“For I Had a Story that No One Could Beat...”

I went to Best Buy this weekend because I had to return a DVD someone had given me as a gift (I already owned it). This wasn’t a trip I was anticipating with any great excitement, because my Best Buy is located in an extremely congested area. It’s in this block of strip malls containing the local Wal-Mart (my least favorite store of all time), a couple of grocery stores, Target, a sporting goods store, Borders, and every other shop anyone in a twenty-mile radius could want. So the titanic parking lot that services all these stores is a study in stationary road rage, compounded by the fact that the exits are ingeniously situated in a way that induces traffic jams, which in turn induces impatient people to lay on their horns for extended periods of time. In short, it’s not a fun place to visit unless you’re the type who enjoys honking back.

So anyway, I finally found a parking space that was holding a mere two stray shopping carts from Wal-Mart, parked, and then played human Frogger with a handful of pissed-off motorists still looking for their own semi-empty parking spots, until I had made it safely inside Best Buy (1500 points to me!). I got my DVD stamped by the bouncer guy who was putting the moves on one of his co-workers at the door, and then joined the long line of blank-faced customers at the returns desk. A few minutes later this guy standing in front of me got shit on by a bird.

Okay, that’s not true, but there were at least three birds flying around inside the Best Buy. Isn’t that strange? I kept waiting (indeed, some might say praying) for one of them to tag somebody in line, as long as it wasn’t me. Because although I don’t normally find humor in the suffering of others....oh, who am I kidding? I’m a loyal disciple of schadenfreude (as any self-respecting fan of The Office is). Anyway, it never happened. Nothing fun ever happens when I’m around... *sigh*

After I returned home I wondered what my reaction would’ve been if a bird shit on me inside Best Buy. It seems like it would be a particularly degrading thing to happen to one while "safely" indoors, you know? Out in nature it’s a potential hazard we all live with. But I think I’d take it personally if I got shit on within the spacious, yet undeniably artificial (and, one would think, not very bird-friendly) confines of a retail superstore.

Would I get out of line? Perhaps I’d walk up to the wide-eyed girl behind the desk and say, “I’m sorry to interrupt your transaction with this other customer, but I just got shit on. By a bird. Inside your store.” Then I’d stare at her expectantly, with poop running down my forehead. How could this poor girl possibly respond to such an odd a series of statements?

“Um. That sucks. May I offer you a Kleenex?”

More likely I’d get out of line and head straight for the door, secretly itching to snap at the guy who’d stamped my DVD on the way in, should he be foolish enough to ask to see my receipt. Let him try, if he dare. “I just got shit on!” I’d reply venomously. “By a bird! In your store!” Perhaps hoping he’d fall all over himself with heartfelt apologies, shoving $50 Best Buy gift cards into my hands, etc., etc.

Though of course it’s more likely he’d barely take his eyes off the co-worker he was flirting with to say “Okay, sir. Have a nice day!” using that ersatz enthusiastic/automatic delivery of which only retail employees are capable. After all, he doesn’t own the fucking place. Why should he care? He’s just trying to get laid on his lunch break.

So I guess this entry is my first (and hopefully last) homage to Dr. Seuss’s And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, the classic tale of a kid who saw absolutely nothing of consequence on his way home from school one day. I’d like to tell you that my next entry will cover something that actually happened in the Real World (instead of my childish “I like stories about poop” world) but I’m not making any promises.

Actually, Con Air Sucked Too

Though I hope to not fill this blog with sad tales of my workplace or, worse, even sadder tales of driving to and from my workplace, I’m still struggling to figure out what would make a good story here and what wouldn’t. So let’s consider the following a little experiment:

This morning I needed a stamp for an addendum to my January rent check that had to get postmarked TODAY (another story, much longer and fraught with pain--not to mention even lamer--than the following one, so I won’t go into it), and in asking around I learned that Deborah, our receptionist, was usually willing to sell stamps to employees as long as they only wanted one or two at a time. I took this to mean that these stamps must be from her personal stash, which I found a little odd but irrelevant to my own dilemma. So I walked to her desk and asked if this was true (that she sold them, I mean, not that they were from her personal stash)--you have to be careful with Deborah--and she said yes, “as long as you only want a couple.”

Wanting to show that I’d been adequately warned of this stipulation I said, “Oh yeah, I only need one.” This seemed to please her, and I’m all about pleasing people, so I began to feel like the transaction was going pretty well. She pulled a metal box out from under the desk, opened it, peeled off a stamp and handed it to me. Just as I stuck it onto the letter she said, “That’ll be 37 cents, please.” That’s when I looked down at the quarter and dime I was holding and wondered why I thought stamps were still only 34 cents.

