Sometimes I scare myself...

I keep churning around an idea for a story that I’m certain has to have been told already. It’s an idea that scares the earwax out of me. Someone must have written it already.

I didn’t pay very much attention while trudging my way through the Chicago Public School system. I spent more time and energy on getting out of assignments than it would have taken me to actually do them. I’m especially deficient in the department of world history. I bring this up because I have only passing knowledge of the great leaders of the world. Those who rose up to control huge portions of the globe and the lives of millions.

The story that I’ve been chewing on for the past few weeks doesn’t involve someone who wants to control the world, or cleanse the genetic pool, or anything like that. I’m interested in someone who wants to destroy the world. Not so much crack the planet in half, but rather exterminate as much of mankind as possible in one fell swoop. (I will never tire of the phrase ‘one fell swoop’)

I’m a bit behind on my comic book reading, but for the sake of argument let’s take Lex Luthor. He’s mad as a hatter, right? But he’s also a genius. Somehow Superboy made him bald when they were kids, so he focuses a lot of his energy on killing Supes. But what if he didn’t have Superman to fixate on. What if this criminal genius set his sights on destroying life on Earth as we know it. This being a comic book he might need to have an ulterior motive, like wanting to create a new race of man from the ashes of the fallen. Perhaps he has a bit of lint from Superman’s bellybutton and he’s going to exterminate all of mankind and create a new race that will bow down to him without question, but which also have a hint of Superman’s DNA twisted within their own. Whatever.

People have done some pretty heinous things, but what if there walked among us someone with a superior intelligent, who decided, for some reason or another, to focus all of his energies on destroying his fellow man.

The way I figure it, he’s a scholastic genius. He’s got a handful of degrees in the genetic sciences. Either he’s a trust fund baby or he’s committed some unspeakable acts to insure that his mission is well funded.

He would use his academic credentials to secure a position at a research facility that either manufactures what he needs, or serves as a stepping-stone to achieve the security clearance he’ll eventually need.

The type of individual we’re looking at here has zero respect for humanity. He has no conscience for his actions. Nothing will stand in the way of him achieving his goal.

After considerable research he’s determined that a virus created by a Russian wunderkind in the 1970s will do the ticket. If released in an airborne form it kills instantly, either through skin contact or by inhaling. An added bonus is that the victims, who have vomited up a lot of soft tissue, including their lungs, become a breeding ground for the virus.

The other way to expose a maximum number of people to the virus is through the water system. The results are much slower compared to those exposed to the virus in the airborne form, but at the same time the results are much more insidious. Anyone who digests the infected water or even comes into physical contact with the water, becomes breeders. The virus incubates inside of them, any anyone in the same room with them or that comes in contact with them, suffer the immediate effects and start coughing their lungs out. The lifetime of the virus when released into a fresh water supply is only 36 hours.

The virus is potent enough that a scuba tank-sized container hidden in a water treatment plant could affect millions. Our crazed villain calculates that as few as ten treatment plants will need to be infiltrated.

He decides to put his plan into action on New Years Eve. There will be plenty of crowds to affect with airborne bombs. Simultaneously, via radio control, he will release the virus into the water supply. Within hours, thousands will be dead. In 24 hours it will be millions. The scientists capable of recognizing the virus and concocting the cure will be long dead.

Within 30 days the virus will have done its damage. Major cities have been obliterated. People are rotting in the streets. HAZMAT teams confirm that the virus is no longer a threat. Help comes from all around the world, from areas not affected by the New Years Eve slaughter. The dead are buried, the streets are cleared, order is somewhat restored.

The volunteers return home, not realizing that they are carrying a sleeper virus; one so sophisticated that the HAZMAT idiots couldn’t find it with a flashlight and a map. Six months later stage two of the genocide begins. Everyone that the carriers have come into contact with, and everyone that the people they’ve come into contact with, suddenly come down with a mild cold. A week later they develop a severe fever that tops out at 120 degrees, more than enough to cook the brains of everyone infected. Even more die during stage two.

Is our villain sitting on a mountaintop, next to his well-stocked cave, laughing at all that he’s done? I don’t think so. That’s not what this guy is all about. This is what he was born to do. Surviving the slaughter was never a consideration for him. All he cared about was getting the job done. I picture him inside the countdown ball that drops in Times Square. He’s got a tank on his back and he’s releasing the virus in all directions, with a determined look on his face. Minutes later he dies with no regret, hoping only that his plan succeeds.

*************

So that’s the idea that’s been bouncing around inside my head. Has there ever been anything like this done before? Please let me know.

Sleep eludes me...

It’s 3:00 and I can’t sleep. For past half hour I’ve been watching an old favorite movie of mine. It’s not a blockbuster. It’s a low-key affair called the Friends of Eddie Coyle. It stars Robert Mitchum (an actor who has never been afraid to play his age—you have to give him credit for that. It also stars Peter Boyle, an actor who has never been afraid to be bald. Again, credit where it’s due. Another great supporting player is Robert Jordon. He’s always been one of my favorite B or C-list players. I first noticed him as Logan’s pal Francis 7 in 1976’s Logan Run. He also had a great role in 1985’s The Mean Season.

Yesterday I was paging through a magazine and came across a crossword puzzle. I don’t watch a lot of new shows, especially shows like Dawson’s’ Creek or the OC or shows like that. I could rock on a puzzle set in the 70s. Anyway, one of the questions was the name of the robot in Logan’s Run. I know the robot was modeled after and the voice was provided by Roscoe Lee Brown, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall the name. Until now. It was Box. I’ve heard for a few years that Brian Singer wants to remake Logan’s run. I would like that. I would pay nine bucks to see that.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the story of a bottom rung crook who must have screwed up his parole or something, and tries to stay out of prison by providing info to the cops. It was shot in and around Boston, probably on a shoestring budget, with lots of local flavor. It probably never won any awards, but it tells a good story and gets the job done.

The movie is over now and I’ve switched over to 1988’s The Lady in White. This is a movie that I’ve always wanted to watch. I still remember reading Roger Ebert’s review in the Chicago Sun times and checking the show times. The premise is that a little kid, played by Lukas Haas (who held his own against Harrison Ford in 1985’s Witness) sees the ghosts of kids molested and killed twenty years earlier. I guess he tries to find out who did the nasty deeds. I’m going to change channels. I want to eventually see it from the start.

I switched over to 1987’s Someone to Watch Over Me. It stars Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers and was directed by Ridley Scott. I always thought this was a weird choice for Scott. I mean, the guy directs Alien, Blade Runner, Legend and then this?

Back in 1987 I decided to give it a go anyway. Besides, Tom Berenger was up and coming and he reminded me of a young Paul Newman. Plus, there was the Mimi Rogers factor in the equation. At time I hadn’t seen her in anything before, but even so, she had the ‘it’ factor, the factor that both intrigued me and made me feel fancy in my pants.

I always wondered about Tom Berenger. It was in a lot of high profile films in the 80s and I think he was poised to become someone big, but that never happened.

In 1988 I went to see a Tom Berenger movie called Betrayed, with my friend Jim Higgins. It was in a dumpy little theater in Staten Island. Debra Winger co-starred in the film, which happily took me by surprise and turned out to be something that I wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m surprised that it never turns up on cable, but if you ever see it, I suggest that you do.

Years earlier when I worked at a commercial print shop in Chicago I used to walk three or four blocks over to the bank to cash my check on payday. I forget the name of the bank, but it was a relic from the 1930s and it was a beauty. At one point in the movie The Betrayed, a bank robbery goes down in a familiar looking bank. It was my bank! I don’t know what came over me, but I actually stood up and shouted, “Hey, I know that bank! That’s my bank!” Jim Higgins pulled me back down to my seat and shushed me. Luckily the theater was mostly empty.

Anyway, I should try and get some sleep. I don’t think Mimi is going to be getting named anytime soon. She did that plenty in other movies, in later years. I think it must be in her contract to be naked in every movie she makes—except for Lost in Space. She wasn’t nude it that but here were plenty of robots, so that makes up for it.

And hey, don’t judge me because I like seeing attractive movie stars naked. Don’t you judge me.

Holy Batman!

The first Batman movie is on cable right now and I’m stuck by how beautiful the design of the film is. I know that the fellow who inspired a lot of the cityscapes and buildings is long dead, but if they ever do a Watchman movie it should look like this movie.

Speaking of Alan Moore and the movies, we’re finally going to see V for Vendetta this weekend. Last weekend I was on deadline. We also going to try and see the stick-up movie with Clive Owen and Denzel Washington. I want to see it before the big twist/reveal becomes common knowledge.

People I know are a bit iffy about fitting all of V for Vendetta into two hours, but as I recall, the comic was a bit chatty. It was good chatty, back when Alan still had some good stuff to say, but I don’t think a lot of it will be missed from the movie. The Watchmen comic series was pretty chatty/fat, with a lot of stuff that was non crucial to the storyline going on, but the fans would have six or seven heart attacks each if anything is left out. I true representation of the comic can never be made into a movie because if you have Dr. Manhattan’s big blue dong swinging around that long it’ll drive the rating through the ceiling. My wife Valarie thinks that one of the cable networks might be able to pull it off. I think she’s dead right.

We watched the final episode of The Shield earlier this evening. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, let me just say that I thought it ended with more of a whimper than a bang. I was expecting a multi-megaton bombastic close. It was still entertaining as hell.

Ah, back on T.V. I just caught a glimpse of Billy D. Williams as Harvey Dent. He would have made for an interesting Half-Face. He sure couldn’t have done worse than Tommy Lee Jones.

