What I Like About …

… and now you have.

Rick Gualtieri, a very funny fantasy novelist from my home town in Jersey, sent out a tweet tagging people to play in the Lucky 7 tagging game.  Unfortunately I followed the link, not understanding, and as a result find myself tagged in a writers game.

The rules? Very simple:

1. Go to page 77 of your current manuscript;
2. Go to line 7;
3. Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences, and post them as they’re written. No cheating;
4. Tag 7 other victims–er, authors.

Except I’m not specifically tagging anyone, just the first 7 people with works in progress who visit.  If you read this far, ha!

So, from The Right Medicine, here are seven lines starting from line seven on page 77 of the current version of the manuscript.

“He definitely had a girl, but I think things must have gone sour.”

“Why?

“He came in just before Valentine’s Day and bought more than ever before. We had to help him carry it all out to the car, and stuffed his trunk.”

“So why do you think it went bad?”

“A guy buying that much is planning on asking something important, but he never came back after that. She must have dumped him. And on Valentine’s Day!” she said, shaking her head in sympathy.

The truth is I was not a fan of the television show 21 Jump Street. I thought all the characters were flat, the writing stilted, the actors pretty but boring, and the weekly “very special episode” just a little to0 80s.

21 Jump Street reboot is either a bad Harold an Kumar ripoff or American Pie done as a buddy cop movie. Still VERY funny.

My wife, who is almost eight years younger than me, was such a huge fan she calls it “Jumper” to this day. When I bought her the DVD set a couple Christmases ago she ran through the whole show in 37 and a half minutes, which is impossible to do given modern physics but future advances in time something or other I don’t understand made it happen.

So when the new movie was announced Maureen was stoked and I was, well, not. But it was a total reboot and done as a comedy (laughable series, laughing feature film?) and it had Jonah Hill writing and acting. So I decided to take a shot on the flick.  Got my sister to babysit, bought the tickets online, asked my wife out on a date.

What I didn’t realize is that this was not a reboot of 21 Jump Street, but either a pretty decent American Pie sequel done as a buddy cop flick or a pretty bad Harold and Kumar ripoff.

Instead of an ensemble cast like on the TV show it focused on two guys. Instead of competent law officers held down by their innocent, youthful looks we got morons with innocent, youthful looks held down by their incompetence. There were more dick, fart and sex jokes than in a 7th grade football locker-room culminating in one of the most cringe-worthy scenes in the history of dick jokes.

Yet I laughed regularly and often. I didn’t like the movie, came out disappointed, wouldn’t watch it again but I laughed a lot. Some of it was uncomfortable laughter, some of it was crowd-induced peer-pressure guffawing, and some of it was genuine mirth (the tripping scene has some very funny animation).

I certainly don’t think this movie was worth heading out to the theater, though we had excellent service at McCormick and Shmick’s for dinner afterwards. If you decide you need to watch it (like my wife) or will put up with watching it (like me) wait until it is on HBO or Netflix.  It’s worth 90 minutes of your life, just not 90 minutes plus a drive, $12 ticket and high-blood pressure inducing popcorn.

The Samuel L. Jackson video on guns yesterday put me in mind of this Alan Shore speech from Boston Legal, which is just about exactly how I felt during this time.

An excerpt:

Well, Melissa Hughes noticed. Now, you might think, instead of withholding her taxes, she could have protested the old fashioned way. Made a placard and demonstrated at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential appearance, but we’ve lost the right to that as well. The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest.

Stop for a second and try to fathom that.

At a presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you are wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed.

This, in the United States of America. This in the United States of America. Is Melissa Hughes the only one embarrassed?