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Post by stabcaesar on Dec 10, 2023 11:15:12 GMT
Just finished it. The final hour is absolutely brilliant and some of Scorsese's strongest work (Brendan Fraser's embarrassing cameo aside), there are some incredible sequences scattered in the first two hours as well (e.g., Lizzie Q's death, phenomenal), and it's really beautifully shot, but there's just no chemistry between DiCaprio and Gladstone. Their pedestrian, hollow, thinly-written "love story" really downgrades this film. Which is a shame as it could've been a stone-cold masterpiece.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 31, 2023 1:33:02 GMT
if you would've told me 2 years ago Marty Scorsese of all people would've taken the Osage Murders and turned it into a shallow, tensionless excuse to have Leo DiCaprio make grumpy faces at the camera for three hours, I would've laughed.
I have no idea what went wrong here. There's no narrative momentum at all. Most of the deaths hold shockingly little weight because of the matter-of-fact way Marty shoots them and Thelma edits them into the monotonous narrative because apart from a few moments of grief, life mostly seems to move on in Fairfax. Just another dead Osage, just another sentence in the Wikipedia article. This is 100% because Marty reframes Ernest Hale of the central POV and shifts focus away from the Osage. There's no inner life or conflict to this guy at all and the 3 and a half hour plot moves largely on his stupidity. He just keeps killing his wife's family and there's never any indication as to why or how he justifies it to himself. If he's too stupid to understand, then why is he the protagonist instead of Mollie (or another Osage character? or hell even Tom White). If he knows what he's doing and is conflicted about it but doing it anyways, MAYBE try to devote some time to fleshing that out instead of having a grumpy-cat-looking Leo commit these heinous crimes like they're a minor inconvenience. There's zero tension.
I really have no idea what people are seeing in this. Marty's monotonous approach and the horribly misguided screenplay doom it from the start. I was so excited to turn it on but by the 80-minute mark it was painfully obvious how the rest of the story would progress. If David Grann's book was murky and spread too thin, this feels like a soulless retelling of events from the perspective of an outsider looking in.
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Post by mikediastavrone96 on Dec 31, 2023 2:07:51 GMT
if you would've told me 2 years ago Marty Scorsese of all people would've taken the Osage Murders and turned it into a shallow, tensionless excuse to have Leo DiCaprio make grumpy faces at the camera for three hours, I would've laughed. I have no idea what went wrong here. There's no narrative momentum at all. Most of the deaths hold shockingly little weight because of the matter-of-fact way Marty shoots them and Thelma edits them into the monotonous narrative because apart from a few moments of grief, life mostly seems to move on in Fairfax. Just another dead Osage, just another sentence in the Wikipedia article. This is 100% because Marty reframes Ernest Hale of the central POV and shifts focus away from the Osage. There's no inner life or conflict to this guy at all and the 3 and a half hour plot moves largely on his stupidity. He just keeps killing his wife's family and there's never any indication as to why or how he justifies it to himself. If he's too stupid to understand, then why is he the protagonist instead of Mollie (or another Osage character? or hell even Tom White). If he knows what he's doing and is conflicted about it but doing it anyways, MAYBE try to devote some time to fleshing that out instead of having a grumpy-cat-looking Leo commit these heinous crimes like they're a minor inconvenience. There's zero tension. I really have no idea what people are seeing in this. Marty's monotonous approach and the horribly misguided screenplay doom it from the start. I was so excited to turn it on but by the 80-minute mark it was painfully obvious how the rest of the story would progress. If David Grann's book was murky and spread too thin, this feels like a soulless retelling of events from the perspective of an outsider looking in. I'll try to offer some of what people are seeing in this as a response to your specific criticisms. What I think is so effective is the indifference of the violence, how casually it is employed. It is not exciting or out of the ordinary, it's largely unemotional, and all there is for us as an audience is observation. We are confronted with the genocide happening in this community, and faced with the indifference that allowed these killings to transpire. That extends to Ernest himself, perhaps the least self-reflective character of Scorsese's oeuvre (maybe alongside Jordan Belfort). How can he reconcile killing his wife's family with his seeming love for her and their children? Perhaps it's just denial or delusion, thinking that the killings will funnel the money towards Mollie making it his by proxy of being her government-mandated guardian and they can live happily ever after. That's probably why he takes a sip of her poison, that weakness and denial within himself of what he is taking part in. I myself think Ernest's denial is in fact what makes him a worthy central character in this story, having the audience (which Scorsese of course knows will mostly be a white American audience) confront this country's history of white supremacy and the complicity we carry on in not actively fighting against it today. Because even now there are a lot of people who will handwave or try to explain away why they are doing nothing to speak out or fight against injustices taking place; in fact, they will often outright deny it to prevent the dissonance altogether.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 31, 2023 18:22:09 GMT