Speaking of comic book movies, there’s been very little buzz on the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300. It’s being directed by Zack Snyder who did a Crackerjack of a job on 1994's Dawn of the Dead. 300 is a period piece and is going to be a hard sell without any big names in the cast. I guess time will tell. It 's too bad Miller had such a bad experience in Hollywood in the early 1990s with the RoboCop films. He could have been doing some fun films. Perhaps his acceptance level will be high enough after the Sin City films wind down for him to do the kinds of movies he’d like to do. It would be a waste if he didn’t.

The way the story goes. The way the earthquake story goes.

Nothing to see here…the earthquake is over.

I was upstairs writing a few things miscellaneous things for Liquid Development, watching the earthquake movie and I dozed off. I’m on a new medication for my back, so I blame the drugs.

So I don’t know what happened during the last hour or so of the movie. I can postulate that: Jennifer Garner and the recently-arrived-from-a-war-torn-unnamed-country cabbie wound up together.

Sharon Lawrence finally got to her son’s school and found him hiding in the bathroom. Before I dozed off I recall seeing a great shot of him finally clearing the rubble from the only door in the room and opening it to see that the remainder of the building he was in had been sheared off. He hung swinging from the door, shocked by what he saw.

***I have the 70s music channel playing right now and they’re spinning Johnny Rivers’ Rockin’ Pneumonia – Boogie Woogie Flu. When’s the last time you heard that? When’s the last time you heard a hit song with the word ‘pneumonia’ in the title.***

Back in the subway tunnel, I think the murderer that Charles S. Dutton’s lawyer daughter freed of all charges showed his true colors and revealed himself to be a calculating and blood-thirsty killer. Everyone will be in peril, but the guy from 24 will step in and be a hero in time and the killer-freed-in-error by the lawyer woman will get a fifty-ton block of cement dropped on his head during a key moment.

And in the end, I think that the gruff mayor, played by Charles S. Dutton will patch things up with Tom Skerritt, who will stay on as the fire chief, provided some concessions are made that no doubt will have something to do with the burn victim he was visiting earlier. Perhaps a bigger budget for fire gear for the city’s fire fighters.

The final shot of the film will be Sharon Stone being reunited with her bathroom-trapped son. They will kiss and hug the very way she should kiss and hug me. Then we would go home and eat some cheese sandwiches or something, because we just survived an earthquake all and that’d make a person hungry. Then she would complain about how dirty she got during the earthquake and say she was going to shower. She would accidentally leave the bathroom door open and I would catch glimpses of her undressing. The shower would come on and steam would cloud up the mirrors and make the room a cloudy paradise. I would finally screw up my courage to go in there. She did leave the door open, after all. Ask Freud, there are no mistakes. So I swallow the last bite of my cheese sandwich and walk into the bathroom. The only problem is that she’s not in the shower yet. She’s sitting on the toilet dropping off the kids into the pool. I don’t know what she had for breakfast that morning, but the smell of whatever it is she’s pushing out of her ass makes me want to vomit, then all of a sudden I do vomit, all over Sharon Lawrence. I expect her to be horrified, but instead she seems to be aroused by the chunks of semi-digested cheese and bile dripping off her body. She reaches a hand out to me, with a sexy look on her face. With her other hand she’s pulling toilet paper off the roll and wiping her butt. I scream. She screams even louder in delight. I’m trapped. I have no choice but to swallow my tongue.

Wow. I still think she’s kind of cute, but I hope I’m nowhere near Sharon Lawrence if there’s an earthquake.

The disaster continues...

There’s still no word from Symantic, I made my deadline for Liquid Development and the boys are off at the Game Developer’s conference in San Jose, so I’m returning to the earthquake movie. My daughter is home and on her computer so I can’t do anything on it.

I’ve learned the Charles S. Dutton is the Mayor of what’s left of New York. Tom Skerritt had been the Chief of Police, but he’d resigned just this morning. There is no love lost between Skerritt and Dutton. Because police headquarters and fire headquarters has been destroyed, that makes Skerritt the head of the police and the fire department. He tells Dutton that he takes his resignation back. Grrr. Lots of teeth grinding on both sides. Skerritt says that he needs the streets clear for fire and rescue. Dutton orders that every privately owned bulldozer in the city will be put in action to do the job.

Jennifer Garner can’t lose her taxi driver. He’s from some war-torn country so he knows how to survive in conditions like these. Garner tries to stop some looters and nearly gets killed. Cab driver stops the violence. She keeps pushing him away but she needs him and she knows she needs him. Romance is on the horizon.

Back in the subway tunnel an asshole that Charles S. Dutton’s lawyer daughter just freed from a murder charge has taken charge of the situation. He’s showing an ugly side that she never saw in the courtroom. He wants to leave the injured behind. They’re mostly dead already, he reasons. Finally he gives in when the crowd turns ugly on him. The lady lawyer has stuck up a friendship with the guy who plays Curtis Manning on 24.

Commercial break. The Geico lizard is talking to another lizard about pie and chips. I don’t understand what the point of the commercial is, but I like it. I already have Geico insurance.

Oooop, the subway tunnel suddenly starts filling up with water. This could be bad.

If I had to compare the two I’d say that this earthquake movie is better than then the movie Earthquake from the early 70s with Charleton Heston. I think that one hit Los Angeles, so that was no major loss.

ChiPs star Eric Estrada is on television hawking a real estate package for Vila Vista village in Arkansas. I could get a free weekend trip there if I call now. Hmmm… Tempting if Jon was there too, and that blonde woman. If the three of them were there I’d go.

The commercial breaks are getting longer. They must be running out of movie. I have to go do some writing. I’ll check in on the earthquake a little later.

Disaster for lunch...

As I type these words I’m watching a disastrous movie on the USA Network. It’s called ‘Aftershock: Earthquake in New York’ and it stars Tom Skerritt and Sharon Lawrence. I’ve only been watching for a few minutes, but the movie has been on for a half hour. There’s still no earthquake. Mostly they’ve been busy introducing characters that I guess we’re going to care about once the quake flattens New York. The movie was made in 1999 and I’m expecting the effects to be horrible.

Oh, a young Jennifer Garner just appeared. She’s a frustrated ballet dancer. She’s having lunch with her father, who played Greg’s wealthy father on Dharma and Greg.

I usually don’t watch movies on USA, but I stopped on this one while eating my lunch, because Sharon Lawrence is in it.

I had such a major crush on her when she was on NYPD Blue. She was also on a sitcom with Doug’s wife Carrie, years before she was cast on King of Queens.

Oh, there’s Charles S. Dutton. He appears to be someone important. He’s talking on the phone with his daughter, but she says she’s going to go ride the subway. That could be bad, what with an earthquake on the way.

Oh, commercial break.

I’ve been struggling all morning long with folks at Symantic. I upgraded the virus protection on my daughter’s computer, and the old Nortons software isn’t recognizing the new Norton’s software. Symantic doesn’t have a toll free number for frustrated customers who need help. You have three choices if you’re in trouble. 1.)Send them an email describing your problem and they’ll get back to you. 2.)Phone them, for a $30.00 charge. 3.)Internet chat with the help desk.

Oh, Tom Skerritt is in a hospital, visiting someone who has half their face burned off. His I.V. bottle is shaking. No one seems to notice.

I tried the third option first with Symantic first, and had the chance to text chat with no less than three helpers. All were in India and none had much of a mastery of the English language.

Oh, the quake has hit. Jennifer Garner’s taxi cab just got creamed by a White Castle sign, but the cabbie got her out first. Oh, the MOMA is crumbling. The effects are fair. Not insulting. A little boy is trapped in a public bathroom. There’s big trouble in the subway. Sharon Lawrence’s refrigerator is open and all the contents are falling out. Her little doggie is running around the apartment, dodging falling tables and lamps. The cabbie has dragged Jennifer Garner under a water delivery truck, thinking it would be a good idea. A sink hole has eaten most of the truck, they get out from under it just in time. Lots of rubble and people are falling from the skies. Hmm, the quake seems to be stopping. Nope, here come the aftershocks. There’s trouble in the hospital room. The burn victim has lost his oxygen mask. The subway car with Charles S. Dutton’s daughter on it is running out of control, and careening at an odd angle. Oh, no…the statue of liberty just fell down in the worst effect shot of the movie. The people at USA probably cut out any scenes of the World Trade center. To protect my sensibilities. Lots of chaos in the streets. Lots of steam or somke shotting up. Now fire. Oh, Jennifer Garner’s cabbie has caught on fire. She puts him out and they huddle in a dooway. People are screaming, children are crying. The burn victim finally gets his mask back. Times square is a wreck. Sorry Disney. Sharon Lawrence’s dog’s name is Low Rider. Maybe Lou Rider. She still looks hot. Her hair’s a mess and she’s all dirty. Maybe she’ll take a steamy shower.

Commerical. So after I gave up on text chatting with people who didn’t have a clue as to how to help me, I went to the second option and sent a detailed email message to Symantic.

This Easter you can find faith in Christ. Those Mormons make the best commercials.

So this morning I got an email response, from their help center in India. He told me that he was sorry for my problems and gave me the URL for two help pages on the Symantic site. I went to both and tried everything it suggested. No good. I fiddled around a little on my own and managed to get the new software registered, but again, the old software doesn’t recognize it.

