The Netflix Challenge continues on the non-fiction tip with the powerful documentary, Off and Running.
This is the very interesting story of Avery, a young girl struggling to find herself. Nothing super special about that, except Avery is the teen-aged African-American daughter of two white Jewish lesbians.
We meet Avery as she begins efforts to contact her birth mother. The decision to do so effects everyone in the family, including her multiracial older brother and Korean younger brother, and the film deals heavily with questions of race, identity, culture, religion and sexuality.
My mind is still reeling a little bit from this one, so I called upon Carolina to sum up the message:
"Adopting a kid and loving that kid is not enough. That kid might need more and you have to make your peace with that. No matter how loving and giving your home is, that kid will always have questions."
The most important thing is Off and Running is off the queue and we've got just 60 more titles to go.
We've lost some ground on the Netflix Challenge this week and I blame my wife. She's the one who put Modify on the queue and Modify is the reason I've felt sick to my stomach for most of the week. Thisis a documentary featuring interviews with people who have engaged in various forms of body modification -- that can mean anything from simple makeup, tattoos and piercings to branding, those giant earlobe stretchy things and horn-like forehead bump implantation.
And that was all well and good, but then they started with the plastic surgery footage, penis piercings and other genital oddities, and I just couldn't stand to watch.
Honestly, I missed a good bit of this movie because I had to close my eyes. There were even moments when Carolina felt it necessary to cover my already closed eyes. I don't even want to imagine what was going on then.
This one is definitely not for the squeamish, or anyone with a normal gag reflex.
Among the small number of movies I find entertaining enough to justify repeated viewings is the 1984 screwball college comedy classic, Revenge of the Nerds.
Once we hit puberty, my best friend Erick and I would watch this movie every chance we got. And we weren't even high. I know we truly and soberly believed every bit of it was hilarious, but let's be honest, our devotion probably had as much to do with the Tri-Lambs' panty raid and Betty Child's ass than the witty repartee between Lamar Latrell and Wormser.
Until I hatched this scheme to watch every title on my Netflix instant queue, Nerds just sat there like an old jar of icy hamburger dills in the back of the fridge. I didn't necessarily plan to use it, but it made me feel safe knowing that it was there and ready if I ever needed it.
After watching it last night, I'm pleased to report that while some of the jokes have grown a little stale, there's still genius to be found in Revenge of the Nerds.
Filmed right smack dab in the middle of the Reagan '80s, an era ruled by hard-bodied heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Lewis Skolnik and Gilbert Lowe blazed the trail for what would be termed "geek chic" in the new millennium. You can get the commemorative bootleg T-shirts here.
We first meet Lewis and Gilbert as they head off to their freshmen year at Adams College. Maybe they should have gone to City Tech? Nah! Adams has the best computer department in the country!
Although the two nerds are hoping for a fresh start in college, they quickly learn that the campus is dominated by the good looking and athletic party crowd in the Greek system, specifically the Waspy Alpha Beta fraternity and Pi Delta Pi sorority. When the Alpha Betas burn down their frat house and push the freshmen out of their dormitory and onto cots in the college's gymnasium, Lewis, Gilbert and a group of other social castoffs (a sleazy nose picker, an allergy-prone geek, a Japanese guy with broken English, an effeminate gay African-American) band together to form their own fraternity.
Only one national fraternity agrees to give them a chance at a charter, the all black fraternity, Lambda Lambda Lambda. Sensing a brotherhood in the shared torment and injustice suffered at the hands of the white majority (a point driven home when the Alpha Betas burn "Nerds" on their front lawn), Tri-Lamb chief U.N. Jefferson agrees to make the nerds full-fledged members of the fraternity.
Using the talents that God gave each of them (and some muscle from their Tri-Lamb brothers), the nerds are able to rise above the Alpha Betas' brutality, win the prestigious homecoming carnival and control of the Greek Council. It's an underdog story for the ages. With plenty of T&A, to boot!
Supporting Evidence:
1: During the party the nerds' throw to impress U.N. Jefferson and the Lambda Lambda Lambda brass, Dudley "Booger" Dawson saves the day by breaking out the "Wonder Joints." Soon, everybody's high, horny and dancing to "Thriller."
Example 2: Sometimes the cheapest jokes are the best and what's cheaper than poking fun at the way Japanese speakers have trouble pronouncing Ls and Rs. And, WTF are "robster craws" anyway?
Gilbert: I just wanted to say that I'm a nerd, and I'm here tonight to stand up for the rights of other nerds. I mean, all our lives we've been laughed at and made to feel inferior. And tonight, those bastards, they trashed our house. Why? Cause we're smart? Cause we look different? Well, we're not. I'm a nerd, and uh, I'm pretty proud of it.
Lewis: Hi, Gilbert. I'm a nerd too. I just found that out tonight. We have news for the beautiful people. There's a lot more of us than there are of you. I know there's alumni here tonight. When you went to Adams you might've been called a spazz, or a dork, or a geek. Any of you that have ever felt stepped on, left out, picked on, put down, whether you think you're a nerd or not, why don't you just come down here and join us. Okay? Come on.
