One of the best parts of the Stanley Kubrick movie Full Metal Jacket, apart from the line ”You are born again hard!” is when R. Lee Ermey squandered the authority he had earned because of that stupid television show (Lock n' Load with R. Lee Ermey) where he was blowing up watermelons with homemade canons. John might be thinking of Gallagher or his brother who was impersonating him for a while. John once read an interesting live tweet review of a Gallagher show that really absolved him from ever needing to see a Gallagher show. The story of modern Gallagher is that he is a racist xenophobe, a crazy Tea Party hates-the-Mexicans, unfunny racist human.

Merlin is fascinated by Stanley Kubrick who is a very intimidating guy much like John. He was going to make this movie in 1987 when he looked like John Bonham or Merlin’s friend Adam. He knew he had to get all of this stuff right and he brought in R. Lee Ermy whose job it was to make sure that everything was up to snuff.

Kubrick's actor was bugging R. Lee Ermy because he was not getting it right and so R. Lee Ermy went to Kubrick and told him that this is not going to work because nobody who was ever in the reigns would see this guy and believe it. Stanley responded with: ”Thank you very much, please give your notes to my assistant!” and R. Lee Ermy fucking went into full-on R. Lee Ermy mode in Stanley Kubrick’s face. He scared the living shit out of him by doing basically what he was saying this actor was not doing and Kubrick was blown away and offered R. Lee Ermy a shot at this role.

The thing he had just done for 15 seconds made Kubrick literally shit his actually American pants and it was awesome, but here was the thing: He had to do it for 15 minutes without stopping and without repeating himself while people threw tennis balls at him and although the video of that has supposedly never been found or released, he fucking did it! That is how you make a case! You don’t just go somewhere and throw your resume on the fucking Internet, but you get in there and say ”You are going to hire me, jackass!”

Contact, Matthew McConaughey (RL10)

The movie Contact with Jodie Foster must have been cast by monkeys because Matthew McConaughey was in it, whom John hates, playing a religious person and representing the most callow human male in the cosmos. Every time John sees him in a film where he is playing anything other than a surfer douchebag, he wonders how he got cast in this movie.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mia Sara, Sloane Peterson, Gwendolyn Cooper, Danica McKellar, Ione Skye (RL42)

Merlin’s two cousins from Ohio were 5 and 10 years older than him and they were really into The Beatles and into Yes. They did never touch him inappropriately, but it was all appropriate as far as he was concerned. ”So THAT’s how it is in your family!” (reference to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, see this clip). Merlin mentions the cute knees of the female lead Sloane Peterson (played by Mia Sara). She looks like Susanna Hoffs whom they discussed earlier (see RL19).

John never felt like Sloane was his type because she was too skinny, but she was Merlin’s type because she was unattainable. John admits that she was very cute. She is in Merlin’s Diane Court pile (from the movie Say Anything..., played by Ione Skye), a bit like Winnie (Gwendolyn Cooper) from The Wonder Years (played by Danica McKellar) who now teaches math to kids (Google: ”Winnie sexy math”, her books are called Math Doesn’t Suck and more).

Rita Moreno, Robert De Niro, The Intern, Movie banter (RL180)

If we were to create a musical in our culture right now, we would need a Rita Moreno and a Rip Torn (not Rip Taylor). Rip Torn was fantastic on the It's Garry Shandling's Show and Rita Moreno was the original EGOT. The number in West Side Story called Tonight Quintet, which also exists as a YouTube video, is where everything is coming together, all the songs and all the gangs, and Rita Moreno is putting on her stockings. She is totally awesome! It is basically the going-to-the-mattresses-scene from The Godfather.

John was forced to consume the movie The Intern with Robert De Niro and the manic pixie dream girl (Anne Hathaway). Merlin happens to really like her and have dreams about her and there is no way he would see that movie. She is very exciting, particularly in this role as a CEO. The script keeps claiming that she is a real powerhouse, a ball-breaker CEO lady who is tough to work with, but she breaks into tears all the time, she is flighty, she can’t decide, and she is a manic pixie dream girl. That incongruity is jarring!

The twist is that Robert De Niro is the intern. He is an old man who comes from the old school and wears a suit every day. They don’t get along very well because she doesn’t need his adult supervision, but he is very patient like a wise Buddhist Dharma, sitting on his toadstool waiting and doing menial tasks without complaining, which is what wise old men do in order to eventually earn the trust of everyone. Young guys look up to him and want to wear their tie in the same way than he does. The problem with Robert De Niro being in this movie is the same as The Fonz (Henry Winkler) being in Night Shift: He was good, but it was the first movie he did after Happy Days and he was playing low status, like a Weiner. No, don't do that! Anybody but The Fonz! Every other role Henry Winkler did were roles that Alan Alda rejected for being too wimpy.

