Taxing Our Movie Patience

I love movies. I borrow them from the library or from friends. If I really like a movie, I look through the bin at the Dollar Store, or on the shelves at Goodwill. I have several shelves of slightly scratched or cheap DVDs.

Sometimes I even pay more than a buck to buy a movie or television series, but only if it’s truly great art, or has lots of explosions in it. But after I pay, there’s a second sales tax that comes with it – not a money sales tax, a sales tax of my time.

Back in the days of VHS, I put in my tape, hit play followed by fast forward to get through the leader, advertisements, previews, and that stupid FBI warning that everyone has seen thousands of times and nobody reads.

I can still fast forward, or even skip the previews on a DVD, but a lot of the crap at the front they MAKE me sit through.

I put in the disk and up comes the community standards warning on the first preview. I hit every button I can think of to get past that endless screen. I can press the skip, fast forward or even the menu button, and the stupid DVD doesn’t care. If I want to avoid seeing that tired old message (which I haven't read yet,) or the more tiring FBI message (which I also haven't read,) or the most tiring or all Interpol message

(which I refuse to read because I'm AMERICAN, buddy, and I don't spell it with a K!) I have to leave the room.

How is that right? If I own a DVD, why can’t I skip through that stupid crap? Sometimes even the anti-smoking ads are skip-proof. There’s absolutely no reason for this. It’s not as if some movie bootlegger (or chain-smoker) can stand up in court and claim ignorance of the law (or danger of cancer,) because the skip function worked on their DVD.

Lions gate is the worst. They won’t even let you skip the elaborate hour-long (at least it seems that way,) Lionsgate logo sequence that begins in the inner-workings of a door lock and ends with music so loud that you’ll either be too deaf to hear the movie, or you don’t catch the fist lines of the feature because you turned the sound down low – which means you’ll have to rewind or restart which, of course, leads you back into that stupid lock leading to the ear-crushing crescendo.

Maybe Lions Gate has financial interest in hearing aids.

Disney – a once beautiful visionary producer of family entertainment, now turned evil corporate octopus – gives you a confusing option to skip the 25 minutes of promotional garbage, but only if you can figure out what button to push when they tell you to. I’ve yet to choose the right one because I guess I’m not smart enough to follow their legally acceptable instructions to avoid their marketing blitz.

I bet the average parent of five-year-olds isn’t smart enough either.

And I guess that's the problem. We, the consumer public are collectively too stupid to demand that governments and corporate villains stop taxing our leisure time with their boring, obnoxious, and sometimes phonetically harmful propaganda.

Demand you rights! Tell these time-stealers to enable our FF, skip and menu buttons. Go to it now, fellow consumers!

And while you're doing that, I'll be chuckling manically as I fast-forward my old, but user-friendly VHS tapes.

Take that, time wasters!

Here's the least worst of the YouTube vids on the subject.

TatTwoo

   I've never gotten a tattoo.  I could only think of one thing to put on my arm - a picture of Herve Villechaize.

   I figured people wouldn't get it, and a lot more would misunderstand.

   But in spite of have no intentionally pigmented scars on my body, I can still appreciate those on other folks - especially those people who aren't worried about being misunderstood.

  After all, who wouldn't understand having SUMT or OLAE on your hand?  But some people go a lot further than that.

   I lack the insight to get a tat like that.

   Of course one eye lacks depth perception.  This guy (I assume it's a guy,) is a natural for teaching middle school.

   And if you can tattoo eyes on your body - why not put body tattoos on the eye?

   Here's somebody who wanted to make the phrase, "Talk to the hand," more feasible.

   If he won't talk to you, you can always talk behind his back.

   Or to his finger puppets.

   Tattoos have a way of bringing people out.

Which can be good or bad depending on what's in there.

   As with gas, it's better out than in.

   This one never got all the way out.

   Is this coming out or going in?

   I wonder how many paint fans have dangerous creatures attack and don't brush them off because their first thought is: "When did I get that tattoo?"

