Wednesday, October 18, 2006
For helping out at Sean’s wedding a few months back, he gave me a fifteen dollar gift card to Hastings. If you don't know, Hastings sells new and used books, movies, and CDs, so fifteen bucks there can get you quite a few things if you’re careful with it. I spent mine on a nice hard-cover coffee table type book that was marked as used but looked untouched. I collect those types of books because I’m a freaking nerd and it was a welcome addition to my bookshelf. What a great deal. I only had to endure an eight month courtship, a three month engagement, and a marathon wedding day to get it.
My younger brother also got a gift card and he finally used his the other night. He came home with a CD (by Snow Patrol, a wussy British band) and a used DVD of The River Wild that only cost six bucks. He obviously doesn’t realize that only retards and the technologically inept buy CDs these days (since downloading music is much more economical). But his purchase of The River Wild made up for his mistake.
If you’ve never seen the movie then I envy you. It’s one of those films that’s so corny, so sappy, and so melodramatic that it achieves a cult-like status for its lowliness. What makes it unique is that it’s not washed-up porn stars and soap actors starring in the film, which you’d expect for something this bad. It’s Oscar-winning and highly-respected individuals like Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, John C. Reilly, and Benjamin Bratt who drag us through this stinking mess, and that only adds to its dubious appeal. I cringe with every line of bad dialogue, with every note of the twangy soundtrack, with every shot of Streep’s wrinkled cleavage. Yet I can’t stop watching it. It’s like the dead cat you see splattered on the side of the road. You know if you look it’s going to make you sick, a little depressed, and maybe even a little angry, but you stare at it anyway as you drive by, and then circle the block for another look. So sad, but so true.
I actually owe the movie a huge debt, since it saved me from having a lesbian sister-in-law. See, Sean is a gifted athlete who was on the track team in college. And one of the perks of being on the track team, as opposed to the football or basketball team, is that track is a co-ed sport. The men and women train and participate together. You can imagine what happens when you take thirty buff studs and thirty toned women, put them all in spandex and mix them together for five months. They start to check each other out, pair off, date, and eventually get married. Amazing what spandex can do.
Sean was no exception to the norm and dated several girls from the track team. One of them, whose name I’m tempted to mention but won’t, became quite a serious girlfriend a few summers back, and I was worried that they might get married. She was everything you’d expect a highly accomplished female athlete to be: muscular, aggressive, driven, competitive. Basically, she was a man. She was my age and attended a rival high school in the area the same years I did. Since she dominated high school track, she was quite well-known, and the guys on my team nicknamed her “The Man” or “Lesbo” because she looked so much like a dude. Seriously, she had a big square jaw, robust shoulders, nonexistent boobs, and her hair was always pulled tightly back into a bun or a short ponytail. She wasn’t exceptionally tall and probably didn’t weigh over 130 pounds, but the way she moved betrayed her. The sexy wiggle of a female was missing. I always wanted to see her naked, not for sexual stimulation, but to check for testicles.
Anyway, Sean’s relationship with her was getting pretty serious and she invited him to go river rafting one weekend on the Snake in Wyoming. Her family was really into rafting and Sean agreed to go, since he had some experience with it too (he and I had a near-death accident rafting the Weber runoff a few years ago…ask me about that later). So, on the long drive up, they were talking and Sean learned a terrible secret. She told him her favorite movie was The River Wild, and she was being completely serious. Of course, Sean couldn’t deal with his girlfriend liking such a crappy movie, and they broke up a while later, because of that and a few other reasons, one of which was my constant insistence that she was a lesbian.
Sean is happily married now to a woman who actually looks like a woman. The lesbian track runner/River Wild lover ended up completing college and then served a mission for the LDS church. I spent my giftcard wisely. My younger brother, who has a history of doing stupid things, wasted his, but only on that crappy CD. Six bucks for a heterosexual sister-in-law is a bargain.
My younger brother also got a gift card and he finally used his the other night. He came home with a CD (by Snow Patrol, a wussy British band) and a used DVD of The River Wild that only cost six bucks. He obviously doesn’t realize that only retards and the technologically inept buy CDs these days (since downloading music is much more economical). But his purchase of The River Wild made up for his mistake.
If you’ve never seen the movie then I envy you. It’s one of those films that’s so corny, so sappy, and so melodramatic that it achieves a cult-like status for its lowliness. What makes it unique is that it’s not washed-up porn stars and soap actors starring in the film, which you’d expect for something this bad. It’s Oscar-winning and highly-respected individuals like Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, John C. Reilly, and Benjamin Bratt who drag us through this stinking mess, and that only adds to its dubious appeal. I cringe with every line of bad dialogue, with every note of the twangy soundtrack, with every shot of Streep’s wrinkled cleavage. Yet I can’t stop watching it. It’s like the dead cat you see splattered on the side of the road. You know if you look it’s going to make you sick, a little depressed, and maybe even a little angry, but you stare at it anyway as you drive by, and then circle the block for another look. So sad, but so true.
I actually owe the movie a huge debt, since it saved me from having a lesbian sister-in-law. See, Sean is a gifted athlete who was on the track team in college. And one of the perks of being on the track team, as opposed to the football or basketball team, is that track is a co-ed sport. The men and women train and participate together. You can imagine what happens when you take thirty buff studs and thirty toned women, put them all in spandex and mix them together for five months. They start to check each other out, pair off, date, and eventually get married. Amazing what spandex can do.
Sean was no exception to the norm and dated several girls from the track team. One of them, whose name I’m tempted to mention but won’t, became quite a serious girlfriend a few summers back, and I was worried that they might get married. She was everything you’d expect a highly accomplished female athlete to be: muscular, aggressive, driven, competitive. Basically, she was a man. She was my age and attended a rival high school in the area the same years I did. Since she dominated high school track, she was quite well-known, and the guys on my team nicknamed her “The Man” or “Lesbo” because she looked so much like a dude. Seriously, she had a big square jaw, robust shoulders, nonexistent boobs, and her hair was always pulled tightly back into a bun or a short ponytail. She wasn’t exceptionally tall and probably didn’t weigh over 130 pounds, but the way she moved betrayed her. The sexy wiggle of a female was missing. I always wanted to see her naked, not for sexual stimulation, but to check for testicles.
Anyway, Sean’s relationship with her was getting pretty serious and she invited him to go river rafting one weekend on the Snake in Wyoming. Her family was really into rafting and Sean agreed to go, since he had some experience with it too (he and I had a near-death accident rafting the Weber runoff a few years ago…ask me about that later). So, on the long drive up, they were talking and Sean learned a terrible secret. She told him her favorite movie was The River Wild, and she was being completely serious. Of course, Sean couldn’t deal with his girlfriend liking such a crappy movie, and they broke up a while later, because of that and a few other reasons, one of which was my constant insistence that she was a lesbian.
Sean is happily married now to a woman who actually looks like a woman. The lesbian track runner/River Wild lover ended up completing college and then served a mission for the LDS church. I spent my giftcard wisely. My younger brother, who has a history of doing stupid things, wasted his, but only on that crappy CD. Six bucks for a heterosexual sister-in-law is a bargain.
