blogs-of-our-lives

[blogs-of-our-lives]

           I’m sorry to say this, but this may very well be the last of the Blogs of Our Lives post.

           :(

           I’ve had a lot of fun writing for this, but it’s just not what I want to do with my life. And as much as I enjoy it, it’s taking time away from other creative projects. For my tens of viewers, it’s not the end of a chapter, but the beginning of a new one. Thank you all for reading, and believing that I can make something wonderful and funny out of trash. I just want you all to know that deep down, from the bottom of my heart, no matter how much love I have for you all, I will never ever ever love you as much as I hate Brightburn.

             Brightburn suuuuuuuucks. It sucks sucks sucks. I couldn’t wait until later in the post to say that. I had to lead with how trash the movie was, and now I’m going to spend the next couple pages explaining why it’s trash. It’s so bad that I – shitty movie connoisseur, who is making himself watch Days of our Lives and write about it – hated the movie so much that I decided to write a whole paper about it just to prevent someone else from being tricked into seeing it.

           I will start with the only good thing about the movie. The concept. Brightburn is about a young kid (I’d estimate about sixth grade) who discovers he has super powers akin to that of a god. He has super strength, he has super speed, he can fly, he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and he’s almost indestructible. Essentially Superman. It’s not a particularly original idea, but I was intrigued with the fact that the kid seemed to almost immediately become evil. This isn’t particularly farfetched. In fact, psychopathic traits are fairly common amongst children. The brain isn’t done developing, and in some senses the child is a psychopath. Kids simply grow out of it. Luckily, kids are small, they’re weak, they can’t drive, they can’t vote, and they can’t even get a movie ticket to an R rated movie like Brightburn, which I refuse to grant the respect of italicization. The amount of damage a kid could do is extremely limited. So the idea of a middle-schooler with superpowers is kind of terrifying. Imagine a child without empathy who you can kick your ass. If you tell them to go to bed, they can throw you through a wall. And it’s not a one in a million chance the kid will be a psychopath. Plus, when I was a kid I used to think when it rained somewhere it rained everywhere. It blew my mind that it was raining in my hometown but not in my friend’s town. When my dad was a kid he was terrified of this movie called Killdozer. About a bulldozer that came to life and killed people. In his words, “What are you going to do, hide from it? It’ll just bulldoze everything.” Kids are idiots.

           Side note, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that I italicized Killdozer but not Brightburn. It’s intentional. I respect a movie about a killer bulldozer more than a $12 million movie.

           Anyway, that was the only good part of the movie. The concept. Now I’m going to tear it apart, starting with the pacing. Nobody really knows or cares about the pacing when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, the movies often feel like they stagnate or are rushed in parts. Brightburn is one of the worst examples I can think of. The buildup just drags on and on and on and on. By the time [SPOILER ALERT] Brendon (or whatever the fucking kid’s name is) turns evil, we had been sitting in that theater for a solid hour. Maybe more. That’s two thirds of the movie (including credits) that was spent just building up. So now, when we finally get the action payoff, it felt like the movie was rushing to the end. The kid destroys most of the house, kills four people, and then blows up a plane in like twenty minutes. It’s like trying to write on a piece of paper and running out of room so you have to make the letters smaller and smaller to fit on one page. But it’s a thousand times worse than that, because the paper had a set length. You could plan out where the letters needed to go and how big they can be. A movie isn’t made with a length in mind. So it’s like reading a sentence but the letters get smaller and smaller for no clear reason. It felt like they didn’t know how to end the movie so they just threw some crap together and tried to play it so fast we wouldn’t realize how trash it was.

           On to the acting. I have no real complaints. The mom and the dad did pretty good jobs. Even the kid did a decent job. At times it was pretty weak, but I think most of that was on the writing.

