Thank Buddha because the summer movie season is finally here!

That means it’s time for big budget movies with huge explosions, large naked breasts, rap stars sipping root beer in skull mugs. Plus all the stars are coming out of the woodwork to appear in these blockbusters meaning all of these huge, explosive and larger than life films are guaranteed to be Grade A, number one…all right, let’s cut the PR cue card talk already. If you want mindless, happy fluff about movies no one has seen, go read Variety or Ain’t It Cool News.

Folks, I’ll level with you. The thought of another summer movie season gives my headaches a headache and the fact that I have to sit through them for work makes me wish for the long loving embrace of the winter when mountains of freezing, blistering snow blocks the road, keep you from leaving your home and close down the movie theaters for weeks at a time.

So instead of going on and on and on about which movies are a waste of time or what movies will suck (here’s a hint: they all are), let’s change the scenery with some “Mashed-Up Movies.” For the unfamiliar, the game was created months ago by myself, my brother and my best friend in a downtown Dallas steakhouse on a hot summer afternoon after several tall cold beers, the fuel for all great things we consider to be modern creations of genius.

The rules are simple: you take two movies that have the same last and first word and mash them together to create a new movie, thereby saving you the time and money of having to watch two crappy movies at once. So this week in honor of another dreadful summer movie season, these “Mashed Movies” will all feature an upcoming movie release. Think of it as an intentionally funny episode of “Ebert & Roeper At the Movies.”

First up, four smoking hot MILF friends come back together to share the trials and tribulations of their lives, their loves and their love lives while driving a herd of cattle across the picturesque southwest with a gruff cowpoke who craps bigger than them. Sarah Jessica Parker and Jack Palance star in “SEX AND THE CITY SLICKERS.” This ride is gonna get bumpy.

A bumbling French detective falls in love with a beautiful maid accused of committing a murder he knows she did not commit, even if she wears silly face paint and laughs like a drugged up clown every time someone dies in “A SHOT IN THE DARK KNIGHT.”

Director Mike Judge tells the story of a depressed office drone who realizes life is too short to spend it behind a three cubicle walls and strives to achieve his lifelong dream of following in his chimp grandfather’s footsteps and returning to outer space in “OFFICE SPACE CHIMPS.” This summer, re-entry sucks.

Ed Norton plays a distraught teen who turns to a hate group for acceptance after his father is killed by two black men, but ends up learning about a huge conspiracy that threatens to tear at the very fabric of national security, government cover-ups and the existence of life on other planets in “AMERICAN HISTORY X FILES.”

Macaulay Culkin plays a kid who everyone thinks is a good little boy but really carries a heinous nature of evil and violence that he uses against his family who teams up with his best friend to make a homemade action movie in “THE GOOD SON OF RAMBOW.” Shoot first, ask questions about whether or not your cousin killed his mother later.

And finally Robert Downey Jr. stars as Tony Stark, a wealthy industrialist who builds himself a state-of-the-art bio suit after a life-threatening experience and decides to fight crime the only way he knows how – by going undercover as a cheerleader coach to protect a group of University of Texas cheerleaders who are the only witnesses in a federal murder case in “IRON MAN OF THE HOUSE.

The first thing I noticed from watching the second series of this underrated NBC drama without having watched the first is that just about every major female character has great big knockers.

Normally, that’s not something you (or I, for that matter) would expect to hear in a review about a serious high school, small Texas town drama, but it’s the first thing I noticed just after I hit play. I mention this not because I’m a macho male who only watches movies or TV shows based on cup sizes or I’m hoping this review will get published in Maxim. The reason it stood out (no pun intended) so prominently in the first few minutes of the opening episode is because it made me worry the show would become yet another attempt at fake California trying to recreate the homespun football life of small town Texas.

It’s happened to many times for me to count. Directors think if you hire hot actresses, put them in tight jeans and flannel shirts tied in a knot in the stomach and drown in their accents in a chicken fried dialect filled with more y’alls and yeehaws than a tour stop on the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” that they’ve successfully recreated the South in all of its glory.

By the time the first episode got underway, “Friday Night Lights” had me hooked and wishing I had watched the first season because it’s honest, humorous and humble in just about everything that every other show or movie gets wrong about my part of the country.

The second season picks up with Coach Taylor, played by Kyle Chandler, moving to work as a coordinator for a big college football team after his Dillion Lions take home the state championship. He leaves his wife, played by Connie Britton, and his daughter, played by Aimee Teegarden, back in Dillion and rushes home just in time to witness the birth of his second daughter, Gracie Bell.

The show immediately gets underway with all sorts of great plot twists and sub-stories that take their time to build into something meaningful and emotional. The most gripping of the bunch involves Dillion high schooler Landry Clark, played by Jesse Plemons, who accidentally kills a man attacking his crush Tyra, played by Adrianne Palicki, and dumps his body in the river without telling anyone.

The most surprising points of the plots are its humor. It doesn’t beat you over the head with jokes or smart-alec comments when the drama has died down. It has a very warm and dry sense of humor that finds very funny moments in the honest ways some of these characters would react in a real life situation.

It also doesn’t just put characters in situations without explaining their motives or showing some kind of metamorphosis as they go through these situations. Just about everyone has a reason for acting the way they do and they change because of it, whether that was their initial intention or not.

Chandler also does a superb job of holding together his family and player characters as the high school football player coach who realizes that being a team is more important than winning the game. Just about everyone plays their characters with a realness and genuine feeling that you’ll sometimes forget the fact most of these actors have probably never been in a town like Dillion for more than five minutes.

All addicts have their favorite hook-ups.

Every alcoholic goes to their favorite bar to get drunk because everyone behind the counter knows their favorite pour before they even open their mouth.

Every junkie goes to the favorite dealer to get high because they know they aren’t a cop.

Every john goes to their favorite prostitute because they remind them of their mother.

Movie addicts aren’t much different. They all have a movie store they go to, sometimes on a weekly basis, where they blow their paychecks on DVDs, posters and other assorted paraphernalia. They do it impulsively, without thinking about what financial responsibilities they will miss, what possessions will be repossessed or what bones will be broken and in how many places, all because they spent $70 bucks on “The Thin Man” box set instead of their student loan.

Their choice in stores also says a lot about themselves and their level of addiction. Some choose to go to the friendly neighborhood rental store, the one owned by the neighborhood hippie whose been there since Laserdiscs went out of style and has anywhere from five to seven screenplays sitting under a corner of the display case since one of the legs fell off years ago.

Some prefer to do their shopping online because you can find everything from the mainstream to the extremely rare if you poke around enough cyber corners. They also save a lot of money on sunscreen and gasoline, which might sound like an insult but given that global warming and oil companies are squeezing our budgets with the vice like grip of a medical tourniquet, we could actually learn something from these people, these pale, pasty, pathetic people.

The most delusional among us go to the big name store chains like Blockbuster and Circuit City, which are now merging to become one giant extremely crappy movie store company. It’s like poop hooking up with puke to become poop-puke.

My store always seems to be on my radar where ever I am. It’s on the way to my Dad’s apartment and there are only two roads to get to him: one is a toll road that doesn’t pass in front of the store and the other is a road that takes me directly to both. My subconscious movie nerd (I call him Bernard because all Bernard’s are nerds, yes I mean you Bernard) always reminds me to bring enough loose change for the ride there, but not enough for the ride back forcing me to take the road that runs directly in front of…hey it’s the movie store! Well, maybe I can stop and just do some browsing.

It’s one of those stores that sells old and used movies they bought from people who needed to sell it because they got sick of watching them, wanted to trade it in for something else or ran out of blood to sell and needed some quick cash before the bar closes. As soon as you walk in the front door, you’re smacked in the face with a cinder block of dusty DVD cover smell, movies abandoned by their masters long ago that have been repackaged, marked down and restocked for your viewing pleasure. For even the smallest of movie fans, the smell can become cocaine for your nose.

Every time I go there, I find something I haven’t seen that I should have or something I know I’ll like even though I’ve never heard of it before and I have to buy it. You can’t walk out of this store empty-handed. The dealers behind the counter are surly and sarcastic, and sigh loudly, even if you ask them a question as they wonder if you’re just stringing them along and wasting their time for someone who’s willing to do what it takes to make the money for their next score. There are no free rides on this rolley-coaster. It’s buy or beat it.

