Knowing what we know now about Mel and Gary.. this has to seriously jump up a few places on the list of greatest fights in movie history. It’s like the Irresistable Crazy meets the Immovable Insane. For all we know, the only amount of choreography that went into this was, “Alright.. you fight and Mel wins at the end. Now “Action!” “

What is going on in Arizona has nothing to do with race. It’s not whites against hispanics. It’s Americans vs. Illegal Immigrants. It’s business as usual in the media though, trying to portray whites as racist, close-minded bigots trying to hold another race of people down. I am a 35 year old white male. I am by all accounts what would be considered middle class. I wake up and go to work every Monday through Friday. I come home and help my kids with their homework and take them to their sporting events and other activities. On most days, I am up at 5:00am, at my desk at 6:30am, leave the office late in the afternoon and by the time the kids are in bed and I have a moment to myself, all I want to do is just sit on the couch, watch a little tv and get a decent night’s sleep so I can get up and do it all over again. I mow my own lawn. I put food on the table. Every once in a while, I take the kids to McDonald’s because it’s a special treat that they enjoy. My income taxes, social security contributions, etc. are automatically deducted from my paycheck. I get my health care through my employer. I lie awake at night sometimes just thinking about how much college is going to cost a decade from now when my kids are in high school and how I have nowhere near enough saved. Then I think about retirement and how I know I don’t have nowhere near enough saved at this point in my life. The media like to portray “white America” as either fatcat Wall Street types who light their cigars with hundred dollar bills or as ignorant rednecks living in double-wides. Either way.. it’s always a villainous portrayal. Well, you know what? I am a white American.

I am a person that was raised not  to see color. I grew up with the Cosby Show as the #1 rated show in America. I grew up listening to rap music and rock n’ roll and appreciated both equally. I get along with everyone.. blue collar, white collar, white, black, Asian, Hispanic and on a personal level, I can see that people are people and we’re all just trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing on this big rock. I am white America.

People love to throw out the term “American Dream”.. but what they seem to forget is that back in the day, with the flood of immigration through Ellis Island during the early part of the 20th Century is that the American Dream was simply to BECOME AN AMERICAN. Everything after that was gravy.. The Europeans that settled here from Italy, Ireland, Germany, etc.. assimilated into American culture. For their children’s sake, they learned how to speak English, assimilated into the culture and jumped into the melting pot. Their children were Americans and they raised them proudly as such. Our European ancestors did not come to this country and ask for America to take care of them.. they came here to take care of their families in America. They worked their asses off and the thought of a government handout was insulting to them. I don’t know about other cultures but I can say for damn sure, that the men of my grandparents generation of Italians in this country would be ashamed to even consider help from the government to financially take care of their families.

The color of my skin automatically carries the stigma of being considered some sort of racist oppressor if I say anything bad about anyone. I’ll never see an Italian-American president in my lifetime yet somehow I am supposed to feel some sort of guilt simply because of the color of my skin. White people marched with blacks during the civil rights movement, yet the only time you ever see white people in old video footage from that era, it’s spraying the hoses on black people.. and fifty years later, here we sit, with white people being intellectually oppressed and effectively muzzled by the mainstream media because god forbid if you have an opinion on anything.. the media sprays the hose on you and accuses you of being a racist. Then you have to do the little dance, defending yourself against the almighty “R” word with such ridiculous defenses as “Some of my best friends..” and by the time it’s all said and done, you’re exhausted and sorry you even opened your mouth in the first place. And African Americans.. while you’re sitting there buying into what they’re selling you about this immigration issue being another whites vs. minority battle.. all I can is, wake up… cause just like the media doesn’t give a flying f*ck about lower income white people.. you’re up next on the chopping block.

Remember when Isaiah Washington called TR Knight a “faggot” on the set of Grey’s Anatomy and a few months later he was given his walking papers because of it? That was the first taste that the plight of the African American in this country can be trumped by another group of people. You think it’s a coincidence that after the media celebrated our first African American president that all of a sudden here we are a year or so later, a different minority group has now come center stage in the media’s eye and has become their new focus? How can the media possibly sell the African American as the down trodden picked on race in American society when one of their own has reached the pinnacle of American politics? They can’t.. and they know it.. and they’re moving on.

Conflict sells. Strife sells. You look at any article on Yahoo or your local newspaper’s website about the problem of illegal immigration and you’ll see an interesting dichotomy, in that the story itself’s slant is so left wing and sympathetic towards the noble illegal immigrants, yet all of the reader comments underneath the articles have such a different opinion. The majority of Americans agree with what Arizona is doing.. they’re fed up with illegal immigrants draining our economy, taking away from our own children, making us bear the burden with supporting their families. (On a side note.. if the government really wants to go after illegal immigrants.. do it old school, like they did with Al Capone. Don’t even make race an issue.. just go after them on tax evasion. Most Americans; even bleeding heart liberals hate tax evaders.)

So here you have the media trying to slant the issue to make it seem like the majority of Americans support illegal immigrants when it’s not the case.. and the people that don’t support it are clicking on the articles and voicing their opinions and giving the news outlets what they reeeallly want.. which is clicks on their websites for ad revenue because that’s what all this bullshit is really  about.. and presto, we have our next civil rights movement burgeoning.. and guess what, sooner or later.. the lower class black people in this country are going to be cast aside like lower class white people were.. their voice completely taken away and eventually, when they finally speak up.. they might even start calling you racists for speaking your mind. How dare you speak ill against the noble illegal immigrants. Oh, it might not happen tomorrow.. or next year.. but it’s going to happen unless we give the media a new slant to the story.

And what the hell would sell better than whites and blacks as Americans coming together in solidarity to take a stand? Man, that would be something the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Apollo Creed showed up in Rocky’s corner when he went into his rematch with Clubber Lang. You guys have the president.. now is your chance to speak up.. now is your chance to step up. Pull out your race card and help us, cause pretty soon it’s going to be void in fifty states, Arizona included. Comprende?

Writer’s note – this was actually written at the beginnning of June but I didn’t go through with posting it.. but you know what, there is nothing racist about being a proud American and wanting what’s best for our citizens’ children.. so screw it. The media tries to sell it as a class warfare between the upper class and the lower class.. but the truth is, all rich people do is keep more money in their own pockets.. while it’s the illegal immigrants that  take money out of the middle and lower class’ pockets. While we’re being nickel and dimed for health care, insurance, exorbitant property taxes, illiegal immigrants are working the system. They’re dropping anchor babies and getting free health care, government subsidized housing and food. Their children are going to qualify for our middle class citizens children’s college scholarships because we make just a tad too much money and our children are going to be saddled with student loans upon graduation while people that aren’t even in this country legally’s children will walk out unburdened. The American Dream? It’s been stolen.. and I only wish all of the voices who only feel comfortable commenting on message boards and under articles can somehow find a way to get a voice to Washington and let them know that they don’t speak for us.. 

