We finally had out holiday work party and… well, let me give you a quick back story first.
At my office, which is an IT firm based within another larger company, we guys always had a sad little game we played. For all my years there, we ranked the women in the office on their level of attractiveness. I know; I already mentioned it was a sad little game.
The thing is, we always placed one woman we worked with at #5 on the list of five, no matter how many attractive women we had working with us at any time. If there were three – she was #5. If there were six – the same. (At least we were consistent.)
One thing that was also consistent about her was she enjoyed to drink. Like me. At company parties. So long as we were both at company parties, neither of us felt particular embarrassed by our levels of intoxication. In fact, sometimes we used to be able to bring others to our depths.
But she was let go last year. This holiday party was the first one I attended at which she was not present. I fear I am now the company drunk. I would have added lone company drunk, but the the implies that.
This was originally going to be a simpler post. A lackadaisical examination of Google’s search engine. An uncovering of why any time you type in an actress’ name the second search result is her name +feet. But then this happened:
And the Masters of the Microwave
I watched the original version in Italian on their website, and it confounded me. I hoped the subtitled version would help… and… well… check it out for yourself:
She’s an elderly Alzheimer’s patient, and the whole movie is her husband telling their life story, which was also based on a true story (oops, I forget to put SPOILER ALERT!)
And mix it with this flick:
And you get The Vow:
Channing Tatum plays the husband to Rachel McAdams’ amnesic wife, and he doesn’t know how to act… just like in real-life.
What color sounds like the least exciting color? Give up? Howzabout:
The Boring
So, as is par for the course on this website, I got to thinking… how many movies are named after colors much more exciting sounding than The Grey? Let’s see by checking out A Handful Of… “Color”-ful Movies.
RED
RED... featuring some ORANGE.
I could have went with some other titles like Red Dawn, Red Riding Hood, Red State, the current film Red Tails, or the French film Rouge, but I chose this one, which is actually an acronym for Retired and Extremely Dangerous. But my point is proven so far… RED sounds so much better than The Grey.
A Clockwork Orange
I prefer my clockworks to be green.
I’ve never seen this Stanley Kubrick classic, but as a student of film (not that great of one if I haven’t seen A Clockwork Orange), I am familiar with enough of it to know this was a better choice than Orange County to go against The Grey.
Yellowbeard
You have to take this poster's word that he has a yellow beard.
Yellow is a tough sell for movie titles, so this is the best I’ve got. I could have chosen Yellow Submarine or the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), but come on… Yellowbeard is about pirates! Sure, it was made before pirates were (are?) cool, so The Grey can walk the plank! Aaargh!
Green Lantern
Sometimes green means stop.
Green Lantern was a tough pick, especially against such examples of “greenness” as Green Zone, The Green Hornet, The Green Mile, and Green Street Hooligans. Maybe I should have picked Green Street Hooligans. The Grey is only slightly less better than Green Lantern…
Deep Blue Sea
Hey! Look out for that
Samuel L. Jackson makes a lot of things automatically better, and since he wasn’t in The Blue Lagoon, Blue Velvet, Blue Valentine, the French film Bleu, or the Swedish film I Am Curious (Blue), Deep Blue Sea blows The Grey out of the water.
The Color Purple
Again, my favorite color for clockworks.
Okay… so The Color Purple wasn’t my first choice to battle The Grey, but Purple Rain or The Purple Rose of Cairo don’t sound like they’d fare much better. Purple might be the color of kings, but when it comes to movies, it’s a notch better than grey.
Now if Liam Neeson’s latest was called The Gray, it’d be a completely different story…
There dream exclusively featured Gabourey Sidibe, a.k.a. Precious (she will forever be tied to this role like Jon Heder is to Napoleon Dynamite).
She played on my softball team, and she brought some an amazing talent. She had a fantastic bat that warranted unlimited homers over the fence.
Precious Fielder
Which worked out immensely well, seeing as how she had great difficulty running. We tried her at first, and we tried her in right field. But it just wasn’t working.
So then it occurred to us – deep, deep centerfield. It worked like a dream. She was a dream. It was… a dream.
I think she's even wearing high heels. You go girl.
This post comes from a time pre-blogging… way back in 2006. Times were simpler then. I didn’t have to think of new blog posts every day…
You might have seen a lot of this commercial lately:
Well, in case you’re wondering who that new group is, I’m here to help you. Hailing from Scotland, they’re The Fratellis, and this song is called Flathead off their album Costello Music.
