I am organizing a ten-year class reunion for my old stomping ground, Red Mountain High School. It will compete with another reunion for the same class being held across the street. Check out all the details at www.realrmreunion.com.
The year is 2004, the 213th anniversary of the passage of the first amendment. I bring this up because it is in danger of being effectively abolished for the first time in my life. People from Howard Stern to Bono are being swept up in the FCC’s dragnet led by Michael Powell and his right wing consorts. This has swung Stern to the left, which is actually good, because I used to be so offended by his political rantings I had to change the station and hope I remembered to turn it back in time for Lord the of the Anal Ring Toss. Now I don’t have to do that.
2004 is more important because it is the 20th anniversary of Motley Crue’s debut album, Too Fast for Love, a blistering eruption of leather, sex, and electric guitar. Besides its lasting contribution to cock rocking, it may also have something to say about the state of the world- even today. So to people like Powel Jr. and Sen. Sam Brownback, I quote a line from an unreleased song recorded during the Love sessions, “What’s right for you ain’t right for everyone”, and to Stern, I quote the chorus, “Stick to yer gunz!”
To join the fight against the unconstitutional actions of the FCC visit www.stopfcc.com. To purchase the remastered edition of Too Fast For Love visit www.amazon.com.
During a typical day, I have plenty of mental idle time – mostly when I’m waking up, driving to work, working, driving home from work, watching TV, and falling asleep. For the bulk of this time, I like to have brain tournaments to deduce what is the best of its kind. Diet Vanilla Pepsi, for example, was the winner in the diet soda contest I held during a meeting with my boss last week. Other bouts have included favorite colors, fast food chains, dating-themed reality TV shows, and grunge supergroups. Incidentally, the latter category is also a deciding factor in sizing up a potential girlfriend, as it is important she has an opinion on the subject, no matter what it is. “I like Mad Season,” is just as legitimate as “I prefer Temple of the Dog’s high-minded meditations on loss… and guitar feedback!”. But if she gives me a funny look when I ask her about the matter, then intercourse is probably as far as the relationship will go. And even then, I’ll be inserting “Hunger Strike” on the foreplay tape just for spite.
Yesterday, I came upon a dilemma that could not be solved in my head. It would require notes and charts and the issue was this: What is the best sports maneuver in film history, the Pamchenko Twist or the Triple Lindy? The Twist is from The Cutting Edge, an ice skating drama starring D.B. Sweeney and Moira Kelly as two polar opposites paired together on the rink for one final chance at personal redemption and Olympic gold. The Lindy is a platform dive featured in Back to School, which stars Rodney Dangerfield as a senior citizen who returns to college for hi-jinks.
In comparing the two, I had to look at several categories, the first of which was believability. The Pamchenko Twist is a pairs ice skating trick in which the male grabs his partner by the ankles, swings her around like he’s performing the hammer throw, and tosses her into the air with sufficient vertical force as to provide enough time for him to skate under and catch her. It sounds like a definite loser until you consider the Triple Lindy is an old man doing flips from diving board to diving board in slow motion. However, I had to consider the context of each. The Cutting Edge purports to be based in reality, so the Twist becomes slightly less believable, while Back to School seems to be more of a fantasy, so the Lindy suddenly becomes more plausible.I also had to consider that the audience of Back to School will generally be drunk, rowdy, and likely to believe anything at 2 in the morning. The audience of The Cutting Edge, however, will be hung-over and annoyed that they are watching it for tenth time on the TBS Saturday Morning Supermovie. The edge in believability: Triple Lindy.
Next, I had to balance the emotional impact. The Pamchenko serves as a climax not only to the quest for Olympic greatness, but as a poignant climax between the two protagonists, who have just declared their love for each other after an hour and a half of sexually charged arguments about what music they’ll perform their ice dancing routine to (she wants classical, he wants rock ‘n’ roll!). The Lindy, on the other hand, is really just a funny way to end the movie, as the film’s true core involving the sub-textual love between a crazy millionaire and his street-wise limo driver has already been resolved by this point. Yet, the dive does win the swimming match for the school because one of the other divers chickened out at the last second. Who is this cowardly diver? None other than actor William Zabka, who was also the villain in The Karate Kid done in by Daniel Larusso’s crane kick, which just happens to be the third best sports maneuver in cinematic history. So the pleasure of seeing Zabka shamed again adds exponentially to the gravity of the Triple Lindy. The edge in emotional impact: Triple Lindy.
