Tag: david wain

Jenna Does Elvis #14 – Speedway (1968) / Live a Little, Love a Little (1968)

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Wow guys, this is really winding down. I have only five more Elvis movies left, and my heart is feeling a bit heavy.

Now we’re getting into 1968, better known as the year Elvis released his ’68 Comeback Special and blew away the entire world by not just for looking spectacular in an all black leather outfit, but for performing actually good music. If you haven’t watched the comeback special, I highly recommend it—this is Elvis live for the first time since 1960, and boy does he bring it. But, just before Elvis got his groove back, two movies came out before it that year:

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An Interview with Madeline Blue of ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ and ‘Justified’

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I met Madeline Blue in quite the serendipitous way. My friend / next door neighbor Jeanine asked me how my mom was doing, because she’s been quite ill this winter. I told her she was a bit better, but still very much on the mend, and that I’d been spending a lot of time with her watching TV—in particular, we’d been marathoning the brilliant FX series Justified. “My friend was on Justified!” My jaw dropped. “Yeah, and she’s been staying with me the past couple days!” My jaw dislodged entirely and fell to the floor and spent way longer than the five-second rule there.

Turns out her friend Madeline had played a prostitute by the name of Minerva in the third season. A quick IMDb-ing refreshed me as to which prostitute this was, and also enlightened me to the fact that this very same actress had also played the highly-memorable role of ‘Cure Girl’ in one of the greatest comedies of all time, Wet Hot American Summer—a favorite not only of mine, but of my mom’s as well.

I knew that a surprise visit from her would be the perfect thing to help perk my mom up. Jeanine agreed, and put me and Madeline together, who immediately got the synchronicity of it and was more than happy to do it. And it couldn’t have gone better.
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Netflix Longies #2 (Thunder Soul, 26 Years: The Dewey Bozella Story, Rolling Thunder, Mobsters, Batman: The Movie)

If you don’t know what Netflix Longies is, go read the first paragraph of Netflix Longies #1. I don’t feel like having to write it out again or copy and paste it or whatever. Anyway, here we go:

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Thunder Soul (2010) | Dir. Mark Landsman | 83 min.

I’m big into soul and R&B and funk and whatnot. Earth Wind & Fire, Frankie Beverly, Blue Magic, The Stylistics, Tavares, The Commodores—the list goes on. That’s the kind of music I was raised on, instead of Raffi or Barney or whatever. And there’s a channel on Time Warner Cable, in the MusicChoice section, called R&B Classics (channel 608 in NYC) and pretty much every night I’m listening to that while working on my laptop. It’s just calming as all hell.
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10 Woefully Underrated Comedies

It’s not hard for comedies to slip under the radar. Like any ‘genre film’, so many are pumped out each year that it’s almost impossible to keep track of which ones are good. Unless something gets an alarmingly high rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or was made by people you trust no matter what the Tomatometer says, you probably aren’t going to see it. And then you’re going to forget it even existed. Here’s ten great ones that probably passed you by.

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Dan in Real Life (2007) | Dir. Peter Hedges | 98 min. 
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I Don’t Like Jokes, I Don’t Think They’re Funny

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Jokes, almost inherently, aren’t funny.  We all know scores of  ‘classic’ jokes from the aristocrats to dead babies to chickens crossing roads.  None of them are funny.  But, in the right context, we’ll laugh at them, because the joke isn’t what’s funny—the idea of the joke being told is.  It’s that extra layer, that prefix, that meta, that deeper meaning, which gives a joke life, and makes it funny, and makes you truly laugh.  (Laughing simply because you’re ‘supposed to’ is why sitcoms are popular, despite their unfunniness.)
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