Being sick, I've had a lot of time to sit around and watch movies.

6. (1235.) Saturn 3 (1980)
While I find it hard to believe that Kirk Douglas would willingly be in a movie this bad, his co-star is Farrah Fawcett, and I find it hard to believe she could be in a movie any better than this. (It's even harder to believe this piece of Star Wars-exploiting gore-porn crap was directed by the same man behind Singing in the Rain!) Blech.

7. (1236.) Never Too Young to Die (1986)
Jon Stamos in the role he was born to play: a college gymnast-turned-super-spy in love with Vanity (the singer, not the deadly sin)! Not quite good enough to be a cult classic, but Gene Simmons does his best to make it so as the inexplicably hammy (and criminally underdeveloped) evil hermaphrodite.

8. (1237.) Fool's Parade (1971)
This film about a few ex-cons running from corrupt officials is the definition of a "star vehicle." It simply wouldn't work at all without Jimmy Stewart bringing his screen persona to the poorly defined lead role. In fact, most of the roles are poorly defined, but Jimmy Stewart bets you won't notice until it's too late.

9. (1238.) Killing Gunther (2017)
SNL alum Taran Killam's directorial debut lampoons the particular genre of movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, which makes it all the more entertaining that Schwarzenegger is on board to lampoon himself. Much enjoyed.

10. (1239.) The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001)
A made-for-television movie starring Richard Dreyfus. It feels to me that the movie makes mountains out of mole hills, but then again I was only 5 when the key events took place, so I'm in no position to have any perspective on the national mood at the time.

More to come.

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From here on out, I'm going to make an effort to make my posts more cohesive. Looking back, it appears to me that my blog posts ramble all over the place. For example, take a look at something I've blogged about many times over the years, something like movies. Sure, most of what you'll see is my predictably negative feedback about how much I hated whatever super-hero movie I just watched. Only occasionally I meander off and talk about Golden Globes or Eddie Murphy's head. And I never talk about how much I like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane or Beautiful Girls. Well, until now.

Maybe when I start typing, I should write down a topic sentence. That way when I wander too far from the plot, like Terminator 2: Judgement Day, I can remind myself where I was going. Although people seem to like Terminator 2, despite the fact that its story takes a 90° turn about halfway through and appears to destroy its own premise. If Sarah Connor destroys the research that leads to terminators, she can't have been harassed by terminators from her future and a whole lot of people will have wasted a few hours in a dark theater.

I find that long-winded obfuscation of the actual point is a flaw in most of Cameron's scripts. I like True Lies, but it also takes a right turn about halfway through. More accurately, I suppose what I object to is the subplot in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and his crack team stalk his wife when the main plot is about a terroristic threat to the United States. If spend our time worrying about who loves us, then we've let the terrorists win.

Couple my distaste for Cameron's screenwriting with the public's overboard response, and it should be easy to understand why I still haven't seen Avatar. Call it a personality quirk, call it a character fault, call it curmudgeonly pigheadedness. If the silent majority decides to like something, I'll decide to hate it. And once I decide that I'm going to do something, it's a done deal.

Wait. What was I saying?

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I just watched Schwarzenegger's movie Commando straight through for the first time. (I'd only caught the very end before.) I found it very amusing. I should have watched it before now. I had no idea that it had such a robust cast: In addition to the obvious Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong, and Alyssa Milano, the film featured Dan Hedaya (who looked afraid of the gun he was firing at the film's climax), Bill Duke (the world's blackest man), David Patrick Kelley ("Warriors, come out and play!"), Branscome Richmond (who is in almost every non-speaking role in the past 30 years where a Portuguese/Spanish/Mexican/Indian is getting his ass kicked and the director needs a good reaction shot but we all know him from Renegade), and Bill Paxton (as Bill Paxton; is there any other role for him?). I mean, damn.

Speaking of casting, when it comes time for Schwarzenegger's Col. John Matrix to kill everyone in sight, it's pretty clear that they weren't filming on location in Latin America. (Wait, is John Matrix even a real name? His daughter's name was Jenny Matrix? Could I just make a movie and call someone something really stupid like Ford Taurus and get away with it? At least "Action" Jackson and "Desolation" WIlliams were nicknames.) I think every extra was a white guy wearing a really bad Groucho mustache and fake sideburns made of felt. Perhaps the grooming habits enforced by Dan Hedaya's deposed dictator were the reason that he was overthrown in the first place. It can't be easy to fight a coup d'etat when you have to make sure that you aren't sweating off your spirit gum.

It would have been a MUCH better film if any attempt had been made to make Matrix's antagonist Bennett look a) strong, b) fearsome, or c) less like a butch fag. (Clearly, this is the character that South Park's Mr. Slave is based on.) Bennett's mustache is the worst looking thing in the movie after his leather pants and sleeveless chainmail shirt. As Matrix taunts him into a hand-to-hand knife duel, his face goes through some orgasmic contortions that I think are just a little bit uncomfortable to watch on a man dressed in fetish gear before a bodybuilder who has been oiled-up for a "straight" action scene. Then I'm suddenly supposed to believe that this flabby gay man has equal strength to manly-man Matrix, who I've watched break steel chains in his bare hands, lift a phone booth over his head, remove a bolted down car seat, and kill Bill Duke? Um, no.

It's also completely worth noting that this film was penned by Jeph Loeb, a comic book writer that I once respected. That is, until he teamed up with Jim Lee to produce one of the worst stories in the history of Batman only to wash it down with some of the worst stories in the history of Superman/Batman. >sigh<. Credits for the film bill Loeb as "Joseph Loeb III," the same writer who wrote Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf 2, which really means that I shouldn't have ever respected him as a comic book writer in the first place. Teen Wolf was the only movie that I was ever embarrassed for having watched. My skin still crawls thinking about it. Curse you, Michael J. Fox, for following up Back to the Future with that, that... thing!

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Gooooold!

I may have mentioned the TV show Gold Fever on my blog before. If not, shame on me. It's broadcast on the Outdoor Channel, the same channel as the sublime Ted Nugent's Spirit of the Wild, and features prospecting enthusiast Tom Massie crawling through caves and tundra in search of that most alluring of elements: goooooold! (Which is, I swear, how Tom pronounces the word every time he says it.)

The show is unintentionally one of the funniest on TV. Tom's earnest, endless pursuit of gold is just about as amusing as watching Yosemite Sam chasing Bugs Bunny. I've seen Tom get lost in a cave, slip and split his pants, and fall into a creek, all the while talking 100 words per minute about gold and pitching $80 annual memberships in the Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA). In short, I've always pegged this guy as the good-natured, hyperactive fellow in high school who was a lot of fun to hang out with for a few hours, but a few ounces short of a pound, so to speak.

Turns out, Tom Massie is the Executive Vice President of the Outdoor Channel itself, a $40 million company. Tom and his comparatively surprisingly suave brother Perry - think of redneck versions of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger from Twins - have owned and managed the company since the death of their father, Buzzard (no joke), in 1993, developing it into a minor media titan on the back of such shows as Shooting Gallery, Inside Paintball, and Turkey Country. So not only is Tom Massie a cornball, gold hunting machine, he's also a successful television executive in the dog-eat-dog world of cable television.

What is the moral to this story? Don't judge a GPAA book by it's cover? Scratch the surface of a ridiculous goofball and you may find gooooold? Do what you love and the gooooold will follow? I'll let you decide.

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