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Greil Monaco's No-Life Top 10

Filed under: Imported

Again, with grovelling apologies to Mr. Marcus for stealing his gimmick, here are some things I've noticed lately.

1 & 2) America the Lard-Assed. Hey, I'm a fat guy from way back, and even I'm appalled by the never-ending expansion of my peers. It's really getting ridiculous when you have to take a detour in the supermarket because one person has effectively closed off an entire aisle just by standing in it. The other night I saw a pair of oversized lovebirds sitting side-by-side in a restaurant booth amply built for two, and the woman still hung out by an entire buttock. Speaking of restaurants, Red Lobster nearly went broke recently due to the mulitple servings their customers helped themselves to at an all-you-can-eat crab buffet. And speaking of big butts, the company that makes nearly all the movie theater seats in the country has been cleaning up lately because theaters across the land are having to replace their old seats with ones big enough to accomodate their extra-large customers. Where does it all end? Exactly where you'd think: we've gotten so fat that we can no longer fit into regular-sized coffins.

(The last item reminds me of a news story from many years ago about a 450-pound dead man whose corpse started a grease-fire in a crematorium oven and burned down an entire city block. Now that's what I call revenge!)

3) Liquor stores in Minneapolis. As I slowly but surely change my residence permanently to Minnesota, I'm less and less impressed with my new-found home, and the restrictions on booze-buying in the state are at the top of my list. If I want a bottle of wine at 1:55 a.m. in Des Moines, I can get it seven days a week, including holidays. In Minneapolis, the state-run liquor stores-- all twelve of them-- close at 8 p.m. (a few seconds longer on weekends), and if you didn't stock up by Saturday night, you're going to be cold sober on Sunday. Yet the names so many of the town's hooch-houses sport would indicate that it's a community of hollow-legged lushes: The Liquor Barrel, The Liquor Warehouse, Mainline Liquor, Drunks R Us. (Okay, two of the four are real.)

4 & 5) The Transporter (France - 2002), directed by Cory Yuen. As both a hopeless Grand Theft Auto addict and unabashed fan of Jackass (the latter being the best tool ever for thinning out the ranks of impressionable young male dolts), I've thought that a good way to combine the two would be a movie based on the game that starred Johnny Knoxville. Catching up on my video store browsing last week, however, I found that it's already been made, or close enough (and leading man Jason Statham is nothing like Knoxville). Judging by the reviews at imdb.com, apparently this James Bond and martial arts hybrid is a big disappointment to Matrix fans, but since I'm not one, I thought it was figuratively and literally kick-ass. Director Yuen has been making action films in Hong Kong for over 20 years and he knows what he's doing when it comes to fight and chase scenes. For the most part, this is nothing but fight and chase scenes, but done in a more lighthearted and imaginative way than American movies. Plus, at 90-odd minutes, a run-time virtually foresaken in the U.S., it's a perfect no-think entertainment that never bores or overstays its welcome. Recommended.

P.S. Just as MTV and Jackass now have a slew of lawsuits on their hands due to a few idiots' self-induced injuries and deaths, now the makers of GTA III are facing the same thing.

6) Phil Hendrie's second annual 9-11 show. As I've written before, I'm a former fan who still admires Phil's great work from the past but thinks he sucks today. My dislike for his current work is almost exclusively because he just isn't funny anymore, but I admit that his bigmouthed, uninformed "bomb-'em-all" pro-war bullshit was what got me to stop listening altogether. In fact, the last show I heard was his 9-11 "special" in 2002, where he broadcast live from a studio near Ground Zero. (He lives and works in L.A.) For the first hour it was mainly Hendrie patting himself on the back for his own patriotism, as he blew on and on about how moving just being there was, and if you aren't there, you can't know (like he does) what it's like, and how we-- he-- must never forget what happened. Well, this year I decided to bury the hatchet and tune in for old time's sake, just to see what he had planned for the second anniversary. It was a rerun of last year's show. Hope you enjoyed the day off, asshole.

Once again, that's enough-- I'm off to drink and eat like a pig and play some Vice City.

Posted by Steve Monaco at September 30, 2003 6:12 PM

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