Warming Up

One night stand gigs are maybe something that I should leave in the past. A late night return followed by an early morning dog licking meant I was pretty much out of commission for the rest of the day. If I was single and had no living thing to care for that wouldn’t really matter as I could just stay in bed all day and recuperate. But there’s very little opportunity to catch up on sleep. I haven’t been this tired since Phoebe was a baby, but at least she’s a bit older now so I don’t have to deal with….. oh fuck, how the Hell will we get through October? My wife has a baby in her stomach. Hopefully the nutrients from the digestion of that child will feed our actual baby who is in her… I don’t know, ovaries? No one knows Ian Stereophonic. Don’t feel bad. Your guess is as good as mine.

I was deeply regretting the decision to add a puppy to our workload in this very busy and stressful 2017 when I was standing in my in-laws garden at 6am waiting to pick up dog shit. 

But later in the afternoon as Wolfie picked up a watering can and ran around my laughing daughter who couldn’t believe how much fun this was, it did make some of the effort seem worth it. About two minutes of the week long effort. But still. It was something. 

Back to my bachelor lifestyle of sitting alone in one room, eating a left over microwave curry (just a little side dish) with too much microwaved rice, drinking a beer and watching Netflix whilst playing a game of Civilisation II that had already officially finished, but which I was continuing onwards to see if I could make a perfect world where ever city had happy citizens who had every advance possible. Maybe I am trying to find imaginary order because my life is in so much chaos. But I prefer Civilisation when you have vanquished all your enemies (I am allowing the Persians to stay in the game as they have just one city and are making no trouble). Perhaps I am just old. I am sure when we get to move into our house properly everything will get back on an even keel, but it’s a bumpy ride at the moment. 

I managed to find an Adam Sandler film that I had not seen and it was a doozy! “Just Go With It” tells the tale of a man who was born with a ridiculously large nose (not that this really turns out to play any part in the film other than giving Sandler something to make him look funny for the first five minutes) who becomes a plastic surgeon (so his nose is taken back to normal, though presumably he didn’t do his own operation, so no real need for that to be his job, beyond having some fun with different sized breasts and bad-facelifts), but discovers the power of having a wedding ring in picking up women and having no strings sex. Personally I have not found this to be the case. No one has tried to hit on me in a bar since I got my wedding ring. Which is good obviously as I would have had to leave them disappointed (to be fair, that would still be the case if I had been single and had sex with them). I partly only got married because I believed the lie that women are falling over themselves to bed married men.  Adam Sandler is lying to you.

And Adam Sandler isn’t really married in the film - he nearly got married but his fiancee cheated on him. But he still had the ring. And discovered that single women love it when a married man is honest about how awful his marriage is. So he tricks them into bed with his brilliant scheme and then doesn’t have to see them again because they know that he is married. It’s what every man wants.

I don’t know why so many films revolve around people lying to each other to get sex or a relationship. Personally I found that people are much more interested in being with someone who tells them the truth. Even if the truth is, “I want no strings-sex with you.” In fact even more so then. So many rom-coms perpetuate odd myths about romance and this film is right up there with the worst of them in that regard. No one needs to be tricked into having sex. People want to have sex. That’s why there’s so many people. Don’t be too much of a dick, wash every day, be interested in other people, don’t be too intense, keep things light-hearted, work within your own league (though don’t forget in Cup matches you can occasionally enjoy success with people in much higher leagues - and also if you’re desperate for a win, go and have a kick around in the park with some schoolboys…this metaphor is starting to break-down), and tell the truth. You don’t have to tell people all the truth straight away, but outright lying will fuck you up (and usually pretty quickly).

Having established the big nose that goes and the job that is barely relevant and the wedding ring trick - the rest of the film is more or less about something else. Adam Sandler inexplicably gets off with a woman half his age whose main attribute is her body. He falls in love with her, unlike the other less meaningful casual encounters, even though there is no discernible difference (apart from this one being from a much higher league than him). He doesn’t do the ring trick on her. But in the morning he wants to give her his card so she can ring him. But he doesn’t want to stand up because he is naked, so he directs her to his trousers to get the card. But she finds the wedding ring…. Now I assumed he’d done this on purpose to get rid of her, because none of that stuff could ever really happen. But no, he really loves this one (he thinks) and now she’s cross because he’s married and she’s not that kind of woman (no, because none of them are -believe me, five years of a wedding ring- OK it might just be me).

Rather than just saying, “Yes I used to be married, but I am not now, so I took the ring off,” or even “I used to do this douchy thing where I’d pretend to be married to pick up single women - I know, how would that ever work?” he lets her storm off. And he’s heartbroken. Because he really liked her boobs (I am assuming). There’s no way of knowing if he loves her more than the other one night stands, because Sandler is exactly the same in every respect. Jack the lad, jokey, looking like he’s lying in order to see and touch more boobs. Even though that’s his job and you’d think he’d want some time off.

Anyway, then it gets more convoluted. His plain single-mother assistant Jennifer Aniston (you know, that kind of plain) tells him that he should lie a bit more and just tell her that he was married, but now he’s separated. He should have thought of that himself. Or just taken the woman to the records office to show that he had never actually been married. People can have rings in their pockets for lots of reasons. Maybe he found it on the ground or was involved in a con like the one that was tried on me and my wife in Paris. Whatever. It was easy.

But the girl wants to meet his estranged wife to prove everything is above board, because that’s the kind of thing that happens. And rather than saying, “We are getting divorced and my wife hates me and so she won’t do that,” he convinces his hard-working, mother-of-two, good friend who he’s never had romantic thoughts about because she is over 30 (but I think you know where this is going) to pretend to be his estranged wife. She accidentally lets slip that she has kids and so Sandler has to pretend they are his kids, rather than just saying, “Look, I don’t know what I was thinking. I genuinely like you and I made up all this stuff to try and see you again, but the truth is you don’t have to worry, because I am actually single,” he ropes in the kids to lie too and then through a series of events they all have to go to Hawaii together and keep up the pretence.

Because the only way to have sex with people is to lie to them. And if you want a serious relationship then you must lie even more. To the extent that any future life you might have together will become untenable because your partner is bound to find out the truth.

OK, it’s a light-hearted farce and it’s not meant to be real. But it pushes a weird version of romance that presumably some people buy into. The kind of romance that makes you think playing a piano in public for hours and hours is a way to win back someone who doesn’t want to be with you.

Worse still, Sandler is doing all of this because he is bedazzled by the youth and beauty of this pleasant but vacuous woman (but fair enough, he’s vacuous too), making out it’s because he’s in love, even though it’s clear that he isn’t (and that he’s about to find out what love really is). But because he teaches one of her kids to swim in one of the moments that he’s not embroiling everyone, including minors, into a horrific deceit (and if sex happens under such false pretences, is that not some kind of crime?) Jennifer Aniston realises that he is a kind man with a good heart and falls in love with him.

He really isn’t a kind man though. He’s a horrible lying idiot. His charm is superficial, even by the low sleepwalking through it standards that Sandler employs in his roles.

It’s not romantic that his true love was sitting in front of him at all times. That is just another thing that makes him despicable. And it’s only once he’s seen Jennifer in a bathing suit and realised that her body is pretty good too, that he starts to fall in love with her.

Anyway, it’s not “The Cobbler” and there’s hardly any magic at all. And there’s all the set up for a Dolph Lundren cameo, but maybe he was sick on the day they were filming his bit as they manage to paper over it without Dolph actually appearing on screen (I think, I was playing Civilisation at the same time, so forgive me if I have made some errors). 

This film has been out for six years, but I would still like to warn you against watching it. And to tell you not to lie to get people to like you.