Tuesday, July 19, 2005

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

Anyone who says they like The Godfather: Part III is either (a) lying or (b) clinically retarded.

The length of the meeting is inversely proportional to its relevance to your life. So the briefing where you'll learn what you need to know to complete a special assignment and not get fired might last 5 minutes, but you'll spend an hour and a half at the company meeting, listening to birth and anniversary announcements for people you've never met.

The book is better than the movie.

At home, in their personal bathrooms, away from the world, most men never wash their hands.

With the exceptions of Good Will Hunting and Awakenings, everything else Robin Williams has done is vastly overrated. This includes Dead Poets Society.

Men feel about women who read chick lit the way women feel about men who watch porn: Avoid at all costs.

Conan O'Brien has the best musical guests of any late-night talk show. If Jay Leno's got Britney Spears, Conan's got Old Crow Medicine Show. No competition.

Also, not just chick lit: Men avoid women with cats. Dangerous people, those.

No CD sounds as good as one you bought when you were 21.

posted by Dan Carlson @ 8:41 AM   2 remarks

2 Comments:

Can I take issue with a couple of things? Thanks:

I must be retarded. I liked GF3 because it was about redemption. It was a different movie.

I'm with you on the meetings thing.

I hate it when people compare the book to the movie, although it's inevidable. The book is only better than the movie if you like books better. I like movies better. But I realize that they are different mediums that can't really be compared. It's like comparing running and swimming.

I also liked Dead Poets Society, but I see your point. I fell for it because of a place in my life when I first watched it. It's kind of a Chick Flick for guys.

Everything else yeah.

By Blogger Kyle, at 12:40 AM, July 24, 2005  

You're not retarded for liking Godfather Part III. But it's still a bad movie. Nothing could have been more of a transparent attempt at Coppola's desperation to recapture the days when he was still a master. I mean, he directed Jack, for crying out loud, another entry in the long list of godawful Robin Williams dreck.

You're right about not being able to compare the media. Books are a mental medium; movies are a visual one. This is why it's so hard for something written for an audience of one to be successfully translated into something for an audience of thousands. Books also allow for greater depth and development; the author can take as many pages as he or she wants to in order to describe characters or situations, but after 2 hours a movie audience is going to get restless. And still, some of the best American movies from the past 100 films are based on books, simply because the source material was so rich: The Godfather (the first 2 parts), Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Graduate, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, To Kill A Mockingbird, M*A*S*H, Forrest Gump, Schindler's List, etc. This is why original movies are so hard to do well. No one seems as willing to compose in a visual medium, and when they do, their films often go unseen by most audiences, who would rather see soemthing uninspired (e.g., Wedding Crashers) than something that might affect them (Me and You and Everyone We Know).

And I guess I just got fed up with Dead Poets Society because it seemed like so many people at college thought that's what good movies should be like, and that makes me sad. It's like when guys latch onto Gladiator or other such tripe.

By Blogger Dan Carlson, at 2:05 PM, July 24, 2005  

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