An hour later, I walk out of the place with a plastic bag full of movies and tapes and a wallet that’s as flat and sickly looking as the ozone layer. Addicts always say they can quit any time they want. Not me, I admit to my addictions. I say I don’t want to quit.

Besides, technically Bernard is the one with the problem. Did you know he also smokes crack?

Whether you thought Charlton Heston was a God-fearing man who could actually make God fear him or another crazed gun nut who would shoot his mouth off faster than a bullet-spewing MP5, you have to admit he was a man worth admiring. Even if his opinions made you wish he’d croak just so you could pull his gun from cold dirty stinking paws, the damn dirty ape.

Heston and I wouldn’t get along politically on every issue on the scale. He supported the last three winning Republicans for president, and I consider George Bush and his son getting elected another sign that God may not exist. He was pro-life, and I’m pro-shut-the-hell-up. He supported gun rights and even ran the National Rifle Association, and I choose not to own guns or hunt because anything that involves getting up at 5 a.m. should be outlawed and used as torture on our enemies.

He held some opinions as bold as his voice, and he made no bones about sharing them with the world, whether they wanted to hear them or not. He practically started the celebrity pundit movement. Heston became one of the first celebrities to use his celebrity sway to try and affect public opinion. Without Heston, people with polar views like Susan Sarandon, Barbara Streisand and George Clooney wouldn’t spend every waking minute in front of a camera telling the world what they should and shouldn’t do. Damn you bastards! You blew it out of proportion! Damn you all to Hell!

Now that he’s passed on, a lot of people will remember him for the stances he took, especially those who didn’t agree with him. Those people need to get a pro-life.

Heston was, at his deepest core, an actor and a movie star. That’s what he did for a living. It’s hard to erase some of the images his activism created. Who can forget Heston standing before a group of gun crazies behind the podium with a musket that could rip a hole in a Buick in his wrinkled grip as he hoisted in the air and exclaiming in that deep, baritone voice “From my cold dead hands”? I can’t because all I could think was, “At least give us some other options.”

But that shouldn’t be what he’s remembered for, and even though it was a big part of his life, a lot of the media retrospectives trotted out that very image on just about every airwave that’s shot across the dark American sky. I’m sure a lot of middle aged, Red state Republicans didn’t have to take their Viagra that night, but Heston had a greater impact on the world.

This is the guy whose performances in movies helped anchor them in the rough waters of time like “Ben Hur,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Soylent Green” and “Wayne’s World 2.”

This is the guy who told the world that soylent green was people, told Ramses that he would get his ass kicked by God if he didn’t let his people go and told unaware audiences that apes destroyed America, which I’m sure was some kind of thinly veiled rally for intelligent design, but that would destroy my point.

Politics seems to be creeping into every facet of our culture these days like some flesh hungry blob that oozes into every crevice and crack. It’s become so entrenched in our psyche that we let it think for us, speak for us and even act for us, and trying to separate it is like trying to separate coffee and milk with nothing but your bare hands.

Don’t remember him for “From my cold dead hands.” Remember him for “Get your stinking paws off of me, you damn dirty apes.” You can even remember him by combining the two. “Get your cold dead hands off of my gun, you damn dirty apes.” At least it’s a step.

Henry Bean’s latest film, Noise, about a man who tries to silence New York City by breaking into cars and disconnecting the alarms is based on a true story.

It’s partly his own. I don’t just mean he wrote the script. I mean it’s based on his own life.

He said during a Q&A following a screening his film at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival that he actually got arrested for breaking into a car and shutting off the alarm that had been ringing on and off for about five hours early in the morning. As he sat in a NYPD Precinct holding cell waiting to be transferred to central booking, he heard two cops talking about what he had done.

“They said, ‘What if everybody did that?’” Bean said. “’Then everyone would turn off their damn alarms.’”

Bean, winner of the Sundance grand jury prize in 2001 for his first film The Believer about a Jew turned fanatical Neo-Nazi, said “Noise” is the second part of a self-titled trilogy of “Fanatic” films, people so obsessed with something that it runs and can ruin their lives. He couldn’t say what his next film in the trilogy will be, but he described the rights he purchased for it as an artistic fanatic that’s “an adult live action version of Horton Hears a Who.”

“I’m interested in somebody committing civil disobedience and I’m sympathetic to him,” Bean said. “What interested me in this is someone is trying to fix a problem everyone else thought was trivial…I’m interested in arguments to the world about what’s real and what’s important.”

He said he doesn’t see these tendencies as obsessions and he hopes audiences don’t think of Noise’s protagonist David Owen, played by Tim Robbins, as an obsessive person.

“I think we all have like obsessions, one thing that speaks to us,” Bean said, “a reality that trumps all other realities.”

Robbins and William Hurt, who plays the villainous mayor of New York City in the film, were the only people he cast for Noise. The rest of the cast including Bridget Moynahan who plays Robbins’ wife and Margarita Levieva who plays Robbins’ partner in crime and post-separation girlfriend all auditioned. He gave all of them a lot of freedom to work in and around his script.

“The wig was Hurt’s idea,” Bean said referring to a bright orange hairpiece Hurt wore for the film, “and he paid for it because we couldn’t afford to pay for it.”

Bean said he also left some personal elements of his legal battle in the film such as filming a scene where Robbins breaks down and then into a loud car on the very street where Bean got arrested for doing the same thing. He also tried to cast his defense attorney as Robbins’ attorney in the film, but he was, let’s just say, unavailable.

“I was represented by (former New York Governor) Eliot Spitzer after he got out of the prosecutor’s office and said he was going into politics,” Bean said. “I offered him the part and he said he couldn’t do it because he had a busy schedule.”

It’s an hour and a half from McKinney to Dallas. It consists of a half hour straight shot towards the heart of the Big D followed by an hour of twisting concrete that go back and forth, over and under, on top and underneath each other in order to squeeze every square inch of land into driving space for the daily commuters.

I cross the county line in my pale cherry red 2003 Pontiac Sunbird, a cheap imitator of Raoul Duke’s great red shark but a feisty one with spirit and heart that beats harder than the manual says its four cylinder engine can. The road begins to slowly change color, turning from its uniform gray into a dark, sinister green becoming darker and darker with each passing mile. The road then starts splitting into small cracks until they meet at the corners and form a pattern of tiny soft pentagons. My head turns back on the road and a giant snake lunges at the car. I swerve to another lane to avoid its poisonous chomp. I try to find an exit that won’t throw me too far off course but the only way to get off this goddamn thing is to jump the grassy median and get back onto the surface road.

“If only this was a rental car,” a voice muttered.

Dallas is no city for someone to get lost in. The locals look for people who are lost so they can pounce on them like a wounded gazelle slowly bleeding to death on the plains of the Serengeti. Whip out a map and you might as well be wearing a sign that reads “Fresh Meat” hanging from your head on a necklace made from barbed wire.

I try to stay on the road that I’m battling by not putting up much of a fight. It’s not that hard. The road’s short staccato hisses tells me its more amused by my being lost than the fact that I’m probably denting its spine with the lousy shocks on my Sunfire.

“Calm down,” I tell myself. “Don’t show fear. That’s how it knows you’re there. The goddamn slime can sniff out a truffle of fear from two counties over.”

The assignment: the American Film Institute’s Dallas International Film Festival, a two week celebration of movies and celebrity in a city the traffic gods have abandoned because even they can’t fix it and they can transubstantiate. I have two days to cover as much as I can.

I turn off the highway and onto Mockingbird Avenue, a tiny suburban road that takes drivers through some of the most affluent parts of the city followed by the cheapest strings of motels, chicken joints and fast food places between Disneyland and Disneyworld. The road also takes more middle class drivers to Love Field Airport, the Greyhound bus of the American skies. A large portion of the road has been blocked off so construction crews can tear the skin off the concrete for what seemed like 100 blocks. I take a detour through neighborhoods with homes so big they blocked out the early morning sun.

The ride from my hotel wasn’t any easier. Not knowing directions is one thing, but asking for directions is another. I need to get to Victory Park, home of the Dallas Stars, the third greatest franchise in National Hockey League history behind the Detroit Redwings and the Wayne Gretzkys (also known as the Los Angeles Kings), and my press pass, the skeleton key that will get me into every nook and cranny of the city for the next two weeks. I only had two days. Not even the locals know how to navigate their own goddamn city. They either just drive to and from work or drive in the direction that gets them the farthest from the city the quickest. I head back out on the highway, U.S. 35E, trying to piece together the meager directions I could muster together on my own and hit the highway with tires squealing and barely holding up on the amount of air inside them.

