"Oh my God, you're so funny."

I just watched an SNL Digital Short on Youtube. It was fucking hilarious. It was so good in fact that it turned my views on SNL around. I thought that it had lost it's spark since Will Ferrell left the show. But they got some pretty funny guys on there now who could bring it back. At least for me. So I watched about ten videos and as I was scrolling for more, I saw that there are a bunch of copycat videos, which the authors call "parodies". They aren't parodises so much as they are blatant rip-offs. That "Lazy Sunday" skit was "parodied" about twenty times in the same exact way by twenty different people. Another recent skit, "Dear Sister" was parodied the same amount and that premiered last weekend.

Why are people doing this? You are not funny. You are not clever. It's dumb and pathetic. Please stop it, you're flooding the internet with something that it already has too much of: stupid shit. That's all I have to say.

SuperMovie

If you asked a group of people, fifteen years ago if they liked Spiderman, you'd probably hear a room full of crickets. Now though the tables have turned and comics in general are in the mainstream. It is no more a social gaffe to know that Logan is really James Hackett and that he was subjected to the Weapon X experiments during World War II thus creating the animalistic adamantium-laced superhero known as Wolverine. Since X-Men came out in 2000, people and filmmakers have turned thier attention to the box office phenomenon. Because not only do superhero movies make big returns for studios, but they are also very thoughtful and well made films, well at least some are. Here is a short list of some of the major superhero films made as of 2000:

1. X-Men
2. X-Men 2
3. Daredevil
4. Eleckra
5. Hulk
6. Spiderman
7. Spiderman 2
8. Blade 2
9. Blade Trinity
10. Fantastic Four
11. V For Vendetta
12. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
13. X-Men 3
14. Ghostrider
15. Batman Begins
16. Superman Returns
17. The Punisher
18. Constantine
19. 300
20. Catwoman

I added 300, Constantine, LXG, and V for Vendetta even though they aren't traditional comics rather they were adapted from graphic novels. But they have superpowers (John Constantine could see demons, V had super strength. Leonidas didn't have any real super powers other than being a complete and total bad-ass.) I added Catwoman because, even though it was said to be a heaping pile of wasted celluloid, it is still about a superhero.

What I think is great about superhero movies, is that they take away the apparent juvenescence of comics and injected a new maturity to them. These characters are no longer just beings with incredible powers but they have mulitple dimensions with doubts and conflicts. But the thing is, these comics had all of these before. Filmmakers didn't just make all that up for the movies, those qualities have been there since the beginning. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, the majority of people either, couldn't or didn't want to, see that.

I just read an interview with Robert Downey, Jr about his research into Tony Stark aka Iron Man. He said that this character was going to be different because of the core character that Stark is: a womanizing alcoholic who dons a protective armored suit to stay alive after he is mortally wounded. Stark sounds like an anti-hero and the first of it's kind in a mainstream superhero film. Blade could be defined as an anti-hero but that film is and forever shall be under the radar (sadly) of films like X-Men or Spiderman. But Iron Man will be the Hud of superhero films and I personally can't wait to see it.

That Wierd Kid on the Internet

If you don't know already, Daxflame is, and forever will be, the greatest thing on the internet. He's a 15-year-old kid named Bernice Juach but his handle is Daxflame because "it sounds cool". You can see Daxflame on Youtube. He posts video diaries and "motion pictures" on his site. The diaries are full of emotion, teenage angst, and all sorts of digestable material. It really is a symphony to watch one of his meltdowns. The crux of the show, as I like to call it, is his dealings with Sojax-an amalgamation of a kid named Jacob and his would-be-girlfriend Sophia. His goal is to become friends with Jacob and to get jiggy with Sophia so that they can "rule the school".

What I love about this little social experiment is that Daxflame, even if he does seem like the epitome of wierd, reflects a side of all of us when we were in high school. All we wanted to do was to have friends, be popular, and be the big wolf on campus. That's all that matters in high school. We don't have to worry about jobs or money because we are dependent on our parents. And our grades are subordinate to our social lives because being smart only hurts you in that department.

But Daxflame is a cultural phenomenon, which is why I consider to be the greatest thing on the internet. There is a discrepancy as to the authenticity of Daxflame. Many consider him to be acting and that his exploits with Jacob and his stories are all contrived. This causes a lot of people to be Daxflame-haters. While others on the other hand think that he is genuine and sincere and that he really is crying those tears of loneliness and depression. To be honest, I don't know what to think of him. I know I love his show. See, for me, it doesn't matter if he's faking it or not, if it's all a spectacle and he's acting. I don't care about that. I watch movies all the time and I never think of movies that way. I never say, "Oh well that's just Tom Cruise, he's acting, he could never jump off a building like that." I suspend my disbelief for Tom Cruise and I can do the same for Daxflame. But why can't others do this? What makes Daxflame different from anything else? Is it the way in which he presents his show, like a diary? Perhaps people feel duped because Daxflame's program is shown as a real-life documentary but they someone see through it as an artifice. This manipulation of reality that Daxflame's show deals with, I find fascinating.

