tammytoes

I hope everyone had safe, warm, and relaxing holidays. Thanks to Ray, my family, and my friends for making sure that I did.

Napoleon 2: Electric Boogaloo

Okay, I can’t seem to stop having conversations with people about Napoleon Dynamite, so I felt the need to write a follow-up. Let me be clear: I didn’t hate this movie. I feel strongly irritated by it, but seething hatred is the kind of emotion I save up for films like Elephant (which I had the displeasure of seeing several months ago on DVD and hated so much I couldn’t even blog about it) and for filmmakers like Kevin Smith (one day I will surely blog about why I hate Kevin Smith, dear readers, and it won’t be pretty). So here are my final words on Napoleon Dynamite: it’s mean and it bugs me.

It’s mean because it develops no internal life for its characters. Somehow the actors playing Deb and Pedro manage to wring something out of their badly-drawn dialogue, but everyone else is just occupying film space. Which means that when Napoleon Dynamite gets his head slammed into a locker by a corn-fed jock while looking out past the fourth wall with that slack-jawed blank look on his face, we – the audience – are the ones wearing the letter jacket. The film is an exercise in laughing at people, not laughing with them, which left me feeling irritated and empty afterwards. And how hard is it to come up with a town full of eccentric nitwits and poke fun at them? The real trick, the real meaningful exercise of satire, is to offer something creative and original – even if you’re creating through idiosyncrasy or being self-referential.

It bugs me not just because it’s mean, but because it’s smug. Let me put it this way: if a David Lynch movie had a scene with someone feeding a llama in it, it would freak the holy crap out of you. Or make you cry, or laugh heartily. Because the llama is there for a reason, taps into something happening for you or for the character feeding it or imagining it, it has a point for being there even in the most eccentric of circumstances. In Napoleon Dynamite, a character feeds a llama because the filmmakers think it will be funny to have someone feed a llama in their movie. Or perhaps more specifically, they think it’s a funny way to further humiliate their main character. This is not brilliant filmmaking, nor is it even very funny filmmaking.

It’s just mean and it bugs me. So there.

However, lest you think I’m a film snob, I would like to take this week of blogspace to do something embarrassing to myself. Therefore, for the rest of the week, I’ll be adding a feature called JUSTIFYING THE CRAPPIEST MOVIES I ADORE.



Justifying the Crappiest Movies I Adore Part One: The Blood of Heroes (1990)

Let’s just start off with a doozy, shall we? The Blood of Heroes is one of my all-time favorites, a relatively plot-free, semi-violent, post-apocalyptic sci-fi spectacle with no special effects and bad dialogue. And I love it. The first reason why I love it is because it takes place in some unspecified future time after the world has been ravaged by nuclear war and cities have moved deep underground. This gives the film all sorts of license to have its characters do silly things, like carry a chest of drawers on their backs and strap old tires to their heads for armor. The second reason why I love it is because the film completely bypasses the need to explain anything. No kidding! There’s a brief prologue at the beginning of the movie that tells us that the movie is set SOMETIME in the future, and that NO ONE REMEMBERS why or how people of the unspecified future came to play the futuristic sport that the movie revolves around. That’s right – the filmmakers don’t even try to get you to suspend your disbelief – it just doesn’t matter! By the way, in case you’re interested, the futuristic sport in question is called “jugging” and involves teams of people using American Gladiator-like weapons in an attempt to beat the hell out of each other and put a dog skull on a stake. That’s pretty much it, all right. The “plot” follows an ex-pro jugger named Sallow (Rutger Hauer) as he and his rag-tag team of tire-wearing jugger friends attempt to play and beat one of the pro league teams. So they fight, and then they drink a little bit and exchange some bad dialogue, and then they fight again, and the whole thing happens over and over for about 90 minutes. And there’s a subplot involving a young jugger played by Joan Chen who desperately wants the attention of the league and she gets to do this super-cool scene to prove herself to Sallow and the other juggers by ripping off another jugger’s ear with her teeth in slow-motion. And there’s a character named Dog Boy. And Rutger Hauer wanders drunk through the movie saying things like, “We’re playing like old women. We should be drinking and fucking by now,” and clearly wondering how he got fat since he made Blade Runner and ended up in this terrible movie. And there’s a couple of great actors (Joan Chen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Delroy Lindo) in here clearly trying to pay their rent. It’s second rate Mad Max and Death Race all the way.

In one nonsensically memorable scene, the juggers take an elevator underground to get to one of the Five Cities.

Joan Chen to Rutger Hauer: “How deep do we go?”

Rutger Hauer to Joan Chen: “Very deep.”

That’s right – it doesn’t matter! Let’s just go beat the crap out of some other juggers!

The thing about The Blood of Heroes, though, is that it rocks. Just like Blood Sport, you somehow get sucked into it. The jugging scenes are highly enjoyable, and the characters are somehow sympathetic and interesting. It’s pure, joyful, craptastic entertainment. Semi-famous martial arts guy Richard Norton even gets a cameo. And there’s this loveable hulk of a bad jugger guy named Gonzo. I could go on for hours, but you should really just come on over, guzzle a beer or two, and watch The Blood of Heroes with me.

So – whatdoya think of the new digs? I’ve finally added comments, so feel free to add your own breathless prose to the site.

