Author’s Note:
Some of you may be so intrusive as to wonder why I haven’t posted a review since December. If you must know, during the holidays I was falling asleep in front of the television much more than usual, and I went to my primary care physician and found out I have Couchman’s Disorder. This rare condition is, unfortunately, incurable. I can only manage my symptoms. According to my physician, I will notice a marked increase in couch-related narcoleptic episodes. I am concerned, but at the same time, I am okay. I am both concerned and okay. My recent enlistment with Exit Sandman, a support group for Couchman’s sufferers, which meets once a week in an auditorium that is furnished exclusively with pre-school chairs and/or high school science class stools, to ensure our discomfort lest we fall asleep mid-commiseration, has connected me with a spectrum of sleep-impaired individuals — including one young man named Kelso who is afflicted with Couchman’s by Proxy, a fascinating, closely-related disorder that causes him to pass out recklessly on the couches of others, often while wearing stiff jeans, and sometimes resulting in his waking up the next morning to the noisy vacuum and disapproving stares of a cleaning lady, or the strange company of a child who is watching Saturday morning cartoons — with whom I’ve created a network of shared pain. In light of these recent developments, I am happy to have begun this blog, as it is a wonderful outlet for my sleepish cinematic exploits, which, apparently, will not be dwindling in frequency, but in fact will be intensifying, gradually, until I am nothing but a worthless human blob.
And now, Breakdown, sleep-reviewed in real time …
A red 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee travels through the desert, a beaut among the buttes. Whence do they come, these SUV pilgrims, with their amazing ground clearance? Ah, Massachusetts plates! I subside into everlasting sleep.
Rage! Road rage in the middle of nowhere. I am awoken. Kurt Russell plays the role of Jeff Taylor: Masshole, emasculated at the gas pump. I doze — suddenly he is honking his car’s horn in classic Masshole fashion. Who turned up the volume all the way on my television? The remote — egh — the remote is…it’s in a remote location. I wonder: What radiates more thickly? The Jeep’s horn blasts, or Kurt Russell’s generous mane?
Everything is suffused with orange: a world of jagged mountains is smudged by the inexorable ciliary sieve of my converging eyelids. I sleeeee …
Erf … I feel unwell. I have ensickened myself with expired quiche.
Where am I? I … I think I see this: a deputy in an office, accomplishing zilch. Yes, and here we have the unfriendly proprietor of Belle’s Diner, sharpening a knife against a knife, which is not advisable.
Jeff Taylor’s wife hitches a ride in a big rig with a man wearing a denim jacket and aviator sunglasses. She is, of course, promptly abducted. Jeff Taylor drives long distances in search of her; I fall asleep while he’s behind the wheel.
My eyes are mostly shut, but I recognize famous actor J.T. Walsh as “Red” Barr, a kidnapper in a cerulean semi, delivering the following line, which discomfits me: ” … [she’s] about 5’5″, 115 lbs., 3 or 4 of that just pure tit. Nice curly brown hair, upstairs and down … ” My discomfiture is thorough.
I lose my grip on Jeff Taylor’s reality. He wears so much khaki. The khaki is all that remains, for me. I can feel it on my skin, as though I am once again a young boy, attending Sunday church, my ill-fitting, pleated khaki pantaloons bedeviling me — bedeviling me! — by ensuring that my genuflection does not go unhindered, almost to the point that I lose my balance before the tabernacle. Also, I am very disappointed in the free beverages and snacks available in the banquet hall, as usual.
Couch-bound and drooling, I explore the murky waters of my subconscious, like a junior Cousteau, the couch my faithful sleep-sloop, impermeable, so little filtering inward from without, such treasures rushing outward from within!
The film’s score uses hi-hats: pathetic. Their miniscule chiming is split wholesale by the sturdy keel of my davenport. I sleep adrift, the sofa my life boat. I laze on pilled upholstery, a kinked, dribbling garden hose of a man.
“You son of a bitch!” — a refrain, along with “Yagh!” “Yahh!” and “Eeezch!” issue readily from Kurt Russell, who clambers from underneath a moving tractor-trailer while a kid goggles from a beige Buick LeSabre that motors across a pale mountain backdrop. I descend into a species of sleep found only in convalescent homes, among the elderly.
I awake to a Swiss army knife being given, as a gesture of paternal affection, to a boy. What living hell is this? Upon which plane of unnatural existence have I resurfaced, eyes a-blink?
I hear crickets. A barn! — and, yes, bars of light slice through its shutters, tattooing the floor with a set of washed-out parallelograms that find their origin in die-cast aluminum floodlights attached to the eaves of a sunbeaten, rural garage. I can taste the lumens. I can taste the lumens through the screen.
Jeff Taylor’s wife squirms in a canvas bag, before being stowed away by goons who, having pulled a busy all-nighter of violent kidnapping, rush off to eat breakfast, made by Red’s wife. This part of the film centers on the dual subjection of two different wives to varying forms, and degrees, of mistreatment: one is bagged and dumped in a subterranean fridge, and the other is forced to make pancakes before sunrise.
I sleep in starts and snatches. My quiche blunder pays wretched dividends. My bedclothes are comprised of a fleece Yankees blanket that is meant to cover one’s thighs in a baseball stadium.
I have awoken, but to what? Thundering timpani signaling daybreak. And just what, exactly, is unveiled before my bleary gaze? I watch (in horror) as a tractor-trailer broadsides a trailer home — a whole home, halved.
A highway car chase, during which a shotgun is discharged irresponsibly, results in a number of major automobile accidents (for example, a young man burns alive when his overturned Pontiac Firebird becomes literal).
A car crashes through a jackknifed 18-wheeler. (This film provides an ongoing assortment of bisecting people and things! I see limitless T-boning! The extent and frequency of the perpendicular wreckage makes it seem as though, with 90 degrees of disrespect, the characters will go to any length to wrong each other at a right angle, and for that reason, perhaps it is only too appropriate that I am half-asleep.)
“Red” Barr is thrown off a bridge onto a riverbed, roiling the sediment, the water plashing against his cowboy boots. He survives! Seconds later, his Peterbilt falls off that same bridge and reduces him to a paste.
I join him in forcemeat repose.
3 out of 5 stars
Sleeping Critic 