Wow, in the midst of an earthquake, Jennifer Garner managed to find her father under a pile of rubble. He’s dying and he tells her that he’s proud of her and that he loves her. He wants her to be a dancer. The cabbie starts pulling the rings and watch off her dead father, his wallet too. She freaks out but he tells her that she needs to hang onto things that will remind him of her. Back in the subway Charles S. Dutton’s lawyer daughter is shaken, but not stirred. Tom Skerritt is out on the streets now. He helps a little girl find her parents. Lots of people are walking over very neatly stacked piles of rubble. Tom Skerritt stops at a fire station. It turns out he’s a fire chief. He’s trying to get his boys out on the street to help those in need. I wonder if Tom Skerritt could help me with my computer. A girl in a news helicopter is talking to Skerritt, describing what she sees. The Brooklyn Bridge is in the water. City Hall and police central are flattened.

I don’t think Sharon Lawrence is going to get naked anytime soon. My lunch is done so I’d better get back to work.

I wrote back to Symantic. Perhaps they’ve responded. It could be worse, there could be an earthquake.

The original millennium bug...

I saw one hell of a crummy movie back in 1989

One day, back in the mid-1980s I was depressed and I went to the library. I think I was writing for NOW Comics at the time and it might have been when I was working on staff. I would have gone out to a bar or a movie, but my depression was usually always connected with being broke so I spent a lot of time at the library. I would split my time between reading and people watching.

I used to and still do read a lot of fiction, mystery and science fiction. I never too a liking to fantasy. I tried to read The Hobbit at least a dozen times. If it wasn’t for Peter Jackson I probably would have never found out what happened to Bilbo Baggypants.

I like my sci-fi old skool. I’m not sure if the cyber punk movement has started yet back then. Digging through the shelves of books that I’d grown to know so well I came across an author I’d never heard of before. His name was John Varley and the book I was holding was called Millennium.

I’m a sucker for a book or movie with a great concept, and Millennium had a dandy. In short, time travelers from a diseased future earth hop back in time to moments before big disasters, like the crash of an airliner, and they haul the people who are about to die to the future, where they can harvest them for spare parts. They then fill the seats of the doomed aircraft with crude clones whose only purpose is to become charred body parts. Neat idea, eh? An investigator for the airline notices some discrepancies with the crash wreckage, has a run in with some conspiracy nuts, and ultimately meets and falls in love with a troubleshooter who has come back in time from the future to smooth things over.

I read the book in one sitting, and then read it again enjoying the nuances. Varley isn’t the greatest scribe on the planet, but dang, I loved that book.

After things went seriously sour at NOW Comics I headed back east and hooked up with my old roommate, Tom Morgan. With the exception of some books for Byron Preiss, I couldn’t sell a thing. Tom came back from the 1988 San Diego Comic Con with a business card from a new publisher called New Comics Group. I wrote some stories for an anthology they were publishing called Asylum, and helped them develop a comic based on a fun (albeit short lived) animated series called The Bionic Six. My editor at New was Valarie Jones, one of the best editors and nicest people on the planet.

After a couple hundred telephone calls and hanging out during business trips Val made to New York, we were officially BFF (best friends forever, in case you don’t savvy Internet-speak). Things changed a lot for me when Val complained that she was going to be in Europe for an extended vacation and she didn’t have anyone at the New Comics Group office that could get the comics prepped and sent off to the printer. Prior to taking up writing for a living I had paid the rent as a graphic designer, plus I’d picked up a thing or two about getting books ready for print while doing time at NOW Comics, so I offered to help out. Val jumped at the chance.

Since I wasn’t exactly setting New York on fire, I figured I’d give California a spin, so I packed up everything I owned and Tom Morgan drove me to JFK. California was nothing like I’d expected. The New Comics Group offices were in a tiny town called San Mateo, located just south of San Francisco. A couple days after I arrived, Val and her boyfriend took off for Europe. With them gone, I officially didn’t know a soul in California. Val and her publishing partner shared a house with a bunch of people in a quasi commune situation. Nobody got paid but you had a roof over your head and one or two square meals a day.

With Val gone out of the country I was suddenly very lonely.

I didn’t have a car so I rode the bus to a sorry little mall a few miles away. Next to the sorry little mall was an even sorrier little movie theater, but my heart skipped a beat or two when I saw on the marquee that one of the movies playing was Millennium. Suddenly I wasn’t so lonely. Here was my old friend. Back in New York I’d half heard something about them doing a film adaptation, but in the rush of packing up and moving I’d totally forgotten.

Outside the sorry little theater I studied the movie poster and thought at first there had been some sort of mistake. The poster said that the movie starred former Charlie’s Angel angel Cheryl Ladd, and weird semi-country musician Kris Kristofferson.

That couldn’t be right. I was pretty sure I remembered all the major characters from the book and absolutely none of them could have possibly been played by Cheryl Ladd or Kris Kristofferson. No way-no how.

Still, there it was printed on real cardboard and in my face. Maybe I was remembering the book wrong. Whatever was going on, I bought a ticket to the next show. I spent a depressing hour walking around in a nearly deserted Sears store where everyone I made eye contact with seemed on the verge of suicide.

I made it back over to the theater a little early, but I wanted to get a good seat. I shouldn’t have hurried. I could have had any seat I wanted. I was the only person in the theater.

Two hours later I felt like I’d just walked away from a train wreck. I stumbled over to the bus stop shelter and tried to gather my senses about me. To call the movie I’d just witnessed ‘horrible’ would be giving it far too much credit. Whatever movie classification is five or six increments beneath ‘horrible’ would have been closer to the mark.

For a few fleeting moments I thought that perhaps the movie was supposed to be a comedy. Something like a Saturday Night Live skit. But, no. It was astounding how little emotion Kristofferson and Ladd managed to display. It was like they were wooden puppets.

This ordeal happened back in 1989 and to this day I don’t think someone could have made a worse movie if that was their intention from frame one.

Weeks later Valarie returned and live in California started to perk up. Those of you familiar with our history know that in the following years Val and I worked for First Comics in Chicago and Eclipse Comics back in California, and while all this was going on we made the jump from being BFF and roommates, to the happy couple we remain today. Just a few weeks ago we celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary.

The moral of this story? Well, there is none, except that Millennium sucked like a Dyson.

I have a pet peeve--wanna see it?

My pet peeve’s name is Snarky. He lives under the stairs and I feed him bits of old cheese.

I’ve had the misfortune over the years to know people who simply couldn’t keep their big fat opinions to themselves. Wait, that’s wrong. Let me rephrase that. I’ve had the misfortune over the years to know people who couldn’t keep their big fat opinions to themselves, and these people seemed to go to great lengths to voice their opinions in the loudest, most absolute manner possible.

Contrary to what you may have read scribbled in marker on the bathroom wall in the men’s room of the Shell gas station at exit 47 of the New Jersey turnpike, I’m not what you’d call an American history aficionado, but, I do know that one of the principals this great country of ours was built on is freedom of speech. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I usually love to hear them, when delivered in a palatable form.

This is what I greatly dislike—
“I heard you talking to Emily about seeing the new Pauly Shore film. I saw it this weekend. Save yourself nine bucks. It was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Certainly the worst in the Shore’s filmography. Only a complete moron would go to see a movie like that.”

This is what I like—
“I heard you talking to Juan about seeing the new Pauly Shore film. I saw it this weekend and didn’t care for it too much. I don’t think it’s the best movie that Shore has seen. You might be better off waiting for it on cable.”

If someone gives me their opinion, the last thing I want is to have the topic of discussion shaded with absolutes. Ben and Jerry didn’t get rich by selling one flavor of ice cream. Tastes as well as genital size differ from person to person. Plus, when you club someone over the head with an absolute you automatically put them on the offensive. If you tell the person with the opinion that you’re going to have a look see for yourself, or if you run into them a week later and they learn you went and saw the movie anyway, it means that you put absolutely no value on their opinion. It’s worthless. They should have saved their breath and kept their mouth shut.

I know someone who used to be guilty of the absolute opinion thing when it came to food. She fancied herself a chef, and no one’s cooking, and especially their baking, could hold a candle to what came out of her kitchen. I recall one incident in particular that took place at a company where we both worked. It was someone’s birthday, or some occasion where a cake had been brought in. We all were handed a slice and were chewing away, yum-yum-yum, when all of a sudden this person blurts out, “Oh my God! This tastes awful!” and tosses her slice of the cake into the trash. So there the rest of us stood. The cake tasted pretty darn good to me, but a cake would have to be pretty darn awful for me not to finish it, but because of her absolute declaration, the cake was horrible, and if we ate it we must be total idiots. She also put us the position that if we didn’t toss our cake into the trash as well, her opinion was meaningless to us and that we must have thought she was a fool.

I love hearing the opinions of others, especially if it leads to a debate, but iron clad opinions are turn offs for me. I don’t need for things to be candy coated, but please leave me some wiggle room to have my own point of view.

This all comes up because I think I was pretty absolute in my review of the film version of RENT. It may be on your list of the top ten movies of all time, landing right between Bio-Dome and Encino Man.

And that’s one of the reasons I love America so much.

Technology--there's no denying that it's for me!

I’m in awe of my new cell phone.

My thirteen-year-old daughter isn’t.

My iBook is two years old, but it still astounds me that I can be three our four rooms away from the Internet hub in the house and wirelessly download the preview for the new Superman movie in under a minute.

It still blown away that just a few hours ago I copied tonight’s episode of the Sopranos for a friend of my wife on our digital video recorder, and then burned the episode onto a DVD for her.

Again, none of this fazes my daughter, and this bothers me. Personal computers, video games, satellite television, digital watches and cordless phones all existed before she was born. She never knew a world without all this technology and she takes it for granted.

