Scribblings of a Madman

Gone Lazing

2008-06-02T18:34:00.003-04:00

I've been bad about this, I know: three posts in the first two weeks of the blog's life, then not a peep for two weeks.

Well, I'm back, and I have an absence slip: finals swallowed me up, I worked a lot, and recently I decided to quit my job. Fortunately, I did manage to type out twenty pages of a novel, brainstorm a comedy script, and polish up a poem or two in that time.

Anyway, expect frequent updates from now on. I'm not going to promise one a day, but at least three a week to start.

Happy summers to all, except those in Antarctica and Alaska, you guys don't get to wear swimsuits and jump in the sea unless you're crazy men who believe yourselves to be fishes.

Ain't No Cream of the Crop

2008-05-16T22:36:00.004-04:00

There's something about certain movies that forces me to love them, or at least love liking them. Yes, this holds little in common with what I'm doing with this blog, but "bad" movies are part of my daily dose of entertainment. Now, I don't mean every piece of crap vomited into theaters or picked out of a nose to be slapped on a store shelf--there's bad and then there's bad (lacking talent, technical skills, etc.) yet enjoyable.

Why? Well, they simply entertain me. In my mind, the worst a movie could do is bore me. I can look past flaws or embrace a film if it offers me something. So, with that in mind I will present a much beloved piece of the Internet: a list, of my favorite cinematic rejects.

Behold:

1. Death Wish 3
Trailer

The perfect representation of the 80s in America. Make it bigger, because bigger is best, logic be damned. The setup is that Bronson's Paul Kershey returns to New York to visit a friend, only to walk in on his murder at the hands of some street punks, setting him off on the whole vigilante trip again, except this time the police tell him it's okay that he does it as long as he tells them about it and he ditches the entire idea of attacking at night or using his apparent age to lure his targets in.

Instead, what we get is the mid-sixties and already gray-haired Bronson donning a leather jacket, punching out muscular large guys with one hit, sexing up a twenty-some defense attorney, and running through the streets with Rambo's machine gun. Reagan's politics of blowing away criminals with a "big-game, explosive tipped" magnum for as little as stealing a Kodak camera are in full force, and the police will applaud from the sidelines. Gratuitous explosions occur constantly. Shoot a car? Explosion. Throw a molotov cocktail in a two-story building? All of the windows blow out on both floors in a gush of flames and the thing tumbles to the ground in a miniature Nagasaki fireball. Set fire to a taxi cab meter repair shop? It blows up, twice no less.

Oh, and I should mention somewhere here that Jimmy Paige supplies the soundtrack.

Led Zepplin's Jimmy Paige.

2. Commando
Trailer

All you need to know about this is that Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime plays a Rambo-ripoff who must save his daughter from an evil dictator. To do this, he spouts off one-liners such as "Let off some steam" (after impaling a man with a steam pipe) and killing what must be more than a hundred people on-screen in the fifteen minute finale. Dozens meet their end by hatchet, machine gun, knife, sawblades used as ninja throwing stars (!), shotgun, rocket launcher, double-tasered, beatdown, knife, thrown off cliff--hell, I could go on for several more lines listing the methods Arnold uses, but it's better just to say that most of a small country meets its end at his hands.

Also, this is the most homosexually toned film I've ever seen thanks to its main villain, Bennett. Bennett is a member of Arnold's old special forces team who wants to get back at him, and he's best described as a "Australian Freddie Mercury" who wears a chainmail vest, a belt across the vest, has a handlebar mustache, and toys around with his knife most of the time. In the showdown, his face quivers as he screams, "I don't need the girl!" over and over, mixing it up with "I just need the knife!" Arnold replies to this something along the lines of (and you have to imagine this in his accent), "Come on Bennett, throw away the chicken shit gun, you don't just want to pull the trigger, you want to put the knife in me, and look me in the eye, and see whats going on in there when you turn it, thats what you want to do, right? Come on, let the girl go, just between you and me, don't deprive yourself of some pleasure. Come on Bennett, lets party!"

