Signs The Movie You're Making Is Gonna Suck

With all of the focus grouping and second guessing in the Motion Picture Industry an awful lot of shitty movies get released. This wouldn't make much difference if they made a lot of money to counteract their lack of quality, but this is often not the case. The people whose money really matter is mine and yours.

There are many unofficial rules I use that a movies going to suck that hold strong and true while some (goes straight to DVD, stars Keanu Reeves) have been proven wrong, albeit rarely. These are the surefire ones.

1. When the most famous person involved with the movie is the executive producer.
This is especially true when the person hasn't had the best track record ("from Executive Producer Jennifer Lopez"). I would be the last person in the world who thinks you need proven stars to make a worthwhile movie, but the persons that make shitty movies don't share my opinion.

2. When you make a sequel and you can't get the star to commit, but do it anyway.
This is especially true when the original movie is the biggest one the star has ever done. I mean if you can't get Jeff Fahey to do Lawnmower Man 2, pack it in. Who's Jeff Fahey? Exactly. You can almost guarantee suckage if the star DOES come back when they died in the first one. Then they have to be shoehorned in with flashbacks or improbable resurrection (The "Sean Connery in Highlander 2 Rule").

3. You have to connect two obviously separate scenes to get a laugh in the trailer for a comedy. What? There aren't enough jokes to sacrifice for a thirty second commercial?

4. Your making the third, fourth or more in a series where nobody even realizes there were any sequels at all. Do you know there have been 4 Tremors movies? 8 Hellraisers? 4 Revenge of the Nerds? Have you already turned your browser elsewhere?

5. Three Words: Starring Paris Hilton. She's like the Pauly Shore of the new millennium. Just awful.

Today in Fake News: Made-Up Conspiracy Believed By Conspiracy Theorist

Since The Onion doesn't accept submissions, I have to pose my own fake news.

Eugene, Oregon- Local Conspiracy Theorist Lee Abbott, creator of the web site It's All Connected, is spreading the rumor of another government plot to control the general population that saw it's origin as a joke.

Mike Franklin, who has lived with Abbott for two years explains: "I was at a party discussing Lee's crazy blog and we started coming up with our own out-there plots to crack ourselves up and someone said that the government employed subcultural taste makers to get kids to wear their pants big, so they would fall down if they ran from the authorities."

"I didn't think we went far enough, so I said that they also encouraged facial piercings and tattoos to guarantee that they never infiltrate the upper classes. When I got home, I told Lee about it and I though he'd get the joke, but 20 minutes later it was on his site under the headline, 'Subjugated By Subculture', with a theory that everyone from Fred Durst to Fallout Boy was on the government payroll."

The other people in Abbott's newsgroup have run with the story as well. Gary "Stumps" Campbell of the Altoona Truth Network says, "This merely confirms what many of us have thought for years, that the Military-Industrial Complex will use any tool the keep the "sheep" in line."

Franklin has been shocked at the impact his fictional story has had. "I thought about telling Lee it was just a joke, but how I want to make up more 'conspiracies'. It's just too easy!"

My Concept Album (really)

I come up with A LOT of ideas; some good, some (most) are bad, but I have learned to use my internal editor to stop me from talking too much about it so I have less to explain when I don't actually do it. The only thing that I talked freely about long before it was done was Surviving Retail because I knew it would happen, eventually.

Which brings me to the concept album. I haven't recorded it, but do have almost all the songs written, which is the time consuming part for me. The concept is: a songwriter is writing his regular songs about music and women. The songs are upbeat, in stark contrast to the lyrics which betray a deep depression. This is where it gets a little more....Right around this time, fusion power is developed to the point where every home has it's own reactor that's powered by running on trash (like the Delorean in Back To The Future). It is quickly found out that the reactors can easily be converted to fusion bombs. Every home has a potential WMD and the paranoia that springs up in society as a result starts creeping in to the songs on the album. The songwriter (let's call him Your Pal) looks at the world around him and sees how everyone is just as miserable- if not more so- than he is. This is where he decides to try to destroy the world. Between hints in his album and numerology on the cover, he tries to get his listeners to set off their bombs after he detonates his at his home record release party after plays the last song. He dies of course, but he doesn't see himself as a mass murderer; he's more of an opportunist. He knows that people, driven mad by the power they have in their home appliances, will do what he has done. By coordinating other people to do it,he will cement his place in history. If there's anyone left to write it, that is. But by default, it's the most historically significant pop album of all time; how many people did Sgt. Pepper's kill?