I mean, wasn’t it less than a decade ago that 9/11 happened and all of a sudden our society was rallying together  and it seemed like Hollywood was taking a backseat to real issues and now here we are worse than ever.. being inundated with Lindsay Lohan updates and a daily dose of Mel Gibson phone conversations (which are friggin great by the way.. ) while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t even talked about in the mainstream media hardly at all anymore. Are we still shellshocked by 9/11. Is the country in some sort of collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that was compunded by the recession? Because I look at America right now and man, it’s friggin depressing. It’s just a sad state of affairs and maybe that’s just the nature of the game.. You get older and shake your head because you know how much better things used to be.. while the country just keeps rolling along.. Maybe the American Dream was just a dream all along and the reality was always this  depressing. Who the hell even knows..

Dave

dave@whatever-dude.com

For the most part, it doesn’t bother me.  The originals still exist.  Who’s to say a remake can’t be valid in it’s own right?  Too often, however, the trend is to completely miss the elements of the original that made it popular, enjoyable…worthy of a remake.   It leaves you wondering “Did they even watch the original?…or just get a cursory glance at it’s Wikipedia entry”

Most recently the remake bug crept into the horror genre, and I still looked the other way. Despite finding these bastardizations particularly troubling, I’ve kept my mouth shut.

Anyone that knows me can attest to my horror movie expertise.  While most of my high school peers were out being productive members of society, (drunkenly trying to feel up cheerleaders on a mud covered ATV somewhere) I was at the local Blockbuster deciding whether 976-Evil or Fright Night was the better showcase of Stephen Geoffreys acting prowess.

The winner is Fright Night by a head

 Seriously, if it was on rental shelves between 1993 and 2006 and remotely resembled horror fare, it was in my VCR…as sure as Evil Ed up there ended up in gay porn.

When Friday the 13^th was remade I figured there wasn’t a whole lot of cinematic “magic” to recapture anyway, so I wasn’t too disappointed when it fell flat.  The bar was set pretty low to begin with.

The “Jason” Formula:

Setting: Campsite…or NYC streets…or Spacecraft (WTF guys, really?)

Cast: Several horny teenagers and one bookworm/ingénue/fish out of water

Supporting Cast: Cabins, Premarital Sex, Cutlery, Corey Feldman

Insert gruesome death – repeat.

Crank one of these out every 3-4 years and you’ll have an endless supply of spectators ready to shell out $9 for a ticket.

When the Nightmare on Elm Street remake overly sexualized Freddy by making him a pedophile rapist, I was disappointed.  That’s not creepy, it’s just sleazy…Even so, I thought it was a decent homage to the original.

For the record, I’m all for a darker Freddy.  Toward the end of the original franchise he was more like a stand-up comedian frequenting the airport Ramada then anything that would illicit fear.  I just wanted them to cut the cheese factor, though, not make him someone you’d see “interviewed” by Chris Hanson on Dateline.

Like most remakes, these recycled horror attempts missed the mark.  Whether by failing to find a new audience, infuriating the old audience, or by some sort of netherworld curse on anything soiling the purity of the horror classics, they’ve flopped…and I’ve mostly stayed indifferent to them, until one man decided to “reimagine” what I consider to be the greatest slasher movie of all time.  I just can’t keep quiet anymore, Mr. Zombie.

Rob Zombie: Assaulting the sensibilities of horror movie fans since 2003

After making shitty music for rednecks year after year, Rob Zombie decided to commit his brand of uninspired, low brow shittiness to celluloid also…and there was much rejoicing across trailer parks nationwide.

Before I dive into how Rob Zombie took one of the most expertly crafted and executed horror films of all time and shat all over it, I’d like to talk about what makes a movie scary.

The Scariest Thing is the Unknown

A cliché statement, yes…but often overlooked in horror movies these days.

Would The Blair Witch Project have been scary at all if you had seen what was pummeling the tent in the middle of the night, or what sideswiped our hero at the end?  No, Blair Witch was scary because everything was only implied, not shown, leaving your own personal boogeyman to populate the vacuum.  Your imagination fills in the blanks and it will always produce something more frightening than what CGI could create. (Possible exception for the closet scene in The Ring)

“Hey, have you seen my umbrella?”

I’ve heard terror described as being mauled by a tiger in the jungle, while horror is hearing the twig snap under the tiger’s paw as it approaches you from behind…and that’s an important distinction.  The original Halloween truly was a horror film.

Yes, Michael Myers wasn’t a visually unseen killer in Halloween.  He loomed like a dark cloud in the background of the whole movie.  But what made Halloween embody the concept of horror was the unseen psychology of the killer.

Freddie was burned alive and exacting revenge on the offspring of those who killed him.  Jason drowned as a child due to negligent camp counselors and was exacting revenge on future generations of promiscuous teenagers.  Michael Myers had no motive.

Halloween opens with a young Michael spying on his sister and her boyfriend mid awkward teenage coitus (in true 70’s drive-in movie fashion).  After what has to be the quickest sex anyone (aside from internet commentators) has ever had, the boyfriend leaves.  Little Mikey then grabs a butcher knife from the kitchen and offs his still naked sister in her bedroom.  The parents arrive shortly after to find their six year old son staring blankly into space, bloody knife in hand.   That’s the cold open; cut to black; fast forward 15 years.

So you’re John Carpenter and you’ve officially stunned the viewer.  No explanation? Nothing? …and there never is.  Not in the original, anyway.  Even Michael’s psychiatrist Sam Loomis, played by the B-movie scenery chewing Donald Pleasance, has no clue where the homicide came from.  His expert opinion backed by years of studying the human psyche is to deem Michael “pure evil”.  I’ve tried to find that in the DSM-IV, but I guess psychological diagnostic criteria have changed some since 1978.

“Let’s see…Narcissism, Oedipal Complex…ah, yes…Pure Evil”

So what we’re left with is a faceless, seemingly invincible killer with no clear motivation or agenda.  And that tapped into a fear we all have: Insanity.  Whether it’s our own insanity or the idea of someone out to harm us; a human threat that (unlike the rest of us) can’t be swayed with logic or reason, we all fear insanity.  This was laced throughout the plot masterfully.  When Michael impales Bob (aka: expendable horny teenager #4) and pins him to the kitchen door, he stands back and cocks his head to the side.  It’s the same look your dog gives you when s/he hears a high pitched sound.  It was a mindless inhuman fascination…it was appreciation. Those subtleties up the “creepy” quotient and thicken the atmosphere.

