…then are Mott The Hoople fans “Hoopleheads?”
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Author: Thoughts On The Dead (Page 92 of 1031)
I’ve had this scene in my head for 40 years, and I’m only finding out today that one of the Airmen was Leo McGarry? AND THE OTHER ONE WAS BABY MICHAEL FUCKIN’ MADSEN?
AAAAAAH! GHOST PANTS!
“Stop that.”
Who said that? I see only a set of legs in a pair of ludicrous trousers and overpriced trotters.
“We get it. The jacket’s camouflage.”
See what I did?
“Yeah.”
Although see ing as how you’re in the Hollywood Hills, wouldn’t it be better camouflage if your coat had a picture of Laura Dern’s house on it?
“She lives right up the street.”
Under-appreciated talent.
“Banged her.”
Nice. So that’s the Nomad 3L from Visvim, right?
“Oh my God, yes! I never thought you’d start showing some interest in my–”
CELL PHONE NOISE
“–collection of…you’re a prick.”
Yes.
“Is it Nixon?”
No.
“Kim Jung-Un?”
Nope.
“Am I gonna enjoy this conversation?”
Maybe at first.
“Prick.”
…
“You’re on with J–”
“Baby sweetie honey this is your old friend and confidant Diamond DAAAAAAAVE comin’ atcha live and in person dispersin’ ALLLLLL the hits and good-time groovinary hijinks and grabass that you’ve come to demand from the brand. David Lee Roth: Accept no substitutes, especially if they’re named Sammy Hagar, HAHAHAHAHA!”
“Man, I wish you called me when I was 16. I don’t know if 45-year-old me has enough energy for you.”
“Want some coke?”
“No, I–”
“You got any? I got some, but some turns into none real fast when Diamond Dave’s in the house.”
“No coke.”
“More for DAAAAAVE!”
“Do you always refer to yourself in the third person?”
“Little trick Ricky Henderson taught me! Now, Joshy Boy, you strap on a chair and tell your ol’ Uncle Dave what’s happening with the computers. I was on a visionquest with two Mayan rock climbers I know from Piscataway and Miss March 1984 when I was informed the computers were talking about me.”
“Quick question: Do you know what Twitter is?”
“Sure, that’s what the guys in AC/DC call cocaine.”
“I’m not even gonna try to explain social media to you. What happened was that a 17-year-old didn’t know who you were.”
“Chick?”
“A young woman.”
“How the yobbos?”
“She’s 17.”
“Yeah, I gotta get in there quick before she wears out.”
“I’m not discussing this any more. What’s with the Confederate flags?”
“It’s a party, man.”
“Not when I am.”
“When are you?”
“The future.”
“Well, shit. Can’t fuck teenagers, can’t fly the Rebel flag. Future sounds like it’s full of pussies.”
“Yes and no.”
“Petey Pumphouse.”
“What?”
“My mustache. If I had one, that is. I’d name him ‘Petey Pumphouse.’ It’s informal, yet harkens back to a more masculine era. Lotta hark in that name.”
“I don’t give a shit, Weir.”
“What’s your’s name?”
“I didn’t name my goddamned mustache, man.”
“What if it wanders away?”
“I’m gonna go stand behind the drums for a while.”
“Okay. I’ll, uh, see the two of you soon.”
I repeat myself: the Rolling Stones’ unreleased material is better than 99% of other bands’ actual records. Here’s all I could find on YouTube.
Banquet-era:
Sticky Fingers:
Exile:
It’s only rockyroll, kids:
Some Girls gimme money:
Some Girls gimme gold:
Suckin’ in the 80’s
Suckin’ in the 80’s (and 90’s!):
Ain’t too many of Tom’s songs fit for Monday mornings, but this is one of ’em.
Hey, Bobby. Whatcha doing?
“Benefit of some sort.”
For?
“Got me. I, uh, would assume not the John Birchers.”
Do they even still exist?
“Yeah. They’re in charge now.”
Right. Who are these folks?
“Wilco.”
Bobby, that’s not Wilco.
