Every Winter Olympics, I do two things:
- Marvel anew at the existence of ice dancing.
- Watch the 1993 Disney comedy Cool Runnings.
The movie stars John Candy, testing our suspension of disbelief as a former Olympic athlete. He has a theory that world-class sprinters are really just underdressed world-class bobsledders. And when three of Jamaica’s fastest are tripped up trying to qualify for the Summer games, Candy gets to put his theory to the test. As he explains to one of his old teammates:
Listen, three of these guys can run the hundred in under ten-flat. I don’t care who you are, that’s lightning!
But what Irv fails to mention is that the fourth team member, Sanka Coffie, runs the hundred in about fifteen.
“Hey, wax on, wax off! Hey buddy, wax on, wax off!”
If I’d heard that all the time as a kid, I’d probably get pretty damned tired of it, too. Especially if I were hyper-aware that I was hearing it because I was an Asian kid. And not Japanese either, Goddammit! I’m not, but I sympathize.
There’s no question that Kensuke Miyagi occupies a special place in the pantheon of Asian-American stereotypes, and that he’s a locus of cultural antipathy, especially among Asian-Americans.
But that antipathy is unfortunate. Not just because it is born of pain, but also because Mr. Miyagi as he appears in The Karate Kid (and not as he appears in the larger cultural phantasmagoria, or for that matter, the latter Karate Kid sequels), is not nearly so narrow or offensive a caricature.
A defense of Miyagi, and more on why that defense is important, follows…
Last weekend, America’s #1 and #2 movies were the PS2-inspired cop drama Max Payne and the Madagascar/Kangaroo Jack tequila-inspired love child, Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
Part of me can’t help but see this as a missed opportunity –
As any millennium generation video gamer knows, sometimes what a John Woo/Wachowski Brothers-inspired police detective fighting impossible odds really needs is an uncannily smart dog, and what an uncannily smart dog having adventures out in the big city really needs is a dark conspiracy of power and corruption that requires it to crawl through mazes and push buttons with its nose.
More on dogs, antiheroes, antihero dogs and Dead to Rights, after the jump –
Movie critic A. O. Scott has what appears to be a new series of retrospective video reviews of his favorite movies on the New York Times website, and much to my surprise, his latest entry is an independent art film from 1985 called Rambo: First Blood Part II.
Why my surprise? Find out after the jump.
I’m a little late to the party on this, and I’m reticent to go too political in this blog, but this piece of overthinking is too good and right up our alley to go unremarked.
By the way, this isn’t the last time I’ll discuss LisaNova, who I think is a very interesting cultural figure about which you can say quite a bit. But without further ado:
The amazing original clip and a bit more analysis after the jump . . .
[Overthinking It Magazine is the weekly feature where we give you articles you'll like all the more since the sabbath gives you an extra minute to ponder them. It may not replace your Sunday morning tryst with the newspaper of record, but we promise it will give you lots to overthink about. Oh, and if you're in a newsreader, click through to the site. I spent precious time on that graphic. --Ed.]
For your overthinking consideration, I give you Mediocre Film’s hit web series,
Retarded Policeman:
It stars the very funny Josh “The Ponceman” Perry, who is an aspiring professional actor and has Down Syndrome.
If you’re like me, your first reaction after laughing (it’s a good little show that’s very funny in its own right) was, “How am I supposed to feel about this?”
Discussion and more video, after the jump.
Have you seen the May 5 cover of Time Magazine? Christopher Lambert has seen it, and it’s difficult to tell whether he’s amused or not.
Hey, he’s Christopher Lambert — the man doesn’t have a ton of range. But he does know how to chop someone’s head off.
And now, apparently, so do the season’s Democratically ordained Princes of the Universe, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Oh, I know the temptation is to dismiss the citizenry of the overthinkingit phantasmagoria — guys like Connor MacLeod of the clan MacLeod (who has a lifetime membership) — but if current trends continue, you’re likely to hear a lot more of this guy in the darnedest places.
The cover, and the future, after the jump –
By now, you may have come across a real gem of a Web site — Garfield Minus Garfield. The premise: show Garfield cartoons without any of the talking animals. The result: A creepy bachelor talking to himself, which is a necessary and oft-ignored background element for the Garfield mythos. As the site puts it:
“Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”
I’m kind of jazzed that this stuff is sweeping around the Internet — this whole piece is really brilliant, and I don’t have to belabor it so much as just point you in the right direction and ask you to leave a comment in the forums.
But as great as “Garfield Minus Garfield” is, I don’t think it holds a candle to Lasagna Cat, which I dare to say is the best use of the Internet as a medium I’ve seen since homestarrunner.com perfected the flash cartoon. Video after the jump.
[I'll get back to wrapping up my "No Crying In Baseball" series next week, but for a bit, I want to start a new series -- books I fantasize about writing someday. I'll probably come back to this intermittently. It's a blog series I've always wanted to write. –Fenzel]
So, my boy Bill Bryson wrote a new book about some old subject matter: Shakespeare: The World As Stage, part of the Harper Collins Eminent Lives series. Harper Collins describes the series as “Brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.” I recommend the series for pleasure reading (it’s a soft recommendation), but that’s not what this post is about.
I like Bill Bryson a ton — mostly for his writing style guide: Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right, which is the most fun you will ever have reading an index of words that isn’t by Ambrose Bierce. He’s got a witty, comfortable, conversational style, and he doesn’t bullshit you. That, of course, makes it difficult for him to write a biography of Shakespeare, because, as Bryson goes into very early in the book, most biographies of Shakespeare are bullshit.