And that brings me to another point: Horror movies must be entrenched in mystery to be effective.   Not just a mystery about what and how, but also about why.  This can be difficult to sell in the slasher sub genre.  It’s a challenge to build more than just a surface mystery around a masked killer picking off high schoolers.  Halloween was an original, and it accomplished this through psychological implications that stick with the viewer long after the end credits have rolled.  It was done so well that in 2006, the original Halloween was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”

Let’s contrast this with the Rob Zombie school of filmmaking, which is none of those things.

Rob Zombie’s first filmmaking attempts, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, were very similar in style, and by “style” I mean groin-punching levels of maturity and taste.  Take the most vulgar, filthy, inbred, white-trash rednecks you can imagine and make them sociopathic killers.  Easy enough…it worked for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and that’s fine.  Despite my personal preference against that type of movie, I can see they have a place in the genre.  I couldn’t have survived my childhood in Alabama without a healthy fear of hillbillies…I get it.

...

Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake took those same filthy redneck archetypes and made them, not just insular characters, but the friggin Myers Family.  What was a picture perfect, mid-west family that inexplicably produced a homicidal sociopath became just another abusive lion’s den.  One of the distinguished patriarch’s first lines is about how he wants to “Skullf*ck the shit” out of Michael’s mom…ah, Mr. Zombie, your prose is so ethereal.

I would hate to live in Rob Zombie’s world.  Everyone in RZ’s suburbia is sexually depraved, morally reprehensible, and constantly drunk.

The remake’s first half is spent explaining Michael Myers and his violent tendencies.  This would be like opening Citizen Kane with a scene of Kane as a child riding his sled clearly labeled “rosebud” and then proceeding on with the rest of the movie.  Rob Zombie immediately neutered the mystery of the original and then finished up the second half with torture porn, after which he presumably patted himself on the back and continued drinking Natty Light and squeezing canned cheese into his bearded face.

The original Halloween had a nondescript quality that hit home.  You could imagine this episode happening in your neighborhood because of how unremarkable the setting and characters were.  The violence was sudden and inexplicable.  Rob Zombie’s Halloween made Michael Myers a relatable villain, and that is exactly the opposite of what made the original disturbing.  He made the soulless Michael Myers sympathetic.  He humanized the poster child for inhumanity.

And then there’s the way he treated poor Loomis.

There was no better casting choice in the original for Michael’s psychiatrist Sam Loomis, than Donald Pleasance.  Pleasance was type cast as a villain for most of his career, playing a Bond villain at one point.  I honestly don’t think anyone else could have sold the ridiculously over-the-top dialog Pleasance was asked to dish out.  I would describe him as the sole voice of reason in the film, but everything he said was so melodramatic, no one could call it “reasonable”. It’s almost impossible to believe his character was supposed to be a trained doctor.  He’s part brave hero, part crazy old doomsayer, and all horror movie icon.

The classic Loomis monologue: “I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes… the ‘devil’s’ eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… ‘evil.’

In Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell) is more of a self-interested opportunist.  He swaggers into the movie looking like a cross between a pot smoking hippie and a grizzled biker.  After dramatically removing his sunglasses in true Carusonian method, he tells Michael’s mother that her son is deranged.  A child psychologist actually described a patient as “obviously deranged”…to his mother.  I wonder if he reevaluated that choice of words after she killed herself.

Also, notice how the original Loomis spent 8 years trying to reach Michael.  In the remake it takes about 8 months for Loomis to declare Michael lost forever.  Sure, he still visits Michael for the 15 years he remains locked up, when he’s not capitalizing on Michael by writing a book about the murders or touring colleges to promote his profit making venture.

Let’s also look at Michael’s escape from the sanitarium.  The original escape was chilling, once again leaving more to the imagination.  Loomis and a nurse drive up to the hospital where they see the patients wandering the grounds.  No hit-you-over-the-head exposition, just a quick few lines of dialog to set the hairs up on your neck, and let you know that something is wrong.  Before you know it, Michael has ambushed the car and is driving away into the night.

Michael’s escape in the remake is directly attributable to (you guessed it) a couple of drunk rednecks.  Two guards decide to enter after hours to rape one of the newly committed girls, a standard Rob Zombie plot point, and they figure why not do it in the 300lb murderous psychopath’s room…which because of Mikey’s obsession with making masks, looks remarkably similar to a Slipknot concert.

The many faces of Michael Myers

Predictably, Michael dispatches them both and heads out to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting population of Illinois.

As far as the killings go, well…if you’ve seen one slasher movie, you’ve seen them all.  Rob Zombie wasn’t any more brutal in his death scene execution than John Carpenter was in the original.  Teenagers hook up and subsequently get stabbed or choked or bludgeoned and the viewers cheer or cover their eyes or say “Oh no, GIRL! Don’t go in there!!”, depending on your level of respect for the other people in the theater. Usually, a good time is had by all.

Except for me, who sits there boiling with anger that people call Rob Zombie an “artist” or a “filmmaker” or a “homo sapien”.

I guess I shouldn’t be this upset over a remake.  Maybe it’s my childhood attachment to the original.   The first time I saw Halloween, I’m not sure how old I was, but it’s fair to say I was way too young to be watching that type of movie.  It won me over early and I never looked back.  It became the yard stick by which I judged every other slasher movie I saw from then on.  I considered John Carpenter a horror master and even sat through the 6 minute fight scene in They Live because of it.  I feel like Rob Zombie skullf*cked my childhood.

I guess I’m just hoping for a new crop of horror filmmakers to be inspired by a more subtle way of storytelling.  I would hope they would focus on things that horrify rather than terrify.  If they grow up watching Rob Zombie movies they’ll never know what it’s like to be creeped out…grossed out, yes…but not creeped out.  That ability to unnerve the viewer is what made John Carpenter, and the original Halloween, great.

In the end, I’m surprised John Carpenter gave his blessing to Rob Zombie‘s crayon-scribbled rendering of his seminal work.  I’m shocked Malek Akkad, son of the original Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad, attached his name to this project.  But overall, I’m stupefied at the audacity of Rob Zombie…to think he could take the killer redneck stereotype that he lifted from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and apply it in a broad stroke to every film he makes is insulting to horror fans everywhere.  It’s an oversimplification, it’s lazy as hell, but most importantly it doesn’t fit in Halloween.  If you want to make more of your own movies, maybe a sequel like House of 1001 Dalmatian Corpses, by all means, Mr. Zombie, go for it. But leave Halloween alone.

Please.