I grew up the son of a television repairman. When he was young my dad worked on a ice truck, and then a meat packing house. He only made it through seventh or eighth grade, but he wasn’t a stupid man, and when the chance presented itself in the late 50s for him to learn radio and television repair, he jumped on it and took to it easily. Back before solid state electronics there were only a few things that could go wrong with your television or radio. The electric cord became frayed or cut, the antenna got snapped off, or one of the tubes inside went bad.

Before the advent of the transistor radios, the older models were all AM and only had three or four of the little vacuum tubes inside. It was pretty easy to try switching out the most common tubes and you were back in business. The televisions were a little bit more complicated, but for the most part it was checking tubes and connections. More serious problems involved a bad picture tube, or a voltage regulator or some such affair.

My dad worked during the day at a radio and t.v. repair shop, and at night he did freelance repair. I used to go along with him on some of his calls. My job was primarily to sit in front of the television while he poked and prodded in the back. I held a mirror so he could see the image on the screen for reference. I also got to carry his toolboxes to and from the car.

The way it worked at the shop where my dad worked was that someone would bring in their radio or television (if it was a portable) to be repaired or to get an estimate. My dad and other employees at the shop would also bring in big floor model sets from customer’s homes if they couldn’t fix them there. Anyway, what would happen a lot of the time was that my dad would open up a television and call the owner to say that it was going to cost two hundred bucks to fix. The person on the phone would either tell him to go ahead and fix it or to keep it, because there was no way they were going to spend that much money on a hunk of junk. This meant that out behind the shop a massive stockpile of useless radios, tape recorders, record players and televisions would build up. Which was good for me.

When I was old enough to pick up and hold a screwdriver, I was opening up everything electronic in the house. Radios, telephones and record players. I must have had a knack for electronics because I managed to get most of them back together again in working condition.

Every summer my dad’s boss would have a big garbage dumpster delivered behind his store and hire me to come in and strip down the abandoned equipment for usable parts. This meant opening up the televisions, yanking out the tubes and speakers, and pulling the big fat yolk off the neck of the picture tube. This was valuable because it was loaded with copper wire. Later, after all the hard work was done I would go through all the little vacuum tubes that I’d yanked to see which were still functioning and could be saved. One of my favorite things about stripping down the televisions was pulling out all the big picture tubes. I would hoist them up as high as possible and drop them like bombs into the metal dumpster. Each one sounded like a bomb going off.

Some of the smaller electronic devices like radios and reel-to-reel tape recorders I’d take home with me to see if I could fiddle with them and get them working. I don’t think I ever succeeded, but I had a hell a lot of fun trying.

It was a good time, but then things got complicated. The printed circuit board come along and changed home electronics forever. Tiny transistors and resistors took the place of vacuum tubes. Radios and televisions became cheaper to buy, more expensive to repair, so easier to replace. If something breaks, don’t waste time and money getting is fixed, simply buy a new one.

My dad retired from the radio and television repair business just as the skills he’d learned over the years became useless. When we got our first VCR in the early eighties he couldn’t even figure out how to hook it up.

I have a real problem with technology being accepted as a given and taken for granted. When I was a kid and there was a moon shot, that’s all that was on television for that day. Coverage would start four or five hours before the launch, and continue on for three our four hours after liftoff. Today, when a U.S. shuttle goes up you’d miss the news about it if you blinked.

Maybe I’d turning into a cranky old man, but I watch my daughter chatting online with her friends, then download some new songs and put them on her MP3 player or on her phone. I try to point out what a miracle all this is and her eyes glaze over.

My new cell phone probably has more computing power in it than there was in the command module of those early space shots, but I use it to take pictures of my cats doing funny things around the house. It can access the Internet and the knowledge of thousands of years of civilization is in the palm of my hand, but I use it to download a song for my ringtone (Boots Randolph’s Yakety Sax a.k.a. The Benny Hill theme song, no less). So maybe I’m no better than this clueless new generation who will soon be running things.

Still, I really am in awe of my new cell phone. I can’t wait for someone to call me.

Is it just me? Naw, it can’t be.

People I know. People I trust. People I would lend more than fifty bucks to. People I would pick up from the airport at three in the morning. People like these have told me how much I’ll enjoy film version of the Broadway blockbuster RENT.

I just finished watching the DVD and something’s wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I thought it stunk to high holy heaven.

Could so many people be wrong and I am the only one who is right?

Perhaps I have a disorder of the brain. Some sort of chemical imbalance that affects the way the neurons snap my synapses. But there would be signs other than conflicting views on Broadway musical, right? If I really had a brain disorder I would be doing things like filling my pockets with salad dressing, and naming and caring for my individual dandruff flakes.

No, the more I think about it the more I think I’m the one who is right and they’re the ones with Creamy Ranch oozing out of their Khaki pockets.

For starters, I think you should be able to sum up the plot of a good play in a single sentence, with less than fifteen commas. You can’t do that with the film version of RENT. I’m not certain that I can explain the plot if I had all night and half of tomorrow.

I also think you should be singing and humming songs from a good musical for days and weeks after seeing it. The only song from RENT that I can recall involves some sort of numeric equation. It was something about ten-thousand-three-hundred-forty-seven hours in a umm, something something something. There was a song the whole cast sang in a restaurant that was kind of catchy, but I forgot it as soon as I heard it.

Nearly all the songs in the movie version of RENT, and there were a lot of them, sounded exactly alike. And the thing of it is, there was no reason for half of them to even exist. For the most part, the songs they were singing consisted of chunks of dialogue these characters should have been sharing. I’m a firm believer that a good song can certainly move a play along, but I had the distinct impression that the playwright was afraid to have people sitting around talking, so he simply jammed the information he wanted to convey into a talky song.

It’s always nice to see Sarah Silverman in anything, and Taye Diggs is one of the more handsome men to set foot on planet earth, but their combined might could not hold my attention to the screen.

Perhaps everything made more sense on the Broadway stage. Perhaps there were plot elements and even some character growth that never made it to Hollywood.

And one last thing that I know will bother me for months to come unless I do a miniature exorcism right now; the character of the budding filmmaker drove me bonkers. He runs around the whole movie with a sixteen-millimeter movie camera, pulling it out of his bag and shooting from the hip at awkward moments. He mentions several times that he wants to make movies that make a difference, and there’s no way-no how he’s going to sell out to the man. Toward the end of the movie he starts spending some quality time on the Movieola, editing together his opus, and during one of the last songs of the movie he turns on the projector and lets it rip…and the whole film (that we see) consists of badly framed, badly out of focus, under and over exposed snippets of film. The guy’s pet project looked like it had been filmed and edited by some of the street people he’s so fond of filming.

Again, perhaps his movie serves as a terrific device in the stage production. I could see where it might. But I wasn’t lucky enough to see it on stage. I had to see it in my living room.

If I were into clichés I would moan something about saying goodbye to two hours of my life that I’ll never see again.

Now I have to go find my Chorus Line CD and wash the madness away.

Polish Power!

Everyone who knows me knows that I loves me my Polish movie posters. They make American posters look like sad piles of crap--or something like that. I thought I'd share the Polish posters for some of my favorite movies.

If you read the credits and know a thing or two about movies you'll be able to figure out what movie the posters are for. Think of it as a game. There are no prizes--just a bunch of fun!






























































































For those of you who have old man eyes like I do, here are the movies the posters are for:

One of Mel Brooks last good movies HIGH ANXIETY

Before he turned into a killer, OJ Simpson acted like an astronaut in CAPRICORN ONE

Burt Lancaster, one of my favorite movie stars, kicked ass in AIRPORT

Burt also shined like the star he was in THE PROFESSIONALS

An overlooked fun-time movie, INNERSPACE

Get the hell out of the way of RUNAWAY TRAIN

Gene Hackman is good in everything (MST3000 pun intended) and he rocked in SCARECROW

David Bowie and Susan Sarandon in the same movie? It must be THE HUNGER

You simply can't stop THE TERMINATOR

Quiet! It's time for Mel Brooks' SILENT MOVIE

I got your superhero movie right here, buddy...

There’s a new batch of superhero movies that are peeking up over the horizon, ready to assault our senses and sensibilities. I believe that X-Men 3 is arriving first, sliding in place just before Superman touches down. There are also a handful of movies due out that are more about the superhero lifestyle than actual superheroics. Uma Thurman plays a heroine whose boyfriend has to deal with breaking up with her, and I think Tim Allen has something in the works about a retired superhero that has to don his tights again in order to train a group of young heroes at an academy.

Although it’s not a superhero movie, V for Vendetta is due out in a week or two and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it. I haven’t read the comic book it was based on for over ten years, which I think may turn out to be a very good thing. I say that because I enjoyed the hell out of last year’s Constantine, even though it bore little resemblance to the comic book series it was adapted from. I think that everyone who wasted their breath screaming about how the title character shouldn’t be played by an American, and how the story should have been set in England and not Los Angeles, of all places, missed out on the opportunity to enjoy an engrossing and visually stunning movie.

Opinions are like bellybuttons, in that everyone has one and most are filled with lint. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you my opinion on the assorted superhero and comic book movies I’ve seen over the years.

They are presented in the order that they popped into the mind, and not in order of preference. Those of you who are bothered by lists being out of order should probably turn your heads and look away.


Superman (1978)
I read in a magazine, a year or so before this movie was released, that the film would start with a shot of a kid reading a Superman comic book. Then the camera would pan up to the kid’s bedroom window and then zoom out into the star-filled sky. We would continue to zoom through space until we reached Krypton.

That’s what they promised and that’s what they delivered.

