#don't be ridiculous *sips from giant mug labelled 'I Love David So Much tea'*

[honeylikewords]

tell me abt the Good Boy Benny Lambo! let all the emotions out frond

oh boy oh boy thank you my lad

okAY SO DO YOU SEE THIS BOY

THIS BOY?

THIS IS A GOOD BOY

AND I’M GONNA TELL YOU EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM

So, because I’m about 100% sure no one who follows me has seen this movie (or, at the very least, only a handful of very dedicated fans have seen it, because this movie basically disappeared off the face of the earth, doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, and its page on iMDB is about four sentences long and tells the reader NOTHING about ANYTHING), I’m going to give a synopsis of the movie and about my baby, Benny.

(If you wanna watch the movie, you can rent it here or on iTunes!)

This is going to get long, so I’m putting it under a read more for those of you who don’t want to suffer the excess on your dashboards.

The movie is based on a play called ‘The Mayor’s Limo’ (which was written by the guy who wrote the play/movie ‘Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding’, which, oddly enough, ALSO starred Jon!). The premise is that Benny is a homeless man in New York, going under the name Banzai (which is terrible and I refuse to refer to him as such). He’s self-destructive, lonely and frustrated, determined to keep everyone and everything at a distance as he tries to get by on the streets.

His ‘friends’ in the homeless camp have learned that the nearby homeless shelter is being destroyed in a move from the mayor to buy out a church and its surrounding property for several million dollars, and the homeless are staging a rag-tag protest to try and keep the shelter open. Benny refuses to participate and instead walks around the streets, frustrated when he realizes that no establishments will let him in to use the bathroom.

He is kicked out of stores and buildings and eventually comes to the police precinct across from the homeless protest and asks an officer if he can use the bathroom. When he is rudely refused, Benny hears his friends calling to him, asking him to be part of the demonstration, as they’ve realized that the limo parked in front of the shelter belongs to none other than the mayor who is trying to buy out the church and shelter. Frustrated, angry, and in desperate need of relief, Benny decides to “protest” by hopping the divider between the protest and the limo, and, uh... he pees all over the limo. 

This is seen by numerous cops, journalists, priests and nuns of the church, and even the mayor himself. Obviously, they have Benny arrested and taken to the precinct, even though all of Benny’s homeless friends are both delighted that he took a stand and furious that he is being arrested. 

The rest of the movie plays out inside the precinct, where Benny is held in a cell (or ‘cage’ as he refers to it) inside the precinct and the three night shift detectives try to suss out anything about him. They have direct orders from the mayor to try and paint Benny as a dangerous man so that he won’t be held as a hero or martyr in the papers, so they’re trying to find any information they can to show that Benny is a bad, bad man.

Benny, however, is clearly struggling with severe mental illness. He lashes out at the detectives, has rapid mood swings, and is clearly terrified of being held in the cage. He oscilates wildly between emotional extremes and seems to have endured a great tragedy; when asked where his parents live, he grimly says “if there’s a heaven, they’re in it.” 

To cut to the chase, Benny’s parents and brother were murdered in an arsonist fire. Two men set fire to Benny’s house with all of them still inside, and only Benny survived. The trauma of the event has left him severely damaged, with a fear of fire, a determination to never live in a house again, and completely destructive internal guilt. He believes the house fire is his fault, as the two men who set the fire were trying to get back at him.

So, in a bout of rage, Benny went to find the men in their apartment and beat them within an inch of their lives before contemplating whether or not to set their place on fire, too. He ultimately decided not to, terrified of this part of him that had come out through the loss of his family, the grief becoming too much for him to handle anymore.

After that, he disappeared onto the streets, refusing to answer to his original name and desperately trying to forget who he was before.

The movie runs its course with the detectives finding out who he is but sympathizing with him, hoping that if he just keeps his mouth shut and nods along, they’ll be able to release him with just the minor infraction of public indecency. Unfortunately, the chief of police has it in for Benny and so does the mayor, and both conspire to expose Benny; they find his real name and the story of how he sought revenge on the men who killed his family, and they have the angle they need to portray Benny as a menace to society instead of an example of how the system has failed.

By the end of the film, they have illegally brought in photographers and journalists to the station, despite Benny begging not to be photographed, seen, or interviewed. The flashing from the camera bulbs sets Benny into a panic attack and PTSD-like flashback to the event of the fire, and he has to be taken from the precinct kicking and screaming, then placed in an ambulance. The film ends with the resignation that Benny has finally succumbed to his illness and has become what he previously stated he feared being: “a talker”, or one of the mentally ill people who stand on street corners, talking to the air as if someone is there, completely lost to their own mind.

The entire movie is actually really good, despite being pretty low budget. I honestly did only watch it for Jon and I have to say, it’s not pretty solidly in my top five Jon movies because he’s SUCH a good actor. He displays an incredible range in the movie and can really convincingly shift between emotions SO fast and give them all real depth and dimension. He plays “crazy” and yet there’s so much salience and awareness there, and Jon really knows how to display trauma in a realistic way. It’s incredible and Benny is now really high on my list of best Jon characters.

He’s very playful, almost childish, and while rude and coarse, it’s clear that this behavior isn’t who he is. He used to be a three-time state champion quarterback and was determined to go to college. He loved his parents, and especially his mother, who he regarded as a beautiful spirit and a kindhearted woman. He’s clearly very intelligent and quick-witted, and all of his dialogue can prove it. He used to get good grades and won a scholarship to a good school, but lost it due to an accident that left him unable to play football for a while. He was a really, really great guy who lost everything.

His family was taken from him in a tragic way and the men who did the act were never convicted, so of course Benny felt compelled to do what he did. It’s certainly not a good thing, but it made sense, and I can hardly blame him... Benny’s like a combination of Frank Castle and David and Shane (and maybe a sprinkling of BJ?), all pulling different aspects of them out and showcasing what a dimensional, complicated man Benny is.

Basically, I love him very much and want to give him a bath and a good square meal and a safe place to live and a million forehead kisses because he’s a big sweetheart who needs something to tether him to reality. Like, you can SEE how much he wants to be part of the normal world, but the only thing holding him back is his confused and self-damaging ouroboros of guilt and self-punishment. He’s convinced that he deserves nothing good, nothing happy, nothing safe. He’s determined to harm himself, but if he could just be given a chance to be happy...

Anyway, I basically just want to write about him being happy and being loved, despite his insistence that he does not deserve love, and about his journey back to being a part of something bigger than himself, because he deserves to be cared about and seen and helped and loved, just like everyone on earth. Just because he’s lost and hurt and scared doesn’t mean he’s beyond saving and not worth helping. Everyone deserves a chance to be happy and to do good for both themselves and those around them, and ESPECIALLY him when he did NOTHING wrong, in the grand scheme of things.

please someone just let me write about him being HAPPY

anyway i’m crying so please enjoy more gifs of this fluffy puppy

a puppy in need of comfort :’(

a happy laughy puppy!

a smirky puppy >;3c

anyway i love him

(source for gifs)