My Idol: Fuller McCallister

My dream is to one day write, direct, and produce Home Alone. 5--the movie that could've and should've come between Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It starts out just like Home Alone--every scene is exactly the same--but instead of following Kevin McCallister and all his shenanigans, it's about Fuller, Kevin's cousin/the most compelling character in the movie, and whatever was going on with him during the time that Kevin was alone in his home. 


Fuller McCallister is my idol because he wears suspenders and because he has fly hair, but mostly because he never, ever goes easy on the Pepsi. He knows drinking Pepsi before bedtime is just going to make him pee all over the place and he knows that everyone knows this about him, but he doesn't care. He hits that Pepsi hard and fast. Fuller hits that Pepsi like a champ. There's a lesson to be learned there, my friends. A lesson about Pepsi and how you should never go easy on it. 


In another world, Fuller and I are BFF. We devote whole evenings to not going easy on Pepsi. 

After these marathon Pepsi binges, we inevitably slip into a sugar induced quasi coma and end up peeing all over the hide-a-bed...

and Kevin. 

It's really gross, I know. But what are you gonna do? Go easy on the Pepsi? Yeah right. When I die, my headstone will read: Here lies Amber. She did not go easy on the Pepsi. Her pee was bright yellow and globular.


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Can this song please be my ringtone? 

Bummer #1: My Girl

(I'm introducing a new feature about Hollywood's sick fascination with traumatizing youngsters and the toll that this personally took on me throughout my adolescence and now as an adult. I'm looking to post something new every Monday. What better way to kick things off than with the Godzilla of soul-crushing family films: My Girl.)

Heartwrenching films usually move toward a single grim climax. At which point, we, the audience, tear up, feeling either genuinely moved or emotionally manipulated. The structure of these movies and our reactions to them really just follow that basic plot chart from high school English.

My Girl's structure, however, looks like something you might see on a seismograph.

(click to make bigguh)
My Girl is relentless and it's that lack of emotional respite that makes it so heart-shattering. You watch this movie and you feel like you really went through some shiz.

It's brutal! Every time I sit through My Girl, I spend the last fifteen minutes of the movie crying. 

When I was younger, that crying was just straightforward sobbing. These days, though, it's more about me trying and failing to rage against the inevitable tears--the end result being a lot of gulping, hiccuping, and an overwhelming feeling of lunacy. My Girl just hits me on this incredibly visceral level; the government should seriously look into somehow weaponizing it.

Thomas J.'s death is disturbing. Clearly. And when you're ten years old, even if you have a firm grasp on the concept of death, the last person that you expect to see die in a movie is a kid. Especially, a kid with glasses.

Like going to prom or accidentally calling your teacher "mom," crying at the end of My Girl is a rite of passage. I honestly love this movie but I've gotten to the point where I don't need to watch it anymore because (a) life is already depressing enough, I don't need to deliberately inject any tragedy into it and (b) I can't believe or accept how easily Vada gets over her BFF's death. I mean, it was kind of her fault that he died, right?

He was looking for her mood ring when those bees stung him.

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