“Are you absolutely positive? I mean, uh: would you stake your life on the fact that these gentlemen are not part of Wilco?”
…
I would not.
“There ya go. Group of guys dressed like this? Nine times out of ten, they’re Wilco.”
Okay.
“And, uh, Baby Garth.”
What?
“Guy squatting down to my left. You know Baby Yoda? He’s Baby Garth Hudson.”
He totally is.
Hey, what would Also Sprach Zarathrusta sound like if Miles’ electric band played it?
Did everyone else know that My Cousin Vinny concludes with a Travis Tritt song that summarizes the movie’s plot Gilligan’s Island-style?
- Two hours and twenty-two minutes?
- Fuuuuuuuck me.
- Wait, can I make a wish?
- You’re allowed to make a wish at 11:11, but what if the tragically flawed film you’re watching is 2:22?
- Your wishes should be heard in that situation, I believe.
- Here is mine: I wish I were doing anything but this.
- I got, like, five books going right now.
- The new Ronan Farrow joint,
- Biography of Sam Cooke.
- Latest edition of The Best American Sports Writing.
- But nooooooooooooo.
- Attack of the fucking Clones.
- Okay, so what’s going on with the Star Wars?
- Is this Naboo?
- All planets in Star Wars have one climate, as we know.
- Hoth is ice.
- Tatooine is desert.
- Naboo is CG.
- Hey, an explosion.
- I do love when shit blows up.
- In some films, nothing at all blows up.
- I can’t stand those movies.
- Ever see that flick where Anthony Hopkins plays a butler who’s secretly in love with Glenn Close or some lady who kinda looks like Glenn Close?
- They just hang out in castles and suppress their feelings at one another.
- No kung fu,
- That’s not the content I crave.
- And now we come to two of the Prequel’s fatal flaws:
- Everything is boring.
- Everyone’s a fucking moron.
- Look at this bullshit:
- Jus’ sittin’ around havin’ a chinwag.
- Bubba!
- Fetch me up mah whittlin’!
- This is not to say that a conversation between two (or more) seated participants must necessarily be boring.
- Remember the scene with Hans Landa and Farmer Perdit in Inglorious Basterds?
- Ooh, what tension.
- George Lucas does not do that.
- Characters sit.
- And they talk.
- Then there’s a screen-wipe.
- And, like I mentioned, everyone’s a fucking moron.
- Palpatine doesn’t do a heel turn in the third film.
- He’s openly, blatantly, gleefully malevolent from the get-go.
- Cackling and rubbing his hands together and saying obviously evil shit.
- And these MAGICAL, MIND-READING WIZARDS have no clue.
- Dumbasses.
- And now we get an action sequence.
- Boba Fett tried to kill Natalie Portman, whom My Boyfriend and Calvin Klein were protecting.
- They were protecting her by leaving her alone in a room with a giant window.
- Again: fucking morons.
- (I will call Hayden Christiansen “Calvin Klein” because he reminds me of an underwear model: he’s very pretty, and I don’t need to hear him speak.)
- Why does Coruscant look like Blade Runner?
- Were the Coruscantians also fearful of Japan taking over the world in the 80’s?
- Anyway, Calvin Klein is chasing a bounty hunter who’s also a shape shifter that was was hired by a different bounty hunter to…oh, who cares?
- Honestly, man.
- The planet is dying.
- We have no more glaciers.
- Tom Petty is dead.
- And yet this is how I spend my time.
- At least the characters in The Road spent their end of the world getting some exercise in.
- I’m gonna see in the apocalypse at home, bitching about my WiFi strength.
- Oh, god, they’re in a cantina.
- It’s Star Wars, so there’s gotta be a cantina.
- That’s what the song El Paso and Star Wars have in common: both require a cantina.
- But Rosa’s cantina did not contain any Rodian bounty hunters or Twi’lek dancers.
- Cartoon Yoda looks so cheap.
- The Mandalorian made a wonderful decision to use a puppet for Baby Yoda as much as possible.
- You might not notice, but your brain did.
