Justin Robinson's Blog, page 29

Very Special Blossom: To Tell the Truth

The bro code has become such a staple of pop culture that even those not bound by it (namely, hos and their ilk) can probably recite at least a few tenets. As it turns out, the other side has a code as well, or so I was passionately informed by Mrs. Supermarket after watching this week’s Very Special Blossom, “To Tell the Truth (s2 e6).

I’ll try to explain the source of her rage. In this week’s episode, we have two plots. The A-plot (the one that drew her ire), Blossom has a crush on a guy and is utterly convinced he likes her back. What Blossom doesn’t know and finds out later, this same guy recently asked Six out and she said yes. Six is entirely ignorant of Blossom’s affections and was innocently accepting a date with a crusty-haired pale-jeans-wearing early ‘90s heartthrob. And this is where Mrs. Supermarket called bullshit. There was no way Six didn’t know Blossom liked that guy, because apparently best friends always know the other’s crush. She explained that she was once in the Six role of a similar situation, and when the guy asked her out, she told him to fuck off. “Or I was just really mean to him. I don’t remember,” she said, with a cruel indifference that was both hilarious and chilling.

I was a little surprised that there was this level of esprit d’corps among young women, mostly because of the stereotype that if you put five women in a room, you’re going to end up with about sixty blood feuds by the end of the day. As it turns out, there is a correlation between teamwork and testosterone. The more you have, the wider your face is, and according to at least one study, wider-faced men are more likely to be team players, as long as there’s an opposing organization they can unite against. Assuming this holds true, Robert Z’Dar is the greatest team player in history.

Robert Z’Dar. Possbily Piltdown Man.

Blossom is hurt and jealous, but really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Six did nothing wrong in this situation, and is kind of dumb to boot, so the fight and subsequent falling out comes out of the blue for the poor girl. And now Blossom has to apologize and come clean, but doing so might drive a further wedge between them, and thus we come to the theme of the episode: the truth.

Over in the B-plot, Anthony has just finished his certification to become an EMT. Apparently, he has always wanted to do this, but this is the first I’m hearing of it. There are tons of jobs for EMTs, but all include a questionnaire inquiring into the applicant’s experience with drugs and alcohol. And as we all know, Anthony has all the experience with all the drugs ever. He makes Scarface look Amish. Anthony has had more cocaine in his pee than pee; it comes out looking like soggy Splenda. Anthony has used so many drugs, there’s a statue of him in Medellin called “El Blanquito Hambriento.” What I’m trying to say is, this questionnaire pretty much kills Anthony’s chances of ever having gainful employment, but only if he answers it honestly.

So how honest should one be? Anthony decides to disclose his history in his interview and he’s extremely lucky that he’s on a sitcom trying to teach a lesson rather than, you know, in reality. The interviewer turns out to be a recovering alcoholic and is willing to take a chance on someone in the program. Meanwhile, Blossom reveals to Six that her anger was motivated by jealousy but lies about the actual cause. The show is taking the side that a lie for personal gain is morally wrong, while a lie to preserve the feelings of another is okay. This is known as a white lie, presumably because it’s the kind of lie white people tell each other.

If everyone were honest all the time, civilization would collapse. Our way of life is based on the mutual acceptance of certain illusions, the chief of which is money. Cash has no intrinsic value (and in fact only canned food and shotguns do), but we all pretend it does, and so it functions as it’s supposed to. This dovetails into more insanity as one imagines a perfectly honest society. We don’t call fat people fat. They’re heavy, or zaftig, or pre-Raphaelite. We don’t call our boss a testicle-eating sociopath, even if he’s presently picking the fragments of your balls from between his teeth. We have another word for these kind of lies: manners. And they make the world go round.

The most honest man in history.

Before I wrap this up, I have a final point to make on this episode. In retrospect everything seems inevitable. Well, except for the ascension of William of Orange to the throne. Seriously, was that guy a weather witch or what? Everything else seems to be inevitable, especially with regards to careers. People are successful because they are talented or hard-working. Luck had nothing to do with it. It’s a myth that collapses with even a cursory look (the fact that Harrison Ford was the biggest star on the planet because he fixed George Lucas’s cupboards is one of many examples), but it has remarkable sticking power because the people with all the money and success desperately want it to be true.

So when someone who seems like they are poised for major stardom suddenly falls off the map it almost feels like reality wasn’t living up to its side of the contract. In the early ‘90s we all thought Jonathan Brandis was going to be the next big thing. Photogenic, talented, and ubiquitous at least for a short time, JB was poised to conquer Hollywood. But for whatever reason, the roles stopped coming and at the age of 27, he hanged himself. Brandis pops up for a brief cameo in this episode as the boy Blossom likes. He doesn’t really get to do much, but it was easy to remember what we all thought he was due, and what he thought he was destined for. When things didn’t shake out that way, he took his own life.

I hate to end on such a down note, but seeing Brandis poised on the cusp of his brief stardom made me a bit maudlin. Hopefully the next episode will put the smile back on my face.

David talks about the importance of truth in sulfites or check out the previous Very Special Blossom.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: honesty, the best policy, the ho code, to tell the truth, Very Special Blossom

Now Fear This: Fido

He probably smells my dog.

One of the great joys of art is the exploration of a new world. Books, comics, and of course movies have the power to create a place big enough to be lost in, and nothing is more satisfying when that world’s details make it feel larger than the story. Sadly, most plots seem to focus on the destruction of said world, as if the only reason to create a universe was to tear it apart. I hated that growing up. I wanted the sense that this place in which I had invested so much emotion was still out there somehow, chugging along, having an infinite amount of stories within its lovingly defined borders. The makers of the 2006 Canadian horror-comedy Fido seem to agree with me.

The film establishes its world perfectly with a black and white film reel entitled “A Bright New World.” Using fifties-era graphics and cheesy set-pieces, we learn that at some unspecified point in the past, a cloud of radiation enveloped the world and had the effect of bringing the dead back to life. The Zombie Wars followed, and humanity was in bad shape before a savior emerged in global corporation Zomcon and mad(?) scientist Dr. Hrothgar Geiger. With Geiger’s invention of the “domestication collar” and someone remembering that fences are a thing, humanity has managed to thrive under the benevolent rule of Zomcon.

The domestication collar is the cornerstone of the film’s plot as well as how a severely depleted workforce can create the pocket-sized utopias human beings live on. See, the human race is confined into fenced-in safe zones that look like idyllic small towns circa Leave It to Beaver. Every house has a smooth and bright coat of paint, every lawn is as even as a Johnny Unitas flat top, and photogenic flowerbeds bloom on every corner. Humanity is mostly idle while collared zombies go about the tedious tasks of manual labor. As long as the red lights on the neck don’t go out, zombie in a domestication collar will follow commands and won’t attack. As befits a company holding the keys to not dying in a blasted zombie-infested hellscape, Zomcon owns everything. The town in which the film takes place is a wholly owned subsidiary of Zomcon, with Zomcon logos plastering everything from the zombies themselves to beer and milk.

