by Aminatou Sow and Phoebe Connelly

● [Good bourbon] and coke

● A body shot

● Vodka Tonic

● Vodka Redbull

● Screwdriver

● Grasshopper/Girl Scout Cookie

● Jagerbombs

● Hard cider

● Black & tan

● Tequila sunrise

● Malibu & ____

● “Whatever she’s having”

● Hot Toddy

● Frangelico

● Disaronno

● Ciroc

● ____tini

● Sex on the Beach

● White Russian

● Frozen Strawberry Daiquiri

● Shots with more than one ingredient

● Cosmo

● Pinot Grigio

● Long Island Iced Tea

Aminatou Sow and Phoebe Connelly once asked a bartender to make them pina coladas.

‘Final Destination 5’: Death’s A Great Punchline (That Needs A Better Setup)

We don’t do much with death in media. While pop culture is packed with anal sex jokes and headlines likening the Dow to a high-class hooker, the actual mechanics of death are one of the few things we bypass. Call it the last taboo.

Movies wade through death in a variety of ways. Typically, there’s buildup to a tragedy, with a focus on the pain of loss and the hardship left in its wake. Death is used alternately as character forger or plot device (is the hero really dead?? He CAN’T be!!). But horror films enjoy a singular relationship with death. Horror alone has our permission to roam the Stygian shore and frolic in all the coarse, grubby ways the human body can cease functioning. Morbid and profane, you say? Well, if we can chat about anal sex over breakfast, why not death? Both happen on a daily basis. And no series delights in death more than the Final Destination franchise.

There is literally NOTHING to these movies other than the rampant celebration of Demise (and the young hotties sacrificed to it). Death isn’t merely the villain in these films: It’s the protagonist, the minor characters, the subplot and the leitmotif subject. Not even the Saw series gives death such star treatment. Saw and its spawn are focused on pain and agony, rather than what follows after; the torture scenes in those movies are so impossibly gruesome that death comes as a denouement. But in the Final Destination movies, death is the means, the end and everything in between. The only point is to watch people get knocked off in kitchens, or planes, or escalators, or SUVs, or dentist offices — you get the drift. The key is to recognize that it’s all an inside joke, the punchline of which is that you don’t need a psychopath in a mask to deliver death to your door, all you need are a few mundane objects and your own mortal stupidity.

Alas, a good joke can be spoiled by a tired setup. Which is what has happened to FD — it’s a prisoner of its own formula. Group of hot young things cheat a violent public death due to someone’s accident-premonition (the opening sequences of these films are always spectacular, and the major bridge collapse that starts off Final Destination 5 is hardly a stretch of the imagination these days). Then the survivors get systematically picked off in Rube Goldberg-meets-Dario-Argento sequences that utilize everything from swimming pool filters to laundry lines. Cultural fears are reflected (death by acupuncture! All that loony Eastern medicine could KILL you!), and various statements are made about the fragility of life and the emptiness of middle-class consumption (getting Lasik? Going tanning? Prepare to meet thy doom). Toss in Tony Todd for a little exposition about how “you can’t cheat death blah blah.” (You put Tony Todd in your movie for one purpose: to show your predominantly white audience the scariest black man alive.)

The problem here isn’t the accident sequences — they remain the raison d’etre of these films. No, the issue is the premise. It was silly in the first movie, and now its omnipresence bogs the sequels down like piñatas in a septic tank. The producers need to ditch the “cheating death” formula. It’s not necessary. Just present the characters, and have them start dying. If you want to add a little social relevance/Saw-style sermonizing , have them act like douchebags until the universe conspires to take them out in creative ways. Abandon the increasingly peripatetic dialogue and lame attempts at character development, and accept that the sole purpose of these people is to perish in a cacophony of blood and irony. As for FDfans, we get a bad rap for being shallow gore-junkies. Which isn’t entirely true (ok, it’s a little true). But we’re into more than just satisfying our gruesome death-lust. We want to see death not taken so seriously. We want to laugh at it, even a little. And yes, we want suspense to precede the gory thrill. We’re human beings; we may as well embrace that not everything about us is lily-coated dulcitude. We flail, we bleed and, eventually, we die. Turning inevitability into a joke climax renders the event itself less scary. That is, if we could ever really convince ourselves that our own deaths were anything but terrifying.

