Your Thursday Regret: Pink Floyd

It is fairly common knowledge that back in the day I was a major consumer of alcohol. The popularly-tossed-about figure is "a bottle of vodka a day," and while that is a slight oversimplification it's close enough to accurate for our purposes (our purposes being, for this feature, a bizarre mix of nostalgia and mordant self-criticism). What is slightly less-known, or at least less-publicized, is that I was a recreational user of complex pharmaceuticals at the time as well, though certainly not to anything close to the same extent.

All the big words in that sentence were chosen with exquisite care. (Hm, there I go again.) "Recreational" and "complex pharmaceuticals" are the keys there - it was hardly a regular or even semi-regular thing, and your garden variety narcotics held no interest for me. I was a pills guy back in college, and when it came to pills I had one rule: up, up, gotta be up. This isn't that surprising when you consider the massive quantities of depressants I was ingesting at the time - taking Quaaludes on top of Absolut is not only a good way to ease yourself into hypotensive brain death, but it doesn't provide you with any sort of different experience; it's just more of the same. Plus, I don’t know if they even still MAKE Quaaludes. No, I was a stimulant guy, the more exotic the better. It is interesting to note that I don't directly recall ever taking stims while I was drinking, indicating that while my body was clearly trying to kill itself it apparently wasn't in any sort of actual rush to do so.

It is also distinctly possible that my taste for chemical enrichment did not extend beyond little while AWAKE! pills because one time around my 18th birthday I was at a party and I watched a guy drop acid. As I stood there drinking a screwdriver whose color was best described as a thin, pale, semi-transparent light yellow he proceeded to have what I still consider to be the Freakout of the Millenium.

This guy went BERSERK.

I've hallucinated before; never from drugs, just lack of sleep. I distinctly remember a class my sophomore year when I hadn't slept in about 40 hours previous and the print in my British Literature textbook turned bright red and started sliding back and forth across the page, and when I looked up the room was full of smoke. A few months back, driving home from New York in the middle of the night I started seeing cars and trees that weren't actually there. As hallucinations go they're kinda lame. The real problem with hallucinating isn't so much that you see all kinda of wacky shit but that moment when the conscious part of your brain realizes that you're seeing things that aren't there. THAT is what fucks you up, your conscious mind not being able to handle the disconnect between what you're seeing and what is real.

But this guy back at this party, oh my goodness, he just lost his shit. He was running around the room like his life depended on it, having shouted conversations with people no one else could see; he'd stop every few seconds and try to swat away imaginary insects from the air around his body; he'd clutch various limbs and body parts as though he were afraid they'd fly away. I believe the appropriate drug culture term for what he experienced is "a bad trip." No kidding. When he started screaming about "the monster" I finished my screwdriver, politely excused myself, and vowed never, ever, ever in my life to take LSD.

I have occasionally wondered in the years since if not ever taking LSD is what eventually led to the erosion of my love of Pink Floyd, but I'm pretty sure now it probably wasn't that. If acid usage and the concomitant flashbacks are necessary elements to enjoying a band I'm pretty sure the band wasn't that good to begin with.

The weird thing about Floyd is that unlike a lot of the things I've talked about here I can't remember what it was that made me actually like them in the first place. Back in high school I saw them in concert, for Chrissakes, and I have NO IDEA WHY. It was just one of those things you did back then. To an extent, I suppose, everyone discovers music - I mean really discovers that they actually have a musical taste, even if for most people it's laughably bad - in mid-to-late high school somewheres, and if you don't go hip-hop or country it seems that sooner or later, before you get to college, you're into Pink Floyd. It boggles the mind.

So I go off to college and I have all these Pink Floyd CDs. I did the whole bit with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz around, I dunno, junior year or so, and even though I was still into Floyd I had long since determined that I really fucking hate the Wizard of Oz, so even drunk it wasn't as impressive as it probably should have been. I listened - looking back on it I honestly can't believe this - to Dark Side and The Wall OVER AND OVER AGAIN. What was I THINKING? At one point when I couldn't find my copy of The Wall I actually borrowed one from someone else and NEVER RETURNED IT. This is how much I was into Pink Floyd back then and looking back I really can't figure out what the hell I was doing.

