The final gasp : Two for the money

Two for the moneyⁱ is so very incredibly 90s it bleeds!

Everything, everything about it. It's plainly and evidently the last gasp of the US blue collar. That Brandon Anthony role, that's evidently what Tucker Max would have wanted to live, for one. With him, all of you. Are you kidding me, dad to actually take him on, sit him down in the good office up front like that ? No ifs, buts or maybes ? Fire the obnoxious New York Times jew loudly and publicly over a matter of faith ? Over believing in him ? Are you fucking kidding me ? What fucking college, what fucking anything, that's the lifeblood right there, you can feel it just as it's slipping away. Don't you wish you were a father to your son ? Too late now, and regrets are cheap, but if you had the chance, wouldn't you have done it right ? If you could ? Hm ?

It's Pacino's last good role, after a lengthy career. He's made a dozen films hence and I'd take watching back to back toothpaste commercials over having to suffer through any of them. But it's also the character's definite, definitive last breath. Hear him out :

You're a lemon. Like a bad car. There is something... there is something inherently defective in you, and you, and you, and me, and all of us. We're all lemons. We look like everyone else, but what makes us different is our defect. See, most gamblers, when they go to gamble, they go to win. When we go to gamble, we go to lose. Subconsciously. Me, I never feel better than when they're raking the chips away; not bringing them in. And everyone here knows what I'm talking about. Hell, even when we win it's just a matter of time before we give it all back. But when we lose, that's another story. When we lose, and I'm talking about the kind of loss that makes your asshole pucker to the size of a decimal point - you know what I mean - you've just recreated the worst possible nightmare this side of malignant cancer, for the twentieth goddamn time; and you're standing there and you suddenly realise, hey, I'm still... here. I'm still breathing. I'm still alive. Us lemons, we fuck shit up all the time on purpose. Because we constantly need to remind ourselves we're alive. Gambling's not your problem. It's this fucked up need to feel something. To convince yourself you exist. That's the problem.

You know he's right ; you can see it in your father's eyes. That's what all you English-as-a-first-and-therefore-only-language tards are all about, you've been spawned by these human miseries, long wrestling with their own feeling of inexistence, and you're stuck trying to survive it somehow. They've recreated that inexistence, turned a country into an imaginary figment, prepared you thoroughly for lives that never could exist. The 90s were the last gasp of that whole show.

This moment, right at the cusp where the traditional blue collar hope for social mobility through sales-and-management, start-at-McD-with-the-mop-and-make-something-of-yourself-son hadn't yet faded, to be unconvincingly replaced by "search engine and social media experting", whatever the fuck that's even supposed to be. The film is technically late, by 2005 the first dotcom bubble had already burst, and any hope of US supremacy or for that matter survival had long collapsed in the smoke of the "World"ⁱⁱ Trade Center.

You -- or at the very least, I -- can literally smell the fading optimism, the dissipating hope. Who knows, maybe there's yet a future. Back in the 90s the mornings smelled different. Even the soundtrack carries the same note, back before wiggers took over ; back when every two bit teenaged hack with a guitar flattered himself with Kurt Cobain records.

Kurt Cobain blew out his brains ; everyone else just went down with the downing ship. But before drowning, for a brief moment twenty years ago, they still clung to a hope beyond hope, to an inertial sort of hoptimism.

On three you get ready...

1. 2005, by D.J. Caruso (Disney Product Placement goon) with Al Pacino, Matthew McConaughey, Rene Russo [↩]
2. Hey, it hosted teh World Series, amirite ?

   The world cares cared. Totally. [↩]