Whatever Works is my new favorite movie.
This is a big deal.
Previous favorite movies: Star Wars, Raising Arizona, and then The Matrix.
I thought I would hang on to The Matrix forever, and I’m sure some people who know me personally will be happy to read that I’ve let it slip to the #2 position on my chart. It was a nice run though — being my favorite for more than a decade.
My mother would have loved Whatever Works. She had the habit of only auditing the first 30 minutes of a movie. If it wasn’t working for her, she and Steve would leave. Life’s too short for a boring movie.
Mom and Steve seemed to always be having fun when they were together. As far as I know, they never had an argument or a fight.
A store at the mall in Tulsa sold very soft, long scarves in a variety of colors. My mom loved them. When she got sick and her memory started to fail, and they were at the mall, she would frequently buy a new scarf. Steve never told her that she already had the same scarves at home. She loved them and she loved buying them, and Steve loved her, so more and more scarves came home.
Pretty cool, eh? We should all be so lucky to find someone as devoted to us as Steve was to her. I’m sure the secret starts with being that devoted to someone else.
My father says first you have to be a friend and make a friend.
My father and Steve are both great guys. The 12-year-old nugget in my brain remembers being pissed about my parents splitting up, but both ended up happy (my father also remarried) and I ended up with two more great people in my life.
Oh, about the movie.
Larry David plays a self-proclaimed genius of the string theory variety who is forced to live among the sub-intelligent inch worms in New York City. He thinks he’s the only one who sees the big picture and he understands everything, and everything is flying apart, and entropy sucks, so he’s depressed and pissy.
His day job is teaching children to play chess. When they screw up, like taking the “poison pawn,” he yells at them for being so stupid. One mother complains that he threw the chess board at her son. He corrects her. What he really did was pick up the chess board and pour all the pieces on her son’s head.
The movie really starts at the end. David’s character is telling the audience his story of how he learns to love life by doing whatever works to find some joy, happiness, and love.
All of the characters are wonderful.
Yes, they take the obligatory shots at right-wing institutions such as organized religion, Mississippi, and the NRA, but it’s not a political movie. I saw it as more of an insight into how some New Yorkers think.
I don’t want to say what happens. It’s certainly worth renting.
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