Monday December 13, 2004

Somebody else’s world, and I’m not welcome to it

What gives a man the ultimate shaving experience?

It’s a fair question.

I just don’t care.

KC and the Sunshine Band doing Gap commercials would appall me, if they didn’t just pretty much bore me instead.

And I cannot honestly believe they actually released an Extended Edition of Return of the King. Jesus God. Watching the theatrical version was like being trapped below the event horizon of a black hole. I can’t imagine actually sitting through the entire new version. I mean, you’d miss work. And anything left of your youth.

But while I’m dwelling on things that indicate that whoever’s world this is, it isn’t mine, let me jump on what I certainly hope is a bandwagon with several million other riders already aboard by noting that people using the pop music from my high school years to shill their products on TV is starting to really fucking annoy me.

And pretty much any Christmas themed commercial that involves anyone carolling fills me with a mad homicidal urge, as well.

A friend gave me an Evanescence CD a while ago. I’ve started listening to it a lot at work (where one of the perks of my particular job is that unlike the poor schmucks who spend most of their day answering customer phone calls, I get to listen to music while I answer customer emails, instead) and I find I’m enjoying exactly the tracks I’m meant to enjoy, which is to say, the two tracks that have been released as singles and gotten a lot of popular airplay and even use in various TV promos, Track 2, “Bring Me To Life”, and Track 4 “My Immortal”.

Let me say right now that I had to go find the CD case in order to figure out what those song titles were, and I’m a little surprised, since if I hadn’t read them on the case, and confirmed them by checking the lyrics in the liner notes, I’d have presumed that “Bring Me To Life” was actually called “Wake Me Up Inside”, and that “My Immortal” was titled “All Of Me”.

Some of the other stuff on the CD is starting to grow on me, too, despite the really irritatingly pervasive Goth/vampire sub-theme throughout all the lyrics.

It also appears that “A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree” isn’t enough for people any more, so someone has created another Peanuts Christmas special, “I Want A Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown”.

I personally am still waiting for FOX to do a grim n gritty animated Peanuts special in which Charlie Brown gets framed by Lucy and sent to the reformatory. I think “Don’t Bend Over To Pick Up The Soap, Charlie Brown” could be a defining classic for a whole new generation.

Oh, but I really enjoy these commercials for Levitra. You know the ones, where the good looking 30-ish chick trying to pass as a middle aged woman spends all her time smirking and rolling her eyes at the camera while talking about how ‘her man’ uses Levitra, because he’s really ‘noticed a difference in the quality of the experience’.

Actually, I don’t enjoy them at all, and generally mute the sound when they come on, but I do get a kick out of rewriting the ad copy to something more accurate like “My man uses Levitra. Because I’m no longer enough to get his dick hard. Maybe it’s the way I smirk and roll my eyes, I don’t know.”

Watching the Bucs get their arms and legs pulled off by the San Diego Chargers got boring halfway through the third quarter, so I decided to do something entirely self serving. I went to Mike Norton’s always enjoyable blog and started traveling around to every URL on his blogroll.

I naively figured I’d leave a few comments on each blog, which might lead to people from those blogs checking out my blog, which might expand my viewer base and get me more positive attention, which, in general, seemed like a good idea all the way around.

But, as my italicized header indicates, this isn’t my world any more.

Some of the blogs didn’t have comment threads. (Cocktail Doll didn’t seem to have anything except an interesting graphic of a good looking woman with her hands tied above her head. I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing, but I couldn’t leave any comments there. And shudder to think of what lawsuits might have followed had it been otherwise.) Others did have threads, but in order to leave a comment on them you had to register with their particular blog-servers, which I simply find exasperating. Yet other blogs had comment threads anyone could leave an entry on, and several thousand people already had, so there seemed little point in me chiming in, since it would have taken me nearly as long to read the comment threads as to watch the Extended Edition of Return of the King.

And then there were the blogs that I couldn’t have commented on in a cogent fashion if I were imprisoned as an enemy combatant and posting on one of them was my only shot at a Presidential pardon. One, for example, started out promisingly enough, with some guy bitching about how he didn’t really like either the Republicans or the Democrats, but then he got into some endless diatribe about Nurturing Parents that had my eyes glazing over two sentences in. When I woke up again, civilization had fallen and cannibal gangs were out in the street in front of my house barbecuing my neighbors’ twin puppies over an empty 55 gallon drum they’d cut a hole in the side of so they could use it as an oven. Or at least, that’s what it felt like.