NOTE: We’re unveiling a new ratings system! Behold the drippy chainsaws! Out of five chainsaws, FD5 gets two.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl’s Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

• “Most gay person I’ve ever seen.” — Dharun Ravi.

• “His (family) is sooo indian/ first gen americanish . . . just like . . . first son off to college . . . his rents defs owna dunkin (donuts).” — Tyler Clementi.

New docs in the Tyler Clementi Rutgers suicide case reveal that everyone sits around and gossips on IM about each other. (Some more literately than others.) Why can’t an Indian dude and a white gay dude in a dorm room get along? Ugh.

“For the police operation officers dressed up as gladiators themselves to infiltrate the gangs. Other officers, disguised as dustbin men and members of the public, took part in the raid. They came to the rescue of colleagues who were set upon by angry gladiators. Police say the arrested men came from seven families, and were working with five tourist agencies that control the market for guides at the Colosseum. They had divided up tourist sites such as the Colosseum, the Piazza Venezia, and St Peter’s Basilica, according to police, and were defending their territory with violence.”
 — Some lucky policemen in Rome just got to take part in the best undercover operation of their careers.

“The point being, to understand Isherwood is to understand his infatuation with liars, which — returning to the camera metaphor — I think makes it reasonable to ask whether he himself was lying, or at least half-lying in a way he could find almost believable.”
 — Old Awl chum Matthew Gallaway writes in The Millions about Christopher Isherwood and the notion of being a camera and lying and memory. (He references the great Jonathan Richman song, “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste,” which was nicely covered by Galaxie 500. But that R.E.M. song is my favorite R.E.M. song, and I think it’s also Isherwood inspired, so let’s listen to that first.)

There is other music that has been inspired by Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, too.

Here is the video to the CONTROVERSIAL!!! lead single from the CONTROVERSIAL!!! new album from Jay-Z and Kanye West. I like it. It’s a lot the chase scene from the beginning to Back to the Future, except Jay and Kanye have made their time travel vehicle out of a Maybach (and an Otis Redding sample) instead of a DeLorean.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, “mindlessly,” motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that’s why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing.

— The shock of last night was ludicrous comedy-remake offender and general prat Russell Brand making sense of England.

New York, changing: “Beginning August 15, The New York Times Company headquarters located at 620 8th Avenue, New York will stop using a Caller ID of 1111111111 for outgoing telephone calls and will instead use the main telephone number, (212) 556–1234.”

“For a few weeks in March and April, a strange fad took hold in the headquarters of Condé Nast Publications at 4 Times Square,” wrote Warren St. John in The New York Times during the spring of 2003. “After sharing elevator rides with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Condé Nast employees sat down at their desks and typed accounts of their vertical journeys with the fashion icon,” he continued…. Then the seas changed for the magazine world. McKinsey consultants and magazine closures followed and this year the company lost its position as this city’s top privately held fashion magazine publisher in terms of market share to less-glamorous Hearst…. But last weekend, more than eight years after the genesis of the Elevator Chronicles, someone on the Internet again began recording vignettes from Condé Nast’s elevators.

— This perfectly captures the very odd deja vu I’ve had all week. Life imitates depiction imitating depiction imitating life. What I enjoyed about the CondeElevator Twitter was that it read entirely as fiction. (And a particular kind of grandiose fiction.) It was all so improbable… which, to be fair, is just like real life. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t. But what’s the difference when your identity rests so heavily on stories you’re telling about yourself?

“Chirping sparrows are actually trading insults like gangster rappers, a new study has shown. What sounds like harmonious song is really the noise of males trying to appear macho, say researchers. And, just like humans, most of the boasting and trading of insults is done to impress the girls.” It goes on, but you get the point.