for 4 April 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Actually Polly, I actively encourage smart, funny women to abuse me. I find it very rewarding to have bad moods taken out on me. Perverse, I know, but a useful sort of perversion, given how angry smart women tend to be.

And who'd want to hang out with dumb chicks?

And as for NMH, while it is an elite prep school, it does have one of the best financial aid programs of any school in its class. It also draws about 30% of its student body from overseas, making for a fascinating social scene. But you've probably heard all that from that pompous ass who blew you off. That guy must have been on crack. Elite crack.

Ciao

Ben Schwabe
<bschwabe@MIT.EDU>

Oh, he wasn't pompous. You underestimate me, thinking I'd go out with some pompous ass. I like the faux-humble, ultimately distant types much better.

Funny you should ask "Who'd want to hang out with dumb chicks?" because I distinctly recall discussing this with an exboyfriend. We had recently broken up, and we were speaking with a younger guy, who was saying that he was dating this woman who was very smart and cool, but "a total psycho." This was before I understood that a wide range of utterly innocuous behavior often falls under the definition "psycho" as defined by vaguely frat-ish men. Anyway, I explained to this guy (perhaps with a wee bit of self-loathing misogynist traces picked up from my years as a frat-boy wanna-be) that all smart women are somewhat psycho, because when you grow up smart, and a woman, in America these days, it makes you more than a little neurotic (I said this with perhaps a wee bit of feminist anger picked up from my years as an angry feminist, an era that hasn't quite come to a close yet). I can't explain why this happens, and certainly smart men have their own set of El Guapos to deal with. At any rate, my exboyfriend chimed in by casting a firm vote for the dumber, less crazy varieties of women in the world. And then he married one of them, and had three beautiful darling little children.

I, on the other hand, went on to alienated scores of men who had previously believed that a smart woman would be "great to date" and "much more fun when it comes time for Trivial Pursuit." Well, I'm emotionally unstable, and I'm terrible at Trivial Pursuit. So, each relationship ended more quickly than the last, but at least, for a short while, they admired my agile mind. The better to control you with, my dear.

Fuck, maybe I'm just stupid and crazy and there's no real excuse for any of it.

Oh, the crack. The elite crack. How could I forget?

Abusively,

Polly

In the latest issue, (the one with the Sopranos on the cover) the weasels at Newsweek have appropriated your recurring x-y axis graph doohicky. They plot TV shows along a "dumb" to "smart" x-axis and a "daring — safe" Y-axis. FWIW, they equate "dumb and daring" with MTV Undressed and "safe and smart" with the West Wing. Just thought you should know. You're nobody in this business until somebody else is stealing from you.

John K
<jknapp@oacpc.com>

When the weasels start stealing your ideas, that's when you know you're ready for the big time. I'd better get my manager and my publicist on the phone, pronto, 'cause this means I'm gonna break wide, real quick-like, baby!

Unsafe and stupid,

Polly

i occasionally read your little virtual rag despite my tendency to become annoyed with the we-know-all-and-the-rest-of-you-are-fucked attitude. but your recent guide to avoiding Bad, Evil American Movie Entertainment, while funny, was about as played as the clichéd clichés you describe. haven't we been bemoaning the state of glossed-over Hollywood entertainment since the beginning of time? and i wonder how many truly good or even just plain entertaining movies of our past would hold up to your ever-so-helpful guide? let's try a few examples:

1.The Impassioned Genuflection

you mean like as in Shawshank Redemption? that was a pretty good movie. and, oh wait, Streetcar Named Desire? "Stel-laaah!" not to mention about a billion Jimmy Stewart flicks.

2. The Singalong

you mean like The Blues Brothers (the original, not that gawd awful "2000" sequel atrocity)? or Stand By Me? or (speaking of "I Will Survive") Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? i can't stand musical theater mostly for the near embarrassment i feel when someone bursts into song during a particular comedic or dramatic moment, but taking it out as a unnecessary evil is going a bit far. same goes for film.

3. Outrunning the Fireball

geez, how many great "action" flicks has this been done in? like Die Hard. like a good lot of the Indian Jones or James Bond movies. like, um, Star Wars.

4. Suburban Wankst

ok, i'll give you this one. though, pseudo social commentary isn't just left to the Suburbia Sucks clan.

5. The Romeo Spill

right. and take that heap of slapschtick comedy with you, will you're at it. i mean, duh, schtick is schtick. i don't think a single Charlie Chaplin, Marx Brothers, Abbott/Costello, Buster Keaton (etcetera) piece would have made it past this one.

6. The Blank Uzi

however right you are about the precision of machine guns, please see number 3. also, aren't movies supposed to do that? i mean, make the impossible possible? sure, by using the same AMAZING thing happen over and over (and over) again, they make the impossible ordinary and boring. but still.

7. The "Star" Treatment

see, you showed yourself up in your own argument. the cheer that greeted the Fonz was pretty cheesy but it was fun. just like when Sean Connery gets off the horse at the end of that Robin Hood remake. "ooh, look. Connery. how perfect." (er, don't worry, i'm not convincing myself with this one either.)

8-9. Overly Sentimental Crap That Makes Me Wish I Hadn't Gotten Butter on My Popcorn

you win these, too.

