What Brings You to Procrastacritic?

One week last month, these were the top searches leading here. 
 
I have never been so proud. It could have been better only if "jack lord fake name" and "joe dirt underrated masterpiece" also showed up. But about this list,...no, this poem,...I will not bemoan. I stand by it...at least until Mr. Rollins hunts me down and crushes me with his patented Bicep Vice-grip move. 

 

Rambo (part __)

Resplendent in Ralph Karen hand-woven headband, Rambo heads up river.

It was a summer evening in northeast Washington state, wavy heat rising from the pavement outside the hotel, where some channel had a Rambo marathon going on. I thought, "Great. I haven't procrastacriticized Rambo, and it's about freakin' time."

Then a couple of things happened to waylay me. One was learning that the Rambo I was watching was not from the '80's but a mere four years ago. But that wasn't what stopped me. It was learning the very next day that Stallone's son had died. Even though nobody looks at this blog, picking on the grieving seems mean even for a blog critic, so I gave it a break. I feel for him, and cannot imagine that kind of loss.

Rambo, however, is an imaginary guy, even more so than Rocky or Sly Stallone his own self. In the confusingly eponymous 4th episode (at least they decided to stop the even more confusing "First Blood Part __" titling), John Rambo is near Burma. Presumably in Thailand or Laos, although I could tell most Americans he was in Vietnam or Guyana and it would make no difference.

Now, he is a reclusive villager (a feat tat only w Westerner can pull off), spending his days catching snakes for the locals to use in their tourist shows, in a place where the rain only ever stops when he wants to do some face-acting. For some reason (I'm thinking it must be common sense), the locals prefer to have a crazed vet do their cobra-catching, and I even suspect that they invented the whole snake-show thing as a way to put this uninvited psychopath in harm's way, hoping the problem would solve itself. Instead, they end up having to complain that enough cobras are in custody, and they'd like to get some pythons; Rambo has been so effective a snake-catcher that the village is soon to be devoured by rats.

Admittedly, I an no expert in the economics of snake-catching, but I have to assume that the villagers are horrible snake-keepers or Rambo is secretly killing the serpents at night, because otherwise a once-daily snake show would not create sufficient demand for a snake-grabber bringing them new talent day after day, earning enough to afford a boat and nice archery gear. Unless, of course, the people really were trying to kill him and divvy up his stuff.

Or maybe he supplements his living by blacksmithing. John J Rambo, brooding and Thorish, pounding rebar into propellers. Later, as he prepares to do battle, he makes a machete. In a jungle country, where machetes are the single most common metal tool and the closest rebar is in Yangon, hmmm. Makes no sense, until you ponder the depth of the man's self-sufficiency, the scope of his killer artistry. No store-bought blade for him…not a chance. I can respect that.

So then along come the missionaries. The movie failed to portray them as being drawn to his snake-handling abilities, which was disappointing. Instead, they just want to sneak them into Burma to help tribespeople who are being persecuted because they are Christian (and oh yeah, the wrong ethnicity). Clean-cut do-gooders clearly disgust Rambo, who is too wise for that peace and love bullshit. The intensity of his dismissal, of course, can only signal a turn-around, and the fact that one of the missionaries is a pretty female can only mean that Rambo's heart will melt, and that we are all about to learn something.

What we viewers learn is that by 2008 the effects, if not particularly special, are more convincing than in First Blood Part I, or II, or probably even III. [Oh the redundancy, it reminds me of that time I saw in a friend's footlocker of porn the title "My First Time, Part II"?!] Every lead-hitting-flesh shot seems to be individually miked, and both the injuries and corpses seem more realistic than at the dawn of the Rambo Age. This installment reportedly has the highest body count of any in the series, and we are treated to everything from fresh dismemberment to pig-gnawed bodies to blowfly-bloated bodies. Two thumbs up for realistic carnage.

Not so much for the dialogue. Rambo remains speech impaired, and prone to saying things like:
"when you're pushed, killin's as easy as breathing'"
or
"there isn't one of us who doesn't wanna be somewhere else…but this is what we do...live for something, or die for nothing" (his longest speech, I think).

