March 24, 1999. Wednesday.
 

    I received an interesting e-mail yesterday from someone claiming to be from a record company in Korea who saw either the Underpants Cowboy or Three Match Breeze page and seems to be interested in distributing the music in Asia. Hee-hee-hee.  Apparently this poor soul (no pun intended) thinks that I run a legitimate business.  Well, maybe I do...now...   So i wrote her back and told her that I'd LOVE to discuss licensing my products in Asian markets.  How cool would that be?  "Yeah, we're really big in Korea right now.  Our album just went gold."  Imagine the concert at the DMZ:  "Today, Underpants Cowboy plays to a crowd at the 38th Parallel, thus unifying two countries with long-standing distrust."  Ok, I guess I'm getting a little carried away. But this web stuff is really a growing source of amusement.  Maybe my jokes will pay me big dividends.  I mean, this girl sees the page and maybe "discovers" something.  Who knows who else is looking. Hmmm... maybe that "Wanted: Ninjas" page isn't such a good idea after all...

    So Berry's sort of BFLOABT (Boyfriend for lack of a better term), Jason, is here for a few days.  He's actually on a business trip.  Now that's funny.  We went out to dinner last night and he paid on his expense account.  He has to drive around and look at billboards with people who own the billboards.  Washington DC is now one of his "markets" that he's assigned to patrol.  I guess he finds it pretty amusing that these guys he drives around with, all middle-aged men, have to kiss the ass of a 23-year old kid who's had the job for 2 months.  God, he looked so grown up.  But i'm never one to turn down free food, especially at a pizza place famous for its pizza. The place was called Faccia Luna or something like that.  Kind of a pretentious name, but the inside was pretty nice.  jazz music, although a little too loud, was playing, and lots of black and white pictures of things Italian, the sort of pictures that Rodzilla is so fond of.  In fact, sitting with my back to the door (which I hate), I happened to notice that in the back corner was a picture called American Girl in Italy or something like that, the same exact picture Rodzilla has on her wall.  I'm sure it's a fairly famous picture, but the only place i've seen it is in her room.  It was kinda weird to run into it at a pizza place in Arlington.  So while Jason and Berry sat on one side of the table, I sat there on the other, occasionally glancing at the picture, kinda wishing Rodzilla was there.  But oh well. I'll see her soon enough.

    When we came home, we basically watched TV for the rest of the evening.  Jason and I watched a bit of Bram Stoker's Dracula, mostly for the necro-erotic weirdness of it all.  During the movie, we had several little discussions.  I remarked how Cary Elwes, who plays one of the people who goes to kill Dracula, and Billy Zane, most recently from Titanic, have sort of the same typecasting. Billy Zane is always cast as the Handsome Man in any movie he's in.  He's hardly had a role where it wasn't his job to be handsome.  Memphis Belle, Titanic, Only You, all the same.  Cary Elwes has had a few more real roles, but he's often cast as the "sophisticated" handsome man. Anyway, I don't think Jason really agreed.  But we both did agree that Keanu Reeves, uniformly bad in every post-  Bill and Ted  role (even the sequel), was positively horrendus in this movie.  His best scene is in Dracula's castle, where he's being seduced by Dracula's minion vampiresses. This is mainly due to the presence of the scantily-clad vampire girls, and partly to Keanu's mostly not speaking.  I did tell Jason how much I liked Keanu in  Point Break, however, but he asserted that it was most likely because of the comedic value of his role.  Probably true. But i'm also a huge Gary Busey fan.  And we were both glad that Gary's weird-ass kid Jake wasn't in the movie. Anyway, we stopped watching when Berry came out.  So of course she started her mad flipping.  The first movie that came on? Only You, featuring Billy Zane.  After she vetoed that, we switched to the Movie Channel, which was showing Starship Troopers, which coincidentally features Jake Busey.  I don't know why I always have to waste my clairvoyant powers on shit like this, instead of sitting around talking about how cool it would be if bags of money started appearing in front of me.
 

    So we watched Starship Troopers for the rest of the evening. It starts off sorta teeny-boppy, then gets exceedingly and graphically violent.  Berry watched for the former, Jason and I for the latter.  Honestly, it's one of the most puzzling movies ever.  Almost every review I've read on it didn't even assign it a grade or stars or thumbs up or down, because no one was really sure if it was meant to be a spoof or a serious, horrible movie.  If it was meant to be a serious action movie, it's one of the worst movies ever. But if the whole thing was a joke, it's one of the grteatest, smartest movies of all time. I'm leaning toward it being a joke.  From the acting to the casting to the plot to the dialogue, everything seems like a big joke.  Example: "The fuckin bugs whacked us, Johnny!"  "You're just one.. big... 'smartbug,' aren't you?"  "To beat the bug, we must first understand the bug!" and the dramatic "I...I'm dying, Johnny!"  It's pretty hillarious.  Berry thinks a lot of the lines came straight outta Grease or West Side Story.The cast is entirely made up of young, attractive people, all typecast to portray young, attractive people.  The smartest one of the groups is this guy who can sort of sense feelings in others. He's played by none other than Neil Patrick Harris. That's right, tv's Doogie Houser.  It HAS to be a joke.  Something I noticed for the first time yesterday: The wanna be girlfriend-stealer rival of our main character, Johhny Rico (the name alone is funny enough) is played by Patrick Muldoon, who previuosly played rivals and girlfriend stealers in such shows as Saved by the Bell and Melrose Place.  I don't think that was a coincidence.  Anyway, I highly recommend this movie.  The propaganda scene with kids smooshing cockroaches while their parents applaud approvingly is worth it alone.
 

    So after the movie, I went to bed. Exactly what Berry and Jason did, who knows. I'm sure I won't know the whole story until this weekend.  I chatted with Rodzilla for a while, then went to sleep.
 
 

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