I'll try to offer some of what people are seeing in this as a response to your specific criticisms. What I think is so effective is the indifference of the violence, how casually it is employed. It is not exciting or out of the ordinary, it's largely unemotional, and all there is for us as an audience is observation. We are confronted with the genocide happening in this community, and faced with the indifference that allowed these killings to transpire. That extends to Ernest himself, perhaps the least self-reflective character of Scorsese's oeuvre (maybe alongside Jordan Belfort). How can he reconcile killing his wife's family with his seeming love for her and their children? Perhaps it's just denial or delusion, thinking that the killings will funnel the money towards Mollie making it his by proxy of being her government-mandated guardian and they can live happily ever after. That's probably why he takes a sip of her poison, that weakness and denial within himself of what he is taking part in. I myself think Ernest's denial is in fact what makes him a worthy central character in this story, having the audience (which Scorsese of course knows will mostly be a white American audience) confront this country's history of white supremacy and the complicity we carry on in not actively fighting against it today. Because even now there are a lot of people who will handwave or try to explain away why they are doing nothing to speak out or fight against injustices taking place; in fact, they will often outright deny it to prevent the dissonance altogether. ok so admittedly my dislike for Leo's performance goes a lot of the way towards making the prospect of spending 200+ minutes with his character a slog especially at the expense of Osage POVs, but even with a different actor I'd still take issue with Marty's approach here. Ernest absolutely lacks self reflection (the comparison I was thinking of was Jake LaMotta) but there are narrative ways to confront unreliable protagonists through other characters and Marty's done it before (Joey in Raging Bull, Agent Denham in Wolf of Wall Street) and that was sorely lacking here. Hell just give Plemons a few more lines (so he'd have actually had something to do) or rejigger the Mollie/Ernest relationship to give her more agency and more of a POV on what's been done to her family instead of morphing into a passive observer, but there's virtually no interest in that. Ernest drinking the poison goes partway toward interrogating his denial in the way that LaMotta's "I'm not an animal" scene in the jailcell goes partway toward explaining his rage, but neither goes far enough, and in this case it's not enough to justify spending 200 minutes with this scowling stooge. If Marty wanted to make a cautionary tale about white supremacy from the white POV, he could've made William Hale the protagonist or Tom White, while making Ernest's denial an important aspect of the story but not the main focus. IDK, I feel like I forgot about Ernest Hale the minute I finished Grann's book and I still find him forgettable. I don't think Scorsese does enough to interrogate his contradictions.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Dec 31, 2023 18:32:57 GMT
just quickly add re: the techs... Jack Fisk's sets are immaculately detailed and much better than Barbie's. Prieto's cinematography is gorgeous and his best work after Silence and Brokeback. I wouldn't mind a nomination for Jacqueline West, but I don't want her to get in at the expense of Mirojnick for Oppenheimer or Janty Yates. The invisible VFX work is a masterclass in supporting effects.
but I'll be honest, Robbie Robertson's score didn't even hit my radar after the first few minutes.
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Post by JangoB on Dec 31, 2023 18:55:03 GMT
but I'll be honest, Robbie Robertson's score didn't even hit my radar after the first few minutes. I kind of understand that. It's incredibly vivid in the opening and does stand out from time to time but for the most part it's in that *thump thump thump* mode which gives the movie a somewhat eerie heartbeat but doesn't really register as amazing scoring or anything. It's more like an effective background tool. I can even see someone thinking it's a bit monotonous. I think it works but I see where you're coming from.
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Post by Nikan on Jan 17, 2024 11:20:33 GMT
Gladstone is pure class.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 28, 2024 22:36:03 GMT
more ammo for the Gladstone is supporting crowd. I know screentime is only one metric with which to gauge these things, but Matthew Stewart calculated her KotFM screentime as just under an hour which amounts to 27% of the movie's total screentime. For the record, she only has a bout 9 more minutes of screentime than Bobby D who has about 46 minutes.
I don't know how anyone could watch this and say she's lead. Mollie practically disappears in the second act and only has a minimal presence in the 3rd. The movie isn't remotely about Mollie or her POV.
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Post by Archie on Jan 28, 2024 22:42:06 GMT
Meh. Screentime means nothing tbh. I rewatched the whole thing a few days ago and Gladstone does a whole lot more than so many previous best actress winners. And her presence is pretty much felt throughout the entire film.
