TEN MINUTE MOVIES AND OTHER NONSENSE

Out of Paul’s collection, and based on rave reviews featuring phrases like “You HAVE to check this out, you’ll REALLY like it,” I just tried hard to watch Kingpin, 10 Things I Hate About You, and With Honors.

Kingpin was mildly amusing for a while. I enjoyed Bill Murray’s part early on. Once Woody Harrelson lost his hand the movie went south pretty quickly, but I hung in there until the “I milked your cow/we don’t have a cow, we have a bull” non-joke, at which point I told myself firmly NOT to throw up and pulled the film out of the VCR.

10 Things I Hate About You features Julia Stiles, so I wanted to like it, at least enough to keep watching it. And it started out well enough with some Barenaked Ladies. Ten minutes into it, however, I still hadn’t come across a single character I remotely liked or had any interest in, and when Allison Janney’s horrifyingly obnoxious guidance counselor character showed up for the second time still working on her piece of shit porn novel, I bailed. Maybe if the high school depicted in the film hadn’t been even less realistic than the high school in The Breakfast Club I could have stuck around, but I doubt it.

With Honors managed to annoy me from the start… I mean, Brendan Fraser is just an annoying actor, what are you going to do? And Moira Kelly doesn’t exactly exude charm either. Thrown in Patrick Dempsey at his absolute smarmiest and I was loathing this thing from the outset. While I’m aware that the arc of this movie was clearly (with tedious predictability) meant to encompass Fraser’s movement from hard hearted budding right wing power broker to compassionate lefty liberal, as facilitated by his encounter with crusty-but-lovable homeless scholar Joe Pesci, and he would have become more likable as the film went on, I had no patience for it. When his hard drive crashed (and he had no back up floppies) and he HAD to rush out to Kinko’s that very moment with the ONLY existent hard copy of his thesis, you knew Vital Plot Machinations lay ahead, and I hate it when you can just see the story-gears grinding away. It’s simply lazy damn writing. I stuck around through the tripping, the thesis hitting the grate just exactly right to land in the boiler room where the homeless guy was living, and Fraser’s meeting with the homeless guy who was holding his thesis hostage, and, having not seen anything about the film that was remotely interesting (and being pretty sure I’d seen the entire story, including the obvious inevitable romance between Fraser and Kelly, laid out for me with all the subtlety of any Dean R. Koontz paragraph), I gave up on that one, too.

I checked back in with the Falcons-Rams game and that was still dreadful, with Michaels and Madden doing their desperate best to make every four yard gain seem like a play off victory, and, well, this is just one of those games where they mostly justify their large paychecks through managing to nearly convince whatever pathetic audience tuned in that this is actually in some way a meaningful game.

In fact, one of them… I think it was Al Michaels… just gushed effusively about how ‘the Rams are looking like the 1999 Rams, the Greatest Show on Turf indeed’. And I’m like ‘yeah, dude, they’re playing the Atlanta Falcons without Michael Vick. The Houston Texans could look good against the Atlanta Falcons without Michael Vick’.

So, it’s a dull Monday night here in Brown Eyed Handsome Man Land. Although this entry, whatever I do with it, most likely will not be posted until Tuesday, just to avoid confusion.

I should note that apparently posting an Egregious Email Violators List works. Jillian Who Is Only Jillian slammed me with a not particularly friendly email within hours of that entry going up, as I’ve already noted here, and this morning (well, this afternoon, but that’s morning to us members of the Unemployable subclass) I was delighted to find an email from Alli waiting in Juno’s New Mail column as well. I owe Alli an apology (well, no, I don’t; I had no way of knowing this, but I’m trying to be gracious and god, Trinity, Emma, and Elayne Riggs all know that’s difficult for me) since it seems she’s been suffering from double morning sickness, lately… yeah, her wish to be a mommy is being rewarded with twins, and that, plus she and her husband acting as members to the Wedding from Hell (which Alli regaled me with an in-depth account of) has soaked up most of her free time lately. So… good to hear from you, Alli, and thanks.

