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Hello blog! Lots of news to report! I have a new comic-makin’ gig at unwinnable.com! And my first contribution seems to be pretty well-liked! Thanks to everyone who read it!

Also, I guess I never mentioned that I started a stand-alone site for the VHS comic! www.vhscomic.com is the place! It’s 30 pages worth of fairly coherent narrative and drawings, if you’re into that!

MAN, I have been neglecting this blog lately. How can I make it up to you? How about a beeteedee.com original that’s SURE to become an internet meme? How about that? Do you want to be the first on your internet to know about the next big thing? Then look at THIS:

And I know this cat! See, here’s proof:

FILE PHOTO

Internet criticism: There is a lot of it. An increasing number of people do reviews in video format nowadays, because who wants to read? But also, video reviews lend themselves well to a certain type of criticism, exemplified in this video by critic Confused Matthew:

In Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman talks about Prince’s strategy for giving interviews to reporters, which is as unique as it is dickish: Prince will not allow reporters to use a recording device or take notes during interviews, essentially making it impossible for Prince to be quoted out of context, or quoted at all. The reporter probably doesn’t come away from the interview with any of the exact wording that Prince used, just an overall impression of the conversation.

This is kind of the way most reviews are written. Reviewers are allowed to take notes of course, and most will comment on specific scenes or lines of dialogue in movies, or specific lyrics in songs, or whatever, but they generally give you the overall impression they took away from the experience, or at least that’s what the grade or star-rating is based on, and that’s all anyone cares about, because again, reading sucks.

But Confused Matthew and his ilk do something different! Here, we get a minute-by-minute account of what the EXPERIENCE of watching 2001 is like. As it turns out, it’s kind of incredibly boring! I saw 2001 once, but until I watched this review, I guess I completely forgot about these interminable early scenes. If you asked me what I thought of the movie I’d probably have a mildly positive overall impression based on the things that did stick with me: the innovative art direction and the nifty “man vs. technology” theme.

That’s the way it is with a lot of things that are favorably regarded. People forgive glaring flaws because, you know, they don’t remember ‘em! As Charlie Kaufman learned in Adaptation, the third act forgives all sins! Don’t get me wrong here, I’m sure there are some hardcore Kubrick fanboys ready to defend the half-hour’s worth of nothing that kicks off 2001, and I’m sure that all of those defenses would contain the word “atmosphere”. But does it hold up as a piece of entertainment you can recommend? Will it stand up to the intense scrutiny recommendation invites?

Strangely, this brand of critical analysis seems to be most entertaining when applied to the Star Wars prequels, particularly The Phantom Menace. Logically, applying laser-focused scrutiny to such a shitbomb seems like it would be a colossal waste of time; it’s not like any sane person came away from The Phantom Menace with some sort of a favorable impression. How could you? There wasn’t even that third-act redemption to leave you with a good taste in your mouth! There were plenty of individual flaws about it that stuck out, sure, but there seemed no need for anyone to pick apart this owl pellet. The movie, as a whole, just didn’t work.

But when Phantom Menace came out on DVD and people were able to actually attempt to parse the shittiness, it quickly became obvious that there was more going wrong here than in your average shitty movie. This wasn’t a plane that crashed because a few instruments failed, this was more like aircraft made up of a bunch of random shit hammered together by a 5 year-old. There may well be something wrong with every frame of this movie!

You could say it’s just a case of unimaginative nitpickers going for the lowest of low-hanging fruit, but I think there’s something to be said for the deconstruction/destruction of The Phantom Menace. The Star Wars prequels are to dudes who make fun of bad movies on the internet what the “Aristocrats” joke is to comedians, what “My Favorite Things” is to jazz musicians; it’s a rich palette for interpretation in one’s own style, a great springboard for a lot of observations on the fundamentals of storytelling and how badly they can be fucked up. Something like that.

At any rate, Red Letter Media attracted a lot of attention for a review of The Phantom Menace not that long ago, and rightfully so! Talk about deconstructing the movie, this review is almost as long as the friggin’ movie! If you’re not put off by the serial killer shtick there are a lot of great points being made here. And if you ARE put-off by the serial killer shtick I got something for you, too: The aforementioned Confused Matthew did a series of  reviews that touched on a lotta the same points (and did it first!)

Are you done watching all that stuff? Welcome back! And hey, it looks like Red Letter Media just did a follow-up vid on of Attack of The Clones! If you not only liked but loved the serial killer shtick from their Phantom Menace review, you’re really in luck, because they went bananas with it this time! Beyond that, the guy does a pretty good job of peelin’ the rotten onion - this video delves deep into the layers of shittiness that lurk beneath Attack of The Clones‘ veneer of mere staggering ineptitude. For example, most casual viewers were probably too distracted by that painful, cringe-worthy dialogue between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen to realize just how insanely implausible their entire romance is. Again and again, Anakin says and does things that would be complete deal-breakers on a real date with anything even remotely similar to a human female. Red Letter Media does a play-by-play of this disastrous courtship, highlighting the many, many instances in which Anakin says and does things that make him seem arrogant, whiny, or just downright creepy.

To say that more thought went into this analysis than went into the script for Attack of the Clones is an understatement on par with saying that Mark Hamill’s 70’s haircut has aged more gracefully than Hayden Christensen’s hilarious rat tail. I guess that’s what is so appealing about these videos! I mean, sure, it would be nice if this amount of thought and care went into the prequels while they were being made, but hey, better late than never! At least somebody thought about something at some point, right?

So apparently Eric Fournier, the man who was apparently behind the internet phenomenon Shaye St. John has died, and though I’m not sure that he’s really dead or that he really was Shaye, apparently I’m gonna blog it. This ain’t Newsweek!

I wish I had a little bit of journalistic acumen or something and could at least give you a bit of concrete info about Fournier and maybe how he came up with the character or some such bullshit, but, according to an article on the prestigious wikibin, “No commentary or insight about Shaye Saint John has ever been presented to the public by her creators.” All I know is that Fournier was a presence in the Bloomington, IN punk scene of the 80’s as a member of hardcore band Blood Farmers, and someone named Eric Fournier is listed as the director of 2004’s Shaye and Kiki, the only commercially-available piece of Shayeanna.

The only background that I could find is Shaye St. John’s fictional backstory, which was summed up well enough in an article on some site called lollipop.com:

The idea/story/mythos behind Shaye Saint John is that she was a hot woman who was horribly disfigured in a car accident. As a result, she appears in public wearing this weird-ass, creepy as fuck mask, and hobbles along with clunky prosthetic legs and hands. Her mind appears to have sustained a bit of damage as well, as the numerous short films, bits of wisdom, and assorted clickables on her website can attest.

I would say that Shaye St. John represented a bold new strain of alternative comedy, but I have no idea what those words mean. I just think that anyone who can find the yuks in Neil Hamburger’s shtick should be able to appreciate this finely-crafted nightmare fuel/comedy.

I’m not sure what makes Shaye so disturbing. Is it the hacked-up mannequin parts, including a mask that bears a frightening resemblance to Carl von Cosel’s girlfriend? The burned-up baby doll she sometimes talks to? The disembodied chipmunk voice spewing gibberish about “modeling sesh-ons” and “kitty candy”? The whiplash editing and random use of video filters and sound effects? The honky-tonk website with Progeria-victim wallpaper and annoying autoplay sound?  I don’t fucking know. Whatever the case, don’t worry - it’s only disturbing until it becomes HILARIOUS.

It’s particularly hilarious to watch it with a group of people and observe their reactions, and when I watch it alone it is, OK, ever so slightly terrifying. But I’ll tell ya, this is great date movie material! And it is on Netflix!

We can only hope that Fournier pulled a ‘Zmuda and had someone lined up to don the mannequin parts and play Shaye for the rest of eternity… Right, gang? We’re hoping for that, aren’t we?

1982’s Beach House is a cheapo teen sex comedy that was clearly created by psychics. Though at first glance it seems like a shitty attempt to rehash the winning formula from blockbuster hits like Animal House and Porky’s, it is actually a shitty attempt to pre-hash the winning formula from a blockbuster hit that wouldn’t materialize until almost 30 years later: Music Television’s The New Jersey Shore.

It’s about a bunch of people who aren’t from New Jersey, most of them Italian, who rent a Beach House adjacent to the shoreline in the state of New Jersey where they sit around and have idiotic conversations and hook up, and - brace yourself - there’s a character named “Snooky”. The spelling is different, and it’s a dude, but still! Still!

