Recommendations

A high school girl plucks a case from the rack and brings it up to the counter one January afternoon. “Hey, I've heard a lot of different things about this movie. Have you seen it? What do you think?”

Fernando rises from his seat (he's currently speaking with one of his friends via the internet), saunters over to the counter, and looks down. He's expecting one of the newer releases; The Town or Resident Evil: Afterlife or the like. But then he draws in a hissing breath between his teeth. The Human Centipede is looming up at him. Very few things are capable of looming up at someone, but that movie is definitely one of them.

Fernando's personal opinion on the aesthetic merit of this and similar movies has been explained previously, but as he is in the business of renting movies for profit, it behooves Fernando to put the best face he can onto the film.

In order to do that, though, he needs to find something positive to spin.

“Um,” Fernando begins, trying to stall for time as his mind percolates, “I actually have not. It's a very...idiosyncratic movie and, um, doesn't really appeal to my tastes. If you've heard anything about it, you know the basic plot, I'm sure.”

“Yeah,” the young lady agrees. “I've heard it's pretty gross.”

Fernando shrugs, but now he's latched onto a sales pitch-y thread of conversation. “You won't get me to disagree. But if you're into that sort of thing—and some people are—then it may well be up your alley. One of my friends watched it not long after it came out.”

“Oh? What did he think?”

“She described it to me as, 'A man doing a bunch of people the favor of putting them into a permanent rimjob circle but lacking in the courtesy to close the loop.' That's probably not a spoiler, since a picture of exactly that is on the back of the case.” The girl laughs and Fernando continues, “She told me she and her friends laughed pretty much all the way through. If you can get past the squickiness inherent in what the, um, attachment surgery necessarily entails and you've got the right mindset and people around, I guess it can be one of those so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasures. Just be sure to have some sort of brain bleach around if you're feeling brave enough to tackle it.”

The girl laughs again at the last sentence. “Ok, I'll take it!” and she plucks the tag from the case. Fernando replaces the dread artifact in its nook on the rental racks while the high schooler follows him and after a short while selects a second movie, Friday Night Lights.

“In case I need something to try to forget the other one,” she explains as Fernando fills out the rental slip.

Sometimes it hurts being this good.