Classic Movies Ruined Forever By Outdated Plot Devices

"Hello, you've reached the Winter of our discontent. It's not 1994 right now, but if you leave your name and number I'm sure Ben Stiller will make a movie with it eventually."


Classic Movies Ruined Forever By Outdated Plot Devices:

• Ghostbusters 2 - The old Statue of Liberty license plate scene at the end
  
  
• Rambo Part III - Fighting for the Taliban
  
  
• Pretty much any technical scene in War Games
  
  
• Say Anything - Who the hell still owns a tape deck?
  
  
• Ninja Turtles, Short Circuit 2, Coming To America and anything else that features Twin Towers in the New York City Skyline. [Ed. note: FROWNY FAAAACE.]
  
  
• Reality Bites - Ethan Hawk would have fucking shot himself if he knew about Twitter.
  

American Idiot: Everything That Is Wrong With Theater and Why It Will Save The Stage

This past Thursday I attended an evening showing of Green Day's American Idiot on Broadway.

Why did I do this? Because it was my mother's birthday. My mom has been listening to Green Day longer than I have, longer than some of you reading this–the younger ones who really shouldn't be reading material of this maturity–have been alive. My mom owns "1,039." I don't care if you got really into Killswitch Engage or Tool when you were fifteen, facts are facts and the facts are that my mom is way cooler than you are. (I once got her a new Offspring album for Mother's Day.)

So yes, my mom bought herself tickets to a real Broadway show for her birthday, and the show she wanted to see the most was American Idiot. She invited me along because, frankly, she didn't know anyone else who could appreciate both theater and internationally acclaimed pop-punk. Being a gentleman, of course I accompanied her.

These following facts are what makes American Idiot better than any other play since the time of Shakespeare, though conversely it's also what will destroy everything the hoity-toity believe good theatre should be:

• There is plenty of cursing - Both in the songs and in the (sparse) original dialogue, there is nothing classy or farcical about it, like in much of punk's early history, it's just there for shock value, though this in itself is a conveyance of raw, unrefined emotion, something usually only achieved in musical theater through emoting or high-brow writing.
• Most of the audience already knows the words - You never have to listen too closely if you already know what the lyrics are telling you. Except for Disney musicals with puppets and other remakes, only theater nerds no the words and story to modern plays before seeing it for the first time. Most Victorian plays, meanwhile, were either topical or retellings of classic stories well known to the public.
• You can walk in wearing jeans and a t-shirt - Hell, they have sharpies lining the entrance so you can sign the walls as you enter the St. James Theater. Something is very wrong about this, but I have to admit it feels good as a young, hip person to own the shit out of something historic like that.
• YOU CAN DRINK IN THE FUCKING THEATER - I can't stress this enough. There are multiple bars inside the building, on at least two different floors and, yeah, okay, they're insanely overpriced ($17 for a cocktail and a beer), but frankly the bartenders are looking for tips and understandably loose with their liquor. But here's the kicker: they let you take your drinks into the show. You can drink during the performance. I was ecstatic to find a bar inside, livid that I couldn't drink during the punk rock show, and then dumbfoundedly reverent when I found I was mistaken.

This is exactly the point to reiterate that this show contains within it everything that will both kill and revive Broadway as an entertainment form. It is accessible, it is fun and more importantly it is youthful. It's grabbing a whole new generation of people at once, rather than subsisting on a few theater nerds until that generation ages and becomes conservative enough to start attending the theater.

And it doesn't hurt that this play is filled with enough sex, drugs and rock & roll and, oh yeah, real booze for the audience to get heteronormative men into theater for the first time since …

Alright, I've tried for about fifteen minutes now to come up with something that got men unabashedly into live theater and frankly I'm going nowhere. All my jokes either revolve around Rent or "Shakespeare In Love" and neither of those is very red-meat-and-potatoes manly.

I could use another $5 beer.

On Skunks

While I was dogsitting for my dad last week, I came back to the house to find a friendly visitor in the front yard. No, it wasn't the well-meaning but overly personable mentally challenged guy from down the drive; yes, it was a skunk as the title suggests.

At first I just kept approaching the thing. I was busy, still singing in my head from the drive up with the wind in my face and a blaring radio. Then I realized there was a critter in front of me.

First thought? "Oh, aren't you cute! What the hell are you?" This is a fair question. This wasn't the kind of skunk you see in movies. With it's tail down and fir immaculately groomed (and without his Winter plump), it just looks like some kind of skinny, black ferret. "What are you doing eating our yard seeds in the daytime, little ferret?"

