Time, Stop!

Friday night, Festival night. Tomorrow, a Midtown Saturday Night. “I’m in puzzle mode,” Celine Unger says in The Code, a new movie Da Boss was telling me about when he got back home (my WORK AREA!). I asked him how the movie was. “I’m in puzzle mode.” That’s all he’d say. I guess he liked it because he keeps saying something from it. I hate movies. This shit is only worth it for paying the bills. Thank God the industry is doing so well and the economy is booming, otherwise I’d walk into a McDonald’s and offer myself up fresh for the first customer who wants a pluck. The spur claws are hung up and I am GOING TO DIE!

But I really do love my job.

Da Boss also liked a movie called Vulcanizadora that he said I’d “like very much.” Could you be more specific? NO, apparently (I didn’t ask him again). While he was sitting his ass down and watching full, completed films, I was busy editing his mess of an ending a week before it’s set to premiere. A week. Come on. Why? We do this to ourselves. Not the universal “we” that’s poisoned the pop culture lexicon for most of the last decade. “We need to do better.” Who’s “we”? I’m doing just fine. I love my job, I love my family, I love my country, and you know what? I LOVE MY BOSS! In the normal way. The All-American Way.

He wouldn’t answer any of my questions about the movies he saw, so we sat and watched the latest rough work mix of “Time Waits for No One.” He slumped and sighed in his chair. “Another three weeks and we’ll be fine.” I reminded him that the screening was in a week—less than a week, we were in six-day 23-hour territory. Da Boss started panicking and eating all of these Starburst chewable tablets that he said “made him calm down and relax like a giraffe” which I found dubious at first and then he started acting and sounding like a giraffe which was creepy too but I decided to ignore it and soldier on until he kept doing it and doing it and really annoying me like Fuck. Why. Won’t. You. QUIT IT!

I played him the movie. He was silent—unusual. He stayed silent… even weirder. I was thinking about what kind of mess we’d made—the we that’s just us—and I was having my doubts, but about 10 minutes, right after the first “SEDUCED & ABANDONED” inter title, Da Boss said, “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” I nodded quickly and said I agreed, which I did, it’s awesome, it’s great, I love it, I, I mean we, did an incredible job and we’re really just all too proud of ourselves right now. Come to the screening October 11 at Normal’s. YOU’LL SEE!

But Da Boss really did like it…

—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits