… was in the cycling movie Breaking Away over 30 years ago. Dave Stollar worships the Italian bicycle racing team. When he gets a chance to race against them and keeps up with them they interfere with his front wheel and force him off the road.

Dave: Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know
Father: Well, now you know

True Romance, Domino, even Top Gun – I think I’m the only one alive who preferred him to his brother Ridley

Why couldn’t it have been Joel Schumacher – I cry every time I watch Man on Fire

So sad.

I’m too tired to get all up in arms again and make it artful because Dick Clark wasn’t about art – Google Brad Laidman and Dick Clark for the things I’ve written about him in the past.

Here’s one which people didn’t understand had a comical but basically true tone to it Happy New Year: Dick Clark is still the Anti-Christ

Here is what I posted on facebook – it’s not grammatically correct or well thought out. Dick Clark doesn’t deserve that.

I knew it would happen but it’s killing me today that Dick Clark is somehow being praised as a great liberator of black music when in fact he was largely responsible for providing the dead years of rock and roll with Frankie Avalon Fabian and Bobby Rydell – when the Payola hearings happened Dick Clark was 100 times more guilty than Alan Freed but Dick Clark promised to stop being so naughty and profited on the white backlash while Freed who truly loved the music died penniless – Do some research today Dick Clark was a parasite to real artists – he insisted on lip syncing, he tried to kill Soul Train by ripping it off with his own sterile version until it was protested off the air – he created the American Music Awards so that popular became more important than artful – all he ever cared about was making money he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body and anyone who had said good things about him in the past only did so because he was so powerful that they had to do so to protect their careers – i don’t wish death on anyone, but i’ve always been amazed that supposedly the truth has to take a vacation on the day you die

Doesn’t the big opening of Hunger Games sort of prove that our society is actually now really that ignorant and decadent?

Hunger Games is all sort of a ripoff of a Japanese film called Battle Royale. Oddly, I found out about Battle Royale from Quentin Tarantino, who oddly enough basically just ripped off an Asian film when he made his first film Reservoir Dogs. It’s pretty ironic if you think about it.

Sometimes something is so gleefully stupid that it becomes a revelation of brilliance.

I loved the television show 21 Jump Street. I was frightened to death that the movie version was going to defecate all over my memories, but perhaps there was a reason why Johnny Depp seemed 100 times more willing to do a cameo in the movie spoof of the show that made him a star than he was to actually do it the first time around.

First I saw the trailer, which was somehow terrible. It must be hard to take a movie this funny, and it’s the funniest, raunchiest movie since Superbad (the first time Jonah Hill was too old to go to high school), and make a trailer that bad. After seeing the trailer, I not only didn’t want to see the movie, but I was actively enraged that the movie was even going to exist. Then the good reviews started to come sputtering out, and I figured they were merely a case of a film that everyone thought was going to be terrible, being sort of passable, but that’s not true. It’s actually a parody of such comedic genius that it’s on par with Airplane and Blazing Saddles.

That’s all I’m going to say about it because hopefully the trailer was so bad because the film industry for once didn’t want to give away all the movie’s joyous surprises, so who am I to ruin the experience for you. All I’ll say is that yes Johnny Depp did his cameo; yes he thankfully brought along fellow McQuaid brother Peter Deluise; and yes it was all kinds of awesome.

21 Jump Street came out in 1987, which was my junior year in college, and fulfilled all kinds of personal fantasies for me. Like Jonah Hill’s character in the movie, I went through high school two years ahead of everybody mentally and two years behind everybody physically. Take my word for it, I made the best of it, but like high school does to everybody it left me scarred for life.

By 1987, I’d filled out a bit and wanted to go back so badly that a close college friend of mine and I actively discussed doing it on a regular basis. As for the TV show that helped to build the Fox Network, it was ten times better than it had any right to be and most of it had to do with Johnny Depp. His Tom Hanson was supposed to be something of a square, but the vintage blue Mustang that he drove was the exact car I wanted to be driving and Johnny Depp was well Johnny Depp. There was an episode where Depp went undercover as a Hispanic gang banger and he even managed to pull that off.