I knew the movie was going to be a winner when the teaser poster arrived in the mail. It was the Bob Peak painting of a red, yellow and blue streak rocketing across a cloud-filled sky. It promised that we would believe a man would fly.

I was always a Marvel Comics reader, not DC, but of course I knew the whole Superman mythos, which the movie brilliantly delivered. Overall the movie sustained a delicate balance of strengths and flaws, so most people walked away satisfied.

I never understood what all the fuss was about over the casting of Marlon Brando. I was more impressed by the one-two punch that was delivered by Glenn Ford as Pa Kent and Gene Hackman as Luthor.

Margot Kidder and Ned Beatty were fun, and the special effects delivered the goods when needed. The one character that never reached off the screen and grabbed me was Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent/Superman, and I think that’s a major compliment. The way I always saw it was that the movie was never really about Superman, but rather it was about how the world reacted to Superman. I saw it as Superman being the core that all the other characters and events orbited around.

And that was perfect.


Superman 2 (1980)
I used to complain that the one thing I didn’t like about the original Superman movie was all the time that was spent in Smallville. I wanted more fighting in Metropolis and less teenage angst in the wheat fields.

It turns out I was young and stupid then. When Superman 2 showed up it gave us all kinds of fighting and action, but that didn’t turn out to be the good thing I was hoping for.

For me, the movie was tainted from the start. Not Lois getting rescued from the Eiffel Tower. That was pretty fun. No, what I choked on was the notion that the portal to the multi-dimensional cell that Zod and his minions were locked in by Kal-El’s daddy back on Krypton in the first movie, just happened to be passing through the Milky Way at the exact moment that Superman tosses a nuclear bomb into space. What are the chances of that happening? You’d need to be Superman to calculate the odds of that happening, and I think he’d be too embarrassed.

Supposing you were able to choke that bit of lunacy down, next up you’re expected to believe that Perry White would send Clark Kent and Lois Lane to Niagara Falls to research shady hotel operators who are ripping off newlywed vacationers. What exactly did Jimmy Olsen slip into Perry’s coffee the morning he made that decision?

The bit with Clark Kent fetching his glasses from the fire in order to accidentally show Lois that he’s Superman was nice. And there was some good stuff with them falling in love and all that.

But all that is overshadowed by silly action scenes that seem to go on for hours, and special effects with very visible seams showing.

The movie was bearable, and you could forgive a lot if you drew upon the good will that the first movie had generated.

To this day I’m still creeped out by the scene between Lois and Clark at the end of the film. She knows his secret and she knows it’s going to change her/their life forever. So what does Clark do? He kisses her and somehow sucks the oxygen out of the part of her brain that knows Clark Kent is Superman. The kiss ends and leaves her happy and dumb, oblivious to all that’s happened. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s a responsible way to use your super powers.


Superman 3 (1983)
I’m too embarrassed to ever watch this movie again. Everyone in front of and behind the camera is just going through the paces to earn their paycheck.

The only reason this movie was made was to generate money. Sure, there are sparks of fun here and there, but for the most part I feel nothing but sadness when I think of this movie.


Superman 4 (1987)
I’ve heard a lot of stories about why this film was made. Some reports claimed that Christopher Reeve was so outraged over what a hunk of junk Superman 3 was, that he vowed never to don the tights again unless he had complete creative control, and it was finally give to him. Other reports said that after a string of bombs (The Aviator, Street Smart, The Bostonians) that Reeve was turning into box office poison and he needed to make a picture that showed a profit. I have a feeling that it was a combination of the two compelled him to tie on the cape.

The result was a mishmash of eco-friendliness (Superman steals a couple of billion dollars worth of nuclear arms from dozens of countries and chucks them into the moon) and amateur fight scenes with a Nuclear Clone.

I could die a happy man never seeing this film again.


The Shadow (1994)
I guess technically The Shadow doesn’t belong on this list, but I feel that it’s a hugely underrated film and I take every chance I can to hype it. Based on a script by Hollywood wunderkind David Koepp, and directed with an abundance of flair by Highlander director Russell Mulcahy, The Shadow falls squarely into the love it/hate it category of movies.

During the years that I’ve supported The Shadow, I’ve found that not only do people either love or hate the movie, it seems that people feel the same way about the star, Alec Baldwin. I’ve met people who hate the movie—even if they’ve never seen it—just because they hate Alec Baldwin so much. Perhaps one of the many reasons I love this movie so much is because I love Alec Baldwin so much. He was perfectly cast in what I’ll admit is a far from perfect movie.


Nick Fury – Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1998)
This film definitely falls into the category of guilty pleasures. I think legally anything you enjoy that involves David Hasselhoff has to be referred to as a guilty pleasure. This chunk of goofy fluff was written by David S. Goyer, who must have comics in his blood because he went on to write all three Blade movies. Goyer also wrote 2005’s outstanding Batman Begins, and the highly underrated Dark City.

It seems to me that everyone involved with this movie knew it was never going to be taken seriously, but they tried to make it fun anyway. The special effects shots of the Helicarrier were much better than you’d expect in a made-for-tv movie.

I think of this movie like a really good school play. In the end it’s just a load of hokum, but you have to give them credit for trying.


Spider-Man (2003)
I’ve been a fan of director Sam Rami’s films since the second Evil Dead movie. The guy has a twisted vision that I love getting in sync with. Darkman was a rollercoaster ride that I didn’t want to get off of and Army of Darkness was a hilarious blast of fun. I guess Rami was afraid that Hollywood wouldn’t take him seriously if he kept making mind-bending gore fests, so he calmed down and made A Simple Plan and The Gift.

I didn’t know what to expect when it was announced that he’d be helming Spider-Man. Would the Darkman Sam Rami come back to play? It turns out he didn’t, but the movie turned out fine anyway. In the comic books I was never a big fan of the Green Goblin, so it was a bit of a disappointment to hear that he was going to be the villain. The mechanical Green Goblin mask and suit didn’t help matters.

Toby Maguire made for a letter perfect Peter Parker. He was a tad more goofy than the stoic Peter in the comics, but that was okay. The Spider suit was outstanding. I still don’t know how he could have cooked it up in his bedroom, but I could go along with it. The organic webshooters were a little creepy-I kept getting the impression that he was shooting sperm out from his wrists. And speaking of sperm, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson was nothing short of a fanboy’s wet dream.

The ending scene in the cemetery made me scream with horror. When Peter turned his back on MJ I was in agony. It felt so very, very wrong.


Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Not that he necessarily needed to redeem himself, but Rami made up for the mistakes he made in the first movie. In retrospect the first Spider-Man movie seems more like a warm up game for the second.

The movie was hitting on all cylinders from the first frame. Chubby Doc Ock kicked royal ass as a villain. Rami seemed comfortable enough to bring back some of his old visual tricks. Doc Ock’s wife seeing herself in the shower of glass shards heading her way, and all the crazy reflective graphics during the slaughter in the operating room. Classic stuff.

The special effects were almost perfect, and there was all kinds of great character development with Peter, Aunt May, Mary Jane, and even Doc Ock.

This is a fun movie that I’ll always stop to watch if I see it while surfing the movie channels.


Catwoman (2005)
I’ve tried to watch this movie on at least three occasions. I just couldn’t do it. After twenty minutes or so I find that I’m either bored to tears or laughing at what I’m seeing on the screen. It may turn out that the last three quarters of this film are fantastic and I’m really missing out, but I guess it’s my loss.


Captain America (1991)
A friend loaned me a bootleg copy of this film. I don’t know if it was released theatrically or even straight to video. I’ve never seen it in Hollywood Video or Nazi Blockbuster. Matt Salinger played Steve Rogers/Captain America, taking over the role played with much hilarity by Reb Brown in the 1979 made-for-tv film.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the 1991 movie was Captain America’s ears. In the comic book his ears stick out through holes in his mask, but that didn’t work out for the movie so they wound up gluing rubber ears onto his head.

The movie also featured two of my favorite actors, Melinda Dillon and Darin McGavin, who were reunited after starring in 1983’s A Christmas Story.

Batman (1989)
I have one very cool memory of Tim Burton’s version Batman and it has nothing to do with the film. I was living in New York when this film came out and when the advance poster came out it was everywhere you looked. Plastered on the sides of buses, on taxis, and up and down the walls of the subway. Posters, especially those in the subways, were prime targets for graffiti artists and anyone with a magic marker and something to say. The thing is, nobody ever tagged or defaced the Batman posters. It was almost like they were protected or sacrilegious to touch.

As far as the movie, I thought casting Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman was a fatal flaw that I could never get past. Michael Keaton is a talented actor, and I’m sure that he’s a fine, upstanding gentleman, but the truth of the matter is that he’s a shrimpy little guy. Bruce Wayne needs to be a big, almost hulking man. His tailors can cut his suits to help hide his bulky shoulders and ironing board legs, but when he attends a social event he inadvertently towers over everyone in the room. He has to be big because this is the same guy who holds bad guys by their ankles off the top of skyscrapers.

When I first heard they were making a Batman movie I thought that they needed to cast someone like Steven Segal. Now don’t laugh. Before he got all fat and puffy, he had the perfect body type for Bruce Wayne.

My biggest problem with the movie, aside from Burton’s inability to direct a fight scene, was Jack Nicholson as the Joker. I really liked him at first, but a little bit of the Joker goes a long way, and we saw way too much of him. So much so that he became pretty silly before too long.