I must also note that indeed, indeed, Nate Clark’s lurking fees are all paid up, but what about the rest of you slackers? I should also take the time to thank Scott Ryan for going above and beyond the call of duty in supplying this space with continual comments, many of which actually make some sort of coherent sense, occasionally ::grin::.

Hey, I kid Scott.

And, to David Fiore, I currently have a 3K file with “BY ALL THE GODS ABOVE AND BELOW: Monotheism, Paganism, and Agnosticism in the DC and Marvel Silver Age” typed in the upper left hand corner, sitting on my hard drive. When I’ll get around to actually putting a little more text into it I couldn’t tell you, but, well, I started it out.

You know, looking back at Monday Night Football, I want to say, I’ve read a lot of stuff since the start of the season about how Lisa Guerrera is a lousy journalist and never provides anything of substance and clearly she’s just there to give the predominantly male audience something to look at that’s prettier than Al Michaels or John Madden. And, first, well, she’s WAY better looking than Al Michaels or John Madden, and honest to God, I have no problem with that. But, second, she strikes me as being a damn smart and competent woman in her own right, and whether or not she reports on ‘anything of substance’ during the ridiculous media contrivance that is a Monday Night Football game, she’s one of the elements I consistently enjoy about the ridiculous media contrivance that is Monday Night Football, and I have a vague idea just how much work must go into those little 90 second long sideline interviews, and while I’m sure she gets well compensated for it, still, I don’t think her job is the piece of cake a lot of her critics seem to feel it must be.

Rush Limbaugh made a complete ass of himself when he popped off about the media giving black quarterbacks a free ride, but I really do get the distinct feeling that from a great many male sports writers, no woman will ever really get a warm welcome working in any professional capacity other than cheerleader or hot dog girl at a major league football game.

Let’s see, what else can I bore you with in this unfocused textual flailing… ah. The DVD in-stack is all stuff I’ve already seen… Ghostbusters, Final Fantasy, Swordfish, and Braveheart. I also still have Scott’s extended version of Fellowship of the Ring, which I’m always happy to kill three hours or so being absorbed into.”Riddles in the dark” indeed…

It occurs to me that I haven’t done updates on my roleplaying campaign lately, with Paul and Scott both playing. Well, I’m not going to start now, since that’s completely geeky. Paul doesn’t like my combat system at all, though; he finds the whole notion of immediately taking a huge minus off everything you do once you get hit to be onerous and absolutely no fun, and is oblivious to my explaining ‘combat isn’t supposed to be fun’. He makes the valid point that maybe not, but roleplaying games ARE supposed to be fun, and doesn’t want to hear anything else, so, I don’t know… either he’ll come around or he’ll just stop playing in my world. Either way, I have absentminded fun running for the two of them, but they only play for three hours at a time, aren’t great roleplayers, and tend to play stoned out of their minds so they don’t much follow the subtle nuances of my scenarios, either. Not my ideal gamer party, but you do what you can with what you have.

Both Pat and Scott dropped by tonight, which was unusual. Pat whipped me at a few more games of MTG: Battlefields, but I did better; at one point, I had him down to three points before he killed me. I have to learn to summon big stuff faster.

I am still reading Taltos by Steven Brust, but it’s the last book in the Vlad Taltos series I have to reread. After that, I’ll have to find something else. Paul has finished my three Marvel Masterworks volumes featuring Avengers 1 – 30 and a couple of Annuals, and turned his nose up haughtily at the notion of reading any more issues in ESSENTIAL AVENGERS (because they’re in black and white, and yes, Paul is one of those people, he doesn’t like to watch black and white movies, either), so now he’s working his way through my Avengers/Defenders War graphic collection, and after that he wants to tackle my Top 10 issues, since, as Bob and Doug McKenzie might put it, “he will then be an expert in the field of Silver Age comic books”. I don’t know if Paul is going to like Top 10, but he’s enjoyed what Alan Moore he’s read so far, and he does have something of a grounding in the Silver Age now (he also recently read some early issues of Fantastic Four I had in a Masterworks edition, as well as Marvels) so maybe he’ll at least vaguely comprehend the envelopes that Moore is pushing.

