Wax on, wax off

Most of my life I have been known as a "visionary type," or "abstract thinker." Generally, these have not been compliments. My graduate school advisor called me his "philosopher student" one time, which I still insist on interpreting as a good thing. A few years ago, one of the directors at our company asked me to come into a software requirements meeting he was holding and "do some of that crazy-talking you do."

I realize now that I am a rank amateur. My boss is internationally famous for visionary thinking, and uses  words like "aspirational," "transformational," and "entangle," often in the same sentence. We've been working on a grant proposal for the past few weeks, but he's been busy with other things, so I've been doing most of the writing. Reading through it this morning, I realized it sounds awfully pedestrian. I was very tempted to send a message asking him to run through it and add some of that crazy-talking.

Movie Sunday: Cabin Boy

Image from here

I said last week that I had been planning to do a stupid one, and they don't get much stupider than Cabin Boy. Let me start by saying that I'm not a fan of Chris Elliot. I hated him on David Letterman, and pretty much everything else I've ever seen him in, which is as little as possible. But I loved this movie. I still have no idea why.

The film was produced by Tim Burton, who was originally supposed to direct it.  Chris Elliot plays the lead, an idiotic boarding school graduate who we first meet at the waterfront, looking for his father's yacht. It features David Letterman as a fancy-lad-hating sock monkey salesman, in a cameo appearance that was an instant classic.

Instead of the yacht, Elliot ends up on a filthy fishing boat with some filthy fisherman. The ensuing odyssey is ridiculous, and strangely sweet. Somehow, the combination is perfectly tuned to Elliot's particular brand of obnoxiousness, and the result is a very funny movie.

At least some people think it's funny. I know several people who hate this movie. A lot. But if you liked The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, you will love Cabin Boy.

Movie Sunday: Airplane!

Image from here

I was originally going to do a different stupid movie this week, but two things happened to change my plan. First, Leslie Nielson died, and I heard him say, I am serious ... and don't call me Shirley, about a hundred times.  But what really did it was that one of my former students dropped by while Airplane! was playing on AMC, and I realized that he had actually never seen it. In fact, while he said he had heard of it, he really had no idea what it was about. And this is one of the cooler kids, who knows a lot about old music, vintage TV, and delivers Holy Grail quotes on a regular basis.*

I tried to explain it as "an old movie full of stupid jokes, but that's not important right now," which cracked me up, but didn't really seem to help him at all.

Airplane! is like an encyclopedia of comedy. From slapstick to satire, it has examples of practically everything, though it admittedly tends toward the lower forms. But while explaining it to my friend, I was reminded of the time it was made, and the string of disaster movies that made Airplane! the Scary Movie of its time. I guess Leslie Nielson owed the revival of his career to Irwin Allen, at least indirectly.

That was another small irony of this movie. Airport, Towering Inferno, Airport 75, Earthquake, Airport 77, and all the rest, gave washed up old actors -- the kind who today would show up on Dancing with the Stars -- one more role to pay the rent for another couple of years. But Airplane! gave several washed up old dramatic actors, most notably Nielson and Lloyd Bridges, new careers in comedy, at least for a while. As dumb as it was, it really was a phenomenon. This is the sort of thing that's hard to explain to a 22 year-old.

So if you haven't seen it in a while -- or God forbid, ever -- indulge your drinking problem and watch it. You may be amazed at how many of the old jokes you know came from this movie.

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* Your idea of what constitutes a cool kid may vary. But we are talking about computer science majors, here.