Zombies, as the symbol of the apocalypse, have a certain power over humans, so it’s inevitable that humanity would want to take some of that power away. By turning our predators into gardeners, butlers, dog walkers, etc., they are transformed from rotting cannibal bogeymen to emasculated servants whose clumsiness inspires countless cocktail-time anecdotes. Also inevitably, now that zombies enable idleness and have an element of danger, they have become status symbols as well. Helen Robinson (Carrie-Anne Moss), our protagonist’s mother, is horribly embarrassed when the neighbors move in with a gang of six zombies, and quickly buys one of her own just so she won’t be ashamed at not even having one. They’re like a new car that could messily devour the family if its starter ever got messed up.

Aw, crap. This zombie has a bad motivator.

The zombie she buys is our titular Fido (Billy Connolly), named by Helen’s eleven-year-old son Timmy. Little Timmy is having a rough time. He has no friends and his distant father Bill (Dylan Baker) could not be less interested in him. Of course, when your father is played by Dylan Baker, that might be for the best. Timmy turns to Fido for companionship, and the big lug turns out to be a pretty good pal for a cannibal corpse. The problem arises when his collar is momentarily disabled, and he causes a miniature outbreak. The penalty for this is the destruction of the zombie in question, and Zomcon has the right to throw the entire family out into the Wild Zone.

Timmy isn’t the only one who has grown close to Fido. Helen, frustrated with her brittle and inattentive husband, turns to the zombie for some needed male attention. Sure, some of that attention is because he wants to eat the soft parts of her face, but it’s been awhile since Helen has felt desired. Fido is the kind of man who won’t abandon her and Timmy to play golf, who notices when she’s wearing perfume, and who will kill and eat anyone who bullies her boy. Bill, sensing Fido’s usurpation of the father’s role in the household, and harboring a shameful phobia of the undead, is only too happy to turn the zombie over to Zomcon when the time comes.

On the surface, Fido is a movie about family. The action serves to pull the family together, granted maybe not without every original member, and certainly not in the way everyone would have thought in the beginning. The theme is paralleled with creepy neighbor Mr. Theopolis (Tim Blake Nelson), a former Zomcon employee let go because of his relationship with a zombie. He got his hands on the fresh corpse of a young woman, and promptly had her turned into his personal undead sexpot. Through the film, he learns to value his Tammy as, if not a person, a being worthy of some level of respect.

For a quickie genre piece, the world of Fido is remarkably lived-in. Beyond the film strip, the ‘50s trappings, and Pleasantville gloss, the movie puts details into things most watchers might never notice. Timmy’s room is decorated with soldiers killing zombies. PE class is a shooting range where kids perforate paper targets and recite a handy mnemonic rhyme: “In the head and not the chest/Head shots are the very best.” Funerals are crushing financial obligations, featuring head coffins to insure the dearly departed remains that way. Instead of Boy Scouts, Zomcon Cadets learn the basics of survival in a post-apocalyptic world. And old people, ready to drop dead at any moment and thus rise as carnivorous monsters, are viewed with open suspicion.

Horror reflects our fears, and Fido is very much a product of its time. A Canadian production in 2006, it illuminates the concerns of the Bush era from an outside perspective. The zombies in the Wild Zone could easily stand in for the persistent and nebulous threat of terrorism. This threat, though valid, has created a police state run not by an elected government but by a for-profit enterprise, the film drawing parallels with real-life ubercapitalists-turned-feudal-barons like George Pullman. Zomcon uses slave labor to keep its empire functioning, and the promise of slow death in the form of exile for anyone who breaks its rules with no oversight or appeal. Mr. Bottoms, the local Zomcon security head, even admits to using his power to score the nice house in which he now lives. What no one in the film realizes is that in horror comedies, irony is king and every character gets exactly what he deserves.

Zombie films often fall into the trap of being nothing but lukewarm remakes of Night of the Living Dead. Fido manages to be unique and inventive, and creates a world I’m glad is still out there.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: family values, Fido, headshots, Now Fear This, zombies

Bushido Badge

This is a pretty good primer for the level of police work we’ll be seeing.

Lethal Weapon casts a long shadow over the cinema of the late ‘80s. This is because it is fucking awesome. Unfortunately for the rash of imitators, it featured Mel Gibson before he turned into the world’s funniest Holocaust denier, Danny Glover back when he was only a little too old for this shit, and a ridiculously solid writer-director team of Richard Donner and Shane Black. Samurai Cop had none of these things, and is thus amazing for entirely different reasons. Insane reasons.

Tagline: You have the right to remain silent… dead silent.

More Accurate Tagline: He’s here to chew bubblegum and disrespect Japanese culture… and he’s all out of bubblegum.

Guilty Party: Writer, director, and Gemini Amir Shervan. An Iranian-born movie theater magnate, Shervan had a dream of coming to Hollywood and sharing his glorious emotional problems with a public that was frankly not prepared for it. He made several films using the tried-and-true formula of goofy ‘roid monsters with flowing locks and a shaky understanding of police procedure going after the kind of ruthless yet flamboyant drug smuggler that were thick on the ground during the heyday of the neon rod. Basically the kind of movies that should have been made by Kim Jong-il and Tracy Jordan.

Synopsis: The Katana Gang is new on the scene and is looking to establish themselves the way vicious coke-traffickers have since the beginning of time: by making friends. Unfortunately, this does not cause them to ship out a bunch of drug-and-sword themed gift baskets, but whatever. Instead, the boss, Fujiyama, dispatches his chief henchman Yamashita (Robert Z’Dar, whose face seems to have its own pelvis) to make a treaty with them. Instead, he just kills all of them, in one case with something I swear is the hidden blade from Assassin’s Creed.

Meanwhile, Samurai Cop (Matt Hannon in his first and only starring role) and Black Partner (Mark Frazer) are on a drug bust. This mostly consists of chasing a blue van from downtown, to the marina, and up into Angeles Crest, which if you’re at all familiar with the geography of Los Angeles, you know would require teleportation, and I’m not even sure that Caprice they’re driving is equipped for 8-tracks. Because arrests are for cops not on the edge, they just murder everyone. Samurai Cop then unwinds by banging Peggy, the Amazonian police helicopter pilot.

