Curse You, Writer's Strike and ReRunland, on This Lazy Night

Oh, KVOS TV12. How low you have sunk.

I mean, really...

Airing Throw Momma From the Train. [shudder]

It's been 20 years. 1987. 2007. Do the math. Hollywood releases how many movies per year? Surely, if you really wrack your mind, you can conjure something a smidge, um, oh, better? Something that doesn't feel like the cinematic equivalent of nails on a blackboard? Come ON.

There's no shortness in irony that it opens with Billy Crystal being a hack writer trapped in writer's block at a desk, stuck on the sentence "The night was..."

And produced by Steven Speilberg and Oprah Winfrey? No wonder I don't trust her taste in movies. Wild Hogs? [shudder] William H. Macy deserves better.

[Rant mode off.]

Okay, maybe I'm being elitist and the movie doesn't completely suck, but hey. I was 14 and couldn't believe I'd spent my money on it. 14, and highly opinionated. And not altogether flush with cash, of course. So, (movie + money = bad) wasn't an acceptable outcome.

Now Goonies... there's a movie.

***

It's, like, 15 minutes later and I'm watching a senior citizen's Fight Club battle, and reading this:

“[T]his much maligned four-letter word has no intrinsic meaning,” Randazza writes. “Fuck [can] play a role as a figurative term, for example, ‘to fuck’ can also mean ‘to deceive.’ It is a word of force that can assist us in our expressions of joy when used as an infix, as in ‘abso-fucking-lutely’. ‘Fuck’ helps us express rage when we scream ‘fuck you’ at a football referee, or at a motorist who has just cut us off in traffic. ‘Fuck’ can help us express pain, as it is quite frequently the first thing out of most men’s mouths when they strike their thumb (accidentally) with a hammer. ‘Fuck’ is a vehicle for our disappointment, when we see that our report card is not as good as we had hoped, or when our significant other is late for dinner, or leaves us
altogether. ‘Fuck’ is an old friend, who can always make us laugh.”

He quotes from the movie Wedding Crashers: “‘This girl’s fit for a strait-jacket. I mean she’s fucked three ways to the weekend. But you know what, Father? I dig it!’”

“If I didn’t use ‘fuck’ liberally,” Randazza says of his argument, “I’d be conceding the fucking argument [that the word isn’t used in proper settings]."

Randazza is Orlando attorney, Marc Randazza, launching a defense for his client's attempt to trademark the name "Fucking Machines", which is a whole other can of worms I ain't getting into. Oh, and that can of worms can be found here.