It was around this time in my analysis with so many areas left to cover that I began to grow tired of the exercise. It all seemed so… pointless, almost as if I was some media slave completely wasting my life with this shit. It just so happened it was then I saw that commercial again on television for a company that sells mail order replicas of the swords from shows like Xena and Highlander. I realized I needed to be thinking about more important things. Like what’s the best late night ad on channel E! ever, this new sword-themed one or Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break 6?
The latest catch phrase in political spin seems to be “negative advertising”, this year’s “political hate speech”, next week’s “activist judges”, all totally meaningless. Both Ed Gillespie and Terry Holt have lamented the “millions” of dollars spent on negative ads in explaining polls that have any democrat beating Bush by over 10 percent in November. Gillespie predicts the “the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics” from the left-wingers.
Of course, the Bush campaign was responsible for one of the ugliest campaigns in recent history against John McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 primaries. Though in retrospect, maybe push polling McCain as a “liar, cheat, fraud” and a “pro-abortion… fag candidate” was not so much negative as it was spiritually disapproving. Now, John Kerry and John Edwards are getting in on the intra-party shit slinging. With the field narrowed to two, Edwards has begun to point out the difference between himself and northern senator, which prompted Kerry’s manager to quickly declare “it’s funny how fast he turned negative”.
The irony is that a lot of recent “negative advertising” is just “true advertising” and the only way some see to defend it is to marginalize and discredit it with disingenuous language. “Negative” and “bad” may be synonyms, but negative campaigning is not necessarily a bad thing, not as long as it’s accurate. If I can’t have that, then at least give me something I like to call “push positive” commercials:
| “If I’m elected I promise not to start unnecessary wars, bleed the environment dry, and leave children behind in our educational system while confusing the elderly voting block with doublespeak”. |
You see how it only accentuates the positive of the contender speaking? Plus, just about anything is perfectly legitimate:
| “As president, I would never cover up anything in my past, up to and including going AWOL from guard duty in ‘Bama because I killed someone while I was drunk driving in Nantucket.” |
All of this would most certainly be true (and positive) for any Democratic candidate.
Because of my last eulogy, I received a lot of heat from readers, including one John Ritter fan with the phrase “princeofdarkness69” in his e-mail address who made the claim that this site “sux” and “wouldn’t know funny if it bit [us] on the ass”. I’ve learned my lesson and won’t use this opportunity to discuss how any of Jonathan’s work could be improved the way I did with Ritter’s TV show 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter (allusions to incest). I will say that if I had written for seaQuest DSV, I would have included a lot more sexual innuendo between Roy Schieder and the psychic dolphin. And I’ll leave it at that.
I am most familiar with Brandis because of his work in Ladybugs, a Rodney Dangerfield vehicle that allowed Jonathan to dress up as a teenage girl and dominate between the lines on a female soccer team. Outside the lines, of course, he falls in love with one of his teammates and helps Dangerfield learn the true value of higher education by forcing him to go back to school and get his degree. Even though one internet reviewer “did not care for [Dangerfield’s] patented line about ‘finally getting respect’ being mixed in with the techno song during the end credits” that was my favorite part. That was a really good song.
What I remember most about this movie are the circumstance under which I saw it. It was the only time anyone has turned around and yelled at me to “Shut up!!!” in a theatre. This includes the time I screamed “This is the worst fucking movie I’ve ever seen!” during Tomb Raider, once five minutes into it and a second time nearer to the end. This also includes my irrepressible yelping during The Texas Chainsaw Massacre… remake. Ostensibly, the reason I was reproached at Ladybugs was because I was laughing too loudly. Laughing too loudly at Ladybugs?! To be fair, it was during the supposedly serious, high drama of the movie’s climax when the winning soccer kicker was floating in slow motion towards the goal. You know the one. I just thought the use of ball-related slow-mo was even more hilarious than the shot used for Peter Horton’s wicked dig and C. Thomas Howell’s subsequent spike during the finale of the classic beach volleyball flick, Side Out. You know the one.
From Side Out to Sidekicks. Later, Brandis starred as a poor man’s Ralph Machio who overcomes his asthma with homo-erotic daydreams about him and Chuck Norris saving Modesto, California from ninjas. I suspect this was the beginning of the end of his film career, and ultimately, his life.
