My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I are pretty particular with our moviegoing. Ten bucks is starting to feel kind of expensive, so we try to be discriminating shoppers. Sometimes we guess right – we’ve seen movies like “Bandits”, with Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett (ooh, rent “Bandits”, really, really), which were wonderful and nobody else got; and sometimes we guess wrong – “Up” was a lovely, poignant movie, but I wasn’t really in the mood for poignant that afternoon. But there’s only one movie that made us want to throw something at the screen, we were so insulted at its stupidity: “Hancock”. <\/p>\n
How many of you saw “Hancock”? Came out last year. A criminal waste of Will Smith (oughta be a law, I tell ya). “Hancock” was a brilliant, brilliant idea: a superhero on the skids, a drunk jerk who can fly, who saves the life of an advertising executive who decides, in gratitude, to rehabilitate his image. The first 45 minutes of “Hancock” are one of the best setups in the history of film. And then? My heavens, I can’t even really tell you. First, it turns out that the adman’s wife is also<\/em> a superhero, and then it turns out that they’re, um, angels, or gods, or immortal, and, oh, the two of them used to be married, or siblings, or – my, what a mess. An incomprehensible, maudlin, preposterous mess. <\/p>\n What reminded me of “Hancock” was John Gerard’s set at Amazing Things last night (and, by the way, go see John Gerard – he is a truly compelling performer), where he performed a song he wrote that was inspired by the movie. Unlike the movie, John actually finished his idea, and unlike the movie, John made his idea work. It didn’t salvage the movie for me, but it certainly reinforced my sense of John’s mastery of his craft. <\/p>\n A good idea wasted just drives me up the wall. There are so few truly good, original ideas in the world. Wasting one is a sin. This is one of the reasons it takes me so long to finish some of my songs – I just don’t feel like the outcome is worthy of the original idea. Right now, I’m in the middle of a song whose first line is “Woke up on the wrong side of a bad cup of coffee”. This has promise. Unfortunately, the song does not rise to the promise, and I’m pretty sure it never will. I’ve downgraded my goals from “victory at any price” to “withdrawal with honor”, and it still refuses to be finished – I’m getting the feeling that I could plunge to “helicopter off the roof of the embassy” and I’d be no closer to writing the last line. <\/p>\n But every so often, a song does make it to the end, and in those moments, I mostly feel a deep sense of satisfaction – a conviction that I’ve done justice to the idea. It’s a good feeling, and it reminds me of why I love to do what I do in the first place – after all, if I don’t write “I Wanna Be Your Henchman”, who will? Stay tuned for that one, by the way: its current expectation level is “ticker-tape parade down Broadway”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I are pretty particular with our moviegoing. Ten bucks is starting to feel kind of expensive, so we try to be discriminating shoppers. Sometimes we guess right – we’ve seen movies like “Bandits”, with Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett (ooh, rent “Bandits”, really, really), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-low-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sambayer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}