When we’d get irritated with each other, sometimes we’d wave each other off and say, “Bzz! Bzz!”
#Chris tucker fifth element movie
If I recall, we watched the movie again the following night. Instead, though, she was laughing hysterically.
I waited for my mother to get up and turn the television off. I had never seen anything like this on screen before I probably wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing down there, but my mouth was agape. I remember looking at the advertisement for the film, scanning Milla Jovovich and Bruce Willis’s faces as well as the space ships and constellations whirling in the background.Ī few hours later, we were sitting on the living room couch with our cocker spaniel wedged between us while Ruby Rhod (played by Chris Tucker) seemingly performed cunnilingus on a futuristic flight attendant. This was 1997 and the video cassette in my hand was Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. I likely could have saved us both a great deal of frustration by confessing that I was absolutely uninterested in watching straight people have sex, but that’s hindsight.
“I don’t care about violence,” she’d say whenever I held up a possible movie rental in the New Releases section of Blockbuster. To which I say: Exactly.Īttempting to protect me from being ravaged by pop culture, my mother had a rule. It’s entirely possible that each of the sections of this essay will contradict and cancel one another out. Here, I hold a line from Lydia Davis’s story “Break It Down” before me like a talisman: “…you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can’t help thinking about it all the time.” I fear that if I think about it for too long, the whole shimmering structure of my love for this film will crumble to dust. Let me just enjoy the damn thing.Īnd so, as I prepare to write about The Fifth Element, I would like for you to know that I’d much rather not write about it. Let me at least in the dark, I ask of my critical self, be dumb and amused and emotional and campy. The reason is simple I prefer not to “think” while watching movies.
Quite a feat for me considering that I typically hate re-living films, even ones I enjoy in the moment. Surely by now, I have sat through at least fifteen viewings. Never has it come about that I’ve turned down an opportunity to watch The Fifth Element. Notes after Fifteen Viewings of ‘The Fifth Element’
0 kommentar(er)