Danny

dannygrantmusic@gmail.com

I grew up a wayward son, a vagrant, a child without a home…no, not in a social services kind of way.  I mean I was a military brat.

Being the child of a military officer affects your life in several ways.  It means spending 6-8 hours every four years caught in red tape and staggering inefficiency to get a military ID.  It means using that ID to get access to sweet Air Force base discounts on CDs and junkfood.  It often means Draconian parenting tactics.  But above those things, and farther reaching, is the feeling of not having a real home.  Moving every few years makes it difficult to establish a solid circle of friends or any sense of continuity.

These effects were much more potent for my sister than they were for me.  She’s six years older than I and did a lot more moving around, in much more formative years.  I actually got to have a pretty solid run in one location, because in ’94 my dad retired from the Air Force and we settled in the last place he was stationed.

Despite the consistent location, I never really felt like I belonged.  It could have been my ineptitude at anything sports related.  It could’ve been my obsession with comic books and horror movies.  I prefer to excuse myself for any social maladjustment and place the blame on the fact that we settled down for the American dream in Alabama…of all places.

In 1990, we moved from just outside Washington D.C. to Montgomery, Alabama.  Montgomery is an interesting choice for a capitol city.  From a city planning aspect, it could be described as a series of strip malls and pasture.  We have a downtown area with heavy roots in the civil right movement, but beyond being famous for racism, Montgomery doesn’t have much of what you’d call “culture”.

“And if you look to your left, you’ll see another place where minorities were beaten”

So to cohabitate with your average Alabamian, I realized early on certain concessions would have to be made.  I would have to pretend not to be bothered when half the kids in the neighborhood dropped the n-bomb.  I would have to curry favor with those same kids by reassuring them I was a frequent Baptist church attendee, and not the son of an atheist who didn’t even know what the inside of a church looked like.

Thankfully, like minds eventually attract each other.  I ended up attending junior high and high school at a creative arts school for kids who (for the most part) didn’t step off the deer stand and onto the school bus.  But despite fostering an appreciation for all things creative, my progressive high school couldn’t overcome some of the backwards thinking ingrained in my peers.  Certain conservative roots run too deeply to be exorcised by an art history class.

High School is a funny time.  We’re all trying so hard to establish an identity of our own, especially the “artsy” (weird) kids I hung out with.  There was such a drive for rebellion, but it always seemed to manifest in groups and cliques that were effectively being “different” together.  Sure, we had the typical goth crowd, and the hippies, and we even had the elite…well, as elite as you can get at an arts school.  Even the most rebellious still had their southern sacred cows.  Artsy kids actually purchased and enjoyed country music.  Stoners and Goths were planted in pews every Sunday dressed in khakis and button-ups.  The elites could be found slaughtering woodland creatures and mud-riding on Saturday nights.  It was a bizarre juxtaposition.

I may have spent most of my life in Alabama, but I am not of Alabama.  The rest of my family shares the same thinking.  My sister moved to New York City as soon as she graduated high school.  Her drive to get the hell out of the south was much stronger than mine.  I stayed behind and went to college at the University of Alabama.  Here I didn’t have the “arts” filter to shield me from the typical backwoods simpleton.  Students attended class in full camouflage.  Evangelists with bullhorns would shout at passing co-eds that their clothes were too revealing.  I couldn’t walk down the strip of bars on the edge of campus without hearing “Sweet Home Alabama” echoing from a dive or passing car at least 12 times.

Bonus story: Lynyrd Skynyrd actually performed a concert on the U of A quad while I was a student there.  How could a band that had most of it’s members die in a plane crash perform a show, you ask?  Well, the band is now a Frankenstein version of past members and new recruits basking in the reflected glory of deceased Van Zants.  Once word got out to all the trailer parks in the tri-state area that the ultimate redneck band would be playing on our campus, the show quickly became a debauched spectacle of drunken white-trashery…so, of course a big group of my friends and I were in attendance…can’t miss what’s sure to be a colossal shit show, right?  The highlight of the event was a middle aged lady asking me and a few buddies to make a human privacy fence around her so she could squat and take a piss right there on the quad.  Y’know, instead of walking the 20 feet to the row of port-o-johns.  Alabama = nothing but class.

Anyway, after graduating and contemplating my future working as an auto parts supplier or sales representative at Woods-N-Water, I succumbed to the pull of bigger and better things and followed the trail blazed by my sister to the big city.  Here I am today, working a corporate job in a cubicle, trying to get into the music industry, and (by virtue of my love for this site and for writing) taking a crack at internet commentary.

After living here three years, I feel like I’ve found kinship with the residents of the city.  It feels like a place that fits me, much better than Alabama, at least.  The further I get from Alabama, though, the more I start to notice my own southern sacred cows.  Take the whole marriage and kids thing, for example.  In NYC people stay single until their mid-late thirties.  There is so much importance placed on the individual: career, growth, ambitions…to get married young would be too self-sacrificial.

Contrast that with Alabama where most of my friends got married younger than 23.  And these days, every time I get on Facebook, I see status updates entitled “Meet Otis” followed by 90 pictures of a newborn.  I have to say, something in me thinks the idea of a little Danny running around sounds appealing…It’s like my Alabama self is long overdue for a wife and kids, while the New Yorker is expecting 5-10 more years of bachelorhood.

Bonus side note: Southern people are so family oriented that the latest trend is to create joint Facebook accounts, as in “TomandJenny Smith” or “CletusandBobbieSue Yokel”…I can’t even imagine the testicle-shriveling level of codependency you have to sink to for that to sound like a good idea.

So the battle continues.  On one side, I have my metropolitan self content in the cold shadow of NYC high rises.  On the other side, I can’t help but enjoy football and bluegrass music.  I guess no matter where I live there will always be a nagging voice telling me to buy a tractor and a 12-pack of PBR and have myself a party for one.  Certain roots run too deeply to be exorcised by a move to the big city.

Maybe I’ll never feel like I belong in any specific location, but if I can vent from time to time on the internet, then maybe I will have a home…or at the very least add to the number of societal rejects on the internet.  There can’t be that many of us on the web, can there?

Danny

dannygrantmusic@gmail.com

Now, I’ve sat through some extremely shitty kids movies and television shows over the past eight years..  Talking animals.. shitty cgi movies voiced by celebs.. dogs playing sports..  Hell, I’ve sat there and let my kids completely control the tv after dinner  over their lifetimes and I’ve seen every episode of Drake and Josh, iCarly, Spongebob and whatever else Nickelodeon has thrown our way.. but I have to draw the line somewhere.

