In Which We Wake Up And Jennifer Lawrence Is Kinda There

The Sleeping Girl

by ELEANOR MORROW

Passengers
dir. Morten Tyldum
116 minutes

It is a very weird moment in Passengers when Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) walks by Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) in her hibernation pod. He has been woken up ninety years too soon on his generation starship, and he is looking for some feminine companionship. The only place he can go for advice is the ship's bar, where an android played by Sarah Silverman's boyfriend tells him not to wake her from hibernation. Jim is so sexually frustrated by Aurora's unavailability that he takes out his anger on a boxing bag. "She's the perfect woman," he whines to no one in particular, even though he has never met her.

Well, Aurora is not the perfect woman, not by a long shot. Jim finds various videotapes of her recorded by the company previous to her interstellar journey that make it clear she is a pretentious twerp. He is still fixated on this one birthmark on her neck and he ends her hibernation anyway, a move so incredibly selfish that is impossibly to like or even respect his character. But then, the more you learn about Chris Pratt, the more impossible it is is like or respect him, too.

Lawrence looks relatively emaciated for the role, but director Morten Tyldum goes to great pains to make her appear very soft. She wakes up with complete makeup, including eyeshadow and immediately has a panic attack that the two of them are alone together. I guess she is afraid of what will happen?

She tells Jim that she can't imagine being completely alone for a year, like this is the dirt-worst nightmare that could befall anyone ever. The room he lives in has a basketball court, couldn't he like work on his jump shot and read Elena Ferrante books? That would have taken until approximately June, and he could have ruined a woman's life after that.

Even though there's a bunch of hibernation pods around that could probably be used to go back to sleep, I guess a part of Jim doesn't really want to, given that he has unlimited alcohol, food and Jennifer Lawrence. The two of them put a serious focus on breaking into the command deck, although it is somewhat unclear as to what they could accomplish there. Eventually they notice that the ship's automation seems somewhat awry, which should have tipped them off to preserving food and reproducing. The two have a warped, semi-passionate sex scene, not halfway as erotic as it is seeing Jennifer Lawrence in a full-body white swimsuit.

With nothing else to distract her, Aurora focuses in on her traveling mate. She asks him questions like she is a combination between Studs Terkel and Jane Pauley. One night she gets dressed up for him and he's like, "Wow." She tells him that he cleans up pretty good as well and they pretend to go on this weird date where it is not completely clear whether or not Jim plans to drug this woman. Aurora has applied an astonishing amount of makeup by this point, like gobs of it.

Now that these two are a couple they try having "spontaneous" sex around the ship and running (?). At this point Passengers slows to a glacial, disgusting crawl. Let me attempt to describe the kind of chemistry Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence have together. It is like when you have a friend who is a very complicated woman, and she meets a man who gets her. Then one time you're out with both of them at a restaurant, and while Jennifer Lawrence is in the bathroom, Chris Pratt tells you that he's on Reddit.

In a very emotional scene, Aurora finds out that Jim woke her up from hibernation, and by this point we sort of hope she murders him and bags his body. Instead she throws a vase and sobs.

The ship breaks down completely after that, and these two twits haven't saved any food whatsoever. Fortunately, Laurence Fishburne wakes up and the entire rest of the plot is forgotten about in short order. Even though Fishburne is the only one who has any idea what is going on, Aurora is immediately combative with him and the only thing she can think of is to tell him how upset she is that the breakfast bar is malfunctioning.

"It's murder," Aurora tells Laurence Fishburne about her predicament, and he gives her a folksy metaphorical, semi-racist way to come to terms with the situation. Shortly thereafter he dies. While the one-sheet for Passengers, promises "there is a reason they woke up," it turns out there is not really a reason whatsoever, and Aurora figures out how to love her murderer. Maybe she'll start doing feminist movies next year.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

In Which We Find Out Why He Dumped Jennifer Lawrence

The Happy Couple

by DICK CHENEY

Imagine some guy (Chris Martin) is placing his rigid penis inside of you, and then the next day he says, "I've got to spend the day with Gwyneth." You respond how any sane person would; you say, "But she will definitely not be having sex with you, Chris." "Sex isn't everything," he responds, and goes off to consciously uncouple.

It is hard to be Jennifer Lawrence. How do you think that she felt when she was dumped by Chris Martin for a darker-haired version of his ex-wife? I can answer that for you: She felt absolutely terrible. I mean, look at this woman:

Chris' new girlfriend, British actress Annabelle Wallis, is a lot more accomodating than Jennifer Lawrence. Ms. Lawrence has been let down by men before. It's not exactly a phenomenon to which she is unaccustomed. She put out a casting call for boyfriends quite recently, and not a single member of One Direction responded. She intimidates men, probably, but she did something worse than intimidate Chris Martin: she bored him.

