I have to say this: In that moment, Rachel was awesome. Meanwhile, I guess I probably have to describe the films to you. You’re being less awesome than Rachel, you stupid reader.
I mean, I’m the one who’s deciding you have to read about them, so really it’s me who is being a human poop factory right now.
This should come as a surprise to no one.
This is obviously just a partial list.
Earl, the Wrath of God II (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2005). Yes, I know. The II makes no sense. It should have been either Aguirre, the Wrath of God II, or Earl, the Wrath of God I. Whatever. At the time, Earl, the Wrath of God II just seemed to work. Also, we were eleven. Give us a break.
Anyway, Earl’s bravura performance as a psychotic fake-German-speaking Spanish conquistador was overshadowed by a near-total lack of plot, character development, intelligible dialogue, etc. In hindsight, we probably should have used less footage of Cat Stevens flipping out and attacking one of us. We also should have added subtitles, because there is no way to tell what Earl is trying to say. “Ich haufen mit staufen ZAUFENSTEINNN,” for example. It sounds great, but literally translated, it means “I pile/cluster/accumulation with [nonsense word] ALCOHOL-DRINKING-STONNNNE.”
Ran II (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2006). We really stepped it up for Ran II, with costumes, a soundtrack, weaponry, and a plot that we actually sat and tried to write down beforehand. Here goes: An emperor and his sons are having dinner. One of the sons makes fun of the emperor. The emperor becomes enraged and kills his own court jester. The wife of one of the other sons runs in and announces that she has just gotten remarried to another emperor. She is noogied to death. The second emperor, meanwhile, lives in a bathroom and eats soap, and has a lengthy freak-out scene when a messenger tells him that his wife is dead. The messenger turns out to be the rebellious son; the rebellious son, however, then makes the mistake of walking under a tree, where a mysterious assassin is waiting with some toothpaste. The assassin and the first emperor chase each other through the forest for a while. This causes the second emperor to have an even longer freak-out scene. Eventually, he runs into the living room and commits Elbow-Forehead Suicide, while the for-some-reason-alive-again court jester sings a very loud nonsense song.
And that’s when things get complicated.
Apocalypse Later (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2007). Again, not our best title. Once we found out what the apocalypse was, we thought that it was ridiculous that Apocalypse Now was not, in fact, about the End of the World. This movie can best be summed up like this:
1. Earl, wearing a bandanna and holding a Super Soaker, demands to know when the apocalypse is happening.
2. Offscreen, I tell Earl that the apocalypse is not for a while.
3. Earl sits in a chair and does a lot of cussing.
4. Repeat.
Star Peaces (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2007). It’s the year 2007 on planet Earth, not the future, and although he has an awesome name, Luke Crazy Bad-Ass is the lamest guy in his entire neighborhood. For example: His wallet contains nothing but pudding, and instead of wanting to make out with him, girls prefer to punch him in the stomach. Then he discovers two robots in a sandbox who tell him that he can move things with his mind. There is no evidence that this is true, but he tells everyone about it anyway, and when they ask him for a demonstration, he gets really angry and does the Robot Dance of Anger. At one point, he thinks that his bike is some kind of futuristic speeder and uses it to ride around Frick Park with a Super Soaker, making space noises with his lips and attacking people that he thinks are storm troopers. Then the police show up, as in, real policemen who were not in the script but who were called up by an old lady we almost ran over. This turned out to be awesome, because we hadn’t really written an ending.
Hello, Good-Die (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2008). Breakthrough! This was the first of many of our films to use sock puppets. James Bondage, British superspy, wakes up in bed with a beautiful woman, who is secretly a sock puppet. We know that it’s a secret from when James Bondage says, “The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet.”
Cat-ablanca (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2008). The thing is, cats can’t act.
2002 (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2009). We felt very liberated after watching 2001. If Aguirre, the Wrath of God taught us that the plot of a film doesn’t need to have a happy ending, 2001 taught us that a film doesn’t even need a plot in the first place, and a lot of its scenes can just be weird colors. Artistically, this is our most ambitious film, which also makes it the least fun to watch.
The Manchurian Cat-idate (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2010). Not only can cats not act, they also hate wearing clothes.
All in all we made forty-two films, starting with Earl, the Wrath of God II. We had a ritual for when each film was finished: We would burn the film to two DVDs, erase the film on Dad’s computer, and then I would take the raw footage out to the garbage behind our house while Earl smoked a cigarette. Mom usually watched disapprovingly while this happened—she thought we would want the footage for later, and also, while she tolerated the smoking, at the same time she wasn’t exactly the biggest fan—but she let us do it, because we didn’t give her a choice.
We didn’t want anyone watching the films but us. No one. Not Mom and Dad; we knew we couldn’t trust their opinions. Not our classmates; we didn’t care about their opinions, not after the Aguirre, the Wrath of God fiasco. Also, it’s not like we really were friends with any of them.
In Earl’s case, the fact is that he just didn’t give a shit about making friends. I was the closest friend he had, and aside from making films, we didn’t hang out all that much. In middle school he started spending a lot of time on his own; I didn’t know where he went, but it wasn’t his house or mine. There was a period where he was doing drugs, but I wasn’t really privy to any of that. It didn’t last very long, either; there were two movies that we did where he was sort of cracked out the whole time (Walk Lola Walk [2008], Gay.I. [2008]), and then pretty quickly he got himself together. By eighth grade, he had restricted himself to cigarettes. However, he remained a very solitary person, and there were weeks where I didn’t see him at all.
And as for me: In middle school I just had a hard time making friends. I don’t know why. If I knew why, it wouldn’t have been so impossible. One thing was that I just usually wasn’t interested in what other kids were interested in. For a lot of kids, it was sports or music, two things that I just couldn’t really get into. Music really only interested me as a soundtrack to a movie, and as for sports, I mean, come on. It’s some guys throwing some balls around, or trying to knock each other over, and you’re supposed to watch them for three hours at a time, and it just sort of seems like a waste. I dunno. I don’t want to sound condescending, so I’m not going to say anything else, except that it is literally impossible to imagine a thing dumber than sports.