Not to mention her multiple POV scenes, which De Niro doesn't get.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 28, 2024 22:44:01 GMT
Meh. Screentime means nothing tbh. I rewatched the whole thing a few days ago and Gladstone does a whole lot more than so many previous best actress winners. And her presence is pretty much felt throughout the entire film.so is De Niro's.
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Post by Nikan on Jan 28, 2024 23:10:35 GMT
more ammo for the Gladstone is supporting crowd. I know screentime is only one metric with which to gauge these things, but Matthew Stewart calculated her KotFM screentime as just under an hour which amounts to 27% of the movie's total screentime. For the record, she only has a bout 9 more minutes of screentime than Bobby D who has about 46 minutes. I don't know how anyone could watch this and say she's lead. Mollie practically disappears in the second act and only has a minimal presence in the 3rd. The movie isn't remotely about Mollie or her POV. Could this dude calculate all the performances by everyone ever? I'd subscribe lol
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Post by mikediastavrone96 on Jan 29, 2024 0:22:18 GMT
more ammo for the Gladstone is supporting crowd. I know screentime is only one metric with which to gauge these things, but Matthew Stewart calculated her KotFM screentime as just under an hour which amounts to 27% of the movie's total screentime. For the record, she only has a bout 9 more minutes of screentime than Bobby D who has about 46 minutes.
I don't know how anyone could watch this and say she's lead. Mollie practically disappears in the second act and only has a minimal presence in the 3rd. The movie isn't remotely about Mollie or her POV. Could this dude calculate all the performances by everyone ever? I'd subscribe lol He's done all the Oscar nominees.
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Jan 29, 2024 1:38:44 GMT
more ammo for the Gladstone is supporting crowd. I know screentime is only one metric with which to gauge these things, but Matthew Stewart calculated her KotFM screentime as just under an hour which amounts to 27% of the movie's total screentime. For the record, she only has a bout 9 more minutes of screentime than Bobby D who has about 46 minutes. I don't know how anyone could watch this and say she's lead. Mollie practically disappears in the second act and only has a minimal presence in the 3rd. The movie isn't remotely about Mollie or her POV. Matthew Stewart also argues that Gladstone is Lead
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rhodoraonline
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Post by rhodoraonline on Jan 30, 2024 1:10:51 GMT
I don't get all this hoople. Didn't Anthony Hopkins get Lead Acting Oscar for Silence of the Lambs for similarly less screentime?
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Post by stephen on Jan 30, 2024 1:16:48 GMT
I don't get all this hoople. Didn't Anthony Hopkins get Lead Acting Oscar for Silence of the Lambs for similarly less screentime? Speaking for myself, the issue isn't that Lily Gladstone is running lead. Anyone with supporting screentime who wants to take a stab at the leading category, be my guest. The issue that I have is that the filmmakers purported to restructure the novel's white saviour narrative to center it on the Osage (and Mollie in particular), but instead it just refocused and reframed it from the perspective of a sniveling white perpetrator and sidelined the most essential character of the piece to be a passive plot device for much of the movie.
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rhodoraonline
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Post by rhodoraonline on Jan 30, 2024 1:28:02 GMT
But I feel that is why her performance is so powerful and resonating with a lot of people. Like Archie said, her presence is felt regardless and yes I did long to see more of her and more of her role in getting attention from the FBI, for her to have more agency in the movie than was shown. But what she got to do was powerful nonetheless. People trying to derail her momentum on social media need to just shut up.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 30, 2024 1:34:15 GMT
A pretty good analysis of why the KotFM script kills how DiCap's performance is assessed underrated and screws in effect Gladstone, DiCap and the film. This is from a poster but Jeff Wells chose to highligght it on the site.......well said I think........
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Post by mikediastavrone96 on Jan 30, 2024 1:43:40 GMT
"Would The Godfather have been as compelling a story if Fredo was the main character instead of Michael?"
Fredo hardly does anything in the first Godfather. Ernest gets a lot to do in Killers and that's the point. Yes, he is acting as a puppet for Hale, but he also has a personal stake in the killings given his seeming love for his wife. And yet he does it anyway. He isn't just being reactive, he has agency and chooses to do the evil thing despite having a motive to stop at any time. That's infinitely more interesting to me than any alternative - duplicitous guy pretending to love his wife, a fool clinging onto the approval of his father figure, etc. That framing does undercut how DiCaprio's performance is perceived as it doesn't grant him much interiority (his lack of self-reflection being pretty much the whole point of the movie), but I don't really care about why he or the screenplay wasn't nominated when I myself appreciated them.
