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So Awesome Day is upon us once again.  For those who are new to my ramblings or those who do not catalogue each of my glorious syllables in a special, perhaps gilded, mind-drive (for shame!) Awesome Day is part of my continuing, global and lifelong mission to turn things I hate (in this case my birthday) into things that kick ass (in this case Awesome Day).

Awesome Day is the day each year when I ask each of you to do something wonderful, something divine, either for yourselves or really anyone.  Tell that barista that you’ve had your eye on that she ensorcels you, jump the fuck out of a plane and flip physics a bird as your chute unfurls behind you and you quietly make gravity your bitch, throw a last-minute Awesome Day party to wallow in fellowship or just take yourself to a spa or a baseball game and remind yourself that shit need not be as fast as all this.  As small as all this. 

It’s the day I hope we each remember that life is not simpling for living, it is for being alive.  The day when we declare that the damn Buddhists got it all wrong.  We should not be here now; we should be extraordinary here, now.

We live lives of mortgages and classes and car pool lanes, we exist, evanescent, between bus stops and borderlines and we can’t go balls-out all day everyday.  It’s like driving Excite Bike with the B button; you can only do it for so long before you get pulled over for overheating.  But on April 24^th we line our world-entire with those little arrow things that allow us to do whatever the fuck we like.  On Awesome Day we remember that we are infinite.  On this day we are each of us risers. 

For my part I began my Awesome Day celebrations moments ago (it’s the 24^th somewhere) by giving what little was in my paypal account to Invisible Children, a group of cats and kittens trying to stop children from being abducted and tortured and abused and forced to kill people.  Philanthropy is not a requirement of Awesome Day, it’s just something I can’t afford to do all that often, so I did it for this day of days.  And while I encourage you all to celebrate in unique ways, in ways that are as selfish and as shallow as you like, I also offer these two cents: Charity is no longer the purview of the wealthy and we are all in this together.  Money is not an end, it is not a proper goal, it is not a life; it’s a vulgar tool with which we can craft many splendored things.  I would like to use what I have to build a structure for our love. 

Get a beverage of your choice and celebrate good times come on!

E 

He had a heart of stone…

Hey Folks,
Christopher here. Some years ago, Ethan, Travis, and myself {collectively known as Etc. [not really because that would be dumb (and yes, I used parenthesis inside brackets inside braces… that’s how I roll)]} where was I? Oh yeah. Ethan, Travis, and I were in the habit of seeing every comic book movie that came out no matter how bad. And keep in mind, this is the time of The Fantastic Four, Ang Lee’s Hulk, and Mark Steven Johnson *shudder*. We had decidedly low standards for our outing to see The Punisher back in ‘04. I mean, it was the directorial debut of the guy who wrote Armageddon; we knew it would be horrible. But we had no idea just how bad it could be. The highlight of the whole damn thing was just after John Travolta, who thinks his wife is cheating on him with his homosexual best friend, throws her in front of a locomotive. Trav says, “Well, that’s two train wrecks we’ve seen tonight.”

For those who can’t believe it’s quite as bad as I say it is. Feel free to watch the last three minutes here. I swear, it’s like a messed up version of Zeno’s paradox: Sitting in the theatre, the movie kept getting half way closer to the end, but never seemed to finish.

Somehow almost a third of the reviewers liked the damn thing, which makes it twice as popular as the original Dolph Lundgren version. If you want to be punished, you can watch the trailer to the original gem that started this avalanche of crap here. But better than watching the movie is watching Dolph Lundgren watch the movie with a weird ass french narrator. Seriously.

Apparently, someone somewhere along the way decided to make another Punisher movie. And this time they decided that what it lacked in intelligence, it should make up in brain matter being splattered across the screen. If you like gore, check out the show reel here. Yeesh!

So about a week ago, E and I were at blockbuster and considered watching this new Punisher movie. Punisher: War Zone. Why would we do such a ridiculous thing? Let me quote the bard of our generation: “You know how some people cut themselves as some sort of penance or some sort of autoflagelation thing, you know?” I think it’s like that for us.

We found it on the shelf, and we stared into the abyss, and—I swear to you—the abyss stared into us. Neither of us wanted to be responsible for making the other watch it, so we ended up trying to find excuses not to go with it. Our dialog went something like this (only much longer and more drawn out)

E: So, you want to get it?
C: Sure, if there’s nothing else you want to see.
E: Would you rather watch something else?
C: No, no, it’s cool. We can totally do this.
E: We survived the Thomas Jane version. We can totally do this.
C: I really wish you hadn’t brought that up. Now I’m sensitized to awfulness.
E: We can get something else.
C: You want to see something else?
E: Not necessarily. But you know what might be better than watching this movie?
C: Not watching this movie?
E: You know I was building up to thing here and you totally stole it.
C: Sorry about that.
E: You want to rent this thing and go home?
C: I hear Death Race is a fine fine film.
E: Really?
C: No. But finer.

Eventually I had Death Race in one hand and The Punisher: War Zone in the other. I picked a number from one to one hundred for each. The Punisher was 66.6 (duh). For rough symmetry, I made Death Race 34. Ethan was going to pick a number and whichever movie it was closer to was the movie we would watch.

C: Pick a number, brother.
E: 34.
C: Dude, that was the exact number for Death Race!
E: Really?
C: Totally.

And that, my friends, is how random chance (or divine providence) kept us out of the hell that surely is the latest romp through comic book vigilante hellishness. But you know how they say, out of the frying pan into the toilet (or something like that)? The action sequences in Death Race looked like the cars were moving at ten miles an hour and then they sped the film up. I suppose that made the movie too short because they then dragged the dialogue out to the pace of grass growing on an artic tundra. “If you’re… not careful… you… might end… up with an… ex… plodded head.” The best and worst line (and if there were a way to post the audio here, I totally would) was when Jason Statham is making his big escape, and the prison warden played by Joan Allen says: “All right, cocksucker. Fuck with me, we’ll see who shits on the sidewalk.” Dear Lord.

The point to all of this (is there a point to any of this?) is that bad movies are like war. War is hell, but it also brings people together in a really awful way. And yes, in this weird little metaphor bad movies are Nazis and Dolph Lundgren is Hitler. And I’d rather be watching a shitty movie in a foxhole with my brothers-in-arms than watching a fine film on my own. And if that’s not enough of a conclusion for you, here’s a weird as hell short film that I stumbled upon on youtube. Make sure to see the last ten seconds of it.

You want to watch Death Race now, don’t you?