The New Black

"_______ would be a great name for a restaurant" is the new "________ would be a great name for a band."

Lost on the Moon?

Now there's help!

If only Google could help me find my keys...

Kevin Spacey is the Mother of Invention

Will wonders never cease?

Hollywood actor-turned-theatre director Kevin Spacey has installed an 'autograph' flap at London's Old Vic theatre, so he can safely meet and greet fans following performances there. [...] he has now fitted a clever contraption that allows him to reach out to the crowd and grab programs and scraps of paper to sign without greeting fans in person. A source tells London newspaper the Evening Standard, "The flap was Installed last week. Kevin loves it. He signs autographs between 10:30pm and 10:45pm. Not only does it make autograph-signing much less hassle but he also feels safer as he doesn't have to open the stage door."

Am I the only one with images of an arm sticking out of a mail slot? There's Kevin Spacey, sitting awkwardly on the floor, his face pressed up against a steel backstage door, his arm out of the "autograph flap," flailing wildly, waiting for fans to come up and put whatever they want autographed in range... accidentally signing dogs, passers-by, cease-and-desist orders...

Anyway, as much as I admire Mr. Spacey for his ingenuity, I have to wonder... how do they know it's his arm?

ATB: Catch-up

Okay, so I got a little behind on these Addicted to Bad write-ups. I wish I had an excuse, but it was a combination of laziness and busyness. Look at that: Two contradictory concepts that taste great together. Maybe I should market Laziness Cups. Eh. Maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, how long has it been since I wrote one of these up? Seven weeks? Geez. Better dive right in. And what better way to do that than explain why there was no column last week. Simple, really: My brain just wouldn't work. I can't be any clearer than that. Which may mean that it's still out of order. Hard to say. It's a bit like being drunk, or rather how they describe being drunk to you in high school "don't drink" rallies: The drunker you get, the less you realize how drunk you are. Which has never been my experience. I know how drunk I'm getting, I just lose the capacity to care...

What was I talking about? Oh, right: Brainy no worky. I don't know why. Normally, I can squeeze out something funny. Something. Anything. It's one of the rushes of being a columnist: Starting with absolutely nothing at the 11th hour (literally), but finding it as you go. But there's always a risk of coming up empty, like I did last week. I tried and tried, but my brain just couldn't make the connections I needed it to. I could still form a coherent sentence, but I couldn't make it a funny one. So I just gave up and hoped no one would notice.

And, judging by the lack of letters, no one did. Now, it's a given that, as a general rule, people don't write unless they're angry, so I don't get many letters anyway (at least, I hope that's why), so maybe my absence just meant an absence of things to be angry at me about. Or maybe no one noticed. Hard to say. I'm trying hard not to get fixated on it.

So let's move on to something else. Namely, Nicolas Cage.

Nic, Nic, Nic... What happened, man? Is it a rule that Oscar winners have to take the crappiest movies they can find? I mean, 8MM is just a dank, depressing piece of shit movie. It tries to be all deep and intense, but it just comes off as confused and self-important. Who needs that?

This was a tough one for me, because, after the Batman Forever debacle, I swore I would never watch another Joel Schumacher film. Which meant I was ahead of the curve when Batman and Robin hit. And I was just fine not having to watch the "critically acclaimed" Tigerland, thrilled to miss Bad Company, and overjoyed not to see Phantom of the Opera. And, as an added bonus, no Joel Schumacher meant not sitting through two hours of Nic Cage trying to grimace meaningfully in 8MM.

But I make sacrifices for my readers. Yes I do. So I watched it, and it was about as bad as I expected. The question was, how do you write about something this dumb and depressing? I didn't really have an answer, but I was fixated on the woman who looked disturbingly like the Rappin' Granny from The Wedding Singer, so I ran with that. The end result is a column that starts off rather weirdly, but then has some really good moments:

8MM tells the story of Tom Welles, a private investigator who lives in Dismal, Ohio, where he does detectivey things. Tom is married to Catherine Keener, who spends all her time standing around and saying "I love you" wistfully to Tom, so you know things are going to get ugly. He gets hired to discover whether an old snuff film is real or not, so he seeks out the most depressing, poorly lit locations on the planet. Along the way, he finds out that the world is an awful place filled with horrible people who have no redeeming value, except for porn store clerks, who are kinda nice. Only then the horrible people kill the porn store clerk and threaten his family, so he has to set them on fire and/or stab them. The horrible people, not his own family -- although that was apparently the original ending. I hear it tested poorly.

