I hate it when this happens. You find something near and dear to your heart, some nugget of entertainment—be it a band, a book, a TV show, a movie—so far on the fringes of culture it can hardly be called “pop.” And then it a-splodes.
I’m not talking about “underground” things that worm their way into mainstream consciousness. I’m talking about something smaller and, because of that, more poignantly painful. I’m talking about what happens when the hipsters get ahold of that something near and dear. The horror!
Take this, for example: Mega- Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Perhaps you saw the trailer on YouTube or clicked the link on Yahoo’s home page, which dubbed it “an internet sensation.” If so, damn you. You’re the reason I couldn’t get the movie shipped to me from Netflix when it dropped.
Months ago I read about Mega-Shark—this back when almost nothing was known about the flick, other than the above iconic photo of said mega-shark om nom nomming the Golden Gate Bridge. I immediately put it on the Netflix queue.
One thing I miss about the 80’s: the innocence. What else can you say about a decade during which “romance” was clearly understood to mean “freaky stripper sex?” Vince Neil could sing that the “Tropicana’s where I lost my heart” without irony or crippling self-awareness. In those halcyon days, it was utterly plausible for a bespandexed rock star to fall in love with a woman simply by virtue of her ability to execute a vertical split on the pole.
Credit Reagan. Or the as-yet-unleashed full fury of the AIDS crisis. Or a desperate release of tension in the shadow of potential nuclear annihilation. For whatever reason, it was undoubtedly a purer time.
. . . Granted, my take on the 80’s might also have something to do with my having been ten when Mötley Crüe released Girls, Girls, Girls. So sure, this innocence might have been inherent not to the decade itself, but to my developing mind. But I think not. There’s a reason kids these days gravitate towards hip-hop, not rock. You won’t hear Coldplay singing: “Friday night and I need a fight/My motorcycle and a switchblade knife.” But you might hear Fiddy say just that.
In case you didn’t know it, blogging is hard. It’s not just “loser in his mom’s basement spewing mindless invective.” And it gets worse in the summer, when the heat threatens to melt your brain.
I hear you: “If you’re so evil, shouldn’t you like the heat?” To which I reply: DMX was right when he titled his 1998 opus It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot. Hell is hot . . . but it’s a dry heat.
. . . All of which is to say, sometimes you’re flagging and need an assist, content-wise, and this week Michael Bay has come through for me in spades. I didn’t know if I would see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at any point. Looks pretty awful. But I am glad it exists because it at least gives us this, probably the greatest movie review I’ve ever read. Congrats to reviewer Charlie Jane Anders at io9.
Highlights include:
Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.
. . . And:
LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he’s not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen’s prostate that somehow achieved sentience.
. . . And:
[E]very single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on “over the top” as if from a great height.
It doesn’t matter if you care about the movie. Just read this review. I promise you will come away happy . . . and, if you’re like me, actually wanting to see Transformers: ROTF. Now: go forth and readeth.
T’other day, whilst driving home, a white minivan passed me on the highway. Emblazoned across the back in huge letters was the question: “GOT LASHES?”
Reading this, what springs to mind? Lashes—as in forty lashes, as in blows from a whip or scourge, naturally! Right?
No?
Well, that’s what sprang to my mind. Which fact called for deeper examination: what kind of lashes was this van offering? It was a white minivan, which seemed to eliminate the alluring possibility of Athens, GA, having its own rolling S&M dungeon. Not to wallow in cliché, but a van like that would surely be black, or at least blood red. So go ahead and scratch those hopes of getting your sadomaso on. Scratch hard. Harder! Make it bleed!
If this van wasn’t a vessel of blissful, agonizing release, though, what was it? I’ve been reading up on some 14th century history, the Black Plague . . . yes! Flagellants—flagellants went about lashing themselves. The van was a motorized agent of penitence! I pictured the back filled with zealots naked but for hair shirts, whaling on themselves with rawhide whips. Forgive us, Lawd!
Whilst attending the Braves game last Saturday (vs. the Brewers, or as FOE Billy dubbed it, “Old Milwaukee vs. Milwaukee’s Best”), something strange, pathetic, and awful happened:
Bottomadaninth, two outs, second baseman Kelly Johnson strides to the plate . . . and over the loudspeakers, what song doth blare? “Your Love” by the Outfield. You know: “I don’t wanna lose your love . . . to-niiiiii-iiiight/I just wanna use your love . . . to-niiiii-iiiight.”
Huh?
Some players choose menacing metal intro songs: “Enter Sandman” for Trevor Hoffman, “Crazy Train” for Chipper Jones. Others choose something rhythmic and pounding from the current hip-hop canon.
But “Your Love” by the Outfield? Has anyone heard a worse walk-up song? Ever?
We were stunned—prevented from laughing only by the disbelieving pity constricting our throats. We rationalized what was happening: maybe it wasn’t Kelly Johnson’s chosen song. Maybe “Your Love” was only playing because it was the bottom of the ninth, and the Braves didn’t want to lose . . . to-niiiii-iiiight.
Here’s a thing. The largest known supermassive black hole turns out to be even . . . larger, according to a “new model.” That would be Yahoo-speak for “black holes are cool if you take out the science!”