A couple of other blogs seemed more promising, because they were all about comic books. But one went on an eternal drone comparing Sandman Mystery Theater to the old adventure pulps, and since I don’t read Sandman Mystery Theater, there was nothing there for me. Another reviewed at length about a dozen different comics, none of which I read or care about.

A more enlightened man would now muse wryly, and in a charmingly self depreciating fashion, about how similar all this must be to me babbling on and on for thousands of words about stuff like Buckaroo Banzai and HeroClix battles, but, in all honesty, I think any such observations would be clearly ridiculous. Anything I write about is, by definition, utterly fascinating. All those other guys are just dorks.

Anyway. It seems clear that at some point in the recent past, what used to be My World has been hijacked and transformed into something horrible and strange.

Or, you know, maybe it’s always been like that, and I was too busy watching The Return of the King to notice.

Top Ten

Hey! While I had virtually no time over my nearly non-existent Thanksgiving non-holiday, I did manage to cram in a long overdue sorting and alphabetization of my newly expanded comics collection. And when I did it, I discovered that my first issue of Alan Moore’s brilliant Top 10 series was missing.

This annoyed me hugely, so much so that over the past few weeks, when I’ve had a chance, I’ve gone through the various shelves of the one tall bookcase that my comics collection currently nearly fills, hoping to find it. I figured it had just somehow been misfiled. And, a few days ago, I found it again. It had been misfiled; it had slipped in between Top 10 #9 and Top 10 #10.

So that was cool.

But it’s not what this entry is even remotely about, you’re very happy to hear.

Let’s talk about the Ten Best Movies Of All Time… you know, according to me.

(I can’t do the Ten Best Movies Of All Time according to anyone else. For one thing, I have no way of knowing what they would be, as I very nearly don’t know what they are for me. For another thing, I really don’t care.)

First, I’m not going to list them in any particular order, because that would be way too much work. Just narrowing down the list from, you know, all the movies I’ve ever seen and enjoyed, to, well, the ten I consider to be the best, is enough of a challenge.

So, let’s see.

Looking at the, I don’t know, what, maybe 100 films I actually have on the shelves out next to my TV (they’re built in bookshelves; the most pleasant surprise about moving into this cinderblock rat hole I hadn’t even glanced at before signing a lease was discovering them, and in addition to holding my DVDs and videotapes, on top of them I have a good third of my burgeoning HeroClix collection, and I honestly really enjoy my little pointless digressions, and what, you think I’m writing for you? HA!), I came up with the following list of candidates:

The Terminator - on the list for a couple of reasons. First, it’s that rarest of things in a cinematic context, which is to say, a science fiction movie that is actually science fiction, and that actually works. Most Hollywood ‘science fiction’ is, really, just a genre movie with aliens, space ships, and ray guns (the Star Wars movies are little more than Westerns in space, just for one prominent example). Terminator, however, actually examines the impact of futuristic technology on human society and human behavior. I grant you, it doesn’t do it in a particularly original, subtle, or insightful way, but still, the ‘science’ in any Star Wars film does absolutely nothing except zoom around and look good. The character archetypes in Star Wars can be fairly easily re-written for any other kind of genre at all… something George Lucas himself proved, when he fairly easily re-tooled all of them and put them in a really bad sword & sorcery movie called Willow.

Beyond that, The Terminator is, in my opinion, an entirely perfect film. Even the best movies have something wrong them with them somewhere... the plot doesn’t work in some particular, someone doesn’t do a stellar acting job, a piece of characterization doesn’t work, the dialogue is flat… something. But The Terminator just works, all the time, in every frame. The plot is seamless, the cast is actually fairly remarkable, the dialogue is solid all the way through… it’s just a flawless movie. And beyond that, it’s a movie that works on nearly any level you want it to. For most people, it’s just a supremely entertaining action movie; if you care to look deeper, though, you can see an almost Luddite anti-technology subtext throughout the film.

