Andy Gapin

Last night I did what any true nerd would do, I went to the midnight showing of the Simpsons movie.

I thought that it was going to be packed so we got there at 10:15. There were only about 25 people there then and no one was in line, they were just hanging out. I was pretty surprised and had I known, I wouldn’t have rushed to the theater. Around 10:45, a line started to form and at 11 they let us into the theater. Then we played the waiting game…aw the waiting game sucks! let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos!

Finally, after only a couple trailers, the movie got under way.

Now before I got into my little review of the movie, I should say that I went into it with mixed expectations. Based on what I had read online and which writers were involved, I was feeling like it would be pretty decent, but the last few seasons have been a bit weaker as well so I didn’t know what to expect. Though this is something that always bothers me with Simpsons fans. They are always saying how it hasn’t been good in years blah blah blah. The thing is, most episodes throughout the entire series can’t be fully appreciated after just one viewing. It’s not until you’ve seen them a dozen times that you finally get all the little subtle jokes that you can really appreciate them. It’s when you are watching with some friends and everyone says the lines as the characters say them that the show is really at its best. Even in the late 90s, I remember saying that I thought the show had run out of steam, but now when those episodes are rerun I laugh my ass off. Many of them are among my favorites now. While I don’t think that the past few seasons will achieve all of that, I still think that there is a lot of good stuff in them that many fans don’t want to take the time to try and find.

So let’s get back to the movie. I thought it was terrific! It really encompassed all 18 seasons pretty well. It took little things and styles from throughout the entire series’s lifespan and put them together in a way that was very entertaining. There was some of the smarter humor thrown in, but also plenty of the more slapstick humor. I can’t wait to see this again (tonight!) so I can pick up some of the stuff I missed.

What you need to remember when you see this movie is that it’s based on a cartoon that has been on for 18 seasons (and counting) and that has gone through various styles as each writing team adds their own flair to it. It’s not going to be a return to the glory days, but it’s also not stuck in the 18th season. They really did everything they could to represent the series and not just an era which is exactly what should be done. It’s not The Simpsons Season 8 Movie, it’s The Simpsons Movie. I think that it was everything that it should have been and it stayed true to what it was supposed to be.

If you go in expecting it to be bad, then you’re not going to have a good time, but if you go in understanding what it is supposed to be, you will laugh a lot and walk away with some good quotes to use with your friends. And really, when it comes down to it, that’s really all the Simpsons is about, quotes.

Oh, and for you Hank Scorpio fans out there, while Mr. Scorpion does not make an appearance, at least not in a speaking role, he might have been in one of the mobs (but since he doesn’t live in Springfield, maybe not), there is a character that you’ll love almost as much.

Last night, being the moron that I am, I locked myself out of my apartment. I thought that my keys were in my pocket since everything else was. Even my car keys were there! To my dismay, exactly 1.46 seconds after I closed the locked door behind me I realized that they weren’t there. So I did what any normal person would do, I walked around to the side of the house where I left a window open. Since I was only going across the street to the convenience store, I didn’t bother to close the window and I wasn’t going to deadbolt the door. The screen was still down, but I thought that I could open it from the outside. I messed around with it for a few minutes, but I really did not want to destroy the screen and have to replace it so I was being very careful.

After a little while of messing around with the screen, I heard the neighbor on the phone (her window was open) with the cops telling them that someone was breaking into the house next door to her. Ah!

At that point, I just kind of sighed and banged my head on the window sill. This left with a decision, do I stay and wait for the cops to come and explain to them that I live there while they give me a hard time about it or do I split and go grab my roommate’s keys. I went with the latter, but in hindsight I think that I should have stuck around for the cops. That would have been a much better story.

One of my favorite things in the world is when out of nowhere you get the urge to listen to an album that you haven’t listened to in years. Sometimes it’s a band that you haven’t liked in a long time or even hate now, but that one album was always good to you. Then you take the time to dig it out and you put it on to find out that it withstands the test of time and is still awesome to you.

This just happened to me with the Juliana Theory / Dawson High split. I know I might lose some friends for this, but this album is still great. I don’t think I’ve listened to it since high school, but someone posted the opening lyrics to the album on a message board earlier and I just HAD to listen to this. So I pulled it out and put it on. It was great. From start to finish it was just as good as I remember it being. Understanding This Is A Dream was the only other thing that I liked by them, but I never liked it as much as this split.