One thing that might help you appreciate this story is a quick description of Deborah’s attitude. She’s usually perched right on that line between playful sarcasm and authentic annoyance, so that you’re not sure if she’s really rolling her eyes at you or just doing it for effect. It’s no exaggeration to say that half of the people in the building are afraid of her. So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I said, “Uh, they’re thirty-seven cents now?” She smirked that smirk of hers and asked me how much I planned to give her, so I held up the quarter and the dime for her to see. She only saw the quarter at first and practically shrieked, “You were going to give me a quarter?”

“No, no!” I fanned out my coins (can you fan out two coins?) to show her and said, “I thought they were 34 cents for some reason.”

She made a harrumphing noise and said, “This ain’t 2001, honey,” and I could only nod at that since I was still baffled as to why I couldn’t remember the correct price of a stamp. For as many bills as I pay in a month you’d think I might have it stuck in my head a little bit better. (Then again, the reason I needed the stamp was because I’d unthinkingly paid last year’s monthly rent amount instead of this year’s monthly rent amount--but I promised I wouldn’t get into that, didn’t I?) So anyway, since it was too late to give back the stamp without using a pair of scissors, I promised her I’d be right back with the two cents I owed her.

Only I didn’t have two cents to give. The thing is, I was so eager to get away from Deborah that I completely forgot I keep all my change at home in a big jar, because I hate change.

So every time I passed by the front desk for the rest of the day (which, it figures, amounted to about six times more than I normally would in an average day) she’d call out “Where’s my two cents?” or “I want my two cents!” which made me laugh--not only because Deborah’s got a great delivery (and because she has always been stoically unmindful of whether there are any other people in the reception area when she says stuff like this), but also because it kept reminding me of the pissed-off paperboy in that John Cusack classic, Better Off Dead.

So I guess the moral of the story is that I like John Cusack--even though he occasionally makes crappy movies like America’s Sweethearts and Serendipity.

"WHAT'S WRONG?"

So I received the newly released DVD of THX 1138 for Christmas this year, and despite the prominently placed phrase “The George Lucas Director’s Cut” all over the box (which should’ve set my spidey-sense tingling) I was really excited to watch it. For, as anyone who’s suffered through a conversation about movies with me knows (assuming he/she didn’t stop paying attention when I launched into my detailed lecture on the staggering genius of Jim Carrey’s 142 distinct facial expressions, as cataloged by me), THX 1138 is second only to Blade Runner as my favorite science fiction movie of all time. Since the advent of DVDs I’ve been waiting patiently for this one, because I’d never seen it in its original widescreen form (I wasn’t even born when it was released in theaters in 1970, and the two movie house revivals I’ve attended were both a bit of a letdown, sound- and picture-wise), and I was well aware of the rumors that Warner Brothers had cut a few minutes out of Lucas’s final cut back in ’69, which I was hoping accounted for the “Director’s Cut” hoopla on the box.

Silly me. This is George Lucas we’re talking about, after all. And he ruined it. Not completely, mind you--nowhere near the level of defilement he inflicted on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (not to mention Return of the Jedi, a movie I don’t even particularly like). He was actually kind of restrained, comparatively speaking. But still, he changed it. And it pissed me off. Listen: I know George has lost his mind. He has created two of the worst big-budget science fiction movies I’ve ever seen, and he’s about to release a third. But I can ignore those horrible prequels because they don’t diminish my love of Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back one bit. They are completely independent of each other as far as I’m concerned. But George’s newfound discovery of the joys of re-editing is leading to some truly criminal acts. I kept my mouth shut when he made Greedo shoot first, etc., because let’s face it, Star Wars is a movie for kids. Sure the films were perfect in their original incarnation, and no amount of “updating” will make them appear as if they’d just been shot yesterday (which, as far as I can tell, seems to be George’s intention), but the Star Wars movies are diversions. They’re fluff. I love them, but despite all of Ben and Yoda’s pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo they still have very little to say. THX 1138, on the other hand, is a movie with a soul. And George did his best to try and rip it right the fuck out of its chest.

So as I said, it pissed me off. Enough so that I wanted to write George a letter, but I knew he’d never read it. Then it hit me. This blog is the perfect forum for such bursts of impotent rage. So although George will never read it, at least it’s in a spot where he could, assuming he ever Googles himself along with phrases like “colossal dickhead.” And thus, without further ado, I present to you my open letter to George Lucas:

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Dear Mr. Lucas,

Thank you for raping what is perhaps your most important (not to mention most personal) movie. It didn’t even occur to me that you might do the right thing and add a bunch of useless shit to this film. I was so naïve! Let’s face it, this movie’s 1969 incarnation was totally low budget. Never mind that this actually worked to the movie’s thematic benefit. Sure, the idea was that this particular future you were showing us was a sterile, barren, and oppressive environment devoid of interpersonal contact, and that the only color and vibrancy was in the items that our degraded future selves were supposed to “buy, buy more [of], and be happy.” But that was 1969. As you’ve rightly judged, that movie no longer has any value or meaning in our new utopian culture. So you did what any sane director would do: you added digital effects to spruce it up and rip that old theme to shreds.