About then process of elimination as to hat this odd little thing was started to pick up. I examined the adorable little hands and the shorter fur and the long snout, and I reached the conclusion "skunk" right as I caught a glint of white on its tail.

And yet I'm still an idiot.

Next thoughts? "Oh, awesome, I'm so close. That thing is really cute! It looks like that pink-nosed skunk bitch from Bambi. What was its name, again? (It was "Flower.") I wonder if I can pet it. I wonder if someone lost it. People keep skunks as pets. They just get them de-scented-"

"FUCK SHIT ASS!"

There's a reason people have to get their pet skunks de-scented. Suddenly everything about what skunks do when they're scared came back to me, but, not surprisingly at this point, it never occurred to me that my respect for all cuddly mammals and general suaveness might not placate the skunk.

I figured I wasn't scared of him, he shouldn't be afraid of me. We're both critters. If I can go about my day without bothering him, he should respect that and do the same. We'll be buddies.

Finally this train of thought seemed what we'll call "stupid." I wondered if I could just get passed the skunk and into the house on the walkway. There was a good four or five feet of space. As I inched forward in a very purposeful but oblivious manner, Mr. Skunk raised his tail an almost imperceptible degree higher and stopped chewing the seed he had found.

Remembering that skunks can shoot a concentrated stream of stank accurately distances of up to ten feet, I slowly backed away and waited until my not-friend went back to his nuts and seeds.

I ended up getting inside by taking a wide arc around the little guy, well out of ass-stink range, all the while not pointing in his direction, trying to reduce the amount of fear pheromones I was pumping through calming exercises, and just generally giving off the air of an animal that came across another animal it knows and doesn't want to bother.

Only later did I remember: I fucking hated Flower. Little pink-nosed bitch ruined my concept of Pepé Le Pew for me forever. Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure she was just constantly rolling ecstasy. Nothing always that happy.

On Cajones

You ever see a dead critter on the side of the road? I mean right on the side, not in the middle or part-way in like he made it about as far as the average distance of an outer wheel from the shoulder, I mean right on the edge.

I use to think that guy was just shit at crossing roads. Dude, you made it like a foot and a half. That's not very impressive. You basically died at the first opportunity. You're those guys on the beach from the beginning of "Saving Private Ryan." Yeah, it's stacked against you, but jeeze!

But then I realized something. A good percentage of those dead critters I see on the road's periphery are pointed towards the woods, away from the center of the highway. Sure, I suppose a number of those tried to turn around and run back–the cowards!–but I have to assume, statistically, some of those animals made it all the way from the other side of the motorway. Granted, they weren't the Ultimate Street Crossing Champion like any of their friends who managed to make it across the street, but those guys did a pretty damned good job. They went for it and, yeah, they failed, but they almost didn't. (To extend the "Private Ryan" analogy, I guess these guys are like that one soldier who walks around in a daze picking up severed limbs to see if they're his. Yeah, he's pretty screwed, but what a trooper.)

So just imagine the cajones on those critters that go ahead and take that last long trek. It's only a road to us, but even the biggest raccoon tops out around 25 or 30 pounds. Lets take a conservative estimate and say the average raccoon's about 20 lbs. He eats well, but he's still spry. That's still more than eight times smaller than the average American by weight. By height, he's like a fifth of us.

Have you ever tried to cross a highway without a crosswalk? With speeding cars? At night?

No, you likely have not. But wait, it's far worse for out little raccoon friend. It's hard enough to cross a highway as a person, now consider that for a creature about 18" long and weighing only 20 lbs.

Try imagining a highway that is from end-to end not four lanes wide (plus a median), but twenty lanes wide. Now imagine that instead of every day cars about 16 feet long and weighing 1.5 tons, cars are eighty feet long and twenty feet wide and weigh as much as 32,000 pounds traveling upwards of three hundred miles per hour. Now imagine you've never seen shit like this before in your life.

That's what squirrels and raccoons and badgers and skunks and cats and deer do every day. They're all fucking lunatics. The ones that make it back must seem like action heroes to all the other woodland critters. They come to this impenetrable river of death and say, "No, Mother, I must go! There must be something beyond the great divide. Perhaps we will find a new source of food, a new lace to live! If only just one of us has the courage to try. I will return for you, Mother. For all of you."


But yeah, most of them went out about two feet, froze, and got whacked trying to make it back, crawling away like little bitches.

