This is a strong beer that isn’t heavy and doesn’t have an overbearing flavor. It’s a 7.5% english pale ale. It was sweet and I could tell that it was going to induce a headache. It did, but it also got me buzzed.
Also, this picture does not do the bottle justice. In real life the neck looks much more like a butt plug.
When I saw Welcome to the Dollhouse so many lives ago the thing that made the biggest impression on me was that it had no ending. I was a little confused at first because I don’t think I had seen anything like that before, but it made so much sense. Nothing changed for Dawn Weiner. She didn’t become a hero, she didn’t grow out of her awkwardness and you can bet she continued to get bullied at school. It was reality. We see how Dawn ends up in Palindromes as the movie opens with her funeral.
Palindromes is another offering by Todd Solondz of characters that are pathetic when we meet them and, rather that overcoming adversity and prevailing, end up just as miserable if not more so than when the movie started. In this film we follow Aviva, a thirteen year-old girl who is determined to get pregnant. She does so and her parents put an end to it, prompting her to run away. She encounters a truck driver with who, it is hinted at, is an ex-con for some sex offense, and who she feels some sort of connection to. She also meets a family consisting of cheery, bible thumping parents and a team of adoptive children all with some sort of handicap. This family are the only characters that are always happy, but naturally they do not escape the perpetual glum reality of Solondz’s films. The truck driver and Aviva see the anti-abortionist father as a major threat (I don’t recall the exact reason, but it has something to do with him discovering that Aviva has had an abortion) and decide to take him out. One of the children, a little girl, gets caught in the crossfire, and it’s all downhill from there.
The main idea of this movie is essentially what I felt after seeing Dollhouse, and is summed up at the end of the movie by the character Mark Weiner, Dawn’s brother, who is being accused of molesting his other sister’s baby. He talks about how people never change, that no matter what happens to them they are the same, forwards and backwards, because we are hard wired that way. “If you‘re the depressed type now, that’s the way you’ll always be,” Mark says. “If you’re the mindless, happy type now, that’s the way you’ll be when you grow up.” I can’t say I agree with that completely, I think you can be the depressed type all your life but you can change how you deal with it. However, I think Mark would file that under “People think they do (change), but they don’t.”
I enjoyed this film, but I felt the pacing was rather slow. There were a couple of times I wished the “la-la-laing” in the score would hurry up and the film would get to the next scene. I don’t see myself watching this movie too many times again. Happiness set a standard for me. The pacing was great, the script was great, the acting was great, and while Solondz’s movies always leave an impression, none have entertained me as much as Happiness.
One other thing, I do like how Solondz used several different actors to play Aviva. They ranged in age and hair color and were played by both black and white girls, including Jennifer Jason Leigh. I think this was an effective was of showing drastic change in a person who essentially remains the same in their core.
Several times today I had to correct my coworkers because of the name and design of this product. They would say things like “They made a drink now?” and when I commented on the $1.69 price, my boss even said “You gotta pay for the brand.” No, Crayola, famous maker of crayons, did not make a juice drink. Crayons is a generic name for the waxy coloring stick. But now it’s a registered trademark for this juice company. The owner trademarked the word “crayon” under the food category twenty years ago.
How are they? I tried a pink lemonade and a fruit punch. I can’t say they tase any better than most other juices. The can boasts that the juice contains no high fructose corn syrup and yeah, I can tell the difference. I mean they tase different and are better than, say, Snapple lemonade or fruit punch.
I don’t think I got to get a real feel for the flavor of the juices because I had them out of an eight ounce can. They do produce a 12 oz plastic bottle. I think one would get a better idea of the tase of these beverages from one of those. I’ll have to hunt one down.
Other flavors include kiwi strawberry, mango orange, and watermelon and berries.