Rambo does not want to go with the woefully unprepared and naive Jesus freaks, and warns them against entering a war zone. Of course they do, and of course he ends up going in to save them, cajoled by their preacher (the White Shadow!) into joining a group of mercenaries hired with the job. Rambo is aloof, though, and clearly sees this whole episode as an imposition on his usual snake-catching gig; he is not  one with the mercenaries, and we see that he is better and wiser than they are.

Rambo guides his boat up-river to the…yawn…heart of darkness. There are no heads on sticks or acid trips, just some pirates with slow enough reflexes to be dispatched easily. The hot missionary's milquetoast guy friend objects to the killing, warning Rambo that he will report the murders, which we should all immediately recognize as foreshadowing to his subsequent bashing-in of a Burmese guy's head with a rock. With typical understatement, Rambo responds with"They would've raped her fifty times... and cut your fucking heads off! Who are you? Who are any of you?"

The whole movie is like this. Stallone recognizes hypocrisy and loathes it, but deals with it though subtle writerly devices like head-bashing and mass murder.  Or men of god who hire mercenaries, who turn out to be not that good at fighting. Oh, and of course the evil villain who wants to 'purify' Myanmar has a thing for young boys…genocide is not quite bad enough, so you gotta throw in some pedophiliac buggery to make it clear. I keep wondering what would have happened had a young Stallone been handed a dictionary instead of a copy of armaments catalogues and boxing videos; what if he had gone for a refined message, instead of escalating body counts?

At some point after said body count topping 200, after he gets to use his hand-forged blade on the evil Myamarmy, after he delivers the missionaries to safety (having taught them to not be so damned peaceful and self-righteous), we see that Rambo has finally made a breakthrough. He returns to Arizona to find his dad; he is ready to step out of the heart of darkness. Or maybe he's just tired of cobras, and wants to try his hand at rattlers.

Godspeed, John Rambo, Godspeed.

Front Man Capitalism: Precrastacriticizing Henry Rollins

The Magnificent Creature known as Henry Rollins, bottom (Artist's conception by Coop)

Henry Rollins is a comin' to town soon, which means I should review the show several years from now, but this time I'm going precrastacritic, because I ain't going to the show anyway. May as well pre-judge (as per childhood religious training).

The reason I won't go see this icon of American Hardcore punk, this spokesman for the outsiders, is that he's gonna charge more than I've ever paid to see anything in Olympia, and has the gall to call his tour "Capitalism," in which he goes to the capital of each state (get it!? Pure Henry Gold) and talks about the injustices of capitalism that he has seen in his world travels.

People my age came to know Henry as the singer of Blag Flag, a seminal band which became that way under Dez, but hit punk fame (translation, suburban demi-rebels like myself were able to buy the album) when Damaged hit the record stores, overwrought Henry photo on the cover (he's punching a mirror!). Then he had to have a band named for himself, showed up on a bunch of cable shows and the movie blockbuster Jackass, did whatever it took to make a living without ending up as the burger flipper he sometimes says he was set up to be. 

But instead, he's a "spoken word artist," a phrase that, when translated from it's native Capitalistian, means, "I don't like sharing the take with a band, and I'm more of a visionary/poet/raconteur than a musician."

And I am supposed to pay five times what I would pay for a Fugazi show to take in this one guy, no smarter than Ian for sure, and without the music. He did promise Capitalism, so I guess I shouldn't complain.What sucks is the "I'm with the proletariat" conceit. I watched the video linked to at the calendar that announces hi Olympia show, sitting through  11 excruciating minutes of him talking about how his free-spiritedness and tough upbringing made him qualified to work in the service industry at minimum wage, and thus is my brother.

Bullshit, Henry Garfield (yup, Rollins is a made-up name). Were you street-wise, or a student at the elite Bullis School? Were you earning your blue collar cred while working at a Haagen Dazs ice cream store back when the name meant luxury to the rich, and a complete blank to the rest of us? You like to talk about how close you are to the edge, but you say you've been on tour more than 100 days this year, each time a few hundred people paying 25 bucks a pop to hear you claim that you're just a poor working stiff. 