The Katana Gang is really mad about Samurai Cop. They exposit that he’s called “Samurai” because he lived in Japan where he learned the language and martial arts. Yamashita vows to determine who the real samurai is around here. I assume he’s talking about the traditional samurai training in calligraphy and flower-arranging.

Anyway, the Captain is contractually obligated to be mad at Samurai Cop and Black Partner and demands results. Our heroes head off to boss Fujiyama’s favorite hangout to get said results. He’s having a meeting with his top flunkies, and has a pretty blonde on his arm that’s far too young for him. Samurai Cop literally cannot function unless he’s sleazing all over some hapless woman and immediately creepily hits on her, alternating with an inspirational speech about the importance of hard work and America. No, seriously, this is a thing that happens. After the cops are done with the shakedown, they go outside to the parking lot, where Yamashita follows and sics his thugs on them. Because Samurai Cop and Black Partner are basically just serial killers with badges, not a single arrest is made.

And in the middle of the fight, Samurai Cop suffers a debilitating stroke.

Samurai Cop returns later, not to collect evidence or maybe see if the bodies have been moved, but to hit on the Blonde. She seems interested, but does not mention the giant stuffed lion head on her wall. He leaves and is hilariously jumped by another set of goons. Did they respawn or something? Samurai Cop beats them to death except one guy, who gives up Okamura, one of the Katana Gang’s top lieutenants, as the man who ordered the hit. Samurai Cop and Black Partner raid Okamura’s house and kill everyone. That’s some bang-up police work.

Samurai Cop stalks the Blonde at church (forgetting about his relationship with Peggy because fuck her) and takes her back to his house on the beach which is far too nice to afford on an honest cop’s salary. He then proceeds to seduce the Blonde in a parade of unpleasant scenes.

And here’s a production still of one of those scenes.

Yamashita goes after the cops, first taking out a red shirt and his wife, before moving onto Black Partner and Peggy. Black Partner kills the goons dispatched to his place. Yamashita tortures Peggy for Samurai Cop’s address, and let me remind you that she knows this because they were in some kind of relationship, and one of the reasons she’s not there now is because he’s fucking someone else. By the time the bad guys show up to kill Samurai Cop, he’s finished his unholy business and shoots his way out with the Blonde.

The Captain has had enough. He wants the whole Katana Gang dead, and sends Samurai Cop and Black Partner to get it done. They take out Fujiyama, Yamashita, and an ethnically diverse horde of goons with bullets and swords. Samurai Cop and Black Partner are triumphant.

Life-Changing Subtext: It’s all well and good to be Japanese, but don’t get in everyone’s face about it.

Defining Quote: Samurai Cop: “Well, this one’s dead too. Not captured alive.” Yes, Samurai Cop, that’s what dead means.

Standout Performance: Matt Hannon as Samurai Cop. So much goes into his terrible performance in the titular role that it’s tough to tease out exactly what makes it so enchanting. We start with the look, which would have been ridiculous even at the time. He looks like slightly douchier John Romero, which is especially impressive, since Romero spent most of the ‘90s inventing new ways to be a total tool. Samurai Cop wanders around in light mom jeans, cowboy boots, work shirts, and has a mane of hair that keeps trying to sing lead for Steel Panther. For most of the film, the hair belongs to Samurai Cop, but for a couple pickup shots, he’s clearly wearing a woman’s wig, sometimes with a trucker cap perched suicidally at the top.

Real men wear terrible wigs.

Samurai Cop is supposed to be a roguish womanizer, which the film accomplishes by having him come onto literally every woman that he encounters. Unfortunately, the teachers in Samurai Cop’s special school never explained the difference between flirting and sizing someone up for that giant canvas of human skin he keeps in his basement.

A lot of hay is made of Samurai Cop’s supposed proficiency with the Japanese language. The only Japanese word he seems to know is “katana,” and that could just be because he plays a lot of Shadowrun. In other scenes, he seems baffled by the pronunciation of relatively common Japanese names. He’s not really much of a samurai, but in his defense, he’s also a shitty cop.

What’s Wrong: The Katana Gang maybe has two Asian guys in it, Even Robert Z’Dar, as top henchman Yamashita, is not even slightly Japanese. Since his real ethic group appears to be anaphylactic shock, I’m pretty sure it’s okay.

This is Robert Z’Dar. I’d make a joke here, but genetics beat me to it.

This movie has more awkward ADR than Italian porn. Half the time every single minor role appears to have been overdubbed by someone doing a crappy impression of a Lebanese cab driver.

Flash of Competence: There is some solid late-‘80s nudity to be had.

Best Scenes: Samurai Cop features several sex scenes, all of which are potentially scarring. In the first, Samurai Cop gets it on with Peggy, but both of them seem unclear as to how genitals function. They know it feels good when you touch them, but the mechanics of how they dock are fuzzy. So they leave their underwear on, for her, a thong whose waist is so high her whale tail could be seen from space, and for him, some black manties. Get used to those manties. They’re practically a supporting player.

They pop up whenever Samurai Cop goes to the beach with the Blonde (twice) and when he takes her back to his room for doin’ it (once while Peggy is being tortured). They’re in another scene, this time on Okamura while he prepares to get a little something. I can’t prove it, but I like to think that after Samurai Cop killed Okamura, he steals the man’s underwear, because that’s just how Samurai Cop rolls.

Later on, Z’Dar gets it on with the redhead that follows him around. And she’s just all kinds of naked. Turns out she’s also an , “acting” in her lone “legitimate” “role.” It would be depressing if not for how goddamn funny it is. They have sex on top of the covers of a made bed with a single sheet covering the no doubt terrifying thing Z’Dar’s got between his legs.

And then there’s the only known team up of Samurai Cop and Lindsay Lohan.

Transcendent Moment: Every other minute, we have to be reminded at how incredible Samurai Cop is, because the movie was cobbled together from scrawled notes on Matt Hannon’s Trapper Keeper and a bunch of karate moves he learned from watching Cynthia Rothrock movies. The scene where he does a wicked guitar solo while sexually taming eight lions had to be cut for time. Anyway, we know he’s a master at everything Japanese: karate, the language, sushi, sword-fighting, tamagochis, body pillows, sleeping in coffins, so by the time we’re ready to see him face off with another samurai, it’s a big deal.

The final boss fight against Yamashita is framed like one of the classic duels in a Kurosawa movie. Unfortunately, neither Hannon nor Z’Dar know what to do with a sword, so they filmed both guys very carefully stroking each other’s weapons, and then sped up the film. This inevitably leads to a karate fight where Samurai Cop defeats his rival through judicious use of making monkey’s O face.

Caaaaaan you feeeel the loooooove tonight?

Samurai Cop is an instant anti-classic. I heartily recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in terrible cinema. Just avert your eyes whenever the manties come out.

