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Nine Inches, concluded: All Night Party, One-Four-Five

One-Four-Five   A divorced doctor, Rick Sims, in misery because of the break-up of his marriage, takes up the guitar again.  He befriends a guitar shop employee and the two of them jam together, and they also share their stories of bad marriage.  We learn, through flashbacks, that Sims had been a pillar of the community.  True, he'd fallen for the mother of a cancer-stricken child, but nothing had come of it.  In fact, the mother had screamed at him at the funeral of her child.

Crushed by the rebuff, Sims then has a one-night alcohol-fueled fling with an office employee, Olga. He believes her to be unmarried, but finds out otherwise when a husband shows up and beats him up.  Divorce follows, and misery. Limited visits with his children, money problems, crummy living situation

But the guitar seems like a light at the end of the tunnel. He gets better, enjoys the camaraderie. They post a jam session on YouTube and wait. Ending:  "There was a faint current of dread running beneath his optimism, because good things turned to shit all the time, and you couldn't always see it coming."

All Night Party

The party is for high school seniors so they don't get themselves killed (as some students in the school had years earlier) by drinking and driving.  Liz, divorced and harried by the mundane in life, is nudged into being a chaperone.  She meets up with a cop who'd been obnoxious to her and her 13 year-old daughter years earlier. She remembers; he doesn't seem to. They hit it off, though, sort of. Various dramas.  Liz is in charge of the "chill" room where kids can get away from the noise and sleep, lounge if they want. Liz is concerned about her sexually active hs daughter who is staying with her boyfriend that very night.  Various kids use the chilling station for various reasons . . She helps an unhappy girl at the party.  Cop comes back, tells her that he was classmates with the kids who had died years earlier. . .  Randomness of life/death . . . Drunk girl, Jenna, helped by Liz . . . then sent home . . . Liz then confronts the boy who abused/used Jenna and slaps him across the face (exhaustion, yes, but also a real act--and there has been something artificial about the entire evening.

At the very end, the cop asks her to breakfast.  She's so tired it takes her forever to say yes, but it is a second "real" event of the artificial party.

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