There are still bits I like, to be sure. "One Of These Days" still works on some sort of primal level in a way I really enjoy (plus it reminds me of Life on Mars), and, since hearing it on the radio on the way to class earlier this week was what got me thinking about this whole thing in the first place, the line in "Run Like Hell" that goes "if they catch you in the backseat trying to pick her locks," as rock and roll metaphors go that's really just outstandingly good.

But honestly, my disillusionment with Floyd came into being a couple months back when I was driving someplace without my iPod and "Comfortably Numb" came on the air, and while I was sitting at a red light listening to it I just said out loud to my empty car, "what the fuck is this song about?" I couldn't come up with anything. My mind drifted as I drove - it was on Bustleton Avenue, I remember that, though God knows why I remember it or what I was doing there - and I realized I couldn't think of what a SINGLE Floyd song was really about beyond, I dunno, sounding neat.

I haven't done anything drastic like erase all the Pink Floyd from my iTunes - honestly Floyd sliding in my estimation must have started a long time ago because there isn't a whole hell of a lot of it in there, so at some point my albums disappeared for good and I didn't notice - because it's not like their music is offensively awful (like some other people we've talked about here). I just don't understand what I ever saw in it in the first place, and the fact that I am unable to determine my own motivations pisses me off more than anything else.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: The One Where The Masses Rise Up Against Me

My family had some fairly serious money troubles when I was a really young kid. My parents, god bless them, were spending basically every cent they had (and then some) educating my sister and I, and that didn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for anything else. As I got older things started to loosen up a little but they didn't really get completely cleared up until... oh, I'd guess sometime when I was in college or thereabouts.

Around Christmas, when I was very young at least, my mother wouldn't say anything, she'd just look worried all the time. As I got older my mother had a familiar Christmas litany. I swear she would say the EXACT SAME WORDS every year: "it's going to be a lean Christmas." She would say that in an attempt to cushion the blow for when that year's present haul wasn't as impressive as the previous year.

I didn't notice at the time but I now realize that every time she said that when my father was in earshot he would just smile, basically to himself. Somehow my mother never realized that every year, without fail, my father would go out on Christmas Eve in an orgiastic frenzy of present buying and every year, without fail, no one would be disappointed.

One Christmas present, though, that my father did NOT buy came when I must have been 8. Amongst a sea of other presents were two videotapes: one had the first three Star Wars movies on it, and the other had the first three Star Trek movies. Apparently the A/V department at my father's school had gotten their hands on a tape-to-tape recorder, and my dad went and rented all those movies and put them onto single tapes for me. I'm assuming they were recorded in SLP or "picture quality, what's that?" mode, though admittedly the crispness of said images is not that big a deal when a) you are 8, and b) your TV is as big as an RV but only has a 19" screen, thus rendering the quality of the tape pretty much a non-issue.

So I had these tapes. My memory of them is remarkably vivid: the label on the Star Wars tape was written in my dad's giant all-capitals block-letter handwriting, and the label on the Star Trek tape must have been written by whoever it was at Girard who made it; the handwriting was considerably smaller and more elegant than my father's. I had these tapes and, in probably the first instance of the obsessive nature with which I would inhale entertainment for the rest of my life, watched them over and over and over and over AND OVER again. My parents didn't mind - it is worth noting that when I was that age they weren't much older than I am now, and they were both long-time gigantic nerds to boot - and my sister was 6 and, I dunno, I guess she was around or something.

I was already a big Star Wars fan, even at 8. Empire was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I had books and action figures and all that stuff. My course as a lifelong Star Wars nerd was locked in around my fourth birthday. (Thanks a fucking lot, Mom and Dad.)

I don't remember specifically liking Star Trek BEFORE I got that tape, but I sure as hell did afterward. I went the same way as I did with Star Wars, vacuuming up as much material as I possibly could; if you think adult collectors of things like this are sad you should see it at that age; when you're 8 or 9 paraphernalia is like crack, and with the associated addict behaviors to boot.

In the process of my multimedia hoovering I learned basically everything there was to know about Star Trek at the time. It is worth noting here that this was before the days of the net and Wikipedia and whatnot where over the course of a couple hours you can, Matrix-like, download every vital piece of information about an entertainment franchise directly into your brain and have the equivalent knowledge of having seen every episode/movie/whatever without ever watching a frame of film/reading a page/whatever. I learned everything about Star Trek the hard way.