I’ve also been into a lot of pop punk lately. Mostly Weston, Screeching Weasel and bands that sound kind of like Screeching Weasel (e.g. The Steinways, The Copyrights, The Tattletales, etc.) All great stuff. While a lot of it is new, it really takes me back to high school when that stuff was the best music on Earth.

Ah…simpler times!

Sometimes, I wish that we lived in a world where we could just say what we were thinking. Like all of those times when you’re bitching about something someone else is doing or saying and you come up with all of these really blunt (but great) things to say, but never actually say them. Yeah, I wish it were socially acceptable to let it all out. We’re too afraid of hurting people’s feelings these days. If I screw something up or say something dumb, I want to know about it. I hate how people just try to be courteous in these situations. I’m a big boy, I won’t be offended, but I will appreciate your honesty and it will definitely cause me to think more next time.

For example, yesterday I received an email from a co-worker asking me a question. I replied and then a few hours later they wrote back with a second question, the answer to which they could have easily figured out on their own just by paying attention to what was going on around them. I wrote back with a nice response and even gave him more information than he asked for because it only took me a second to get it and would have saved him five to ten minutes of work on his end. A little while later he replied to an old email I sent over a month ago asking the same question again, making it completely obvious that he didn’t even see my last email. Now really in the general scheme of life it’s such a little thing that I shouldn’t even be bothered by, but come on! Try a little! I really wanted to hit reply, attach my original response with the answer, and say “Please see the attached reply to your email with the same question that was sent yesterday, jackass. Stop wasting my time by asking me the same question twice because you’re too lazy to read through your entire inbox to see that I already answered you and I did it in a very timely fashion.” Of course, that response would more than likely get me fired and is completely socially unacceptable. But why? Someone’s feelings might get hurt? Oh boo hoo! Our country is too afraid of people getting offended and upset. Grow up and stop taking everything personally. We all make mistakes and we should be called on them so that we can learn from them and not make them again.

It’s like how today with kids in school teachers can’t do or say anything without fear of parents flipping out. We baby our kids too much these days. I know that when I was growing up it definitely wasn’t this bad, but now we’re just raising bratty, whiney kids who won’t be able to handle the real world at all.

Sometimes, I think that honesty needs to be given a higher priority. Maybe my example above was being more rude and abrasive than honest, but at least being able say something along the lines of “I already answered this for you, please check through you inbox to find it” would be nice to be able to say without people thinking you’re an asshole.

As I was typing this, Against Me!’s Piss and Vinegar came on. It was complete song karma, the lyrics are exactly how I’m feeling at this moment…

I’ve heard the hype about your band, Ive seen your video playing on the TV. Publicity photos in magazines, no none of it makes me feel anything. I would be lying to you if I did not say something that would make me feel like a politician. A middle of the road opinion that no one finds offensive or challenging. I’m not interested. The stage is not a pedestal. I don’t think you’re bad people I just think that your aesthetic is horrible. Please treat me with the same respect and candor. I would appreciate the honesty. A little less professional, a little more upfront and confrontational.

Just say what you’re thinking.
Say what you’re really thinking.

Last night, we got through three movies, which hasn’t happened in a while. Fido was awesome. Imagine The Sandlot if it were a zombie movie…Better yet, imagine crossing Stand By Me with Jurassic Park and replacing the dinosaurs with zombies. The idea of the movie could easily be seen as a follow up to Shaun of the Dead…even though it took place in the 50s. The movie takes place following a huge zombie war that is ended when one man starts a company that helps to return normalcy to peoples’ lives. They fence in the populated areas to keep the zombies out and develop collars that the zombies can wear that will not only curb their thirst for flesh, but also make them domesticated. Because of radiation, all deceased rise to become zombies. The only way to stop this is to decapitate all dead bodies and bury the head in a separate coffin. Or, the deceased can come back as a zombie and be put to work. Only 10% of people end up having funerals, the rest become zombies.