Tarzan improved by an order of magnitude this week, but that still didn’t make it very good. It’s nice to see Lucy Lawless playing a regular part… she’s always fun to look at… but I kept expecting her to jump in the air and kick someone. But then, I keep expecting Mitch Pileggi to bitch out Mulder and Scully for breaking standard procedure, too, and I suppose that’s not the show’s fault. Overall, I got a much better sense of the chemistry between Tarzan and Jane in this show than I had previously, which helped the whole thing enormously, but I still didn’t think it was all that well plotted or scripted, and while Travis Fimbull seems to be an excellent actor for a male model, nonetheless, he obviously got this part on his looks and it shows.

Once FOX starts up with Arrested Development (which looks hilariously funny from the promos) in a week or two in the Sunday at 9:30 timeslot, I doubt I’ll look at Tarzan again. In fact, I may not be watching it that long.

The Practice, with James Spader, has been interesting. I can’t say much more than that because the storylines remain as ridiculous as we’ve come to expect from a David Kelly legal show, and Spader’s character is as inconsistent and all over the place as Bobby Donnell ever was… but he’s much more charmingly up front about his moral inconsistencies, which is obviously meant to make us like him, and well, it’s working on me. The latest ep had the extra little fillip (for me) of featuring two minor supporting character actors who used to be on Herman’s Head (as two of Herman’s internal voices) and it was nice to see them again.

Sharon Stone’s nutball character, on the other hand, cannot move through her story arc and get her ass gone fast enough to suit me. She’s not even all that good looking on the show, and I’ve never thought Sharon Stone acted anywhere near as good as she looked. Plus, she started out by dissing my man Jimmy, and that’s just gonna make me hate someone a lot.

Oh, yeah, apparently Angel is now in syndication on FOX at 1 a.m. Saturdays, which is cool.

I have no job, and no money, and that just sucks.

And this one has wandered enough, so let’s put it to bed.

But… wait! There’s more!

I mentioned Scott and Pat had both come over. Pat left early… we seem to have bored him… but Scott mentioned he wanted to go to Wal-mart, because Matrix Reloaded was coming out on DVD today. So he drove Paul and I up there, and then sat in the car (for some reason Scott hates going into Wal-mart) and we picked up the DVD for him, plus did some much needed grocery shopping, then came home, threw a DiGiorno’s Deep Dish Three Meat pizza in the oven and the DVD in the player and watched the movie for the last two and a half hours or so.

I watched it mostly to be social… there’s a link to my article on the essential immorality of The Matrix somewhere on the bar to the right, if anyone cares… and discovered that while this film is more of the same beautifully done, action packed eye-candy, it’s still just as contemptuous of human life as the first one, so I’m glad I spent no money supporting it.

The pizza was pretty good, though.

Oh, and proving that Jillian Who Is Only Jillian knows very little about me, I just got a nice email from Scott Shepherd thanking me for making him laugh with my rant about football on yesterday's blog page. BOO yeah. Scott is going through some serious shit in his personal life right now I don't feel free to go into details about, but it's harrowing, tragic crap involving the health of a very close family member, and grim, grumpy, surly, 'you're no fun and that's why nobody likes you, you mean mean man' Darren made him laugh.

WHO's not a fun guy? WHO doesn't provide people with hilarity and pleasure and good times? Not THIS Brown Eyed Handsome Man, that's for damned sure. I re-submit, not caring whether anyone approves of it or not: I'm a fun guy, I make people laugh, anyone who doesn't like me is CHOOSING not to like me and the issue is with them, not me.

Neener neener neener.

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.