But you're not cleaning piss in a public nursing facility, and you are not flipping burgers or even slinging yuppie ice cream. You are, as you mostly have been, starring in the Henry Show. Appearing and voicing over, DJ-ing and blogging. Lots of it at henryrollins.com (not .org, .net, or even .us, but .com, just to be clear), where the rest of us can also buy t-shirts with the Henry birth-date emblazoned on them, again for the low low price of $25. Ignoring for the moment the creepy cult-of-personality vibe of selling stuff celebrating the Adored One's date of issue, I'm sure that the reason the shirts cost so much is that they are made in a unionized American factory. 

To harp on the website a moment longer: why is Capitalism so much more evident than that there Freedom you claim to love and defend? The "Dispatch" blog allows no comment, no democratic feedback, and when I get to the "Contact" page, most of the addresses are for money stuff. The approach seems to be, "I am Henry. Now shut up and listen. Or buy something." I wonder too, how far your internet power extends, since I posted an abbreviated rant of this sort at the Olympia Film Society's page announcing your show, only to have it never appear.(Maybe there will be something tomorrow...I tried again.)

However, I do get to see this poster, featuring you as Uncle Sam, co-opting our nation's most scoldy icon to sell tickets. Clever, very clever. And better than that "I copied it from Johnny Rotten" crazy-eyed stare you do; the Uncle Sam pose demonsrates your versatility. Also, it's a welcome relief from the muscle guy stances you seem to favor, looking like Napoleon's Uncle Rico, only meaner. 

Meanwhile, you are making your way here as I pre-criticize. Honolulu to Anchorage to Olympia, and you've traveled all over in months and years preceding. Ergo the "Dispatches" trope on your .com website. We imagine tuning in to read your tales of exotic travel, global humanity, and regional complexities. But mostly there are plugs for your radio show and appearances. Since I know something about Honolulu, I was happy to see you posting from there, but was disappointed to see you only plug away and write boringly about the logistics of traveling shows. There was no there there. Not even any Henry there. If you just wanna phone it in, give up the blog and tweet.

The people who do go see you will enjoy it, probably ($25 is a powerful inducement to feign satisfaction for most of us, Henry). Hell, I enjoyed Black Flag (most recently a half hour ago, on the original vinyl), and actually would rather abide a show-boating, only slightly ripping-me-off guy who speaks out against corporate corruption than most of the alternatives. 

But your being a disingenius is bothersome. Why not admit you were born weller-off than many, that your service-working years were spent in an upscale establishment, or that maybe you got the gig with Black Flag because you had the resources and the parental indulgence to goto NY city to be at their shows for nights on end? People with publicists and booking agents are not your garden variety proles. It's OK, I'm too old and too employed by a state government to call you a Sellout. And if you priced your shows a bit more like Fugazi, I'd probably be among the appreciative crowd.

Nemesis: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Ready, set, steal!

Even for a procrastinator, I've put off facing off with my nemesis long enough. So long I had to rent the movie to remember anything beyond the melting nazi (but not enough after that to suppress memory once more). Enough years between release and review for me to have kids who can mock the old-timeyness of the production values and special effects. Nearly long enough for the movie to meet the federal threshold for being historic.

Until such time as archaeologists can officially start considering the locations (AD 2031), they must satisfy themselves with the film. Raiders sits proudly astride the canon of Archaeology Training Films, if only because we cannot avoid it, along with Planet of the Apes (for the second smartest character in the movie, an archaeologist chimp, and of course for the material culture images from another branch of the primate evolutionary tree), Platoon (for the jungle-stalking hand gestures), and,...and some other stuff.