What ever the case may be, Daxflame proves that perhaps, people aren't ready for reality.

Happy New Year

I suppose I'm a nice guy, whatever that means. Some people have told me that, although others have told me I'm an idiot. Today I went to Panera Bread with Emily and as I was leaving the parking lot to enter the street, I saw a homeless man there. He had a piece of cardboard that said, "Waiting" which I thought was both strange and ironic as I was on my way to my job at T.G.I Friday's.

So anyway, like I said, I suppose I'm a nice guy and I roll down my window. I give the old guy two dollars and say, "Take care of yourself." I thought that would be the end of it but he wanted to talk and he got my attention with the first thing he said. This was our conversation:

"Happy New Year!", said the homeless man.
"I think you're off by a few months, buddy," I say.
"Oh yeah, it's Easter, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"Jail can make you go crazy."
(Among other things)
"You were in jail?"
"Yeah, these cops around here, they put me away for no reason!"
"Just for standing out here?"
"Yeah, they put me away because they can't catch the real criminals."
"Right."
"And them real criminals pay them off."
"Really?"
"Yeah, they been doing it for a thousand years."

He then went on a long diatribe about corruption and conspiracies in the judicial system.

The old homeless man then, in that moment, made my day. You see, all the homeless people I've ever met (which is quite a few considering my time at Happy Helpers for the Homeless) I've never met a crazy, conspiracy theorist, stereotypical homeless person. Sure I've met some crazy ones, like the crazy bag lady who dances in front of traffic in Severna Park, but none that could actually justify their craziness. They were homeless because they were crazy, not crazy because they were homeless. This guy, for example, was a product of government corruption and conspiracy. While it's probably all in his head, he thinks it's true and that makes it so exciting. This guy was really fucking crazy.

Most homeless people are just a bunch of sad-sacks who mope around asking for spare change, but not this guy. This guy was always looking over his shoulder. He was ever-watchful of the Man trying to bring him down. This guy had secrets, or at least he thought he had secrets.

Anyway, it was the most entertaining moment of the day and it's all thanks to my reasonable generosity and love for the homeless.

The End of John McClane?

So there is this new action movie coming out this summer called Live Free or Die Hard. This is the fourth installment of the Die Hard series, a series which seriously altered the way we look at action heroes.

John McClane was a different type of action hero. Unlike Schwarzenegger and Stallone, when he got shot or punched or whatever, he got hurt. He ran out of bullets. He made bad decisions which lead to innocent people getting killed. Though he didn't want it to happen, they did. He made mistakes. But he rose above and defeated the bad guys in the end. And he usually did it with a sarcastic smirk on his face.



But like I said earlier, McClane was a different kind of action hero. He wasn't muscle bound and invincible. He wasn't specially trained to kill. He wasn't a cyborg or a genetically altered super-human. He was a wise-ass cop from New York. That's it. And we loved him for it.

John McClane also did something that I think is significant, considering the times and the type of movie it was. This little action was probably shrugged off by the causal viewer but for me it really stuck out. At the end, when he hugs the black cop (the dad from Family Matters). That's it. That hug. Never in an action movie in the 80s, a time of uber-masculinity (thanks to Schwarzenegger and Stallone) and homophobia (thanks to society), would two dudes embrace. Ever. Especially if they just defeated a group of German terrorists. Not even then.

This is where my problem with the new Die Hard comes in. I saw the preview and I see that the idea of John McClane was thrown away. This new John McClane is blown out into the realm of stylized action super-men. McClane can be seen performing fantastic feats of strength and dexterity like swinging onto a platform from a bar like some Russian gymnist. Also from the trailer, he can be seen climbing all over an F-15 to which he leaps about fifty-plus feet to a destroyed free way. I really hope I'm wrong but judging from the trailer, I'm right and it's a sad thing to behold. It looks like Hollywood raped the idea of a revolutionary character in order to please the over-sensitived, onanist teenage minds of America.

The First of Few

Okay so I'm in the library right now and I felt like ripping some famous guy off. And to prove my pretentiousness and the fact that I think I know more than others, I'll give $100 to anyone who can tell me where the title of my blog comes from. Okay, I took it from Ginsberg. No one would have gotten it. Except for Ginsberg enthusiasts but how many of those are there?

Also I just want to say that this blog will be absolutely pointless. There will never be any blogs of significance and for some reason I take pride in that. Perhaps it stems from my incredible desire for mediocrity, my hell-bent crusade to rid myself of anything substantial. Or maybe I'm just lazy.