Rising Shards

I can't lie, my immediate reaction to the independent theater was a bit of disappointment. I spent all day thinking about movie theater popcorn slathered in way too much butter, along with some candy, but the only popcorn they had was either green or purple, with a specific sign in a weird font saying that there was no butter whatsoever on either of them.

"The matcha seaweed popcorn does take some getting used to, but it's actually kinda good once you get used to it," Pippi said.

"OK..." I said. "What's the purple, then?"

"I haven't dared to try it," Pippi said. A fiendish grin crossed her face. "You wanna?"

"Well, if we're gonna be spooked by a movie anyways, maybe some scary food to go along with it would be nice?" I said.

"And if it sucks, I'll make you regular popcorn at my place, how's that sound?" Pippi asked.

"I bet you make awesome popcorn," I said.

Well, weird popcorn aside, it was still a movie night with Pippi, so that'd be cool. I hadn't seen a horror movie in theaters since the last Killerationer movie, and that was pretty terrible, so some weird experimental movie was probably cool. We took our seats in the back of a half filled theater, one that was maybe a bit too full to get up to any friskiness during, but I still held out some hope we'd find a way. The movie was called "Seventeen Bottles," so my guess was it was gonna be some thing where a serial killer was turning people into goo and putting them into bottles.

One benefit of an indie theater, no trailers, the movie just started. I thought it was a commercial at first, the movie just started with a shot of a woman drinking Dr. Steev Cola. And then she just kept drinking it. A really, really long single camera shot of a woman drinking a soda slowly. She belched as she finished it off. Then grabbed another? She opened the second one and sniffed it, then let out an anguished wail like my mother did when I told her I wanted to go to clown college.

"Smells so bad...smells like...blegh!" The woman said before taking a sip. The smell didn't seem to have an effect on the taste, and she slowly finished that one too. We were about seven minutes in now, just watching a woman slowly drink soda in an empty, desolate room. I glanced at Pippi to make sure I wasn't losing it, but she had leaned forward, like this was the climax of a big action movie.

"Oh, oh god," the woman said as she finished her second soda, tears streaking down her face. Finally she got up, and the long shot ended. Was that fifteen minutes of a single shot? She walked casually away...until she got to a vending machine. It was my turn to say "Oh god," blurting that out as I realized she was getting another bottle, her third. Surely this movie wasn't going to be just this chick drinking fourteen more bottles of Dr. Steev? Pippi didn't react to me saying anything, still enraptured by the film.

The vending machine started talking at bottle four, and the woman called it Daddy? Like, was it her dad turned into a vending machine or something? By bottle five I was eyeing the door. I couldn't just up and leave Pippi but this was just...what the hell was this? I couldn't even snack my way through it, the matcha/seaweed popcorn was abysmal, and one taste of the purple stuff nearly had me throwing up.

After somehow making it through this lady drinking bottles six through seventeen, I hoped it was finally over, but the woman gathered all the bottles and looked between the garbage and recycling for a while. She put half in the garbage and half in the recycling as the credits mercifully started to roll.

"That was fascinating," Pippi said as we left. "An exploration of the seventeen avarices and their effects on the psyche, I think."

"Wow," I said, not getting that from the film at all. I guess there were seventeen bottles and she did something sinful with each of them? I didn't really need to see the explicit stuff she did with the twelfth bottle in as graphic detail as they showed it, but I didn't say that out loud.

"So, what'd you think?" Pippi asked eagerly. Way too eagerly.

What could I even say about that? I think it was the worst film I've ever seen. I never wanted to see a bottle of Dr. Steev again after that. Did my new potential almost-girlfriend have horrible taste in movies? That was the fear on my mind. What if I said I hated it and she got mad? But I couldn't say I liked that, could I? For the second time in a day, I had a difficult choice to make, and I didn't think playing the scenarios out in my head would help.

"I...thought it was interesting?" I said.

"You hated it, didn't you?" Pippi said, her words as blunt as the woman in the movie when she said the fifteenth bottle reminded her of her mother.

"Maybe...please don't be mad..." I said.

"Awww," Pippi hugged me. "I thought it was neat, but it's OK if you didn't think so. Thanks for putting up with it, at least?"

She wasn't mad, that's good. But I was a bit shaken up by that film.

"How about this, for you putting up with my indie arthouse bullshit, we do whatever you want when we get home," Pippi said. "Sound good?"

That did sound pretty good, but I did need the car ride from the theater to Pippi's place to decompress after that.

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