for 4 November 1998. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Suck EGGs: Hartley & Stillman

Awards have always bored me until
this one. J'aime beaucoup
le cinema du Hal Hartley!
Have to say I lost my
in-her-20s girlfriend around
the time I tried to cuddle up
with her to Metropolitan,
thinking she would get some
kind of lasting feeling.
Yeah, I agree Flirt was
horrid, and you're right that
someone becoming
famous on the Internet because
of some tart who learned HTML
is just impossible! And guess
what? I actually started to
write you to nominate Woody
Allen for the award. I am
the Bob Hope fiend who
brought another in-her-20s
girl to the opening of the NY
Film Festival thinking it
might impress her. It did.
To her credit, she
walked out of the movie, only
to find another 80-year-old
with his hands up in the air
and face in pain saying, "Just
stop. Stop. No need to
make any more!"

I went alone to see Hartley's
Book of Love. Tell Polly that you
guys can stop following me
around and making fun of me.
I'm past the Armageddon
hysteria. It already happened
I'm sure. Maybe that was what
that big radiation storm was
all about on August 27.

I'm just trying to figure out:
Did I get left behind?

jharford
<jharford@weebotech.com>

You're not supposed to put a
definite article before a
proper name in French or
English. Except when
referring to Le Donald.

Women tend to put "taste in
movies with a lasting
feeling" fairly low on the
list of mating criteria. But
any woman who would walk out
on a Bob Hope movie isn't
worth your time anyway.

Following you around and
making fun of you,

Sucksters

you know what the saddest
thing is about making fun of
people? it's just so goddamn
easy. i mean, let's take a
look at stillman. he's one of
those guys who sat behind
you in algebra class and
sighed when the teacher
didn't call on him because he
was just so damn eager to
prove that he knew
everything. i remember
renting Metropolitan because
i accidentally confused it
with Metropolis. what a pile
of indistinguishable dreck.
it was like watching Revenge
of the Nerds without the
jocks, beer, nudity, humor,
or tear-jerking pathos. if
hartley wasn't busy with his
gun, i would have taken it
and shot every one of those
shallow characters. kudos to
you. in this claustrophobic
society of "don't step on
anyone's toes," it's nice to
see some people still have
the balls to say, "hey, guess
what? you suck." and to
think, my ex-girlfriend used
to get mad at my best friend
and i because our favorite
pastime was going to the
local mall, sitting on a
bench, and making fun of
retards and old people. gosh,
are you guys looking for
writers?

Jason Richards
<jasonr@rradv.com>

You're wrong: The movie you
rented was Metropolis. You
should have fast-forwarded to
the end, where Chris Eigeman
is revealed to be the silver
robotic woman.

Retardedly sitting on a bench
and making fun of smart
people,

Sucksters

After snoring for the last
eight business days to the
EGG Awards, skimming
paragraphs about people I've
never heard of, nor care to
and Neve Campbell, your ninth
installment of
"too-busy-doing-something-
else-to-write-a-full-column"
got my attention. Like and
dislike of Hartley and
Stillman is one of those
dividing lines for the urban
hipster. I've always
considered strong dislike for
Hartley and Stillman to be an
indicator of attention
deficit disorder. I suppose I
just have an appreciation for
patience that you don't. Of
course, I don't have a daily
deadline. At the least,
you've finally picked some
geniuses for these awards of
yours, even though you've
rarely stuck to the theme
(Neve Campbell?). I would
nominate Kevin Williamson. Go
see all the Michael Bay
movies you want.

Jonesin' for Filler,

Stephen Spainhour
<stephen@ora.com>

"Nile crocodiles, as
everybody knows, are also
frustrated actors." - Mr.
Peabody

And this dividing line is
drawn by whom? Well, let us
tell you something, Mr.
Snoot: Suck isn't here to
satisfy the urban hipsters or
the one-upping artsy poseurs.
We take our mandate directly
from the American People:
the Alabama sharecropper's
daughter at her quilting bee,
the hearty Maine fisherfolk
who furnish the nation's
tables with the fruits of the
sea, the Nebraska family
farmer who tastes the season's
harvest and finds it good,
the Avenue U mechanic with a
Real Doll in his closet.

