Sleepless (12/7/99)
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Persuaded somehow by the lack of any other entertainment to watch the eminently forgettable Eighties Ackroyd vehicle
Doctor Detroit the other evening, I was amused to discover that one of the best of the few good gags in the piece was the deadpan announcement by the principals of a small college that they were waiting on the endowment for a Harold Robbins chair. It’s always gratifying to find your own old dumb jokes bubbling out of the fetid marsh of the collective unconscious; even if you were not personally responsible for their entry into the atmosphere of the age.
A note on the famous Bond spoof
Casino Royale: consulting the entry in the IMDB, I discover that the uncredited writers on the project included Ben Hecht, Terry Southern, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. Presumably the producers were unable to contact Oscar Wilde, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and William Congreve.
And let’s put this on the record with the utmost expedition:
Dogma. [Kevin Smith, 1999.]
Midway through the action in this latest from the pottymouthed New Jersey auteur, a toilet in the back of a seedy tavern backs up and overflows and a heinous Shit Creature forms from the greenish-brown slop on the bathroom floor, rises to its feet, and lurches out into the barroom to menace the brave company of mallrats [Linda Fiorentino, Salma Hayek, Jay, Silent Bob, et al.] there met to save the universe — providing an elegant allegorical capsule summary of the relations among Kevin Smith’s imagination, this scenario, and the hapless audience assembled in the theater. — For those theological illiterates who lack the wit to attempt that punk bitch John Milton or that dickless motherfucker Thomas Aquinas, or to mess with the shit of James Joyce or Saint Augustine, this will probably look deep. The rest of us may be permitted a different opinion. — Somebody ought to explain to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck that many have been cool before them, and many will be cool hereafter; that cool is not eternal or immutable, and that most of their predecessors on the pinnacle atop which they find themselves at present precipitated the abrupt conclusion of their fifteen minutes by signing onto projects like this. [Even Janeane Garofalo had the sense to walk after her cameo.] — Does this movie suck, or what? Jesus fucking Christ.
Later.
____________Through the looking glass (11/11/99)
