2002-07-26 - 12:17 p.m.

More RockGirl, Retail Therapy, and Goldmember

So my conversations with RockGirl are all about passive aggressive. It's all about trying to pretend that we're still a functioning couple while she throws in digs about how crappy she feels and how she never sees me and I just let it all slide. It's not healthy in any way shape or form and I'm an asshole and a coward.

~*~

I need to find a job. I seems to be coping with the stress in my life through retail therapy. Yesterday I ordered two theatrical swords (all swashbuckle-y and shit). Today I fell prey to email marketing (not exactly spam, but an update from a site I have shopped at before) and bought two lamps. In my defense, I've been looking at lamps almost exactly like them, but not as cool, and they were exactly half the price I've found anywhere else. I'm a sucker for shiney things, pointy things, and bargain merchandise.

~*~

Last night eRoommate and I went to see a late showing of Goldmember. If you don't want spoilers, stop reading now. Though, honestly, there's not much to spoil, and I recommend you sew a rabid badger to your head before wasting any money on this lame excuse for a movie.

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Here's the deal. If I had watched the first three minutes and then walked out, I would have been happy. I don't know how they got so many big names to do cameos in such a shitty movie. Maybe the stars didn't read the script. But then Michael Caine had a big role, so he must have known the script was shit.

This is how it breaks down. Mike Meyers has created a host of lame, one-joke characters. He trots them all out, and tells that one joke four more times. Then he brings out some new, lamer, no-joke characters. He resorts to potty humor. He revisits ideas that didn't work the first time around (like the shadow scene) or rehashes jokes that should have been done once and left for dead (Shhh comes to mind), not done four or five times.

Plot. It's a novel concept, I know. Apparently Hollywood has abandoned plot entirely. Goldmember lurches from one bad setup for a lousy joke to the next, then throws in some sappy crap at the end to masquerade as plot and character development.

In my improv classes one of the rules is "Don't go for the joke". Real funny comes from character and story. Be true to the character, and try to tell a good story. If you go for the joke, and sit there staring at the audience waiting for them to laugh, you've lost them. You might as well install a laugh track.

Of course, the shaved apes in the theater with us were that laugh track. They ate up all the crap with a spoon. They loved it.

Americans are dumb.

All in all, Goldmember did make me laugh. But five minutes after I walked out of there, I couldn't have told you what happened in the movie. It made me laugh, but it was easily one of the most ham-handed, worst, lamest excuses for movie-making I've seen in a long time.

Don't even bother.