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That sort of describes the political drama Rendition.
Other times, I hallucinate and travel back in time in my mind, dreaming of better earlier days.
That's like the children's fantasy flick The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.
Most times though, I just figure I should get myself a girlfriend. Ideally, a real one, but if nobody wants me, then a fake one who keeps absolutely still while I bend her into all sorts of positions. This would be like in the rubber doll movie, Lars And The Real Girl.
Maybe, I sometimes also think, I should travel to Batam by ferry to seek comely company since the horror show, The Ferryman, is also playing.
But when I think of the passport checks, dirty stares, dark glasses, false moustache and slippers I have to buy to disguise myself, I chicken out and turn limp and timid as The Fairyman.
Now, when I think of the word 'rendition', I always imagine it to mean a classy, pleasant affair, like I'm sitting in utter refinement at the Esplanade listening to a lovely cellist's rendition of Bach in C Minor. I had no idea that it could be about somebody being hung up totally naked, dirty and helpless to a sadistic torturer's interpretation of electrical shocks up the poor guy's butt in Scream Major.
Rendition refers to the secretive, controversial American government practice of abducting foreign people who are deemed security threats for detention and interrogation in unknown locations overseas.
To me, that's a barbaric, abhorrent, illegal, cowardly and totally indefensible method, akin to chaining up a dog in somebody else's home and telling that fella to beat it up anytime he wants to.
It makes my blood boil just thinking about it.
I understand that there are quite a number of unfortunate individuals who have been subjected to this heinous abuse in real life but the kidnapped Egyptian person in the movie is very, very lucky. I don't mean lucky in that he's brutally strung up and fried in a dungeon that looks like the set of horror flick Hostel but that he's Toto-winner lucky because he's married to Reese Witherspoon.
Reese, playing the blonde, All-American wife of the victim, doesn't know where the hell her missing hubby is and at one point in the movie, she yells in a don't-mess-with-America's-sweetheart manner at Meryl Streep of The Devil Wears Prada, who's here as the heartless Devil-Swears-Torture villain.
The funny thing is that in real life, Meryl is a fearless bleeding-heart liberal dead set against the politics of today - which is why I adore her - just like Jake Gyllenhaal, formerly of Brokeback Mountain, who plays a sympathetic CIA man who watches the abuse up close and winces because it truly is Break-back Mountain.
Rendition plays like a child's version of important issues but since I agree with its basic condemnation of human rights abuse, I let it torture me with its simplified, dumbed-down tale.
The real children's show is the latest in the let's-con-kids-for-more-money fantasy-garbage business, called The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. My mind just wandered as I thought about my dinner later in The Cooker: The Duck Is Rising.
The movie's very frustrating to watch because the mysterious folks in it keep telling the clueless boy hero how little time there is to stop the end of the world but they take their own sweet time in not telling him exactly what the heck he's supposed to do or what his powers are.
Why, oh, why couldn't they send him an SMS on the first day saying 'Btw, u hv super strength n can move objects abt at will. C u lata' instead of letting the poor kid think he's going nuts?
Speaking of moving objects, there are some objects that don't move at all. In the sweetly quirky Lars And The Real Girl, that object is a beautiful full-size doll who looks like Angelina Jolie. She's the inert companion of a head case with major human-contact problems played by Ryan Gosling, a serious guy who loves turning acting into a big-time psychiatric art form.
It's very funny seeing Ryan treat the doll as if she's a real person, talking and listening to her the way I talk and listen to my bolster every evening. I went to the website - an actual one called realdoll.com - which really sells these gorgeous fake babes because it's time I spend time with a false girl too instead of pretending to be a real man.
You have to be over 18 to enter the site and overpaid to buy a doll like that because, man, she's expensive as she's built to allow for 'anatomically correct positioning' and custom-made 'all the way down to finger nail colour'.
I tell you, I'm in love. But I can't afford her.
Because I still need to buy the dark glasses, false moustache and slippers when I take her to Batam.