I try to get directions on the phone from the press agent but it’s hard to keep your mind and hands on the wheel and the phone at the same time. In Dallas, it’s harder to do either if you have a wireless device. I barrel down McKinney Avenue and run face first into a red light with cars just barely eeking over the start line. They blow their horns at me letting me know my picture has been put on their mental fridges as their own personal asshole of the week.

Parking is an even bigger issue than driving. The roads are so sprawled out and allow for so many cars that there aren’t enough spaces left over to put your car. It’s always go-go-go in this city. Go to work. Go to the store. Go to this movie. Go to that party. Go to this bar. Go to that store. If they actually took some time to stop and look around, they might realize what a mess their city has become.

It’s not the most perfect city in the world for a film festival but then again, none are. As soon as the Hollywood machine sinks their talons into a town, it gets flooded with people, all chasing the same dream at 70 mph in a high powered Lexus that runs on blood and whose parts are lubricated with vodka and tonic water. It’s become Paris Hilton country, a place where people imitate each other in order to move up the status line, something I never thought I would see in a state that once tried to lead a fiery revolution against its current masters. People are dolled up in high priced clothes and hair that doesn’t look any color God intended hair to be. They wear flashy jewelry, avoid food at all costs and use old Neiman-Marcus bags to carry their documents and belongings. I stick out like a vegan at a pig roast. My fat frame, straight hair and substandard clothes do their best to keep me alienated from the rest of the clan. It’s no bother. I’m not here to watch them watch me anyway. Hunter S. Thompson always complained he had trouble covering a story because he would become the center of attention. The only way I could do that here was to set my hair on fire and run around naked screaming like a raving banshee on CIA grade narcotics. It pays to be invisible.

Coincidentally enough, the first film on my checklist is the Alex Gibney doc Gonzo. I have to race across the city to get to the theater at a decent time and curse my way through a parking lot infested with zombies in Gucci clothes just to get to the theater to find out I’m movie royalty. They love the press here. You don’t have to wait in lines. You don’t have to phone ahead to save a will call seat. You get to walk ahead of the line with a golden letter hanging from your chest that can get you in anywhere. No need to buy the ticket to take the ride. The ticket is free as long as you can prove you bleed ink.

The only seats available are at the very front, the kind of you have to snap your vertebrae in two places so you can look up and drink everything in. The theater is filled with posers, punks and other assorted art house riff-raff who, whether they are sitting in the front or their back, already have their noses turned up at the screen. There are also a noticeable number of Dr. Gonzo impersonators. They aren’t wearing the costume, just acting the part. An old mean looking mother fucker in a tweed jacket and a fedora hat asks if he can pass out of the aisle. I try to give him a reassuring “Oh sure” but before my lips can even utter the “h,” his face morphs into a crude pit bull turning his profile shot into a possessed McGruff. He barks back “Look, I’m not trying to attack you! I’m just trying to get through!” as angry dog spittle slaps against my cheek. He stomps past me into the aisle in search of fresh meat to gnaw on and drown with a blood chaser in bile filled stomach. I’ve seen his type a hundred times before. Some angry guy too bored and uninspired to come up with his own style and too lazy to do anything about it spits out someone else’s style but only does it with the anger and whiskey soaked mayhem and without remembering to add the insight that always comes before the insanity. These people are the kind of deluded freaks who make up this upper class downtown scene, people who copy and paste other people’s designs into their own spiritual inbox. They would act, sound and smell like the filthiest swine if he owned an overpriced sushi restaurant.

It’s even worse in the bars and restaurants. All I need is a quiet place to sit and write my reviews when the bar’s designated drunk saddles up next to me and wants to chat about the cosmos, the stars and the meaning of the universe. I sit down at the bar of a seafood restaurant in West End (every movie theater in the festival was located right smack dab in the middle of a yuppie shopping mall), plug in my computer and just want to work and watch the North Carolina-Louisville Final Four game in between sips of Shiner Boch and thoughts about the movies I’ve just seen. The designated drunk spots my computer and immediately wants to read what I’m writing. She sees the name “Hunter S. Thompson” and her id goes ape-shit on me.

“Oh Hunter S. Thompson, that’s so true,” she said while trying to order a naked tequila shot, whatever the hell that is. “He blew his brains out because he was too busy trying to live up to his image, but that’s the way he should have gone. You know he’s just like Johnny Knoxville. Did you know he broke his pee-hole? He probably lost his whole dick, if you ask me.”

The bartender keeps asking me if he wants me to throw her out and keeps trying to play defense for me because I’m too timid and tired to tell her to fuck off. She couldn’t take a hint if you beat her over the head with it. Eventually, she leaves and wanders out into the street, another poser in a town where imitation is flattery but hardly sincere.

The bartender gives me another Shiner. This one’s on the house for putting up with her.

“She’s the story,” I tell him.

“I hope she’s not driving,” I think to myself. “Not in this town.”

Al Gore has global warming. Rev. Jim Phelps has homosexuality. Uwe Boll has film critics.

Everyone needs something to fight whether it matters to the rest of the world or not and director Henry Bean takes noise pollution to task in his sarcastic, clever, witty David and Goliath comedy Noise, the second entry in his self-titled “Fanatic” trilogy.

Tim Robbins plays David Owen, an upper class businessman living in what seems like the loudest part of New York City. He gets tired of hearing car alarms at all hours of the day and night and decides to do something about it since no one else will. He becomes “The Rectifier,” a self-styled vigilante who breaks into cars to shut off their alarms after they sound past the 3-minute ring limit. Of course, while he sees himself as standing up for his personal space, the Mayor, played by William Hurt, sees him only as a series of misdemeanors that will lead to 78 years of jail time, even if the public has taken the Rectifier’s side.

Eventually, the Rectifier is outed by Ekaterina Filippovna, played by Margarita Levieva, after he leaves one of his calling cards behind. Instead of taking him to the press or blackmailing him, she simply wants to know why he does it. To David, it’s not an issue of following the law or reducing noise pollution. It’s simply a matter of courtesy. He can’t just close the window to block out the noise because he wants to keep the window open.

Such a massive fanatical undertaking doesn’t come without a price. He puts his job, his home and even his family on the line as they try to put up with his cause. To him, adjusting to someone’s else convenience is his inconvenience.

“What if Jonas Salk had that attitude towards polio?” David tells his wife Helen played by Bridget Moynahan. “Eh, it’s just polio. Just adjust to it.”

The script written by Bean has a great sarcastic attitude filled with funny lines and a great sense of humor. Just about everyone in the film has a chance to grab a laugh and 9.5 times out of ten, they hit their mark.

Robbins is also the perfect person to play David since both have a devoted passion to noteworthy causes. He clearly adapts his own experiences as an outspoken opponent of the war and the Bush Administration to his own character. David is a passionate pit bull who latches on to a cause he believes is right and won’t let go no matter how hard someone tries to shake him off or a fanatical man obsessed and it’s hard not to root for him.

Meanwhile, Hurt comes off as a little too much like a cartoon villain, a stubborn, New York mayor who only cares less about his constituents even if they don’t side with him. A film like this needs a big asshole to counter Robbins’ fanaticism as a villain, but it doesn’t feel as real or believable as it could be. It doesn’t detract the audience for rooting for Robbins and against Hurt since most of the Mayor’s moves are done through government loopholes and behind the scenes dealings as Robbins and Levieva try to fight the noise through more legal and less misdemeanor means.

The story comes with a lot of curves that work very well to keep the film interesting. As Robbins’ Rectifier persona begins to develop and his family begins to slip out of his grasp, you begin to wonder if Robbins is right or just a fanatic who is letting things get to him. Either way it’s a story anyone can relate to whether you think he should champion his cause or not giving it an everyman quality that so few comedies of its kind seem to have.

Director/Screenwriter Jason Wulfsohn and screenwriter/actor Sacha Grunpeter experiment with a unique way of delivering their message in Tracing Cowboys, but its delivery makes to hard to want to discover it.

Cowboys stars Grunpeter in his final performance (he died in a car accident on the final day of shooting) in an autobiographical look at identity, dreams and trying to find both without sacrificing yourself.