If you’d rather watch some of the worst Yakmala has to offer, check out Vampire Dentist . Or for more of foreign cultures have a look at Katherine’s statement on Kashmir.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: '80s, cheese, manties, Samurai Cop, wigs, Yakmala!

The Next Big Thing

This week, I participate in a little thing wandering around various writerly circles where we discuss what we’re working on.

1) What is the title of your next book/work?

City of Devils

2) Where did the idea come from for the book/work?

Jagermeister.

3) What genre does your book/work fall under?

Comedy noir. There are some horror elements, since most of the characters are monsters of one kind or another.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters

in a movie rendition?

Charlie Day in the lead role of P.I. Nick Moss, with Emma Stone as the witch Hexene Candlemas, and the voice of Christopher McDonald as Mayor Oculon. And then a lot of work for Jim Henson’s creature shop.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Private eye Nick Moss is one of the last humans left in Los Angeles, as long as his new case — finding a missing mummy city councilman — doesn’t kill him.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m hoping to find a willing small publisher.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the

manuscript?

Around two months.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your

genre?

It’s a lot like Mr Blank, my other comedy noir.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The movie Cast a Deadly Spell is probably the core inspiration. I also wanted to write something funny after writing two horror novels and a paranormal thing that might as well be horror, but I was still in a monster frame of mind.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader¹s interest?

Imagine an alternate history Los Angeles sometime in the 1950s where everyone is a monster. The cops are werewolves, the politicians are mummies, the musicians are phantoms. And now try to imagine it’s funny.

Matt Adams, author of I, Crimsonstreak tagged me. Find him over at his website and follow him on twitter.

I was supposed to tag five other writers, but no one was interested, and let’s be honest, I’m not going to try that hard. So I tagged one person. Fortunately, she’s got the personality of ten people, so the way I look at it, I’m ahead two to one.

She is Kate Marie Collins, author of Daughter of Hauk, and proud native of Walla Walla, Washington (a town for which I have a great deal of fondness for… well, one reason. But a pretty important one.) Check out her website, and follow her like a puppy.

Filed under: Level Up, Moment of Excellence, Puffery Tagged: cast a deadly spell, City of Devils, comedy, neo-noir, noir, The next big thing

Very Special Blossom: The Joint

It all comes down to something very, very simple: William Randolph Hearst owned timberlands. The land, not the footwear. He used them to make paper, and then filled that paper up with whatever insane thoughts he had in that moment and called it news. The problem was, there’s a cheaper and more efficient way to make paper, and it involves hemp, something owned by Hearst’s competitors. Citizen Kane was screwed until he realized something: he was William Randolph Fucking Hearst. The truth was for people who didn’t have all the money ever. So he cooked up some phony stories, preyed on a little racism, and got white people good and riled up, (thus inadvertently writing the blueprint for Fox News) and bam, marijuana was made illegal for allegedly making people violent. No, seriously, this is the story he went with. And the public ate it up.

Like… like… uh, what’s that stuff?

It was inevitable. Not marijuana’s illegality, but that I would eventually come across an anti-drug episode in my trek through the moral landscape of popular television. The only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner. Drug hysteria was one of the major pastimes in the ‘80s, right up there with actually doing drugs. Things got so bad that Nancy Reagan appeared on an episode of Diff’rent Strokes to discuss the problem with noted addicts Todd Bridges and Dana Plato. While Blossom is not technically the ‘80s, it occupies that part of the early ‘90s where all the fun parts of the previous decade were lost but hadn’t yet been replaced by Nirvana and CG dinosaurs. Many of its concerns are grounded in the era of pastel suits and feathered hair.

From the word go, drugs were unavoidable. Anthony’s backstory revolves around his former addiction allowing the writers to mine comedy from his wacky misadventures while simultaneously admonishing the young viewers about following in his footsteps. I’ve been waiting for an extremely dark episode where Anthony falls hard off the wagon and ends up hallucinating a dead baby crawling across the ceiling. Or maybe one where Six gets on heroin and ends up turning tricks down on Lankershim to pay for her habit, while a terrifying pimp with a weirdly ominous name like “Sleep Out” slaps her around.

Sadly, no. This week’s very special episode opens with Blossom and Six in a twitter, meaning they’re all keyed up and scared, not that they’re only expressing themselves in 140 characters or less. They found a joint on the bus. Excited and frightened by this new opportunity, they decide to go upstairs and smoke it. And we smash cut to the most dated joke in this particular time capsule: a close up on a frying egg, with Anthony intoning, “This is your brain on drugs.” Just in case you’re too young to remember anti-drug pop culture ephemera, this was a famous and oft-parodied PSA in which a grumpy middle aged guy held up an egg, your brain, and then cracked it into a frying pan where it sizzled, showing your brain on drugs. It might have been effective imagery for all of five minutes, but it’s tough to remember after the deluge of hacky quips that immediately spawned in its wake. Even the anti-drug PSAs got in on the action when future Mrs. Supermarket RLC starred in a more violent version.

While Anthony cooks eggs and cracks jokes (or cooks jokes and cracks eggs) at Joey’s expense, who should wander in but Barnard Hughes, who you remember as Grandpa in The Lost Boys and deliverer of one of the great final lines in movie history. Apparently, he is the maternal grandfather of the Russo clan, leaving me to wonder if Dianne Weist isn’t Blossom’s real mom. Because this is in the days before internet, Grandpa can’t just head over to Mr. Skin and find out who’s naked in what and so has to ask Joey, who of course has encyclopedic knowledge of movie nudity. This exchange becomes much more upsetting later on when the family watches a video together and it’s Midnight Express. So apparently the nudity Joey and Grandpa really wanted to see was being raped in a Turkish prison.

Meanwhile, Blossom and Six continue their debate over what to do about this joint. They go through the usual ideas: burying it, burning it, and finally smoking it. Anthony figures prominently in the debate, both for his past addiction and his bloodhound-like ability to sniff out pot smoke. At that moment, Nick comes in with an offer of Chinese food and a video, which sounds like something you should do after the pot, but whatever. The pertinent part of this is that Blossom pockets the joint before going downstairs, and when she comes back upstairs, realizes that it has fallen out of her pocket. She returns to the scene of the crime just as Nick finds the joint in the couch cushions.