On Salting the Wound

As Emmy nominations have started coming out, a wonderfully bittersweet act of providence has granted four separate "noms" to The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien.

Now, O'Brien in interview recently reacted–there's no better word for his multiple levels of honest and facetious maniacal laughter/tears and sobs–to the news that most Google users didn't even know what The Tonight Show was. Frankly, I never gave a crap either, until the imminent cancellation allowed O'Brien and his crew to be completely unrestrained and, well, good in my eyes. Only in knowing that their time was short did they begin to film the show they wished they'd been filming for years. It's like the cancer patient who lives more in his last week than most people do in their whole lives. You remember Last Holiday? No, you shouldn't, but that's what it was about.

Anyway, knowing that the first episodes of O'Brien's new TBS show will absolutely have to contain some jokes about Peacocks, I was thinking they could try one of these as a really expensive joke for the first week or so:

• The To Knife Show with Conan O'Brien - The Tonight Show set is rebuilt plywood-for-plywood, but with the addition of giant gleaming butter knives to either side of the main interview area. Obvious references to knives are made all night, including bad puns, claiming that their main audience is now survivalists and serial killers and having the first interviewee be Paul Hogan (of Crocodile Dundee fame).
• The To Knit Show with Conan O'Brien - Same as above, but far cheaper. Conan sits in a rocking chair next to a grandmotherly old woman who knits for the entire hour or until she falls asleep mid-sketch. Occasionally, she gives Conan tips on pearling.
• The Two Wife Show with Conan O'Brien - Conan rebuilds his set as a farm compound and dresses as a fundamentalist Mormon for the whole episode.
• The To Fife Show - This is either an opening sketch about feudalism or small flutes, I haven't decided yet.
• The 'To Life' Show - Everyone, especially Andy Richter, is so ecstatic to not be unemployed that every seven minutes during an otherwise typical Conan O'Brien Show the entire crew raises glasses of Manischewitz and a latke in a toast.

However it works out, I would just like to point to the irony that The Conan O'Brien Show is clearly going to displace Lopez Tonight from its current time slot, but no one is going to complain about that because as far as I can tell no one actually likes George Lopez for any reason. The man is about as funny as a paper bag.

Oh, sorry. Sorry! I forgot you can't make fun of ethnic comedians because it might be construed as subtly racist.

I meant to say George Lopez is "about as funny as a brown paper bag." Now everyone's happy.

Reasons I Want To Get A Motorcycle

Not included in this list: "Because I want to look like a gay leather enthusiast."

Reasons I Want To Get A Motorcycle:

1. To ride it
2. To look cool
3. To save on gas
4. To have an excuse to break out my old leather jacket
5. So girls will want to ride it and they'll have to hug me
   

On Lindsay Lohan

Recent obsessing over why Hannah Montana could possibly have become so famous to the contrary, my pop idol heart will always belong to Miss Lindsay Lohan.

Ever since she was 11 in the parent trap. (I hate dating myself, but I was only 10 too.) Through the eating disorders that robbed her of her luscious bosom, the drugs that replaced the eating disorder, the rehab and vaguely homoerotic bond with her best friend that replaced that, and even all the gross ways she looked trying to find the perfect amount of coke and liquor to power her through an existence empty of the accolades she so desperately craves. Even when she acknowledged that she was in an open lesbian relationship and appeared to actually grow as a person. Alone in my head, I stuck by her even through that.

It's been some crazy adventure, ups and downs, more downs than ups but much greater ascensions than even the longest crash. That said, here is a graphic representation of how hard I want to bang Lindsay Lohan over time:


(A full, giant-sized version can be found here, for those of you who are interested.)

Lets try a little break down.


1998 - The Parent Trap - Great remake. I'm ten, but even I want to kiss the Californian Lindsay on the lips out behind the swing set at recess.

2003 - Freaky Friday - Another remake. Yeah, she was around in between, but this was her next big thing and the first in her three contractual Disney pictures. She was an maladjusted teenage pop-punk chick who was gorgeous but wore a lot of black and didn't know she was hot. The perfect high school girlfriend. Also, from what I hear she and Jamie Curtis were both gave amazing performances of each other.

2004 - Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen - Dramatized being an egomaniacal, stupid bitch. Clothes were visually busy, distracted from lack of quality in rest of movie.