           Fuck the writing. The Chekov’s guns of the movie were stupid and obvious. In one of the first scenes, the mother whistles during a game of hide and seek in order to get him to whistle back, like an off-brand Marco Polo. My editor literally leaned over to me (like two minutes into the movie) and whispered “I bet that’s going to come back later.” It did. Later on in the movie, the dad comments to the mom that it was strange Braxton had never broken a bone or even got a cut. Like two scenes later, the kid finds his space ship and immediately cuts his hand on the metal. Sure enough, it comes back later in the film, in a way so stupid that I’m going to struggle to put it into words. The mother jumps to freedom from her house and somehow cuts her hand during the fall. She looks at the cut (which is shaped exactly like Bryson’s and positioned in the exact same place), looks at the barn where the spaceship is hidden, looks back at the cut, and says (I’m paraphrasing) “The spaceship! It’s the only thing that can hurt him.” The biggest sign of a bad writer is when the characters think about what they’re about to do, say what they’re about to do, and then do it. JUST DO IT. I remembered the garbage scene from earlier in the film that established the only thing that can hurt him. Who was that line for? Children who weren’t paying attention? The film was rated R. Maybe they assumed the only people they could trick into seeing this trash were too stupid to follow a plot. And yes, I’m one of the idiots they tricked into watching it. Jokes on them, now I’m tearing their movie apart on my blog with tens of readers.

           I’ve told you guys about I, Frankenstein. The movie was worse than that. At least the writing in I, Frankenstein, while bad, followed a formula. There was never a point in which I rolled my eyes, it just in generally wasn’t particularly good. Brightburn, on the other hand, was aggressively bad. It was like all the different facets of a movie (acting, special effects, writing, pacing, visuals) had a competition to be the worst part of this dumpster fire of a film. I’m being too hard on the special effects. They were just wildly unmemorable, not actually bad. But somehow, incredibly, Brightburn was even worse than the sum of its parts. At a certain point, I looked up and started watching the blinking light of the fire alarm. There wasn’t really a pattern to it. I was fascinated. At another point, during the resolution of the movie, a man sitting behind me got out his phone and made a phone call. And you know what, I don’t blame him. It wasn’t like he was taking away from the experience. I was glad he was having more fun than me.

           Something I didn’t realize until now, when I looked up Brightburn on Wikipedia to trash how much money went into making it ($6-12 million, so honestly they used the money pretty well), was that it’s called a “superhero horror film.” I took a class my last year in college about Horror as a genre, and the running theme of the class was the question what is horror? I’ll define horror as best as I can, and you are all free to agree or disagree as to whether or not it’s true. I personally do not consider Silence of the Lambs to be a horror film, though it is scary. It’s a crime film. Even if the film contained supernatural elements (like, say, if Hannibal Lecter was a ghost and rather than breaking out of prison he comes back to life), it would still be a crime film. On the other hand, I consider the movie Friday the 13th (the 1980 film with Kevin Bacon, not the trash remake) to be horror. Even if the film contained no supernatural elements, it would still be a horror film. Friday the 13th Part 1 doesn’t actually contain anything supernatural, but if I mentioned one that does (Parts 2-12) I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to remind everyone that a young Kevin Bacon not only dies in this movie, but also has a sex scene. It’s arguably his strongest performance.

           Returning to my point, a universal part of horror seems to be the haunting. It doesn’t need to be a ghost haunting, it could be a human haunting as well. I’m sure it exists, but a movie about a stalker could easily be classified as horror, depending on the tone of the movie. Hell, The Gift was a great horror movie, and nothing supernatural or even particularly out of the ordinary took place. Looking at IMDB’s top 10 horror movies of all time, it lists The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street (trash), Psycho, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Of these movies, I haven’t seen Psycho, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or The Exorcist (at least not all the way through). In every single one of the films I have seen, the characters are haunted by some kind of being. In some movies, they’re hunted by it, and in others (particularly the Exorcist), they’re tormented by it. But either way, a haunting is an essential part of every movie. In Silence of the Lambs (IMDB rated it as the 14th best horror movie, naturally), the killer never haunts the characters. He’s a menace, a killer, and a danger to everyone, but he doesn’t haunt them.