Nick makes the entirely reasonable assumption that it’s Anthony’s. Because when a pig has been fucked, you don’t call Steve the Home Invader, you call Jerry the Pig Fucker. Of course, sometimes Jerry is entirely innocent of said pig fucking, and it turns out it was Little Annie Angel experimenting with her identity. Anthony denies it, as does Barnard Hughes, leaving Nick with the uncomfortable realization that it’s the fault of either Joey or Blossom. The big plot twist is that it’s actually both of them — Joey found it in his locker, then lost it on the bus where Blossom found it. A guilty conscience causes both of them to come clean to Nick (though Blossom had one of her late-night soul-searching talks with Anthony, who to his credit was more worried that the joint had been laced with something). Nick does what any responsible father would do when you have one recovering addict and two kids thinking of trying drugs: he calls on Anthony for an anti-drug speech.

Mercifully, the episode ends there, leaving me to wonder what it would look like if Blossom and Six actually smoked out.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: drugs, drugs are bad, just say no, mmm'kay, the joint, this is your brain on drugs, Very Special Blossom

A Bad Movie Roundup

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! If you’re anything like me, you love terrible films. In the bad movie club to which I belong, Yakmala, we’ve watched a lot of truly awful crimes against celluloid. Here are some reviews to keep you nice and warm and maybe pick an enjoyably bad flick to work off that New Year hangover.

Ator, the Fighting Eagle : A swords and sorcery would-be epic that’s totally cool with incest.

The Avengers : John Steed and Emma Peel stage an informal contest over who can give less of a shit.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 : Aliens vs. cavemen in the distant future.

The Beaver : Jodie Foster would like to know what the fuck you’re laughing about.

Blood Freak : A man smokes some pot, grows a turkey head, and becomes a vampire. No, seriously.

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo : You’ve heard of it, now see if it’s worth a look. (It totally is.)

Bride of the Monster : Ed Wood takes on atomic horror in this bizarre diversion.

Color of Night : An unerotic erotic thriller that undermines its femme fatale at every turn.

The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course : Steve Irwin tries to parlay his reality show into feature stardom.

Devil : Five people trapped in an elevator. One of them is the devil. Wake me up when it’s over.

Fireproof : Kirk Cameron learns to treat his wife like a human being. For some reason, this is revelatory.

From Justin to Kelly : The winner and runner-up of American Idol’s inaugural season had some unfortunate contractual obligations.

Glen or Glenda : Ed Wood on the benefits of cross dressing.

Gor : Adapted from the popular pornographic novels, the movie isn’t even redeemed by being porn.

Gymkata : The first Yakmala film and a classic in bad movie annals.

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle : The movie that hates everyone.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) : 100% medically insane.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale : Uwe Boll’s masterpiece.

“Manos” The Hands of Fate : The Master wouldn’t approve of you skipping this one.

The Man Who Saves the World : a.k.a. Turkish Star Wars

Ninja Thunderbolt : One of the greatest terrible movies ever made.

Omoo-Omoo the Shark God : Melville gets the Yakmala treatment.

Quigley : Gary Busey turns into a pomeranian to learn a depressing lesson about God.

Starcrash : A Star Wars knockoff starring an ex-evangelist.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones : You’ve seen it. It’s terrible.

Street Trash : The finest exploding hobo movie ever made.

Sucker Punch : Zach Snyder reeeeeeally likes rape and wants you to know this.

Tiptoes : Gary Oldman plays a dwarf.

Troll 2 : Not a single troll in this one.

The Twilight Saga: Twilight : See what all the fuss is about.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon : Abs vs. abs.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse : Things take a turn for the homoerotic.

There you have it! A bevy of bad for a (really) long weekend!

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Ator the Fighting Eagle, Attack of the Clones, bad movies, Battlefield Earth, Blood Freak, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Bride of the Monster, color of night, devil, eclipse, Fireproof, From Justin to Kelly, Glen or Glenda, Gor, Gymkata,

Liner Notes: Nerve Zero

During my first couple years of attending various comic conventions, I never went anywhere without my sketchbook. It doesn’t have a single drawing by me between its frayed black covers, but there’s a whole page of Groo characters by Sergio Aragones, a Catwoman by Jim Lee (with graffiti by Brian Azzarello), and enough Josie and the Pussycats to make you seriously doubt my sanity. The sketchbook is the common way for attendees to count coup, to prove to others that, yeah, we were there and we shook hands with so-and-so one time. When you meet an artist at a show, they’ll often do a sketch for you, some for free, some for a price that ranges from the reasonable to the “fuck me, how about a kidney instead?” Generally, they take the book, ask “what would you like?” (unless they’re Bruce Timm, and then you’ll get Batman and like it), and spend a moment paging through to get a look at what other high-profile scalps you’ve collected. When they flipped through mine, every artist paused on a Nightcrawler done with simple pencil lines, and with a touch of awe asked me, “Who did this?”

“A friend of mine,” I would say.

He’s easily one of the best artists I’ve ever met, and I’ve met most of the great artists in comic art. So when, many years ago, he asked me if I wanted to do a pulp magazine, my only response was an enthusiastic hell yes. There were four of us, two writers and two artists, and the plan was to have the writers put out short stories and novellas, while the artists provided illustrations. The hope was to create something like Conan or the Cthulhu Mythos for the modern age. Unfortunately, for as brilliant an artist as my friend is, he is also incredibly frustrating to work with. He draws at his own speed, and often gets hung up on a single thing in a picture, so you’ll have this amazing full page drawing that’s totally done except one guy doesn’t have feet. And it stays that way. Forever.

One of the two major series I was working on for the magazine was The Hand of Tyr stories, about a crew of space pirates plying the void during a galactic dark age. It took place long after earth was a memory, after the fall of the first great interstellar human civilization, and the subsequent rise of different feudal powers. It was intended to be pulpy and fun, but with an underlying grit. Each story would star a different member of the crew, and explore the ways a different genre melded with science fiction as well as give a detailed look at a new planet and civilization. The first tale was called “The Hand of Tyr” and was about the race to an abandoned factory world. The second was a novella called “Subspace.”

It was my first real attempt to write noir, which has since become something of a trademark. It clocked in at about 20,000 words, and when I was finished, I felt like I really had something. It was the first thing I had ever written that I actually liked and wanted to show off. As the dream of the magazine fell apart, I decided I didn’t want to lose the work I’d put in. No one was interested in buying a novella from a nobody, but a book might be a different story. After reading Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, I started to understand how to craft a real noir plot, and with his lessons in mind, added 60,000 words to the manuscript. One of the biggest internal hurdles I had to clear was the impulse to save something for the sequel. I would show every little bit of the zero-gravity world of Hinden, because, in science fiction, as soon as you go back to an established planet, you make your universe smaller. I wanted to avoid the trap of Star Wars where we visit the same allegedly distant backwater of Tatooine in five of the six films.

