I’m having trouble watching TV these days. Which is a bummer, ’cause ordinarily I love TV. I think it’s an eloquent and effective medium, a basically good guy, and like every non-Commie, I adore it. It’s gotten me through some tough times. Even its shameless advertising is adorable. So blatant, it’s almost guileless (“Hey, old people! Buy THIS!”).
The problem is, real life is so…full right now, television is boring us. We can’t find any shows that are more dramatic than our lives and all the sitting and talking they do is making us tense. Our reality is overflowing with agony and ecstasy and nothing in between. So craving either reflection or escape, we’re finding only stillness and clever conversation. And not all that clever, either.
As it turns out, life’s a bitch and that bitch is sitting on the couch between us, holding the remote control.
So after trying to watch a nature special on man-eating piranhas which turned out to be (I swear to you) about a man who cooks and eats piranhas, I decided to alter my viewing tactics. Given that my taste in film runs fairly “frat boy” anyway, I am now on the Motel Movie Diet. You’ve probably ignored hundreds of these in your lifetime, but motel movies are like airplane movies with more varied themes. There is absolutely nothing asked of you in the viewing of these films and you have no chance at all of relating to any of the characters or anything that happens to them. Talk about escape!
Here are some of my favorite motel movie genres:
1. Running Down Shiny Hallways – An hour and a half of smooth hairdos, cool sounding footsteps and sweaty typing at computers…sometimes these movies are political, sometimes they’re sciency, but the plot is usually lost on me because it involves intrigue and a secret machine and also I fall asleep
2. Women Together – Women have to hang out together because men are dumb…the women drink and they talk about feelings and hip size and penises…the plot often references the breaking of rules I know nothing about and nothing EVER happens
3. Men Together – Men have to hang out together because women are dumb and they talk about feelings and hip size and penises…the men admit that they are also dumb, but in a more attractive, golden retriever-like way…they drink, too, but then things actually happen to them
4. When Stuff Explodes – These are the best ones (they’re good airplane movies, too, except for all the plane crashes)…the plot is that there is a man and a lady and they’re spies/government officials/military personnel…the man has no respect for the lady because he thinks she’s hot and the lady has no respect for the man because she also thinks she’s hot…then she cries because she’s stressed out and he uses his muscles to break something and then jumps off of something high and and then she thinks hard and does something smart and also jumps off of something high but he catches her and Stuff Explodes!!!
Brilliant…and much cheaper than therapy.
Love,
Kristin
Posted in: words on March 18, 2006