Also, stop by and check out water-wings.blogspot.com, the fancy new blog hosted by our beer-swilling bad girl neighbor, Carrie. She’s got an awful perty picture from her wedding posted there!

Get a long little doggies!

Have had a cold the past few days but have been also feeling so good about my place in life, the universe, and everything that I didn’t really notice until I was hacking up a lung at 5 am this morning.

Speaking of life, the universe, and everything, I just re-read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and giggled many times as I reconnected with my inner nerd. 42. Remember when that seemed like the most clever thing you ever imagined?

Several people in my apartment complex have been robbed the past few days. It’s made me realize how little I have to steal.

Walked four wonderful dogs at the shelter this weekend, realizing that people who walk by kennels at dog shelters and think to themselves, “That dog is way too wacky and has way too much energy,” are likely missing out on great dogs. Once they get their noses in the wind and some grass under their feet, the craziest of dogs in kennels are often the sweetest, calmest of creatures. Just ask Ramsey, the 150-pound slobbering demon beast Rottweiler who quickly showed himself to be a genuine sweetheart, the best walker I’ve ever had, a surefire sucker for hotdogs.

Spent a full afternoon on Saturday in the company of women, doing yoga, meditation, guided writing, and something called “authentic movement,” which would be easy to snark at but revealed itself to be a thoughtful way to reflect and learn. Loved it.

My dear friend Lanie wonders if she has failed her blog, comments that she is perpetually scrapbooking. I think there is much more going on than that, but even if there wasn’t, what would be wrong with it? I am glad that she keeps writing, and I think that she has more than three readers.

I read my undergraduate honors thesis on Kathy Acker today and I had a hard time wrapping my own head around it.

Ray has come home with Theraflu and I look forward to cough-free bliss and a few hours of medication-induced dreams.

A tribute to annoyance…



First, Napoleon Dynamite.

Okay, I know that everyone is salivating over this one, and that’s the reason I avoided it for so long. Whenever anyone would talk about it, I got that vaguely queasy “I’m wondering if I’m gonna be the ONLY person on earth who doesn’t like that film” feeling and, sure enough, I was right. Let me be clear – there’s talented filmmaking and acting at work in Napoleon Dynamite, but the movie is strictly a one-trick gig: put a dumb (or alienated) character in potentially embarrassing situation, and then embarrass them. Hah-hah, wasn’t that funny? I think what perplexes me the most about this film is that so many nerdy (and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible – have you seen photos of me as a kid??) people like it. Because the filmmakers have invested absolutely no heart in their nerdy characters and don’t care about them a whit. The entire narrative engine of the film drives to the big Napoleon dance scene, which is truly an awesome spectacle, but the ensuing applause and support Napoleon receives from the student body that previous ostracized the hell out of him is disingenuous at best and more likely a big dumb fake laugh at you, gentle audience member. Because the only reason the other students cheer at the end is that they’re supposed to in movies like this, otherwise we’d have to realize that the film despises its own characters. What a cheat. The ending of the film makes this clear: in a pretty darn well-filmed scene of Napoleon and his friend Deb playing tetherball together, the camera pulls out slowly and When in Rome’s “The Promise” starts up on the soundtrack. Wicked sarcasm, all right, but the joke is still on the characters. Because the film refuses to take them seriously at all, refuses to step up the creative potential of satire. Perhaps my viewing of the film was obscured by the fact that several rows in front of me were a gaggle of preppy high school girls laughing their asses off at the movie. They had obviously seen it many times and were anticipating each embarrassing moment for Napoleon Dynamite as it happened on-screen. In a world where Napoleon Dynamite actually came out on top, these girls would have been skewered by the film, forced to identify with all of his moon-boot, Pegasus-loving glory. But not in this film.



Maybe two reasons to see it: Jon Heder gives the finest mouth-breathing performance in film to date and Tina Majorino manages somehow to transcend the bad screenwriting to give her character Deb a soul. Other than that, I’d recommend renting Rushmore, Welcome to the Dollhouse or Election again.



Then, there was the car.

And, to put a big cherry on top of the banana split of annoyance I felt with Napoleon Dynamite, I walked out of the movie theater to discover that someone, in an attempt to steal my car, had pried off the handle of the driver’s side door and cracked some of the metal casing in the door itself. NICE. I’m not sure exactly why they were going for my uncooler-than-thou fuel efficient vehicle when there was a Lexus two parking spaces away, but with the holidays around the corner and hence the cash flow not really flowing right now, the net result of that has been some increased agility as I now have to climb over the passenger seat and stick shift to get into my car.



And, ongoing.

Those motherfucking Old Navy commercials! The ones in which the people show up to sing badly-written jingles about sweaters…is anyone else terrified by the Damian-esque little kid in front? And how weird is it that all of the singing people from different ethnicities look exactly the same?

some things that have made me happy the past two weeks. in no particular order.

big bunches of love on the beach. snorkel hunting. snow. moonlight. surprise hot chocolate from ray. making friends out of strangers. volunteers. flourescent crabs. happy voice mails from new york. grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. giving thanks. pad thai. candles. the pacific ocean. a new humidifier. iguanas. mashed potatoes. volunteering. seeing a cockpit up close (all the fuses!). mail. vacation. pajamas. the beach. the mountains. anticipating visits from old friends. thinking about the new year. costa rica. new blogs to read. good gas mileage. black beans. glasses. learning. loving. being.

really.