So in 1987 when I saw a commercial for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," oh, man, it was like the derrick drill hitting that oil field for the first time.

Nerd.

EXPLOSION.

I was instantly hooked on TNG, even though I distinctly recall telling my mother at one point during the first season that though I loved it and it was my favorite thing on television it still wasn't as good as old Star Trek. Still, I watched it with an obsession that would be pretty frightening were I to witness it now in a 9-year-old. When I would get grounded and sentenced to "no TV" my parents would have to make an exception for TNG because I would go completely BERSERK if I didn't get to watch it. It was the first time I was ever completely hooked on a television show. I'm pretty sure that TNG is still the only show where I watched EVERY SINGLE EPISODE at their first-run airtime. In the years since I've gotten pretty compulsive about watching Lost or Galactica but I still DVR them from time to time. Back then, though, I'm almost positive I watched 7 years of TNG eps the very second they aired.

The first seeds of doubt started with little things. Tiny things. Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? I didn't hit that one until I was about 14. What's the point of having shields if there's like 900,000 ways around them? Wow the holodeck and transporters seem to malfunction a lot. Wow there seem to be an AWFUL lot of these anonymous crew members who die with regularity. What the hell does Worf DO, anyway? "Security Chief?" What the fuck is that? The ship has enough firepower to blow up a planet and there's a GUY whose job it is to keep the ship SAFE? From what, the Great Green Arkleseizure?

But these questions occupied the back of my mind, a dark, humid corner where another voice sat saying "if Luke kissed Leia in Empire and they were revealed as siblings in Jedi then these movies aren't planned out very well, but that means..." which we now recognize as the first steps on the road to madness.

I ignored that part of my brain - the part asking distressing questions about Star Trek, at least - for a lot of years. We still had Trek movies with delightful regularity (if not delightful or regular quality) and TNG was, by all accounts, on television in full-blown syndication something like 45 times a week. Somewhere in there, though, there was this, I dunno, gap between when TNG was on everywhere three times a day to when it started its abortive, ill-considered run on Spike, when there was very little Star Trek to be had.

(Side note: what genius decided that it was a great idea to make STAR TREK the flagship show of what is, essentially, the Frat Boy Channel? That is one person, folks, who does not fucking well understand "branding.")

When TNG came to Spike there was this giant promotional push (like you do) and I sat down to watch - seriously, intently WATCH - Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time in several years.

After a few weeks I came to a conclusion:

It's not that good.

I'm sorry, folks, it really isn't.

Part of the reason it's not that good is because of the one part of it that is truly amazing: Patrick Stewart. Even if he wasn't such a great actor - and not to take anything away from the rest of that cast, but he's so far past any of them it's not funny - if nothing else Picard was the only character on the show who was REMOTELY interesting. Every other crew member of the USS Enterprise-D (that's right, goddammit, it's the Enterprise-motherfucking-DEE) is a bland cipher at best or a one-note joke at worst. Dutiful Riker. Naïve Data. Worf the Warrior. And the rest, here on Gilligan's Isle. Seriously, Troi, WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE ON THAT SHIP FOR? She doesn't do ANYTHING.

The actors - all of whom are quite talented, except for maybe Dr. Crusher, whose character was construed so narrowly as to be practically two-dimensional and thus provide no insight into the actress - are all trying very hard, but you can see in the first couple years the show straining against Roddenberry's vision of a perfect 24th century human utopia (which, while philosophically interesting, makes for acutely bad drama) and then, after he left, TNG became stuck in the rut that strain created. By then boring anti-drama had become part of the show's DNA and every time they tried to break out of it things came across as strange and off-putting. The Klingon civil war arc is so out of character for TNG it seems like it's from some other show entirely (possibly the later, exponentially better DS9), the late-seasons "romance" (a term used here in surely its loosest sense) between Troi and Worf is as clunky as Russian poetry, and even Q got tiresome after far too many appearances down the years.