The film opens in an non-linear Slaughterhouse Five style timeline that jumps back and forth through time showing the slowly deconstructing relationship of Ethan, played by Grunpeter, and his girlfriend Debbie, played by Megan Charlotte Edwards. Ethan is obsessed with being a cowboy. He watches The Searchers until he can recite the script from memory. He never goes anywhere without his cowboy boots or his hat. He even wants to be a country and western signer either like “Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash or like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard” because you have to be like somebody in order to be somebody.

Ethan and Debbie are clearly in love but something hiding behind the curtain seems to be tearing them apart. The narrative likes to leave little clues in small chunks along the way like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs on the way from their home. It’s a different method, but it becomes so hard just to follow what’s going on that it makes everything else frustrating to follow.

After Ethan and Debbie get into a heavy fight, Debbie up and leaves without even telling Ethan. Ethan starts getting some interesting pictures in the mail, presumably taken by Debbie, that act as clues to where Debbie might be, so Ethan packs his guitar, a few change of clothes and heads off to Mexico to find her.

At this point, the film flips back and forth between where Debbie is and where Ethan hopes to be. Debbie finds solace at a cheap Mexican hotel with a kindly Catholic family while she tries to get away from things. This part is better jointed together with Ethan picking up more clues to Debbie’s whereabouts. One big clue midway through the 98 minute film gets things going, but the flame that had a chance of growing quickly flickers down again.

Some scenes feel slow and repetitive and since every thing Debbie does leaves a trail for Ethan to find, it can also become predictable. There are some surprises that keep it from becoming a complete bore, but most of the climax plateaus, including the ending, don’t make many eyes perk up.

It’s hard for me to be really hard on this film because it has something original and unique to say and it tries to do it in an interesting way, even if it doesn’t work every time. Grunpeter and Edwards also give very in-depth and compelling performances that help drive their passions and the lessons, but its disjointed and jumpy style makes it hard to want to keep chasing.

Every journalist who actually cares about journalism knows the legend of Hunter S. Thompson. They know about his love affair with guns, explosives and other things that go “Boom” and can wake up entire counties. They know about his drug fueled, whiskeyed-up journeys through the heart of the American dream from the fake glittery veneer of Las Vegas to the campaign trail of several presidential elections. They know about the cars he wrecked, hotels he crashed and bill he skipped out on all in the name of pursuing the ultimate story.

What they may not realize is even though his style of reporting changed the very nature and soul of journalism, his fame and reputation also may have destroyed it and ultimately himself.

Director Alex Gibney, director of the penetrating and engaging documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, takes on Thompson in his latest documentary with HDNet Films and manages to tackles both the good and the bad side of the Good Doctor’s legendary life.

Gibney opens the film with a reading from Thompson’s “Hey Rube” column, an online column he penned for ESPN’s Page 2 Magazine, on the Sept. 11 attacks. Actor Johnny Depp, who prepared to play Thompson’s alter-ego Raoul Duke in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by living with and befriending the real Thompson at his ranch in Aspen, Colo., narrates Thompson’s words throughout the film, but the opening words are undoubtedly the most profound because they pretty accurately predict the events that are to follow the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Then the film kicks into gear and takes the audience through Thompson’s turbulent beginnings and rise to fame as a journalist, novelist and writer who slowly began deconstructing the reporting process and turning it into “Gonzo,” a form of reporting that puts the journalist into the story he is covering and gives him total control over what he sees and how he sees it.

Gibney cleverly uses Hunter’s style and tone to drive the movie from beginning to end. His visual interpretations of Thompson’s work are vivid and bold. There is a risk of taking Thompson’s work so hard and loud that they come out looking like a third-rate heavy metal music video, but Gibney knows when to pop them an upper and when to slip them a downer at just the right times.

The film also does a good job of balancing clips and video footage from Thompson’s life with interviews with his family members, friends, journalism associates, political allies and even his political enemies. The political subjects Gibney chose to interview (former presidential contender George McGovern, former president Jimmy Carter, former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan) are among the film’s most interesting points because they portray Thompson as a man who had a great passion for his country and his government and did more than light things on fire and shoot wild boar with an automatic machine gun. They also drew the most cheers and laughter from the audience. They even managed to make Buchanan funny.

The most surprising section of the film is Thompson’s slow and steady breakdown. Since everyone knows the stories of drunken excess and total disregard for public safety and property, you’d expect the wild binge drinking and shotgun blasting Thompson would be just as big of a hoot on the screen and while they have some hilarious moments, it’s really more sad. Thompson ends up destroying himself with the very image he helped to create to break down his own enemies.

By the time Thompson commits suicide, a wave of anger and frustration came over me: anger at the establishment for failing to heed his warnings, anger at the media for driving any trace of humor and pathos out of their industry in order to preserve their good standing with the status quo, anger at his readers for turning him into a literary Johnny Knoxville and anger at the man himself for leaving the world when it really needs Thompson most and not Raoul Duke.

Gibney sadly proves that Thompson was too weird to live and too rare to die.

Something like this only happens once every two or three lifetimes. It’s the kind of moment that should be reserved for people who find the cure to some horrible disease or prevent an entire African village from starving. People who have so much karma in their spirit accounts, someone in Congress is trying to think of a way to tax them for it.

Alas, it happened to my brother and me. Frankly, we didn’t do anything remotely worthy enough to deserve it. We’re not bad people. We’re just not humanitarian gods. It’s not our fault. It’s hard to wipe out hunger when you have to roll pennies together to eat at Wendy’s just so you can feed yourself.

We got an entire movie theater to ourselves.

This has never happened to me or anyone I know. Then again, everyone I know is a tool so that either means God smiles on people who aren’t the biggest tools or there is no God and we’re all on our own. So if you don’t think I’m a nice guy, then God doesn’t exist. It’s as simple as that.

We were stuck in our parent’s house on the Easter weekend with nothing to do and Paul, my brother, wanted to share the sheer joy of Will Ferrell’s latest movie, Semi-Pro, with me. We had to drive a little out of way to find a theater that wasn’t playing it so far ahead in the day, we could buy, kill, defrost and roast a whole pig and still have enough time to sit down before the trailers rolled.

We got there early, so we picked our favorites seats: high up and right in the middle. It’s the perfect view in any movie theater. Your neck requires absolutely no bending up or down in order to look at the screen and your eyes can take everything in without having to scan back and forth in order to keep every scene in context. I’m sure in 30 years, it will prevent me from having any serious neck or eye problems, but the popcorn and silo sized colas will turn the rest of me into a large lump of flesh who has to shift three layers of fat away just so doctors can feel for a pulse.

The lights went down and the commercials started rolling and we were still the only people in the entire theater. We had the whole joint to ourselves. We were like Will Smith in “I Am Legend.” We could go where we wanted, say what we wanted and do what we want and the only company we had were the echoes of our voices and our shadows on the walls.

I immediately put my feet up on the back of the seats in front of me like the rebel that I am. Paul took it to a whole other extreme. He broke through every conceivable barrier that stands between men and their movie theaters that will earn my respect for years to come. He took his shoes off and plopped them down on the floor, not even bothering to place them together like he just got home from a hard 12 hour shift at the steel mill. Then he raised three pairs of arm rests on the seats next to him, stretched his legs across their cushy goodness and lounged across them like a fat Roman emperor watching gladiators battle to their death for his enjoyment for the entire movie. The manager didn’t walk out of his office/closet to tell us to sit up. The pimply teens who cleaned the theater didn’t call for their bosses. The guy in the projection booth probably didn’t even know he was there. I must have been the theater’s biggest loser of the week sitting in a theater all by my lonesome watching a third-rate Will Ferrell movie on the day Christ died of my sins.

I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. Paul knows an opportunity when he sees one. I’ve always admired people who live life that way. I spend every waking minute worrying about the consequences of my actions. Every cheeseburger I eat is sure to give me a heart attack. Every cigar I enjoy is sure to give me mouth cancer. Every girl I meet is sure to break my heart, wreck my car or leaving me buried in a ditch under 50 pounds of concrete and a plastic tarp.

I admire people who have learned how to turn off their own personal alarms and just enjoy the things life has to offer. It’s just too bad they all like crap like Semi-Pro.

Most God fearing people think of envy as a deadly sin, a mortal blotch on your soul for St. Peter to see on your resume when you’re trying to get that sweet champagne supermodel pool boy gig in Heaven. Not me.

