Best Website Ever

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Bad Movie Club

I'm so excited. A friend of mine recently introduced me to a little film called "Manos" Hands of Fate (yes the superfluous quotation marks are part of the original title). The club has experimented musing films like "Death Wish 3" (which is the funniest movie ever by the way) and "Troll 2" - I am glad to have graduated to a movie that appears to be what is widely regarded as the worst movie ever made. So bad is this movie - it actually blurs the line between movies and home movies, and evokes philosophical questions like "well, what is a movie really" or "what is art"?

A few brief exercpts about the film I found by googling it online:

"The camera (they) used... was a 16mm Bell & Howell model that had to be wound by hand, meaning it could only record film for roughly thirty seconds at a time...In addition, it couldn't record sound; Therefore, all dialogue and sound effects were dubbed in later. "

"In spite of all of this, Hal somehow managed to get "Manos" booked in an actual El Paso theater, and it even got a fair amount of coverage in the local press leading up to its premiere. However, at the first showing, nonstop audience laughter prompted the cast and crew to sneak out halfway through. And after an almost non-existent theatrical run, this movie was promptly consigned to the compost heap of obscurity, where it languished for decades before finally being resurrected by MST3k."

"A deputy wearing a cowboy hat jumps out and walks up to the car...not one second of the deputy walking up to the convertible is left out. He tells Dad that he has a "tail light problem", and proceeds to lecture him for quite a while about it. He then starts writing Dad a ticket, but I have to wonder what name he's putting on there because he didn't ask to see a license. Suddenly, Dad engineers a crafty plan to escape citation:
Dad: Can't you give us a break, officer?Deputy: [thinks about it for two or three nanoseconds.] Well, alright."

"Just as we cut to them, however, something black and white flies through the frame. Closer examination reveals this to be the clapboard [!!], accidentally left in the final edit. Now, in most productions, a clapboard is used for the purpose of synchronizing the film with the audio recorded on location. So I don't even need to point out how stupid it is to use a clapboard in the first place when your camera doesn't record sound."

Dad Stories

Like most men (boys?) of my generation, my dad is an icon to me. His academic, political and social contributions set a high bar for me to attain the american dream of surpasing the prosperity of the previous familial generation. Despite all his great achievements though, I must confess nothing gives me greater pleasure than giving him a hard time. Being the 7th of 8 children, my dad is a bit older (respective to me) than most of my friends parents. In this context, from time to time he will really "miss the boat" in his ability to communicate or empathize with someone my age. To no end, my younger brother and I are amused by this. That being said, I wanted to record a couple of my favorites in this category.

Second runner up: when my dad didn't understand why I didn't want my brother to stay with Carrie and I on our wedding night. Eventually, he gave in under the badgering by me, my brother, my step mother, and most of the rest of the family but I'm not sure he ever got it.

First runner up: The time he gave my brother and I a nickel to go buy a nerf football. A nickel. That's 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 Argentinean pesos to you and me.

Favorite of all time: When I was a sophomore in high school, he decided I was staying up too late, and that he needed to re-institute a bedtime for me during the week. Not entirely unreasonable I guess. Unless...his initial suggestion was...wait for it...8:30 PM. For those of you south of Nome, it’s still light out in June at 8:30. When I protested (in between bellows of laughter), his follow up suggestion (after insisting he thought this time reasonable) was that he "anonymously" poll ten of my classmates as to what their bedtimes were. Given that I went to a school that had 67 people in my graduating class, and that it was an all boys school, there would be nothing anonymous about it, and something like that is basically a lifetime prescription for an atomic wedgie.