Now first off, this new Karate Kid movie is pretty much a Will Smith muscle-flex, trying to jumpstart his son’s career and showing just how much clout he has in Tinseltown, that he can take a beloved 80′s movie and on a whim, find producers to bankroll it and insert his offspring into it. I had a birthday party for Max at the local bowling alley a few weeks ago.. and this is the Hollywood-elite equivalent of that..  ”Hey, whaddya want for your birthday? Oh, you want to remake the Karate Kid? Sure.. let me make some calls.”

So, now let’s look at the trailer..

Alright, now in the original, it was enough of a stretch in the 80′s  that a single Italian mother from New Jersey would get a job offer from a computer firm in California and they would relocate her and her son across country.. but you’re telling me that the plot of this one, is that a single urban mother  (and just going by what the trailer shows and what Hollywood has taught me.. her child has cornrows and is named ‘Dre.. so I know they’re not from Bel Air but from the streets) gets a job offer in China? Seriously.. read that again. A single urban mother gets a job offer in China. =/ If Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that it’s damn near impossible for a single urban mother to find a man.. but now you want me to believe that one is getting an overseas job offer, from a company in a communist country no less?

Seriously, a single mother telling her young son, “Good news.. I got the job in China. We’re leaving next week.” sounds like something that barely made the cut for the Bad Idea Jeans commercial. At least in the original, when Daniel was whining that he wanted to leave sunny California to move back to Newark, NJ, you realized that he was just being whiny because he was getting his ass handed to him every other day.. In this case, “I wanna go home..” seems like a legitimate grievance for any kid that was forced to move to China.. ass kickings or not.

Now, not to toot my own horn.. but back in the day, I wrote an article about William Zabka, who played Johnny Lawrence in the original Karate Kid (and well,, toot toot.. but I kind of was the first person in the history of the internet that recognized  the “William Zabka – Complete 80′s Asshole Trilogy – http://www.whatever-dude.com/posts/123.shtml and received a thank you e-mail from Zabka himself who told me that I completely nailed the  underlying message of the Karate Kid.

So, taking that at face value.. if the underlying message was that the original Karate Kid was a fish out of water story where the protagonist, Daniel Larusso came up against a bunch of kids who were under the spell of a Vietnam vet, who picked up karate while he was overseas.. and he mistaught these kids with a violent, Americanized version of karate that missed the point that it’s an artform which was to be used for self-defense.. and it took someone from the homeland of Okinawa (Mr. Miyagi) to teach Daniel the true values of karate to ultimately overcome his adversaries and redeem all of the kids in the process.. what does that say about the plot of this remake? That you can take a little black kid, send him over to China and after a few weeks of training, he can beat kids who grew up with “karate” as a way of life that had been handed down for generations? It’s a pretty ugly, imperialistic view of things; not to mention that Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was basically fired from CBS 20 years ago because he spoke the underlying racism that appears to be the  plot of this movie.

Karate Kid 2 was weak enough because it was a little unbelievable that Daniel could go over to Okinawa and even give Chozen a fight, nevermind beat him.. but now you’re going to use that kind of basis as the plot for the original in a reboot??  It’s insulting.. not only to Asian people but just to intelligence. Nevermind the fact that it’s not even karate that’s being taught here.. but Jackie Chan himself even refers to what he’s teaching.. kung fu. Even calling this movie the “Karate Kid” and having it take place in China would be like having a remake of the movie “Major League” be about a group of ragtag ballplayers come together for the Cleveland Indians to ultimately win the big game against the New England Patriots at the end.

I realize that it’s just a kids movie and probably nothing to get worked up over.. but you know what, looking down the pipeline and seeing that the “Red Dawn” remake is set to come out later this year.. with, once again.. the Chinese as the villains, I just have an irrational fear that soon enough, with the way things are going, we’ll be seeing a reboot of Rocky starring Nick Cannon, that has a montage that includes him running with a piece of wood behind his head that has two huge bowls of rice on each side as he trains for his big fight against Aporro Creed… and with a generation of Italian American kids now that have grown up with The Sopranos, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of NJ, etc.. the whole concept of the Italian underdog who overcomes adversity through hard work and perseverence ,which was Hollywood’s only saving grace when it came to portraying Italian Americans in a lovable yet determined light back in the day..  is being hijacked and we’re left with nothing but negative stereotypes which have actually gotten worse over the past ten years.

But I digress.. Now, sure there will be those out there that say that rebooting 80′s movies is no big deal and the originals will always still be there.  That’s the thing though.. coming from a generation of guys that grew up on 80′s movies and have a greater portion of our vocabularies dedicated to movie quotes than is probably considered psychologically healthy..  as a father of two young boys, there are some movies that I can’t wait for them to get a little older so that we can watch and enjoy them together. The problem is though, if you reboot them and then advertise the shit out of them on every kids channel; having Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan show up on every damn kids award show doing karate demonstrations over the past year.. the kids are going to want to see these remakes when they hit the theater and you’re effectively putting the parent in the conundrum of whether or not to take your kids to see these inferior products,;thus risking the kids not wanting to see the originals because now that they’ve seen the shiny new product and the originals are too old looking.. That in turn, will cause them to miss out on truly classic quotables like  ”Get him a bodybag. Yeahhh!! “Sweep the leg.” “Points or no points, you’re dead meat.” “I hate this bike..” “I really like your car, Mrs. LaRusso..” etc, etc..  and it kinda sucks because as someone who has seen a lot of kids movies over the past decade, none of them are quotable like 80′s movies were in the least. Seriously, John Hughes probably had more quotable lines in one of his movies than all kid/teen oriented fare over the past decade. It’s not just rose tinted 80′s glasses talking here either..

Perfect example of this is a few months ago, I rented “The Goonies”. Not only did the kids absolutely love it and watch it about five times during the rental period.. but even now, a few months later, Max will randomly blurt out, “Rocky Road..huh huh..”. Now, if they remade it and deemed it politcally incorrect to have a deformed,  mentally handicapped guy chained to a chair and watching tv.. and they advertised the crap of that remake and Max begged me to see the remake in the theater and never got a chance to see the original first.. chances are for the rest of his life, he’d be walking down the freezer aisle and if he saw rocky road ice cream, no pop culture reference would even register with him.. and that my friends, is bullshit.

So, while I would’ve liked to have waited until he was ten or so to watch the Karate Kid together.. Hollywood leaves me with no choice but to make a preemptive strike (Strike first? Strike hard? Show no mercy? You betcha..) and rent the original on Friday night.. and if he wants to see the remake afterwards, that’ll be fine too. I’m pretty confident that once you go Cobra Kai, you never go back..