           Brando from Brightburn never haunts anyone, except for a ten second scene where he spies on his crush, which was honestly more cringey than creepy. So no, it’s not a superhero horror movie. It’s not a horror movie. If you want to call it anything, call it science fiction. The kid’s an alien, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t that like the number one test to see if you’re watching sci-fi? Right now, if you google “horror movies,” Brightburn is one of the first 10 images to appear. THIS IS UNNACEPTABLE.

           I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but horror has always been a trash genre. I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m the horror equivalent of a comic book nerd writing about how The Avengers ruined my childhood and it was all wrong because they got one detail wrong from the source material. [Side note: I really enjoyed Endgame, and at the time of writing this, it is the number one highest grossing film of all time, and honestly it deserves it more than the trash blue cat people movie. It was a really satisfying ending to one of the largest franchises of all time]. Even the golden years of horror, the Friday the 13ths and the Nightmare on Elm Streets and Halloween, are all just… pretty good. The writing was competent, the music and cinematography were original and not bad, but it’s not particularly scary, and it looks like every horror movie will eventually become that way, except for the ones that rely on cheap jump scares. That’s the nature of horror, I suppose. It preys on a current and relevant fear, and as that fear becomes irrelevant, so does the movie. So when I complain about modern horror, I complain about the cheap, shitty writing that goes into by uncreative and unoriginal people that disappoints everyone. Modern horror is an easy paycheck. It’s cheap and it’s surefire. The Brightburn garbage raised $30 million dollars on a budget of $6 million. Pet Semetary, Crawl, and Annabelle Comes Home raised a collective $366 million to a collective budget of $66 million. That is a fucking absurd return on investment. None of these movies (except for Crawl, kinda) did anything different. Pet Semetary was a remake. Annabelle Comes Home is a continuation of the Garbage Cinematic Uni-garbage-verse that spawned from The Conjuring. So horror has become a yearly money-maker for big production companies. Just put out some trash that will surprise (not scare) people, and watch the dollars roll in. Financially, this is the golden age of horror. They can make anything with a jump scare and make MILLIONS.

           I don’t know what the point of all this is. I’m not telling the genre to do better, because it’s doing pretty fine. Midsommar and Us both got pretty good reviews. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark looks pretty good. It’s not like all the talent dried up. There’s still plenty of creative and original people working on horror movies, and they’re making some really good stuff. I guess it boils down to me hating Brightburn on a deep, personal level, and I’m not really sure why. I watch tons of trash. As I type this, I’m looking at my collector’s edition DVD set of Under the Dome. It’s garbage. Truly truly terrible. But there are scenes I liked. Shots I liked. It was made by people who were bad at what they do, but they were still creative. There’s this one episode where the government tries to blow up the dome, and everyone inside thinks they’re going to die. All the characters, thinking they have minutes left on earth, all finally do something. The plot unravels into something much, much, much simpler, as all the characters stop lying or trying to hide their motives. Everything untangles for just a moment, and after they survive the blast unharmed, it leaves the question what next? Sure, the conflicts were childish and silly, and the character arcs were (to put it nicely) poorly handled. But they tried to do something well, and for just a moment they struck gold. There’s nothing like that in Brightburn. There’s not a single scene that I can look at in the movie and say you’re on to something there. Keep working. If I were given the script and a blank check and told to write a better one, I would strip it down to the foundation. I wouldn’t rewrite it, I would delete everything except the core premise and start over.

           It just really really hurts, having to type out that this movie was worse than Under the Dome.

           I know it’s too late to convince anyone not to see Brightburn. And that’s fine. Sometimes the world moves too fast for you to make a change. But I just want you to know deep down how much I hate that movie. I resent it for wasting my time, my energy, and my money. It’s worse than Days of our Lives.

           Fuck you, Brightburn.

           Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me.

[blogs-of-our-lives]

How to Make the Perfect Gin & Tonic... Ingredient #2 May Surprise You

[blogs-of-our-lives]

I, Frankenstein is a Trash Movie

           I’ve been putting off writing this for some time now. I watched Episode 98 immediately after watching 97, and you can tell it was getting a little hazy by the end. I can vaguely remember the beginning of the episode, and that’s when my memory was at its clearest. So I may take some creative liberties and make my own plot as I go.