This concept came together after I noticed that all of the songs I was writing had to do with various kinds of heartbreak and the end of the world. One of the songs, "She's Got The Bomb," got turned into a story that I'm currently writing about the aftermath of these explosions, since Your Pal isn't nearly as popular as he thinks he is.

Possible titles:

Without You I'm Something

Earth Don't Suit You

We've Got The Bomb



Update: I've decided to call it Ragna-Pop.

My First Untimely Death

Late Summer- Early Fall 1989

I was 19, just starting college when I ran into my ex-girlfriend's best friend. This ex and I had kind of a bad break-up, so I wasn't sure if her friend would want to talk to me. I was not prepared for what happened; upon seeing me, she stopped walking, shocked at the very sight of me.
"Pete, I thought you were dead!"

Because I am so very quick on the uptake, I immediately responded with a, "No!"

It turns out that someone from my past had told her that I had drowned at the beach a month before. It was Tommy, my former next store neighbor that I punched once; which was one of my least proud day, I even wrote a post about it. I was at the Indian River Inlet beach, like he said, but I wasn't (that) drunk and I certainly didn't drown. Since it had supposedly happened a month before she found out, she didn't check the news to see if it was true; she even almost called my parents.

I had no idea why Tommy would have said something like that, unless his sense of revenge has a shelf life of more than 5 years. I had even seen him at a party where I met the ex a few months prior, but I thought that he didn't recognize me. I had a lot more hair then than I had 7 years prior- or now for that matter. Most of the kids at the party were my age- 19- and Tommy was very conspicuous being the youngest person there- about 14. It seemed like his brattiness had flowered into delinquency, drinking and smoking pot with the older kids, who were visibly freaked about a 14 year-old grabbing their joint. If he knew who I was, he didn't say so.

Which brings my back to my death. We talked about it, and we decided that her friend should tell her I was still alive. As fun as it would have been to do, I couldn't in good conscience call her and go:
"This is Pete calling....FROM THE GRAVE!"

The Last Iraq War Anniversary Blog! (Hopefully)

I go through my day thinking of things to post here some time big, fat, glowing topics just drift right on by; the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. After reading the book Fiasco, about the planning of the Iraq war, my roommate-who works in politics- said that his organization put more planning into political campaigns than the Bush Administration did for this war. He wasn't exaggerating.

I've been wrong about so very much in my life, but my mind has never been swayed that the Iraq War was a bad idea. But I'm just a person, what I know about Iraq is what I've taken the time to learn. So when President Bush first said that Saddam Husein was going to have to atone for his role in 9/11, I thought, who said Iraq had anything to do with it? Did he just make that up?

Of course, as through most of the Presidency, we were suppose to take their word for it with a administration-wide game of "Do as I say, not as I do." A lot of us on the more liberal side of things had our patriotism challenged when we balked about war with Iraq, but a lot of us wanted exactly what President Bush said HE wanted: to punish those responsible for 9/11. We were also cursed with memories good enough to remember all of the promises that have been broken in the meantime.

Saddam had WMDs, you know who else does? Us. We sold them to Iraq as a matter of fact. WMDs are great if you want to sit the big boy's table of international diplomacy (which is the reason Saddam loved the idea that people thought he had them), but they are a bad strategic move to actually use. Even if a rogue group got a nuke or nerve gas that they used in any part of the world that they MAY have gotten from Iraq, Baghdad would most likely be blinked out of existence by our own WMDs.

Saddam was an evil guy, without a doubt, but this world is full of evil guys in power. Imposing our foreign policy on this part of the world reminds me of a rich friend I had in High School; whenever I'd have some financial limitation that he didn't, he say,"Can't you ask your parents for the money?" No, I couldn't, and not just because of pride. It wasn't as simple as he saw it.