Dave

dave@whatever-dude.com

There seems to be two camps in regards to “Sex and the City”.. In one camp you have those that think that it’s the ultimate girl empowerment show; the flesh and blood embodiment of what it means to be a woman in today’s society and to have a close knit bunch of friends.. and in the other camp is every heterosexual guy on the planet.

For the record, I have seen pretty much every episode of SATC. I’ve also seen every episode of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Carnivale, etc.. What can I say.. I was pretty much HBO’s bitch in the early-mid 00′s.  I know all about Big and Aiden.. Miranda and Steve.. I think that Kirstin Davis is a hugely underrated piece of ass and I wouldn’t f*ck Kim Cattrall with your dick.

So here we sit in 2010 and what made SATC so laughable back then is magnified by like 1000x now. Sarah Jessica Parker started her career playing the roles of the kinda nerdy, second banana type  in shows and movies like “Square Pegs”, “Footloose”,  and “Real Genius”. She made a minor transition to attractive leading lady in movies like “Striking Distance” opposite Bruce Willis and “LA Story” with Steve Martin in the early 90′s. It was an absolute stretch even at that point to consider her hot but she had a decent body at that point in time.. so we let it slide.

Then came Sex and the City.. SJP was already past her prime and her Wicked Witch of the West facial features were in full bloom.. yet here was the media shoving her down our throats as this sexpot, fashion icon.. and every guy on the planet was like WTF. The only saving grace of SATC was that it was created by Darren Star of 90210 and Melrose Place creation fame.. and it did have good dialogue and the plots were passable and HBO promoted the shit out of it.

The thing is though.. and women can’t seem to grasp this is..  but if you didn’t have Sarah Jessica Parker as the lead, SATC wouldn’t be as divisive between men and women as the show and movies have become. Now let’s put this in terms that some female readers might understand. Imagine if you toook the show “Entourage” (which was basically marketed as SATC for guys from the get-go).. but instead of Adrian Grenier as the lead.. you cast Steve Buscemi..

Alright, so we have a show about Steve Buscemi and his pals.. Now if you had every media outlet try and portray Buscemi and his character as the ultimate single male in his 30′s.. dating attractive women.. being a guy that every guy aspires to be with the keenest fashion sense (even if he dresses like a complete retard – and let’s face it.. the whole image of SJP getting splashed while wearing a tutu by a bus in the opening credits would be like equivalent of Buscemi playing football and getting tackled into a mud puddle while wearing M.C. Hammer pants). You could put up a show of Citizen Kane quality.. but you could never get around the fact that  the lead character looks like Steve Buscemi.. Be completely honest. If you saw Buscemi having two chicks fighting over him.. you’d think the show was bullshit.

And that’s why guys don’t like SATC.

So taking that into consideration..

Put a big ass hat on Buscemi and you’d get the equivalent of the picture above.. Now..  you’re going to tell me that guys don’t like SATC because they don’t “get it”.. It’s a girl thing. I wouldn’t understand? Come on ladies; give guys a little more credit. Guys don’t like Sex and the City because of Sarah Jessica Parker and the media trying to portray her as a sex symbol and not as something you would shield your children’s eyes from if she was walking by you. It’s as simple as that..

Dave

dave@whatever-dude.com

Nobody even questions it anymore..

Along those lines.. one of the things I enjoy picking up at the supermarket every once in a while and tossing on a salad is imitation crabmeat. Whether that segue is completely brilliant or just flat out ridiculous is beyond me.. Never have I really ever questioned just what the hell imitation crab meat is though. I mean, it’s imitation crabmeat. That’s what it is. That’s what it’s always been… but really, what the hell is it?

It's 9:30 on a Tuesday night.. The kids are asleep.. Lost is a rerun.. and I'm not even writing about real crabmeat. Send help.

It doesn’t really taste anything like crabmeat and it’s not like I buy it because I’m pretending that it is crabmeat and I’m some poor schlub trying to live the seafood high life vicarously through a $2.50 package from the seafood department at Shop Rite. Doing a little research, it would appear that it is really ground up white fish processed and colored to try and give the appearance of crabmeat. But why? Why can’t they give it some other name without such the negative white trash-esque connotation. It’s a relatively innocuous, flavorless fish that has a nice texture when thrown on a salad. So I gotta ask.. Who marketed this?

I mean, it’s not like you would walk into a Toyota dealership and ask for an “Imitation Lexus”. You wouldn’t go to your local video store and rent “Heathers” starring Winona Ryder and Imitation Jack Nicholson..  or “Sweet Home Alabama” starring Reese Witherspoon and Imitation Matthew McConaughey.. or go to Itunes and download that Tik Tok song by Imitation $inger.. so why would you give a food item a name that almost sounds like it’s not really food at all and some sort of plastic creation, like Jeff Goldblum trying to teleport a steak and Geena Davis spitting it out.. I’ve waited almost a decade to make a “The Fly” reference on the internets.. and I did it! I fucking did it! Top of the world, ma!!

Now if you’ll excuse me.. I have to go ponder why Easy Cheese does not need to be refrigerated even after it’s been opened. I mean, what’s up with that.. and what’s the deal with airline peanuts?

Dave

dave@whatever-dude.com

Even more amazing than that to me is that it’s been almost nine years since I wrote this article for the original incarnation of W-D.: http://www.whatever-dude.com/posts/102.shtml

The posts that I wrote back then that I can truly say I knew were pretty good the second after I wrote them are few and far between.. The Cobain one happened to be one of them. (go give it a quick read before coming back and finishing this one. )

One of the things that I enjoy about growing older is how life experiences continually gain momentum and without even realizing it, all of those day to day experiences build up like compound interest and a few years later, you can totally have a different perspective on specific topics and life in general.

Take the death of Kurt Cobain for example. There I was at 25, so steadfast in my belief that he had been murdered. I mean, no way would Kurt leave little Frances Bean behind in the care of crazy ol’ Courtney Love.. but now, with a little perspective, I can see it’s not so cut and dry. You see, there’s a pervasive mental illness that the general public has little knowledge of.. or at least they think they have no knowledge of it when they hear the term.. but trust me, they do.

Courtney Love, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.. three women that make headlines in Hollywood , who at one point or another have just been written  off as “crazy”… but rather than look at them as simply that, society should be looking at them as textbook examples of one of the most widespread but underreported mental illnesses. I’m talking about Borderline Personality Disorder. Now, to give a quick copy and paste from Wikipedia, here is what the medical community defines BPD as:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition, DSM IV-TR, a widely used manual for diagnosing mental disorders, defines borderline personality disorder (in Axis II Cluster B) as:^[2][16]

A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, as well as marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness
8. Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms

The thing about the psychiatric community and the DSM-IV in general, is that everything is so clinical and it’s hard for the average person to make the leap from what’s written to what the behaviors look like in real life. Most criminally, the one thing that the psychiatric community doesn’t touch on nearly enough is how people with the mental illnesses affect those around them.. their friends and family.