As visionary as it was, Beach House is not without it’s flaws. For one thing, the camera isn’t always in focus. And then there’s the acting. I know (from watching Music Television’s The New Jersey Shore!) that real-life guidos tend to be a bit muggy, but it seems as though the director of Beach House must have yelled at the actors between each take, “No, no, no! Be more EYE-talian! Haven’t any of you guys ever seen Rocky?” It’s like one of those Saturday Night Live skits from they inevitably do in the last half hour of any recent episode, where the cast-members bust out their nuanced NOO-YAWK accents for a fake talk show called “Bronx Chat” or something. (EDIT: upon googling, it turns out this off-the cuff example is depressingly close to a real SNL skit called “Bronx Beat”!)

The plot is exactly like West Side Story, so that’s good: a bunch of kids from Brooklyn and a bunch of kids from Philly wind up renting different floors in the same shore house and a culture clash ensues. Inevitably, members of the two warring factions have a taboo love affair, or something. To be honest, I missed about a half hour of the middle of the movie and when I came back it had inexplicably turned into some kind of shitty thriller, with a creepy weirdo chasing one of the female characters through a darkened amusement park.

So why am I writing about a movie I haven’t even watched in its entirety? Because of the music, man! The soundtrack is by Adam Roth, who would later go on to be a member of the Del Fuegos and do work with Dennis Leary (the evergreen “I’m an Asshole” from No Cure For Cancer). The songs are representative of my current musical obsession (you know, late-70’s power pop). How good is the soundtrack to Beach House? Well, there’s a punked-up rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” that’s so good they threw in a scene where all the characters play baseball for no reason whatsoever. It’s that awesome.

OK, maybe I’m overselling this, but the last scene, where the band plays on the beach while all the characters dance in the sand, is the best music video ever made. Do I recommend watching Beach House? Not really. But LISTEN to the fucker!

So I decided to pay tribute to the departed Corey by revisiting possibly his most important contribution to Shitty Dude culture: the 1992 “erotic thriller” Blown Away. It’s certainly not his best work, or even the best movie he did with Corey Feldman. Hell, it’s not even the best movie called Blown Away. But if you’re a dude of a certain age, it’s likely you remember it well! Or at least, you remember parts of it well.

If you’re like me, Blown Away was LEGENDARY amongst dudes in your middle school, possibly due in part to a the fact that current Celebrity Fit Club member Nicole Eggert appears naked a couple zillion times throughout the movie. It’s nothing crazy! Just the softest of downy-soft softcore, the Fisher-Price My First Porno that ushered many a young delinquent into pervhood. If you’re at that magical age where you’re willing to sit through absolutely anything to see some skin, Blown Away goes down easy: It’s everything you wanna see, with a few miscellaneous Corey butts thrown in for… Actually, I dunno who that’s for. Did they think anyone besides horny pre-teen dudes would wanna watch this movie? Crazy.

Plotwise, there’s not much to speak of here. Blown Away was one of the early 90’s many “Crazy bitch” thrillers, similar to Poison Ivy, The Crush, Single White Female, and about a hundred other generic pieces of shit. For those familiar with the tropes of this highly predictable subgenre, it shouldn’t take a lotta sleuthing to figure out that Eggert’s seductive slut is teh maneater, a lil’ mynx who always seems to be suspiciously close to the epicenter of death and disaster. But she’s ain’t all bad! When she puts a bomb on someone’s car she’s always nice enough to put a big-ass digital timer on it so you know when it’s going to go off!

Haim essentially plays the Gary Stu-type here, a nice guy with a nutjob older brother (Feldman) who gets mixed up with a nutjob broad. See, he works at a resort of some kind where his one and only job responsibility is to ride a horse around aimlessly, and one day he happens upon Nicole Eggert wearing the sluttiest riding outfit imaginable and being attacked by a crazy horse. He rescues her, and nudity ensues.

Eggert turns out to be the daughter of the resort’s owner, a Tommy Wiseau-ish Eurotrash weirdo who doesn’t seem like he could even be distantly related to Nicole Eggert. Dad doesn’t appreciate Haim hanging around his unbelievably slutty daughter, and lets him know that over dinner after a hilariously unsexy sequence in which Haim sticks his dopey-looking, gym sock-clad foot between Eggert’s legs under the table. I suppose they were trying to do something a little different here  by having the dude be the one to do the under-table foot-play, but it doesn’t make any sense - Haim’s character is supposed to be intimidated by the dad, so why would he take a risk like that? It seems as though they must have filmed that little bit after the fact, thinking the audience for Blown Away wouldn’t be able to sit through an entire scene that was devoid of any sexual content… GOOD THINKING!

