Hit-Girl Makes You Sad (Remastered Deluxe Edition)
My First Time Seeing a Tearjerker in a Theater
Hello, friends!
So, I probably won’t do much reposting of older blogs or anything like that here at ALL YOU CAN EAT. I want to write about what’s on my mind NOW, and keep y’all updated on current happenings and future endeavors. THAT BEING SAID… this one is special to me. It might, seriously, be my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It was the first time I’d attempted anything like it, and was probably the first time my true, actual voice came out on the page.
I wrote it in August of 2014, and it’s just a fun little piece about my wife and me going to the movies together. We were celebrating our fourth anniversary, back when we only had one kid, and after we went to our favorite sushi restaurant, we decided to go to the movies… and I let her pick which movie we saw. That’s the gist of it! But it’s just this special moment, a preserved piece of my past, when I was a new husband, a new father, a new writer, full of enthusiasm and determination to turn my dreams into my reality, and to build a future for my family.
When I read this yesterday, for the first time since writing it almost 10 years ago, I laughed my ass off… but found myself wiping away tears by the end. And so I decided to share it with y’all, to let 32-year-old Shane tell you a story about how much he loves his wife.
I’ll be posting up Plate #2 of ALL YOU CAN EAT NEWS next week!
You know what it is!
HIT-GIRL MAKES YOU SAD
My First Time Seeing a Tearjerker in a Theater
August 2014
Okay. Let me first explain how this happened.
It was my wife and I’s four year anniversary. We have been together for eight years and married for four. We have a three-year old daughter. I mention our daughter because since her birth, we don’t get to go out much. Not the kind of night out we used to have. The two of us used to party and could get a little crazy together, but all of that is behind us. I don’t miss it. Nowadays, a night out for us is dinner and a movie. Maybe bowling. I know, we’re out of control.
Now, back to the anniversary. I wanted to take her to our favorite restaurant in Austin. A sushi place called Uchi. I’m a frugal guy. Money stresses me the hell out and I never buy myself anything. But this restaurant is just one of those places where no matter how big the check, I feel it was money well spent. It’s that good. If you’re ever in Austin, hit me up. We’ll go. I’ll take any excuse to eat at Uchi. So! Our night starts there. Our daughter is spending the night at my mother’s house, so we are relaxed and not worried about the time. Which is a strange feelings these days. We eat an incredible dinner, have a few drinks. The night is still young.
“How about a movie?” my wife says.
“Okay, yeah,” I say and pull out my phone and check times. “How about the new Ninja Turtles movie?”
She gives me a look that cooks all the raw fish in my belly. I realize that throughout our relationship, we have pretty much only seen movies that I want to see in the theater. Horror movies or action movies or comedies. Which she enjoys. But she is still going to these movies because she knows I want to see them. We have watched plenty of romance and dramas and sad movies at home. But never in the theater.
“What about the one with the girl who dies? It looks sad.”
“Huh?”
“You know. The girl. From Kick Ass.”
“Hit Girl?”
She nods. I scroll through and see what she’s talking about. It’s called If I Stay.
I’m fat and happy and buzzed, and having just come to the realization that I’ve been a selfish bastard when it comes to picking movies, I cave and agree. She makes a sound somewhere between a dying kitten and the air being let out of a balloon.
Remember when I said I was frugal? You know as well as I do that the snacks at the theater are insanely overpriced. So we stop at the gas station first. Stuff my wife’s purse with candy and drinks. I’m trying to convince myself to have an open mind and to do my absolute best to enjoy this movie. Don’t ruin this for her my deconstructing every fucking scene and word of dialogue like you always do. Just shut the fuck up and eat your Reese’s Pieces and let her be happy. Or sad. Because she’s excited as hell for Hit Girl to make her sad.
We get there and she’s paranoid, as usual, that her purse is stuffed with snacks. Unauthorized snacks. Criminal snacks! So she’s pressed up hard against me so that her purse is between us. This always cracks me up.
“Babe. The employees are high school kids. They don’t give a fuck about our smuggled candy.”
“Yes they do. And they’re going to catch us and—”
“And what? Take us to the back room? Chinese water torture with popcorn butter?”
“Shut up and walk with me.”
Even though we just ate a big expensive meal and have a purse pregnant with forbidden chocolate peanut butter buttons, we can never resist the popcorn. Overpriced as it is, we always gotta have it. So we’re in line and she’s freaking out more and more that we’re going to get caught.
“It’s suspicious that we’re buying popcorn and not a drink. They’re going to know because nobody gets popcorn without a drink.”