They continue to talk about Robert De Niro and if he really needed to take on this role. They also talk about Archie Bunker. Merlin has never seen Casino. Sharon Stone’s acting in this movie is tremendous! They mention various other Robert De Niro movies. Merlin reads some of the plot keywords from American Hustle, like cheating husband, drunk wife, sexual attraction, and so on. Amy Adams is an extraordinary actress and she lights up the screen of anything she is in. As far as John is concerned, American Hustle is the debut of Jeniffer Lawrence. Merlin only finds two X-Men movies to be good, although he is the biggest X-Men fan in the world.

How John saw the Matrix (RL249)

In March of 1999, John was walking down the streets of Downtown Seattle and was super-bummed after having just received the message that the drummer and bass player were to leave his band The Western State Hurricanes. All of a sudden, a car honked and the whole Death Cab for Cutie came along in their Scooby Doo van, a root beer brown 1980:s Ford van and all four of them were hanging out the windows, like they won't fit in the van because they have cartoon heads and drive with their heads out of the van. John told them that his band was about to break up and they invited him to join them.

They drove with him to Bellingham where they live and they went to see The Matrix that night. John was 29 and the others were around 22/23. The movie was great because there hadn't been anything like that before and John didn't have any foreshadowing. He still has a lot of sentimentality around the first Matrix movie and he can't separate it from whether or not it is a good movie, but he suspects it doesn't acquit with his normal desire for movie narratives to line up. Merlin watched it recently and it still looks really good and feels really good for being as old as it is. It was one of those movies that started something new. It wasn't just the bullet time and shooing everything in front of a green screen had been done for a while, but the two Wachowskis had been so audacious about how they present things and they were not above a superhero-shot of the team coming out the door.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Movie adaptations (RL249)

John asks Merlin about the Guardians of the Galaxy movie and they banter for a while about the film and about superhero movies in general. When John saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy, he had never even heard of them, because he does not participate in Marvel comics at all. He had thought that the characters were a discrete creation for that one movie and wasn't aware that they had pre-existed. The movie was a thrill ride for him because he didn't think there were people this smart and funny making movies.

When Guardians of the Galaxy 2 came out, John got spooked because he was certain Hollywood would screw this up. People had been standing in line for The Phantom Menace! Merlin's friend Dan Moren saw the film 3 times on the opening weekend and was just wondering "That was good, right? It can't be just me?"

John likes the movie The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, because it has everything! It has Sam Rockwell, the one Hollywood actor that John would enjoy to meet. Merlin has never seen the movie, but he loves the book and has read it with his daughter. John calls it a turd in a punchbowl because it is very heavy and there is no fun in it. They continue to talk about movie adaptations and the difficulty and pressure that comes with them. The problem is: If the movie works well, nobody notices why it was good, but if it doesn't work, all you can do is obsess what they should have done differently.

How movies from the 1970s hold up (RL258)

At some point in 2016, John had shown Close Encounters to his millennial girlfriend in order to get her up to speed on all the media she had missed out on. He successfully got her through The Godfather, but it took them 4 watches, which should have been an early warning sign. You don’t tilt at the windmill you want, but you tilt at the windmill you have. So as John was watching Close Encounters for the first time with someone for whom it wasn’t a touch down, he noticed that as with so many movies from the 1970s, pacing is a little slow and the movie is from the era where a married couple bickering angrily was made for laughs. John got very uncomfortable just by the tone of their marriage. It is played as a domestic comedy where she is a classic movie shrew who always just complains, is completely impatient and doesn’t listen while he is freaking out and making mash potato mountains in the living room while the kids are throwing their dirty diapers around. The whole tenor of that plot was not funny and didn’t feel realistic as it did at the time. The special effects are nothing you haven't seen much better elsewhere.

For the first half of the film, you just see lights in the clouds and it is very hard to explain to someone who didn’t have that experience how it was in the 1970s to talk about UFOs, Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. Back then you had a certain feeling about unexplained mysteries and the mere mention of the Bermuda Triangle where planes would fly in and not fly out would send a chill up your back. Today all of it has been so broadly disseminated that there is no surprise left in it. We are talking about cryptozoology! When John was working at the news stand 20 years ago the nutcases who bought the cryptozoological magazines were standing with John at the counter talking about Chupacabras, but nowadays there is nothing interesting or spooky about those things anymore.