It’s been the reason why I’ve accomplished what I have, reached the plateau I’ve climbed and achieved the goals I’ve set for myself. Envy has been a motivator. It wakes me up every morning with a cold bucket of water, points a finger in my face and screams like Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket after he catches Gomer Pyle at a Hooters in a wing eating championship.

“What is your major malfunction, numb nuts?” he screams as I’m wiping the combination of sleep and Marine spittle out of my eyes. “Don’t you want to be successful? Don’t you want to be somebody? Everybody else is somebody while you’re practicing to be dead right now! You’re nothing but a lowlife scum-sucking parasite with syphilis that only sucks the life out of other people just to prolong your weak pathetic existence! You make me want to punch a baby! Ahhhhh!”

You can guess where it goes from there. I bolt out of bed and skip my morning pee because I’ve done it already. I brush my teeth with visions of more successful people swirling around my head like a mobius strip and use their success as fuel to further myself. I’m a green Hummer that runs on pure unleaded hatred and only needs a fill up once a day.

Case in point, W. Bruce Cameron. He is a syndicated columnist, writer and author, best known for his book and TV show “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter” and its sequels “8 Simple Rules for Boinking My Teenage Daughter,” “8 Simple Rules For Ruining the Life of My Teenage Daughter” and “8 Simple Rules For Getting My Teenage Daughter Pregnant and Then Getting Your Ass Ripped Off and Beaten to Death with by Me, Your Future Father-In-Law…Daddy.” It was originally titled “Juno.”

We haven’t exactly exchanged friendship bracelets. I’ve run into him at a couple of writing conventions and swapped jokes with him between other writers and he became a personal hero and fan. He also picked up two days worth of bar tabs in Oklahoma City. The man is either an angel or a devil in disguise.

Last week, the Hollywood Reporter announced that a major movie production company with producers who have worked on films like Forrest Gump and The Devil Wears Prada bought the rights to his latest book with plans to turn it into a major motion picture, probably for more money than I’ll ever see unless I take a PR job with Satan.

Everybody else in my little e-mail writing circle was happy for him. They showered him with congratses and good lucks and well wishes, and he graciously accepted them with humor, grace and self-deprication. He deserved it. No one reads anymore since buttons were invented, and this only happens to one man once a generation. Humorists Dave Barry (Big Trouble), Jean Shepard (A Christmas Story), Robert Benchley (the Oscar-winning short How to Sleep) and Dan O’Brien (The Da Vinci Code) have had their books turned into some of the funniest movies ever committed to film.

I didn’t send him word one. Why should I? I’m not his equal. He won’t notice me. Besides, why give fuel to someone I should be trying to surpass? The rest of the day made me feel moody and irritable. Anything that could tick me off did and anyone who slightly got in my way got a cold callous pair of eyes staring back at them that wanted to jump out of my skull and tear their hearts out.

Envy didn’t make the deadly sin list because hate, murder and karaoke got promoted. Envy may not be able to stab, bankrupt or starve someone into death. Envy just lets you to do it to yourself. If you’re tearing someone down in order to pull yourself up, you’re still in the same place you started from and once they get down there, they can probably kick your ass.

That day, I didn’t need to fill my self-loathing envy quotient by going to a gym, endorsing a paycheck or trying to pick up a girl in a bar and getting rejected like a Joe Pesci 3-point shot.

I was already full of it.

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist, reporter and crow taste tester living in Texas. His website is www.dannygallagher.net.

It’s a story and an epic struggle that’s been foretold and examined in everything from classic literature to modern movies since, well, the beginning of time. It’s such a universal theme. Some films have used the end of the world as devices to warn audiences about the dangers of nuclear warfare and human ignorance while others have used them as an excuse to put a $60 million explosion at the end of the film to wake the audience up that fell asleep 30 minutes after the credits started rolling.

So stock up on canned goods, make you way to the bomb shelter and remember to “Duck and Cover” for the 10 Greatest Doomsday Scenarios in Film History.

10. When worlds collide in When Worlds Collide

In this classic 1951 sci-fi adventure, the world isn’t just behind the 8-ball. It IS the 8-ball. Another planet, Bellus, has gone off its orbit and lined itself up for a direct hit with Earth. Of course, only one man knows this will happen and the scientific community treats him like he’s Chicken Little. The film becomes a race against time to build a rocket that will take 50 lucky passengers to another planet where they can sustain themselves until they pollute their own drinking water, leave litter all over the place and build nuclear weapons to blow the other side to kingdom come. That’s probably what the sequel would have been like.

9. Zombies walk the earth for no reason in Dawn of the Dead

You can blame zombies on whatever you want: plutonium fallout from a downed satellite, biblical prophecy, public schools. The fact is they are here to stay and it’s either kill or be killed and be their dinner. George Romero started the end of the world in Night of the Living Dead and left them in complete charge by the end of Day of the Dead, but Dawn of the Dead is of significant importance because it shows how the zombies were able to take over the world. Instead of cooperating to survive and prolong the human species, selfishness does all but two people in by the time the film is over forcing the dwindling human race to move underground. The whole film is a lesson in cooperation and consuming. It’s like a feature length episode of “Sesame Street,” but with more cannibalism and people getting stabbed in the neck with screwdrivers.

8. The Earth is demolished in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

So it’s not the best version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ever done. As a matter of fact, it’s the worst. But the opening scene where the Earth is destroyed to make way for road construction with just a single pop was the way Douglas Adams himself would have wanted the world to end. No big explosions, no nuclear mushroom clouds, no giant rings of fire ripping the universe a new black hole. Just a tiny, delicate pop and the Earth is no more. It makes the biggest laugh in the film. The rest of it makes you wish the rest of the film would just pop off.

7. A giant apocalyptic rabbit in Donnie Darko

No film in recent memory mindfucked us more than Donnie Darko. This twisted, elaborate, winding road down the mouth of madness is capped off by the fact that the end of the world is either being foretold by a divine madman or a very clever guy in a bunny costume with way too much time on his hands. If a giant rabbit started predicting the end of the world, we’d be confused too right up until an airplane engine landed on our house.

6. Humans do it to themselves in The Day the Earth Stood Still

This film takes the alien invasion epic to a whole new level using the aliens as a warning that the Earth must change its way or feel the wrath of the universe. We all knew it would happen sooner or later. We litter all the time. We dump toxic chemicals into the rivers. We build nuclear weapons because we’re bored. Mankind is destined to destroy the Earth God created for us. Fortunately, a kind hearted alien stopped in to warn us of our impending doom. So what do we do? We shoot him. USA! USA! USA!

5. A child becomes the Antichrist from The Omen

The Antichrist is always the last person you suspect it to be. Christian scripture says it will be a man with a special mark. Jerry Falwell said it would take the form of a Jew. Everyone else thought Jerry Falwell actually was the Antichrist. No one suspects cute little Damien of being the being that will bring about the end of the Earth and open the portal of Hell for Satan to rule for eternity. Look how cute is when he rides his little tricycle and telepathically orders the Nanny to jump to her death.

4. Nuclear war in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

There always seemed something remotely chilling and cold about Stanley Kubrick’s classic dark comedy. Maybe it’s because everyone has the bomb now and we’re just one mispronounced syllable away from becoming fried chicken crispers on the sidewalk. The film satirizes the Cold War concept of “mutual assured destruction” meaning the cataclysmic events of nuclear war would be enough to deter either side from using their weapons. It’s basically seems like trying to hold together the Hoover Dam with duct tape. So if the world ends because of one nutwing general who wants to teach the enemy a thing or two, don’t say he didn’t warn you.

3. A video game in Wargames

It’s the ultimate irony. We spend our days simulating Hell on Earth and a computer game creates Hell on Earth. And what’s the only thing that can save us? Why it’s a kid who spends his days in his room with a girl and a computer and paying more attention to the computer than the girl. Yes, it’s not only a sharp satire about how technology and nuclear warfare can destroy us all, it’s also the perfect film to advocate gay rights.

2. Aliens attack in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

There have been a million movies where the aliens land, shoot up major landmarks while we shoot at them and then they die for some dumb reason that’s written in at the last minute to keep the film from going over budget. None of them holds a candle to the way Ray Harryhausen chooses to end the world: giant flying saucers crashing into things. This is the way I want the world to go because sure we might die, but at least we’ll be geeking out to the very end.