           Welcome to Carter’s nightmare carnival funhouse version of Days of our Lives.

           This show makes me sad. I write way way way slower than they produce episodes. As I write this review for Episode 98, they’ve already released episode 205. Granted, I have no intentions of following it every day (episode 200 has a thumbnail of Ciara passed out on the floor as an obviously fake fire consumes her house, so I’m abso-fucking-lutely reviewing that one next), but the blistering pace that this show takes is disheartening. It just goes to show that life moves fast. You blink, and kids your age are getting married. In the previous NFL draft, the Buffalo Bills selected linebacker Tremaine Edmunds in the first round, at the age of 19. He’s younger than I am. That’s ridiculous. I’m getting old, fast.

           The episode opens with John at the hospital. He looks flustered, glancing around desperately. For those who haven’t read about the previous episode, the last we saw John, he had just entered the Dimera mausoleum with Will. As the door shuts, we hear a gunshot. Shortly behind him is Paul (wearing a black leather jacket, everybody in this show is wearing a black leather jacket, it’s like the soap opera version of Sons of Anarchy).

“What have you done?” Paul asks, staring in horror at the floor.

John steps in behind him, holding a comically small gun. “The same thing I’m going to do to you,” he says. It cuts to the outside of the mausoleum, where we hear another gunshot.

I didn’t mention this last episode, but imagine if that was the last thing you heard. It was clearly not a sincere question. Paul knew what happened. Ugh. I hate that line so much. Imagine your first memories. Imagine kindergarten, first grade, all the way up to middle school and high school. Every moment of your life, every love and every regret, every moment of anger or sadness, has been leading up to an old guy in a black leather jacket with a tiny gun saying “The same thing I’m going to do to you” and then shooting you.

Anyway, we’re caught up. John is distressed, and at this point it’s kind of unclear what he’s trying to do. I can’t remember if John is trying to finish off Steve (John is a spy tasked with killing Steve, the eyepatch guy), trying to tell his wife (Will’s grandma, and just so you guys all know, there’s no coming back from murdering someone’s grandson. No amount of foot rubs and boxes of chocolate shaped like hearts can help you come back from murdering your wife’s grandson) that he’s a spy, or maybe he just had a moment of clarity and realized that Days of our Lives can only rent like three sets at one time and he truly had nowhere else to go.

I’ll just tell you all the truth. Will and Paul are alive. They both make an appearance on the thumbnail of episode 191, and unless it’s from a flashback (more on that later), they survived. Just as a good rule of thumb, if this show wants you to think somebody is dead, they’re probably alive.

Fun fact, when someone on the show says “They’re in a better place” when talking about a dead character, they’re telling the truth.

Oh god, I just realized that it doesn’t even matter. They’ve blurred the lines between life and death so much (Will returning from the dead with amnesia, the Salem Stalker victims returning to life, John dying in a car accident and somehow appearing in this episode) that there truly is no reason to believe anyone is dead. It doesn’t matter if an actual licensed doctor comes on screen and pronounces the character dead. You could probably bring back your favorite character just by emailing the producer. The email is [REDACTED BY EDITOR – You absolutely may not use my personal email address], by the way. Email that at least twice a day every day, and soon you’ll get your character back.

The scene cuts to a man and a woman standing next to each other in front of the Dimera mausoleum. The mausoleum has “DIMERA” etched into the marble, just in case the viewer has forgotten that scene from less than 24 hours earlier. It could have easily been confused with any of the thousands of mausoleums that appear in our day to day television. These two people (the woman is a former lover of Andre Dimera, the most recent Dimera to pass away – which apparently is common enough that it merits the need for a mausoleum – and the man is of absolutely no consequence and isn’t worth the number of words I’ve invested in him already) take up most of the episode, pondering Andre’s life in front of his tomb, before they will presumably enter and discover Paul and Will’s “bodies” (I have no idea what they will find there), but are also painfully boring. I’ve said before that a single Days of Our Lives episode contains very little content. Usually it has about a conversation’s worth of information. For example, the description of episode 189 is “Kate makes a huge confession to Chad.” Presumably they also talk about the confession, right? Usually not. Usually the episode breaks down in the following way: Kate sees Chad and says hello, cut to other characters, cut to commercials, Kate says she has a confession, cut to other characters, cut to commercials, Kate says the confession, cut straight to commercials, Chad looks upset, the episode ends.

