Comic posted Friday, Sept. 24, 2004

Posted: 8:58 am, Friday, Sept. 24, 2004

Whew, sorry about yesterday's disjointed Green Day post - I wrote that while actually in the process of dying of exhaustion on Wednesday afternoon. Got a lot of sleep yesterday, though, so today's post ought to be a bit more coherent.

Tonight, we're going out to dinner as a farewell to 2.0's friend April, who is bolting the City, returning to Scotia from whence she came. Scotia is in the same general area as my hometown, and back in high school, April was always mocked with the newsticker reading "Berne-Knox-Westerlo Central School, closed today because of snow." Us and Ichabod Crane, the only thing anyone up there knows about us is that we are always closed when it snows. Anyway, we're hitting Joya for grub and Last Exit for booze (you can read about Joya in the Recommends section, if you feel the need).

Thank the good Lord, Andrew W.K. had this on his site:

NEW ANDREW W.K. ALBUM!!! THE POWER NEVER STOPS FORMING!!! Andrew W.K. has begun recording the third full-length album!!! The new songs are building to an ever higher level of power and exaltation!!! Radiance, resplendence, and richness will coarse through every moment of every flourishing grandstand! Effulgence will surge with each thunderous collpase! The gorgeousness and grandeur of each sweat-dripping, blood-pumpking, head-slamming moment of lusterous pure majesty taken to the highest level of celebratory royalty!!! Binary is banal! MORE INFORMATION COMING SOON!!!

If you've never been to Andrew W.K.'s site, it couldn't be more highly recommended. The Ask Andrew section on the right hand corner is simply amazing. You'll find many more sentences (and non-sentences) like those above. Midway down page 2 of the expanded Ask Andrew section, someone asks him what brand of watch he wears. This is a must-read. Thanks to Carrie for pointing the watch one out to me. Of course, even more recommeneded than the Andrew W.K. site would be his music and his concerts. His first album, "I Get Wet," contains such timeless classics as "Party Hard," "Time to Party," and "Party 'til You Puke." "The Wolf," his second full-length, continues to explore the party theme with the anthemic, "I Want to Have a Party," but also explores further realms of the human psyche with "Make Sex" and "I Am Totally Stupid." Classic stuff here, folks.

In all seriousness, while Andrew W.K. is clearly out of his friggin' mind, the albums rule and the shows are among the most fun you will ever attend. I got concussed the second time I saw him, which did not stop me from getting on stage. It did stop me from staying on stage very long, though, as I thought I was going to vomit and realized that wouldn't be very polite.

Go Irish, beat Huskies!

I have no real point in telling this story, but last July 4, driving back from drowning half of our brain cells at the Jersey shore (for more about this, read the watchmeturn30 description in the Links section), we passed a big movie billboard for Gigli.

Tree: "We're there."

Gigli had already been saddled with horrid advance word, but it's about the only movie I've ever seen that was slated to open on a Wednesday in all of its advance print advertisement (billboard, subway ads, etc.) and then got pushed back to the Friday of that week. I've seen getting moved forward, but never back.

Flash forward a few weeks, and I've now been on a date with 2.0, and was planning on doing something that Friday with her. But I've got to see Gigli. So I invite her along. Compound this with me blowing her off the next day (Tree's fault), and I have absolutely no idea why this chick stayed with me (seriously, I set a record for bizarre-behavior-by-a-dude-not-trying-to-scare-the-girl-off at the beginning of this relationship... I invited her to Gigli, I blew her off, I told her I was watching wrestling while on the phone one night, I told her I was going to be late for dinner once because I was running ten miles in training for a marathon, and I grew a beard... any of those should've been deal breakers, and now we live together).

2.0 declines the invite, resulting in Freddy vs. Jason being the first movie we see together.

Tree and I go to the AMC 25 in Times Square on Friday night, with a flask of rum in tow with which to spike our Diet Cokes (we may be ironic, but we're not gluttons for punishment). The AMC is the home of the dumbest audiences ever. We saw Adaptation there and the guy next to us was translating the film in German to his ditzy girlfriend, who shrieked at several points in the film. If you've seen Adaptation, you know that it doesn't exactly induce shrieks at any point. We saw Better Luck Tomorrow there and the audience couldn't figure out which of the five Asian kids got shot at one point. 2.0 and I saw Lost in Translation there and got stepped on by people looking for seats for practically the entire movie. There has never not been a film rendered aggravating by the AMC 25.

The audience did not disappoint. It was packed with American Idol rejects and their boyfriends, and people who presumably thought they were from whatever block Jenny seems to think she's from. These people were sitting in the aisle because the show was oversold. I have to imagine that this was the only packed-house showing of Gigli in the country.

And the crowd loved it. It was amazing. J.Lo's name (J-Lo? How do I denote her?) drew applause during the credits. She was cheered her first appearance on screen. Tree and I smiled at each other. This is exactly what we wanted. The crowd was already turning in a veteran performance when they stepped their game up another notch. Ben Affleck's Gigli chracter is hitting on J.Lo's character.

J.Lo: "You're not really my type."

Daredevil: "What about me's not your type?"

J.Lo: "Your penis."

The crowd erupts in laughter.

J.Lo: "I'm a lesbian."

Crowd: "Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h..."

As far as dumb crowds go, that's like Don Larson's perfect game in the World Series. The biggest, dumbest stage, and the most incredibly stupid reaction possible. Gold, Jerry, gold!