2004 - Mean Girls - Actually written by Tina Fey, this explains why the movie always seems like it was really good before being edited for television, except the parts that were cut out never existed in the first place. I distinctly get the feeling that Fey wrote a much better movie, as evidenced by the non-lesbian and the fat guy, depictions of legitimately vile high school life and pretty much any scene involving Tim Meadows. This was the absolute last and hottest jailbait Lindsay Lohan.

2005 - Herbie: Fully Loaded - Lohan in a jumpsuit, pre-substance abuse? By Zeus, at the premier events for this movie Lindsay was at her absolute finest. During the movie? No. After? Nope, that started her first major downward spiral, but right as the last of her Disney obligations was bombing in theaters, eighteen year old Lohan was looking so good I wouldn't have even minded picking up Wilder Valderama's sloppy seconds.

2006 - Just My Luck - I have actually seen the last seven minutes of this movie and had previously read a synopsis on Wikipedia. That said, it was just as horrible to watch as I'd imagined and up to that point successfully avoided experiencing. Poor acting, ridiculously "classically" handsome people running around pretending to know what their characters jobs actually entail and falling in love by wacky circumstance. Essentially, it was a teenage girl's version of Confessions of a Shopaholic, which actually fits the previous descriptions as well. Lohan's character is such a vapid, consumer whore, reveling in it until the plot of the movie forces her to become a real human being before finding her worthy and giving it all back as a reward, that I want her to fall off a slick cliff face. Yes, there's a point where I hate who you are inside so much that even I wouldn't sleep with you. Shocking, I know.

2006 - A Prairie Home Companion - Didn't see it. Heard it was really good. Lohan improves in my book for performing well in a grown-up movie.

2007 - Arrested on substance abuse charges. Sentenced to rehab, court dates, drug tests and later a very fashionable leg bracelet.

2007 - Georgia Rule - See my comments about Prairie Home, but add that she looks healthier and actually desirable again.

2007 - Never mind, she's a hot tranny mess again. Lots of photos surface of a pale, squishy-looking, strung-out Lindsay, hammered, wearing bikinis inside various hotel rooms. Many pictures of her nipples surface in this time and no one is doing damage control like they did for that one time she forgot her panties on a night out with the Hilton skank.

2007 - I Know Who Killed Me - Perhaps all that might have been due in part to her portraying a (literally) tortured, drug-addled stripper in this horribly bad thriller with an inappropriate fantasy twist. Though, appropriately, it puts a firm contrast on Lohan's character dichotomy: party sweet, successful, beloved daughter and her whorish evil twin every thinks is the same person.

2008 - Lindsay dates a girl openly. I'm wracked with that awkward feeling I usually get when a female friend I genuinely like gets a boyfriend and I am forced to deal with the realizations that a) she does not see me in that way, b) I will likely never sleep with her, and c) it's actually better for her emotional development to have a positive, functional relationship like I am incapable of. It's sad, but still kind of makes you feel good. Then she went crazy when even a very butch woman told her she was too much of a selfish bitch to deal with emotionally. Having been dumped by both primary genders, Lohan goes wackadoodle and tries to grab some of her stuff from her ex's place and gets caught outside hiding in the bushes.

2008 - In the middle of all that craziness, Lindsay achieves a childhood dream of becoming Marilyn Monroe for a day by posing nude for Playboy Magazine, replicating famous Monroe spreads and finally being naked on camera and not-blurry. Simultaneously, this fulfills many men's childhood dreams as well.

2009 - Labor Pains - OH GOD SO HORRIBLE MAKE IT STOP! [Note: babies are the precise antithesis of living your own successful life. That isn't the point this movie makes, but it's what I took away from it and that's what I think every time I see an attractive woman weighted down by kids or a baby bump. But hey, at least she puts out.]

July 6, 2010 - Lohan is found guilty of violating her 2007 probation and sentenced to 90 days in prison and an additional 90 days of rehab. Lohan cries like a little little bitch who didn't know she'd been getting trashed for the past three months in direct opposition to a court order and a piece of bling that measures her alcohol intake.

2010 - Lohan appears in Robert Rodriguez's Machete, a full-length exploitation film previously teased during the intermission of Grindhouse. Like the other 837 big-name actors in this movie, Lohan is gritty and likely murderous, and like all her female costars apparently appears topless and objectified. Ostensibly, it's her dream role.


I never thought I'd say this, but I'm tired of hearing Lindsay Lohan's husky voice in the back of my head and thinking about her breasts. She's too high-maintenance. I just want to go to sleep and maybe have a sandwich later.