This is a very long-winded way of me telling you that it takes the full 60 minutes of Days of our Lives for the two people to enter the goddamn tomb.

It’s about time I talk about the flashbacks. I don’t remember what each individual flashback contained, but there were two or three in this episode. And holy crap, they were genius. Not the content of the flashbacks, but the idea of them. Because they literally reused old Days of our Lives footage. Imagine if I could copy and paste bits of previous Blogs of our Lives episodes, label them as a flashback, and call it a day. Oh man, I am jealous of the writers. Until I remember they’re stuck in the Fields of Asphodel that is being a writer for Days of Our Lives.

Naturally, the flashbacks have slightly lower quality than the episode itself. We live in an age of progress, and in a few years, even the most recent movies will look dated. But this is just absurd. It looks like someone went frame by frame and printed out the entirety of the flashback, photocopied them, photocopied them again, and put them back in. Also the audio sucks. I don’t have anything poetic to say about it. It just sounds like the voice actors did their recordings via walkie-talkies.

Remember Gabi, the chic murderer? Well now she’s talking with a police officer in the station. He’s trying to get help her out, clearly a friend of hers. “You’re going to be home to see your daughter soon,” he said.

“That’s not likely,” a woman says, strutting into the room. She’s got a satisfied, smug smirk. “I’m pressing charges.” Ah, she must be the DA. I think? Is that how law works? The DA can just press charges? Does that mean that she just as easily could have chosen not to? For murder? I’ll give DOOL a pass because I don’t understand it myself.

And now my notes start making even less sense. The handwriting is larger and sloppier and mostly illegible.

The former lover of Andre Dimera and the man accompanying her continue on their Hamlet-style soliloquy, talking and talking and talking and just standing outside the damn mausoleum. Finally, she opens the door and gasps, before the camera fades to black, ending the episode. Which is the biggest cop out I’ve ever seen, but nothing in this show surprises me anymore. I’m not mad, just disappointed. I’m telling you guys, an hour of Days of our Lives contains about five minutes of something actually happening.

Of course, this isn’t the end of my notes. I will transcribe them below exactly as it is written:

·       GUY IS MURDRER

·       WOMAN SEES THINGS

·       PUNTS SRYNGE IN SLEVE

·       FIGHTS OF ANGELS AND ALL THAT

All of these wonderful pieces of insight culminate in a full page entry, in all caps, on the next page. SHE FINDS HIM THERE.

I don’t know. I was going to put more to that sentence, but I realized it answered every question one could possibly have about that list. Why did I forget how to spell? I don’t know. Presumably I was in a rush to get all my ideas down. Where does the syringe (or rather srynge) come in? Who is the woman that sees things? Why are the angels fighting? I don’t know.

My best guess is that John Black stole a syringe to inject Steve with poison, seeing as both were in the hospital. Which opens up the possibility that I meant to write “punts srynge in STEVE.” Somehow I doubt that, however. I assume I meant “flights of angels,” a Shakespeare reference. Who even knows. You guys can probably decipher my notes better than I can.

The other day, I was at Walmart (while procrastinating writing this, and I suppose in a way I’m still procrastinating by writing this side segment), when the $3 movie bin caught my eye. I’m drawn to it every time. I love DVDs (there’s something to be said about physical media rather than digital), I’m a cheap bastard who loves cheap-ass shit, and I love love love love love bad movies. More on that later.

I found a three movie collection of Prom Nights 1-4, starring Jaime Lee Curtis. It seemed to be some kind of an off-brand Carrie. Also, for those of you with keen eyes, it was not a mistake that the 3 movie collection contained 1-4. For whatever reason, the set contained Prom Night, Prom Night 2, and Prom Night 4. Why not Prom Night 3? Won’t I be lost without knowing what happened between Prom Night 2 and Prom Night 4?

