This week: Songs made for and performed on a tv show or movie. Sell-outs or instant classics? You be the judge.
Vanilla Ice - Ninja Rap
Vanilla Ice rapping about ninja turtles fighting a giant snapping turtle and wolf … can a guy’s childhood get any better? This movie made me the man I am today.
Zack Attack - Friends Forever
This video just barely beat out Guy Love from the Scrubs musical episode, there was just too many cliches to pass up: nerd on keyboard, black girl on bass, and a pretty boy lead singer. Narrated by the great Casey Kasem (voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo), this is easily one of the best episodes of Saved by the Bell ever. Kelly Kapowski, you broke my heart.
Adam Sandler - Grow Old With You
This video is all too fitting, seeing as how I’m about to get married and move to Las Vegas. I only hope that Billy Idol is on my flight when I do.
Tags: adam-sandler, Favorite Video Friday, guy-love, marriage, Music-Videos, saved-by-the-bell, scrubs, teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles, vanilla-ice, zack-attack
Related Posts:
For the first time since I was a child, I spent the entire day reading a book. I forgot what an amazing feeling it was to lose myself for hours at a time inside some world created by someone else. There’s always something just a little bit familiar to these worlds. If there wasn’t, we could not become so lost exploring them. This story, however, seemed more familiar than any story I’ve read in years.
I just finished reading Ender’s Game. I literally closed the book just seconds before I started writing this. I identified personally with little Ender Wiggins. It was strange to watch as he went through these strange worlds in ways that were so familiar to me. In this book, a little boy quickly became isolated because he was different. Many adults would praise him and many worried he was not living up to his potential. His peers mocked him and played tricks on him. Any displays of weakness were quickly snatched up and used against him. So he quickly learned to shield his weaknesses from the view of others.
He began to isolate himself voluntarily. He trusted no one and only let down his shield in the privacy of his own room. He had small pockets of friends here and there, but even they were only allowed to see what he wanted them to see. He was never comfortable in large groups, always sensing their judgment or possible danger, so he sat back and watched them from a distance, observing their interactions, learning more about himself and mankind through the interactions of others than he ever could in any school. Still, he isolated himself, still he watched, still he learned, still he longed for a childhood he could never have; companionship he thought always out of reach.
It’s interesting to me the way a text, such as a book, or a movie, or a song can connect with us on such a personal level that we transcend our own existence. We begin to see our lives from the outside, through the eyes of some character in some story, taking place in some other world. The story is the same. It is our own story, but the characters and the setting are all different. This is what draws me to the art of storytelling. Whether through books, or movies, or music, I am always looking for new versions of the same old story; different perspectives of my own story. I wonder if others are reading the same stories and connecting on such a personal level as I am.
On the flight home from visiting my family for the holidays, I watched a couple episodes of Scrubs. This show is another one of those texts that takes me out of my regular frame of mind. It’s not quite as transcendent an experience as some, but this show always reminds me of my buddy Scott. It’s uncanny the similarities between the interactions of JD and Turk and myself and Scott. It goes all the way down to the mannerisms of the individual characters. It’s like someone took our life and hired a team of writers to make it more interesting and cram it into 30-minute segments. I can never watch an episode of Scrubs without being reminded of Scott, and it never fails to put a smile on my face.
While I was out visiting my family, trying feebly to adjust to the three-hour time difference, I watched Hotel Rwanda. This proved to be a completely different kind of transcendent experience. This was not a reminder of past or present experiences, but a demonstration of what-ifs. It appalled me to watch as these people were stripped from their homes and their loved ones as their country tore itself apart.
In this story, one man comes at first unwillingly to the aid of many of his friends. Over the course of the story, he rises to conquer greater and greater obstacles. But it is not this man that I identified with. This time, I connected with the cameraman played by Joaquin Phoenix. His job was to capture as much of these people’s tragic story as he could so that his superiors at the major news network would get more viewers. His mission, however, was much more noble, and much more tragic than that.
There is a scene in which all the foreign nationals, all the white people, are leaving on a bus, leaving all the Rwandans to deal with the savagery on their own. A group of children then come walking down the street, singing and cheering only to be separated into Rwandan and National, chum and prize fish. Nuns are separated from the orphans they have cared for and come to love, forced to leave them to a grim fate. The cameraman comes out and films it all, but it gives them little hope.
Earlier in the film, the cameraman is talking with Paul, the hero of the story. Paul tells him that he’s glad that the cameraman is filming all the savagery, that now the west will be forced to do something. The cameraman replies simply, “I think, if people see this footage, they’ll say ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what that would be like if it were me. What would I do if I were there, the only one able to tell these people’s story to the world? What if those were my friends being torn from the orphans they had grown to love, leaving those orphans to uncertain death. Would it all be for naught?
This is the reason I chose film and media as a possible career. I want to tell these stories. I want to tell my story. I want to be a voice for the voiceless; I want to be a tool for the development of some young mind somewhere, destined for greatness; I want to be a speaker for the dead, but will it all be for naught?
All of these transcendent tales end with the hero accomplishing some great feat, or overcoming impossible obstacles. All those trials they overcame, all those lessons they learned all prepared them for that one final battle, where they emerge bruised and battered, victorious, and a completely different person than the one that began the story.