Coldplay release their seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, this week. The title comes from the fact that Chris Martin woke up one day and was like, "You know how when we sleep at night, our head is literally full of our dreams?!?!" And the band members were like, "Yes, Chris, we will say absolutely anything to stop you from being depressed about women."

A Head Full of Dreams contains not one single song about Jennifer Lawrence. It pretends that she does not even exist, that she never existed, that she was just a rebound-esque distraction for Chris as he found a more interesting woman with a lot more life experience than Jennifer Lawrence. I mean, when Lawrence reaches back into her life history, what does she really have to tell Chris that is worth repeating in song lyrics? "Let me reminisce about that time I got my period on the set of a multimillionaire movie I wasn't paid enough for." No, he's not interested in that. He misses Gwyneth, and when she used to tell him about the evils of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.

"Been around the world looking for someone like you," Chris openly admits on A Head Full of Dreams, essentially, someone like Gwyneth. This is a frightening thought, but to Annabelle Wallis' credit, she seems to have embraced being the faux-coupler. She even sings on the album's best track, "Up & Up". "Army of One" has Chris explaining that he is "going to fight for you," a statement especially galling to Jennifer Lawrence, because he took her about as seriously as a child takes his own mortality.

Chris Martin is a child, but so is his new girlfriend, who grew up in Portugal. "If you get the chance to live abroad, lessons in life it gives you are like no other," she explained in one interview. Then she allowed a photographer to take pictures of her dressed like this:

Fortunately in ensuing months Annabelle has gone brunette, because it is important to Chris that she does not too closely resemble a younger version of his children's mother. On A Head Full of Dreams, Annabelle's singing is basically identical to Gwyneth's in that their voices are both dissembled into the background, superceded by Chris' vocals. The only woman you really hear during the entirety of A Head Full of Dreams is, weirdly, Beyonce. She guests on "Hymn for A Weekend," which sounds like basically every song on the album.

Coldplay worked with various hitmakers instead of writing their own album or letting Brian Eno arrange it. The result is something more in the vein of popular music today than their usual sound that resembles a U2 cover band, so I guess they were successful in what they were going for. The comments from Martin to USA Today recently were downright scary: "If I may speak for the band, sometimes you need a break from the singer," he told them. Yikes.

The only problem with this slight alteration in sound is that Coldplay was actually better at sounding like U2 than the original band, and their music occupied an important niche that appealed to sensitive white men who felt overwhelmed by strong women but unable to articulate exactly why. Instead, the producers of A Head Full of Dreams did a fine job of making the album sound like everything else that is on the radio, just with more ridiculous lyrics. "I want to hold you and sway," Martin explains like some fucking idiot. A Head Full of Dreams is so gleefully enthusiastic the album sounds like inspirational music for atheists. "I'm feeling drunk and high," Chris whines, even though he is neither. He is just thankful to be dating a woman who doesn't demand anything from him.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Up & Up" - Coldplay (mp3)

In Which Our Dragons Have The Run Of The Facility

Ser Kevan Will Save Us

by DICK CHENEY

In the histories Herodotus describes a rarity: an Egyptian king not born into the nobility. Amasis was a drunk and a thief before he became king. He would wander, inebriated, into the homes of the rich and wealthy, stealing what he could to restore whatever fortune he lost at gambling. When he was caught he would be presented to oracles for judgment; some confirmed his felonies, others absolved him of any wrongdoing. When he became King he ignored the gods who had said he was innocent, and started to revere those who convicted him. This is something like the philosophy a Lannister uses to strangle his whore.

Tyrion dumped Shae, married a ginger over fifteen years her junior, and murdered her in her client's bed. I'm surprised he did not rip out her teeth afterwards and hang them around his neck.

was he reading on there, or just constipated from incest revelations? Either way, it doesn't pay to linger. Walk around, see what you feel when you move a bit.

