Kid Rock's Comeuppance: Joe Dirt

Mostly, my posts tend to be mean and sarcastic, or at best something akin to a hipster's glee in irony or camp. I pick on targets like Heston and Jack Lord (both incapable of doing any more than haunting me), movies that are unintentionally funny, not what I'd consider to be great entertainment or art.

So now, it's time for one that I consider a cinematic masterpiece. A movie released in the first year of the millenium: Joe Dirt. David Spade, casting aside his sarcastic schtick and small-guy side-kickery to play a pure and humble (and so temptingly mockable) hero on an epic quest, a zen master never cowed by life's indignities. A working man abused but never downtrodden, he is the cream of the 99%.

He is, of course, imaginary. The real Joe Dirts are locked up, burned out, or beaten down, but this guy comes straight out of the halcyon days of his ilk, keeps on keepin' on, crankin some tunes, and ultimately triumphing with his hemi. The exalted hemi, his favorite bands, the Auto Trader obsession, and all that shit was not intended as documentary, but captures a reality that does exist, or did anyway. While not forgetting to be hilarious. Not high-brow, understand (although some lines would work as New Yorker cartoons), but not overly dependent on farts either and above the crowd in terms of literalizing the "he's being shit on" theme. Seems like everything Joe says is something I heard in high school. Anyway, thanks Spade and Wolf for a kick-ass script.

Whoever cast this was right on. His small-town girl-next-door-friend is sweet and genuine (and extra authenticity points for casting a Brittany as a Brandy), and having Dennis Miller portray a self-adoring douchebag mock-jock inspired by Dirt's story to a patronizing dullness is pretty dead-on. One of my favorites among the human(ish) cast is Kid Rock playing grown "man" still going by Robby (another authentic name, and this time the "actor's" actual name, as opposed to his clever trade name). It is incredibly satisfying to see Kid Rock get his comeuppance in the movie, and also to realize that this was probably the acme of his career. Finding a dog with such elasticity is a coup, as well.

Speaking of which, this movie has the funniest dog-ball scene ever, tender in every sense of the word. [Not really, it is not at all like these tenders: boats, caretakers, or those weird little strips of chicken meat with a big tendon at one end.]

So I was watching this with my older kid, up til just before the sex (maybe sibling incest) scene, when she was shooed out. As some of you know from an early procrastacritique of mine, I am home-schooling her in sarcasm, and wanted to show her the particularly mean (and in my opinion, unworthy) brand of snarkasm Dennis Miller delivers so oilily. When he's playing Zander Kelly, I mean.

But because I'm a censorous old man, my daughter missed the best pose sequence this side of the collected stretches of Nacho Libre. Joe takes off his shirt and strikes every attitude of bad-ass nonchalance he can, in slow-mo, while a white trash hottie takes it in. He's the carny sex god, and for some reason his stances and expressions just crack me up to no end. [I swear it is a coincidence that I just happened to watch Zoolander, and I am not really obsessed with model-style sequences].

One of the first things people comment on with Joe Dirt (OK, maybe the only thing) is his mullet, so of course for me it will be last. The hair is cool and all, but it is a wig, whereas his facial hair is natural; he doesn't even have to shave. This trigger's Miller's best line, "Now, you're telling me you were so ingrained with white trash DNA, your facial hair actually grows in on its own all white trashy like that?"

So. Joe Dirt. Ridiculous realism. The losers' winner. A story arc more than the sum of it's tangents. A movie here un-mocked.

Stone-Age Philly: Rocky I

[This is another post dredged up from my original blog, Mojourner Truth, and was originally entitled "Lithic I," due to my smartassociation and archaeologic.]

Sorry if you clicked on this looking for something on stones. I just didn't want to title this entry "Rocky I," even though that's what it is about. After making my near-teen kid watch Planet of the Apes by way of home-schooling her in sarcasm (see "Shallow Space Travel"), I figured a lesson on abject mockery was in order, in particular the iconic moments of Rocky that have sustained comedians for decades now.

As you may know, Rocky was the story of an exceptionally stupid and no longer very young boxer in Philadelphia who, against all odds, gets a shot at the heavyweight title of the world. (Why stupid? Maybe all the blows to the head, maybe the deadening effects of living in Philly, or maybe he was just a dumbass.) His best friend and mentor is a rubber ball whose cheerful acceptance of being slammed into the spit and velveeta-stained streets of the Philly slums provides the self-proclaimed Italian Stallion with his fighting strategy: take blows to the head until your opponent tires or dislocates something.

The champ that reaches into the City of Brotherly Love (lovingly shot in a palette of soot and carcass hues) and pulls out a smalltime leg-breaker for a sham battle resembles Muhammad Ali in some ways: black and beautiful (sorta), boastful and uppity (the late-70's was an era when white people bemoaned melanin run rampant in their sports world). But it being Hollywood, and a film released in the afterglow of the bicentennial, movie champ Apollo Creed is not a conscientious objector, but loves America so much that he wears red white and blue trunks, albeit in an uppity way. Later Rocky the champ will don similarly patriotic garb before defeating communism in the guise of a hulking nazi poster boy, but that's another tale.

