Mary Louise Parker

Bombs, Away.

Remember shoebox dioramas? The ones your 3rd grade teacher assigned you? The basic idea was that you’d take worn out old toys and cram them into a flimsy box with some hastily applied paint and decorations. Then you’d have to present it to people with the bare minimum of enthusiasm. Remember?

Yeah. Red 2 is the perfect cinematic rendition of that.

I sat earnestly through the beginning of this week’s press screening. I did my part with an open mind. Red wasn’t the worst movie I’d ever seen. Maybe they’d do something special in the sequel?

I took the whole thing with so much seriousness, I even shushed a pair of giggling girls behind me who were chatting through the pin-drop-quiet first act. ‘Look ladies, we’re in a movie theater, here. There’s a movie playing. Please be quiet,’ I said sternly. But by the time Mary-Louise Parker’s character, Mary-Louise Parker, told Catherine Zeta Jones’ character, Ms. Over-the-top Ambiguously-Ethnic Jones, to (and I’m quoting directly here) ‘Suck it,’ I was done. Just done. I don’t even remember how it ended.

That line right there was tacit permission for everyone everywhere to no longer give any number of flying shits about anything else that happened…in the theater or on the screen. Light a bonfire, sing a song, slap an old lady, even have a full blown conversation. If the filmmakers didn’t care, why should you?

There was, however, one and only one bright light in all of Red 2: John Horatio Malkovich. He should be sealed in Lucite and mounted on the US Capitol building, mostly so that he never does anything related to this franchise ever again. Ever. But not even his clever screwball antics could scrub the skidmarks out of this one. Were you really going to see it anyways?

Not Sure If Quitting Because I Hate People or Because People Hate Me

Mary-Louise Parker has announced that she plans to quit acting because the world is full of a-holes. A-holes like you and me.

While promoting the high-art think-piece R.I.P.D. in Australia, the 48-year-old Weeds MILF spoke candidly of her future in the entertainment industry, and basically telling the world she’s done. Why? Well, she told some Fox affiliate:

The world has gotten too mean for me, it’s just too bitchy. All the websites and all the blogging and all the people giving their opinion and their hatred. It’s all so mean-spirited, it’s all so critical.

Uh, yeah. And what the hell would I do with my life if it wasn’t? Jeeze, MLP, won’t you think of the children? Or at least those of use who make our living thinking like them? She continued:

It’s a mean culture…It’s reality TV and it’s watching people suffer and watching people humiliate themselves. It’s little girls in pageants and housewives and plastic surgery and people in rehab. It just feels like a very ugly. It’s like someone just lifted up a rock and that’s all we’re looking at.

Again, duh.  Look, we all can’t go on Tibetan throat-singing retreats and wear hand-made organic cotton sarongs while trying to drum the world a better place, now can we? No we can’t.

Personally, I’m a little saddened by this development. Ms. Parker is great to look at and she did wonders with Weeds. But, I’m not going to give up. I’m not going  to just put down my keyboard because the woman whose recent choices of roles includes a movie about ghosts who hunt other ghosts (R.I.P.D.), an action movie about old people and its sequel (Red and Red 2: Geriatric Boogaloo) thinks we’re all being too mean. We’ve got to forge on.