Fair warning, folks, I’m going to quote nearly an entire article written by Jim Belushi here. It may seem like unsolicited punishment for you the reader, but I simply wouldn’t be doing my job if I let this slip by without inspection. So, Jim Belushi wrote a column about relationships for the Chicago Sun-Times. This column depicts Jim Belushi not as man, but as cartoon-man, a caricature of “dumb husband” from an infomercial, the guy who shows up in a black and white flashback trying to put an entire pizza into the toaster, or who becomes angry and confused when he proves incapable of opening a milk carton. It is a women-be-shoppin’ joke come to life, delivered as a life-lesson without irony.

Yes, I am on my third marriage.

Maybe not the best way to start a relationship column, but perhaps the irony is intended. Proceed.

But I’ve learned a lot of things during those marriages to make this one work; I’ve learned lessons from mistakes. If you don’t, you’re an idiot. When I met my wife Jennifer, I couldn’t wait to exercise what I had learned. It started on the third date.

“I took a pull on my scotch, and when she sassed up, I reared back so as to smack her one, but then I thought, ‘Hold on, Belushi. Let’s do it different this time.’”

I was driving down Montana Avenue in Santa Monica…

Suddenly you understand why people are always talking about streets in SNL’s The Californians sketch.

…and Jenny was sitting in the passenger seat. Here comes the test, guys, for a successful marriage: She lifts her hand oh-so-gently, sticks her finger out, and points at the next street and says, “Why don’t you turn here? It’s shorter.” I stopped the car, pulled over to the side, took off my seat belt, did a full, dramatic turn and looked at her in the eye. I said, “I think you’re cool, but never, ever e ver tell me where to go in a car. Never point to a street, never tell me which way is shorter, never talk to me about directions while I am driving my car. Never make a sound like an ‘oof’ when there is a car coming near us. I am the master of my car. I am in charge of machinery. This is my Batmobile. Robin doesn’t tell Batman where to go. I will decide, right or wrong, which way we are going … But I still think you are cute. I like you.”

I have this theory about old action stars, that they star in so many movies playing the same type of character, they start to think they are that character and start seeing the world like it’s one of their movies. You see shades of this in Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, and especially Chuck Norris. It seems the same has happened to Jim Belushi, where after too many episodes of According to Jim, his life has become one big shitty sitcom joke, where you just toss out a cliché and hold for laughter. “Look out, woman! Man watching game! No ask direction because tools!” (*Tim Allen grunt*)

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day Vince and I were making S’mores and chatting about life, when he pointed out that 2011 was the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War, that era in world history when everyone lived in pants-crapping fear that the U.S. and Russia were going to destroy us all. More importantly than global genocide and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the Cold War had an undeniable impact on the movie industry, most notably in creating one of the easiest and most overused plot devices of the last 50 years.

Obviously, the Cold War gave us classics like Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and the entire James Bond franchise. It also gave us The Hunt for Red October and Tom Clancy’s career, as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and wherever else Shia LeBeouf and his grandfather Harrison Ford take us. It gave us The Manhattan Project, The Good Shepherd, Thirteen Days, Top Gun, Good Night, and Good Luck, and even Salt, which was a modern reminder of just how hilariously off-the-wall – and flat out terrible – some Cold War films were.

In fact, those are the films that I want to celebrate – the movies that both embraced the terrifying nightmare of global war and laughed in the face of four decades of silent terror. Because without them, we’d probably all be living in mountain bunkers or adapting to our tentacles.

Read the rest of this entry »