If you listen to the audio version of this newsletter, then before the usual newsletter content, in which I read the newsletter, and talk about my life, you will hear about the Extrapolator of Thought and Mind, and the chamber that I, Robert Long Foreman, have been inserted into, so that I can get some rest while the Extrapolator writes and says in my nasal voice the things I would be writing and saying if I were still outside the chamber. How I ended up in this chamber is complicated, and not entirely something I volunteered for or consented to. But the Hoedown Quarterly Review marches on, and if you listen to the audio newsletter you may understand what this is about. I make no promises, except that my voice is indeed nasal and unpleasant to hear.If you change just three letters in the word NASAL, you get the word LASER, but the important thing is that everything you read or listen to here is real and new. It’s clean and it’s good, and it’s made by a man. It’s the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand.Deadpool WolverineI went to see Deadpool Wolverine, the new movie that’s taking up a lot of theater space right now in the land of freedom. I don’t go to movies much, and if it were up to me I would see better ones when I do. For example, later the same evening that I watched Deadpool Wolverine, the local theater was showing a fortieth-anniversary edition of Terminator. That would have been a fun thing to see in a movie theater. It brings me no joy at all to report this, but when I walked into the Deadpool Wolverine theater the smell of unwashed hair, skin, and clothing nearly killed me. Like, I almost died from how it smelled. I’m surprised I didn’t come out of there with fleas.I don’t go out much, so I haven’t smelled that smell in a while, the unmistakable odor of someone’s body when it hasn’t been cleaned in a long time. At first, I thought, Holy s**t, someone has not taken a shower this year. After sitting there for an hour, that smell going nowhere, I wondered if more than one person in the theater had not showered this year. I don’t doubt that’s an insensitive way to start the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand. I already feel bad for mentioning the way those people smelled. But come on, man. This is not the eighteenth century. It’s not even the twentieth century. The people in that theater didn’t smell awful because they were so poor they lacked access to indoor plumbing. They were at a Deadpool movie. If they can afford that ticket, they can get their hands on soap and water. But there really could not have been an audience more receptive to that movie than the one I sat in the theater with. They laughed at every joke. They got every reference to other Marvel films and comics, and they made sure everyone else in the theater knew they got the references. They hollered. They clapped. When that storefront appeared in the background of one shot, with the joke about artist Rob Liefield drawing feet, or whatever, they freaking lost it—even though they must have all known they would see the joke at some point in the film, because even I saw a photo of that storefront with the Liefield feet joke, months ago. I don’t know where I saw it. I imagine it was someplace online that sucks.But I didn’t hate watching the movie. It had its moments. My response was net positive. Emma Corrin was great. Matthew MacFayden did a fine job. You can always count on the English to elevate the substandard material they have to work with. Corrin plays a bald woman who reaches into people’s heads with her hands to read their minds, and the effects they used for that were weird and worth seeing. Whoever made those effects should get a raise. And I liked Wolverine’s hat. They did a great job making that hat.But I didn’t enjoy the movie nearly as much as everyone else in the theater did, and I never went to any Bible camps growing up, but I felt partway through watching Deadpool Wolverine that the movie must be what it’s like to watch your friends at Bible camp perform skits on the last night before everyone goes home so they can start school in the fall. In order to get the jokes made in the skits, you have to have been at camp all summer, because all of the humor refers to things that happened at camp. The jokes have the appearance of irreverence, too, because irreverence is fun. But they don’t cross over into anything like hazardous territory, or—heaven forbid—actual comedy. If you did anything like that at camp, like if you questioned how well the director was doing their job, or whatever, you might get in trouble. It’s not unlike how you can have Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool break the fourth wall and refer cheekily to how Disney owns Marvel, but you’ll never see him, let’s say, pissing on an image of Mickey Mouse. Something like that would be consistent with the quality of humor you see in Deadpool ...