Archaeologists cannot escape Dr. Jones. People always ask where my whip is (I got your bullwhip right here, buddy), and about the hardest thing this non-conformist ever did was buy a hat that vaguely resembles what everyone thinks I am supposed to wear. [For the record, it is a locally made Filson, whose rain-shedding sun-shading excellence makes the inevitable calls of "Hey, Indiana!" bearable.] Most Americans, and plenty of the rest of the world at this late date, know about as much about archaeology from the Indiana Jones movies as from anywhere else.

From the base of excavation to the top of the ivory tower, we archaeologists cringe at what the public thinks of us based on these blockbuster figments. Other than chrono-stupidity of biblical proportions ("Hey, you finding any dinosaurs?"), the perception that archaeologists hunt treasure ranks high among our existential banes. An interesting thing about the movie (oh yeah, I'm supposed to be writing a movie review) is that the protagonist is in fact presented as a procurer-for-hire, an expert in the occult, and to the extent he is a professor of archaeology at all, it is only so that he may cause coeds to swoon until he is called out on feats of daring-do. Neither 'raider' nor 'occulticist' has yet made it onto the list of sub-disciplines recognized by academe, and the fact that this flick shows him being recruited by spooks (who inexplicably demand to hold a top-secret conversation ins a large echo-ey hall) absolutely hammers home that Indy is to get the goods before the Germans, not stop and take notes, screen all the dirt, and all that other boring shit. Under no circumstances is he to waste time mapping a site, other than to find treasure. [Ahh, treasure, the worst of archaeotropes.]

There is, of course, a love interest, as is so often not the case for dedicated shovelbums, nomad-ing their way through their region of choice, living in cheap motels and on cheapskates' checks. No, it is not one of the college girls. Indiana Jones needs something more complex and mature than that: his professor's daughter. Who, I was surprised to learn upon consulting imdb, is not played by Deborah Winger. No, it is Karen Allen, who to my knowledge has never posed for a magazine spread french-kissing a dog, which helps distinguish her from Deb. Whoever it is, the character turns out to be a far more accurate take on an archaeologist man's mate: she can drink her weight in the alcohol of any nation, she looks good in a dress but prefers more practical wear, and she can hold her own in a fight. Come to think of it, those are also the qualifications for a pirate's girlfriend.

At this point in this post, I cannot see the sense in trying to summarize the action or the plot, or to aim for literary criticism. What's the value in pointing out that Natives are portrayed as bloodthirsty, Mestizos as duplicitous, African skippers as good-hearted slave-traders, and Arab shovelbums as cowardly buffoons? Or plodding my way through the large data set of un-archaeological actions, noting each and every professional and technical objection? [OK, maybe just one: after uttering the most hilarious line he gets--"Belloq's staff is too long"--Indy uses a staff that is even longer still, based on the units specified on the Staff of Ra, yet I am asked to suspend disbelief... Oh yeah, that's some prime geek-crit there.]

Belloq, the obligatory nemesis. Like all European stereotypes deployed for this film--the Frenchman is a conniving lightweight, the Nazi is enamored with sado-masochistic coat-hangers--his is entirely accurate. A bad guy not because he steals priceless cultural heritage, but because he steals it for the wrong people. At least he managed to convince those wrong people to make a pit stop on some island to engage in a fake Jewish ritual so that Indy and his androgynously-monikered Marion could have a conversation while tied up together, just before denouement. Unlike most US presidents, I have decided that the nemesis of my nemesis is not my friend.

Oh, Doc Jones, what am I to make of you? The franchise eventually had archaeologists doing all sorts of offensive things, from using femurs for torches to enrolling a spunky kid and an addled Sean Connery in his adventures. Oh, and most of all, making Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...unforgivable. Snatching treasure you don't need, Harrison?

But on the other hand, there's Indiana Jones, making archaeology cool. Had Hollywood inexplicably portrayed archaeologists doing what they normally do: digging slowly, taking notes, spending untold hours weighing, illustrating, researching and writing,...if they'd showed all that, nobody would think our job is interesting. And Indiana Jones hates nazis, like most archaeologists; that's a good thing.