The simplistic approach of the Bush Administration's "They hate us for our freedom, so we'll force it down their throats" does not take into account the deep ethnic divisions and the economic inequities between them. A basic rule of human behavior is they have to take care of themselves before they can devote time to worry about their freedom. Many Iraqis are happy that Saddam's gone but are now refugees or have dead and disfigured relatives and the lucky ones who might have dodged such peril regularly go without power and water. I wonder how much we as Americans would value our freedom if we didn't have a clean place to take a shit for 5 years.

Another thing that I knew that the War would affect adversely was good old-fashioned political discourse. I had a political discussion with someone on the Washington Metro who was in support of the war because of Saddam's WMDs. We disagreed, but were respectful of each other's opinions and shook hands when he got to his stop. I told him, "The saddest thing about this, is this might be the last civil political discussion either one of us will hear for a long time." I was more right than I could have imagined.

But who could could have foreseen a screw-up this huge? It's not like this couldn't have gone better, like we didn't have people who had the experience to help us avoid this, but were fired for their honesty. The egos of the President and Vice-President won't allow them to admit openly that they've done anything wrong, regardless of all the bleeding, exploding evidence to the contrary; a conceit that even their most ardent supporters can no longer share.

I wish I could have seen where we'd be in Iraq now. I would have loved to ask the people who supported it at the beginning if they still would if they knew for a fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no WMD program whatsoever. After refusing to believe either or both (Hell, I believed they had WMDs) I believe they'd say that they wouldn't. Well they didn't and don't after six years where the government worked pretty hard to find even the barest tread of real evidence. But our reasons for fighting morphed enough to satisfy most people to believe we're still doing the right thing.

9/11, WMDs, to establish democracy, to fight terrorists? I'm not one of these people who believes that war is never an answer, just not when we're not sure what the question is.

Eatz,Pwns and L3av3s

When I actually went to college, my English professor refused to recognize contractions (you know, can't instead of can not) as proper English. His reasoning was that contractions were born out of improper use of language that became so common that now it's widely accepted. Although I was pissed off at him when he marked my accidental contractions with red ink, I now recognize his way of thinking.

Correct grammar and spelling are incredibly important to me, but it doesn't mean I'm any good at it, though. Thank God I'm living in the age of word processing, though it is disheartening to mangle a word so thoroughly that spell-check either suggests words that are not even remotely close, if there are any suggestions at all (like when I misspelled "thoroughly" writing this sentence, in fact). There are many grammar things that the computer cannot help you with that I've tried to pick up through my writing; if you read my blog posts in chronological order, you can almost pick up exactly where I discovered the semi-colon. I still have so much to learn.

Which brings us to our current age of intentional misspelling. The granddaddy of all this is, of course, Z in the place of S. Boyz, Girlz, it all drives me fuck nutty. For a short time it seemed like "i" for "y" ("Boi") would surpass its popularity, but the "z" still holds strong.

Using numbers in lieu of letter(3 instead of E, ect) has the benefit of being both stupid and confusing, thankfully it doesn't seem to be catching on; it might be because it's easier to just use the real letters when you're chatting online or texting. Which brings me to..

The contractions of texting -l8r,LOL and the like- which blends elements of all of these linguistic peeves and may prove longer lasting for the same reason that regular contractions have; they make life easier. Each spared keystroke puts the eventual case of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome that much further away. It creates a kind of technological snobbery with it's own lexicon that seems hopelessly obtuse to a budding curmudgeon like myself.

"The Speech"

Being very isolated in general, I am not connected into the ongoing reaction to Barack Obama's speech on Race yesterday. I have read a lot of the first reactions with a sense of shame and anger and not any sort of cohesive way to express this. Until I saw Jon Stewart.

Obama's speech was to observers transcendent, historic,cloying, honest and political suicide; sometimes by the same person. But it shouldn't have to be. As Jon said, he spoke about race like we were adults and it's obvious a lot of us can't handle that.

Just taking in the speech before the reactions, I could not get over how amazing it was for him to say what we, as a nation, needed to hear about this most touchy of subjects, damn the political consequences. But the reactions made me realize how right he truly was.