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Archie
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Post by Archie on Jan 30, 2024 1:44:17 GMT
That version of The Godfather sounds pretty good ngl... and even more tragic!
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 30, 2024 1:58:30 GMT
"Would The Godfather have been as compelling a story if Fredo was the main character instead of Michael?" Fredo hardly does anything in the first Godfather. Ernest gets a lot to do in Killers and that's the point. I think that poster meant - in a hypothetical different movie where they make Fredo the lead, where Fredo then did more it would be less interesting to him / her ........ Here's the discussion of that analysis from that site for those into such marginalia .......... hollywood-elsewhere.com/misbegotten/#disqus_thread
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Post by stephen on Jan 30, 2024 1:58:55 GMT
But I feel that is why her performance is so powerful and resonating with a lot of people. Like Archie said, her presence is felt regardless and yes I did long to see more of her and more of her role in getting attention from the FBI, for her to have more agency in the movie than was shown. But what she got to do was powerful nonetheless. People trying to derail her momentum on social media need to just shut up. I think Gladstone is very effective at selling what she's given, but I also feel a lot of people are bending over backwards to consider it a leading performance for reasons outside of the film itself, to justify Scorsese and Co.'s take on the material and to elevate Gladstone's historic leading run. And yes, while her presence may be felt, so is Heath Ledger's in The Dark Knight, and no one is calling the Joker a leading character in that movie. A supporting character can still be essential to the overall piece and even eclipse a leading performance, but that doesn't make it a co-leading role. If you go by screentime, it's hard to justify a leading placement because De Niro has only nine minutes less than her in a 200-minute runtime, and DiCaprio has a solid 45+ minutes more than her. The idea that because she has the most screentime of an actress makes her a lead is a silly one; you might as well say Miranda Otto is the female lead of The Thin Red Line by that logic. If you go by perspective, Gladstone gets a fair bit of focus early on but she never drives the narrative. Her role is purely reactionary to events outside of her control (incited largely by DiCaprio's actions), but what's worse is that we primarily see those reactions from Ernest's perspective, not from Mollie's. And the thing is, you can still tell that story from the perspective of someone who is at the center of events but doesn't actively drive them, and still have them be your primary characters. Hitchcock was really good at this, particularly with Joan Fontaine in Suspicion and Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt. But Mollie does become less and less important as the movie wears on, especially as Ernest sinks further and further into his depravity. I'm not even one of those people who talks about her languishing in a bed for an hour (partly because she's not in the movie that long); it's that her scenes are entirely and wholly dependent on Ernest with no real independence of perspective of note.
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Post by stephen on Jan 30, 2024 2:03:24 GMT
A pretty good analysis of why the KotFM script kills how DiCap's performance is assessed underrated and screws in effect Gladstone, DiCap and the film. This is from a poster but Jeff Wells chose to highligght it on the site.......well said I think........ Meh, I think it's the performance that kills it. Ernest Burkhart isn't a terribly interesting character as written but DiCaprio's strained mugging and guttural enunciations feel so affected that it grinds out any sort of humanity the character might've had. I look at that character and think of what Robert Pattinson could've done, or Jesse Plemons, or Caleb Landry Jones -- someone who's a lot more age-appropriate for the role, but who also have had experience in playing these mindless reprobates but still make them feel real and have the capacity to draw us in. I think any of those guys could've taken this role and not overwhelmed it with their antics.
