Gentle reader, my wife and children are finding excuses to go to Silver Dollar City once or twice a week to get the most out of season passes, and as I am not an amusement park kind of guy–once a year is enough for me to walk around and maybe get onto the shoot-at-stuff ride (the Flooded Mine at Silver Dollar City), that means I get a chance to watch a couple of movies each week. Which is good, as I have a cabinet full of videocassettes, DVDs, and a Blu-Rays that I’ve been meaning to get to, and I’ve also started grabbing them with more frequency at garage sales and whatnot as I see their availability in such places coming to an end in a decade or so. Wow, that was quite a sentence.
Regardless, I bought and watched two National Lampoon-branded movies from the early part of the century this past week. I picked them up at a thrift store for a couple bucks each (the same trip where I bought My Cousin Vinny).
National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie (2011)
When I got back from the thrift store, I made sure to show my purchases to my beautiful wife just in case my youngest (he of the I thought I’d find you in the Adult section infamy) saw some of the titles and told his mother I bought a Dirty Movie.
So. The movie is not a movie about a porn film a la Zack and Miri Make A Porno. Instead, it’s a meta film about making a film comprising nothing but dirty jokes being acted out. The frame story is a polyester producer who wants to make this film working with the studio, the director, writers, and actors to make the film interspersed with dirty and offensive jokes acted out. You have a bunch of clips with doctor, give me the good news/bad news jokes, Dirty Johnny jokes (a favorite of my father’s) where a schoolboy responds to a normal question with an off-color remark or pun, and that sort of thing. The comedy is full of ethnic humor and jokes at the expense of homosexuals, too, including some in the acted-out-joke portions and in the meta portion, where the writers insinuate that the director is gay. AND an extended bit where the producer wants to insert the baddest word but the head of the studio won’t allow it–and every time the writers, producer, and head of the studio say the baddest word, they bleep it out even though they’re using all manner of other ethnic slurs throughout the movie and in this bit in comparison (“So a bleeped baddest word can call a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out, but a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out cannot call a bleeped baddest word a bleeped baddest word?”) So it’s poking fun at the then-orthodoxy which has only gotten worse.
So it was amusing for people of a certain age who were not raised snowflakes, but it’s also not for young people, so if I ever make a locked cabinet for films to keep them out of the hands of my boys, this one will go in it. Although they’re teens now, so I only would need a locked cabinet for a little while yet, so I will probably not and just rely on their predilections for just staring at their other electronic devices and finding setting up the entertainment center to watch a movie on physical media too much of a chore to bother with.
National Lampoon’s Adam and Eve (2005)
With the title Adam and Eve, one might expect some sort of Biblical story, and that’s not what this is at all. It has a standard setting for a National Lampoon film, a college, with main characters in a sorority and a fraternity (it says), and there’s a lot of drinking, sex, and drug use.
But at its core, this movie has a very, erm, conservative message. Adam introduces himself to the girl Eve, and they start dating, but she’s a virgin, and she’s not sure when she might want to go all the way. So most of the story deals with his frustration and her uncertainty, with pressure on Eve not only from Adam but also her sorority sisters. The gags are typical college movie fare, but the story isn’t about the gags. It’s about the tension and resolution in Adam and Eve’s relationship. Can they stay together without sex? They both declare their love for one another to each other and to others. An obvious plot twist and a satisfying conclusion.
So I was rather pleased with the film. But another one not for the boys.
In the film, Eve is played by Emmanuelle Chriqui, whom I recognized from You Don’t Mess with the Zohan but who also apparently has had a good career in television as well.
Continue reading “National Lampoon Movie Double Feature” →
I bought this book 
So we, like many people in the nation, are getting saturation-bombed on the radio by the One Dime Down woman. I first heard this series of commercials a couple years ago when I was traveling back and forth to the Kansas City area which was already infested with these commercials. They feature a woman with an exaggerated New York accent in high dudgeon that car dealers want a down payment, and that the selected car dealer only requires “one doime down.”
I said I was done with movie tie-in and television tie-in books for the nonce, so I dived right into an Executioner novel.
After 
So we had some time on Sunday evening, my youngest and I, to watch a film. As my youngest is very patient and will watch old movies with me, I picked Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii. You know, my sainted mother was a big Elvis fan–she was a woman of a certain age, after all, and so many of the Baby Boomer women were Elvis fans–but I had not actually seen an Elvis picture before. So I got it in my head to watch this film, and I set it upon my entertainment centers for just such an occasion.