Now for the crappy one…I, Zombie. I had high hopes for this movie. It had been on my list of horror movies to see for a while and I figured that since it was made by Fangoria it would be half decent. No. It was boring as hell. Homeboy decides to try to help some girl that he finds in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere only to find that she is a zombie and wants his flesh. After he gets bit, the rest of the movie chronicles his slow deterioration as the zombigitis spreads throughout him. The entire time he is still alive, so he is not technically a zombie yet, but he finds that he can’t go more than a few days without eating flesh. The movie is filled with semi-pointless flashbacks and dreams that really just confuse you half the time…or maybe I was just confused because I kept falling asleep. There are two masturbation scenes that are just a little more than you bargained for. While you don’t see his wang, you do see his upper body and face as his hand strokes up and down. Leading up to the first scene, you kind of think it might be going there, but you are still shocked to find that it actually does go there. The second time provides one of the only bits of amusement throughout the movie, though I could have done without it, when his body has deteriorated so much that he literally masturbates his wang off. But the makers of this movie felt it completely necessary for him to actually hold the wang up in front of the camera afterwards.

I should also mention that I got emotionally bitch slapped by a fortune cookie earlier in the night. The fortune was “no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

It’s Friday the 13th!

I love Friday the 13th. Not just the movies, but the day. It’s fun! It’s like a diet version of Halloween for other times of the year. Every time there is a Friday the 13th I always invite everyone over for a horror movie marathon. Fun!

Though I consider it to be a fun day, most English, German, Polish and Portuguese speaking countries consider it to be a day of bad luck. In Greece and Spain, Tuesday the 13th assumes the same role. While no real historical date has been identified as the official start of Friday the 13th, one theory is that it came about because of the decimation of the Knights Templar on October 13th, 1307.

On October 13, 1307, a day so infamous that Friday the 13th would become a synonym for ill fortune, officers of King Philip IV of France carried out mass arrests in a well-coordinated dawn raid that left several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy, various obscenities, and homosexual practices. None of these charges was ever proven, even in France — and the Order was found innocent elsewhere — but in the seven years following the arrests, hundreds of Templars suffered excruciating tortures intended to force ‘confessions,’ and more than a hundred died under torture or were executed by burning at the stake. – Katharine Kurtz in Tales of the Knights Templar

However, there is a problem with this theory. No scholar has ever been able to find any historical evidence of Friday the 13th superstitions before the 19th century. So there are many scholars who believe that Friday the 13th is a strictly modern phenomenon that has been mostly fueled by 20th century media hype.

Either way, it is definitely something to be observed, respected or even feared. The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia or triskaidekaphobia and for some people it is so great that they cannot even get out of bed. Over 17 million people suffer from this. The British Medical Journal also concluded that there is a significant increase in traffic related accidents on this day.

So while some will be trapped in their beds or getting into car accidents, I will be sitting in my living room watching gore and loving it. I will have awesome friends around me and beer in my belly. Cheers!

The only sad part about today is that the next Friday the 13th is not until June 2008.

Last night I went to see Against Me! play an in-store at Vintage Vinyl in Fords, NJ. They sounded great, even though they only played for 25 minutes. (I have a bootleg of it. Shoot me an email if you want a copy).

Being at the show made me realize how much of an obnoxious teenager I must have been. We were probably the oldest kids there and the average age couldn’t have been more than 16 or 17. I kept looking around and thinking to myself “was I like this when I was that age?” I wanted to say no, but I think the sad truth is that I was…maybe even worse. 

I probably said the dumbest things and acted like such an ass all the time. I’m bad enough as it is now, I don’t even want to think about how bad I was back then. Actually, looking back, I think I purposely went out of my way to be obnoxious a lot of the time. Ugh!

I’ll try to have a real post tomorrow, but for now…

1. Drinking…good?
2. The birds and the bees
3. Useless body parts
4. When not to hyphenate your name
5. Having more sex makes you healthier – Apparently, the vagina is a “use it or lose it” type of thing. Girls, you better put yours to use before you wake up one morning to find that you’ve lost it.

1. I want to work for Bush!
2. This makes me want to believe in god
3. I’m totally getting this bike helmet
4. Maps! Maps! Maps!

1. More sex is safer sex
2. How to prevent and remedy a hangover