So yeah. Raiders of the Lost Ark kicked off one of those sprees that alters culture, that casts a type so solidly the populace cannot escape. Archaeologists are stuck with Indiana Jones like Nixon had Rich Little and comedians have Seinfeld. [Yes, there are more up-to-date analogs, but dammit, I am an archaeologist.]

Five-O's First Samurai

Samurai so suave
Ricardo Montalbanish
Not so Mount Fuji
-Amonymous

Yes, the very first samurai on Hawaii Five-Oh was Ricardo Montalban. Pretty much every mention I've seen of this episode dwells on the ethnic mismatch. But it's acting, fakery to begin with, and maybe this experience helped Ricardo in his masterful performance as a Space-Mongol years later. Any ethnicity can take on a poorly written part, but only Montalban is a master with the boquilla.

He plays Tokura, a mob boss whose past has come back to haunt him, in the form of 'bushido' bent on killing him. Turns out he was a mini-sub commander who landed on Moloka'i and sat out the war in safety. Actually, this is completely plausible. But then he somehow becomes a criminal kingpin samurai and nobody notices until 1968, when the assassins arrive to punish this cowardly enemy of honor.

He wields a mean boquilla, tries to be inscrutable, and steals the show from Lord. But in the end, Steve-o outwits Tokura, tricking him into confession and surrender by hiring a couple of Japanese extras to pretend to be killer bushido. The episode isn't that great, but of course it isn't that great, it's TV, it's Five-O. But to see Ichiban Montalban, this is where you gotta look.


.

Danger, Will Robinson

Hi kids. Today we get Lost In Space. The show first appeared when I was an infant, so I know it from re-runs grown stale but not yet retro. Never was a huge fan, but there were time-slots in the viewing day when it beat the alternatives, and there was nothing else to do. In college, it seems like the Weird Uncles (me and my housemates) enjoyed it immensely for a while, there being over 80 episodes from it's mere three seasons, running in syndication over and over, replicating the strange DNA of the show for decades after it was canceled. Just as it's stray broadcast waves still seed the universe with some inkling of what we earthlings expect from interplanetary contact. (Ray-guns and wrestling for the most part, with occasional cuteness.)

Maybe it still appears somewhere in TV land, but I haven't set eyes on it since the '80s, have not heard Dr. Smith launch some crazy scheme for him and the boy, or hurl a good insult at the robot. Some day, I'll netflix the show and remind myself of what exactly happened when the earth family Robinson was marooned in space, but why wait for data? Fuzzy recollections and IMDb are enough for now.

As I surfed through the actor profiles, I had to abandon my usual modus operandi: mocking the cast. I fall into snarcasm all too readily, but instead of finding has-beens and fools, I was faced with a collection of folks who went on to solid careers in and out of Hollywood, people who actually seem decent by normal standards (which may make them uncomfortably saintly in the entertainment industry, so I can see why none became blockbuster stars).

So, in no particular order (don't believe that, don't ever believe it when people claim that), here are the players:

The Star. Guy Williams was born Armando Something-or-other, but don't hold the name change against him. "Passing" was a widespread strategy not just for African-Americans in those days, but for all the others whose hyphenated-Americanity held them back; only by going from Italian to Anglo was he able to land the part of the Spaniard, Zorro. Armando recognized Lost In Space as the beginning of the end, and instead of going back to the kind of humiliating roles that somehow held promise to a young Guy--Bonzo's replacement Reagan, or Michael Landon's second banana--retired with his family to Argentina to live out life in a land he loved.

The Star's Wife. June Lockhart played the help-mate, her biology PhD applied to cooking and making space feel homey. Kinda like how she started out as Lassie's kid's mom, and to this day plays the familiar familial female. Without her, TV grinds to a halt.

Second Banana. In a strategic mis-maneuver that proved invaluable to the attentive writers of Star Trek, the premise of Lost in Space left the show without a continuing flow of yeomen to die on-planet, and the lusterless character of Major Don West was never killed, allowing Mark Goddard to collect a paycheck for three years. On the down-side, mid-1960s social mores did not allow him to diddle the only available female, so he did very little. He's spent many years since working with troubled kids, which seems like a way better investment of time.