These are the people for whom
Suck speaks - not for you and your
coterie of plutocratic
country club dandies but for the
common people, the true
Americans, the multitudes
lifting their voices in a
single chorus to declare,
"Stone him! Stone him!"

Snoring for hundreds of
business days,

Sucksters

Suck EGGs: Shelby Foote

I've always hated the type of
person to say, "I know Bob,
and you're no Bob."
Nevertheless ...

I know Shelby Foote or, to
put it more accurately, have
met him several times and can
think of no better Southerner
more deserving of your EGG.
Well, Strom Thurmond does
come a close second.

Susan Wyssen
<swyssen@hotmail.com>

Strom would have been a good
one, but he's had heaps of
this kind of public
acknowledgement.... Hell, the
Congressional Record is a
virtual Strom Thurmond/Jesse
Helms joke book.

Anyway, Foote seemed like a
pretty genteel and
undeserving candidate ... but
the more we tried to get to
know him, the more we were
repelled.

Sucksters

Dear Sucksters,

the Suck-aura West Coast
ahistorical arch-hip attitude
finally has hit on something
that makes me shudder.
Usually I find it fairly to
very entertaining, but this
time, well Hell, you've just
taken all the fun out of
stomping the South for not
winning their
war-to-preserve-
humans-as-property. OK, as a
native Marylander and
sometime Civil War student, I
see the canonization of
Shelby Foote as a foregone
conclusion in many gullible
folks' minds, but y'all
sorrily have confused the
grace, knowledge, and charm
of a true Southern gentleman
and scholar (Mr. Foote) with
the shallow and tepid bald
charisma of a buffoon (i.e.,
Ronald Reagan, your former
governor and our former
president). Mr. Foote does
not engage in
self-aggrandizement of the
sort in which Reagan engaged,
and of which you hedgingly
almost accuse him. This
especially is true where his
fiction-writing is concerned.
Mr. Foote and the now-dead
author Walker Percy, boyhood
friends, ironically started
out in directions opposite to
those in which they ended ...
Foote intending fiction,
Percy intending fact
(medicine). Mr. Foote has
humbly acknowledged that his
attempts at fiction were
mediocre at best, especially
when compared to his friend
Mr. Percy's - you should try
reading their correspondence
(Jay Tolson, ed.;
Doubletake/W.W.Norton, 1997)
for a picture of the true Mr.
Foote. I agree that his
smoothness and his
dramatization of
Confederacy-oriented Civil
War factoids in Burns' PBS
special could get grating to
a Northerner or an
ahistorical person, but
really, if you want to talk
about priggish
self-importance, you ought to
look elsewhere. Frankly, I
don't suffer braggarts, either
subtle or overt, and it was
what I found to be Mr.
Foote's engaging manner (and
perhaps also the imploring of
a past girlfriend who had
gone to Gettysburg College)
that drew me into studying up
on the Civil War. I am sorry
that out there in California,
the land which has no history
but that of pulp cinema, you
cannot comprehend the sense
of historical loss known to
old-line Southerners. But
really, to slag Mr. Foote -
even in jest - to me is not
funny. (I am sure, however,
that your reply to this will
be hilarious, and I look
forward to it.)

Sean O'Neil
Missoula, MT
<beadhead@cybershock.net>

He was a convenient target,
not so much for his
scholarship, but for his face
value as the de facto, token
Southern sympathizer in The
Civil War and the
pundit-related rewards this
has garnered for him. You're
right, though, about us smug
Northerners - so sheltered in
our historiography that even
Foote comes as a shock,
Slavery being Indefensible
and all that.

Of course, it's patently
ridiculous to dismiss the
residual angst of the failed
Confederacy - which, after
all, gave us Faulkner,
O'Connor, McCarthy, and Percy
... not to mention Muddy
Waters, Robert Johnson, and
James Brown. But the cultural
capital of that time seems to
us to be almost spent, and it
may be time to move on to
something else ... like, say,
A Man in Full or KrispyKreme.

Sucksters