My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys. The spotlight monkeys this week are the 28 Days Later apes. I have a friend who loves zombie movies, and he tells me that those films have always been a reflection of society’s contemporary worries, from the death of the nuclear family in the 50’s to the rise of consumer culture in the 70’s. In 28 Days Later a group of eco-terrorists free some chimps from a laboratory, and as a result of this act of terrorism, the zombie germ the chimps are carrying infect all of England. Watching these terrorists and their terrorism makes me think that today’s society largely fears one thing: monkeys.
As you can imagine, this upsets me very much. Whether this worldly anxiety comes from a fear that all primates are disease-born or simply that they are so out of control they must be kept in cages, neither could be farther from the truth. Minus the 1920’s case where monkey cholera wiped out the entire animal population of all traveling carnivals on the eastern seaboard, most of the infirmities that monkeys suffer from (excluding AIDS) are limited to the species and would effect humans no more severely than the common cold.
Secondly, it is obvious to me that monkeys are not so “beastly” that they cannot be released from captivity. For instance, the Japanese Macaque is a race of monkey so genial that star Cameron Diaz owns one. She met hers, named Hiriko, on the set of My Best Friend’s Wedding (the DVD contains the alternate ending of Diaz relating her character’s misfortunes to the monkey at a Los Angeles bar). Hiriko is certainly not kept behind bars. In fact, during press for Gangs of New York, Diaz mentioned that Hiriko serves her tea every morning. My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys.
The day John Ritter died, people were suddenly reminded of childhood and the fond hours many of us spent watching Three’s Company while drinking Shasta. I was not one of those people, and regardless of my interest in gay sitcom subtext, I am glad I wasn’t. I have a feeling I would share, at least, the underlying emotion of one internet anti-fan who wrote this about the show:
“The one fantasy episode I thought of was where the main character from the Texas chainsaw massacre rapes joyce dewit and has ritter up the ass and at the same time is chainsawing chrissy while mr and mrs roper are later forced to eat all three of them. Yeah that would be good I WOULD ENJOY THAT VERY MUCH!!!!!!!!!!”
John’s best television work was actually Hooperman, an innovative, 30-minute show that was half sitcom, half deadly cop shoot ‘em up. Although it was cancelled after one season, it paved the way for at least one more similar show (Dennis Leary’s The Job) to also be cancelled after one season 15 years later.
Ritter’s movie career was also defined by his most embarrassing work. Despite excellent turns in films like Sling Blade and Tadpole, he might be most remembered for the dancing condoms scene in Skin Deep. The only time I even recall seeing him in the theatre was at the movie Stay Tuned, which was about a married couple being sucked into the television by a demon remote control or something. And the only reason I even recollect that is because several teenage girls were pelting me with candy. I have no idea why I was being hit with candy or what I was doing going to see Stay Tuned in the first place. All I remember is that I was in high school at the time and the same thought that ran through my head for hours on end every day was in full rotation that evening, “Get me out of this place.”
After John Ritter died, several people hailed him as a comic genius. I know it is polite to say nice things about people after they die from a heart ailment, but that is stretching it. I think it would have been deserved, however, if he had just made one small change to his current show, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.
From what I can tell by the commercials, it is a sitcom in which Ritter plays a dad who has to do many funny things to prevent teenage boys from sleeping with his extremely hot teenage daughter. I never actually watched it because I assumed Ritter’s character is successful in his efforts. But the show would have been great by adding just one simple thing.
At the end of an episode, during the credit crawl, many shows will show one more amusing little scene inconsequential to the main story line. For 8 Simple Rules, it would have been hilarious if they had a scene every week that implied John Ritter was sleeping with his teenage daughter before they reveal that he actually wasn’t. For instance, there could be a lot of moans and grunts coming from the daughter’s bedroom, and Ritter could open the door and walk out half-naked and sweaty and say, “Goddamn!”, but then a few seconds later, the daughter would come out wearing a leotard and say, “Dad, when are you going to stop being so cheap and get us a membership at the gym?!” Or in a similar setup, dad could come out of the basement half-naked and sweaty and say “Yeah, that felt nice,” and a few seconds later, the daughter stumbles out half-naked and sweaty, but then an Indian walks out a few seconds later and says, “Sweat lodge does good for soul.”
Of course, the series finale, which can never be taped now due to Ritter’s timely passing, could have been the best since Newhart discovered it was all a dream. Something like this would happen: The camera would pan over the bedroom floor revealing discarded garments. Is Ritter helping his daughter look for something in the dresser as they throw clothes all over the place!? No, because we would then see them both half-naked and sweaty in bed and dad would say, “Remember, don’t tell mom we’re having sex!” and the daughter would say, “I love you.”
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