Category: Entertainment

Stuff I Learned From The Movies

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They say art imitates life, and even though I don’t know who “they” are, I believe them.  Sure, in the 21st century, we’re definitely swimming in the shallow end of the artistic pond, but we still have film makers.  These are the contemporary artists whose vision, diligence and painstaking efforts help us understand the human condition.  Here are just a few things I’ve learned from the movies.

Impossible missions are not only possible; they’re down right probable.

Nazis and drug cartel henchmen can’t shoot straight.

There are more than 100 ways to build a time machine, but if you build one, expect it to end badly.

Englishmen are evil.

When you look up “weird” in the dictionary, they spell M. Night Shyamalan’s name correctly.

Your gay friends are a lot smarter than you are.

Aliens hate Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and The Statue of Liberty.

Despite all evidence to the contrary — and a ton of personal experience — major urban areas have very little traffic, and you can drive as fast as you want on most surface streets.

Small towns are creepy, the wilderness is dangerous, and whatever you do, stay away from the water.

Eastern Europe is full of old, broken-down automobiles and abandoned buildings.

White groups always have one black friend, but black groups seldom return the favour.

It’s okay to stalk your ex-girlfriend, a co-worker, your best friend’s wife or the woman in your apartment complex — as long as you’re convinced you truly love her.

Despite all evidence to the contrary — and a ton of personal experience — all people over 50 have Alzheimer’s.

Secret government agents (spies) are easy to spot: they’re the ones in the expensive clothes.

Adam Sandler isn’t funny.

Sad things have subtitles.

People in New York and Chicago are really good at managing their money.  Even when they have the crappiest job in history, they can still afford a decent apartment.

All Asians know kung fu – even the little kids.

Despite all evidence to the contrary — and a ton of personal experience — super-hot girls are actually attracted to nerdy guys.

Contemporary bras are so comfortable women wear them all the time — even when they’re sleeping or having industrial-strength, marathon sex.

When you hear Middle Eastern music, something’s going to explode.

Amy Adams and Isla Fisher are the same person — and she even proved it in Nocturnal Animals.

But the best thing I ever learned from the movies is —

If a bald guy offers you the red pill, run like hell!

Big Dick Energy

cool

I think of Popular Culture as this great huge lake — and I’m a smooth, flat stone, skipping across the top of it.  Every once in a while, I touch the water and get a little wet, but by the time there are any ripples, I’m already back in the air.  Great analogy, right?  And this explains why, by the time I got around to Big Dick Energy, it was already passé.  However, after I saw it a couple of times in my Internet travels, I hit The Google to discover just what BDE was made of.  Total disappointment!  It turns out, according the Beeb (BBC) BDE is merely that intangible confidence exuded by the uber-cool.  Trust millennials to concoct a smutty genitalia description for something that’s been around since Cleopatra took one look at Julius Caesar and said, “I’d like one of those, please.”

No, for all their tweeting about Rihanna, Cate Blanchett, Idris Alba and Harry Styles, millennials didn’t invent Big Dick Energy – they just think they did.  However, it’s impossible to explain this to them because nobody has an answer for “What is cool?” and every generation has its own frame of reference.  Back in the day, my generation actually named Steve McQueen the King of Cool because – uh – he was.  Unfortunately, these days, poor Steve wouldn’t be considered the king of anything — way too much testosterone and too little angst.  The guy probably never had a panic attack in his life.  Believe me, his brand of man just doesn’t fit — in the land of the metrosexual.  Meanwhile, on the other end of the gender scale, my generation had a ton of uber-cool women – Julie Christie comes to mind, as does Diana Rigg and, of course, Ann-Margret.  These women didn’t have drama; they had hairstyles and sunglasses.  And they wore their sexuality like a tailored dress: it just fit them.  All of these women were simply too self-possessed to be “cool” in the 21st century.  For example, I don’t think any of them was ever slammed up against the wall in a fit of uncontrollable passion (a la Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith) in any movie they ever made.  No man would have dared.

So, sail on, millennials!  There’s no doubt Cate Blanchett and Idris Alba have Big Dick Energy, but so did James Dean and Ava Gardner and before that Bogie and Bacall and before that … So you should remember that, in 50 years, your Big Dick Energy is going to be just as old- fashioned as I am, skipping across the lake of Popular Culture.