“You’re right. Look at them. Behind those pimply foreheads lies the brain of an investigative genius.”
We get our popcorn and a cup of water, because we are criminal masterminds, and head to the theater without incident. As usual. We sit down toward the front because the theater is pretty packed. Which is a shock to me. I was convinced the place would be damn near empty. Who the fuck goes to see a sad movie in the theater? I ask myself. Well, a shitload of people. I swept the crowd with my eyes before sitting, just to see what kinds of people go to these things. Mostly couples. A lot of guys who looked unhappy and uncomfortable like me. A good amount of young girls in groups giggling, their faces illuminated by their cell phones. We sit. I remember that my wife asked me to put her Twix in my pocket because she was scared her purse was too full. I pull it out for her. There are no longer two bars, but one flattened, gooey chunk of chocolate, caramel, cookie crumbles, and whatever other shit they put in those things. I give it to her and I can see the red in her eyes. It’s a Twix casserole now, heated by the fire in my loins, I tell her.
The previews start. Again, I tell myself to enjoy the movie. That I might even learn something. I don’t know if I learned anything, but the experience was goddamned entertaining. Let’s start with the previews. Way different than the types of previews they show at my movies. These previews, as I should have expected, were for more sad and romantic movies. Makes sense. I can’t remember the name of it, but there was one based on a Nicholas Sparks book. It was about a young couple, late teens or early twenties even, that fall in love. And oh yes, there is a kissing in the rain scene. I laughed out loud and even clapped when I saw it. Punch to the arm. Okay, sorry, honey. Shutting up now. So, the guy goes to jail. Cut to the future. He’s out. AND THEY PICKED A DIFFERENT ACTRESS AND ACTOR TO PLAY THEM TO SHOW THEY ARE OLDER! They’re like forty now? Maybe? And they look nothing like their younger selves who, again, looked to be in their early twenties. It was so stupid that even my wife leaned over, shaking her head.
“So they just look completely different now?”
I hug her and take a bite from the Twix casserole she won’t eat. At the very least, I tell myself, this is going to be hilarious.
Now, as a young man, I learned a valuable lesson. I took a date to see the Titanic at the theater. I know what you’re thinking. But you said you’ve never seen a sad movie in the theater before, you lying sack of melted candy! As a young man, I didn’t take dates to see movies to actually watch the movie. You know what I’m saying. But when shit started getting crazy in the Titanic, we watched it. She was instantly gripped by the drama and was shocked and upset. I was laughing my ass off at all the people falling when the ship broke in half, especially the guy who hits the propeller and spins through the air. Watch that part, you’ll see what I’m talking about, and if you’re fucked up like me, you’ll laugh. Yeah. Date didn’t appreciate that.
“How can you laugh at something like that?”
“It’s funny. It’s not real.”
“That really happened.”
“Right. But not every detail of this movie is historically accurate. Did you see that guy hit the propeller and flip around and shit?”
So, uh, never got a call back from her again. So I learned that day. Shut the fuck up and laugh inside your own head. Don’t be a dick and ruin the movie for the person actually enjoying it the way it was designed to be enjoyed.
Back to Hit Girl Makes You Sad.
I won’t get into every detail of the movie. Not because I don’t want to ruin it for you, but because it can pretty much be summed up in this sentence. A girl dies and her ghost has to decide whether or not to stay or to move on. That’s it. We go back and forth between the hospital (where more and more reasons for her to just let herself die keep piling up) and before the accident (where we see how happy her family is and how much they love each other and how she’s falling in love with a boy and how everything is perfect.). You know, all that “make us care about the characters” stuff. Let me just say this. They used a lot of dirty tricks to make the audience cry. It was all very formulaic. Everything was very carefully designed to make you cry your face off. I saw it happening. I recognized that we were being tricked into feeling these emotions. Which is why we see movies or read books or play video games, I guess. To experience something and feel some kind of emotion. To escape and live out lives of fictional characters so we can safely feel sad or scared or angry or whatever. I get that.
I’ll just say this to sum it all up. You know in a horror movie when the scene is very quiet, and the only sound you can hear is the character’s breathing and everything is dark and you just know something is going to jump out and make you scream and you’re preparing for it, but then it happens and you jump and scream anyway? Yeah. This was kind of like that. Cheap tricks to make you jump and scream. This had cheap tricks to make you sad and cry. There were parts, I am not ashamed to say, that had me tearing up a bit. One scene in particular when the parents, both rockers, realize their daughter loves the cello. The dad quits his band and is racing home on his bicycle, a huge smile on his face, with a brand new cello strapped to his back. Anything having to do with a father and his daughter will always get to me now.
