Young Adult's Charlize Theron Could Totally Hail From--& Eat Greasy Food in--Everett

Somehow Theron's metabolism processes junk food at the speed of Usain Bolt.

The Movie: Young Adult at Alderwood 16 in Lynnwood.

The Screenplate: As a 37-year-old functional alcoholic, I can state with supreme authority that at no time in cinematic history has 37-year-old functional alcoholism been portrayed more accurately than in Young Adult, the sophomore collaboration of screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, who improve upon Juno by leaps and bounds, mainly due to a remarkable performance by Charlize Theron, who must make fellow ex-model Cameron Diaz feel really small.

While attending high-school in exurban Minnesota, Theron's prom queen/ cheerleader/supermodel-caliber knockout did whatever (and whomever) she wanted, and taunted the shit out of lesser specimens with impunity. She was earmarked for bigger and better, and effectively achieved that, moving on to a life as a ghostwriter of a popular teen fiction series in Minneapolis, where she spends most of her time drinking whiskey, fucking random dudes, and watching Kardashian reruns.

At this juncture, Mavis is divorced, and the book series she writes is nearing extinction. She gets a birth announcement from an old flame who still lives in her hometown, and abruptly decides to head there in hopes of winning him back--never mind that he's married and has just had his first child.

So, yeah, Mavis is ethically deficient, to put it politely. And upon returning home, she keeps right on looking her nose down on her former classmates, including Patton Oswalt, who was crippled in an anti-gay beatdown administered by some of the jocks Theron proudly professes to have sucked off in the woods back in the day.

And yet, somehow, Theron, portraying an unabashed sociopath, extracts a measure of sympathy from the audience--most notably, during a scene in which, while hammered, she publicly insults half the town, including her parents. Playing Mavis as a cross between Diaz in Bad Teacher and Nicole Kidman in To Die For (yet infinitely better than either), at film's end you're actually left wondering why her former boyfriend (Patrick Wilson, playing the other side of Little Children's coin) didn't leave his homely wife (Elizabeth Reaser and her fivehead, the lone casting flaw; Heather Graham should have been brought off the bench for this role) for Theron's stunning, kinetic, big-city (relatively speaking) party girl. She might experience life through a terminally hungover haze, but at least she's feeling something rather than settling into the Big Sleep of middle age.

Mavis is not only a champion drinker, she also eats like a third-grader with a Black Card at the county fair. After one night of binge drinking, she ends up at the local KenTacoHut--Mavisese for a Kentucky Fried Chicken-Taco Bell-Pizza Hut trybrid that sits among the town's strip mall trapping, ordering off all three menus at once. While there are a fair amount of KFC-Taco Bell unions in the area, the Minnesotan hat trick is not to be found. Alas, we settled on Everett's KFC-Long John Silver's hybrid.

Long John Silver's is, in a word, skanky--at least in part (but not entirely) because Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite porn actor was alleged to have been Long Dong Silver. It's a rare find in the Pacific Northwest, yet fits Everett to a tee. Out of two pieces of fish, one tasted like chicken--no surprise given the proximity to the KFC fryer--and the other tasted like proper fish. The fries were passable, and the Pepsi was Pepsi.

Meanwhile, Kentucky Fried Chicken's macaroni and cheese makes Kraft look like Canlis. But even if its mashed potatoes are arguably produced in a far-off beaker, they taste amazing when drenched with gravy; the biscuits are succulent; and the chicken--even if it's not exactly chicken--falls off the bone delectably, and out of your ass destructively. Like Mavis, you pay for what you consumed. As Wooderson would say, that's L-I-V-I-N'.

Follow Voracious on Facebook & Twitter.