- A REPEATED NOTE: It is difficult to discuss the Prequels without merely reiterating the points of the great Mike Stoklasa at Red Letter Media, whose reviews spawned a billion imitators, none of whom are any good.
- Holy shit, Calvin Klein is a creep.
- How did he bag Natalie Portman?
- Wait.
- Hold up.
- Rose Byrne is in this?
- Oh, poor Rose Byrne.
- You are better than this, Rose.
- You can do comedy, drama, accents, everything.
- AND you married Bobby Cannavale.
- That’s some damn fine marryin’, Rosie.
- YOUNGLINGS!
- Not “children.”
- Cuz otherwise, they would have had to say that Calvin Klein killed a bunch of children.
- But he didn’t
- He killed younglings.
- Much better.
- Look at these little bastards:
- I hope the other younglings bullied that ugly fuck in the back.
- That kid’s too ugly to have a happy childhood.
- This scene also displays one of the larger discrepancies in the Star Wars Universe: How does one train a Jedi?
- The Prequels will have us believe that Jedis must be raised in a monastic setting, and their powers slowly achieved through years of study.
- Non-Prequel films are convinced that a couple weeks of calisthenics and meditating with a crazy old man will do the trick.
- Who is right?
- We’ll never know, but luckily it doesn’t matter.
- Another grievous (no pun intended) fault with Attack of the Clones is the structure.
- It’s wrong.
- If you built a dugout with this structure, it would collapse and kill the entire Little League team.
- My Boyfriend does have a much better haircut in this one than in Phantom Menace.
- I’d ride that man like a Bantha.
- Which would not make me gay.
- The cuddling afterwards would, but not the sex; Ewen McGregor is so pretty that sex with him counts as straight.
- Ewen McGregor?
- I’d like to see me in McGregor.
- Attack of the bones, knowwhatImean?
- Something something clones.
- Other thing, other thing Jango Fett.
- Isn’t Jango Fett a Mandalorian?
- Because he’s got his helmet off.
- And we learned from The Mandalorian teevee show that, in their culture, they don’t do that.
- It’s almost like all of this shit is being made up along the way.
- Ugh, love scene.
- Well, kinda.
- This is the outfit that Natalie Portman has chosen to tell Calvin Klein she doesn’t wanna fuck him:
- Listen, I know the term “cocktease” has been relegated to the Problem Attic, and rightly so, but come the fuck on.
- Put your damn titties away.
- And extinguish the damn fire.
- Is Space Barry White playing on the stereo?
- Enthusiasts, I am a feminist.
- I don’t play the “look what she was wearing” game.
- BUT LOOK WHAT SHE’S WEARING.
- Her tiara is saying “No,” but her boobies are saying “Fondle away.”
- Hey!
- Kung fu!
- Janky Fett and My Boyfriend are kicking one another in the face.
- Niiiiiiice.
- Although I do not know why people insist on punching Mandalorians in the face.
- In The Mandalorian, Gina Carano punched the Mandalorian right in the face four or five times.
- That seems counter-productive.
- Another car chase.
- God, is this punishment?
- I’m not saying I don’t deserve it; I do.
- But I just wanna know where I stand with The Lord.
- Anyway, Janky is chasing My Boyfriend and keeps shooting missiles that sound precisely like the low E-string on a Les Paul.
- BWOW!
- No.
- Wait.
- It’s an A string.
- Positive.
- I literally grabbed my guitar and played along until I got the right note.
- That’s how bored I am.
- So, Natalie Portman and Calvin Klein go back to Tatooine to find his mother, and they visit Young Uncle Ben and Young Aunt Beru and drink Young Blue Milk.
- Natalie is wearing this:
- And somehow the conversation is not solely concerned with her choice of toppermost.
- Enthusiasts, that is a toppermost.
- I know a toppermost when I see one.
- You think Josh Meyers has banged Natalie Portman?
- I would bet not, although I am equally sure that Josh made a run at her.
- She probably ran him off by talking about books or something.
- Anyhoo, Calvin Klein runs off into the desert looking for his mommy but then he kills all the sand-people.
- And Yoda senses it from ACROSS THE FUCKING GALAXY but is still shocked when it turns out that Palpatine is evil and Calvin is a douche.