1. Aliens turn our dead against us in Plan Nine from Outer Space

It’s the ultimate plan to take over the world: reanimate the dead so they murder the remaining humans making Earth ripe for the picking. It would have worked if they didn’t look so damn funny. Those aliens are stupid, stupid, stupid.

Sound Off: What do you think are the greatest doomsday scenarios in movie history?

So all you hardcore James Bond fans there can just live and let die.

All you Star Trek fans can take your final frontier and shove it right up your deep space nine.

All you die-hard Star Wars fans can go suck an Ewok.

Indiana Jones has been the movie hero by which all movie heroes are measured. He has a trademark weapon, an unmistakable look, a wicked sense of humor even in the deadliest of situations and a will and a spirit that cannot be broken. He’s even taken on Hitler, the biggest and most evil enemy in the history of the universe, twice instead of some drooling, snarling alien with no sense of personal hygiene or a giant masked Jedi who has to wear a special suit that keeps him alive and makes him sound like the fat kid on a little league baseball team.

Most importantly, he has a longevity that can’t be matched. In the past 27 years, only three Indiana Jones films have been released. Other franchises have had to release, re-release and even re-re-release six, 10 or 20 films just to match the level of quality and style of just one of the Indiana Jones films. E.T. had to be remade and ended up softening it. Alien has implanted its eggs into more film projectors and mutated into sequel after mindless sequel. Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, if that title alone doesn’t make you quiver in your skivves, you need to stop reproducing and chances are if you’re that big a Star Wars nerd, you already don’t.

The time is perfect for another film. So when the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie hit the web last week, I couldn’t have been more excited than a diabetic kid in a sugar free candy store.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been dying to see something at the theater and the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer was just the adrenaline my heart needed to pump the life back into me. It was just like the Indiana Jones I remembered seeing the trailers and commercials for as a kid: car crashes, whip cracking, the screams of angry German babes, loud punches that sound like someone is punching celery and cabbage with a giant hand made of granite.

Of course, when I first heard another Indiana Jones movie was coming out, a little part of my brain perked up and fired off a warning shot that this may not be such a good thing.

Another Indiana Jones movie with Harrison Ford in the title role is bound to be good. But what happens when it becomes a success, which it most certainly will? Does that mean we could see a fifth, a sixth or even a seventh installment in the franchise? Ford’s 60 years old. What is Indiana Jones going to dig up after the 10th or 11th film? Himself?

Part of me hates to say this but I hope and pray this next Indiana Jones film will truly be his last crusade. I hope Indy saves the day and then right at the last minute, he gets killed in the final frame. I hope he’s crushed under a pile of collapsed Incan ruins as he tries to keep the Nazis from getting their grubby little hands on whatever artifact threatens to destroy the world. I hope he’s shot cold by some hot German Nazi whose ark he raided earlier in the film. Even better, I hope the giant 20 ton boulder he outran in the first movie finally catches up to him, rolls into the frame for no reason whatsoever and squashes him good, then rolls back and runs over him again just for good measure.

I’m not rooting for his death because I want to see him die. I just don’t want to see something so great and something that’s so sparked so much imagination in so many people run past its prime until people hope that it finally dies. Then where will that boulder be when you really need it?

Unlike the life of Houdini, screenwriter and director Richard Shepard knows all too well the story he is retelling in The Hunting Party would be impossible to tell as a coherent story on the screen, although the story written by journalist Scott Anderson about five freelancers who decide to hunt down, Radovan Karadži?, an “elusive” psychopath who orchestrated the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnia people.

He uses this unfortunate fact to his advantage to make a very entertaining, varied and powerful film.

Richard Gere plays the fictional Scott Hunt, a down on his luck foreign correspondent who after an on-air meltdown while covering the Bosnian civil war skips from country to country to scrape together whatever work he can find. Before his meltdown, he toured with his story hungry cameraman Duck, played by Terrance Howard, who makes it to the big time after Hunt gets cut from the major network’s payroll list.

After the dust of the war has settled and peace returns to the region, Duck returns to his old stomping grounds in Bosnia to cover the treaty ceremonies and kick back a few brandies with his old tape chasers along with the network brass’s son Benjamin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, when Hunt sneaks back into his life. Well, back in his hotel room to be exact.

Hunt tells Duck he has a tip that could give him the story that would put him back on top. He knows the whereabouts of the Fox, an elusive war criminal, based loosely on Radovan Karadži?, who has managed to shake the CIA, the UN and just about every international police agency on the planet. The plan is to hunt him down, interview him and maybe even kill him for the $5 million bounty the U.S. government placed on his head.

Everyone involved gives a marvelous performance. Howard seems a little too laid back as Duck but since he’s supposed to be the wiser of the three, it’s appropriate for the part. Gere does a good job as the out of control journalist nothing left to lose, but surprisingly, Eisenberg easily shines the most as a greenhorn reporter who desperately wants to prove his worth anyway he can, even if he thinks his life is in the hands of a man who loves putting his own in constant danger.

Shepard’s script also shines because it plays with the fact that not everything in the movie happened in real life. The first frame of the movie is simply a sentence that reads “Only the most ridiculous parts of the story are true” sending the audience on a scavenger hunt to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. The answer will shock, amuse and disgust you all at once.

Shepard also does a nice job of mixing different elements of action, satire and drama from a clever script, just like he did with his last comedy/action/drama The Matador. It switches gears so quickly that it’s hard to guess where the next scene might end up and gives the film a much more immersible quality.

The DVD picks up where the film leaves off with a copy of Anderson’s Vanity Fair article on which the film is based and an interview conducted by Shepard with two of the actual journalists who went hunting for the real Karadži?.

It’s hard to describe because frankly the last time it was there, we were all little kids. Going to movies used to be fun. Now it feels like waiting in line at the DMV. You stand in long lines to stand in even longer lines to stand in more, even loner lines and the whole time you’re miserable and hopeless because you know what’s waiting for you at the end of those lines isn’t worth the life minutes you wasted waiting to get to it and both moments end with you being snorted at by some heavyset woman who’s life dreams died the moment she dropped out of community college.

I haven’t been to a theater to see a movie in a long time. Even when I was just going by myself to see something I actually wanted to see, the thrill wasn’t as remotely high as it once was. It seems so uninviting, impersonal and different.

Maybe it’s because my happier days of theater going were when I was a kid, when I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of shelling out cash for movie tickets and junk food that my parents knew was just going to rot my underdeveloped brains and organs before I hit puberty.

Even though I was smaller, the theater didn’t seem as big and mall-like as they do now. I lived in a fairly big city as a kid and the theater I frequented had four screens. The lobby didn’t look like the taxiway of a major metropolitan airport. It was quite small and modest, which made it very inviting as if the building was saying, “Please, come in, enjoy yourself” instead of “I am so massive and huge and big and I will make you feel small and meaningless!” Nowadays, it’s like walking inside The Rock.

As you walked in the doors, the theaters back then felt like a giant hug that greeted you as if they were happy just to see you. It enticed you into the building. They had video games machines in the lobby with my personal favorites like “Metal Slug” and “NBA Jam,” not in a flashy arcade that made it look like a room where doctors test people for epilepsy.

It had one concession stand with a very cheery teenage girl working the counter who always gave you that extra smile when she handed you your nachos and jug of cola. They didn’t have a goddamn army of them lined up in a long trench run by people who weren’t smart enough to discover Clearsil and career counseling.

The movies had zero commercials. The movies realized the reason you paid extra money to see something in the theater was so you could avoid being bombarded with advertisements that guilt you into buying crap you’ll never need, so you can watch movies uncut and commercial free that guilt you into buying crap you’ll never need.

The theater liked you and accepted you for who you were. They didn’t try to flash themselves up or make themselves seem bigger than they really were. They didn’t need to because they just wanted you to enjoy yourself for who you were. That’s right. They didn’t hide their emotions or keep secrets about how they really felt about you for weeks until after you shelled out hundreds of dollars of your own money just to drive into town and see them and dragged you to some stupid bar with her ditzy, drunk friends to listen to some dumb cover band that thinks they can play music, even though they sound like the screams of a helpless baby climbing its way out of the jaws of an alligator.

Oh and Happy Valentine’s Day. Bitch.

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist, reporter and owner of a lonely heart living in Texas. He can be found on the web at www.dannygallagher.net.

