Cheese Lice

Devlin brought over two choice little ironic movies last night. The first was called Funky Monkey, and it was about a trained chimpanzee assassin that's rescued by his handler (Matthew Modine, who plays Alec McCall with remarkable skill, considering the character is apparently, not kidding, a black ops commando with the IQ of precocious 7-year-old) and teaches a fatherless little boy how to win at football. Not kidding. Highlights of the movie include

• The chimp actor's propensity to finger its nipples absent-mindedly whenever it's not doing something else
• A bumbling security guard's off-hand joke about having to take a job at ZIT (Zoology International Technology) because he didn't have a college degree -- if you have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny; if you don't have a college degree, chances are you're not gonna think that's funny
• Matthew Modine's character literally crippling / murdering a whole bunch of dudes in fairly gruesome ways -- skateboard to the teeth, thrown into a bunch of buffet tables and chairs, whacked senseless with a fiberglass surfboard.

So that was good.

The second had been shipped to him along with the first, for pretty much no reason that we could discern. It was an animated version of the movie Ben-Hur, refocused, by Good Times Entertainment (of Quigley fame), so that it dwelt a whole fuck of a lot more on the Jesus shit in the original novel by General Lew Wallace. Best of all, though, Judah Ben-Hur is voiced by Charlton Heston, who sounds a whole goddamn lot older than the little Jew on the screen. Heston gives an interview that's included on the DVD that consists of a bunch of responses to what must be questions by some interviewer (though you never hear what they are), edited together in a series of disorienting 30-second takes. A choice segment (approx.):

This story is a classic. Whenever they produce a film or a stage show out of it, it plays around the world; millions of people see it... Why do I think this story has endured? One reason... apart from many others: Whenever they show the film, it plays around the world. And it keeps coming back.

Another great part was late in the interview he's talking about how great it is to work with the middling assortment of voice talent they'd assembled, and he cuts a noisy, heedless old-man fart. Like, "frrrrrp!" Tom and Devstar thought it might be somebody shifting around in a squeaky chair on the set, but I'm gonna stick to my guns. T'was a fart.

On Tuesday, T-Bone's friend Alex had gotten me and Ted tickets to a taping of The Colbert Report, so we checked that out and it was super fun. We had to wait on line for a real goddamn long time, but once we got inside, Colbert was real nice and the taping of the show itself was a marvel of efficiency. They literally do a single take for practically everything, and there was a bit with audience participation (the Bring 'Em Back / Leave 'Em Dead face-off) that they taped during the warm-up that was ready to go and on the monitors at the time they taped the actual segment like 10 minutes later. Since we were in the front row (the theater's tiny; only about 100 seats), I saw that Ted was visible in one of the shots. Tom claims that he could see himself, too, which, I think, would have meant that I'd be there, too, given the order we were sitting in (actually, come to think of it, maybe not...). I wanted to check when the put the clip on the web site, but it doesn't seem like that was one of the ones they picked. Stephen took some questions from the audience at the beginning of the show, and my only regret was that I didn't ask, "Can you give Marc Maron a job?" The production staff was real serious that we be really high-energy, lest we kill Stephen's "buzz," so I was worried about putting him off his game. Probing questions from the audience included, "What do I need to do to get a job writing for your show?" and "I heard you used to be in an improv comedy group. Is that true?" Jesus fuck, people.

So Stallman mentions his (former?) girlfriend on his 'blog sometimes, and I think I found some pictures of her. She's not half bad-looking, considering she's a Bride of Beardo, eh?

Yesterday, on a whim, I bought the Misfits album American Psycho at Best Buy, and it has this great song on it called "Hate The Living, Love The Dead." I'd forgotten how much the Misfits sound like HEAetc., esp. with regard to the sort of fast, straight-ahead drums and well-articulated guitar. There was a different Misfits album (think it was Famous Monsters) playing on some speakers at the store, and when I asked the clerk he said they didn't have it in stock, but he also mentioned that Michale Graves has a solo project he's working on that I should check out, so I did -- I'd forgotten until I got to his site that he's a real contemptible Republican nut-job. So, you know, there's that.