3. Braddock: Missing in Action 3
Trailer

My love for this one has nothing to do with Chuck Norris starring in it. I'm not a fan of the overplayed jokes, not now at least. What interests me is how this film manages to make Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA seem downright anti-American, that its star has no reactions to anything, and that it was made in 1990 with the heart of 1970's Vietnam supporter.

Chuck Norris is James Braddock, a man who, in the previous films, escaped a Vietnamese prison camp and returned to Vietnam after the end of the war to rescue remaining American POWs, thereby sticking it to the Communist high-ups. In the third film, which takes place in 1989, Braddock learns that when he left Vietnam, he not only left the war behind but a half-Vietnamese son. Enraged that the CIA actively plans to block requests for his son's immigration and that bow to Vietnamese will for sake of diplomacy, Braddock heads back to enemy territory where he discovers that his son isn' t the only one left behind, but just one of dozens of "halfbreed" children left behind by American troops--and wouldn't you know it, a British-sounding Vietnamese colonel is making life tough for them and captures them all, knocking around the Christian priest who runs their orphanage while cackling for extra evil points! Many people die, and in the end father and son are reunited as they are forced to kick the asses of Commies together.

Ultimately, the war is boiled down further from its portrayal in the second film as a noble quest to stop Communism and free prisoners of war to a noble quest to free small children and a Christian from the Reds. The idealogy in this movie is such that Ho Chi Minh City (or, as Braddock still calls it, Saigon) is considered hellish and close to apocalyptic in nature.

Absurd comedy at its finest.

And you know what? I think I'll introduce a plot twist in this post: this top ten grew too long for one post, so I was kidnapped, and therefore this will be...to be continued.

Gibberish

2008-05-08T09:16:00.004-04:00

Here's where that writing part of my blog comes in.

I've been typing and retyping this for a while, it's a bit meant for a monthly contest. They gave you thirteen sentences to tell a story, except you could only use the letters A-M to begin the sentences with. My piece lost, so I'll give it a house here:

"The Ritual"

Autumn came to the town, throwing out its blanket of color and a promise of death. Barely noticed, it stole away the life of the place, drop by drop, infecting the trees with shades of yellow, orange, and red. Colors sprouted here and there, hanging from the trees in banners.

Desires for freedom from its limbo bloomed in the hearts of the people, who prayed for winter and summer, for solidity.

Eager, they knitted or bought sweaters with the colors that their trees now blazed in their final moments of glory.

Forlorn, the people took photos to preserve the trees and their free lawns, to keep memory.

Grieving, they stared from their windows or turned heads to watch the many leaves plummet to carpet the grass with their dead—and yet these people hardly realized their sorrow.

Healing, they took rakes to the dead, swept them into bags, sealed them from the world, and set the plastic coffins on the curb for the morticians to take away by truck.

Ignored, the dead rotted by billions, too much for human minds to count, let alone notice. Jackdaws spun over their wake in formations like wheels; winter crouched outside the wake, ready for his turn to take revenge on autumn. Kettles, all the while, found new life throughout the day to heat and make whole their holders.

Laughter again worked its way from the mouthes of babe and child who forgot the days of the dead.

Momentarily, their tears would work their way out anew, as winter brought alien lands and spring marched in to burn them all away, once more leaving them with the dead.

The Circle Opens

2008-05-08T03:38:00.000-04:00

In the beginning was the word.

(The word was all.)

And the word was good.

That's my philosophy, anyway. As a dude who is a writer-in-progress, I figured I'd better find one and stick to it. My tongue isn't as verbose as, say, Hal Duncan, but hey, I do try.

What's that, you say? Yes, this is Scribblings of a Madman and I am the Madman, one Andrew Lavigne. Welcome, welcome, and come on in--it's either hot or cold out, and either one ain't so good 'round here.

We'll have ourselves a good time inside.