I truly, sincerely believe I have good taste in movies. I watch a lot of good movies and can understand what makes them good and why. However, on one fateful day about three years ago, I discovered that it was far easier to enjoy a bad movie with your friends than a good one. I get upset if people talk during a good movie, and don’t care if people talk during a bad movie. We can make fun of bad movies, but not good movies. Most of all, a good movie often invokes a specific mood. It’s hard to match that mood with a group of people. A bad movie also invokes a specific mood, always laughter, which is very easy to match with a group of people.

Which is why I’ve seen Fridays the 13th Parts 1-8, Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason, Nightmares on Elm Street 1-3, FACE/OFF, The Room, a lot of Scooby-Doo direct to DVD movies, Scared Shrekless (in my defense that was a gift), The Wickerman (the one with Nicholas Cage, obviously), The Gingerdead Man (starring Gary Busey), Starship Troopers (starring Gary Busey’s son), Antz, Darkman (treat yourself, it’s pretty great), Flushed Away (I enjoyed this one a little too genuinely), Birdemic: Shock and Terror, S. Darko, Jurassic Park III, Vampires Suck (not as much as that movie did), Hellraiser, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Meet the Robinsons, Hannibal Rising (swapping Jodie Foster for Julianne Moore was a poor decision), Alvin and the Chipmunks, Eragon (sweet Jesus Christ, I forgot about Eragon), Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, The Conjuring (people will try to tell you the Conjuring is a good movie… don’t let them), Ouija, The Boy, and The Visit. Honorable mention goes out to Rubber, which isn’t actually a bad movie, and one other.

I, Frankenstein.

A movie so bad its title needed to be separated so it couldn’t taint any other sentences. The worst movie I’ve ever seen. But I can save that for another post.

You’ll notice that a lot of these movies are horror. I looove horror movies, so I say this with all the love in my heart. It’s a trash genre. I’ve never seen anything like it. For every one good horror movie, there are at least fifty horrible ones. Not fifty bad ones. Fifty horrible ones. I’ll talk about horror as a genre next time, but I’ll leave you with an anecdote. My friends and I wanted to watch a horror movie, so we found a list of the Top 100 Horror Movies of All Time. We didn’t recognize a single movie until #50, and they had the movie Oculus as the 25th best horror movie of all time. That’s ridiculous. The nicest thing I have to say about Oculus was there were a lot of parts of the movie where I didn’t want to get up and leave. There were a lot of mediocre scenes, and I mean that as a compliment. I thought about this for a moment, that Oculus was ranked 25th of all time, and realized that’s about right. There are so so so few good horror movies, and just an absurd amount are terrible. I think it’s due to the fact that all horror movies are vaguely formulaic, relying on tropes for the genre. It makes them really easy to write and produce.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I’ll have the next Blogs of our Lives out much sooner than I got this one out.

Fuck I, Frankenstein.

[blogs-of-our-lives]

Season 53 Episode 95: Lani Has A Secret

           I like to describe my relationship with Beth as ‘friends with benefits,’ only instead of sex the benefits are that we get drunk and watch Scooby-doo. Off the top of my head, we’ve watched the entire original series, the majority of What’s New Scooby Doo, Scooby Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, Scooby Doo and the Loch Ness Monster, Scooby Doo and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery (yes, that KISS), and a pretty big portion of Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf. That’s a lot of Scooby Doo. So when we hit rock bottom (Reluctant Werewolf), we kind of silently agreed to find a new hobby. I suggested Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere (who should have known better than to be in the movie). For whatever reason, Beth wasn’t interested. Killing time one night, we discovered Days of Our Lives. All the most recent episodes are available on the NBC website, dating back about a month or two, if anyone is interested in watching them. Otherwise it’s on at two in the afternoon most days.

