First off, I'd like to thank you for all of your wonderful friendships. As we grow and mature in life, we find sometimes that we just have to leave some things and some people behind.
Now, there's no reason to cry. I'm not not gonna be friends with you anymore. It's just I've started a new myspace page and I'll probably be spending more time over there.
This one is a "myspace comedy" page. It's for my career, because I look at you other guys with "myspace comedy" pages and wonder, "What does he have that I don't have?"
And while I'm trying to click on each and every one of your pictures and add you as friends from over there, it's really time consuming and hard. Plus, I think my computer is jealous. Almost every time I try to click, "add to friends," there's an error.
So let's make my computer really jealous. Like so jealous it does something reckless and dangerous and embarrassing so I'll really know how much it loves me.
Okay, I know it doesn't take a lot of balls to stick up for the number one big-budget summer blockbuster in the face of inevitable hipster negativity. That's why I'm reviewing a film from the "independent" genre on Netflix.
It's time to earn back my right to chunky plastic eyewear.
What to say? I'm still basking in the afterglow of my new favorite movie, available for instant viewing, "Teeth."
I was in love with the concept since 2004 when my friends Amber and Dan and I were swapping movie titles we made up, but we'd love to see. Their version: "Her Thing Had Teeth!"
I don't know if Hollywood spies had the room bugged or what, but I giggled my fool head off when I saw the trailer for "Teeth" hit theaters last year.
"Teeth" is about a teenage girl named Dawn who promised Jesus that she was going to keep her "gift wrapped" until marriage. But then Tobey decided he couldn't wait past the second date and from there on in Dawn meets a lot more sleazy guys and leaves a trail of severed penises in her wake.
Why? Because of evolution. Dawn realizes, then suffers, then embraces the power of a peculiar mutation known to nearly every ancient culture as "vagina dentata."
Dawn goes to a high school that teaches evolution with nod of respect to "other theories." The film doesn't go into much depth on where Dawn sides on the whole creationism thing, but we know she's anti-pre-marital sex, and the diagram of the vulva in every health textbook at her school has an enormous sticker over it so none of those little hooligans go getting any ideas.
When are the anti-education fundamentalists going to learn that when you insist on teaching "abstinence only", you're only preventing a young girl from learning about her body and recognizing that it's not normal to have rows of razor-sharp shark teeth in her cooter? When will they see that nature will take its course, especially if you live in the shadow of the nuclear power plant's cooling towers?
I like "Teeth" because on one hand it's apparently designed to piss off the religious right. I'm sure once the ads came out for its national release, the publicity people tuned into FoxNews and started checking their watches: "When is Bill O'Reilly gonna angrily say the name of our movie?" Fifteen minutes later: "Okay, we'll settle for accusations of poor taste from Sean Hannity."
But it's more than that. It's the story of a teenage girl, which is not an easy thing to be. She's at first naive about the power of her sexuality, then terrified of it, then embraces it as she vengefully takes on the mantle of womanhood. It's a heartwarming, coming-of-age tale where a lot of douchebags lose their peckers.
Sorry if this review is a little rambly and unorganized. I'll try to make revisions after I've watched the movie another five or ten times.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls -- My Review
Look, here's what I wanted to see: explosions, fistfights, creepy crawlies, ridiculously long action sequences, bad people suffering gruesome punishment meted out by supernatural forces they shouldn't have been screwing around with in the first place, car chases, and maybe a dash here or there of comedic macho dialogue.
That's what I got in spades, plus the added spice of McCarthy-era UFO paranoia. And I loved it. I keep hearing people talk about the new Indiana Jones movie as if Steven Spielberg broke into their house and took a dump in their cat's water dish.
"It was too much," "That was silly," "Ridiculous." That's what I hear people saying. And, okay, there was a waterfall sequence that could have been done with a little more imagination. Waterfalls are kinda cliche, but when you're talking about the Amazon where you've got three consecutive waterfalls, you've gotta get that on film.
(I'm assuming that point in the river actually exists.)