- The Force is, it seems, wonky.
- Are there dead spots in The Force?
- Places where it just cuts out like the satellite radio in my car does at certain intersections?
- Another great failure of AOTC‘s script is the utter lack of a villain.
- Who’s the Big Bad here?
- There’s a shitload of henchmen, but no Big Bad.
- Emperor isn’t the Emperor yet.
- Count Dookula doesn’t show up until 90 minutes in, at which point the audience has been pummeled into mental retardation.
- I said it.
- I said it, and I stand by it.
- I don’t care if I get canceled: Attack of the Clones made me retarded.
- If my brain is a river, then this movie has dumped a dead elk upstream.
- Everything within me is now poisoned and sour.
- Okay, wait another second.
- They’re on Tatooine.
- Not even in the built-up part.
- The boondocks of Tatooine.
- When Calvin Klein came back from killing all the
ArabsTusken Raiders, Natalie Portman’s hair looked like this:
- This is Natalie Portman one scene later, still in the same location:
- WHO DID HER HAIR?
- Look how complicated that shit is!
- Don’t tell me Aunt Beru did that bullshit.
- What’s happening?
- They’re badly green-screened in a factory that makes computer graphics.
- And Threepio’s there for “comic relief.”
- I am not relieved.
- This comic relief is not relieving.
- And Artoo can fly.
- It would be astonishing how much functionality Artoo lost between the Prequels and the OT, if one did not keep in mind that George Lucas is a terrible filmmaker and all this shit was made up along the way.
- There are coherent trilogies.
- Lord of the Rings makes sense across all three films.
- And…uh…
- Okay, there is a coherent trilogy.
- Every single other film trilogy was just a movie that did well, and so garnered sequels.
- STAR WARS WASN’T INTENDED TO BE A SAGA.
- It was a stand-alone space romp.
- Completely self-contained.
- There was room for a follow-up, in that Darth Vader was not killed at the end, but no sequel was explicitly set up.
- Anywoogle, Calvin Klein, Natalie Portman, and My Boyfriend have re-united on a bug planet and they have to fight a Space Rhino, a Space Crab, and a Tasmanian Space-Devil.
- I just don’t care.
- Pew pew.
- Zip zap.
- Natalie Portman’s midriff is sweet.
- Good riff.
- Got some ab definition, popped-out obliques, sexy nave.
- I don’t say “navel.”
- I shorten that shit.
- Natalie Portman’s midriff does not shorten my shit, though.
- There’s elongation going on.
- FOODSTUFFS I WOULD EAT OFF OF NATALIE PORTMAN’S MIDRIFF:
- Sushi.
- Charcuterie.
- Assortment of spicy cheese.
- Cobbler (peach, apple, assorted).
- How can something be so busy and yet so lazy at the same time?
- The clonetroopers look like crap because they’re all 100% CG, and they’re all 100% CG because having a dozen guys in costume was too much of a hassle for George Lucas.
- “We’ll do it in post.”
- Everything on Attack of the Clones was done in post, including the script.
- I hate this movie and I haven’t even been paying attention to it.
- Saw it in the same place at Phantom Menace: Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
- Which really is the place you wanna see a Star Wars movie.
- Saw it with the same buddy, too, and once again on opening night.
- Everyone was cheering and whooping just like for the first film.
- And then I went back on Wednesday afternoon to see it by myself.
- I did not cheer or whoop.
- I again needed to take two smoke breaks.
- God, this is dire.
- The only way to enjoy this lightsaber fight between Cartoon Yoda and Count Dookula is to picture Frank Oz in a recording studio making all the little noises and grunts that Yoda makes while he leaps about.
- “Errphf!”
- “Graah!”
- I bet Frank Oz was pissy with the engineer.
- He’s kind of a prick.
- Wait, no, you have to be kidding me.
- 1920 words?
- I wrote over 1,900 words on this vomit-abortion?
- Fuck me.
- I’m stopping before I hit 2,000.
- Just on principle.
- I still have principles; they’re around here somewhere.
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