So then Eggert installs a bomb in her Dad’s dirt bike, and she frames Haim, and his brother double-crosses him, and blah blah blah… The plot isn’t important. But you know what is important? the fact that Corey Haim was dating Nicole Eggert at the time, and yet Corey Feldman has a sex scene with her. It’s a pretty tame one, but still! Was this the last movie the Coreys did together? I don’t care enough to look it up, but it’s possible… Did Eggert play Yoko here? EDIT: No, it looks like they did Dream A Little Dream 2 together a few years after this!

Though underused, Feldman’s pretty hilarious in this movie. He’s clearly trying to play the dark, brooding type here, and you’ll be shocked to know he doesn’t pull it off! In fact, he seems a tad fey in some scenes. Maybe it’s the way he holds his cigarette, or the way he dances - it probably didn’t help that he was already in full-fledged Michael Jackson impersonator mode by this point, but that’s a whole ‘nother story… Was this really only 6 years after Stand By Me? Crazy! And it was only 6 years after Lucas? FUCK!

Well that’s about all the early-90’s nostalgia I can stand. No, actually, Jimmy Fallon reuniting the cast of California Dreams was where I hit the wall. What’s next, Jimmy? The cast of Hey Dude!?

Does it seem weird to you that the guys behind the Found Footage Festival would do a documentary on an insanely obscure country music artist from the middle of nowhere? Well, it isn’t. See, in addition to being a documentary on the history of dirty music, Dirty Country is also a movie about discovering weird-ass shit; the movie’s central story is about a bunch of guys becoming hardcore fans of dirty country artist Larry Pierce after one of them ran across his CD at a truck stop. So there.

Anyways, they definitely had some good ideas going into this. Though he’s not as amusing to talk to as Blowfly, Larry Pierce is a pretty good subject for a documentary! He’s very relatable, in that his music career hasn’t effected his lifestyle in any way. He’s a guy with a blue collar job who lives with his wife of 800 years in some small-ass town, and he just happens to put out a few albums of dick-joke music every year on a small label. He’s sorta like the guys from Anvil, except that when we meet him he doesn’t have bandmates and he doesn’t really play gigs at all, so he’s even more removed from anything that resembles a rock star lifestyle. Larry hasn’t cultivated any sort of stage persona like John Valby’s “Dr. Dirty” or anything.

As an introduction to the history of scumbaggery in popular music, Dirty Country is sorta informative, although at the outset I was sorta bugged by a few glaring omissions, such as G.G. Allin and David Allen Coe. Of course, Coe is old as hell nowadays if he’s not dead yet, and I’m sure he’d prefer to be remembered more for his mainstream country material than for  “Fuckin’ in the Butt”, and I guess the omission of dirty punk acts was a necessity if they were going to keep the running time under 5 hours. Christ, the people at Rhino could probably put together a 4-disc set full of nothing but dirty, filthy music - That’d be more realistic than a comprehensive documentary!

The movie has a sort of loosely-defined focus on stuff that could more or less be defined as novelty music, stuff that’s dirty but also kinda silly. You know, somethin’ like “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell. The ol’ folks called it “bawdy”! Of course, plenty of punk acts and rap acts did joke songs that were sly with their scumbaggery, but generally the genres are known for songs that are a lot less adorable.

So anyway, interspersed with the little featurettes on Blowfly, John Valby, and Doug Clark, we get the story of Larry’s budding friendship with the band -Itis, the guys who discovered his stuff at a truck stop. Despite apparently being a rap-metal (or nü-metal or whatever) band that no one has ever heard of, they are apparently men of means, or the guys from the Found Footage Festival are. They manage to track down Larry, present him with a guitar, and play a show with him as his backing band. It’s a pretty touching story arc for a documentary on people who write songs about buttsex.

I’ll withhold my opinions on their music, because the dudes in -Itis seem like some pretty swell guys, although the movie does tend to beat you over the head with the whole “THESE REALLY COOL GUYS WITH HOT DREADLOCKED GIRLFRIENDS DEIGNED TO HANG OUT WITH A MIDDLE AGED DORK! ISN’T THAT AMAZING?” thing, but I suppose you can blame that more on the Found Footage guys and their choice to pepper Larry Pierce’s climactic performance with interview snippets of anonymous dudes singing Larry’s praises, which I guess is supposed to be a half-assed equivalent of that part in the Anvil movie where Lars Ulrich and a bunch of other successful metal artists are talking up Anvil. Still, this movie will warm the cockles of your heart!