There’s a great blog: http://shrink4men.wordpress.com/ written by Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD, which goes in depth as to how women with BPD (and the other Cluster B personality disorders – histrionic, antisocial and narcissistic) basically make their spouses, children’s and loved ones lives a living hell..

Take a moment to read this one to get a better sense of what living with someone with BPD is like.. http://shrink4men.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/relationships-with-borderline-narcissistic-personality-women/

Now, in the context of Kurt Cobain.. I think to really get a mindset of what he was feeling towards the end of his life, you really need to look no further than the lyrics of one of his post-Courtney songs… “All Apologies”

What else should I be?
All apologies.
What else could I say?
Everyone is gay.
What else could I write?
I don’t have the right.
What else should I be?
All Apologies.

In the sun
In the sun I feel as one
In the sun
In the sun
Married!
Buried!

I wish I was like you
Easily amused
Find my nest of salt
Everything is my fault
I’ll take all the blame
aqua seafoam shame
Sunburn with freezer burn
Choking on the ashes of her enemy

In the sun
In the sun I feel as one
In the sun
In the sun
Married, Married, Married!
Buried!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

All in all is all we are [x20]

Do those sound like the words of a man that has a happy homelife with a wife and newborn baby daughter?  And to put it into the context of a man living with a spouse with BPD.. here you had a guy that was the frontman for arguably the biggest band in the world at the time.. and here he was so beaten down that he was apologizing for everything wrong in the world. “Married. Buried.” Kind of says it all in two easy words.

At the core of BPD is a “fear of abandonment – real or imagined”.. so basically once someone with BPD feels close enough to someone else, this fear will inevitably kick in. Marriage, having kids, buying a home together, etc.. there’s so many different things that can happen to set a BPD off and once that fear of abandonment is triggered.. a BPD will start to do anything and everything to strike first and destroy their relationships before their spouse or siginificant other has a chance to leave them (that’s the kicker.. BPD’s confuse feelings for fact, so even if their spouse has no intention whatsoever of leaving.. since they feel like they might, it becomes a fact in their heads) Having affairs, emotionally abusing their spouses, threatening divorce, threatening to take their children away  and just flat out leaving allows them to have control over the situation and usually they’ll see how much abuse their spouse is willing to put up with.. and once that spouse reaches their breaking point and starts standing up for themself, that’s when they just leave and move on to the next victim.

People with BPD are like chameleons.. they can change personalities, interests, goals, etc.. all on a whim. They infiltrate groups of people, pick the most susceptible member (like an emotional vampire), throw adoration on them, take on their personalities, interests, goals and present themselves as the other person’s soul mate. I mean, back in the early 90′s.. it was more than safe to say that to America, Courtney Love was the female Kurt Cobain.. grunge queen to his grunge king.. and that was never more evident than when Hole released “Live Through This” right after Kurt’s death.

Fast forward a few years to when “The People vs. Larry Flynt” came out and there you had Courtney looking like she cleaned up her act. In the context of BPD though, Courtney never cleaned up her act.. she was dating her co-star Edward Norton… Mr. Serious Well Respected Actor.. so Courtney threw herself wholeheartedly into that role. That’s how seamlessly a BPD can play a role.. that she had a whole country thinking that she was a legitimate Oscar nominated actress who was turning her life around.. when in reality she was just idolizing and mimicking Edward Norton the same way she had mimicked Kurt a few years earlier. That went by the wayside eventually and Courtney went right back to being a trainwreck.. eventually losing custody of Frances Bean last winter.

Do you want more evidence of BPD’s doing this? Let’s look at Britney Spears.. when she was dating Justin Timberlake.. she played the role of America’s sweetheart.. but then after she got bored with that and cheated on him, she went off the deep end.. had a quickie Vegas marriage.. and then in the ultimate chameleon move, she began idolizing Kevin Federline and took on his white trash persona and had two kids back to back. Once K-Fed started to bore her and was out of the picture, she started associating with Sam Lutfi and then Adnan Ghalib and just completely switched gears, almost forgetting she was a mother of two small children and just kind of did everything she could to lose custody of her children because that wasn’ t the life she wanted anymore. It was only after her father stepped in (because let’s face it.. it was probably his love she wanted all along and was most likely a contributing factor to her having BPD in the first place) did she start to listen to reason and ever since then, has kind of kept a low profile in the media.. The fact that she was dating her manager for the past year or so, who wasn’t a complete attention whore and whose name I couldn’t even tell you.. probably has as much to do with this as anything else.  When the next guy comes along.. I’m sure we’ll see yet another Britney.

While most people experiment with their sense of self during their teenage years and pretty much get a sense of who they are and where they’re headed in life by their early twenties.. BPD’s are perpetual teenagers who switch personas based on whoever they’re hanging out with at the moment. It would actually be sad to witness but unfortunately most BPD’s are so damn cruel to the people that they have decided in their head that they don’t need to emotionally leech off of anymore, that any sympathy or goodwill is usually destroyed.

So to bring it back.. 9 years later. Do I think Kurt Cobain was murdered? Well, yes and no. I think Kurt got married to Courtney and once Frances Bean was born.. maybe some of the attention that Kurt used to give to her was now spent on his newborn daughter and Courtney’s fear of abandonment kicked in, so she took advantage of his low self-esteem and emotionally abused the hell out of him.. making him feel trapped and alone.. and he turned to his heroin habit to escape.. and this compounded the worthless feelings that Courtney was mentally beating into him.

So maybe Kurt did hole himself up in that apartment above the garage in Seattle.. did a boatload of drugs and in a moment of ultimate weakness, bought into Courtney’s opinion that he was worthless and the world would be better off without him.. or maybe Courtney had it in her head that Kurt was about to leave her, so she hired someone to take him out before he could leave her.. Either way, a little girl grew up without a father and a country lost an interesting artist.. and whether he pulled the trigger or not, I think it’s safe to say that Courtney contributed majorly to his death, whether it be emotionally or physically.

“Choking on the ashes of her enemy”

The tragedy is that if Kurt could’ve just gutted it out a little longer, maybe he could’ve turned to people for help and would have eventually been able to figure just what her enemy was (BPD).. and if that was the case, would’ve gotten to a place where he realized that no apology was ever necessary on his part.. and that sun that he felt one with, would’ve eventually shone bright for him once again.