Anyway, at one point I became hyper aware of what was going on around me. In the actual theater. It was quiet. Fucking silent. No matter what movie you go to, more or less the people are quiet. But the movies I go to tend to be loud so you don’t ever really know how quiet the people are around you. Yeah. No loud noises in this movie. Silence. Which made the kissing scenes, and there were a fuck ton of kissing scenes, that much more awkward. You know when you’re eating a banana alone in a quiet room? Yeah. That sound. Over and over and over again.
“I’m so tired of them kissing,” my wife says at one point.
It was just around this moment, as I was realizing how goddamn quiet it was in there, that someone behind me farted. Not a huge, rumbling fart. Just a tight little toot. An obvious slip. What made it worse? Nobody reacted at all. It stayed silent. It took everything I had not to laugh out loud. My wife giggled, but held it together. I’m sure my shoulders were bouncing so much as I silently cackled that whoever birthed that baby fart saw me. I like to think it was a young man on his first date with the girl he has always loved. She finally said yes. I know, he said to himself. I’ll take her to a sad movie! Perfect! She’ll melt right into my arms and fall in love with me. But he took her to a Mexican restaurant beforehand. Ordered the cheese enchiladas with two sides of refried beans. Throughout the whole movie, he’s been clenching his cheeks and controlling his breathing, doing everything he could to hold that fart in. Not only that, but a guy on a first date is not allowed to cry. That’s just how it is. If the movie is making him feel sad, he has to start imagining past tragedies or hilarious memories to keep those tears in his eyes. So this fucking guy is a pressure cooker ready to blow, right? And then…Hit Girl made him sad. He lost himself in the moment. And the fart squeezed itself out. And the heavy silence only made it that much more awkward for him, I’m sure. Not to mention my jumping shoulders.
So! The next thing I notice, toward the end of the movie, is all the sniffling going on around me. The silence has turned into a symphony of sniffles. From every angle. The giggling girls in front of us are all sniffling. The entire crowd behind us is sniffling. It kind of sounded like a herd of hissing cats. I turn to my wife to comment about this, and she slowly turns her head and sniffles at me.
“Oh God! They got you too!”
I didn’t say anything. Remember the Titanic? Yeah. I shut up. Wrapped my arm around her and let her have her cry.
The best part for me was the ending. If you give a fuck about the movie and don’t want to know how it ends, don’t read anymore. Now, the reason this was the best part had nothing to do with the movie. It was the reaction of the crowd, and more importantly, my wife.
So, Dead Hit Girl has to come to a decision. Die or Live! You don’t really know what she’s going to pick. Her whole family is dead. What more is there to live for, right? But her love is still alive, and he’s sitting next to her and making promises and singing songs and crying and telling her she got into Julliard after all. The screen goes white. Silence in the theater. Even the sniffles stopped. Fart boy’s anus puckered. And then Hit Girl opens her eyes. The last thing it shows is the boy, her love, saying her name.
And then the screen goes black. It is even more silent than silent now. It was so silent that my eardrums almost imploded. And then the end credits begin. The entire audience, all together, says, “AWWWWWWW!”
I’m now laughing my ass off openly because that is some funny shit right there. Now, I’m assuming my wife said awwwww for the same reason everyone else did. Which was obvious to me. They said awwwww because they didn’t want the movie to end there. They wanted more. They wanted to see the couple making more banana sounds as they kissed. They wanted to see her recovery and her family’s funeral and the couple get married and all that other stuff, right?
We get in the car. I turn to my wife and say, “That was pretty damn funny how everyone reacted at the end.”
“I know!” she said. “She should have died!”
“Wait…what?”
“Her whole family was dead. She shouldn’t have chosen to live. She should have died with them.”
“So you think everyone said awwwwww at the end because they wanted Hit Girl to die instead of live?”
“Well yeah. Right? That’s why I said it.”
And I immediately leaned over and made banana sounds with her. Because my wife is awesome. She dragged me to a sad movie, made me sit through sniffles and melted candy and farts and endless sloppy kissing. But in the end, she reminded me why I love her so much.
So nice try Hit Girl. You made her sad. You made her cry. But she still wishes you were fucking dead.
I think we’ll go see that Nicholas Sparks movie next. The one set in the universe where kids grow up to look absolutely nothing like they did as a kid. At least the banana sounds will be masked by heavy rainfall.
Sad movies are hilarious.
This is fantastic, dude.