Hello, my name is Luciana. In the future, I will love Bradley Cooper, and not know why.

There he is. Shape!

You may be wondering why, aside from Mr. Cooper’s well-defined abdominal muscles, effortless good looks, natural charisma, and dreamy blue eyes that is. Well, I’m not supposed to watch TV, at least according to studies that will be totally contradicted in twenty years, and then resurrected as brand new in forty. As such, the UK has organized (sorry, organised) ‘Big Scream’ screenings where we (and, to a much lesser extent, our mothers; apparently no daddies take advantage of this) can see movies and the babies can scream and poop and get changed and do baby things without getting looks and maybe even a severe tut-tut from a disapproving audience member.

Scott felt that the noise level was meager competition for the title readers and drunken plot advisers that attended the Friday matinées at the Hollywood Galaxy 6 (RIP). That’s a place babies would go to get a chance to tell someone else to be quiet for once.

For the uninitiated, these are not children’s films (last week was Bridesmaids, which was apparently packed), but normal, perhaps even deliberately adult films where you can blow stuff up, swear and show boobies. This is fine for babies, since I won’t develop shame over any of these things for years. As Bradley Cooper is going to be one of the very first images implanted in my brain, I would like the producers of Limitless for not casting Shia LaBœuf; I’ll just leave liking Mr. LaBœuf and not knowing why to Steven Spielberg.

My favorite (favourite) uncle (clonk-donkey), (comma) Scott, has been desperately wanting to go to one of these and write about it in one of his film rants. Why? Because, without a child under 12 months, he’s been told he can’t, and so he wants to. Why is he my favorite uncle? Because he hates babies, and so I want him to like me. As a baby, I have no way of knowing that this is ironic.

Also, he does a great deal of ranting (usually about babies), which I find utterly fascinating, at least until I understand what he’s saying, and then I’ll be just like you. He should love babies for this reason alone, that they’re the only ones who find his cranky musings in any way entertaining. He should also, perhaps, consider the ramifications of the idea that the only people who find him entertaining are those who have no idea what he’s saying, what words mean, or even that language exists.

But as a guest columnist, I’m here to talk about what’s it’s like to go to a big scream at the Duke of Yorks in Brighton. The screening opens to explain that it has been sponsored by Bepanthen, some type of ointment that I will die without. Since we didn’t have it 20 years ago, it follows naturally that I’m in the first human generation that survived. Instead of trailers and so on, we were treated to a lovely advertisement about how mothers apparently having no social, financial, governmental, corporate or societal support, need more, that’s right more representation. The rant, which was all noise and blurry motion, went something like this: apparently, a lobby than can get their own parking spaces in malls, put childproof caps on bottles that don’t save babies but kill old people, and censor movies with swear words, explosions and boobies isn’t powerful enough. I get it. They’re children. Everything they do is perfect and justifies everything forever. Hooray.

He still enjoyed it more than the Orange advertisement.

Then the film starts, with some kind of plot going on, whatever that is. There were, of course, several dull bits of exposition, during which I, and my other under year companions cried very loudly. Like Harry Cohn’s ass (and no, that’s not a pedophilia reference – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0169902/bio -I’m a baby, remember?), we don’t know what plot is, but we’re apparently quite in tune to what boring is.

As to the story, this is the kind of movie that Scott should absolutely hate since it’s 1) about a writer, 2) about a dumped writer. When he refers to himself as having a four digit IQ, a more eloquent expression of a writer’s ego I’m at a loss to find. He should hate it, but he didn’t. Part of this can be explained by the fact that it had enough good parts to be entertaining, just as the bad parts were erased by baby screaming and wandering around.

But this wouldn’t be fair, since it’s just an inexplicably unpretentious enjoyable film, which come out very infrequently, one, say, in my lifetime. As a baby, I don’t understand what plots, characters, dialog, or even objects are, so Mr. Neil Burger has populated the film with lots of visual gags, like extreme wide angle lenses, multiple Bradley Coopers (see above), letters falling from the sky, and a neat little trick of digitally merging zooms down New York streets, a vertiginous image that would make anyone but an infant under 12 months out throw up. It just made me poop my pants. It’s a film that could have been a bunch of people talking in a room, but instead took advantage of itself. I will be very sad to discover that not all films do this.

Plotwise, it was to be revealed that Limitless was the entertaining little brother of the unwatchable Inception, in that makes the central concept (corporate shenanigans) is a fun plot point, instead of an attempt of a very shallow person to indulge in deep metaphysical meditations.

The film is about a pill that makes you smarter and successful, and so it becomes less about ‘what does it all mean?’ than ‘are you holding?’ As Mr. Cooper climbs the ladder of success, he forgets to take care of the supply of the pill that makes it possible. At first, Scott was ranting, in his entertaining way (remember I’m a baby), ‘you’re the smartest person in the world: the one thing you do is take care of your stash.’

But Scott began to forgive the film, as this oversight became a symptom of the druggie haze of material success (‘just give me an option, man. It doesn’t have to be an actual instrument. Just a couple of shares to get me into tomorrow.’) It’s all about how fast, how much, and how fast times how much, meaning that the pill makes so smart, but not so smart that you wouldn’t ask if having $51 million dollars is really so much better than having $50 million dollars (I know, it’s 1 better). It’s as if, possibly without meaning to, the pill is a gateway drug into the real hardcore shit of, you know, all the money, property and scoring that Hollywood people want, but tell us not to.

Fortunately, I’m a baby, and have yet to learn that material possessions are both bad, and extremely desirable. You would think that Limitless was the beginning of my indoctrination into this philosophy, but that would be overestimating the genius of the Big Scream screenings. Because you don’t just have to park like in a regular movie, but also park the prams/carriages/baby tanks, in this case under the screen itself, heredepicted with a giant close-up of Bradley Cooper’s extremely expensive tie. You see, what they’re really teaching us about is parking, who gets what space, when and where, and who has the best cup holder (I do, by the way).

Mine is third from the back. I told you about the cup holder.

In the future, I will spend an extra ten minutes looking for a parking space that’s ten seconds closer to where I want to go, and won’t know why.
(editor’s note: all sketches are done entirely in the dark and unretouched, in the fear that if I did retouch them, they wouldn’t be that much better. Pretty clever of me.).