Nerve Zero (thankfully retitled by my publisher, because Subspace was a working title that held on for far too long) stars Idriel Ramirez, the pilot of the pirate vessel. I had the idea of someone who was such a brilliant pilot because he thinks in three dimensions instead of two, someone born to the weightless void of space. The zeroes, inhabitants of several thousand year old space stations, were my solution. I imagined Ramirez to be utterly helpless in normal gravity, suffocating like a landed fish. The culture evolved from there, as I realized that things we take for granted — concepts like “up” and “down” for starters — would be completely meaningless to the zeroes.

Everything had to be made with a lack of gravity in mind. The weapons came from the fact that I didn’t want these people punching holes in their planet whenever someone had a disagreement. The money had holes in it because I didn’t want it floating away. Beds were hammocks you tied yourself to. Doors emerged from floors or ceilings because it just didn’t matter. It was a fun thought exercise to engage in, although it did make me seasick at times.

I don’t remember when I decided Hinden was an occupied world, but it quickly defined the planet. The press gangs — the harts — were intended as a way for hinds to carry licensed firearms, sort of the equivalent of the classic noir use of the private-investigator-as-a-thug. I was enamored of the old uses of press gang for navies and figured that in a new dark age, the practice might show up again. It also created the dynamic of honor and shame, where being a hart was a good, powerful, and well-paying job, but carried no respect, and becoming pressed was common for pilots but the source of great disgrace.

The mystery itself is classic Find the Girl noir, and is the framework to take the reader on a tour of Hinden. The biggest challenge there was my main character. Ramirez was an insider, so interesting or odd things about the planet would be normal to him, and he wouldn’t necessarily call attention to any of it. It’s why so many authors do the smarter thing and have an outsider as narrator. I had to create a sense of wonder when, to Ramirez, everything was totally normal.

The language is extremely harsh. This was entirely intentional. There’s nothing that annoys me more in science fiction where censors force baby talk into the mouths of supposedly tough characters. Whenever someone on the Galactica said “frak,” my teeth hurt. So while I would create a slang for hinds, I wanted their swearing to be just as harsh as ours is. This is not realistic, since even modern cultures vary widely in what is considered obscene, but in this case I was fine with it.

I haven’t left this universe. I am thirty thousand words into a sequel about another world that’s as different as possible from Hinden. But don’t worry… eventually we’ll make it back to that dented, battered sphere. Give me some time.

David discusses another fallen empire, while Clint discusses Wondercon.

Filed under: Moment of Excellence, Puffery Tagged: Liner notes, Nerve Zero, noir, science fiction, zero gravity

The Best Movies Never Made: Hitlertaur vs. the Apache

Director
Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner

Writer

Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner, Stanley Kubrick (credit only)

Starring

Taylor Lautner, Michael Sheen, Tina Fey, Kevin Spacey

Synopsis
Colorado. The Apache are on the move. Led by ab-tacular chief Never Nude (Taylor Lautner), they are really pissed off about the Overlook Hotel, which sits on top of an old Indian burial ground. It’s really disrespectful and all, but to make matters worse, somehow the hotel has turned all the former Native Americans into white people who live only to party and blow each other in dog costumes.

Meanwhile, Astronaut Mike Dexter (Michael Sheen) arrives to take care of the Overlook over the long winter. He’s exhausted from faking the Apollo moon landing, and has arrived to repair things with his wife Wendy (Tina Fey). Their unnamed son has some psychic powers, but it’s barely remarked on because that’s not what this movie is about. Instead, they’re troubled over Dexter’s crippling Tang addiction and habit of lashing out violently whenever he is kept cooped up over a long winter with only his family to keep him company. He is joined by his best friend, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, which has developed sentience (Kevin Spacey) and is secretly in love with him.

Because of Hitler’s legacy of hating topiary in all forms, the massive hedge maze that gives the Overlook its name (“You’ll overlook all exits!”) has brought Hitler’s ghost through time and space to serve as a genocidal guardian. And he has become part minotaur because fuck you that’s why.

The Hitlertaur spends much of his time replacing the various gadgets in the hotel, from typewriters to vacuum cleaners with German versions and occasionally changing the colors of things and stealing chairs because the Holocaust. These changes haunt Astronaut Mike Dexter, Wendy, Apollo 11, and the son, prompting them to play a variety of schoolyard games, including hopscotch, butts up, and four square.

Astronaut Mike Dexter was going to use some of his time to fake a few more moon landings, but he is continually drawn to the ballroom in fits of homicidal procrastination. There he finds a perpetual New Years Eve party being celebrated on July 4th because time is a concern for lesser filmmakers. All of the guests are former Indians who speak in very brittle WASP accents and call each other things like Muffy, Chaz, and Reginald Whiteington VI. Astronaut Mike Dexter downs Tang after Tang, his resentment and rage growing. At what is unclear, but he periodically rants about various persecuted ethnic groups, and refers to his family with racial slurs.

In a daring moonlight assault, Chief Never Nude attacks the hotel. Hitlertaur knows an opportunity for genocide when he sees one and goes off to fight the Apache. The battle is deeply symbolic as both sides extensively utilize cooking supplies. Apollo 11 tries to get Astronaut Mike Dexter to do something, but he’s having an orgy with a bunch of ghosts and shouting late night catchphrases.

Apollo 11 then chases Astronaut Wife Wendy Dexter and her son throughout the hotel, attempting to beat them to death with a copy of the movie’s script. Astronaut Mike Dexter gets stuck in a time loop and turns into a giant baby. Hitlertaur pursues Chief Never Nude through the maze, only to be fooled when Never Nude walks backwards for three steps, resulting in a trail that suddenly ends.

Wendy and her son get into Apollo 11 and blast off. The hotel then explodes.

Trivia
The film was created when a group of film buffs simultaneously went off their meds and decided to write The Shining as they understood it.

The time period is never specified. The Apache seem to be in the 19th Century, World War II was 1939-1945, the Apollo moon landing was in 1969, and the minotaur isn’t real.

All of the white people in the bar are played by Native American actors in make up. There was a brief protest among white people before everyone pointed out the first 50 years of the film industry and told them to shut the hell up.

An uncredited Kenny Baker drove the Apollo 11 module from the inside.

The son is never named in the context of the movie, although he is credited, somewhat confusingly, as “You.”

Hitlertaur is an entirely practical effect, except for a single frame where his eyes were CGIed to move.

The Overlook Hotel is still a functioning hotel. It was originally built in Dubai for an oil sheik with more whimsy than money who was forced to sell it when his harem was repossessed. It was moved to Colorado, where it still stands. For a little extra money, visitors can stay in the infamous Ghost Orgy Room, where actors will recreate scenes in the film.

Taylor Lautner actually got lost in the hedge maze. They found him three days later by catching the gleam of his teeth on Google Earth.