Call me naive and innocent, but I felt that Tywin Lannister's protestations from his death toilette maybe had the ring of truth. Was he really going to let his own son die? It's not like he has a billion — he has two and one is probably going to need to be recast after he leaves Thrones and the unforgiving role of a one-armed guardsman for a career playing opposite whatever is left of Cameron Diaz.

cameron, being on the receiving end of a direwolf bite is humiliating, but you did the important work of making leslie mann look attractive in comparison

Just kidding Mrs. Diaz, I enjoyed your winsome cameo as the skeleton who slaughtered Jojen Reed. When some white fogey in a cave — subsisting on god knows what besides the fever dreams of young marsh boys — explained that Jojen had known of his own death all along, I screamed at the betrayalthon. I was with the idea that some little girl ("the Children" jesus George it took you five years to come up with that?) was entering Bran's dreams, since it seemed like maybe there could be some kind of romance there down the road.  Now that I know some creepy old Gandalf was "watching them their entire lives," my erection has been reduced to a mere shadow of what it once was.

an old man has been watching you in your dreams, Bran. You fine with that?

I recently was forced/cajoled/bartered by my wife Lynne into watching X-Men: Days of Future Past. The discussion about whether or not to see the movie went a little something like this.

ME: I feel uncomfortable watching a movie made by someone who I know forced young people to have sex against their will.
LYNNE: You loved Blue Jasmine.

I had no comeback for that, and also, Lynne promised to watch the second season of Under the Dome with me, even though she commented that Hank Schrader would never do all those things and Stephen King was "a fucking stupid crone."

that is the worst wig I have ever seen, and I've seen an episode of Modern Family

X-Men: Days of Future Past was the worst piece of shit I have seen in awhile. Time travel movies are always absolutely silly, but this took the cake. At one point Captain Picard explained to Gandalf that he really had no idea whether someone could affect the flow of time, even though sending Wolverine back to the 70s was the entire premise of the film. The worst part of X-Men: Days of Future Past was having to look at Jennifer Lawrence's ungainly blue physique the entire time, and James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender being forced by Bryan Singer to pretend she was appealing in any way whatsoever. Lawrence looked like a dirty blue towel wrapped around two exercise balls.

Afterwards I was so incensed I wasted my time with this utter dreck I convinced Lynne to allow me to use the galactic cap as reparations. (Menopause is for Democrats.) Watch this video, and thank me later, assuming you are okay with applying a preparatory adhesive to the tip of your jambalaya before sexual congress:

Stannis Baratheon's magical arrival on the scene to slay the wildlings was a bit implausible, but what the hey. This show will kill anyone off except Mance Rayder, he's the Ron Weasley of Westeros.

The creepy glance across the funeral pyre that Melisandre shared with our boy Jon Snow gave me chills. Funerals are a wonderful place to meet women, however, especially if the corpse in question was your OTP. Who knows if you might really click with her sister, or your King's shadow-birthing mistress?

was a double death out of the question? the likeability of these two makes Eric Cantor seem charming

The battle between the Hound and Brienne of Tarth brought up a lot of delicate mems of when I shot Condi Rice in the belly-button with a Civil War pistol in a violent reenactment of the Hamilton-Burr duel for my own amusement. I would be lying if I said I did not want the Hound to cut off the tall woman's sword hand so she and Jamie could be twinsies.

The fault here was really Jamie's: if you want to negotiate the safe return of Arya Stark, send a diplomat; if you want someone who is sure to not protect the girl at all and magically leave her post and abdicate her responsibility when things get the slightest bit difficult, Brienne was a fine choice. Podrick was just like "smh miss u Bronn."

Ser Kevan, you must restore the pride to the Lannister name. Twyin did too much dramatic walking away and turning for my tastes att

Cersei suddenly losing her mind about her marriage to the super-eligible Sir Loras came across a bit over-the-top. She is destined to suffer in mediocre subplots for some time while the real man of the family, Sir Kevan Lannister, takes his rightful place as Hand of the King. Jennifer Lawrence will be the newly recast Sir Kevan, and I must say the role of a mature man in his fifties much more befits her natural talents.

missing you greatly Drogon. When God takes a life, do they try to chain him in the basement? Then why lock up these beauties?

Daenerys Targaryen's emotional, subterranean imprisonment of the only two dragons she had handy really made me feel things, but not like good things. It was confusing to me why two absolutely glorious creatures were kept in a hidey hole while Piper Chapman has the run of her facility.

My idea of a spin-off to bide the time until George R.R. Martin finishes things up is the happy adventures of Drogon the black dragon cruising through the Valyrian ruins, consoling and befriending all old folks who live there, irrevocably altered by the radiation poisoning from the Doom. Somewhere among that wreckage he may find the disturbed, half-mad mutants whose intercourse produced Emily Blunt.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can relive all the tears, fears and Hot Pie-related bon mots of this season of Game of Thrones here.

woody allen also has a really nice house.

"Hawthorne" - The Felice Brothers (mp3)

"No Trouble" - The Felice Brothers (mp3)