When that time comes, let’s pray archaeologists don’t excavate a 2 million year old Blockbuster.

I don’t know why other people spend so much time complaining about movies and the media. In the big scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like a very big cause to be championing. If the U.S. Department of Defense announced tomorrow they were pulling out of Iraq so they could launch a pre-emptive strike to keep Hollywood from making bad movies, I would be the first one to speak out against it, although it would take five seconds of arguing with myself and I’d need some time to set my TiVo to record CNN before the first missile landed.

Believe it or not, our music, our television and our films define who we are as a culture and as a people. When our media goes out into the universe and some foreign land that has never even seen our country on a map, that’s the closest thing we have to an ambassador. What comes out of the screen tells them a lot about us a people. In a lot of cases, however, that ambassador makes fart noises with his armpits, asks everyone he sees to pull his finger and tells other countries that “We’re number one” because we’re the world’s largest exporter of fart jokes.

Imagine what that image will be in 2 million years when archaeologists stumble upon a dusty laden copy of Meet the Spartans.

First off, he’d have no idea what the movie is about based on the cover. It is about giant fat hairy guys pretending to be robots? Is it about hot half naked chicks pretending to be hot half naked Romans? Is it about bald chicks falling in holes? He might think this is porn and if he watches it, he will be very mad at us, so there’s strike one right there.

Then when they take the time to study it and review it, they will have no idea what it is. It’s not a comedy because it’s not funny. It’s not a drama because it’s hard to take something so ludicrous so serious. They’ll stare at the screen like a dog watching a monster truck show.

After they watch all the movies it is referencing, they’ll still wonder exactly what its purpose was to the audiences who watched it. That’s when the idea will spark in their brains. The people during this time must have been complete idiots.

They’ll do some research and discover the same movie was the highest grossing film at the box office during the week of its release. They’ll also discover the number one show at the time was a game show where people would admit in front of their family and the nation that they stuff their underwear and secretly hate their parents for money, and the number one comedy album is by a man called Dane Cook, the only man in history paid to have epileptic seizures on stage.

They’ll present their findings to the National Historic Archive. They will give them a huge government grant to allow them to continue their research and they’ll unearth even more astonishing artifacts to back up their bleak findings: the Not Another Teen Movie, the Date Movie, the Epic Movie, the Scary Movies. Then they’ll present their findings in a special wing of the Smithsonian entitled, “The Du’h Ages: See What the World Was Like Before Brains.” A copy of Meet the Spartans will be featured right between the “jackass” memorial and the history of Scientology.

So go ahead, if you want to see Meet the Spartans because you think you’ll have a good time, don’t let me stop you.

Let humanity stop you.

We are living in one of those times. Juno opened three weeks ago and people are still talking about it as if a screening will help you see the eyes of Jesus Himself. The premise seems fairly ordinary. A teenage girl gets pregnant and has to deal with the rapid changes her life is about to undergo as she struggles with the fate of a human life that didn’t ask to be born. The difference with this film seems to be the execution. Unlike other movies, it’s genuinely funny and unique and doesn’t make you wish you weren’t born for having watched it.

This review isn’t based on my personal viewing of the film. In fact, I haven’t even seen the bastard (no pun intended) yet. This is based on the review of the film from everyone I know who has seen the film and insists that I either see it or suffer the wrath of God.

These people are everywhere. It’s easier to escape from Guantanamo Bay with only duct tape and plastic sheeting than the phrase “You have to see Juno.”

“Dude, you have to see Juno. If not, you should donate your eyes to someone more deserving – like a guy who edits dogfighting films.”

“You haven’t seen Juno yet? You should. How do you sleep at night? On a bed of nails made from the bones of baby elephants? I’m assuming since you’re so unfeeling.”

“You should see Juno because if you don’t, than the terrorists win. The CIA said they’ve seen it and evidently have a better sense of humor than you. That’s right, terrorists are funnier than you.”

I’ve even gotten the “You should see Juno” drop from so-called friends who haven’t seen the movie. They’ve only seen the trailer. They are telling me to see a movie they haven’t even seen for themselves. This is the same reason I never let them set me up on blind dates.

It is for this very reason that I will not see Juno. I’m not saying the movie’s bad or not worth seeing. I loved director Jason Reitman’s take on Thank You for Smoking, one of my all time favorite books and writer Diablo Cody is on her way to becoming an edgy scribe who’s words will echo throughout the world long after her lifetime. It’s probably better than half of the films on the marquee. Why should I see a movie just because everyone else says I should? On the one hand, it’s good to see that something as simple as a movie has managed to touch so many hearts and minds and bring people together on so many different levels. On the other hand, that’s also how Nazi Germany started.

It would be one thing if everyone said, “You might enjoy this film.” That would imply that they like me and know me well enough to recommend something they think I might enjoy. It’s the “You should” that makes me want to claw their eyes out with dull fingernails so they can’t ever tell me what movies I should or shouldn’t see again.

“You should” is a very smug and subtle way of saying, “Hey dumbass, I’m smarter, deeper and more knowledgeable about this than you ever will be.” I know because I used to say it a lot and most of the time, it was a worse idea than letting the Insane Clown Posse open a Wiggles concert.

I said “You should” all the time, especially when it came to movies, and whether or not I was right, a part of me garnished my id with a smug self sense of superiority that made me feel that I was better than them. It was a good feeling, but now that the lampshade is on the other drunk’s head, I couldn’t have looked more pompous if I was French.

Opinions are personal beliefs, not widely held facts. You can share them with others. You can stand on top of a building and shout them to the world until the police talk you down. You can let the people you know your take on the world whether it’s politics, religious beliefs or movies.

When you start a sentence with the phrase “you should,” your opinion becomes a fact whether it’s right or not, and I don’t want to live in a world where people’s personal opinions, feelings or beliefs are pushed on other people as indisputable facts or France.

John and Dean Solomon, played by Will Arnett and Will Forte, are pretty much kids with adult clothing sizes. They have an insane amount of energy, seemingly endless optimism and a smile that stretches the full radius of their heads.

They might seem annoying, ignorant and borderline cultish. But deep down, you wish you were like them. Everyone wishes they could live in a world of blissful ignorance where only good things can happen and you can gain all the confidence you’ll need for the day from a brother who’s willing to give you a “Today’s Gonna Be a Good Day on Three.” You know you do.

The Brothers Solomon has an interesting take on the dumb duo comedy. These are a pair of brothers with an obvious lack of intelligence but an overflowing stockpile of happiness, beaming optimism and the will to keep going after their goals no matter how astronomical the odds, no matter how unlikely they’ll achieve it or no matter how many times they publicly humiliate themselves or the people around them.

In this case, it’s to make a baby. Their father, played by Lee Majors, spends 95 percent of the movie lying in a bed after he slips into a coma. His super loyal boys learn his last wish is to become a grandfather so the boys embark on a journey to impregnate a woman with their seed, no matters the cost.

At first, they try to make a baby the old fashioned way by courting anyone and everyone who will go on a date with them. John keeps pinning for the hottie across the hall played by Malin Akerman, even going so far to invite her to a picnic style dinner in their apartment hallway, a clever little awkward moment when Akerman’s boyfriend shows up at the door at the same time as John.

Eventually, the brothers realize they have a better chance of fertilizing an alien’s eggs than a woman’s on Earth, so they offer a surrogate mother played by Kristen Wiig a big fat check to carry their baby for them. Unfortunately, her loud, salty, black boyfriend played by Chi McBride hates the idea and is constantly in the brothers’ never ending smiling faces.

Part of the fun of the comedy comes from the brothers’ pure ignorance. They’ll happily talk about impregnating Kristen right in front of Chi’s big face, and Chi slowly grows angrier and angrier. He never flat out blows up at the boys, but steams at them, which makes for a much calmer and cleverer comedy.

They also have a hundred chances to go for gags that rely on gross out scenarios that only make audiences gag. Instead, the script, written by Forte, takes the high road just about every opportunity and often when you least expect it. For example: the boys wise up to the idea of raising a baby and realize they have to learn how to become fathers. John tries to show Dean how to change a diaper and instead of filling it with something grossly appropriate such as pudding or soggy chocolate, he fills them with everything from quarters to popcorn so he’ll still be surprised when its time for the real thing.