Astronaut Wife Wendy Dexter has no lines. She only screams.

The hotel manager’s name is seen backwards for a single frame, clearly spelling HTIMS MAILLIW which is probably significant in some way.

The committee of directors achieved the opening flying shot not with a helicopter as is commonly believed, but by flinging the cameraman from a catapult. The film is dedicated to his memory.

The hotel exploding is the only thing left from the original King novel.

Goofs
Stanley Kubrick’s name is on the film, so any “goofs” are intentional choices made by the filmmaker to elaborate on a point we could not possibly understand. Even when the boom mike is totally visible in the “Peace Pipe Jazz Freakout” scene.

Memorable Quotes
Hitlertaur: I’m a-mazed you could find me!

Chief Never Nude: Do these jean shorts effectively hide my thunder?

Apollo 11: They taught me a song. Do you want to hear it?
Astronaut Mike Dexter: Sure.
Apollo 11: I like big butts and I cannot lie, you other brothers can’t deny…

(Repeated Line) Astronaut Wife Wendy Dexter: AAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAAA!

Hitlertaur: I hate hedges more than anything! Well, okay, I hate Jews more. But hedges the second most.

Astronaut Mike Dexter: When they said I’d get all the Tang I wanted, this wasn’t what I had in mind.

You (Unnamed Son): I’m symbolic!

Selected Reviews
“I was offended. Also a little horny.”
-Audience feedback card

“Didn’t understand a single frame. A+”
-The Onion AV Club

“Dude. Sometimes a can of baking soda is just a can of baking soda.”
-Stanley Kubrick

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Hitlertaur vs. the Apache, Room 237, stanley kubrick, the Best Movies Never Made, the shining

Now Fear This: Rare Exports

What’s in the box!?!

Every Christmas, a friend of mine invites a bunch of people over to watch Die Hard. It’s taken on the weight of tradition to the point that it doesn’t quite feel like Christmas until I’ve watched John McClane pull glass out of his feet. I screwed up a little bit this year, because at my annual Halloween party, the wife and I dressed up as McClane and Hans Gruber (she was Gruber, prompting her to shout, “Next year I get to be a girl!”), and so watched the film early to get the costumes down. And as much as I love it, I don’t know that I need to see Die Hard again so quickly. Especially because it still provokes sense memories of watching it in my mother’s living room and eating pizza from the place on the corner that’s now one of those combination bakeries/ice cream parlors that sprout like weeds throughout East LA. This might not be a problem. Last year, this same friend gathered a small group together to watch what could become the new Christmas tradition: the 2010 Finnish horror-comedy Rare Exports.

Holidays have long been an important part of horror. In fact, it’s difficult to make a slasher movie without tying it to some holiday, which is what Eli Roth was doing in his parody trailer of Thanksgiving (a trailer so accurate, I swear to God I’ve seen that movie). And since Christmas is the only holiday that’s actively growing across the calendar devouring weaker holidays like some terrifying jingle belled shoggoth, a lot of horror movies have latched onto Jesus’s birthday party. In most of these, Santa is an escaped lunatic coming into your house to cut you up, usually with an axe. Black Christmas is the first of these, though the Robert Zemeckis directed Tales From the Crypt episode “And All Through the House” is probably the best. Rare Exports is one such Evil Santa movie, although it breaks rather dramatically from the formula by positing Santa not as a psycho killer, but rather as one of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones.

Korvatunturi Fell is a small range of mountains on the Finnish/Russian border, and is the traditional home of Santa Claus in Finland. It’s the kind of place where cold isn’t just a temperature, it’s a way of life. A company headed up by a rich guy the film keeps assuring me is American, despite the fact that his accent sounds like Borat after a stroke, is drilling into the mountain. Twenty-four days until Christmas they make a startling discovery: a sixty-five foot layer of sawdust. While this would immediately make me think there was a giant Ron Swanson down there somewhere making a huge dining room set, the “American” explains that people used to store ice by encasing it in sawdust. The mountain is a giant icebox, and iceboxes by definition are for storing something. He seems to have an idea of what that might be, and breaks out the new safety instructions which include stuff like “No Drinking” which, considering these guys are using massive drills for chewing through rock, I hope were already not doing. But there are others, like “No Cursing” which the boss takes extremely seriously. “It’s Christmas. Act like it.” He reminds the miner that it took the Sami people of Lapland centuries to build the mound, and the miners have twenty-four days to open it. And since the Sami are so bad ass they, no shit, castrate reindeer with their teeth, this is a tall order.

Two boys, Pietari and Juuso, watch the excavation, having sneaked into the mining camp through a hole they clipped in the fence. Pietari, the younger of the two boys, still has a stuffed animal he carries everywhere. Juuso can’t be more than ten, but he’s packing a rifle and drives a snowmobile. Pietari still believes in Santa, and is convinced he’s buried beneath the mountain, an idea Juuso scoffs at. Pietari heads home to do some montage research on Santa, and what he finds is less than encouraging. Though it begins with some innocuous pictures of the jolly old elf, they get steadily darker until Santa is a horned monster cooking a boy in a cauldron. All of this made me wonder, what the fuck kind of books is Pietari’s dad buying him?

You’ll like it. It has squid in it.

Who knows, because Pietari’s dad is some kind of crazy northman. He sets punji traps for local wolves, butchers hogs in his very own backyard abattoir, hunts reindeer and generally behaves like someone who is unaware that Game of Thrones is a work of fiction. Pietari, meanwhile, is pretty sure Santa is coming for him, something bolstered by bare footprints in the snow on the roof and in a field of slaughtered reindeer. When dad finds a naked old man clutching a potato sack caught in the wolf traps, things get a little weird. At first, they’re concerned the old guy is from the mining operation and thus “American,” but he doesn’t act like an American even by this film’s shaky understanding of what that might be. He never speaks, even accepting a beating from local potato farmer, Juuso’s dad, and terrifying enforcer Aimo. The only time the old guy perks up is when Pietari comes in, getting what can only be described as an Albert Fish look on his face.

While all of this is occurring, the local village is in the grips of a bizarre crime spree. Ovens, hair dryers, and radiators are all missing. Pietari finds that all the local kids are gone, something that doesn’t disturb any of the parents. I found this baffling, since wolves are mentioned as a persistent local hazard, so maybe these folks just aren’t the most attentive parents. Or maybe if the kid can’t survive a couple days in the hard winter dickpunching the local wildlife he really isn’t worth keeping around in the first place.