Anyway. This does not seem wise to me. At all. We might live in a rapidly expanding universe, but ain’t no sense mocking the gravity-devouring maws that are the beating, all-consuming black hearts of our universe with fat jokes. Are we not asking for it, just asking for it, when we point at galaxy M87 and snap, “Your black hole is sooooo big, it’s got its own active jet shooting light out of the galaxy’s core!”
If sci-fi movies have taught us nothing else, it’s that we either need to (1) be supremely good neighbors to our undoubtedly more advanced, starfaring aliens-next-door or (2) hurry up with the planetary death ray and take ‘em out before they fall on us like maggots to a deer carcass. And since I haven’t read word one about the Obama administration’s planetary death ray initiative (It’s green[-man-killing] technology! It’ll create jobs in battered industrial states!), it seems we need to approach the case of M87’s black hole thusly:
Over the past several weeks, I have refitted the Workstation of Evil (WOE) with myriad devices aimed at thrusting Evil into your brain through your eye sockets ever more powerfully and sexily. That’s right: in the midst of these our recessionary times, the National Evil is not scaling back—no. Far from it. There is a new printer. A new 24-inch LCD monitor. New speakers. A new wireless keyboard. All of it hooked into one lil’ MacBook. All for YOU.
Hooowever . . .
As excited as I know I should be, I can’t help but look at my MacBook without a shudder of puritanical disgust. For Evil’s sake, it looks like a seventeen-year-old girl, fresh off the bus in Hollywood, flush with dreams of making it as an actress—only to find herself scooped up by a seedy porn producer and dumped into a six-person orgy. Every orifice has been filled. White, black, gray—all manner of plugs have been inserted into my poor MacBook, which lies supine, lid closed in apparent exhaustion. (Plus, with the wireless devices, it’s like she’s also having virtual sex while watching another porno on a widescreen TV.)
And I did this. I am that seedy porn producer.
I should be reveling in the joy of a gigantic monitor, rocking speakers, etc. . . . but I’m not. Quite frankly, I feel like washing my hands every time I touch any of these wonderful gadgets.
Where’s your messiah now? Oh, wait. There he is.
Thanks to Netflix Instant, a new 24-inch monitor, and the miracle of sloth, I was able to make a Godzilla double-feature sandwich with Up in the middle. Up is amazing. Go see it. But it lacks a certain, let us say, religious quality you find in very few movies these days. In fact, I feel strongly that only Godzilla movies can really offer the spiritual fulfillment so many of us seek from our movie screens, TVs, and computer monitors.
As I watched Godzilla vs. Destoroyah and Godzilla 2000, I was struck by the same emotions a lot of people told me they felt while Mel Gibson beat the hell out of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ . . . basically, a deep, abiding gratitude that it wasn’t them nailed to the cross. Or in this case, having their shoulder sliced into by the glowing horn of Destoroyah.
Not to go all doom’n’gloom on you, but I fancy the Yahoo home page as the best guage of the supposed decline of Western Civilization. First of all, the editors go overboardlier than all others in terms of writing provocative headlines. World War III will start when Iran’s mullahs stumble across a gem like this:
“OBAMA SAYS ‘I WILL NUKE MIDDLE EAST’”
. . . And the subject matter of the actual article will be a “slice of life” describing how the president sneaks out for a midnight snack consisting of microwaved couscous.
It’s not all Yahoo’s fault; take this article from the venerable Washington Post concerning a high school senior who has never missed a day of school.
I know what you’re all thinking: what a pathetic loser. Agreed.
The thing is, there were two kids in my graduating class with extra-super-perfect attendence. Out of a class of around 350, that’s only half of one percent . . . but consider this: if half of one percent of all three hundred million Americans managed to slog through their formative years without faking an illness so as to play video games all day/mask the symptoms of a teen pregnancy, that would make for 1.7 million perfectly insufferable teacher’s pets. Which—sorry, sunshine—seems to make this not so much a news story.
The National Evil believes in promoting a healthy spirit of bloodthirsty competition among the American people. However, I also recognize that most of us piss ourselves when faced with any form of competition that involves mental acuity, physical skill or the dread public speaking.
So, in honor of our fierce noncompetitive nature . . . and for this, the National Evil’s bipostennial, I present to you:
The First Annual Most Boring Dream Contest!
The rules are simple. All you have to do is describe a dream more boring than this one, which I actually had:
Last night I dreamed I was looking at a map of the United States when I realized that Kansas is actually WEST of Montana! After decades of trusting globes, atlases, road maps, and States of the USA children’s puzzles, I discovered they’re all wrong. There it was on the map, crammed between Montana and Idaho: Kansas.
Just imagine the shock! The horror! The—oh crap. I actually just bored myself awake.
A few caveats. Your dream has to be:
(A) A real dream.
(B) Not just a routine, “Dammit, I’m living my everyday life in my dream” dream. We all have that. It has to be something out of the ordinary, something that would NEVER happen in your life . . . but still boring as all holy hell.
The prize? A night with Megan Fox in the heart-shaped jacuzzi of your dreams! (Emphasis on “of your dreams.”) That’s right—an entire night! You’ll be shriveled as raisins after a marathon 10 hours in the jets!
Or . . . maybe just your name and picture posted here or something along those lines. Whichever you prefer.