Only Available Female. Marta Kristen studies acting, gets some parts, and lands a role on a prime-time show. In which she gets to do nothing. Eldest of the Robinson kids, but too old to be the sweet one and too blonde and female to be the brainy one, "Judy" lasted all three seasons because it was awkward to kill her off, and because network execs like her gams. She's spent many years since working with her own progeny, unfettered by stardom, which seems like a way better investment of time.

The Weird Girl. And now we enter the child actor zone. Angela Cartwright was the cute little kid on Danny Thomas's show (his own kid was busy working on her look for That Girl), and then one of the musically-talended, Nazi-evading, von-Trappes. My fuzzy recollection is of her character Penny having a pet chimp/alien, dreamily uttering lines that sounded like Alice in Wonderland (weirdly childish or else seriously drugged), and being less hot than the maddeningly under-scripted Judy Robinson. After a "Make Room for Daddy" revival in the early 1970s failed (no kidding), she slipped through the looking glass and became a photographer.

Rounding out the Robinson family is the boy, Will, but we'll get back to him later.

Because first there's the character responsible for getting them lost in space, foreign agent Dr. Zachary Smith, whose attempted sabotage of the mission ends up with the ship off course and himself as unwilling stow-away. Instead of being killed immediately, he is saved, if only to provide a steady stream of zany plot lines. Played by another fake-namer, Jonathan Harris (nee Jonathan something too-Russian-and-Jewish for the '60s), the character was described then and now as flamboyant, campy, and effete...basically the arsenal of code words for "gay." But Dr. Smith, far from being gay (Major West received not so much as a longing glance asskance), was more of an ambiguous pedophile (back when such things were not frowned upon by stalwarts of American morality such as the clergy and football coaches). Dr. Smith's schemes always seemed to involve him and the boy sneaking off. By all accounts, Harris worked hard to breathe life into a character initially imagined as nothing more than a sniveling saboteur, good to revile for a few episodes before feeding to an alien of some sort.

Instead, tireless work by Mr Charasuchin-Harris yielded a character of thespianish grandiosity that gave the show a season or two more than it otherwise deserved. His conniving, mincing, rodential character concocting shcemes to get home or get rich, barking at the robot all manner of insults too clever to have been the work of the network hacks writing the episodes. It is a little known fact that the line "nattering nabob of negativism," which idiots attribute to Spiro Agnew and effete snobs to speechwriter William Safire (or by my fuzzy memory to Pat Buchanan), was originally uttered by Dr. Smith to the robot, who had objected to one of the good Doctor's wacky plans. For this, Jonathan was rewarded with nothing but type-casting, so much so that he pretty much moved into voice-over work.

The Robot. I'm pretty sure Robot was Japanese design, first to crack the post-war prejudice that "Made in Japan" meant crap (that's right, young people, people really did think that, before they actually got Japanese electronics, cameras, cars, and....robots). He was chaperone to the questionable jaunts of Dr. Smith and his youthful friend, perhaps the only one who prevented a Coach Sandusky situation from unfolding. Now you now why Robot was always saying "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Speaking of whom:

Will Robinson. Of all the cast, perhaps William Mumy's odd moniker offered the most excuse to change his name, but even as a kid was self-confident enough not to. In fact, he even kept the Will part. Smartest one on the ship (prequel to W. Stryker?), he also turns out to be a renaissance man in real life. He's written and recorded music (some on, yep, Renaissance Records) and scored movies and TV. He's responsible for the immortal "Fish Heads," and has written scripts and comic books ranging from the Marvel - DC superheroes to Trypto the Acid Dog. He's done a shitload of voice-over work, including Ren and Stimpy (but then, so has June). And he's married to the same person he was way back when, and has two kids who do not appear in tabloids. Damn!

So yeah, I'm glad I took the time to find out a little about the stars of this ill-fated galactic journey, even if I never got around to reviewing the show.

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.