, at March 16, 2013 at 7:04 PM  

Also to add my current favourite dodgy "love" song - Driveby, by Train. That is not so much "love" as a really ordinary one night stand followed by stalking. Not Cool.

By  lsn, at March 16, 2013 at 7:07 PM  

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I'm a little behind on my movie blogging, in more ways than one. By this time last year, I'd seen three movies in the theater, as opposed to the current 2013 total of zero (not that Trash hasn't encouraged me to go -- I just haven't felt like it). I never did get around to reviewing any of the movies I saw in the last quarter of 2012 -- or I did, but never got around to posting the results. And here it is with scarcely a week of January left and I'm just now posting my rankings of all the films I saw in 2012. You'd think I could have at least done this before the Golden Globes, or at least the Oscar nominations. I'd feel really bad about my lateness if I thought anyone cared.

But as the saying goes, better late than never. As long as we're ranking things, you can decide for yourself if that's true.

28. New Year's Eve. Execrable.

27. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D. Naked money grab.

26. Ted. Juvenile, obvs.

25. Seven Psychopaths. Misogynistic.

24. Ice Age: Continental Drift. Left me cold.

23. Prometheus. Frustrating, gorgeous, mute-worthy.

22. Robot and Frank. Mostly not bad, but what didn't work really didn't work.

21. Frankenweenie. Burton's now so out of ideas he's mining his own back catalog. And I'm not just bitter because it scared M. Edium shitless.

20. Bernie. True stories don't always make the best movies.

19. The Grey. Downer.

18. The Woman in Black. Jumptastic.

17. The Amazing Spider-Man. Unnecessary.

16. Wreck-It Ralph. Cute. Still poor man's Pixar, though.

15. Django Unchained. Problematic. Deeply.

14. The Hunger Games. Compelling.

13. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Better than expected.

12. The Master. Virtuosically off-putting.

11. The Hobbit. Dumb, but I never got tired of looking at it.

10. Moonrise Kingdom. Virtuosically idiosyncratic.

9. Skyfall. Mostly not silly.

8. Argo. Show-offy, but it works. Amazed to see that the top of Ben Affleck's head is actually round.

7. The Dark Knight Rises. Big damn movie.

6. Chronicle. Underappreciated genius.

5. Lincoln. Overappreciated genius.

4. Looper. Probably the movie I thought about the most afterward, not counting Django and for less troubling reasons.

3. The Artist.. So damn clever.

2. The Avengers. Damn near perfect.

1. Cabin in the Woods. Perfect.

There you go. You may disagree, you may think I'm crazy. That's certainly your right. Everybody's allowed to be wrong sometimes. Why can't it be you?

Thanks, and I'll look forward to doing this again with you next April.

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http://www.yohyoh.com/filmfunda

By  yashvi burra, at January 31, 2013 at 3:19 AM  

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I was pretty pleased with myself after finishing up the bathroom-paneling project. Not just because it looked pretty good by my own admittedly unprofessional standards, but because I had materials left over. Including one uncut eight-foot-by-four-foot piece of paneling I turned out not to need now. Knowing I could now tie it back onto the roof of my car and drive it back to Home Depot made me feel unaccountably smug.

The cure for that feeling turned out to be attempting to actually do so.

Saturday morning was errand time. There were several things to return and/or exchange at several stores (not your gift, of course, your gift was awesome and we will treasure it always), and it made sense to start with the leftover remodeling materials. I had gotten three of the panels home in the first place, so I assumed it would be that much easier to get just one of them back. And this time I already knew it wouldn't fit in the cargo area even with the seat down, so having M. Edium along wasn't going to be a problem. As long as I could get him to quite fiddling with the eight-foot-long pieces of unused trim I was also returning, which ran from the inside of the back window to the shift lever.

