Can we be honest with each other for a moment? I’m not much of a fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Oh sure I like the majority of songs, and the dance numbers aren’t half-bad and Meat Loaf makes anything awesome. Plus Tim Curry is a cinematic B-movie God and Riff Raff is a truly outstanding character. So yes, there is plenty to like about The Rocky Horror Picture Show even if I do think the whole thing is a bit overblown.
But lets be honest here. The movie loses serious steam by the third act as it desperately searches for a single decent joke or running gag to use with even minimal effectiveness. Plus Magenta creeps the hell out of me. But I think my biggest complaint about the film is that the fans, well, suck.
Anna tends to head home to Brainerd, MN about once a month to visit her family. While I enjoy visiting her family, my job doesn’t afford the me the luxury of weekends off so I rarely can adjust my schedule to make these trips. And while I miss spending time with her on these weekends, I am afforded one small luxury. I get to watch movies for this site that she has absolutely no interest in.
Now, over the years we have both forced the other to watch movies that we knew the other didn’t want to watch. But in fairness to both of us, typically these are films that we were passionate about and simply wanted to share something we loved with the other person. Unfortunately, both of us have wildly different tastes. She is fiercely pretentious and very selective in what she will spend her time on. I am more of a buffet styled viewer, slopping anything and everything on the Netfix queue in the hopes I find a gem within the mountain of crap. She became a fan of Bill Murray after watching Lost in Translation, and refuses to watch any of his films previous to it. I am a fan of all Bill Murray films except Lost in Translation, because it sucks. She is a fan of Lars von Trier films like Dogville and Dancer in the Dark. I may have called her stupid for liking those movies. And so on and so forth.
Growing up I always wanted to be a Veterinarian. I was fascinated with animals from the time I could talk, and spent hours every day reading as much about them as I could. But due to an unfortunate Guinea Pig incident when she was growing up, my mother was decidedly anti-animals. My father, for his part, was pro-dog but really didn’t care for anything else unless it related to farm work. Because of this it was always a challenge to convince my parents to let me have a pet.
First up were my two pet Anoles, Jay and Sue. As I grew older I would later come to realize that they weren’t a male and a female Anole, but rather two males. This led to Jay being quite stressed out by the decidedly butch Sue. Eventually Jay succumbed to the stress and an aggressive mealworm, resulting in quite the traumatic discovery one horrific morning. I like to think that I would have been a fairly normal person if not for the discovery of Jay’s half eaten remains. My father, sensing an opening, and to be fair probably not wanting me to get upset when Sue invariably died in the future, proceeded to console his eight year old son by explaining that Sue was just upset as I was and should be released into the wild where she might find another of her own to live with. Of course, at that time I was not yet aware that Anoles were native to Florida and other tropical climates, and would stand no chance of surviving in the wilds of Iowa. Way to convince me to kill my pet, Dad.
In an effort to help boost readership I entered a blog carnival and an online writing contest this past week. As it turns out, it seems people enjoyed my submissions and Where the Long Tail Ends ended up getting selected for both. So in an effort to both pimp my own success and that of others I am providing links to both. Be sure to read the other articles and stories, there is some good stuff in there.
Non-Fiction Matthew R. Usner - Natural Selection By Beer Glass - A rather horrifying anecdote from one of the first jobs I ever had. Matt Gamble - Cool World - A review of the Ralph Bakshi film Cool World, a film that somehow manages to do everything wrong, yet still results in a truly terrible movie.
Fiction
Penelope Anne - The Divide- When love is lost, how do you cope?
During the course of our relationship I have “forced” Anna to watch several movies that she had absolutely no interest in, thus resulting in several treacherous crossroads for us to navigate. And even with huge successes like The Descent, Fight Club and American Movie, it has still proven to be quite the struggle to convince her that my love of a particular film might actually translate into being worth her time to view it. Recently such an event happened involving Slither.
Now when Slither was released about 2 years ago we had been dating for several months and my birthday was fast approaching. I had gotten some passes to an advance screening of the film that was to occur on my birthday. Now, with a March birthday it can be a bit of a struggle to find even a competent birthday film, so I was quite excited at the prospect of watching a halfway decent horror comedy as my own personal birthday present to myself. (more…)
I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!
You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.
From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike Wizards, Street Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible! (more…)
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