When I worked at the toy store, at the surrounding neighborhood everyday I saw an almost casual kind of multi-culturalism; kids of every color from around the world playing together. But did that mean there was no racism? Uh, no. We as human beings cannot control our prejudice, but we can know that these impulses are wrong and still be ashamed of them.

The kind of racism that displayed itself there was of the reverse kind; where you do something racist while trying too hard not to be racist. I'll explain:
Once a lady didn't want to leave her bag in the store, but she made sure to let my black co-worker know that it wasn't because she thought she was going to steal it. It's the by-product of these politically correct times; in an attempt to prove that everyone's the same, we've forgotten that were actually all different, we just shouldn't be judged by these differences and we shouldn't forget that they exist.

Ignorance is when your smart enough but you just haven't learned enough to know better. It's hard to remedy anything if you don't acknowledge it exists or won't honestly talk about it. What specifically am I talking about, Race, Culture? That nagging cough? What am I NOT talking about?

Your Pal's Cinematic Cliches

Roger Ebert has had a long-time collection of movie cliches called his Movie Glossary. He augments his observations with ones submitted by readers and I've got a few for him; I've checked but I don't think he's covered these yet.

The ROMCOM!

Romantic Comedy has quite a few cliches that often make it possible to know the exact plot just by seeing the trailer.

1.The asshole boyfriend.

If one of of the participants in the budding romcom romance is in a relationship, the boy/girl (more likely boy)friend will be so objectionable, you have no idea what they saw in them to begin with. (Wedding Crashers, The Wedding Singer, ect.)

2. The Helper.

The protagonist has a helper to get (or regain) the heart of his beloved, a member of the opposite sex that is just as cute, much more interesting, and much more in love with him than the original object of his affection. (Some Kind Of Wonderful, Better Off Dead, ect.)

3. The Consolation Prize.

After the couple in the Romcom make their final coupling or after the final break-up, someone is left alone. Suddenly, their eyes meet a new love, so you know they're going to be OK. (Pretty In Pink) Sometimes this new love looks exactly like that person (Better Off Dead, Wayne's World 2)

Binoculars.
When ever they show the binocular perspective on a movie, it's always the two images side by side, when we look through them in real life, it's just a single stereoscopic image(countless films).

Whenever someone REALLY needs to see something when they're using binoculars or a telescope, they use their naked eyes to see it instead of continuing to see it more magnified. (Stakeout, Men At Work, Body Double ect.)

I'm pretty sure my friend Ed brought this to my attention but every single to-go coffee cup in New York City seems to be made by the same company. (blue and white with writing on the side)

Saturday Videos

This is an honest-to-God Australian commercial for feminine hygiene products.



Mallrats of Justice- NSFW


You've gotta admire this guy's commitment


http://view.break.com/469591 - Watch more free videos

One Word: Yikes!


You've either seen it, or need to: Kinetic Sculpture

Your Pal Answers Anything!

Earlier this week, I asked my readers to ask me any question about anything (as long as it wasn't about math) and I would answer it. I got a grand total of two questions. I won't protect the identity of the askers because they posted openly on my Myspace, I hope they don't mind.

Liam asks: "Where do babies come from?"

Excellent Question! No one knows for sure where babies come from; I suppose it boils down to your perspective:
If you're the first-time mother of a newborn, your baby came straight from Heaven on a fluffy cloud of dreams. The child will spend much of the next 18 years contradicting this belief.

If you're a childless man being kept awake by a sleeping baby on a plane then babies come from fate to remind them to ask about that vasectomy the next time they go to the doctor.

I think they come from the vagina, but don't quote me.

Jerry asks: "How do you do it?"

Excellent question! No one knows for sure how I do it; I suppose it boils down to perspective:

If you're my Mom, the answer is, "Do what?"

If you're an ex-girlfriend, the answer is, "With as little effort as possible!"

Putting aside anything resembling objectivity, I'll say that I use my natural charisma, boyish good looks and attention to what makes humanity tick to bore you as efficiently as possible.

The blog for my book: Surviving Retail