Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Oppenheimer . . . film

 Solid opening 30 minutes (we're treating this like a mini-series).  O's involvement with left-wing causes . . . rift with Einstein (O thinks of him as over-the-hill and Einstein knows it.)  First splitting of atom.  Lawrence Lab in Berkeley--Lawrence practical applied physics . . . not O's strength.  Main actor is from Peaky Blinders.

The Master Chapter 2

February 1895 (Alice died in 1892) Money problems, jealousy of Wilde; time spent with Lord Wolseley1; off to Ireland to lick his wounds; Irish unrest--Irish landlords boycott all social events; much time spent with manservant Hammond (homosexual attraction again); fancy dress ball, appalling to James, who is only happy in company of Hammond, though Hammond remains a servant and no more; little girl alone on the grounds--inspiration for Turn of the Screw?; conflict with Webster who alludes to Wilde's successful play and HJ's failure; Wolseley was an  Anglo-Irish  officer in the  British Army . He became one of the most influential and admired British generals after a series of successes in Canada, West Africa, and Egypt, followed by a central role in modernizing the British Army in promoting efficiency. He served in Burma, the  Crimean War , the  Indian Mutiny , China, Canada and widely throughout Africa—including his  Ashanti  campaign (18...