           Now, Days has been out since 1965. By the time we landed on the moon, the United States had been enjoying a solid four seasons of Days of Our Lives. Martin Luther King Jr. might have seen a couple of seasons. And I’m willing to bet that someone at Woodstock had enjoyed a few episodes. So naturally I was unwilling and unable to start from the beginning of the series. If I watched an episode a day every day, I wouldn’t be caught up for over 30 years, and that’s not counting the fact that they’re still producing episodes. If I watched Days of Our Lives all day every day, it would take me 418 days to catch up.

           I started with Episode 95… of Season 53. Holy shit.

           This might help put into context how old this show is. There’s a character in this episode named JJ. It’s hard to guess his age, but I’m going to say that he’s – at the youngest – only in his mid-twenties. He’s the child of Jack and Jennifer, two characters of the show. Jack and Jennifer started dating, got married, had a child, and that child was JJ. He then grew up as the show went on, until he is old enough now to consider marriage. There are characters that are born into the show, and the show begins to follow them after they age to an adult. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s like the children are born into a nightmarish hell of being forced to continue where their parents left off. This show has outlived many. People have been born into the shadow of Days of Our Lives and have died under its inky wings of death.  

           The description of the episode I watched is “Gabi is booked on murder charges; Brady and Eve go on their first real date; Lani makes a confession to Eli; Claire realizes Ciara and Tripp are keeping a secret.”

           I admit, the murder charges bit caught my eye. I like a little bit of mystery, especially when I expect the rest of the show is filled with love triangles and comparatively boring day to day minutiae. I was terribly wrong with that assumption, but I’ll get to that later.

           Now, Days is pretty self-aware. It knows that nobody cares enough to watch each episode. So the characters use names enough for the casual viewer to catch on quickly. I learned who Gabi, Lani, and JJ were pretty quickly. Ciara, Claire, and Tripp don’t make an appearance until the end, which I didn’t mind, because his name is Tripp. Anybody who names their child Tripp doesn’t deserve to have a child.

           Gabi seems to be a person of interest in some kind of investigation. At first, I suspected some kind of white collar crime, but I was wrong. They’re reviewing security footage. A character named Rafe tells Gabi that she may be a suspect.

           And all of a sudden we’re with Lani and JJ, who are eating together at some kind of café. Wait, what? Mid conversation, after just a brief lull, the viewer is immediately taken to a different set with different characters and a different plot. There was no segue, nor even a real stopping point. It may have been mid-sentence for all the sense it made. It was about as jarring as if the whole episode was just a long and complex intro to a Scooby Doo movie I was tricked into watching. You quickly get used to the storyline jumping, however.

           JJ is without a doubt my favorite character, because in the few episodes I’ve seen of him. He doesn’t really do anything. When he speaks with Lani, she goes on a long rant about how difficult being pregnant is, despite the fact that she’s about two weeks pregnant. Note the word choice I used. She ranted to him. They didn’t have a conversation, because that implies he participated. She spoke at him. There’s only one circumstance that makes it okay for someone to talk to you like that, and usually you call the other person “professor.” But that’s not why I like him. I like him because it happened to him with another character. This poor guy’s luck, that he just happens to run into the two most narcissistic and talkative people alive. The guy probably hasn’t been home in three days, his boss is calling him wondering why he hasn’t shown up for work, his family is texting him worried sick, the police are starting a missing person report because these two people just have to have JJ be the one sitting across the table as they talk pretty much to themselves.  Meanwhile, JJ nods.

           In a flashback, Lani is speaking to an older woman, possibly her mother. Lani’s character is keeping some kind of secret, though it’s unclear from whom. Her father? JJ? Any of the other male characters? “If you don’t tell him, I will,” her mother ominously warns.

           After there’s a pause in the baby conversation, we’re back to Gabi and her investigation. Apparently she’s suspected of murder. “I can’t go back to prison,” she said.

           Did you say back? You’ve been to prison before? Honestly it doesn’t even matter at this point. We’ve burned through about half a bottle of Grey Goose between the two of us, and I don’t even care if Gabi goes to prison anyway. I’m all about JJ and Lani, and whatever secret she’s keeping from him right now. Beth, if you’re reading this, martinis are gross, and I wish you liked tequila so I could make a better mixed drink. If anyone has any good vodka drinks, for the love of god let me know.

