Monthly Archives: January 2009

Cinematics

The Most Useless Dorian Gray Arrangement Ever

I felt kinda bad for posting that snotty multiple choice bit about Steve Martin yesterday, like I backstabbed an old beloved teacher or something. I mean, when Steve Martin was at the top of his game, he was awesome. The Jerk is still one of my favorite Funny Ha-Ha flicks. If you can find a copy of the criminally out-of-print Cruel Shoes, please do so. It is more than worth tracking down.

But damn it all, the man refuses to make a good movie anymore. Or to do anything remotely funny at all. What makes it even worse is that I don’t think he’s enjoyed selling out. At least now that Robert Deniro and Al Pacino have totally given up, they look like they’re having a blast in the horrible, horrible movies they make. Maybe because they spent so many years being intense, they feel relieved from the burden of all that art and integrity they carried around for so long.

Conversely, every time you see Steve Martin, he looks miserable. Like there’s some guy standing behind him at all times with a loaded gun pointed at the small of his back. “Yeah, see? You just keep makin’ shitty remakes of stupid movies no one remembers and everything’ll be just fine, see?”

He doesn’t need the money, I hope. I don’t think he requires an expensive operation, or has ex-wives whom he must support. But there has to be some reason he keeps doing these awful flicks, right?

Right! And the reason is: Banjo inspiration!

Martin says five of the songs on “The Crow” [his new bluegrass album]…date back to the late ’60s and early ’70s, while others are
more recent. “Tin Roof” came along while he was filming 2003’s “Cheaper by the Dozen,” and “Pretty Flowers” was conceived while filming 2006’s “The Pink Panther” in Boston.

I’m not gonna rag on Martin’s banjo playing, because I’m not qualified. I like to think I’m musically educated, but I don’t think I could discern between good and bad banjo pluckin’. And it obviously makes the man happy, so let him play all he wants. Let him record 17 album-length banjo solos for all I care. Good for him.

But I wonder if Martin feels that his banjo playing is now his real art, that the whole “being funny” thing is just to pay the bills so he can pluck ’til his heart’s content.

Because he cites some pretty awful flicks when pinpointing the muse for his banjo tunes. And not just flops, but totally venal, bottom-feeding, imagination-free remakes of crappy movies no one remembers (except Panther, of course). Maybe he wants to devote all of his creative energies to the banjo. And in order to do so, his day job must be as mindless and soulless as humanly possible.

The dumber, more pandering the movie, the better his banjo music. In exchange for his movies being mindless garbage, he gets to thrive at what he really loves. It’s like the lamest variation on The Portrait of Dorian Gray ever.

That’s how you wind up with a comedic genius making under-the-bottom-of-the-barrel junk like Bringing Down the House: Blame The Banjo.

Parental Guidance

Unreasonable Anger Theatre Presents: Kids Wear the Darnedest Things

Something dumb that drives me nuts: Kids who refuse to dress up.

This is not an Adult Feeling for me, or a Parent Feeling. Even when I was a kid, it really bothered me when I saw other kids at a fancy function dressed in jeans and sneakers.

Maybe it was because I had to get dressed up all the time to go to Witness meetings. So I’d think to myself, Hey, kid, I gotta put a suit on three times a week. You can’t put on friggin’ tie for Aunt Clara’s 90th birthday?

I don’t come from fancy people, by any stretch of the imagination. But I do come from a family where you know that sometimes you have to dress nice. And “nice” doesn’t mean “expensive”. It just means “not showing up to a funeral in a Budweiser t-shirt.”

It doesn’t take a lot of money to not look like a slob. I wore SalVay suits as a kid. Hell, I wore sub-SalVay suits. I wore suits from this nasty-ass thrift store in our local town that smelled like an armpit. Every time I set foot in that place, it took a few weeks off my life, from a combination of intense fear I would be spotted there and the airborne contaminants inside it. Seriously, I think it was built on top of a former pesticide testing facility.

But you know what? We were too damn poor to turn up our noses at such bargains. After a delousing, the suits looked fine. Plus, there was the occasional pearl hidden within. I once managed to snag a vinyl copy of Monty Python’s rare three-sided record for like a buck.

I’m aware that not everyone has what sociologists would call the “cultural capital” to know how to behave in certain social situations. But my feeling is, if you have enough money to not shop at The Pest Hole Thrift Shop like I did, you also should know how to dress at a fahncy function.

All of this childhood anger hit me anew this weekend at a party I attended. The outfits worn by people at this party ranged in their fanciness. I was at the lower end of the scale, in a nice sweater and dress shoes but also wearing a pair of jeans. Some folks were all decked out, others were closer to me. But no one looked like they just rolled out of bed and put on something that’d been laying on the floor.

Then this one kid showed up in a replica NFL jersey and sneakers, and just like that, I was FURIOUS. Because it wasn’t an old holey football top or scuffed-up Keds. No, it was sparkling, brand-new (or well maintained) Vince Young replica and matching shoes in similarly pristine condition.

So this family had enough dough to dress him in the outfit of his choice. And everyone else he entered with wore appropriate attire. He just didn’t feel like getting dressed up. It really pissed me off, in the kind of blind, dumb way that you can only be pissed off when you’re a kid and you find something WRONG and UNFAIR!

And I see NO WAY in which this post could come back to bite me in the ass when my own child refuses to get dressed up some day!

Füd

An Important Wing Update

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Todd Grunfeld, proprietor of Winger’s, just emailed me because he’s heard there’s a possibility of a wing shortage. With less than a week before the Super Bowl, such a shortage could have some catastrophic results for the snacking public and America’s growing ranks of mobility scooter owners.

Todd wanted me to assure my readers that all of his Winger’s locations will be well-stocked with wings in plenty of time for the Big Game. He told me that he’s ordered a special shipment of 17 truck containers of emergency wing rations at great expense from a chicken processing facility in rural Manitoba. Their safe arrival will be guaranteed by armed mercenaries on loan from Blackwater.

And I am only passing along this info because Todd promised me that if I did, he’d find some way to rid my site of that awful, awful ad.