Gilbert: Just join us cause, no one's gonna really be free until nerd persecution ends.
Take that, instant queue! You just got one shorter.
Another night, another Netflix instant queue title obliterated. This time, it was the 2009 British film, The Damned United.
If you ask me, never has a better movie been made about late '60s, early '70s English professional soccer. It definitely made me want to go out and learn more about the whole Premier League set up.
Not quite a drama and not quite a comedy, it is a good sports movie without the usual cliches found in American sports movies. Plus, Peter Pettigrew is in it, as well as the guy who plays Liz Lemon's bad British date.
Mary and Max is the latest movie to fall from the Netflix instant queue.
This one was a Carolina addition, which usually means we're in for something light and sweet or dark and filled with crazy people. Mary and Max manages to balance all of that in this truly amazing claymation animated feature about the pen pal relationship between a lonely little Australian girl and an obese, middle-aged Jewish atheist New Yorker with Asperger syndrome.
Directed by Oscar-winning (HarvieKrumpet) Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot, the film deals with very intense issues like mental illness, alcoholism, suicide, bullying and a bunch of other craziness without losing its sense of humor.
It's sad, funny, amazing to look at and no longer in our queue.
The Netflix Challenge continues full-steam ahead tonight with the 2008 documentary Soul Power.
James Brown, sporting a killer mustache and wearing a navy blue and black jumpsuit with "GFOS" stitched on the front, leads a group of the hottest American R&B acts of 1974 (Bill Withers, B.B. King, The Spinners and Celia Cruz) to Zaire for a joint music festival with Africa's biggest performers to coincide with Ali and Frazier's "Rumble in the Jungle."
The film is edited together from footage left over from the Academy Award-winning documentary, When We Were Kings, which focused more on the Ali-Frazier fight.
There's some great stuff from the plane ride over featuring Celia Cruz and her band playing mid-flight. Azucar!
A highlight from Bill Withers:
And The Godfather:
The best part, though, was right at the very end. After the credits roll, James tells the camera, "I hope this can be put at the tail end of this thing. When you walk out this movie, or you walk away from your television, if there's one thing you walk out with in your mind when get up and walk out in the street, you say to yourself, 'Damn right, I'm somebody'."
If I weren't a lazy ass, now would be a great time to challenge myself to get fit. Maybe run a 10K or some shit like that and put a sticker on the back of my car so everybody driving behind me would know that I, or perhaps some other person frequently associated with my vehicle, was physically fit enough at some point in time to run that distance.
Or I could sit down and try to write something. Really write something with some depth. A big project that I would write and revise and rewrite. It doesn't have to be a novel, necessarily, but something big that would earn enough money to pay for a trip to Hawaii or Peru or another exotic locale of my choosing.
Those are good, productive goals to strive for and would be very satisfying accomplishments, to be sure.
Unfortunately, that's not the journey on which I've chosen to embark.
The family Netflix Instant Queue has gotten completely out of hand. Not counting the 10 entries for various television programs, the queue (or the movie lineup for those of us outside of Great Britain) has grown to 73 items of filmed entertainment just waiting there to be watched. Some of it (Super High Me) has been there since the day our Netflix account was born, continuously getting passed over by newer, more intriguing additions to Netflix's streaming library.
Long story short, the wife and I have challenged ourselves to see how fast we can watch every film in the queue. We will not be allowed to add any additional films onto the pile until the current slate of titles has been wiped clean. It will be a sometimes tedious and mostly pointless exercise, save for the kind of pleasure you get after dumping a big load at Goodwill, or in your own toilet, for that matter. Regardless, it's the mission we've given ourselves, and one we must accomplish. I'm pleased to report the big number has already been reduced by one. Last night, the Matthew Broderick film, Wonderful World, went down without a fight. Nothing groundbreaking here -- just another down-on-his-luck grumpy guy getting his life changed for the better when a hot foreign lady (Sanaa Lathan with a Senegalese accent) unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep. Carolina says that sounds like our story.
Anyway, if you like Matty B., you won't be disappointed.
Come back for more later. We've got a lot of work to do.
Oops, it's been too long. Let me post the following stuff before this blog becomes dormant: Just a couple of weeks ago, I went camping for the first time in 20 years. It was 99 degrees that day. I thought it might be cooler because we were camping on Paris Mountain. Turns out, we were just closer to the sun. The experience did provide a good opportunity to reconnect with Mother Nature and wear my captain's hat.
I went to see the big summer buzz hit, Inception, last weekend. It was good. Definitely more thoughtful than your average summer blockbuster.
I just watched an episode of "Go, Diego! Go!" about a green iguana who has to suffer through a long journey with Diego before he can shit out strawberry seeds at Abuelito's farm. And not a moment too soon, because the big strawberry festival is just around the corner.
Prince released a new album this summer, not in America, just in Europe and only through print newspapers and magazines because he said the internet's dead. He's a dynamo, that Prince, but the album's better than I thought it would be. Lots of old Prince sounds without being too forced. But don't take my word for it. Go to Belgium and get yourself a copy of Het Nieuwsblad!
The Netflix Challenge continues on the non-fiction tip with the powerful documentary, Off and Running.
