Monday, August 29, 2011

Home Alone (1990)

Macaulay Culkin gets left behind by his parents because they don't care about him, he's afraid of a pigeon man (the pigeon man might actually be from Home Alone 2: Jason Takes Manhattan), Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern try to rob his house, and he stops them with hilarious booby traps,* any one of which might easily have straight-up killed these two people. I guess I remember the entire story line (although, then again, I think all of what I just said might have been in the trailer). Christopher Columbus wrote Gremlins.

Why don't all movies star adorable hilarious children??
(Oh, right—because we're trying to keep the suicide rate down.)


* That's what I said! Booby traps!

Monday, August 22, 2011

The Opposite of Sex (1998)

Christina Ricci goes to... Wait. I'm not sure about "goes to." It might actually be the case that the only thing I remember about this movie is "Christina Ricci." I'm confident about that part. Maybe at one point the boom comes into the frame and it's somehow "meta" and intentional?—and/or an embarrassing fuck-up that my friends and I noticed and couldn't believe? [It might be funny if I pretended to think that Christina Ricci gets chained to a radiator in every movie she does, but that's not really what this blog is about. THIS SHIT IS REAL.]

Pretty much the only image that comes up if you Google this movie.
The good news is, this might end up being almost as popular as
Porky's with my accidental-Google-Image-pervert-click demographic.

Monday, August 15, 2011

My Cousin Vinny (1992)

Joe Pesci is a lawyer who represents "two yoots" in a criminal trial (car theft?), and Marisa Tomei is his hot girlfriend or sister or something who staggers around endearingly in high heels and a short dress. Is one of Joe Pesci's clients the Karate Kid? Probably it looks like they don't have a chance and then it turns out Pesci's seemingly ridiculous tactics are actually dark-horse brilliant. We might guess that the prosecutor is an asshole and is duly humiliated. Years later, Marisa Tomei is topless all over the place, and I am not trying to complain about that.

Paint on a mustache and squint your eyes, and might this not
look a little bit like The Paul F. Tompkins Show? FINALLY: A
REFERENCE I CAN BE SURE EVERYONE WILL GET.

Monday, August 8, 2011

TV I Don't Remember: Shirt Tales (1982-1984)

You know how some television shows for kids are pretty much just commercials for toys? (For example, I'm pretty sure the entire He-Man universe was created as a workaround for the fact that Mattel couldn't get the merchandising rights for Conan the Barbarian. That's not a joke I just made up: I'm pretty sure it's actually true!) Well, I Googled Shirt Tales a while back and found out that it started out not even as a line of toys but as a line of greeting cards. With origins like that, how could the show not be good?

I remember that these were a bunch of knee- or waist-high talking animals wearing different-colored T-shirts that would all turn the same color (blue?) when they needed to...um... OK, I have no idea what was different when the T-shirts changed colors. I think it was set up like a superhero thing—or, you know, like the way Voltron would assemble and then kick ass—but I'm not sure anything actually happened when it happened: it really might have been all convention, no content. They had some kind of batmobile they'd drive out of their tree (because they lived in a tree), and they were maybe in a park or a zoo with a groundskeeper who was always trying to catch them and lived in a house with his family. There was a girl panda and a boy monkey (who talked like Humphrey Bogart, whom I first learned about via Shirt Tales). Maybe their batmobile flew? I'm pretty sure my parents hated this show. Hated.


I'm sorry, what's that fucking possum's name?!
Oh...Digger. OK.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Patriot Games (1992)

This might be the point at which Harrison Ford stopped being rakishly delightful and started getting all gruff and unhappy and "Get off my plane" about everything. In this movie he thwarts an IRA bombing and the IRA gets mad—maybe he kills somebody's brother—so they start stalking him at his beach house or something. I think maybe they drive after his wife on the highway in a Libyan terror-van ("Run for it, Marty!") and she gets in a car crash and Harrison Ford gets pissed. Or maybe that's when they go to the beach house? Like, Harrison Ford lures them there? That's all I got. [Oh, and this is kind of a Hunt for Red October sequel.]

"I am never gonna let you go! You hear me? Never!"