The Joker was also involved in one of the most incredibly distracting thing I’ve seen in a movie. When see the Joker’s goons running around doing henchmen-like things, their jackets are festooned with patches featuring a comic book drawing of the Joker’s face. This same drawing had been around for a while and you could buy shirts and hats with it printed on them. So here’s this familiar piece of comic artwork in the movie. Where in the world did it come from? Did one of the goons have some art skills and he cooked the drawing up one day when there were no crimes to do? Arrgh. I get angry just thinking about it. The same thing happened years later in the film Jurassic Park. In the movie the gift shop was filled with souvenirs covered with the same Jurassic Park logo from the cover of the Crichton novel and the movie posters. It’s a beautiful logo, but it belongs in the real world, not in the world that we’re trying hard to buy into and be a part of. Maybe I’m the only one bothered by stuff like this.


Batman Returns (1992)
This one was just as dark and dirty as the first one. Michael Keaton seemed a little more comfortable in his platform shoes but I still didn’t buy him as Batman.

Danny DeVito’s Penguin was bleak and ugly and I have horrible memories of him chewing on a raw fish. Oh, and there was Catwoman who was handy with her sewing kit. I seem to recall Christopher Walken was the bad guy. I don’t recall what his evil plan was. And there was something with an evil circus and the Penguin floating around in a giant rubber ducky.

Nearly all my memories of this film have the same consistency of a chunk of gum stuck to the sole of a shoe.


Batman Forever (1995)
Three years had passed since the last movie. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Hey, Tim Burton is gone and Joel Schumacher is directing. That could be cool. And Michael Keaton has handed the cape and cowl over to Val Kilmer. That’s neat. He’s certainly bigger than Keaton in stature. And Jim Carrey as the Riddler?!? Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face? Hang onto your hats boys and girls, this could be great!

Well, it could have been. Unfortunately the script had all the depth and intelligence of a Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum comic, and it turns out that Schumacher is even worse than Burton at directing fight scenes. Most of them were so dark and murky that you didn’t have a clue as to who was whomping on who.

Jim Carrey gave it the old college try, but just like the Joker, a little bit of scenery chewing goes a long way. Tommy Lee Jones was just plain out of his mind as Two-Face. He was a major ham, delivering every single line for the cheap seats. The cameraman must have had to wipe his spittle off the lens between takes.

Chris O’Donnell awkwardly slips into the role of Robin, and Nichole Kidman shows up as a psychologist who tries to unravel the secrets Bruce Wayne keeps locked up in his noggin. Kidman is mostly forgettable, but she is featured in one beautiful shot. It’s late at night and she’s in bed under a sheet and bathed in moonlight. It’s a stunning image.

Somehow Batman and Robin foil the Riddler’s plan to suck all the brain power out of the world via cable television, and they get to scoot around in the Batboat and Batplane.


Batman and Robin (1997)
George Clooney openly admits that he did this movie for the money. He also said that he’d have to be an idiot to pass up the chance to play Batman. It turns out that he and his cousin, Miguel Ferrer spent hours playing Batman and Robin when they were kids.

Regrettably Joel Schumacher returned to direct. The studio tried to make this movie a success by throwing as much money at it as they could. This time Batman and Robin had a wide variety of foes to have clumsy fight scenes with. There was Arnold Schwarzenegger in his preposterous Mr. Freeze suit, Uma Thurman blowing cuckoo dust at everyone as Poison Ivy, Alicia Silverstone packed a little too tightly into a Batgirl suit, and an idiotic hulking idiot called Bane.

They through everything they had at the movie screen, but in the end nothing stuck. The best part of the movie was the ending. I don’t remember what happened, but thankfully it was over. RIP Batman. You deserved better than this.


Batman Begins (2005)
What the hell happened? What strange and twisted set of circumstances came into alignment in Hollywood to seat Christopher Nolan in the director’s chair for a Batman movie? This is the same guy who did that backwards movie Memento, and the Al Pacino thriller Insomnia. He makes films that require moviegoers to think and to participate in the film. He makes intelligent movies. Who thought he’d be good for a Batman movie?

Working off a script by David S. Goyer (remember him from the Nick Fury S.H.I.E.L.D. movie?) Nolan cast the talented but mostly unknown Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman. The stunt casting trend from the first three Batman movies was thrown out the window and Nolan filled the supporting cast with some fantastic but low key players. Michael Caine as Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler Alfred, Gary Oldman as detective Jim Gordon, Cillian Murphy as Dr. Crane/The Scarecrow, Ken Watanabe as Ra’s Al Ghul, and the superbly talented Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox. The only klinker in the lot is Katie Holmes as Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, Rachel Dawes.

The movie tells the origin of Batman. It spends an absolutely ridiculous amount of time (almost half the movie) getting to the point when we first see Batman put his cowl on to go out and bust some heads. But you know what? The story of what drives Bruce Wayne to actually become Batman is hugely interesting and entertaining. The second half of the movie is cool as hell, but there are times when I think I liked the first half better.

Christopher Nolan delivered the Batman movie that everyone has been waiting for. I don’t know how it happened but I’m glad that it did.

Daredevil (2003)
This one should have been a no-brainer. Ben Affleck as the blind lawyer turned blind crimefighter. Jennifer Garner as Elektra Natchios, a Greek (?) businessman’s daughter with blazing martial arts skills. Colin Farrell as Bullseye, an assassin who turns innocent everyday items into implements of death and destruction. The gigantic Michael Clark Duncan as the Kingpin, a crime boss without equal. And then you toss in Jon Favreau as the chubby comic relief.

It should have been a no-brainer.

After all, it was directed and written by Mark Steven Johnson, the fellow who wrote Grumpy Old Men and the hit sequel Grumpier Old Men. Hmmm, there wasn’t much action in either of those movies. Of course he also wrote Jack Frost, the movie where Michael Keaton dies and turns into a snowman. I remember there was some action in that movie, when the snowman and his son are sledding down the hill, and later when they’re in a snowball fight. Maybe Mark Steven Johnson was hired to direct Daredevil because he wrote and directed the movie Simon Birch, that movie about the kid with stunted growth who is really depressed all the time.

In the hands of a capable director a Daredevil movie would have been a delight. Seeing the world through the eyes of a blind crimefighter would have been astounding. Unfortunately we got none of that. Too bad for us.

The Spirit (1987)
I never saw the appeal of the comic book character The Spirit. If I recall the story properly, The Spirit is a policeman named Denny Colt who the world thinks is dead, so he fights crime as a mystery man who wears a mask.

I liked this made-for-tv movie a lot more than I ever enjoyed the comic. The Spirit was played with plenty of spirit by Sam Jones, of Flash Gordon fame. The script was apparently a labor of love by the talented Steven E. DeSouza, who also wrote the first two Die Hard movies.

Nobody seemed to be under the impression that they were making one of the great films of the 20th century, but at the same time everyone seemed to be having fun, and that certainly came across in the final product. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this film and I hope to catch it late one night on cable.

Fantastic Four (2005)
This movie was made for fans of the Fantastic Four comic books of the 1960s. Everyone else should go read a book or watch something else. With a few minor changes this film is a literal translation of early issues of the Fantastic Four.

I was against a rubber suit for the Thing from way back when I first heard they were making the movie. CGI was the only way to bring him to life; or so I thought. As it turned out the rubber suit worked out just fine. Johnny Storm flamed on to my satisfaction. Sue Storm turned invisible just fine. The less said about Reed Richard’s stretching, the better.

It’s a hokey movie based on a bunch of hokey comic books. If you watch it with in the proper frame of mind you’ll have a blast.

The Punisher (2004)
This movie seems to always be on one movie channel or another. Constantly. For months now I’ve seen it on the cable guide every single day.

It’s not a horrible movie. It’s written with a degree of intelligence the surprised me. I was a bit taken aback that it was set in Florida, but why not?

I was never a fan of the comic books. I love the concept of a man, Frank Castle, who has everything he loves taken away from him by a criminal, so he devotes his life (and his considerable skills) to punishing criminals. He goes about his task with zero conscience to hold him back and with absolutely nothing to lose.

The problem is that he couldn’t be portrayed as the killing machine he really was in a comic book. Even with a ‘Mature’ label on the cover, he could never be shown as the bad-ass- killing-machine that he’d turned into.

The movie took two hours to tell his origin and get him to that bad-ass-killing-machine stage, and then it was over. The movie I really want to see is the sequel that begins exactly where the first movie ended.

The only really bad thing about the Punisher movie was casting John Travolta as the bad guy. Travolta never came close to melting into his character, so it was always John Travolta smoking a cigar and telling his goons to go kill someone. Totally distracting. He had no business being in this movie.

Elektra (2005)
Just like Catwoman, I’ve tried to watch this movie at least three or four times, but have never finished it. Everyone walks around in this movie like they’re only there because they lost a bet or they’re doing someone a favor by being there. If the studio had the kind of money they wasted making this movie, they should have done a sequel to Daredevil with a better director.

This film has all the appeal to me of a soggy dishrag. I get depressed just thinking about it.

X-Men (2000)
I was lucky enough to see this movie at a special screening with an audience that included Stan ‘The Man’ Lee, who co-created the X-Men in the comics in the 1960s. I was a staff writer for Stan Lee Media and it was a blast getting to work with one of my idols.

There is a huge amount of this movie that I enjoyed. Most of the casting choices worked quite nicely. I had my doubts about a lightweight like Hugh Jackman pulling off Wolverine, but he did it. There was lots of fun action and Magneto was a delight. The biggest problem I had with X-Men was that from the very first frame of the film it felt like a set up for the sequel. For two hours I sat through the construction of the foundation and framework for X-Men 2. It felt exactly like an elaborate exercise in seeing how the characters worked and experimenting with how to best show their powers.