Robocop - better science fiction than The Terminator in that it’s a slightly subtler examination of the effects of technology on humanity, both on an individual basis and in a broader context of our society as a whole. This movie also has better dialogue, more interesting characters, and is much, much funnier. Beyond that, in addition to being good science fiction, which is rare enough in films, it’s also an excellent superhero movie, which, prior to the first Spider-Man movie, was nearly unheard of. It is not, however, a perfect film; there are some editing problems that mar the internal flow (I grant you, you have to watch it about fifty times before you finally realize that Clarence Boddicker and his sociopathic crew start to drive over to the old steel mill where Robocop and Nancy Allen are hanging out shortly after midnight, but when they arrive, it’s broad daylight and it can’t possibly have taken them seven or eight hours to get there, even in that clunky old silver-grey van one of them is driving). Still, it’s hard to choose between the two, even if I simply narrow it down to “Best SF Movie Of All Time”, because while I think The Terminator has a slight edge in terms of simply being a better overall movie, in Robocop Clarence Boddicker says stuff like “Can you fly, Bobby?” and “Bitches leave”. Which is pretty cool.

It’s A Wonderful Life - yeah, no matter how I narrow this list down eventually, this movie will stay on it, and you’ve all seen it, or if you haven’t, I’m done with you, so let’s move on.

Miller’s Crossing - just an astonishing, riveting movie, from Jon Polito’s opening, blackly hilarious and brilliantly amoral monologue about trust, and character, and ethics, right up through that final, haunting shot of Gabriel Byrne seating his hat, which has pretty much come to represent both his heart and his soul, more firmly on his head as everyone he’s cared about walks away from him. Of course, the plot is so labyrinthine it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who did what to who else and why the first time you watch it, but I’ve seen it forty or fifty times so I don’t need to worry about that. So authentic does the period slang the movies uses seem that I was rather startled to discover from the DVD’s Commentary Track that the Coen Brothers just made it all up to give the film a sense of taking place in its own strange little world. Miller’s Crossing isn’t quite perfect, unfortunately; aside from having a very nearly impenetrable narrative sequence (until you see it enough to memorize it, as I have) it is also marred by Frances McDormand doing a brief cameo role. But then, every Coen Brothers movie is marred by Frances McDormand in one way or another, since she’s married to one of them.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – Across The Eighth Dimension - utterly indescribable, completely hilarious, and perhaps the best modern day mock-SF/superhero/pulp adventure ever put on film, Buckaroo Banzai is very nearly all things to all people. Along with Robocop it’s easily the best thing Peter Weller has ever done, although, you know, if you look up the phrase ‘damning with faint praise’ in any source book you ought to see ‘calling a movie the best thing Peter Weller has ever done’ listed as its definition. Yet, besides somehow getting a good performance out of Weller, Buckaroo Banzai also boasts a truly astonishing cast of really interesting and amazingly funny Hollywood character actors, including Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedeya, Vincent Schiavelli, Clancy Brown, Ellen Barkin, and, best of all, John Lithgow in his finest part EVER as the Evil, Pure And Simple Lord John Worfin/Dr. Emilio Lizardo. The movie also features future superstar Jeff Goldblum in what has to be his oddest part of all time, chaps-wearing brain surgeon Sidney Bloomfeld, AKA the Hong Kong Cavalier known as New Jersey.

Apollo 13 - Ron Howard gave me brief hope he’d remembered how to direct good movies when he made this absolutely wonderful film about the seemingly cursed Apollo 13 mission. Then he came out with A Beautiful Mind and I realized that it was only the amazing material and his fantastic cast that made him look so good. In addition to Tom Hanks, this particular film also has Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton…and while Paxton is hardly a sure thing, it often surprises me just how many of my favorite movies he shows up in. He’s extraordinary in this film, but then, everybody is. If From The Earth To the Moon had been as good as this movie all the way through, I’d never have given my copy to my brother as a Christmas present.

Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid - astonishingly, not the only Western on this initial list, and even more astonishingly, if I have to pare down, probably not the one that will stay. I’ve seen this movie enough at this point that I can see through the thin spots in William Goldman’s incredibly entertaining screenplay, and for all that Paul Newman and Robert Redford are just fantastic in the movie, still, it’s really hard for me to get over the appalling musical intrusion of “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” about a third of the way in. In addition to that, Katherine Ross is very nearly as good an actor as any floor cleaning product you’ll find on the market today. I swear to God, if she hadn’t somehow snagged this part and that other one in The Graduate, she’d be the Rachel Ticotin of the 1970s.

Despite those flaws, this may be THE most quoted movie of all time, and it’s a very, very good one. I’m just not sure it’s one of the Top Ten… although I’d put it in the Top Ten Westerns of all time without a second glance. That’s mostly because I don’t believe there are very many good Westerns, though… and three better ones are on this list, further down.

