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Whether you’re familiar with the Marx Brothers or not, I recommend (revisiting or) checking them out. Aside from the occasional overly-serious musical number, the movies and jokes completely hold up. After what, 80 years? Phenomenal. Here’s one of my favorite clips from Animal Crackers.

Last Sunday I went to see Better Off Dead at the Aero Theater with live commentary by director Savage Steve Holland plus Curtis Armstrong, Diane Franklin, and EG Daily. It was awesome!!! 25 years later the movie totally holds up. Best part about the Q&A was hearing from the director what a fucking bomb the film was in theaters. In my eyes, Better Off Dead is top 10 status of ’80s comedies. Perhaps even top 5, and as such, it continues to baffle me how critics can crap all over what’s funny. It’s almost like the stock market. If there’s a good buzz about something great or horrible, it will thrive, but bad buzz will kill it.

People sometimes neglect to kick back and enjoy something for what it is. Reminds me of watching MSNBC years ago and the pundits were talking about Whole Foods. The stock was the one to buy at the time, so they did a whole piece on them. But instead of talking about the company and its modest origins and its track record, all the news people just ate toaster waffles from the Whole Foods freezer section and complained about how awful and cardboardy they were. Seriously? That’s what you focus on–one random thing that’s gonna probably suck at any grocery?

It’d be like watching Better Off Dead and saying it sucks because of some arbitrary thing– like a French foreign exchange student who can fix a Mustang, a tween who picks up trashy women, or a relentless, scary skiing/biking paperboy. Ridiculous, maybe, but awesome. Unique and funny sometimes doesn’t come without a little suspension of disbelief.

Anywho, it may be the boxed wine talking– I’ve just switched from rectangular boxed wine to cubed boxed. Which is sort of like moving out of a trailer home into a double wide…But I digress. What Savage Steve was saying was that after opening weekend, no one would even talk to him. People HATED the movie. His agent dropped him. I’m actually rather inspired by the tribulations of Mr. Holland. He shot a great movie in 30 days, and it’s a classic.

The moral of the story is: Hope. If everyone hates your hilarious movie, you still have a shot at cult-classic status.

50 points if you can spot the 3 frames of the video that I shot. Another 50 if you catch the 3 frames my back side show up… (not as hot as it sounds)

According to the targeted ads, Facebook seems to think I’m a heavyset, unwed mother.

Considering my basic statistics of being single, female, and an avid player of Wordtwist, I totally get it. In fact, I’m flattered, ’cause frankly the targeted ads on Evite are far more troubling. When every banner you get is for booze, birth control, and a magical solution for cottage cheese thighs– makes you wonder what kind of slutty, saddlebag-sporting, drunk they think you are? Or rather, I am. Begs the question: Do they have me pegged so wrong or am I lacking some much needed self-awareness? For the sake of argument, let’s leave this rhetorical…