Isn’t this what we’re all trying to do? We’re all learning, we’re all growing, we’re all preparing for some unseen event in the distant future. No one really knows what it will be; it will probably be different for each of us, but maybe that’s the point of all these stories.
Maybe these stories can’t help the victims of the present. Maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe they’re only supposed to help future societies. Maybe we’re all preparing each other unknowingly for that final battle we’ll all face someday where we’ll emerge bruised and battered, victorious, and a completely different person than the one that began the story, ready to pass our boon on to a society that may or may not be ready.
Tags: Articles, books, Enders-Game, film, growing-up, Hotel-Rwanda, Movies, Orson-Scott-Card, reading, scrubs, transcendence
Related Posts:
I’m not sure I could pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but I have become a full blown Media Whore. I think it may have started the day I created a MySpace page. See, at first it was just a way to keep tabs on my little sisters and stalk my little brother, but then I started to spruce things up a bit. I made a redneck page, and then an Emo page (that one was fun… stupid Emo), and then thought up a million other secret identities with which I could incessantly mock every clichéd stereotype I saw in the last high school I subbed at until Tom and his band of MySpace minions got miffed because of my magnificent mockery of their millions of multitasking monkeys and barred me from all forms of arbitrary alliteration.
Then, something strange happened. Things got serious. Or at least as serious as I am capable of faking. I put up some real pictures, gave myself a headline, listed a couple of interests, and officially entered the world of MySpace. It was like my very own MySpace bar mitzvah. Except I’m not Jewish. Although my MySpace page very well could be. I have no idea. I decided to give it the freedom to choose for itself. The point is, I had become a MySpace man.
And so it went for a long time. I added my MySpace friends, left my MySpace messages, and even made my very own MySpace blog (see what I did there?). Everything was pretty normal, except for the fact that I had become one of the very people I wanted to mock, but I had come to terms with that by completely blocking it from my mind and guarding it with a magical little tree frog. His name is Froggy McFunklestein. He’s Irish. He has a drinking problem, but it has nothing to do with his nationality. He has a very high stress job, a lot of responsibility. I think he might be Jewish. Funklestein… sounds Jewish anyway. I’ll have to ask him some time. Maybe I could set him up with my Myspace page. Where was I? Oh yes, whores.
A while later I was perusing a fan page of one of my favorite bands, The Dave Matthews Band, and I discovered that their bass player, Stefan Lessard, had started a blog. Now, I have always loved the bass guitar and always wanted to learn to play it. I always take bass when air banding to 80s hair bands. I decided to check it out. It fascinated me. This guy is a pretty normal, laid back guy with his own normal family, who just happens to be the bass player for one of the biggest touring bands in the nation. He talked about starting a MySpace page. I had a MySpace page. He is now in my “Top 8.”
A little while later I was looking at new movie trailers and decided to check out Zach Braff’s new movie, The Last Kiss. See, I’m a huge fan of Garden State. It was the first movie that I really connected with in a long time. Also, Scrubs is one of my favorite TV shows (it would be right behind Arrested Development if the morons at FOX hadn’t cancelled what could’ve been the greatest TV show of the millennium… the MILLENNIUM!!!), so I clicked on the link to the trailer, which took me to ZachBraff.com. Apparently he had set up a blog too (what kind of megalomaniac sets up a website named after himself?). Anyway, his blog fascinated me too. He basically spouts off whatever is on his mind like it’s some kind of blog or something. He talked about setting up a MySpace page too. He is also now in my “Top 8.”
I started to feel like I had crossed some sort of line. Not only do I now have two people in my friends list that I don’t know, they’re two famous people. I started to feel like I was Penny Lane in Almost Famous, except not for real, some kind of MySpace version. I don’t know why I did it. I started to rationalize it to myself. See, it’s not like they were really promoting or selling anything on these sites. Well, not really anyway. I mean Zach Braff has ads for his new movie all over his page and Stefan Lessard’s blog is on his company’s website, but I’m okay with that. It’s just a place where they can clear their mind and let people know what they’re up to.
Then I crossed a line I can never uncross. It’s like mocking some little boy until he cries because he’s weird looking. Only you wait until he’s talking to the girl he likes. And then she starts laughing too because he’s a little whiny baby. There’s no coming back from that. That kid’s going to develop a complex. And then probably become a comedian. And make millions of dollars telling jokes about girls laughing at him. Or shoot himself in the head for not making millions of dollars and being such a failure. I put a banner for The Last Kiss on my MySpace page. I feel so dirty. It was for a contest. Five people out of Zach Braff’s thousands of friends that put the banner on their page get a free autographed poster for the movie. It’s free. You can’t buy it in stores. Maybe on Ebay. Is that so wrong? He seems like a nice guy. It’s more like he hired me as a special promoter for his new movie, like I’m part of some MySpace street team. He hired me with the chance to win an autographed poster. I am such a whore.
Tags: arrested-development, Articles, blog, dave-matthews-band, emo, media, Movies, myspace, scrubs, stefan-lessard, zach-braff
Related Posts:
Subscribe in a reader