           Throughout all this there’s a date between Brady and Eve in the background. Apparently they used to have a no strings attached type arrangement. Neither are particularly interesting characters and the date is terrible. At some point they turn it into a business meeting and start brainstorming ways for their magazine to reach out to the young white woman demographic. Their waitress (who happens to be Claire) is a young white woman, so they ask her what product would interest her. She answers, “Um… a time machine. Definitely. Yeah my boyfriend and I are in the ultimate long distance relationship.” This is really interesting for several reasons, one of them being that a few episodes later the thumbnail is her, naked in bed with Tripp. I don’t have a good feeling about their relationship.

           “Poor girl,” Eve said afterwards. “Probably thinks that she’s the only person in the world right now that’s alone.” I’m noticing that about once an episode there will be a really well written quote. Every so often they’ll strike gold, then go back to their usual writing quality.

           The best part of the date is that Eve has a glass of wine in front of her, without any condensation on the glass. Which makes sense, because as time goes on, the condensation will change, and the viewer can tell when different takes are being used in the final cut. For the same reason, movie studios have employees making sure that costumes and props stay consistent from scene to scene (making sure a watch doesn’t switch hands, for example, or that the actors don’t move their silverware). So Eve’s glass of wine is probably just a glass of apple juice at room temperature. Brady, on the other hand, has a mixed drink filled with ice, which he frequently drinks from. In conclusion, I’m pretty sure the actor who plays Brady had actual alcohol in his glass. I can’t say I blame him.

So now we move onto Tripp, Ciara, and Claire. Ciara is Claire’s aunt (they’re the same age, both mid-twenties), and for some reason they both live in an apartment together. That’s fine. Tripp also lives there. Also fine. Claire looks like Elsa Jean. Like, a spitting image. If you don’t recognize the name, don’t bother googling it. She just has light blonde hair and a VERY strong jawline.

           Ciara and Claire get an invitation for Rafe’s wedding to… Gabi I think? Ciara invites Tripp to be her plus one. “Too bad Theo isn’t going to be there,” she said, looking Claire dead in the eyes. “You’ll have to sit all on your lonesome.”

           Wow. That’s a real bitch move, Ciara. Capital B. Worse, that was a binch move.

           Not much interesting happens in the Claire, Ciara, and Tripp storyline. Tripp seems to like Claire. Ciara seems to like Theo. Judging from his body language I get the sense that Tripp is into Ciara as well. There’s nothing else worth noting, which is perfect because the next (and final) 5 minutes are the most exciting.

           Lani’s father, Abe, is walking down the street with Lani’s mother. Back in the 1980s, Abe was murdered by a character known as “The Salem Stalker.” I’m not making that up. Abe was killed thirty years ago. He’s alive now. I’ll explain why some other time.

           JJ stops him. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a wedding ring. “I’d like to have your blessing to marry Lani.” Dun dun duuuuun.

Gabi is arrested on suspicion of murder. She’s led away by Rafe, while Eli watches from his office. Lani comes in, teary eyed. Every time we’ve seen her character, she looks like she’s on the brink of crying. Her hand on her stomach (which isn’t showing because, as I mentioned before, she’s like two weeks pregnant), she tells Eli it’s his baby. GASP.

           He has a terrifying series of emotions over the next couple moments, ranging from excited, guilty, and furious. Eli seems like an okay dude, but he doesn’t seem to be the most emotionally stable. The episode ends before he can say anything.

           Just like that, I was hooked. Up until that point, it was just a mediocre show. It was no Scooby Doo, and it was no Mothman Prophecies. But then in those last five minutes, a character gets arrested (again) for murder, Lani reveals she’s pregnant with Eli’s baby, and JJ asks Abe for his blessing. What a way to close out an episode.

           Next episode has spies in it. It’s up to you to figure out if I’m joking or not.

[blogs-of-our-lives]

Does the days of our lives.

He'll yes