This is not to say there aren't moments where the show, through some fortuitous alchemy of script and acting and direction, didn't pop and sometimes even take flight. The episode where Q flings the ship into the Delta Quadrant and we meet the Borg for the first time is remarkably good television, and the Borg's return in The Best of Both Worlds is as satisfying as any season finale/premiere two-parter I can think of. This is true DESPITE the fact that every Borg appearance on the show after are such horrific cock-ups that retroactively poison every instance previous, and that it would take First Contact to truly "make" the Borg. The one with Jean Simmons as Admiral Satie, the witchhunt-y episode (The Drumhead? Maybe?) is, to my mind, the best hour of pure acting (and probably writing) in the entire series. And "Cause and Effect" is a fantastic, just a truly fantastically-executed hour of science fiction, though it occupies a black space in my heart because, in what is surely the greatest irony in the history of the universe, it is the single episode of TNG I have seen more than any other; for a period of - I am not making this up - almost 10 years it seemed like just about every time I turned on TNG "Cause and Effect" was on. And John De Lancie, overused though he was, is still always a joy to watch with Stewart.

But those, and a few others, are really only a couple high points in what is an overall run of surprisingly depressed quality. One almost gets the sense that after 20-some-odd years between Star Trek and The Next Generation the time spent on TNG was the creators learning how to make Star Trek, at least on television. The fact that Deep Space Nine is SO good - and even ten years after it went off the air when I catch it I am STARTLED by how good almost every single episode of DS9 is, and how remarkable the whole series became - is some pretty strong evidence in that direction. Of course, the dreck that was Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise undermines that argument somewhat, but shut the hell up.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying TNG is bad. It isn't. Especially if you compare it to some of it's contemporaries; it is more than probable that part of the reason we have such fond memories of Next Gen is because, for science fiction fans at least, the available alternatives were so unpleasant. It isn't bad. At times, even, it's pretty good, but on the whole it's just not nearly as good as we remember it.

And, of course, if I could just bring myself to not watch it when it's on, I wouldn't have to think about this so often.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: Wacky Summer Jobs

You may or may not know this, but back in my college days one of my summer jobs was as a bouncer at a city pool. I am not making this up. The job had some silly title which I cannot remember, but the actual function of the position was to be a bouncer. To stand at the front gate of the pool and say, "you in, you out, you in, you there's no way, you in, you get the hell out." This was what you did for 8 hours a day. The pool I worked at for three summers had SIX of these guys and at least two of them were on duty at any given time during the day.

Now at this point a reasonable person might wonder why a pool would need a bouncer, let alone more than one at a time. If you are wondering this you have clearly never been to a city pool, which is a good thing. I will provide you with some context.

To get an idea of what a Philadelphia Department of Recreation pool is like, imagine a war zone. It helps if you imagine something from a Vietnam movie, because one of the overriding factors in working at a city pool is that you are sitting out on a giant concrete slab in the merciless summer sun all day and it is incredibly humid. So, say, picture the end of Platoon or the beginning of Apocalypse Now (you know, before the movie becomes an insane parody of itself). Okay. You've got your image? Burning heat, humidity turning the atmosphere into a wet sock, blood-sucking insects the size of a Saab flitting about, and Charlie always lurking on the fringes looking to drop a mortar on you? All right.

Now imagine there's a pool in the middle of that.

That's what it's like.

This analogy is remarkably apt. Most of the time - for about 7-7.5 hours a day, honestly - you do very little. You sit about, chitchat, maybe clean your M-16. The people you're with are pretty cool. You're essentially getting paid to hang out. You have fun. I was technologically inclined and managed to set us up with a working Playstation in the pump house so we were entertained (the pool version of opium in the barracks, I guess).

You can do this because most of the time a city pool is open it's running a program of some kind - swim lessons, adult swim, a slot for the summer camp, lifeguard training or whatever and as the bouncer you essentially don't do anything. You never need to really work the door for any of these things because the people who use them are remarkably well-behaved. Adult swim was the best. For two hours in the afternoon/early evening there were maybe half a dozen senior citizens getting their swim on and you could just sit around and smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit.

However, for an hour and a half every day, there was the unrelenting horror that was "free swim."

This means exactly what it sounds like. The doors were thrown open and anyone - well, almost anyone - could come in and avail themselves of the facilities. Trying to work the door during this period was sheer terror.