Casablanca - a hands down entry on nearly anyone else who isn’t a complete moron’s Top Ten list, but… I don’t know. I first saw Casablanca, after merely hearing people rave about it all my life, when I was a college freshman at a campus film festival. I was blown away by the movie, and I’m still something of a fan, but, still, nowadays when I watch it, I just can’t get over the fact that for all his charm, Prefect of Police Louis Renault is little more than a smooth talking, very suave serial rapist/murderer who thinks joking about whether someone he tortured to death died while trying to escape or committed suicide is actually funny. Beyond that, the movie makes absolutely no sense when analyzed rationally; it’s only our rampant sentimentalism that lets us even remotely begin to swallow the preposterous central romance between Rick and Ilsa, and if you ever really bought Rick’s hard nosed act at the start of the movie, you’re a much bigger sap than I was at the age of 17. (And I was a pretty big sap when I was 17, trust me.)

Still, great dialogue and a wonderful cast of utterly memorable and colorful supporting characters has to mean something. Major Heinrich Strausser may well be the greatest Nazi movie villain of all time (“we Germans must get used to all climates, from Russia to the Sahara” – I just love that line), and watching Paul Henreid play the inimitably classy and noble Victor Lazlo is worth a five dollar admission price all by itself.

I hate to be predictable, but… I don’t know. I might have to keep Casablanca. We’ll see.

The Commitments - Alan Parker’s best movie, but, well, see ‘damning with faint praise’, above. Still, this is a wonderfully entertaining movie, and more than that, it’s got a lot of really good music being actually performed by the people we see on screen playing the instruments and singing the vocals, as well. Beyond that, you have to give props to anything where Colm Meaney doesn’t play Transporter Chief O’Brian, especially when he plays an Irish Elvis nut instead. The Commitments also has a lot of really quotable dialogue (“What did Evel Knievel want, then?” “God sent him.” “On a fookin’ Suzuki?”) and a whole bunch of unforgettable characters. Still… keep this or Casablanca? It may be that I just don’t have enough soul.

The Color of Money - ehhh… yeah, okay, it’s a brilliant film and I absolutely love watching this movie, with its two simultaneously criss crossing characterization arcs that allow us to watch in fascination as Tom Cruise’s character slowly changes moral places with Paul Newman’s over the course of the narrative flow. And it’s got excellent performances and wonderful scripting and some of Martin Scorcese’s most jaw dropping visual camera work ever. (A brief scene where Newman picks up his cue and leans over a pool table, shot entirely on his reflection in a cue ball, seems to neatly sum up the character’s entire existence up to that point.) Still, it’s not even the best Scorcese movie ever; that’s one further down this list. So The Color of Money probably won’t make the cut… but it definitely should have beaten that lousy piece of crap Platoon for Best Picture of 1986.

Goodfellas - Scorcese’s best movie, Robert DeNiro’s best movie, the best mob movie of all time, and the reason I’m not even listing Donnie Brasco, because good as it is, Goodfellas is better. Is Goodfellas one of the Top Ten Movies of All Time? I suspect it is. At the very least, the scene where Ray Liotta pistol whips that smirking wannabe rapist in his own driveway in front of his All American buddies should get its own separate award for being the Scariest Beating On A Suburban Street ever put on film.

Diner - well, it probably won’t make the final cut, but it’s got a great script and makes the most out of a cast that, for the most part, never did anything even remotely this good again – Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Steve Gutenberg, Timothy Daly, Paul Reiser, Ellen Barkin, and Kevin Bacon. Of all of them, only Bacon ever matched or excelled his work in this movie on other projects. For the rest of them, this is the best it ever got… and this is pretty frickin’ good. Barry Levinson was never this good again as a director, either, although with Tin Men he came close.

A Few Good Men - well, one of my favorite movies, anyway, and perhaps the only really solidly good thing Demi Moore has ever been in. Aaron Sorkin wrote it, Rob Reiner directed it, Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson starred in it, and an amazing cast of supporting actors, including Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollack, Noah Wyle, and J.T. Walsh, made it dance and sing. I’ve seen it a few hundred times, or, well, a few dozen, anyway. The dialogue is superb (Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth” speech has made its way into our mainstream lexicon of movie quotes). Still, it’s starting to look like my litmus test is going to be “would you bump Casablanca off a Top Ten list to put this on?” and I don’t think this movie is going to get past that hurdle. But I like it a lot.