Halfway through the movie, John’s girlfriend fell asleep and he wasn’t going to finish watching it either because it wasn’t so great and he didn’t like any of the characters. There is no way you can turn somebody on to The Godfather if your context is that you have seen it 40 times. That movie has been around with John since he was a kid and when it initially came on TV in the mid-1970:s the message he got from grown-ups was that this wasn’t for him and he won’t understand it. John watched the shit out of it and every time it was on, he would cancel anything else and so did Paul Sabourin and so many other people! It was the time when they didn’t have a video cassette of everything. The fact that you could say any word from the movie and the other person would reply with the next line and then you reply with the following line is so funny, it is almost like a cult and you cannot introduce anybody into it, because it is very confusing. You can’t get to where John is after one viewing, but you have to watch it 16 times.

The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, or The West Wing were - in their moment - described as the greatest television that had ever happened. It is great TV, but it would be hard to go back and watch it again and have it feel like the first time. Sex and the City is not as much fun as it used to be, the same is true for Garry Shandling’s Show, or Mr. Show which still holds up. Two nights ago John was doing his usual thing and wanted to see Rich Little on the Johnny Carson show in 1974 talking about the Nixon administration which was so fun! He really wanted to see the comedians of the day do their take on Watergate. Rich Little talking to Johnny Carson where they both are wearing big lapel jackets does now feel eternal or out of time. John spent a little time in that space, but somehow he ended up watching bloopers from Seinfeld. Is this really what the Internet has to offer you? You could use your time to instead educate yourself about the current government of Cambodia! That is when John looks up at the clock and it is 4am.

Bill Murray movies shot on cocaine (RL7)

John is pretty sure they were really high when they made the movie Stripes. The same is true for Night Shift with Michael Keaton. Merlin didn’t see The Razor’s Edge with Bill Murray, a movie based on the book by Somerset Maugham where they were also very much on cocaine and Bill Murray looks like his other role Carl in Caddyshack, but not on purpose. The cocaine is screwing with his smile muscles and it is making him grimace and smirk and he can’t even help it. They try to play it totally straight, but watching it is like watching a cast of 200 people dressed as flappers all grinding their teeth down to the stubs because they are gacked out on 1970s coke, which is unbearable to watch! It is a World War I movie, but John was first thinking of The Great Gadsby, a Roaring Twenties movie shot it in Providence which Merlin’s mother in law is in and there are two spots where you can see her dancing.

Razor’s Edge is a book that Merlin claimed he has read, but he hasn’t. John thinks it is a great book and if the movie adaptation was even remotely good, somebody would have seen it, but nobody has seen it. It is like Where the Buffalo Roam (an adaptation of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson): Nobody wants to see it. The Johnny Depp version (with the same name as the book) is pretty great and has a Neil Young soundtrack. For John as a sober person the movie many times conjured up the exact feeling of being on drugs. The character sounds like he is completely menaced and everything around him is a potential thread that might need to be mazed.

Even in the book The Curse of Lono, which was past Thompson’s prime, there is a section where he is driving a car in Hawaii down a windy road and it is the perfect evocation of speeding out of control on a dark road in a car that is too fast for you. While watching Fear and Loathing you are being transported into a feeling of paranoia and terror of being really high in a hotel bar. Most of the time when you see a drug sequence in a film, it gets all weird, like a dream sequence, but that is so unlike reality. If you have never done drugs and want to know what it is like, John would watch that movie in a dark room and maybe take some drugs to amplify the effect.

War Movies (RL294)

In June of 2018 Merlin and his daughter watched the movie Die Hard. It is the best Christmas movie, she was glad that (Severus) Snape was in it, and aside from some silly costumes that movie is still really fucking good!

John now has a movie podcast and is watching movies all the time. Some of them are still completely great, valid, and awesome. It is a question of tone! Post-Private Ryan everything was trying to be really gritty and although there is quite a bit of killing in war movies throughout time, for a long period it was "Bang! Ouh!" and then he falls off the back of a building and you never see him land. Some movies from the 1950s deal with gender politics, masculinity and all the things you didn’t think existed then, but they deal with them better than the movies now. It has been a real eyeopener for John that there have been really good movies for a long time.

Merlin recommends people to listen to Friendly Fire, maybe starting with Glory, the two Red Dawns or The Dirty Dozen.

page revision: 13, last edited: 25 Feb 2020 17:53

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The Story of John Roderick

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R. Lee Ermy getting hired for Full Metal Jacket (RL10)