If the band name sounds familiar (and they don’t), that’s because their name was inspired by this lady and her brood:
"You better not even think about throwing me from a train."
That’s Mama Fratelli from The Goonies. That’s where they got their name! Awesome right?! So I figured I’d let you know about a few other bands that followed the same idea.
He's from "Barbarella"... and your dreams
This one isn’t the same spelling, but Brit rockers Duran Duran were inspired by a guy from Roger Vadim’s Barbarella… a fellow named Dr. Durand Durand. (Okay, that’s not really him up above, but it’s funnier than this guy.)
A Vulcan priestess by any other name is kind of like a Romulan priestess.
Another British pop group was inspired by American pop culture. This time it was in the form of a cheesy 60’s sci-fi show… a little something called Star Trek. The character is T’Pau, and coincidentally, so is the band. What’s funny is the band sang Heart and Soul with a lot of heart and soul… which are two things the emotionless Vulcans can express.
What a nut (or in this case, a golden chocolate egg).
John Hughes saw this real water tower and based the entire film around it. True story.
The California ska band eschewed the typical ska puns common for band names and opted for Save Ferris, which is of course from Home Alone. Except for a few missteps (Curly Sue, Dutch, Career Opportunities), John Hughes was a fairly clever writer, I’d say. He’ll always be missed, like Kevin McCallister by his family. I never understood why the water tower didn’t say Save Kevin.
Not to be confused with Goldmember
California and England seem to be all about naming their bands after characters. Closing up this list is Goldfinger, named after the James Bond baddie from the same named film. It’s weird, but most of these happened to be named after bad characters or bad situations. Why hasn’t anybody named themselves after a good guy? Someone like Luke Sky(y)walker, for instance?
"So what's it about?" "Well, it's a whole movie about the opening scene of Lethal Weapon. Except it's a dude. And he's clothed."
Man on a Ledge may actually be a good film, but at first glance, it seems like a dumb idea. (Not as dumb as this idea.)
(SIDENOTE: The strangest reaction I get from the previews is that I feel like I kind of missed Sam Worthington being in a movie. It should be noted that this is not because of Avatar or any one of the 100 other flicks he made in the last two years… it’s because of a silly video game commercial.)
This got me thinking about other dumb movies that had dumb ideas and should have never been made (again, not saying Man on a Ledge shouldn’t have been made, but really), and here I’ll rank them from The Shit to Just Shitty. I saw every one of these in the theater. I paid to see them. Minimum wage pay in most cases.
(SIDENOTE: The alternative to this diatribe was about people trapped in situations and things, but I already did that once before. So moving on…)
THE SHIT
Not about ice cream.
This film being ranked as The Shit comes out of nowhere, pretty much like a tornado.
Twister is one of those films that was made mostly because it could be made (CGI effects were getting better). Aside from the graphics, it introduced cow as a catchphrase (effectively replacing Bart Simpsons’ famous cow quote). There are TV shows based around storm chasers these days, so there’s something to its premise. But then again, there are also shows about lady hoggers.
ALMOST THE SHIT
Not about a spelling bee.
I almost placed Arachnophobia at the top because of this scene:
I remembered it being better. But then again, I was only 15. Oh, if you couldn’t guess, this film was about spiders. Bunches and bunches of spiders.
PIECES OF SHIT (tie)
I like their use of yellow. It reminds me of urine.
If you stop and think about it, I paid to see not only a Jerry O’Connell vehicle, but a David Arquette one, too. What was I thinking?
Tomcats was about a group of friends that were in an eternal struggle to be the last bachelor (to win a wager); Ready to Rumble is about two wrestling fans that try to help their favorite wrestler regain his championship title. Sure, neither of their ideas are as obviously dumb as the previous two, but… I’m mostly embarrassed I saw these Pieces of Shit at the theater, hence their inclusion here.
A COMPLETE TURD
They should have tried to steal the University of Phoenix.
Jason Lee. Tom Green when people knew who Tom Green was. One of the Kids in the Hall directing. Stealing Harvard should have stole my heart made me laugh, but instead, it stole my money. The premise is simple: an uncle resorts to thieving to raise money for his niece’s tuition. No comedy ensues. This remains to be the only film I’ve ever walked out on.
JUST SHITTY
...& Boredom
Even my love for Olivia Wilde couldn’t make me like this abysmal so what? of a movie. If you guessed that it’s about cowboys fighting aliens, you’d be right. You’d be right about everything you’d guess.
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