About a week ago, while waiting to check out at a local electronics store, I came across these odd pouches in the snack section.
They looked a bit like IV bags but closer examination revealed they were energy shots accompanied with inexplicably bizarre copy.
It was only after consulting Google did I discover that phrases like "Adonis DNA," "truth torpedos" and "rockstar from Mars" were taken from Charlie Sheen rants.
Further research revealed that the product went out on the shelves more than a month ago. Say what you will about American ingenuity, I'd like to see another country go from embarrassing public spectacle to worthless consumer product this quickly.
You may be familiar with James Blish's idiot plot, generally defined as a plot that is only possible if the protagonist is an idiot (in some variants, the whole cast has to consist of idiots).
I'd like to add an even more common genre, the asshole plot. In these stories, most or all of the conflict comes from a major character who makes things difficult for the protagonist by being an asshole for no apparent reason other than to make things easy for the writer.
Television, with its constant need for story arcs, is rife with asshole plots. Recent examples include Jayne Atkinson's Erin Strauss on Criminal Minds whose campaign to remove Thomas Gibson's character never made any any sense in the context of the story, or Chi McBride's Edward Vogler on House.
But the best example I've seen in a long time comes from CBS's soon to be late Chaos. In the episode "Song of the North," a congressman, played by Currie Graham holds a press conference revealing a secret mission in North Korea. He knows that this information is top secret. He knows that making it public will endanger American lives. He should know he's risking his political career if something does go wrong. The only reason for him to screw up the mission was that the writer couldn't think of anything else.
I was at a party once where conversation turned to Pauline Kael. A guest commented that he didn't know much about Kael except that she "didn't care much for Orson Welles."
The idea that Kael had it in for Welles has been a useful weapon in certain film history debates but it doesn't hold up that when you read what she actually wrote about the man. Here's a representative quote I came across recently:
I mean men like Griffith and von Stroheim and Abel Gance and Eisenstein and Fritz Lang and Orson Welles who thought big, men whose prodigious failures could make other people's successes look puny.
From the review of the Bible, collected in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.
It's easy to forget that before the dark days of Golan-Globus, Charles Bronson was once one of the most promising actors of his generation. In movies like the Magnificent Seven and Once Upon a Time in the West and classic episodes of shows like the Twilight Zone and Have Gun Will Travel, Bronson gave a series of powerful but subtle performances.
Bronson first made the transition to leading man in the late Fifties in Man with a Camera. Check out this episode directed by William Castle and co-starring Angie Dickinson.
They looked a bit like IV bags but closer examination revealed they were energy shots accompanied with inexplicably bizarre copy.
It was only after consulting Google did I discover that phrases like "Adonis DNA," "truth torpedos" and "rockstar from Mars" were taken from Charlie Sheen rants.
