LINCOLN

MOVIE: LINCOLN

Truly a President who had the Horsepower I need with the Luxury I deserve

STARRING: The Last of the Mohicans, Mama Gump and I THINK Tommy Lee Jones. I Think….

                                                 

                               

 

RUN TIME: My Mid-afternoon Nap

GENRE: Slow Clap

DRINKOMETER: One Barrell of Confederate Rye

Fuckin War and America and Shit! Fuck Yeah! 

WHY I WENT: I went to this film Blacked out under a different circumstance than my usual Happy Hour movie shenanigans. It’s 4pm on a Monday and I am wandering around Midtown Manhattan like an actor Zombie thanks to the Sunday afternoon nap that I awoke from at 8pm the night before and haven’t slept since. I had a big LES MIS audition that day that if cast, would pay me good money to spend the months of January through April in warm, sunny Northeast Florida. And I get to be in LES MIS! Safe to say, I really prepped the crap out of this audition.

GAH! Please let me in your crappy production so I can go to Florida for the winter!

After sitting around for 5 plus hours in the hallway of Pearl Studios on 36^th and 8^th staring at all sorts of 19 year old, beautiful, wannabe Broadway starlettes as they clamored and gossiped whilst anxiously waiting for their 16 Bars of singing to show the world what they got (I’m feeling old for the first time in my life), It finally gets the guys portion of the call. I haven’t been on an open call in years. I swore them off and soon I would remember why.

These guys definitely beat me out for my role(s) in Les Mis

I look around and see nothing but boyish looking, 5’5 – 5’9 gay musical theatre types, barely 18 years old, more dancer than singer, and I smile to myself. I’m a Lock! Certainly a 6’2 rugged looking twenty seven year old with a booming voice and countless musical theatre credits and 9 years of NYC experience like me is EXACTLY the type this Regional Theatre would die to have for their production. Because there are so many guys who showed up, some just minutes before, we get called into the audition room twenty at a time to get “Typed” (Based on looks alone, they immediately narrow the field and ask a select few to sing. Its pretty degrading) I’m even happier now, it means less wait time when I’m selected.

More of "The Type" They were looking for

I go in to the room with all the other queens and I hold up my card and smile and walk out and….I get typed out.  My pride hurt, my day wasted and all those gorgeous young girls I won’t have the chance to blow away in Florida. I will rant at how infuriating this process at some point but for now, I am focusing on my next big audition, The Phantom of the Opera.

So here I am, my day wasted and I have a performance in AIDA at The MET later that night. (At least I could mope to the MET where I’m getting paid to perform. Take that Florida Regional Theater) I don’t want to go back to Astoria, Queens just to chill for a minute and come all the way back and same goes for any other neighborhood. I’m drowsy, nauseous, broke and all I can think about is finding a place to nap or I will NOT make it through the show. I go to the MET and register for my official I.D. secretly looking for a couch or pile of curtains to cuddle up on for a moment. NaDa. Nothing is better than having an I.D. card picture taken when you haven’t slept in a day and your performer’s ego just took a 5 hour long slap in the face.

Harnessing the Misery needed to portray The Phantom of The Opera

And then I realize, Oh Yeah, The Movie theatre is right across the street! At this point, I am willing to pay for a ticket to sit alone and go lights out for a bit. But what movie do I know will be so uninteresting, so hollywoody and sappy and crappy and wrong and long, against everything I stand for with movies while not being to loud so I get the best bang for my buck that I will SURELY sleep right through it? Twighlight? No…There’s Wearwolves. Hitchcock? No…not long enough and there’s a chance I may become interested in it. Skyfall? No…It’s the greatest movie ever. AH-HA! The she is –

LINCOLN!

“Ill take one for the 5pm Lincoln please”

“That will be $4,789 sir”

“Here Ya Go. Thanks.”

Hello America I'm New York...I mean Abraham Lincoln

PLOT: I don’t know. I really did get quite a nap in on this guy. It starts off with a PG version of a gruesome, muddy, civil war battle and then Lincoln is talking to these black soldiers while posting up on a buggy or something and thennnnn I fade….I wake and There’s a courthouse? Congress? Fat men in wigs? Fade...Wake Annnnd Sally Field. Fade…Wake annnnnd a lot of men in wigs going “Hub a bub a hub a bub a I Object a bub a hub a beep bop a Not on my land a bub a hub a here yee here yee” And then the 13^th amendment is passed and there’s a slow clap and Tommy Lee Jones, is that Tommy Lee Jones? Yeah that’s Tommy lee Jones. Huh….I didn’t know he was in this…And Tommy Lee Jones is banging his black house servant secretly (Duh like all of our founding fathers were doing) and there’s a slow clap and Robert E. Lee leaving Appomatix Court House and all the Union Guys take their caps off to him in a very slow clappy way and he rides off into the sun and Lincoln gets shot and the movie ends I think and all the old timers in the theatre enjoying this very important early bird movie special start slow clapping and I leave, fresh and rested. Ironically because I am off to the Opera. Thanks Lincoln. I will always never remember you.

