Last night I was lucky enough to finally meet Adam and his wife in person, along with assorted hangers-on. I'm not sure I held up my end of the conversation, but I had lots of fun, and I can feel my cognitive dissonance diminishing as my brain slowly integrates the "real" Adam with the online persona I've contstructed over the years. :-) Thanks for the invite, dude. After dinner we saw Jay & Silent Bob, and I feel compelled to review it. Although I enjoyed the movie, I'm beginning to think I'm a member of a grossly overserved demographic. Some spoilers may follow, if you're worried about such things for this kind of flick. Basically, this movie is "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but, Like, Their Balls Have Dropped This Time Around." It's a long string of geeky pop-culture riffs framed by a long string of gay jokes and dick jokes framed by a plot about getting paid, getting laid, and getting revenge, all constructed to loosely fit in with Kevin Smith's previous movies. I laughed a lot. My favorite part was the treatment of Internet fan communities. I'm not sure how Joe Bob Briggs would rate it, but I know he'd include the following observations: Leathervixen-fu Orangutan-fu Tongue-fu Scooby Doobie-fu Bongsaber-fu Gratuitous George Carlin Gratuitous Carrie Fisher Gratuitous and painful Mark Hamill Gratuitous guy-who-stuck-his-dick-in-a-pie Gratuitous SNL-actor-who-should-have-been-shot-years-ago Like I said, I laughed a lot. I think that this movie has something in common with "Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness," and that thing is this: if I were to take my father to see this movie, he would probably laugh enough to make himself cry because he'd be trying to be more mature than that, and fail, and then he'd come out of the theater feeling vaguely ashamed of himself for enjoying it so much. But I'm younger than that and more conditioned to this kind of humor, so the thing that stays with me the most was this one scene where Silent Bob was on the verge of giving Jay a blow job as a gambit to escape a Miramax security guard, and it hit me: I belong to a cultural milieu so obsessed with media and so gifted with education and affluence that talented directors like Kevin Smith are pretty much more than happy to give us cinematic blow jobs like Jay and Silent Bob in order to make a little bank, and if we think that what's happening is that we're all partaking in a kind of exclusive geeky in-joke, that's fine, but it basically boils down to giving these guys a ride in exchange for some head. And if we look at the proliferation of movies like Galaxy Quest and Scary Movie and yada yada, it's obvious that there's a lot of head getting passed around. And I truly love head, I do, but I'm starting to wonder when enough is enough. Marvin Long Austin, Texas My hero is Guy Forsyth! www.guyforsyth.com "The ego that sees a 'thou' is fundamentally different from an ego that sees an 'it.'" -- Joseph Campbell