Dave

dave@whatever-dude.com

I had completely forgotten how awesome commercials for He-Man toys were back in the day. All of the commercials for kids toys nowadays are so slickly produced that it kind of takes away from the products themselves. The He-Man commercials were so simplistic.. put a couple of kids next to each other playing with the toys, doing the voices themselves and not only do you have a commercial that’s effective enough to make kids want the toys.. but it leaves you with a budget to do a lot of commercials. Hell, He-Man practically had a commercial for each individual new action figure when it came out.

This commercial linked in the article completely cracked me up. Seriously, watch this.. and just put your arrow right at about the 0:07 mark and replay from 0:07-0:11 over and over again a few times.

The kid second from the left deserves some sort of award.. cause I don’t know if the director asked him to freeze along with the action figure or if it was just an impromptu acting decision.. cause it’s not really necessary.. but man, does this kid sell the shit out of it. You almost have to question whether or not it’s some sort of camera trick.  

Now, when you go back and watch it a second time, focus on the kid all the way to the left playing Skeletor. How into it is he? Then watch it a third time and focus on the two of them and tell me you don’t want to buy Skeletor with dragon shaped Binaca on his shoulder? Hell, I might just have to go on Ebay and buy that Skeletor, put a little Scope in the dragon and go hit the bars this weekend. <squirt><squirt> “Helllloooo, ladies.”

Dave

dave@whatever-dude.com

(The “squirt. squirt.” sound effect was me spraying the Scope in my mouth.. and not the sound of the ladies reaction when I approach.  )

Especially when he’s as camp as THIS!

In a world where so many people are openly gay, the entertainment industry is strangely draconian in how it handles this issue. It’s pretty much accepted that, for an established star to admit they like same-sex relationships, it’s tantamount to career suicide. Yet in nearly every workplace, the opposite holds true. Being gay seems to be en vogue everywhere but in Hollywood.

Growing up, there weren’t a lot of openly gay people in my hometown. Gay people were referred to as perverts or freaks…and that was just the clinical terminology. Since I have left school, times have changed pretty radically and some of the people I sat alongside in class have since admitted being gay. I would be lying if I said I though admitting this was “brave”, as I think that term is used quite condescendingly in that context.

I’d be lying if I said I was Mr PC and Right-on. I’m liberal about most things and have a “live and let live” attitude, but I’m uncomfortable to some degree about gay sexuality. Part of it is the fact that I don’t understand it and another part of it is my upbringing. This wasn’t so much my family but the people I hung around with. As a consequence of that, I sometimes struggle to know what to say to some gay people. It’s a bit like the whole race issue at times: you don’t know whether someone’s sexuality is inconsequential to them or whether they wear it as a badge of honor… and don’t take kindly to gentle ribbing.

I think the big problem a lot of us straight guys have is an offshoot of homophobia. It’s not that you hate gay people, but you hate the idea that someone might think YOU are gay! It’s one of those things, where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you deny such a thing, you MUST be, the logic goes. But if you admit it, you obviously are! What’s most concerning to me is that this should be a problem. Why should we care if anyone thinks we are gay?

I think the terminology that is used has a lot to do with this discomfort. Gay people themselves are responsible. Terms like “admit to being gay”, “accused of being gay” and “come out of the closet” implies some sort of wrongdoing or secrecy. The world is pretty diverse now and I think if people acknowledged they were gay from the outset, there would be much less stigma attached to the whole concept.

The bottom line is, I obviously wouldn’t want my sons to be gay and this probably reflects poorly on me in terms of political correctness. However, if one of my sons were gay, I would hate for them to go through life trying to hide it. Although I have much to learn, I think one of the goals of parenting should be to allow your kids to be the best that they are and let their true selves shine.

I often imagine if the roles were reversed and being straight was not considered the norm. I actually don’t think we are far away from that, but that’s another matter and I don’t want to stray too far from the point at hand. Anyway, growing up in a world where something which is natural for you is considered strange or perverted must be pretty dire. I’m adamant that, even in those hypothetical circumstances, I couldn’t pretend to be something I’m not. That’s what mystifies me.
Ricky Martin outed himself by saying that “I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man.” The wording here is strange, of course, since he didn’t seem “proud” to admit this in the last ten years. Every time he was asked, he dodged the question or give a girly laugh… or flicked his hair. Understandably, he had his crack team of PR experts pulling his strings. Still, I think it’s a little trite to say NOW that he’s proud.

Perhaps we are to applaud a man for admitting his truth. In some respects, it is good when performers are finally honest – whether that’s admitting a fondness for drugs, their true sexuality or even sex addiction. You just have to be cynical of the timing, though. There are so many actors who are reported to be gay but who still don’t admit (there’s that word again) it. It’s insane that, in an environment driving by so many talented and diverse gay performers, few in Hollywood can actually acknowledge they’re gay.

Let’s take an actor like Kevin Spacey, for instance. Now, Kevin Spacey is clearly NOT gay and I would never write “Kevin Spacey is gay.” But let’s pretend that Kevin Spacey is gay, just for the purposes of illustration and not trying to be cute. Would anyone have a problem with Kevin Spacey, if gay, playing the roles he played in “American Beauty” and “The Usual Suspects”? Would the fact he was gay deter from what were spellbinding and utterly convincing performances?

At the end of the day, he was acting. It was a performance. Whether an actor is straight or gay shouldn’t deter from their work.

Being gay is unlikely to hurt sales anymore. Adam Lambert was insanely popular on “American Idol”, but obviously it was still a little taboo for the far-right to allow an openly gay singer to actually win the competition. Still, he has been very successful since the show. I truly believe that, even if some people are uncomfortable with the idea of the gay lifestyle, they can still enjoy a movie or record featuring a gay star.

Roger Ebert wisely pointed out that Sean Penn’s brilliant performance in “Milk” shows how little Hollywood itself has changed. In a movie about a man’s crusade for gay people’s rights, it is played by one of the industry’s dyed-in-the-wool heteros. Again, no actor stood up and admitted THEY were gay whilst applauding another liberal, well-meaning message movie. It was hollow.

Hollywood wants it both ways (haha!) They are happy to cheer the message, but too afraid to admit how it applies to them. If we can accept Sean Penn as a gay crusader, I can state with confidence that any gay actor could be accepted playing a heterosexual character.
And then, most sickening of all, Sean Penn wins an Oscar while all the critics lavish him with praise for his “brave performance.” Pretending to be gay for a couple of million dollars and an Academy Award is not “brave.” It’s picking a good role and playing it well. “Brave” is legitimately going to war or battling through a terminal illness. In Hollywood terms, “brave” would be acknowledging your sexuality for real and running the risk of losing a few million dollars. That takes a certain amount of bravery…

Paul
paul@whatever-dude.com