Yesterday's News

THIS was yesterday's lunch. Today's lunch was a bacon cheese-burger at one of my favorite local joints. This particular model came with barbeque sauce, two kinds of cheese, lettuce, onion and tomato, fries on the side and a Red Hook ESB.

Yesterday's lunch was ramen noodles with soy sauce and chili-garlic Cholula, along with the items you probably can't make out in the background there. Those are Kahiki brand lemon-grass "chicken stix," which, honestly, taste like something you might have found of a good Chinese buffet. Honest. They came with their own dipping sauce, which was on the sweet side, and the day I bought them, I used it as an excuse to purchase a jar of Chinese style mustard. Seriously, people, there's like 135 different tastes at work here, once you include the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. (Which, obviously, I did.)

It was also not the accompaniment to the film of the day, which was Wet, Hot American Summer. This is also yesterday's news, in many, many ways.

It was recently re-reviewed by the guys at the Onion AV club (it wasn't this review, but one of Nathan Rabin's My Year Of Flops bits, which is, unfortunately, not indexed in a way that I am finding easy to access). (To.) (At any rate, the combined weight of the MYOF review and the one linked there said I had to see this flick.)

The basic saw is that teen flicks are bad and that's funny. So making fun of teen flicks must be funny, especially if you make it clear that you love the bad/funny teen flicks that you're making fun of. And then of course, if you hire half the cast of MTV's The State, which all hipsters agree was funny, despite the fact that no one who wasn't completely stoned ever laughed at it once, well, that's gotta be even better!

The clock read 3:04 by the time the DVD had loaded and the flick was ready to play. During the opening montage, which portrayed the kind of loud, stupid teenager bonfire parties I used to hate when I was a teenager-- it's summer, people. This is the WRONG TIME OF YEAR TO BE STANDING AROUND A HUGE OPEN FIRE!-- I figured I would give it 15 minutes to get funny.

I made it to 3:15 before I shut the damned thing off.

I could see why they thought it might be funny, but . . . I mean, no. It . . . it just wasn't. Maybe with the proper kind of re-inforcement I could have watched the whole thing, but it was way too contrived, the acting was ham-fisted and squirmy, the joke premises were creaky to say the least, and the basic plot device-- take the moral-sexual ambiguities of adolescence, boil them into concentration in a Petrie dish, and smear the resulting compund over each character in a thick layer-- was obvious. I knew from prior experience there was a fairly funny montage piece coming up-- it was posted on Nabin's review-- and another one with a pay-off that you might not have seen coming from a mile away, but it just didn't seem worth my while.

Oh, well. Maybe some other day. I ended up watching Lewis Black's History Channel special The History of the Joke. Much better. Much better.