So I loaded the remaining segment of paneling on the roof and set about securing it. I still had some twine left over from bringing it and its fellows home, but this time I also used the rope in the garage that I'd forgotten to bring along on the pickup errand. When I'd driven it home, even with twine going across the three panels and lengthwise, I had to stay off the freeway the whole way. The panels were about a foot longer than my roof, and the radio antenna sticking up in back like a dorsal fin meant I could only position them so far back, which left the ends protruding out over the windshield. Not ideal, but I managed to get them home safely. It helped that I wasn't on a particularly busy road when they slid forward off the roof, and I'd managed to ascertain that there was a clear space to pull over in the fraction of a second before they covered the windshield completely.

Which I did, and tied them on more securely, and also stuck my hand out the window to help hold them in place. So now I know how hard a freezing wind has to be blowing before it doesn't feel like I have gloves on at all.

So that was a learning experience. For the return trip, I did my best to tie the remaining panel more securely to begin with, looping the stout rope several times over the roof through the door openings (even remembering, shrewdly, to open all the doors before I did so in order to allow me to get in and out) and then stringing the leftover twine over it all from the front bumper to the trailer hitch. I still wasn't getting on the freeway, but I figured I was in good shape.

But I wasn't done learning. Specifically, I wasn't done learning about knots and how to tie them. I don't think I'll ever be done learning that.

And there's no excuse for it, really. My dad was in the Navy, back when every sailor learned every knot, and he still knows all of them and all their names and which ones to use. I know names like "half-hitch" and "bowline" and "square knot" but don't know how to actually do any of them. And I used to. Not only did I help rig stages back in my theater-punk days, I earned the Using Rope merit badge when I was in Cub Scouts. Not that I have any idea where that thing is now, which is probably just as well. It's a lie now at any rate.

So anyway, M. Edium and I were on our way in our rolling collection of grannies (the one knot I can both name and execute), and I realized a few things. One was that it was a lot windier than the day I'd brought these panels home. The second was that one piece of paneling is a lot more flexible than three are. These two facts were combining in such a way that if I drove more than twenty miles per hour, the front end of that paneling was beginning to whipsaw inside the half-inch or so of slack my frozen (and, let's face it, incompetent) fingers hadn't been able to avoid leaving in the longitudinal line.

Which probably still would have been fine, but somewhere on Excelsior Boulevard, the busiest road I wouldn't be able to avoid taking, I realized that the amount of slack had grown. The wind was getting between that piece of paneling and the wind, and trying to lift it up like a heavily starched sail, pulling loose my crappy knot in the process. Every time the front line went taut, I had to lean a little further forward to see the front end of the panel levitating somewhere above my windshield. The only thing holding it down now was a bunch of rope, a length of twine, and okay, my hand again.

It's probably just as well I had my hand up on the roof, because that way I could tell exactly when the panel snapped in half crossways.

Well, at least now I wouldn't have to lug the thing back into the store. And this was still vastly preferable to having it slide down over the windshield again, especially on Excelsior Boulevard, and even more especially with my kid in the car.

I pulled in to the very next parking lot with half the panel still on top of the car, and half of it resting on the median a few dozen yards behind us. M. Edium really wanted to join me on my expedition across two lanes of traffic to retrieve it, but there are times as a parent when you kind of have to say no.

When I got to it, I saw that the twine had sawed a gash into the front end of the panel a foot deep. When I got back to the car with it, I saw that the twine itself had been reduced to a vague collection of fibers where the panel had been sawing through it. So I guess there's something to be said for the unintentionally remarkable engineering feat of having both of them fail at the same time.

Now all I had to do was remove the remaining half from the roof, then hold up the two halves at an angle and stomp on them until they were broken into jagged pieces small enough to fit into the cargo area with the back seat up. As if the results of the bathroom project weren't sufficient evidence, never let it be said that I don't have skills with wood paneling.

The run wasn't a total failure, though. The leftover pieces of trim made it safely back to the store intact, and I got a full refund for them, as well as the other items from other stores I'd set out to cash in that morning.

And you know what else? The back half of that panel was on there rock-solid. I kind of wish I were still driving it around now, just to show what a half-bad-ass I am.

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