I just wonder if the movie's detractors have really thought about the first three Indiana Jones movies. This guy has waged two personal wars with Nazis and fought some dude who can rip hearts out of people's chest and show it, still beating, to them before it evaporates in fire. He's met the ghost of King Arthur. He's been beat up, shot at, dragged under a truck, dangled by one arm off a collapsed roap bridge, and he's never had to buy a new hat. He's entered ancient crumbling ruins and set off thousand-year old Rube Goldberg-esque booby traps where every unlubricated stone mechanism works flawlessly.
And we went back to the theater screaming, "More! More!"
So if you paid to see the new Indiana Jones movie and you were disappointed, you're the idiot. No one thinks you're smart because you say things like, "That's not very believeable." Eight-year-olds can figure that out.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls: Not as good as the first one, better than the third one. Go see it, eat your popcorn and shut the hell up.
Oh, the flaws I could point out here. Don't know why the scanner muted all the colors. I suppose it's okay, though, because it covers up all the unintentional charcoal smudges.
One of the biggest pains in the ass about being immortal is moving.
Every time you move, it seems like you have more crap that you never use than ever before? Every year you just accumulate more junk. You think you'd stop buying stuff. You think you'd learn not to pop the trunk every time you see a piece of furniture out by the dumpster that "could be fixed up." And perish the thought of telling a birthday well-wisher bearing a gag gift to fuck themselves. You just plaster on a fake smile and give them insincere thanks, and pile the shit in your closet.
Lucky for you, one day you'll die and all that worthless junk will turn into someone else's problem. But what if you don't die?
Over the many lifetimes I've lived, I've had many aliases. For right now, my name is Wayne. I'm a vampire. And I have too much shit.
Imagine having crap you just can't bear to part with because, even though it's crap, it's 500-year-old crap, so there's a good chance it's valuable. For example, I have a musket I picked up off one of my prey at an English settlement in Virginia-- a blunderbuss, I think it's called.
I don't even remember why I kept it. I don't use guns to hunt. I guess I thought it was neat or something. Anyhow, I know it's worth a lot of money now. I've spent a few centuries poor. I don't intend to repeat that experience. I like having assets I can turn over into cash when I need it. Oh sure, my needs don't really cost anything, but I find undeath to go much easier when you've got a little cash on hand.
So here I am, talking to the guy at Pak-It-In Storage, setting up shelter for said musket and countless other antiquities I can't just throw away.
He fills out the date on the lease.
"Wow, can you believe it's almost December already? Where does the time go, huh?"
You know how in the movies sometimes when someone needs to look through someone else's computer or file cabinet or they have to talk to someone who refuses to see them and there's always a security guard or a bitchy receptionist blocking the way?
In an espionage thriller, you might make your way in with a sleep gas grenade. In an action film, you'd probably shoot your way in. But if you're in an action comedy, especially if you're Eddie Murphy, you would come up with a really good lie, and it would generally be about being the exterminator, being foreign, or having a big ole can of AIDS that so-and-so on the other side of the door desperately wanted and if you didn't get it into his office it would explode all over everybody.
I've never lied like that to gain access anywhere. I'm a little disappointed.
Maybe it's because people just tell me what I want to know and let me go wherever I want. I don't really need into Mr. Big's office.
I did used to be a newspaper reporter, though. So that can't be it. I remember many a stressful evening negotiating the release of a car crash report from highway patrol dispatcher. That was an almost nightly ordeal. There were probably hundreds of times when I was working on the big story where pretending to be from New Guinea so hospital security would let me slip past would have been advantageous to my career.
So maybe it's just a problem of motivation. My editors probably would have agreed with that. There just aren't that many places I want to go where others don't want me. I mean, sure, I encounter a little resistance downtown sometimes when I try to get into bars, because I don't know where my driver's license is. But generally, common sense wins the day and the bouncer lets me in. Or I walk next door to the other bar.
There's my problem. I compromise too easily. That's it. Next time I go downtown, I'm carrying a bug sprayer and faking an Australian accent.