I started my first summer at Jacobs on the first day the pool was open. The gates opened for free swim, scheduled for 2:30 to 4:00. They were closed at 3:05 when a riot broke out. I am not exaggerating. There was an actual, full-blown riot. By the time it was over 6 police cruisers and 3 paddy wagons showed up. There were close to 20 arrests. As the pool staff watched from a safe distance, the Guard 2, a guy named Jim, said, "35 minutes. New record."

"Record for what?" I asked.

"Longest first-day free swim," another guard answered. I then learned that the riot usually started much earlier than that. This record would hold up for the next two summers I worked there, when both times the first free swim didn't even make it half an hour.

Now understand that a city pool is one of the most regimented, rule-bound, quasi-fascist environments you're going to find outside of a prison or Nazi Germany. The list of things you aren't allowed to do at one of these places is STAGGERING in its length. A strict interpretation of the rules essentially states that you are allowed to stand in place in the water and not move your arms and legs, if the lifeguards decide to let you in the pool in the first place. One of our favorite ways to control unruly crowds - and that's of the ones who got INSIDE, never mind the hordes of miscreants I would turn away at the gate - was to make them stand on the deck and not get in the pool. People hated that.

The fragile equilibrium of order amidst the thrashing chaos of free swim was mostly maintained only by the fact that everyone seemed to know that the cops responded to calls from Jacobs in about 9 seconds and that the staff - usually me and the other bouncers - would dial 911 at the SLIGHTEST provocation. Don't get out of the pool when we tell you to? 911. Throw a soda at a lifeguard? 911. Make the staff think that you MIGHT CONSIDER starting a fight with another patron? 911 double-quick. And it wasn't like we were abusing it. The cops loved us. They would tell us to call them for anything. And they meant ANYTHING. If you were a cop in the 8th District a call from Jacobs was an easy arrest and a painless way to keep your numbers up. Cops loved answering calls from my pool, and we sure as hell made enough of them.

The insanity would largely tail off towards the end of the summer - the worst miscreants were quite literally all in jail by then - but it would never entirely disappear. The fun of working the door never did. You haven't known true despair until you've stood at the gate of a city pool, looked at someone trying to get in for free swim, and said to them, totally 100% seriously, "I'm sorry, you can't take a parole bracelet into the pool."

I said that at least once a week for three straight summers.

To DIFFERENT PEOPLE EVERY SINGLE TIME.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: Billy Joel

For a very little while back in college I ran with this girl who loved Billy Joel. Like, LOVED Billy Joel. She had the whole shebang going: posters on the wall (odd, when one considers that he isn't that attractive), concert tickets alongside clumsy, blurred photographs matted and framed together under glass, and the entire top rack of a particle board CD shelving unit devoted solely to the complete Billy Joel discography and then some.

"And then some" meant cassette copies of every CD and a bunch of cassette mix tapes. Even in the deepest, darkest days of my obsession with the music of Bruce Springsteen (i.e. last week) I never had tape AND compact disc copies of his albums. Hell, since my music collection went all-digital back in like 1998 I haven't had a Springsteen CD (or any CD, for that matter) for more than a couple hours - buy it, rip it, and toss it was the name of the game, and I stopped buying CDs altogether in 2003 when I went 100% ITMS for music. But even back in college owning lots of CDs and displaying them proudly was something of an alien idea to me. Some people had trouble fitting their CD collections into their dorm. I had trouble fitting mine on my computer.

I was with this woman for a (thankfully) very short time, and her birthday happened to fall inside that (thankfully) very short time. While not as front-and-center as some of its contemporaries my psychosis about gift-giving is well-documented and I spent inordinate hours trying to determine what would be the perfect gift. Eventually I came to the conclusion that The Perfect Gift was a bootleg Billy Joel CD, but not just any old concert recording with terrible sound quality from the Indianapolis Coliseum, no, this one would be GOOD. One of those "import" bootlegs of a famous Billy Joel show, with high-quality sound (we used to call these "soundboard" recordings) and a real CD insert in the jewel case and everything.

