Random Thoughts 4/22/12

People seem to remember "Summer Rental" more, but "The Great Outdoors" is the superior John Candy Goes On Vacation movie.

A "Late Shift"-style movie chronicling the collapse of "Chapelle's Show," Dave Chapelle's subsequent career-immolation and they way both (briefly) led to the otherwise-inexplicable elevation of one-joke-wonder Carlos Mencia to "stardom" would be a thousand times more interesting and funny than any YouTube clip from either series that people insist is "a classic bit" and "still totally holds up."

There have never been enough video games where you play as a non-human, non-biped character.

(more after the jump)


It is, with rare exception, bad form to "go after" the families/spouses of political candidates. However, it is an unavoidable truism that Mitt Romney's kids look/act just like the bad guys in "Disturbing Behavior."

Reading that sentence is the first time anyone has thought of "Disturbing Behavior" in over a decade.

Are Harvey Danger and Nada Surf still recording/performing? I'd like to know, just not enough to actually google it.

The secret to Ron Paul's political viability is that The Internet has made it possible for all the young people with that special combination of being nonempathetic enough to be "conservative" before turning 30, paranoid enough to believe a 1984-style dictatorship is still a remote possibility yet far too comfortably class-sheltered to rock the bunker/militia/seperatist scene to find eachother.

If the rules in "Inception" really are meant to be a metaphor for Christopher Nolan's approach to creating/maintaining audience-immersion in filmmaking, then "The Dark Knight Rises" will be 3 minutes long - ending immediately after Mario Cotillard appears out of nowhere and shoots Christian Bale in the face after having uttered one word in his ridiculous Batman-Voice.

The Internet will go waaaaaay to easy on "The Amazing Spider-Man," way too hard on "The Man of Steel," and will not "own up" to either case until at least 2016.

The reason that glam-metal/cock-rock/butt-rock/arena-rock etc. "went away" is that hip-hop went mainstream and filled in the "aggressive/self-mythologizing/hypermasculine/teen-male-anger/music-to-enter-the-stadium-to" niche. There's a sociology paper in there, somewhere...

If you honestly do not "get" why the "Obama eats dogs!" meme is blatantly fueled by an undercurrent of oldschool xenophobia, "other-ism" and - yes - racism; while the "Romney put his dog on the car roof!" meme is at worst a mountain/molehill situation... I don't know that I can help you.

Every member of the mainstream Entertainment Press who is legitimately SHOCKED that "Think Like a Man" opened at Number 1 this weekend is basically admitting that they don't have very many black friends and/or are not nearly as attuned to the popular-culture outside of their own "niche" of it than they probably assumed they were.