   In the end, the most important thing is just to be honest with yourself.

  Here's a few more from Ellen

Slapstick Stickback

“A boisterous form of comedy marked by chases, collisions, and crude practical jokes.”  - American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
(This is why I so rarely quote - the reference is three times as long.)

Slapstick goes back to Rome.  Along with crucifixion, it’s one of those wonderful innovations of civilization that separated the Republic from the barbarians.
It’s named for a stick that sounds painful, but isn’t so much.

 I don’t think that was the intention with crucifixion.

Aptly or not, modern comedy has incorporated Crucifixion into the slapstick genre.  But it's not all so grisly.

Early films incorporated a great deal of slapstick.  Clever repartee was difficult without sound.

Chaplin was considered a cinema god for his mastery of the art.

Until we deported him for having different political views than most of his audience.

And so the entertainment industry sought out acts to take up the slack.

The Little Rascals

Laurel and Hardy

Abbot and Costello

and of course...

The Three Stooges

For eighty years they have defined American Slapstick comedy

Even when Shemp replaced Curly, they were better than any other team,

Then slapstick got relegated to cartoons.

Live comedies relied on snappy dialog as opposed to physical comedy.

With some wonderful exceptions.

Maybe that's why we're so angry all the time.  We take ourselves too seriously.  What America - the World needs today is...

A good pie in the face.

Or maybe just to watch a bit more Monty Python

A Little Golf

A Little Golf

Golfers are an odd lot. Everyone knows it. Yet most middle and upper-class men, and many women flock to formerly useful farms and pastures to be numbered among those odd-balls a few times a week.

Where else would you see a cut-throat venture capitalist get out of his Mercedes convertible equipped with the latest Blaupunkt to drive a batmobile cart with a jet afterburner in the back.

Or the staid, dignified banker, with her pinstripes and Rolex become a cross between Hippie Barbie and a stain glass window?

I've come to the opinion that the oddness is meant to appease the deities of the game. Hubris is the bait that brings lightning bolts from Olympus (or Valhalla,) and it's hard to accuse a fellow in knickers and a pink shirt of being too proud.

Of course the spiked shoes might not please the worm gods. That might explain why a tiny white ball will so often avoid 30,000 square yards of perfectly solid, grass-clad turf and instead come to rest in the only tiny-ball-sized divot on the entire fairway.

In golf, the little things mean a lot - the ball, the tee, the pencil cut down to a third of its normal length just to fit the theme. This might be why so many golfers don't say, "I'm off to play golf," and certainly never say, "I'm off to play a lot of golf," but rather say, "I'm off to play a little golf."

Shouldn't little golf include things like a windmill, or a volcano?

"No," says the golfer. "That's miniature golf. A little golf is 18 stretches of land large enough to accommodate the Vatican - distances so vast that a cart must be employed to avoid the onset of physical fitness."

The carts, as much as the clothing, show the priorities of the golfer.  You have the impatient golfer who customizes his cart to gain the right-of-way.

The romantic golfer, who in spite of his deep passion for his bride, cannot for a moment abandon his true first love.

The man-child golfer who waxes nostalgic for his first Big Wheel.

The holiday golfer, who, though he abandons his children the moment the presents are unwrapped, does not wish to be accused of lacking the spirit of the season.

The obsessive golfer who spends so much time in his cart that he's forgotten where he lives.

And the ever-hopeful golfer, who deludes himself into thinking that by customizing his cart he can convince karma to let hopeless causes win out.

For me, the only attraction is the opportunity hit carefully manicured lawns with an iron bladed stick and rip out long strips of turf that cost a gathering of millionaires thousands of dollars to plant and maintain.

It's almost like a martial art.

This explains two things - why I like to use my seven iron on the green, and why I'm rarely invited to play any given course a second time. They particularly hate my 37 practice swings per shot when I hack away at their landscape without putting down a ball to hit.

These pros apparently didn't appease the gods.