Glory - great soundtrack, great cast, great acting, wonderful writing, amazing battle scenes, and one of the very rare films that has no lead female characters in it at all. Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Andre Braugher are all amazing in this movie, as is, astonishingly enough, Cary Elwes, something he pretty much never managed again anywhere else. There is, almost literally, never a moment in this film when you can take your eyes off the screen, or at least, when I can; there’s always some interesting bit of dialogue, some fascinating interplay, some cool little characterization bit going on. Edward Zwick never directed anything remotely on this level again in his life, either. Perhaps the best war movie ever made, although, I grant you, there aren’t any other war movies on this list, because Full Metal Jacket is way too harsh, and has dialogue far, far too clumsy and stupid sounding, to make the grade.

Fellowship of the Ring - probably the best sword & sorcery movie ever made, although, well… if I hadn’t already worked the ‘damning with faint praise’ gag into the ground… still, an awesome cast (other than Liv Tyler) a fantastic adaptation of some pretty stirring source material, simply mind blowing special effects, and a narrative that climaxes twice with tragic heroic sacrifices (even though we all knew Gandalf wasn’t really dead, Jackson and his cast did a fantastic job with Gandalf’s heroic sacrifice in the Mines of Moria anyway, and Sean Bean’s incredible death scene, defending the two hobbits to the last to redeem his moment of weakness with Frodo, was simply magnificent) lifts this film orders of magnitude over any conceivable genre competition. Neither of the following chapters managed to remotely measure up to this one, most likely because nobody cool died in either one of them, and Saruman turned out to be a great big wussy who got killed by a gurl, and the best actor in the next two chapters was actually a special effect. Still, for all that The Two Towers and The Return of the King comparatively limped and wheezed, this first film was a mind blower. I may keep it in the Top Ten, despite all that happy horseshit about Farmer Maggot and his stolen cabbages… and especially because the writer who adapted it had the enormous good sense to cut Tom goddam Bombadil right the hell out entirely.

Last of the Mohicans - another fantastic sound track, terrific acting, two heroic sacrifices (Duncan and the younger Indian), amazing fight scenes, good dialogue, fascinating characterizations (including Wes Studi’s brilliant portrayal of the villainous Magua) and, well, yeah, probably the greatest love story ever put on film… I really enjoy watching this movie. Michael Mann never directed anything remotely this good again, either, and anyone who even mentions Heat in the comment threads is going to make me laugh hysterically in scornful derision. I also really enjoy movies that have a lot of atmosphere in them, and Last of the Mohicans positively drips and throbs with atmosphere. Having Daniel Day-Lewis in the central role never hurts a movie, either. Definitely a contender.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence - the only John Wayne western I like, for the perfectly satisfactory reason that John Wayne never had the good sense to act in another Jimmy Stewart movie again. This is one of the Westerns that will probably end up edging out Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid on the final list. If it seems unfair for Jimmy Stewart to end up with two movies in the top ten (assuming he does), I have to assume you haven’t seen many Jimmy Stewart movies. Otherwise, you’d simply marvel that I haven’t packed the list even more, with stuff like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and You Can’t Take It With You and Winchester ‘73 and Rear Window and Vertigo and Rope.

Arsenic & Old Lace - the very definition of the screwball comedy, and perhaps the first film in which people got to see that Cary Grant was actually really, really funny. It is nearly impossible to describe this movie to anyone who hasn’t seen it, so let’s just say, it belongs on this list and probably belongs on my Top Ten as well. And it and It’s A Wonderful Life are the reason why I don’t put more Frank Capra movies on this list, because it just wouldn’t be fair. How could even Martin Scorcese compete, much less Michael Mann or Ron Howard?

Nobody’s Fool - Somebody at one of my many past jobs once astounded me by replying to my assertion that I loved this film by asking “Isn’t that kind of a chick flick?” Nobody who has actually seen Paul Newman goggling speechlessly when Melanie Griffith flashes her tits at him could possibly make that statement. In point of fact, this movie, like many of the other films on this list, defies categorization. And also like many of those other films, it has a pretty amazing cast, including, in addition to the already mentioned Newman and Griffith, Jessica Tandy, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Bruce Willis, Dylan Walsh, and Philip Bosco, among many, many others. Anytime I get nostalgic for a Northern winter this film’s very realistic portrayal of one will very nearly cure me, and I could never, ever live in a small town like this again… but still, I find the movie irresistibly charming in its portrayal of small town eccentricity and the way one person can become so central and essential to so many other people’s lives without anyone really realizing it. Paul Newman has done a lot of good work in his career, but this could be his best role ever. And Melanie Griffith has awfully nice looking boobs.