It was as though the director, Brian Singer, knew for a fact that he’d get to make a second movie, so he was simply introducing the characters and situations to the audience and ramping up to the eventual second outing, where he could really cut loose.

X-Men 2 (2003)
And then he did it. He had us prepped and he really cut loose. X-Men 2 was a blast. Everything was in place for Singer to shock and amaze us. Which he did.

The addition of Nightcrawler was a thing of beauty. The makeup people started with the Nightcrawler we’d grown to love in the comics and then took him to an astonishing new level. He could BAMF here and there with and he moved with the grace of a supernatural athlete. Alan Cumming, the man behind the mask apparently didn’t have a great time making the movie and didn’t show interest in suiting up for another film, which is a shame. I would watch him read the Pennysaver Gazette for two hours.

The film kicked ass from start to finish. Wolverine finally got to see where he was turned into the monster that he is today. It would have been nice to see a Sentinel or two running around stomping mutants, but I guess you can’t have everything.

At the cost of the first movie, Brian Singer hit the nail on the head with this one.

The Hulk (2003)
I’m sick and tired of defending this movie. For a while I got kind of bitter from the reaction I got from people after telling them how much I loved this movie.

For me, Ang Lee hit the nail on the head. Directly on the head. I loved the way the Hulk looked and moved. There was a joke going around that the Hulk was little more than an angry version of Shrek. I hate that joke because it’s simple and wrong.

I had doubts when I heard about Eric Bana being cast as Bruce Banner, but he brought the character to life. Sam Elliott was a freakin’ blast as T. Bolt Ross. Jennifer Connelly was not the Betty Ross from the comics I grew up reading, but this wasn’t a 1970s comic, so I grew to like her a lot. The same thing for Glen Talbot, who was a minor bit player in the comic that became a major player in the movie.

Ang Lee had massively huge balls to periodically interrupt conventional movie storytelling to switch over to a quasi-comic book storytelling style. Floating panels would pop up on the screen to show alternate angles of the main shot, close-ups, reaction shots. Lee didn’t abuse this device. He seemed to only use it when it was only needed, but brother was it effective. It brought comics to the screen like never before.

I’m not a massive fan of Nick Nolte as Bruce Banner’s long lost father being a major player in the story and eventually turning into the bit villain the Hulk has to battle at the end of the film. When I heard that there was an absorbing man-type character in the film I thought it would be the actual Absorbing Man character from the comics. Instead, Nick Nolte’s character accidentally gets absorbing man-like powers in his attempt to become a bigger and better Hulk than his son has become.

I don’t agree with this part of the storyline, but it’s Ang Lee’s movie and you can take it or leave it. In the end, I’ve decided to take it.

Blade (1998)
I dislike this movie, but then again I greatly dislike Wesley Snipes, so this may have tainted my view of the movie. Snipes may be an outstanding person who gives to charities, is a sparkling conversationalist, and is kind to small animals, but he gives off a vibe that I just don’t like. I don’t know the man, but I think if I did I would despise him. That may be shallow, but I yam what I yam.

My memories of the movie are foggy. I recall liking the way the vampires died. That was visually exciting. Kris Kristofferson was fun as the crusty Whistler. I don’t know if his character was in the comic book, but I liked him in the movie. Speaking of the comic, even I was a diehard Marvel reader, and a massive Gene Colon fan, I never got into the Tomb of Dracula books. Perhaps if I was the movie would have meant more to me.

The bulk of the movie was a blur to me. There was something silly about a Blood God in the end, but mostly it was an incoherent blur.

Blade 2 (2002)
I remember even less of this of the sequel than I do of the original. The director came up with an even cooler effect for the way the vampires die. I seem to recall that Whistler had a helper named Scud who turned out to be a bad guy.

So, if I dislike Wesley Snipes so much why did I bother seeing the movie? Because I’m dumb. I think I went because Ashley Wood, who was staying with us at the time wanted to go. Most of the film remains a blur to me.

Blade 3 a.k.a. Blade Trinity (2004)
I somehow fought the urge to see this in the theater. It was tempting, though. The addition of the buff Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel characters was appealing. Plus Patton Oswalt was in it, and Parker Posey, and Triple H, and Whistler somehow comes back from the dead. It really was tempting.

I have since seen approximately sixty-nine percent of this movie on cable and I’m glad I had to strength to not see it on the big screen. It could have been a great fun movie. I think it would have been a much better movie without the cartoon that Wesley Snipes has turned the character Blade into. Man, I dislike that fellow.

Dr. Strange (t.v. movie 1978)
I’ve only seen this movie once, the first (and probably only) time it was broadcast on television. I seem to recall having a bad cold or the flu at the time. I was in my bedroom and kept drifting in and out. The movie was kind of trippy, and I was kind of tripping on cold medicine (or neighborhood pharmacists used to brew up their own brand of cough syrup that they sold to their regular customers. It tasted pretty good and it had a really high codeine content in it, and it made having a cold not so really bad) and the steam from the vaporizer that my mom always kept running when someone had a cold kept fogging up the screen of the television.

I’ll have to get my hands on a bootleg version of the movie to see if I recognize any of it.

***On a side note, I’ve never been a big on for seeing movies while stoned. Back in the day I had friends who would see movies like Altered States while on acid, which even today sounds like a recipe for tearing your eyes out of their sockets. The first movie I saw in a theater while high was a midnight showing of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. I went with a friend and was stone cold sober when I went into the theater, but ten minutes later I had a contact high that it took me days to come down from. I was astounded. I was working as a movie theater manager at the time, and now here I was in a theater where half the people were smoking. The fact that what they were smoking was pot seemed secondary. Smoking wasn’t allowed in movie theaters and now everyone was lighting up all around me. To make matters worse there were even Rent-A-Cops/security guards standing at the back of the theater. Nobody seemed to care but me. About half way through the movie I had inhaled enough second hand smoke to stop worrying and to focus on the movie. It was kind of fun. Bakshi had ripped off Vaughn Bode blind. That was evident. And there was some nice artwork by comic artist Michael Ploog. But smoking in a movie theater? Even back in 1977 that was out of line.

The second movie I saw while under the influence was Ridley Scott’s Legend. The day I saw it I’d had some minor foot surgery and I was supposed to stay home and keep my foot up for a few days, but I really wanted to go. I went with either my friend Rob Dahlberg or Dale DeYoung. I just remember that I didn’t drive. I do remember that the doctor had given me a bottle of painkillers that worked above and beyond the duty. I popped a handful as the movie started and wound up have a very good time. Mia Sara made me happy in my pants, young Tom Cruise acting like a little imp boy was interesting, and Tim Curry as the Prince of Darkness followed me in my dreams for years to come. Even heavily medicated I recall that some of the effects were a bit wonky. There were unicorns that looked a lot like horses with fake horns poorly attached to their heads. I think Ridley Scott likes unicorns. I remember seeing some footage of Blade Runner that didn’t make it into the final movie. There was a scene of a unicorn with a wobbly horn on its head. ***

Mystery Men (1999)
I read the script for this movie in a cheesy motel room in San Jose and absolutely fell in love with it. I made copies for all my friends. I knew that if they could find a way to bring this script to life on the big screen it might become my favorite movie of all time.

Much of the script I’d fallen in love with made it to the big screen. A lot of important stuff was left out. The casting was inspired and stellar. The production design was innovative. There was plenty of quirkiness that you couldn’t help but smile at.

But as a whole, it just doesn’t work for me. If it were a bucket it wouldn’t hold water. Too many holes. Too many good things to count on all my fingers and toes, but just as many missed or lost opportunities.

It could have been a contender. (Plus it’s always a shame to see Eddie Izzard’s talent wasted)

Swamp Thing (1982)
Anyone with half a brain knew this was going to suck like your mom’s vacuum cleaner. There was no chance on this planet that this was going to be a good movie. You had to know this. Still, if you went to see it (like I did) aware of what a train wreck it was going to be, there was some fun to be had.

The best part of the movie was actor Dick Durock in the Swamp Thing make-up. The guy had so much personality that he seemed to shine. You never forgot that this was a guy in a rubber suit (especially when you would occasionally see the zipper seam going up his back) but Durock was so personable it didn’t seem to matter.

I don’t know if it was worth the price of admission, but it was nice to see Adrienne Barbeau’s breasts. For some reason I was fixated on her as a teenager, since first seeing her on the television series Maude. She was an original MILF.

The weirdest and most distracting thing about the Swamp Thing movie was the villain, played by Louis Jourdan. The guy looked positively sick, like he was on an oxygen tank between takes. He was so thin and boney that he looked like if he fell down he would shatter.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
I am a huge fan of the Alan Moore comic. This movie has a lot in common with the comic but is something very different.

On its own, it an interesting but flawed action movie. It contains none of the spark, wisdom and intelligence of the comic.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it, but if I came across it on the cable channels and had a couple of hours to waste, I’d watch it again. There’s enough fun stuff to keep you watching. You don’t walk away with anything in the end, but there are worse things to watch.

Supergirl (1984)
I have a memory of seeing this steaming pile of toxic waste in a Connecticut movie theater with my roommate Tom Morgan, but I could have dreamed the whole experience up. I think it’s better for everyone involved if we all agree that it never happened. It was all a bad dream fueled by some bad Indian food. Agreed?

What's wrong with Rosemary's Baby? Lots!

I finally got around to seeing Rosemary’s Baby the other day.

It wasn’t the movie I’d hoped it would be. In all fairness, there’s no way it could have been. I’d been waiting 38 years to see it and it turns out that Sondra’s father had lied about the ending.