Of course, not all of the jokes work and sometimes you may find yourself questioning if the lack of intelligence of the brothers is real or just written in to make moments even more awkward or uncomfortable. A lot of times, the brothers seem to go out of their way to screw things up, which ruins the comedy if it doesn’t happen fast enough.

The bulk of the comedy relies in the brothers’ pure innocence and director Bob Odenkirk knows the character’s charm and camaraderie are the keys to their comedy by wisely cutting out a lot of scenes where the punchlines were accentuated by a bodily function or a line of dialogue about uncomfortable sexual activities. It’s edgy that knows the best kind of comedy is about walking the edge, not jumping as far over it as you can.

The Upside: It manages to create comedy that doesn’t just rely on being crass.

The Downside: Sometimes the brothers are so dumb (how dumb are they?) that it’s hard to believe they aren’t just being dumb for the sake of being funny.

On the Side: Director Bob Odenkirk is a real American. Click here if you don’t believe me you commie.

Part of the fun of movies is showing the people you like (or least want to throw screaming from the top of a building) the films they generally wouldn’t watch if you weren’t in their lives. The other part is full of pain, humiliation and memories that you wish a swift kick to the skull would erase.

I enjoy an eclectic mix of movies. I can watch the popcorn pulp and generally get just as much enjoyment out of it as a snooty art house indie because there is more to enjoying a movie than just what’s being spewed out by the projector. Some of the best movie experiences of my life were during the worst films ever made just because of the people I saw them with. If I had seen them alone, I know I wouldn’t have had as much fun because chances are I would have walked away from the experience with either a face full of mace or a loss of the will to go on living.

Of course, just because you enjoyed a movie doesn’t mean that love will transfer by osmosis to the rest of the people in the room. If the movie sucks to the majority of the people in the group, the evening is not going to turn out good and they are going to blame the whole thing on you. The only way you’ll be able to win them back is if you can control people’s minds or are carrying some sort of a concealed weapon.

Last New Year’s Day while my friends and I were sprawled out on my friend’s couch like war casualties waiting for service in an HMO waiting room, we watched movies to pass the time. This friend has an entertainment system that if he dies, I’m going to insist he leaves to me in his will…that is, if he really cared about me. A plasma television, huge speakers, a Blu-Ray player, a TiVo that acts as his media slut and a satellite hook up with 2 billion channels that will allow him to witness any event in the history of the world as it happens that we end up it to watch loud rednecks pitching pocketknives on the Home Shopping Network at two in the morning.

We’re flipping around for something to watch when he flips past The Big Lebowski. I’ve seen it more times than my own beer gut, but my friends never have, so I insist we watch it. One of them asks me, “Are you sure this is any good?” with a treble of foreboding in his voice.

I insist that it’s funny. Then my friend, like a gerbil walking through Richard Gere’s house, cautiously made his way over toward the movie.

We caught the movie about a third of the way through just at the part when Julianne Moore makes her entrance, so I had to explain to everyone the plot thus far, which is fairly twisted and complicated if you haven’t seen the whole thing for yourself. Moore plays a feminist artist who is the daughter of the rich Jeffrey Lebowski, so to my friends, this film could have been a screening of The Vagina Monologues starring Some Old British Chick You’ve Never Heard of Talking About Her Vajajay. A sense of bewildered confusion hung in the air like a broccoli fart.

Then the film kicks into gear and all of the funny parts fall without a single laugh. John Goodman tells Steve Buscemi “Shut the #&$% up, Donnie.” No one laughs. Jesus licks the bowling ball to the rhythm of a Spanish version of “Hotel California.” No one laughs. The Dude wrecks his car after a joint falls in his crotch. No one even measures a chuckle.

Not even me. I’m too embarrassed to laugh. I felt like everyone in the room was glaring at me and picturing me in a French beret and a black and white striped shirt smoking some fruity sounding cigarette brand and turning my nose up so high at them, I can smell the back of my head.

I wanted to give my friends the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to just chalk it up to a misunderstanding over the fact they didn’t see the whole thing beginning to end. I wanted to just calling the whole thing off as a temporary brain lockdown since just before we flipped the channel over, we were watching the end of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and trying to get over such horror is like trying to erase the sound of your first born baby’s death rattle from your mind.

I couldn’t because to acknowledge it would deny me what I believed to be true. They were wrong and I was right. End of story. Roll credits.

I just kept it to myself. Everyone walked away from the crime scene where the laughter died quietly and I stay in my comfy cushiony spot on the sofa knowing full well I was able to grasp concepts and emotions far above the heads of mere mortal men. When I see Jeff Bridges taking a coffee cup to the head, I see more than just slapstick humor and comedy that lets us laugh at someone else’s pain. I see the very face of God.

Long story short, it’s good to be me and it sucks to be you. Deal with it dude.

Of course, such a huge party takes a long time to put together and if you’ve waited until now, you’re pretty much screwed. Take solace. You can always consult the greats for advice, if you know someone who can get their hands on a 100 yard Slip ‘n Slide and a donkey. Here are the greatest parties in movie history.

10. The parties from Billy Madison

Billy Madison throws a party almost every week every time he passes a grade and every party seems bigger than the next. There’s only one thing better than a kids’ birthday party where the parents are richer than God, the kid is richer than God. They can hire everything from four wheelers to bears that can roller skate and all you have to do is show up and bring a present and it doesn’t even matter what the present is because chances are the kid already has it or buy it ten times over.

9. The keg party from Dazed and Confused

Remember that old high school days when you’d cruise from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of either a group of kids who would let you sneak into their party and/or had more beer than a drunken Indians fan on nickel mug night? Dazed and Confused captures those days perfectly, those final days of reckless partying and utter disregard for health and human safety just before we become (sort of) adults. It’s the kind of drunken party we wish we could have every night as long as we didn’t have to wake up the next morning for work.

8. The pool party from Anchorman

It’s the 70s. Handlebar mustaches are in style. Velvet clothing is acceptable for males and females. You can walk around in your underwear and ladies will still talk to you instead of giving you a puss full of mace. The Anchorman party is just the kind of groove we’d like to throw if we had the women, the chest hair and the pool.

7. The key party from The Ice Storm

Sure it’s a hotbed of sin and infidelity and reduces the love that a man and a woman share to nothing but meaningless nookie and a romp in the sack, but if you had a one in 11 chance to score with Ripley from Alien, don’t tell me you wouldn’t toss your key into the bowl. What are you? Gay or something? You’re probably an alien, a big gay alien.

6. The godless idol worshipping party from The Ten Commandments

Moses leaves the clan for a few days to climb Mount Sinai, and Dathan convinces the freed slaves to leave their God behind and throw a huge, bitching shindig in honor of their new god, a giant golden calf. It’s exactly the kind of party we always knew the world would throw if we knew no one was watching, complete with wine, nudity and human sacrifice. Someone would have to clean it up the next morning.

5. The Pit Party from PCU

When all else fails, throw a party. That’s the theme of this under-appreciated frat-fest. The Pit is in danger of losing their beloved college stomping ground if they don’t raise enough money to cover their campus damage bill. So they steal the liquor load from the college’s bicentennial ball, knock down a few kegs and convince George Clinton to play at their party for free. It’s a little far fetched, we’ll grant you that. But if you had a chance to go to this party, you’d buy the ticket and take the ride too.

4. The KY Jelly wrestling party from Old School

A movie like Old School was bound to have more parties than Tulane at Mardi Gras, but this one beats out all others because there’s large breasted topless women wrestling in sexual lubricant. We stopped paying attention to what were writing after that sentence.

3. The party from Bachelor Party

Tom Hanks is about to get married and his friends want to send him off in style and if by style, you mean with a criminal records and more health code hotel violations on his record than the last Sex Pistols tour. This party has it all: strippers, booze, drugs, trannies, a coked up donkey and Tom Fucking Hanks. I’m sure Rita gets naked after she’s had a few.

2. The party from Cheerleader Beach Party

There’s a beach with cheerleaders on it and there’s a party. If I have to explain beyond that, you’re gay and possibly an alien.

1. The toga party from Animal House

This is the party by which all other parties are measured. It’s got everything a great party should have: music, broads, booze and a theme. Yes, all parties should have a theme whether it’s a western motif, a carnivale theme or a drink until you can’t walk and then drink until you can’t crawl anymore milieu. If girls didn’t mind a toga made from Star Wars bedsheets, we’d be boogying down to “Shout” right along with them.