Despite the disclaimer in the last entry, I'm going to write about the Olympics again, if only briefly. The nice thing about being retired is that you can watch all the Olympic coverage you want. And not just NBC and USA, even those weird DIRECTV channels I'd never heard of before. Anyway, this is about volleyball. Way back in high school, I had played volleyball in gym class. And then again in college, so I knew the rules. A match is 15 points, you have to win by 2, and only the serving team can score. Or so I thought.
When I was watching the Olympic beach volleyball (remember the Silent Laciga Brothers?) I noticed that the rules were different. A match went to 25 points, and they weren't using side-out scoring, either. Either team could score a point. I thought this was just due to beach volleyball being a spinoff of "real" volleyball. But then on the final day, when USA was playing Brazil in "real" 6-on-6 volleyball, they were using the same crazy rules.
So I decided to look this up, and found that the rules had been changed in 1999. That was three Olympics ago. At this point I'm starting to feel kinda like Inspector Clouseau. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to slip one by me, huh? If you change the rules, I'll figure it out nine years later. I blame this on work. If I hadn't been spending so much time at that flight service station, I could have stayed on top of this other stuff.
Anyway, I miss the Olympics already. And since it's over I had to search elsewhere for entertainment, so I went to see the movie Tropic Thunder. It's hard to find a segue when you're going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but that's the difference between class and crass.
I will not actually review Tropic Thunder. Let me first say that if you didn't find something offensive in this movie, you just weren't looking hard enough. There was something in there to offend everyone, even when they weren't lampooning every Viet Nam movie ever made. I'm not a big fan of political correctness, so that really doesn't bother me. The problem is that while most of the movie was cleverly written, a lot of it could have been written by teenagers.
There are over-the-top performances by Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Tom Cruise, among others. Jack Blackis always over the top, but this time he was waaaaaay over the top. Tom Cruise was uncredited, and this role supposed to be a secret, although the story leaked out on the Internet. Not to me, of course, because I'm oblivious (see above, volleyball.) And if it hadn't been pointed out to me, I wouldn't even have recognized him in his fat suit and balding wig. Again, remember that I'm the guy who didn't pick up on the new volleyball rules for nine years.
The problem with the movie is that mixed in with all the inside references to other movies is a large amount of gross, sophmoric humor. It's hard to pick out subtle clues when they keep hitting you over the head with a sledge hammer. If I saw this movie three or four more times, I might pick up some of the stuff I missed, but I don't think anyone over the age of 18 could watch Tropic Thunder that many times and not suffer brain damage.
Lastly, here is an example. I didn't know the movie had started, and thought I was watching an advertisement for an energy drink. It was called Booty Sweat. When I said crass, I meant it. But if you want to see for yourself, you can actually buy it now. Amazon sells Booty Sweat by the case.
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