Stallone, who wrote and starred in the movie (there was no director) and reportedly stitched together all the costumes as well, wanted to emphasize the value of individual will and hard work, so a fair amount of the movie focuses on his training, culminating in the flick's second most famous moment: Rocky in the same unwashed sweatsuit he's been wearing for weeks, heavily stained on the ass for some reason, charging up the stairs of the capitol and pumping his arms in the air [Yes, Internerd, I know the capitol's in Harrisburg, but Rocky thought it was the capitol.]

Anyway, Rocky runs, sweats, confides his insecurities to his rubber ball, maybe even abstains from sex, and punches beef carcasses (or, in Philly parlance, beats his meat), sometimes before cameras.

The cameras are there because this unlikely challenger has become a home-town hero. The white population of Philly, still years from their triumphant fire-bombing of black activists, seizes on Rocky as a punch-drunk messiah of sorts, or at least a working class hero (of a looser sort, given his joblessness).

And on a more intimate scale, Rocky has other supporters. Like plastic fish and turtle toys that he believes are pets, and feeds diligently. There's Paulie, a sloppy and sometimes violent drunk whose ethnicity is never directly mentioned, but who works for a meat company with an Irish name (to be fair, Sly scrawled unflattering stereotypes of Italian-Americans as well). There's the girl who sold him the pet food and is Paulie's sister, because anyone else would have alien and confusing to Rocky's addled mind. In a true Philly romance, he traps her in his filthy apartment, shows her is biceps and armpits, and she falls for him, or at least under him, making love on the floor among the roach-husks and mouse-turds. Finally, there's his manager, a guy who everyone calls Mick (probably not a Swede), but who is clearly a retired Penguin, embittered after being humiliated by Batman, jilted by the Riddler, and robbed blind by the Joker. Mick supports Rocky by yelling at him, which I guess makes him more of a father figure than the rubber ball, and by telling him "Stay away from women, they weaken the legs." (Luckily Rocky had that one brilliant moment and figured out the beef loophole.)

Then the fight itself, lovingly choreographed by, you guessed it, Stallone. Rocky leads off with the usual strategy of standing there and blocking punches with his face, but eventually he and his corner realize that compared to his usual experience with 3-round bouts, a 15 round prize fight is way more: the cut man thinks maybe 10 times more, Rocky says 100, while the Penguin spits in disgust and says "There ain't no such number that big, Rock," then jabs him in the nuts to perk him up for the next round.

Then this nobody lands a solid punch, knocking down the champ. What follows is a boring see-saw of desperation and triumph, hitting and getting hit, blood, spit, drool, and snot. The only real good part is when Rocky cannot see because his eye is swollen, and his manager wants him to quit, but he says "Cut it, Mick!" Oh, the mockery that line has fed. We used that line doing fieldwork all the time,and I suggest you do the same. It need not relate at all to what's happening; thus are the rules of Rocky's utterances.

So does he win? I dunno, maybe the movie does not say, or maybe I just didn't care. I was too caught up in the most famous moment of the movie, when he is done with the fight, and all the world is crowding into the ring, and Rocky keeps howling "Adrian!"

Adrian had been the name of his pet-shop girl, drunk-boy's sister. But that woman was poor, and based on her glasses and clothes was either a time traveler or some religious extremist who dressed as if the 1960s had never happened. The woman who comes to the ring has new clothes, uses rich-girl conditioner, and sees fine with no glasses. Adrienne, maybe, but not the same spinster he'd woo'd and screwed on the kitchen floor. In any case, a few seconds of celluloid killed off those names, maybe forever. Nobody from that point forward wanted to name their kid something that would be bawled loudly by people trying to act retarded. "Aaaa Dreee Uuuunnnnnn!!!"

So did my kid learn anything? Maybe, but probably not. She did stick it out 'til the very end, through 15 rounds of incomprehensible "dialogue," unlikelihoods galore, gore unbridled, Rocky's incontinence, and of course, my dumb comments. For with so little to work with, refined sarcasm is difficult, and mockery grows dull before long, which is why society as chosen two or three scenes to mock as shorthand for the entire movie, and why I went for the richer grounds of POTA first.

BONUS: That was it for the blog entry proper, but I cannot let this pass without mentioning that fact that the movie included among Apollo Creed's entourage none other than Arnold Johnson. Yeah, Putney Swope himself. Same suit, same beard, although the voice lacked the magic Swope. Sadly, I think that his tertiary sidekick role here was one of the biggest things to happen to him since he starred as the revolutionary advertiser a decade earlier, maybe his last movie appearance. He showed up in episodes of The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son, and after exhausting the 'black' shows, appeared in other shows in the only roles available to bearded African Americans: old men and drunks. Although he did appear in several episodes of Hill Street Blues, it was never in a major role, and unlike Rocky he never got a real championship shot.