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Post by finniussnrub on Jan 30, 2024 2:07:03 GMT
But I feel that is why her performance is so powerful and resonating with a lot of people. Like Archie said, her presence is felt regardless and yes I did long to see more of her and more of her role in getting attention from the FBI, for her to have more agency in the movie than was shown. But what she got to do was powerful nonetheless. People trying to derail her momentum on social media need to just shut up. I think Gladstone is very effective at selling what she's given, but I also feel a lot of people are bending over backwards to consider it a leading performance for reasons outside of the film itself, to justify Scorsese and Co.'s take on the material and to elevate Gladstone's historic leading run. And yes, while her presence may be felt, so is Heath Ledger's in The Dark Knight, and no one is calling the Joker a leading character in that movie. A supporting character can still be essential to the overall piece and even eclipse a leading performance, but that doesn't make it a co-leading role. If you go by screentime, it's hard to justify a leading placement because De Niro has only nine minutes less than her in a 200-minute runtime, and DiCaprio has a solid 45+ minutes more than her. The idea that because she has the most screentime of an actress makes her a lead is a silly one; you might as well say Miranda Otto is the female lead of The Thin Red Line by that logic. If you go by perspective, Gladstone gets a fair bit of focus early on but she never drives the narrative. Her role is purely reactionary to events outside of her control (incited largely by DiCaprio's actions), but what's worse is that we primarily see those reactions from Ernest's perspective, not from Mollie's. And the thing is, you can still tell that story from the perspective of someone who is at the center of events but doesn't actively drive them, and still have them be your primary characters. Hitchcock was really good at this, particularly with Joan Fontaine in Suspicion and Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt. But Mollie does become less and less important as the movie wears on, especially as Ernest sinks further and further into his depravity. I'm not even one of those people who talks about her languishing in a bed for an hour (partly because she's not in the movie that long); it's that her scenes are entirely and wholly dependent on Ernest with no real independence of perspective of note.I think placing her in supporting is fine given the screentime disparity, however she does have a more independent moments than you're letting on. She has the scene where she sees De Niro in her dream, the owl scene, the scene with her mother, the scene with the priest, the scene with Calvin Coolidge and the banker. But preemptively, De Niro also has substantial solo scenes, hence why I do think it is fair to say she's supporting.
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Post by stephen on Jan 30, 2024 2:14:12 GMT
I think Gladstone is very effective at selling what she's given, but I also feel a lot of people are bending over backwards to consider it a leading performance for reasons outside of the film itself, to justify Scorsese and Co.'s take on the material and to elevate Gladstone's historic leading run. And yes, while her presence may be felt, so is Heath Ledger's in The Dark Knight, and no one is calling the Joker a leading character in that movie. A supporting character can still be essential to the overall piece and even eclipse a leading performance, but that doesn't make it a co-leading role. If you go by screentime, it's hard to justify a leading placement because De Niro has only nine minutes less than her in a 200-minute runtime, and DiCaprio has a solid 45+ minutes more than her. The idea that because she has the most screentime of an actress makes her a lead is a silly one; you might as well say Miranda Otto is the female lead of The Thin Red Line by that logic. If you go by perspective, Gladstone gets a fair bit of focus early on but she never drives the narrative. Her role is purely reactionary to events outside of her control (incited largely by DiCaprio's actions), but what's worse is that we primarily see those reactions from Ernest's perspective, not from Mollie's. And the thing is, you can still tell that story from the perspective of someone who is at the center of events but doesn't actively drive them, and still have them be your primary characters. Hitchcock was really good at this, particularly with Joan Fontaine in Suspicion and Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt. But Mollie does become less and less important as the movie wears on, especially as Ernest sinks further and further into his depravity. I'm not even one of those people who talks about her languishing in a bed for an hour (partly because she's not in the movie that long); it's that her scenes are entirely and wholly dependent on Ernest with no real independence of perspective of note.I think placing her in supporting is fine given the screentime disparity, however she does have a more independent moments than you're letting on. She has the scene where she sees De Niro in her dream, the owl scene, the scene with her mother, the scene with the priest, the scene with Calvin Coolidge and the banker. But preemptively, De Niro also has substantial solo scenes, hence why I do think it is fair to say she's supporting. Those scenes are so brief, though -- I mean, the Calvin Coolidge scene alone is, what, twenty seconds? Peppering those little moments here and there to remind the audience that Mollie exists is barely lip service, especially when the movie is as long as it is. She's not absent, but she's also not omnipresent, either in screentime or in plot importance. The movie speeds through those scenes so quickly but God forbid we trim a scene like Ernest debating with Blackie Thompson about whether it was five or twenty dollars he owed him for what felt like an eternity.
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Post by finniussnrub on Jan 30, 2024 2:18:48 GMT
I think placing her in supporting is fine given the screentime disparity, however she does have a more independent moments than you're letting on. She has the scene where she sees De Niro in her dream, the owl scene, the scene with her mother, the scene with the priest, the scene with Calvin Coolidge and the banker. But preemptively, De Niro also has substantial solo scenes, hence why I do think it is fair to say she's supporting. Those scenes are so brief, though -- I mean, the Calvin Coolidge scene alone is, what, twenty seconds? Peppering those little moments here and there to remind the audience that Mollie exists is barely lip service, especially when the movie is as long as it is. She's not absent, but she's also not omnipresent, either in screentime or in plot importance. The movie speeds through those scenes so quickly but God forbid we trim a scene like Ernest debating with Blackie Thompson about whether it was five or twenty dollars he owed him for what felt like an eternity.But we NEEDED more grumpy cat faces, when are you not going to understand this!!!!
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