When I was a kid I went to the movies every great once in a while. Other kids went more often, so those of us who didn’t lived vicariously through them. We would listen slack jawed as our friends reenacted what James Bond was up to in Thunderball, or how Matt Helm had put the kibosh of Big O’s latest plan for world domination in The Silencers. Between what we saw on television commercials, heard from friends, or read in the MAD magazine parodies, we got the bulk of what we were missing.

There were two movies that I would have killed for to see in the theater when I was young: Rosemary’s Baby and Planet of the Apes.

The first ‘adult’ or grown up movie I saw in a movie theater was The Godfather. (I do have a fond memory of seeing a re-release of The Great Escape at the movies with my sister Nancy in the late 1960s, but even though it was a war movie and lots of people got shot up, it was pretty tame. The only nudity I recall was a shot of Charles Bronson’s butt when he’s hiding from the Nazis in the shower.)

My mom traded paperbacks back and forth with friends and relatives and I remember we had a copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather floating around for a while. There were a couple of choice dirty parts that I recall reading and rereading with great gusto, so when the opportunity to see the movie version presented itself I jumped at the chance.

The precise details of the circumstances for my getting to go see the movie have gotten fuzzy over the years, but it involved my friend John Sivak’s older sister and her boyfriend being forced to bring John along on a movie date, and somehow I got pulled in.

It was fantastic. I had never seen such unadulterated violence in all my twelve years on the planet. There was garroting, stabbing, guys getting shot in the face, Jimmy Cann getting plugged with more lead than a case of #2 pencils, and the pièce de résistance—full frontal nudity.

When Al Pacino’s young bride dropped her undies I was flabbergasted. I may have even been flummoxed. I tried to play it cool, like seeing nude women was an everyday occurrence, but it took me a while to get my sea legs after that.

This was of course years before the invention of Cinemax. Back when I was twelve the only nudity I’d been exposed to was in the pages of the odd issues of Playboy I’d come across, and in an arcane publication called The Policeman’s Gazette, which my neighborhood barber kept in his magazine rack. I’d never seen it living and breathing up on the big screen.

Two weeks later I dodged a major bullet. My parents, along with one or two of my sisters and myself were out shopping at a neighborhood mall and it was decided that we should see a movie. The two choices available were The Poseidon Adventure and The Godfather. My mom was really pushing for The Godfather. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Saying that I grew up in a repressed household would be the understatement of the 20th century. The very concept—or for that matter, the very thought of the concept of seeing a movie that featured nudity in the company of my parents—was unthinkable. I would have imploded in a cloud of embarrassment. The only trace of me that would remain would be my smoldering Buster Brown shoes. Thankfully the decision was made to see The Poseidon Adventure instead. My heart skipped a few beats when we saw Stella Stevens swimming around in her panties, but I managed to survive the experience.

With the advent of home video in the late 1970s I’ve had the chance to see a lot of the movies I missed while growing up, but I never got around to seeing Rosemary’s Baby until a recent showing on one of the movie channels. I was a bit shocked by the nudity. Mia Farrow is a bit too boyish for my tastes, but she wasn’t altogether hard on the eyes.

The moment I was waiting for was the ending. When I was a kid I was good friends with the girl who lived next door to us. Her name was Sondra and I used to like to hang out at her house at night because her dad watched Star Trek. Sondra’s parents had seen Rosemary’s Baby and had told her all about it. In the television commercials we never saw the baby, just the crib, so I asked her what the baby looked like. She told me that her dad said they only showed it for a second. The way she explained it, which sounded logical at the time, was that the people who’d made the movie showed the baby so fast that only the parents could see it. That way little kids wouldn’t see it by accident and get freaked out.

For years afterwards I would think and marvel over how hideous the baby must have been for the filmmakers to take such preventative measures. This thing must have been so evil looking kids would rip their eyes out or jump in front of an oncoming bus.

So guess what?

Guess what I’ve spent the last 38 years wasting my time wondering about?

Sondra, if you’re out there and you happen to be reading this, please email me your father’s telephone number. I’ve got something to say to him. I don’t care if he did introduce me to Star Trek. I still have a bone to pick.

The image up on top is from the U.S. release of the movie. Here’s the Polish release poster. Polish posters kick royal ass.

Are you there Jobs? It's me, Fred.

My apologies to Judy Blume for the subject line.

So, there I am plunking away on the typewriter I've borrowed from my next door neighbor when I hear a thud behind me. One of the cats has knocked over my toasted iBook. The office is a bit of a mess with all sorts of things in there that don't belong, so it's paradise for the cats.

I try firing up the computer once again, thinking that perhaps the flop it just took might have been just the kick it needed to come back to life. Computer chips are tiny, right, so a crack in it the width of a hair could cause it to short out, right, so maybe all it needed was a jolt in the right direction to put things back to plumb. Right? (I know I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to technology, but weirder things have happened. Don't judge me. Don't you judge me!)

Needless to say, it didn't work. The computer chimed, the hard drive spun to life, the power indicator glowed a soft blue, but the screen remained black as night. I had a half a thought of calling the place where I'd purchased it a couple years ago and see if they wanted to give me a few bucks for it for parts. I'd had a replacement screen put on it by them which they'd scavenged off a dead machine, and I paid a pretty penny for it, so maybe they would give me a pretty penny for my machine. Everything worked except for the logic board.

Then I had a lightbulb-over-the-head moment. It suddenly dawned on me where I could get lots more than the computer store would give for my computer--eBay! So I took a few digital snapshots, fired up my daughter's computer and wrote a charming eBay listing. I made the opening bid $25 and let it fly. By the end of the day the bids were up to $100. The next day it went up to $150. I was starting to feel pretty proud of myself. The only downside was my daughter looking over my shoulder when I would check the listing to see the current bid. Somehow she thought she deserved a cut of the profits. I've raised a monster.

Bidders started asking questions about the iBook. I hadn't listed the processor speed, because I didn't know what it was. They showed me where to look. Some bidders wrote in with suggestions for getting the machine started, which I thought was pretty cool. I tried their suggestions to no avail. Then someone wrote to ask the serial number of the computer.

I thought this was a strange question. I wrote back asking him why he/she wanted to know. eBay has an option where you can post your questions and responses at the bottom of the listing. One eBayer saw the question and told me why they wanted to know. The person who wrote to me works for Apple in Canada. He told me that there was a group of iBooks that were sold a while back that all seemed to come down with logic board problems. Apple notified dealers that if anyone was having a problem, they would replace the board free of charge. Mr. Canadian Apple guessed that the person who wanted the serial number knew about the recall and was looking to nab it out from under me with none the wiser. (Or perhaps the person was going to look the serial number up and then tell me to bring the computer in. Must not expect the worst out of people, after all)

I brought the laptop to the place where I bought it, the same place that told me it had a bad logic board and they could replace it for $800. The fellow who helped me looked it up on the computer and said, "Oh, yeah, they'll fix it for you. We'll send it in and we'll get it back next week." I was a bit dumbfounded. Didn't he think that the person who checked the machine out for me last time and told me the bad news should have checked to see if Apple would cover the repair?!? His response was, "Yeah, he shoulda checked."

If my name was Bruce Banner I would have turned green and trashed the place, but my name is Fred so I took it like a man and walked out the door. I did steal an iPod, though. That ought to teach 'em. The iPod had a key attached to it by a short chain, and the insides are empty--no electronics. What I'd stolen was the bathroom key for the store.

It might take a few hours, but eventually someone will feel my wrath. Someone who had the burrito supreme for lunch.

My groin hurts…

I know, I know…thanks for sharing…too much information.,.yeah, yeah.

Well, it hurts.

My groin, my pain, my blog. It’s not like you pay to get in here.

It was my intention to spring out of bed this morning and get busy churning out pages on the typewriter before I saw anything shiny that might distract me. I’m at a really good place in the rewrite I’m working on and I wanted to strike again before the magic faded.

Instead, when I stood up I had to sit back down. I’ve got a problem with one of the joint on the right side of my pelvis. The doctor isn’t sure of the cause of the problem. It could be the result of being overweight most of my life, or it might stem from a motorcycle accident I had in the 1980s. It doesn’t really matter. Some days it hurts a lot, some days it doesn’t. There are people who survive and thrive every single day with a lot worse.

I get some measure of relief from pharmaceuticals. I also get a fair amount of relief by stretching out on my left side with my right leg propped up. It seems to counteract the pressure or something. So instead of springing out of bed I slumped to the floor instead.

The cats thought this was great sport and were convinced that I wanted to play. And so I did, until they got bored and went off to lick themselves. Not being flexible enough to do the same, I browsed the bottom shelf of the bookshelf I was next to. The books down there don’t get gone through and reread often, because, frankly, they’re way down near the floor and the books up on the top shelf, where no bending is required, always seem to be more interesting.

One of the books I came across was ‘The Last Catholic in America’ by John Powers. It’s a fun story about growing up Catholic in the south side of Chicago during the 1960s. My friend Jim Higgins bought me the book at a musty used book store while we were roommates in New York.

It was a treat finding the book, and an even bigger one when I found what was tucked between the pages. Three photographs taken during one of the best days of my life.

There’s a nugget of insecurity buried deep inside me (perhaps part of the reason for my groin pain) that still thinks Valarie Lee Jones married me because she lost a bet, or felt sorry for me. I have no idea what I did to deserve this wonderful woman in my life, but if I ever figure it out I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, my groin still hurts. The purple chair I’m sitting on is better suited for my daughter than me. I should go lay down on the floor and see what other treasures I can unearth.