Raising Arizona - if you haven’t seen it, go rent it. The best live action Warner Brothers cartoon ever put on film, Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunt’s best movie ever, and, once again, we have the amazing cast of supporting character actors, like John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, Randall “Tex” Cobb, and, for once, Frances McDormand doesn’t make you want to turn the movie off while she’s on screen, either. (She still makes any sane person wince and squint, but, well, she’s supposed to, in this.)

Besides being hysterically funny in a totally twisted and utterly subversive way, this movie is also surprisingly sentimental and oddly moving at its conclusion. The characters are all rather cartoony, but the Coen Brothers show a real flair for making you care about each and every one of them at one point or another… a talent they were pretty much never to show again after this film.

Reservoir Dogs - one of the nastiest, grimmest, most unpleasant, and simultaneously, hysterically funny and authentic seeming crime dramas ever made. A great cast and an amazing script combined with Quentin Tarantino’s utterly bizarre directorial style have made this one of the most influential movies of all time. Despite all that, it probably won’t make my Top Ten because I can’t watch it over and over like I do most of the other movies on this list; the torture scenes with poor heroic uniformed cop Marvin Nash are just too hard to take. Still, it deserved at least a notation on the runner’s up list.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail - without a doubt the best comedy of all time. The only flaw this movie has is that the troupe clearly didn’t know how to end it, so they just, well, ended it, with what turned out to be the weakest joke in the whole film. Still, the rest of it is brilliant and hysterically funny, and there is no doubt in my mind that this one is going on the final list.

Unforgiven - just an amazing movie. The first and best of the deconstructionist Westerns, with an absolutely great cast delivering absolutely great dialogue in absolutely great parts. This is the other Western that will keep Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid out of my final Top Ten. And then there’s yet a third sneaking in the back door --

Extreme Prejudice - I originally left this off my list because, when you come right down to it, it’s really just an 80s action movie. But it’s a perfect 80s action movie, probably the best thing ever directed by Walter Hill, and it features Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Michael Ironsides, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe, and Rip Torn blowing gigantic holes in Texas, Mexico, and each other for most of 90 minutes of some of the best directed and filmed, sweat soaked dust covered rapid fire high velocity rootin’ tootin’ two gun shootin’ modern day nihilistic Western horse opera without horses you’ll ever see. Why everybody is running around in East Texas with handguns the size of hockey sticks blazing away at each other is far too convoluted to try to sum up here, but Nick Nolte makes one bad ass Texas Ranger. Maria Conchita Alonso is running around chewing holes in the scenery in this one too, as she is wont to do in any 80s action movie that calls for a Hispanic ingenue, but even the dreadful foot stomping she calls acting can’t slow this one down.

This Is Spinal Tap - probably the second best comedy ever put on film, Rob Reiner’s blackly hilarious mock ‘rockumentary’ featuring the fictional Spinal Tap, “Britain’s loudest band”, is just a crack up in nearly every frame. Half the fun of watching this movie is trying to pick out all the background cameos, including Fran Drescher, Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, Ed Begley, Jr., Patrick McNee, Howard Hesseman, Paul Shaffer, and Fred Willard. The other half is just listening to the completely insane dialogue, like “If I told them once, I told them a thousand times, it’s Spinal Tap and Puppet Show, not Puppet Show and Spinal Tap… I made sure we got the bigger dressing room, though.” “What, bigger than the puppets?”

The Road Warrior - Without a doubt the best action movie ever made, the best car chase movie ever made, the best Mel Gibson movie ever made, and the best post-apocalyptic SF genre film ever made, too. And anything featuring a villain called the Lord Humungus, Ruler of the Wasteland and Ayatollah of Rock and ROLL-ah deserves at least an honorable mention. Throw in the Autogyro Captain and a midget version of Wolverine with a razor sharp metal boomerang and you’ve got yourself a definite Top Ten entry.

Now, having typed all that in, I’m certainly not going to narrow it down to ten right now… and I’m starting to wonder if maybe Prizzi’s Honor shouldn’t be on there somewhere, too. It probably wouldn’t make the cut, but can you really have too many Jack Nicholson films? Well… I suppose you can, actually; I’d have to draw the line at crap like As Good As It Gets and Terms of Endearment.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.