*NOTE: Downside of the movie nap. I fell asleep on top of my arm, causing my elbow to grind into the cup holder. As a result, I awoke with my right hand asleep, and the right pinky and ring finger stayed that way for THREE DAYS. It was truly creepy. I mentally prepared myself to cut it off. Thank God it went away because if it didn’t, ooooo boy Spielberg would have SUCH a law suit up his famous ass.

Great Uncle Edwin. See the resemblance?

**NOTE 2: I am a direct blood line descendant of Edwin Booth, John Wilkes brother and Premier stage actor of his Time. Edwin started the players club downtown which still exists today. He wanted a place where educated artists could have discussions with politicians and business over good dinner and drinks. Go figure, Uncle Ed thought the arts were IMPORTANT and some actors were SMART enough to hold intelligent and possibly effective dialogues with those who run the business of our great country…I should probably join. 

WHY THIS FILM IS IMPORTANT: It isn't

HOW DRUNK WAS I: Luckily for the sake of all the Lincoln Center Upper West Side geezers at the theater, not at all. But I DID black out during the film, well for most of it, which made it bearable.

WHAT YOU SHOULD WATCH INSTEAD: Mel Gibson's The Patriot

If I am going to watch an American Historical movie that is way too long, completely mutilates history and cost too much to make, it should at least me done by Mel Gibson. We immediately know it will be false AND I'm guaranteed some awesome action scenes. The movie ends with Mel Gibson Spearing the evil British General Jeremy Issacs through the heart WITH THE AMERICAN FLAG! Thus planting it in the ground and staking our claim to this great land. Now That's the way I want a movie to lie to me.

OR WATCH: Saving Private Ryan

At least Spielberg took a chance with this film and was not afraid to show the audience a first person view of the horrors of war. I remember my grandfather, who stormed Normandy, telling me as a boy that was EXACTLY what it was like, and that this movie was important. The film was not about politics or ideals, American BS or or preaching the glory of war. The film was about a war these soldiers couldn't control in a land they did not know, fighting enemies they did not understand and forced to take on a simple yet horrifying mission to find one soldier who lost all of his brothers so that a mother's entire blood line was not eradicated.

CLOSING THOUGHTS: I wish Hollywood would stop trying to glorify War and our Presidents and our History and keep telling the Same BS that is taught to us in our History Books in a mere ten page chapter in 4^th Grade. Lincoln was not against Slavery on a moral level per se, he was against a booming southern economy taking advantage of free labor and hoarding all of the raw goods the industrial north needed to build and thrive. It was Bullshit. We were all under the same union so we should all have rights to the same commodities so we can all succeed as a country and continue to grow right? Well that is what Lincoln thought too.

Now a days we call this "Propoganda"

See, Lincoln was against the possibility of America, much of which had yet to be annexed, NOT becoming the gigantic, disconnected, to big to agree on anything, megalythic mess of a country that it is now. He allowed 600,000 men to die, several cities to be burned and raided and a newly formed country, still distinguishing itself (much like we tried to separate from the UK during the revolution) to be torn apart. He believed so heavily in the idea of A Union because he was scared of losing the south's resources and Angry that they were harvesting them for free. You want to know why the south still hangs the rebel flag? Go ask them. It isn’t over slavery. The ONLY redeeming fact of the Civil War was that it put the wheels in motion for Slavery to be abolished not just on paper but in reality. True evil is removing another person's choice.

 LINCOLN not only fails to push any boundaries or make any semblance of a controversial attempt to do so through the eyes of one of our greatest living character actors Daniel Day Lewis, but it is “Family Friendly” War and Politics are not Family friendly. If it weren’t for the fact that I was so exhausted, I would have waited to watch this film from the comforts of my mom’s living room recliner, with a good bottle of scotch in one hand and a bad bottle in the other, ready to be hurled at the screen. God I think I need a nap.

A kitty two minutes in to watching the movie Lincoln