Comedy By Remote Control (2018)

I bought a new television the other day and I’m reminded of something I wrote 5 years ago.  Nothing has changed.

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A certain acceptance comes with age.  As you get older, you realize that the world is not going to change that radically between now and the time The Grim Reaper takes your pulse.  Walmart is going to remain the mighty retail monolith it’s always been.   McDonald’s will sell more burgers than Africa has cows — despite the interesting fact that no one you know has ever eaten there.  And Microsoft, Google and Apple are going to continue to rule the world in an unholy triumvirate worthy of Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus.  However, just because you’ve accepted the inevitable doesn’t mean certain things don’t continue to drive you nuts.  Our world is loaded with stuff that simply doesn’t make any sense.  For example, in North America a two-fisted gigantic bottle of Coke™ sells for 99 cents, the smaller (smaller!) bottle costs $1.50 and the bottle of water (that beverage you can get free out of any garden hose.) is $1.89.  Just let that sink in for a moment.  It makes you wonder what Dasani actually means — you just got robbed?

However, the single most ridiculous thing in our world that sends me loopy every time I think about it is the remote control.  This is the point and click device that revolutionized our society.  It changed us from a vigorous, dynamic people into lazy swine with the attention span of a hummingbird without its Ritalin.  It does everything but deliver the potato chips and chew them for us.  I swear, if you knew the correct sequence and pointed it at NASA, you could launch the Mars Rover.  I (the original techno-moron) have recorded Games of Thrones in my living room while lounging through Spaghetti alla Vongolese and a bottle of Amalfi Red (I had to fight to get that combination) on a rooftop in Rome.  It is the most important item, aside from the coffee pot, in any household.  So why, by all that’s holy, is every single one of those little bastards different?

We live in a homogenized world.  If you were magically transported to a shopping mall in darkest Bavaria, when you opened your eyes, aside from The Gotterdammerung music playing in The Food Court, you would have no idea where you were.  You could be anywhere from Indonesia to Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  The utter sameness of most of our planet is worthy of Groundhog Day.  Yet, when your television finally hits the wall of planned obsolescence and you have to buy a new one, you’re about to enter the undiscovered country.  You’re reduced to re-inventing the 21stcentury wheel because the brains of the operation, the remote, has changed its shape, its size, its colour and rearranged all of its buttons.  The first time you use it, you think you’ve paused Breaking Bad: the Teenage Years to go for the Orville Redenbacher’s and suddenly you’re recording a 24 hour marathon of Everybody Loves Friends, in HD, on a channel you haven’t even paid for – yet.  So, you start pushing buttons like a Rhesus monkey in a primate behavioural study.  Nineteen clicks later, you’ve selected the adult classic, Boob Chaser III, which Channel 531 casually informs you, has been “shared” with your Facebook friends.  “Thank you for choosing Pay Per View!”

And it’s no use trying to beat the system with one of those Universal control-everything-but-the-toaster jobbers.  That’s just madness.  You need an advanced degree in binary engineering from M.I.T. just to turn one of those babies on.  By the end of the first hour, you’ve screwed up the set-up so badly the instructions are now in Hebrew and the one channel available for your viewing pleasure is The Weather Network from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.  Finally — $19.95 plus tax, poorer — you give up and go back to fighting with the original villain that came in the box.

I know that, in fifteen minutes any twelve-year-old can reconfigure my system so she can run it off the microwave.  It’s not that technology is all that smart; it’s just that it’s smarter than me.  However, I don’t understand why, when all technology is basically the same, every piece of equipment is so utterly different from the last one that you need to hire Thomas Edison to figure it out.  I can’t be the only guy on this planet old enough to remember Ronald Reagan.  What’s wrong with one size fits all?

We have cars that can parallel park themselves, murderous drones that search and destroy across the wilds of Pakistan from a Wii™ system in Wiesbaden; we’re on the verge of creating nanobots that literally eat disease.  Yet, when I want to watch an old episode of Arrested Development on Netflix, I still need six (different) little boxes to do it.  If this isn’t Comedy Central, I don’t know what is!