I spent almost an entire afternoon canvassing used record shops for such a thing, and when I finally found one I deemed acceptable - I bought it at the old Record Castle on Cottman Avenue, which may or may not still be there, though ten-plus years on I have no memory whatsoever of what album it actually was - I paid a king's ransom of fifty dollars for it, an absolutely OUTRAGEOUS sum of money for me to spend on a gift at the time. Nowadays I feel like a heel if I don't spend at least that much on a gift (for someone in Gift Tier 1, at least: the parents, close friends, women I want to sleep with more than once), but back then, fifty fucking dollars! Great googly moogly. That was like a week's pay, and all for a woman who, looking back, I don't think I even liked that much.

Say it with me, folks: I was drunk.

But, in another phrase we should all be well-versed at saying along with me: I was right. It was, in fact, the perfect gift. It went over big. Huge.

So huge, in fact, that about a week later we stopped seeing each other. I was as distraught as one would expect from such a thing, though an alcohol intake as consistent as mine was back then tends to take all your emotional experiences, highs and lows, and just sort of smear them into one flattish line a few ticks below normal. I wish I could say I was so upset over the breakup - which really hardly could have been termed even that, the entire thing from start to finish went something like four and a half weeks - that I went and drank myself stupid, but I was already doing that on a regular basis to begin with.

In fact, the only unusual effect of the entire ordeal was that I couldn't listen to Billy Joel music for something like a year and a half afterward. It was the strangest thing. I wasn't the rabid stalker-person this woman was, but I had the double-CD greatest hits album and listened to it with some small regularity. I was a fan. But after the "breakup" (such as it was) I couldn’t bring myself to listen to a single song of his. I would change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" came on. I would skip past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" when it came up on Winamp. (Oh, god, remember Winamp? In the immortal whine of Luke Skywalker, "what a hunk of JUNK.")

And now, a decade on, when my musical tastes overall are essentially the same as they were in college - Bruce Springsteen, house music, and Frank Sinatra - now I still change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" comes on (after cursing myself for leaving my iPod at home and being forced to listen to the radio in the first place), and I don't have to worry about skipping past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" on iTunes (which thankfully replaced Winamp) because when it came on about 6 months ago, listening to it for the first time in years - with 6000 songs on your computer you can go a LONG time between plays - I had the sudden realization of, "this song fucking BLOWS," and deleted it along all the other Billy Joel songs on my computer. I've got 58 hours of Paul Oakenfold to listen to, I don't need this treacly, sentimental, overwrought shit.

Since this epiphany took place I have wondered a couple times if my current distaste for Billy Joel is really just a buried subconscious referent of the trauma - he said, with a snicker - from back then, or if I have actually grown somewhat and my tastes have experienced some small measure of maturing.

Then I remember a drunken conversation I had with a good friend of mine a couple days after the whole thing went pear-shaped:

"The only good thing to come out of all this," I said, "is that you know how much she loves Billy Joel? Right, well, now she's got that bootleg I got her for her birthday, and that is supposed to be some kind of historic shit or something, so she's never gonna get rid of it. And every time she listens to it, for the rest of her life, every time she listens to that CD, every time she hears a SONG on that CD, every time for the rest of her life, she's gonna think of me."

I took a long drink of vodka and said, "you know what that means? That means I win."

I still smile when I think of that little pearl of wisdom, so maybe there isn't so much maturing taking place after all.

Your Thursday Regret: John Woo Movies

I have this thing where when I discover something I like - be it an author or band or television show or whatever, any creative sort of thing, really - I am consumed by a desperate need to immediately hoover up every single instance of it known to man. I am almost certain that this quirk goes back at least to my high school years, but for the life of me I can't remember a specific instance of it (Michael Crichton? Maybe?).

The first such instance that I CAN remember is when I "discovered" the films of John Woo. It would have been the summer of 1997 when I saw Face Off, which meant probably... you know, now that I think about it I can't remember where I saw it. Neshaminy hadn't opened yet and neither had the new theatre at Franklin Mills. The last movie I saw at the Orleans was the Star Wars special edition earlier that year, so... fucking hell. The old 10-screener at Franklin Mills, the one like way off to the side of the mall? Maybe? Crap. If we saw Face Off together, let me know if you remember where.

Anyway, the movie.

I watched Face Off on television not too long ago and god DAMN it was awful. I mean we are talking top to bottom just horrifically bad. Laughably bad.

And I used to LOVE this movie.

