If you insist on believing in some kind of sentient, all-seeing, all-knowing entity called “God” then I don’t know what to tell you. Have you ever considered becoming addicted to heroin? It’ll make you feel like Jesus’s son. Kidding.

Okay, let’s hypothesize that “God” is there and, heh-heh, “watching”. On second thought let’s not. Because as Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen said time and again, God doesn’t give a shit about you or your fate or the well-being of your family. Really. It’s not that he’s hostile to you and yours, but that he’s indifferent as to whether you end up rich or struggling or pregnant or dead from Russian shrapnel or whatever. He’s not in this.

Okay, yes — I’ve occasionally thanked God for good fortune or prayed for a fair shake, but it’s not meant with any sincerity. It’s a figure of speech.

I hated, hated, HATED Kelly Fremon Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen. I’m not saying I’m already planning to get my hate-on for Craig’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (Lionsgate, 4.28), which is based on Judy Blume’s 1970 novel. I haven’t seen it and will naturally wait for a screening, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not feeing the negativity from afar. Because I can.

HE nemesis Benny Safdie plays the father of the lead protagonist, Abby Ryder Fortson‘s “Margaret Simon”. This whets my appetite, of course.

And they threw poor George Harrison into this?

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it’s indifferent.” — Stanley Kubrick, sometime in the mid ’60s.

From HE’s The Edge of Seventeen review, filed on 9.17.16: “In the words of John F. Kennedy, I do not shrink from the occasional responsibility of shitting on a teen-angst dramedy — I welcome it. I was frowning and throwing my hands in the air and exhaling and checking my watch less than five minutes in. Okay, The Edge of Seventeen became somewhat more tolerable during the last third, which is when neurotic characters in movies of this sort begin to fold and weep as they lay their emotional cards on the table. But God, that first hour! And the cliches! It poked and prodded and put me through long stretches of hell.”