Boy, the ’60s (with its three television stations and its lack of a global company like AOL/Time/Warner controlling pretty much every facet of popular culture) sure was a nightmare world! But now, in the Golden Age of the new millennium, with commercials for Zoloft, Propecia, Zanax, Wellbutrin, Viagra, etc., all over the place, and soothing 24-hour cable channels inundating us with celebrities who are famous because they’re rich, or because they’re pretty, or because they fought their way onto some reality show and humiliated and degraded themselves for the public’s fickle pleasure by eating monkey rectums, the dangers of a vacant, over-medicated life are a thing of the past. So why have a movie in which human existence has devolved into a horrifying world of drug-controlled, zombified masses? How depressing! No, it’s much better to add some cool cars zipping around the streets, showing that life isn’t so bad after all (as long as you have some money).

I also liked the nicely polished, slightly fake-looking robot factories. Sure, it jarred me right out of the fictional world I’d been absorbed in up to that point because it didn’t mesh at all, but so what? Style over substance is the way to go. (Well, that’s not entirely true, because if you had wanted to maintain the style, you would’ve realized that adding everything you did completely ruined the style. So I guess what I mean is “Neither style nor substance--just neato special effects.”) And by showing us the robot policemen all naked and stuff, you’ve really taken away some of the menace they had--which is great because, honestly, why should we be afraid of this movie’s authority figures? They’re not so bad, right? They’re just doing what they were programmed to do by the state. Yes, you’ve done an excellent thing here. Movies with messages are for pinko, aging hippies, and you’ve got an empire to rule, am I right?

The only thing that bothers me is the scenes in the white prison room. It’s just so...stark, y’know? It’s like there aren’t even any walls in that room. I assume you just ran out of time and weren’t able to add a bunch of electronic-looking shit floating around in the air for no reason whatsoever. That would’ve really enhanced the point you were trying to make. Assuming you remember what point you were trying to make with this movie. It’s okay if you don’t--the screen looks completely cluttered now, and that’s what really matters!

It’s also too bad you couldn’t replace Robert Duvall and Maggie McOmie with computer animated characters. I think this movie would’ve worked a lot better with a couple of Jar Jar Binkses instead of humans. (Which, of course, would've gone against the theme you were exploring with SRT, the hologram character, but never mind about that.) Nothing against Robert or Maggie, but they were so expressive in the film. As they reunited in the white room I actually started to feel some authentic emotions for them and their predicament, which was completely uncalled for. I’m sure you did your best to make them as wooden and automated as the policemen (not to mention every actor you’ve used since Return of the Jedi), but that’s the problem with flesh and blood actors; they tend to bring so much...I dunno...humanity to their roles.

I guess all that’s left now is for you to create a “director’s cut” of American Graffiti, which I’m really looking forward to. First of all, I think you should digitally insert Harrison Ford’s character into a much more modern, sleeker car. That roadster he drives is so 1950s, you know? I mean, c’mon, if any movie needed an update, it’s one that looks like it’s taking place during the Eisenhower administration or something! Also, you should digitally enhance Cindy Williams’s rack, because big boobs would really add dimension to the movie, and that’s what it’s all about.

You remember that time you hired hundreds of carpenters to construct Jabba the Hutt’s sailbarge, and it took them three months to finish it, and then it only had about 17 seconds of screen time before you blew it to smithereens? And you remember how you said, at the time, that a special effect was merely a means to an end, not the end itself, and that any moviemaker who showcased his special effects was doing so because he didn’t have a story to go with them? Thank god you’re not that guy anymore! What a douche he was! And just think--now, with computer animation, you don’t need those carpenters at all. Lucky for us you don’t want to put all the fancy stuff in the background--it should be right out front where even the nearsighted moviegoers can see it plain as day. In fact, you know what would be coolest of all? If you basically threw away the original print from American Graffiti and just started from scratch, creating everything digitally. It wouldn’t even have to be the same story. You’re George Lucas--do what you want, man!

Sincerely,

me

P.S. When did you replace your human brain with a robot one? ’Cause that was a super idea!!!

P.P.S. I hate you.