The trouble is, and I suspect I run into this a lot, I doubt anyone saw the movie, so they have no point of reference, really. And that makes it hard to get into the column, especially one that starts a bit slow, as this one does.

That said, since I wrote this, I've seen 8MM on basic cable at least twice, which disturbs me in more ways than I'd like to count. Not the least of which is this: IT'S A MOVIE ABOUT SNUFF PORN.

But I digress. After 8MM, I tackled Corky Romano, a movie that aspires to sub-Pauly Shore levels.

And I'll be fair: This one was a bit like the broad side of a barn. But, you know what? That's okay sometimes. I had a solid concept, and I didn't really need a moving target. Plus, not writing about it would probably be worse, since it's one of the worst movies in recent years, and it's a bit like ignoring the elephant in the room. Sometimes it's just better to acknowledge the elephant before it shits on the rug.

I wish I could remember where the concept from, but it's kind of a descendant of this column, from my Savant days. That one, titled "The Introduction," remains one of my all-time favorite columns, and I suppose it would be smart to avoid trying to repeat its successes, but I'm nothing if not thick-headed and a sucker for a challenge.

(Since we're talking about Savant, this column has a joke about "Truck Stop Skanks," which is a reference to another Savant piece, this one an interview with myself. I'm continually surprised at how solid these Savant pieces were, given that I was writing a couple of other columns at the time, and I should have been drained of anything useful at that point. But, maybe, having that much to do just takes your inner editor out of play. I should try to be overworked more often.)

After Corky, I headed for Valtown. Valville? Valburg? Oh hell. I watched At First Sight, at the behest of my girlfriend. I thought of doing failing body part movies, like Christian Slater's Untamed Heart and the Duchovny/Driver movie Return to Me, but At First Sight didn't seem to fit in with those movies exactly, and besides it provided plenty of material on its own. (It actually has more in common with another convalescence romance flick, Regarding Henry, but I'll get to that in good time.) Sight has the interesting nugget of a plot in it, about a blind man who regains his sight, but it's treated with all the weight and intelligence of a Lifetime movie. Still, hey, chicks digged it. Except my girlfriend, which is why she's awesome. (Then again, she likes Top Gun and Pearl Harbor...)

Amy just can't just be happy having a handsome, financially independent masseuse boyfriend, she also wants one who can tell her if she looks fat in that dress. So, in between designing strip malls for men who sound suspiciously like Foghorn Leghorn, she takes him to quite possibly the dumbest doctor on the face of the planet, the kind who seems surprised that a man with newly restored sight might not want bright television camera lighting pointed directly in his eyes.

Yeah, that kind of stupid. I know they have "technical advisors" on movies, but how about logic advisors? Guys whose job it is to watch movies and go, "Um, duh..." to the director. This movie needed one. Bad.

Okay, that's enough for now. In the interests of avoiding boredom (yours, not mine... I never get tired of talking about myself), I'll get to the rest later.

Pee on This

Kilwag deconstructs the "Calvin Peeing" phenomenon:

Apparently, it's not enough to like the car that you drive, you’ve also got to hate other brands of cars. [...] Where do they come from? I’ve never seen one in an auto parts store, although I’ve only looked a couple of times. As far as I can tell, the biggest source seems to be guys at carnivals with a computer and vinyl cutter. They set up shop with about a hundred tacky decals of witty sayings like “Shit Happens” and ripped off cartoon characters. By far the most popular variation is Calvin peeing on something.

I've always shied away from putting anything on my car because, well, why bother? Are you going to do anything besides piss people off? You aren't going to change anyone's mind with a bumper sticker. The best you can hope for is a chuckle, and if that's not your goal, then the only thing you're doing is feeding your sense of self-righteousness or ego. And who needs that? I prefer to remain anonymous, thank you.

Plus, is it really worth devaluing your car by hundreds for a $.35 sticker?

Best-Laid Plans...

Never has such a fantastic URL been so wasted. Not to mention completely unrelated to monkeys.

Bastards. I wanted that URL.

My monkeys need a home!

San Francisco: Jiggly and Delicious

Ladies and gentlemen, San Francisco done in Jell-O. (Any guesses what flavor she made the Castro District?)

Up next, Detroit done in pudding.