When I first saw it my reaction essentially boiled down to "slow-motion graphic violence is REALLY FUCKING COOL!" It is with considerable shame that I admit this, but I was entranced by it. They're shooting each other! And they're doing it SLOWLY! Ooooooooooh! How revolutionary! Looking back on it now - they're shooting each other. And they're doing it slowly. Who gives a flying fuck. Oh, and Gina Gershon sucks in everything. Not sure how I missed that the first time around.

When I got back to school that year, though, I made a mission out of tracking down and obtaining copies of John Woo's other films. Understand that back then this was a much more difficult proposition than it is now.

For starters, this was pre-DVD and, as best I can remember, before we had Best Buy in Philadelphia (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that score). Back then all you had was VHS, and in case you don't remember or aren't aware actually BUYING movies on VHS was fantastically difficult. In the jargon of the times and the business, VHS tapes were "priced to rent." It was not believed that there was much of a market for people buying movies on tape except for Disney movies and Star Wars, so if you wanted to buy a movie the day it came out - on VHS, mind you - it would cost you somewhere around $90-100. For one tape. I am not making this up. Then, usually about 6 months later, it would come out "priced to sell" for $15-20, and to get it you had to go to one hideous place: Suncoast Video.

These places were EVIL, and expensive as hell to boot. Plus this was before the days when anyone knew how to use the Internet for, you know, anything remotely useful, so it wasn't like today where even if, for some reason, you wanted to buy something in a physical store you could go on their website and see where the closest location with one in stock was. No, you had to call the store and ask if they had it. And then call another one. And then call another one.

Also, calling Suncoast Videos and talking to clerks who didn't know anything about anything, let alone movies, asking after video tapes - widescreen and subtitled only goddammit! - of obscure imported Chinese movies no one had ever heard of? FUN IN THE SUN, kiddies. Fun in the motherfucking sun.

But still I worked diligently, tracking down my WS/SUB copies of Hard Boiled and The Killer. My copy of A Better Tomorrow was dubbed because, if I recall correctly, there was not an NTSC subtitled version in existence at the time. When it came out on tape I bought my widescreen copy - getting widescreen tapes was actually something of a chore back then - of Face Off. And I watched them. And watched them. And watched them. And watched them. Over and over and FUCKING WELL OVER I watched those movies, spellbound by what I now recognize as ridiculously-choreographed, histrionic gun violence livened up by the occasional halfway-decent performance. My like-minded friends and I - whose names I will not reveal out of concern for their safety - would get together in one guy's room, let's call him... say... "Brian of Medford, NJ" and take massive amounts of Ritalin and watch Face Off and The Killer. Over. And over. And over. And over. AND OVER.

This is what happens when you take Ritalin recreationally. You play Final Fantasy VII for eleven hours straight and you really really WATCH John Woo movies. We would sit there and just stare at them, mouths agape, almost hypnotized. How one can get hypnotized by something paced and edited so frenetically and so very, very loud I do not know, but it can't be good for the brain.

I spent the better part of 3-4 years extolling the virtues of John Woo movies, a period which culminated with the release of Mission Impossible II in 2000, which I recall seeing in Manayunk with my then-girlfriend and sitting there just like I used to when me and my idiot friends were whacked out on Ritalin a few years before, my mouth stuck open, staring at the screen, entranced. I don't remember if she liked it or not, and by then the "I was drunk" excuse doesn't work anymore. It is a sad commentary on my relative maturity that I was so blown away by MISSION IMPOSSIBLE FUCKING II that I can't remember what was going on around me at the time. I actually dragged my father to see it with me (my second viewing) a week later and, looking back, I would like to retroactively apologize to anyone I dragged to a John Woo movie (i.e. my old girlfriend, my father, and some unknown party).

I don't remember when I stopped liking John Woo, but it couldn't have been much after that. Somewhere along the line I just stopped thinking that graphic violence on film was cool, and I honestly couldn't tell you why. The fact that the movies Woo made after that, even by both his standards and mine of the day, were uniformly awful certainly helps. But I look back on that time, realizing that I was practically an evangelist for these movies that I now recognize as twisted abominations of cinema, and I am legitimately ashamed of myself. I am not often wrong, but it is hardly ever that I am THIS wrong about anything.

Though, I have to tell you, after writing this, I find myself wondering how well The Killer holds up...

JLK