The Vic was built in 1912 and I don’t think a stitch of maintenance work has gone into it since.
The venue occasionally hosts concerts, but to keep the Vic venue in the black in between Interpol and Hold Steady shows, the Vic is converted every Friday night into the shittiest movie theater in the Midwest.
The image resolution is smothered in petroleum jelly and the sound is what you would get if you recorded the regular soundtrack being played in a dumpster, rendering all dialogue totally uninterpretable. However, as the name “The Brew & View” would imply, there’s a full bar at the venue. Plus, the actual presentation of the movies is so poor, you know that you’re not missing anything when you converse with your friend, or go take a leak. Also, the movie selection at the Brew & View is pretty spot on in that they show movies that you kind of want to see, but not movies that you really want to see, nor movies that you would hate to see. It’s that sweet in between spot that halves expectations, and allows you to fill in the rest with your own pursuit of satisfaction. It’s like when coffee shops fill your coffee cup up only 4/5 of the way so that you have room to add cream and sugar at your discretion. That’s what the Brew & View is. Only instead of coffee, it’s semi-appealing movies that received a theatrical release over 2-months ago, and instead of cream or sugar, it’s Miller Lite.
Get Him To The Greek was pretty good. The A-Team wasn’t just a bad movie, it was actually confusing. It was essentially a movie based entirely around five unrelated action sequences. The bad guy (I think) was played by Patrick Wilson.
I (and probably you) know P-Wils from Little Children where he plays adulted prom king Brad Adamson, a stay-at-home dad who would be the family bread winner if only he could pass the bar, which he has failed twice. Having just taken the bar, I’m very curious how people fail the bar. I’m not saying that because I’m so confident that I passed the bar (I put my odds of passing at 42%). I’m saying that because I spent the 3-weeks prior to the exam locked in my room, studying for 12-hours a day. I feel like that’s protocol passing-the-bar behavior, but how different is that behavior from failing-the-bar behavior? I would love to find out from the Brad Adamsons of the world what they did wrong. Did they spend those weeks before the bar getting wasted? Planning their weddings? Fucking Kate Winslet? What I don’t want to hear is that people that failed the bar did in fact do thousands of practice problems and essays and went to their classes and put in 12-hour days, but still failed because they’re just too thick. Because if that’s the case, I’m damned.
Afterwards, Obvi and I went to a karaoke bar a few blocks away. Obvi brought the house down with a spellbinding rendition of Wheetus’s Teenage Dirtbag.
Teenage Dirtbag is an ingenious karaoke song because it was super popular 5 to 10 years ago, is vocally demanding yet accompanied with a very approachable chorus, and is kind of lame. All good karaoke songs demand those qualities. Especially the being kind of lame part. Karaoke night is no place to bear your soul through song, nor is it the place for slapstick. You, as the performer, have to be serious, and let the humor come from the act of you singing a sort of lame song in front of strangers. The humor will be exacerbated when people, while singing along with you, reflect back on how foolish they once were for liking this song, while intimately confessing to it’s rediscovered enjoyableness.
The bar was in Wrigleyville, and therefore, filled with lots of mouth breathers. But whatever. Say what you will about that crowd, at least they like to party.
I did Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon by Neil Diamond which was met with a sort of cold response from the crowd. So in order to redeem myself, I took a pratfall off the stage during the song’s interlude. I just want to make the people happy.