It got better. The crowd was consistently entertained by the retarded kid that Ben Affleck had to kidnap for some reason. There was the infamous 'gobble gobble' line that J.Lo propositioned Affleck with midway through the movie (hey, she was a lesbian, but, c'mon, Ben Affleck is dreamy). There was a bizarre cameo early in the film by the immortal Christopher Walken (if there was one thing this film needed, it was more cowbell). There was an even more bizarre cameo late in the film by Al Pacino, in which Pacino sported a ponytail. There was inexplicable gore (they raided a morgue at one point to cut off a finger with a plastic knife, and Pacino shoots a guy in the head, splattering brain matter into an aquarium, and the fish in the aquarium eat the brain matter, and there's no way I could make that up). There was a bizarre scene at the end where Affleck takes the retarded kid to a music video shoot on the beach or something. Hell, I think Affleck wound up adopting the kid, but I could be wrong on that.

The crowd remained in high spirits throughout, although I think they were a little disillusioned by the end of the film. But, as Tree and I tried to escape the AMC, discussing the fact that we should have brought a good deal more rum, we got on an elevator in which two women who seemed fully capable of functioning in society told the guy running the elevator that Gigli 'wasn't that bad.'

Now, that's just a damn dirty lie. Gigli sucked ten levels of ass. It was a tremendously enjoyable moviegoing experience for me, but the movie itself was utter shite.

Gigli's so bad, I don't think you could even watch it ironically anymore. If you're watching it on DVD, you're losing the benefit of being surrounded by people who are honestly into it. I guess if all your friends are total puds and too slow to catch on that you're mocking them, you could invite them over and have yourself a decent viewing of Gigli.

Anyway, that's that. Told you I had no reason for telling that story.

bullfrog

Posted: 9:00 am, Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004

The Green Day review is going to be pretty truncated, sorry. Getting into the show was something of a clusterfuck, as Eric and I waited in one twenty-minute line to find out that we needed to go through the forty-minute line, instead, since our tickets were at will-call. This despite the fact that tickets went on sale last Friday, and damn near everyone had to pick their tickets up, starting at eight, when the doors opened (presumably to fight scalping). It was 9:25 by the time we got inside, and Green Day came right out at 9:30. The show was basically a release party for American Idiot, and they played the whole album. Unlike about 95% of the crowd, I hadn't already downloaded the album off the web, so this was my first time hearing basically everything they played except for half of the first song, which I had heard on the radio while moving my car from one side of the street to the other a few weeks back.

I was a big fan of the music, and Eric's sending me a copy of the album with some B-sides on it. I can't wait. American Idiot, in case you don't read the music trades, is being billed as a 'rock opera' bemoaning the current administration and society in general. Since it was my first time hearing the stuff, I had to look the lyrics up online after the show to understand most of them. I haven't followed Green Day all that much since Dookie, although I liked their song Minority that came out right before the 2000 election - I don't need your authority, down with the moral majority, I wanna be a minority. It looks like Billie Jo can all of a sudden write some really good lyrics. Maybe he's been doing this for a while, I don't know.

So, American Idiot, good. Irving Plaza crowd control, bad. Green Day live, awesome. I've seen them three times now (twice in 2002 when they were touring with Blink-182, who is absolutely horrible in concert), and they have yet to put on a bad show. Billie Jo is a consummate front man, and the band clearly enjoys touring. Oh, they wrapped up with a neat little encore set of Longview, Geekstinkbreath, Minority, and We Are the Champions.

Two other things.

ESPN's Page 2 ran a really good story yesterday about Carlos Delgado, and this guy's activist brother who carried a Delgado For President banner into Yankee Stadium. In case you haven't heard about this, Blue Jays' first baseman Carlos Delgado is the only MLB player to be vocally antiwar, and George Steinbrenner has brainwashed all of the Yankee faithful into thinking that singing God Bless America is something that should take place during the seventh-inning stretch. Tree tells me other parks do this on Sundays, the Yankees do it every day.

I remembered about this while going through the W store yesterday, but the other creepiest on-line store ever (not counting anything peddling sex toys or hentai) is The Passion of the Christ The On-Line Store. (Makes me think of Yogurt with Spaceballs: The Lunchbox and Spaceballs: The Toilet Paper). (alternate punchline: The passion of which Christ? Oh, the Christ!) Who wouldn't want to wear a replica crucifixion nail around their neck, designed by the WWJD guy? Further down on that same page, right toward the bottom, you can also purchase a necklace of the crown of thorns. Cheery! You can also purchase 'witnessing tools', including this card to remind you why Christ died. (If you need a flashcard to help you recall that stuff, you probably shouldn't be trying to convert anyone to your religion. You should leave that to an expert.) While this is all nice and weird, more disturbing to me than the fact that anyone would actually wear a crucifixion nail around their neck is the fact that this stuff's not going to charity or anything like that (at least, not that they mention on their site). This is all padding Crazy Mel and WWJD-guy's wallets. If you're as uber-religious as Mel claims to be, don't you think it would be counterprogramming to profiteer of Jesus like that? Something about it strikes me as a bit shifty. Maybe it's the whole quasi-snuff film about Christ. Who knows?

(By the way, I implore you to explore that expert link - Kirk Cameron evidently has an evangelizing site. It's got some of the slickest .html I've ever seen. And at one point he makes an Osama bin Laden joke. You can't make this stuff up. Also, the God I believe in doesn't exist, because I'm not sold on the whole 'hell' concept. Thanks for clearing that up, Kirk!)

And as long as I'm getting a whole bunch of religious nutjobs out of the way, I m'ise well throw this guy in there, too. And this guy.

bullfrog