Depp might have hated doing the show, but he was great in it and he and Deluise had such wonderful chemistry together that they somehow even pulled off a multi-part episode that seriously paid homage to Oliver Stone’s Salvador. Anyone watching Depp in those years knew that he was going to be a huge star and the only thing that delayed it for a decade or so was Depp’s own discomfort with the idea of stardom and personal predilection for off kilter, character roles in quirky movies.

As for Hill’s movie, it works on pretty much all levels. It enjoys the fantasy of returning back to high school, while simultaneously reveling in how much things have changed since the invention of the iPod, that it is every bit the time travel satire that the first Austin Powers movie was. Best of all, it doesn’t even ruin the original show for me. Depp gets the result he so clearly always wanted, but someone could still do a serious reboot of this franchise, because this one exists in a weird alternate universe where two of the most delightfully dimwitted, mismatched friends somehow managed to graduate from the Police Academy. This is the version of 21 Jump Street that the Three Stooges would have been proud to have made.

Sometimes comedy truly is as simple as a tall good looking guy having a short loser as a best friend. It worked for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and thanks to a lot of raunch, inappropriate drug humor, and sexual innuendo it still does in riotous fashion.

I wasn’t old enough to experience the Monkees the first time around, but these two clips from the Brady Bunch are forever etched into my memory.

Look how concerned Davy is when he hears about Marcia’s plight. Then again why doesn’t he just leave the recording booth and talk to her and save a trip to the Brady’s?

If it weren’t for Davy Jones than David Bowie would be Davey Jones and I bet the Brady’s woudn’t leave Marcia unsupervised in their living room with him.

Everyone my age knows that “how about the flip side” line almost as well as “Marcia Marcia Marcia”

I’ve written many times that the Monkees are no different than the Temptations and should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So now you can add Davy’s name to Clarence Clemons’ for being snubbed until it was too late to honor them.

Someone who apparently wasn’t Albert Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

Maybe it’s the fact that I grow more and more into Charlie Brown every day, but I really think the above art is a million times more relevant to the whole world than the Mona Lisa or anything that Caravaggio (random artist I learned about in High School Humanities – I couldn’t identify a Caravaggio if my life depended on it) painted.

Look there is a real Caravaggio. Kind of creepy isn’t it?

Unfortunately, just putting any one strip into a museum would miss the point since Charles Schultz ended perhaps thirty gazzillion strips with it.

First of all, Lucy is not going to ever let Charlie Brown kick that ball and Charlie Brown knows it. Lucy is always going to go Lucy on him, but he keeps on trying. Is this the sign of a true never say die romantic or just another idiot falling pray to the same stupid mistake over and over again?

I suppose that it’s inspirational that he never gives up and refuses to change his outlook on life, but shouldn’t Charlie Brown’s dad come home from that f-ing barber shop and teach him about life and women and all the other hazards out there?

You could argue that Schultz sort of ripped off the myth of Sisyphus so props to the Greeks for coming up with it first.

And yet me and all my heros keep embracing the Charlie Brown role. I’ve felt like this at least 12 million times in my life, with probably an equal amount of sort of sympathetic people telling you that you have to get your act together.

I think there is a line from Rosie Perez in White Men Can’t Jump where she says something like “You better get yourself a new life honey because the one you got ain’t working for you.”

And yet who doesn’t love a martyr after they are dead and gone?

Oops, now that I think of it she said that to Spike Lee in Do The Right Thing.

This ad keeps coming up on my Facebook page for criminalrecordfind.com. Could this be any more racist than it already is? Is there really an epidemic going on out there of gigantic hulking black males wearing red prison jumpsuits attacking innocent old ladies?

If you have time to look up a potential criminal threat on the internet it’s probably more likely to come from a bald white guy with a pen than from whoever the man is in this picture. It doesn’t even look like a real person. It looks like they incompetently CGI’d a black face onto the Fantastic Four’s Thing.

“Honey there is an African American monster walking down our suburban street. Quick look on the internet and see if he has a criminal record!”