10. "He thought..."

this is so a function of the trailer rather than the movie. if we judged movies by their trailers, we'd have a whole lot of movies switching good-versus-bad sides.

it seems like we'd be left watching black-and-white "art" films and My Dinner With Andre about a thousand times if film entertainment were left up to your standards.

thanks for the hotdog,

Sean McLeary
<sean@cultofsean.com>

ZZZZ...Oh! Uh! ... Sorry, Mr. McLeary, I must have nodded off there after you said The Shawshank Redemption was a good movie.

yr pal,

Vicki

Subject: omigod! you are so funny!

you are! thanks for putting into words the black bile boiling inside me!

I work at Consumer Reports and I couldn't agree more.

your fan,

helen
<popkhe@consumer.org>

That should be a trademarked advertising slogan:

"I work at Consumer Reports and I couldn't agree more!"

People would pay top dollar for an endorsement like that!

yr pal,

Vicki

absodamnlutely brilliant (the 10 reasons not to see a movie, i mean). trouble is, there aren't many new movies left if all the criteria are applied.

you may not find this as funny as i found yours (and mine's out of season), but check it out.

Mark Mobley
Music Producer
NPR's Performance Today

<mmobley@npr.org>

Thanks, Mr. Mobley. As a music critic, perhaps you'd like to address the gravest of all movie trailer abuses — Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings. I'm too much a patriot to advocate frivolous changes to the Constitution, but if a new amendment were all it took to free our nation of Barber's A minor opus, well...

yr pal,

Vicki

Hi y'all. The "other work by Vicki Lester" link at the end of today's Suck piece (27 March 2001, "Ten Reasons Not To Go To the Movies") points to Bartel D'Arcy's page.

(Nice piece, btw. Would that the "valuable consumer information-- news you can use" segments on the local tv news were so helpful.)

Ben Breakstone
<antipode@swbell.net>

Thanks, Ben. Bartel and I had a great laugh about that mixup, I can tell you. People are always asking me if I know BarTel d'Arcy.

yr pal,

Vicki

Dear Tim:  

It's good to see you back on the automatic weapons hobbyhorse. It is actually slightly harder to hit something with a full auto weapon than you might expect: until you get used to them, they jump around like mad and tend to ride up on you, but as you say, they're pretty good at what they're supposed to do. They also have a tendency to go through things and to have MUCH longer ranges than the little hand guns that the Heroes usually are using.  

But you again left out the "drop the gun or I'll shoot the hostage" scene. That one's my favorite.

Alan Kornheiser
<akornhis@optonline.net>

You are correct, sir. You know, if they just took all the brain power that goes into figuring out how to get the hero's wife or daughter into position to be taken hostage in the final scene, and applied it to some useful purpose... Well, at the very least we'd have a cure for cancer by now.

yr pal,

Vicki

Vicki:

The makers of trailers lie for a living. They tell us things and promise us experiences that do not always come true. In fact, rarely does a film live up to the expectations the trailer sets.

However, cinema is an art form capable of many experiences. Cinema, like most art, causes varied experiences for various people even though they all witness the same exact thing. Thus, to judge trailers or cinema against a fixed list of dos and don'ts is about as inane as telling a lover of painting not to view paintings that have blue in them or images of Christ. Just because blue paint and the whole cross motif are widely used does not suggest that they cannot be used effectively.

Trailers are perhaps the highest form of advertising. No other motion image uses graphic text combined with imagery combined with music, edited together in less than 2 minutes to relay a glimpse of a narrative story that just might be moving, or exciting, or worthwhile. And the choice as to whether or not a trailer is any or all those thing is to be made by the viewer, based on their experiences. Not based on your list.

I take it you do not have any experience making trailers or marketing films. And you sound as if your take on the entire trailer entity is slanted based on some unfortunate experiences you seem to have had in a theatre.

May I suggest you digest the trailer to Shallow Grave, or the Usual Suspects, or Seven, or perhaps you would find the Dark City trailer especially nice as it breaks all kinds of trailer structures and rules (it's more usic video style has a unique charm). If those do not tickle your fancy, try the teaser to Any Given Sunday as a powerful experience, or U-Turn, or The Cell, or the current trailer for Memento. Try movie-list.com and go wild. The best editors in the world cut these pieces. And it sounds like you think they owe you some money...$9.00 each to be exact.

Scott Edwards
<scotte@bdfox.com>

Yiiacchhhhrrrggggghhhh! Wuh? Oh! Sorry, Mr. Edwards, I guess I drifted off there when you started calling movies "cinema."

yr pal,

Vicki

Vicky,

I read your "Ten Reasons Not To Go To the Movies" in Suck and really enjoyed it: I'd like to e-mail it to some of my friends but I don't see that button on the page — does Suck still have that option?

thanks

Adrian Doran, Art Director
Homemaker's Magazine,

<adoran@homemakers.com>

Thanks, Adrian! Please pardon our appearance, as they used to say at Caesar's Palace, Rome wasn't built in a day! The little-used mail to a friend function is temporarily being housed at the Suck storage facility in Reston, VA. We're hoping to have it up and running again as soon as Bush II Administration plans for anti-PRC preparedness go into effect. Keep the home fires burning!

yr pal,

Vicki