While the local farmers try to use the situation to pay off their crippling debt, Pietari sees the big picture. Santa is going to get out of his icy prison and eat all the naughty children, which is pretty much everyone at this point. Pietari has to make the highly symbolic choice between the stuffed animal he carries everywhere and a rifle. And yes, this means his dad gave a child who still carries around a stuffed animal a goddamn loaded gun. I wouldn’t be surprised if every local kid were just fired out of a barbed wire cannon into a pit of bears. Anyway, Pietari has to grow up. Ironically, this requires him to first believe in Santa Claus and then to kick the old monster’s ass. And find a novel solution to that debt.

Rare Exports is the story of one brave boy’s attempt to kill Santa. He doesn’t do this to ruin Christmas, but rather because the legends have softened with age, or as he puts it, “the Coca-Cola Santa is a hoax.” It’s a well-earned hostility toward American corporatism, presented as subtext. More importantly, it’s a damn fine flick about the importance of murdering beloved symbols of the season.

Clint reviewed Rare Exports as well.  Or check out Erik’s review of another Christmas movie.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Christmas, Cthulhu, Great Old Ones, Now Fear This, Rare Exports, Santa Claus

Very Special Blossom: Second Base

As I read the title of this week’s Very Special Blossom, I came to a disturbing realization: I had no idea what second base even meant. Leaving aside that I’ve been with my wife for fifteen years and thus have not had the occasion to brag about how far I’ve gotten with anyone in that time, I never actually used the base markers for anything other than their intended purpose. They always seemed like artifacts of the generation one before mine, and even then operated on a sliding scale. One man’s second base was another, more religious man’s home run. So I did a little research, which consisted of asking the one single woman I know.

Okay, so according to her, it breaks down like this. First base is kissing, second base is anything above the waist, third base is anything short of sex, and home runs are penetrative sex. I have some problems with this arrangement. For one thing, a handjob and a blowjob are two different levels of intimacy. I’m not saying that I’d give them out willy nilly, but say my cellmate only wants a handy? That’s my lucky day right there. And honestly, probably his too, since I’ve got my technique down and everything. And while we’re on the subject of prison, anal is indistinct from other kinds of sex? Shouldn’t that be something, like say, running the bases backwards? Stealing home? Also, second base reduces one participant to spectator. And do gay guys even have a second base? That hardly seems fair.

Blossom and Six have some concord when it comes to the general meaning of second base, but not whether or not skin will actually touch skin is up for debate. This is the classic dilemma of the high school hookup, whether or not you’re going to get under that damnable bra. And not for nothing, but they should really teach how to get those things off in health class, because it’s like disarming a bomb. “Seems like just yesterday we started wearing bras, and now we’re talking about taking them off,” Six quips. This is all my roundabout way of saying “Second Base” (s2 e1) is about Blossom deciding whether to let her boyfriend Jimmy get to second base. Either way, I bet he slides in headfirst, like Pete Rose.



Somewhat oddly, Blossom’s boyfriend is played by Justin Whalin, who has appeared in a total of three episodes, all of which are on this DVD collection. They probably could have just called it the Whalin Episodes, since this seems “Very Special” only by the loosest definition of the term. No one is drunk, using drugs, or pregnant. I mean, you can barely get knocked up by having your boobs touched, and then only if it’s a legitimate groping. In his third appearance, Whalin is neither nerdy William Zimmerman of the pilot nor beefy Jordan Taylor of “The Geek.” This time, he’s someone named Jimmy. Since sitcoms weren’t as aggressively serialized in this era, it was not unusual to suddenly introduce an important love interest out of the blue or recast a previous guest star. For a modern viewer it can be more than a little jarring.

In this situation, the sudden appearance of a love interest who looks exactly like a previous one is explainable, and not just because Blossom clearly has a type. The solution lies right there in the structure of the episode. As things open, Blossom is writing in her diary, which is something girls used to do. Think of it like a blog, only no one is supposed to read it, which begs the question of what the hell is it for. Anyway, Blossom is trying to write about Jimmy while every man in house interrupts. Joey needs advice about attracting early ‘90s icons like Christina Applegate and Cindy Crawford. Anthony is panicking over the possibility of an earthquake. Nick has to write a eulogy for a friend who died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight.

It immediately becomes apparent that Blossom is not a reliable narrator. Her story begins with her and Six discussing existentialism, and while I will happily believe Blossom can do that, Six wouldn’t know Sartre if she let him under the sweater and over the bra. Periodically, Blossom writes things that can’t possibly be true, like Jimmy showing up in nothing but his boxer shorts, them doing a tux-and-muumuu dance number, and the family spontaneously combusting. The guest star cameo is a quick aside with Reggie Jackson that’s like a PG rated version of Xavier McDaniels’s classic, “Jeff, don’t come yet,” line from Singles. One of Blossom’s flights of fancy has been rendered cruelly ironic. She claims Joey’s hair has fallen out and it cuts to Joey Lawrence, a bald cap covering his flowing mullet, screaming at handfuls of his brown locks. I can only imagine this actually happened during his slow transformation into Lex Luthor. The point of all of this is that Jimmy might not actually look like Justin Whalin. We only ever see him in Blossom’s version of events, so it’s entirely possible she has taken her average looking man and overlaid the image of Jordan Taylor, the boy she admires from afar.

Also, the island was Purgatory.

Anthony’s fear of and paradoxical desire for the earthquake parallels Blossom’s mixed feelings about taking the next step in her sexual development. And when he picks up the massive novelty pencil in Blossom’s room and rants about how it could impale her, well, it’s hard not to see the Freudian implication of that. Meanwhile, Nick can’t get over a man who refused a cheeseburger one day dying of a heart attack the next. He tells Blossom to reach for that cheeseburger to the point that he all but grabs Jimmy’s dick and presses it into his daughter’s hand.

Even as Blossom gets into the backseat of the car with Jimmy, she doesn’t know if she’ll let him get to second base. I’m not sure if backseat hookups were something people were doing in 1991, either. This feels like an artifact of thirty and forty year old writers putting their own anachronistic youths into an at the time modern character. Anyway, right as she is about to reveal her decision, the earth moves. Literally. The quake Anthony has spent all episode obsessing over has hit. As Blossom comforts a terrified Joey in the living room, she resolves not to tell since some things are private. I thought diaries were private, but whatever. The lesson here is not that one choice or the other was right or wrong, but that it was her choice and we don’t get to judge.

Which, honestly, is pretty awesome. This is a lesson I can totally get behind, at least until I have daughters. Then it’s right to the nunnery with them.

For a discussion of wine, check out David’s piece on California Cabernet.  For getting to second base with short folks, here’s Erik on the barrow downs.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Satellite Show Sports Tagged: evil doppelgangers, Justin Whalin, Reggie Jackson, second base, Very Special Blossom