What a Fool Believes

                                

Remember that scene in Footloose where Kevin Bacon shimmies into town, feet fancy and free on Main Street, jean jacket cracking like a whip with each thrust of his arms, and all the townsfolk flee indoors, some peeking out through the sliver between curtains, worried their eyes will melt in their sockets yet too curious to look away, except for Sean Penn’s brother who runs up to Bacon and is like, “What in h-e-double-hockey-sticks are you doing?” and Bacon is like, “Duh. I gotta cut footloose.” and SPB grabs Bacon by the jean jacket and drags him into his house, Bacon’s attempts to free himself a dance in itself, and inside the house, SPB goes into the history of the town and its anti-dancing ways and this montage ensues beginning in the 15th century where the Spanish Inquisition rolls into the town like a wave of blood, collecting all dancers at the center of town where they hang them naked and sic the Spanish Tickler on them, allowing them one last dance, “La Danza de la Muerte.” and then the montage moves to the Old West, a sheriff and his deputies raiding a brothel that’s actually a front for a dance club, arresting dancers and then hanging them in the town square at high noon, and then the montage comes to an end with the recent arrests and excommunications conducted by John Lithgow, his face a mask of sadism, and now Bacon, having taken this all in, is like, “Bring me to Lithgow, SPB.” and SPB reluctantly does so and Bacon and Lithgow meet in the town square, all the townsfolk looking on from the edges, and Bacon screams, “JOHN LITHGOW!” and Lithgow spits, “Bacon.” like venom and then Kenny Loggins’ theme song begins to play and Bacon begins to dance but no one else does and he looks around in confusion and asks, “Don’t you all hear it? Don’t you all hear the sweet, sweet music?” but all are too scared to acknowledge him except for SPB who says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t hear anything.” and Bacon comes to the horrifying conclusion that Kenny Loggins’ theme song is only in his head and he panics and flees the town and Lithgow is all like, “Good riddance, heathen swine!” and SPB and many of the townsfolk are disappointed with themselves as they felt the dance in their hearts, but now Bacon is out in the desert and his lips are chapped and his vision blurred and the vultures circle overhead and he comes upon a jukebox atop a dune and he goes to the jukebox and there stands Kenny Loggins and Kenny Loggins says to Bacon, “The music must be set free. The rhythm is in your heart but it is also in your mind. Free your mind and your ass will follow.” and then he knocks a pattern on top of the jukebox with his fist and disappears and Bacon looks around for him but all is desert again and Bacon screams like a wounded wolf at the sun before all goes black but the moment of darkness passes and Bacon wakes up on the edge of the town and he gets up and, his heart filling with purpose, shimmies into town once again, feet fancy and free, jean jacket cracking, and Lithgow and SPB and the townsfolk are all in their places in the town square and Bacon dances his way to the center of it all and he looks at SPB and nods and then he looks at Lithgow and shouts, “LITHGOW!” and all the power drains from Lithgow’s face because he knows that the reckoning has come and then Bacon brings his fist to his head and knocks that same rhythm that Kenny Loggins did on the jukebox on his skull and Kenny Loggins’ theme song bursts from the mouth of Bacon and all can hear it and all revel in its beauty, dancing with Bacon, finally, and Lithgow, in one last move of desperation, pulls a gun from his jacket and shoots Bacon in the gut and Kenny Loggins’ theme song ceases and Bacon falls to the ground and SPB and the townsfolk gather around Bacon and Lithgow realizes what he’s done, that he’s disobeyed God, and he pushes through to Bacon to try and save Bacon and redeem himself, but when Lithgow reaches him it’s too late, Bacon is dying, so he recounts the error of his ways, proclaiming that a statue will be built in Bacon’s honor and all will dance around it to celebrate life and then Bacon, mustering his last bit of strength, speaks, “As a wise man once told me, ‘The music must be set free. The rhythm is in your heart but it is also in your mind. Free your mind and your ass will follow.’ Take this to heart, but know something else. One day all of my work will be erased. Do not fret at this. I will be reborn as a young woman named Julianne Hough. I will be soft and creamy but still Bacon on the inside. My work will begin again. This is my fate for eternity.” and with that Bacon passed on and into Heaven where his spirit became fancy and free?

That was awesome.

Remember that scene in Aliens when Paul Reiser tries to downplay the aliens to Ripley and so Ripley grabs Paul Reiser by the lapels of his bureaucrat-on-company-outing ensemble and is all like, “Goddammit, Paul Reiser, this ain’t my first rodeo, you fuck!” and Paul Reiser sings, “Mad about you, mad about you / Lost in your eyes, reason aside / Mad about love, mad about you, you and I” and Ripley goes, “Who do I look like, Helen Shitting Hunt?” and Paul Reiser’s like, “I’ve never heard someone use “Shitting” for that. Usually it’s “Fucking”.” and Ripley slaps him across his priggish mug and says, “You skim-milk-filled robot sonofabitch! You would have qualms about that, wouldn’t you?” and just before Paul Reiser can respond with another smug comment, an alien comes scuttering across the ceiling towards them like a cockroach on a P90X regimen fueled by a Shakey’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet of steroids and gamma rays and Ripley tosses Paul Reiser aside to pick up a machine gun/flamethrower combo and fill that alien’s bod full of lead and flame until it bursts like a water balloon, acidic goo melting holes in the walls and floor, and then Ripley puts down the gun and yanks Paul Reiser back up by the hair and screams, “What did I tell you, you second of two dads turd?” and Paul Reiser, oh man, you know Paul Reiser, “Mr. I’m-An-Important-Representative-Of-A-Mega-Space-Corporation” just can’t keep his stupid craw closed and says, “Actually, I had top billing so therefore I was the first of the two—” and Ripley just punches him in his android guts and lets him fall to that perpetually-slimy grated flooring and then in comes Corporal Hicks with a healthy amount of swagger and goes, “Sarah, we have to go. There’s a terminator come to kill you before you can give birth to the savior of the human race.” and both Ripley and Paul Reiser are all like, “WRONG MOVIE. TRY AGAIN.” and Corporal Hicks deflates and mutters, “Not again.” and as he turns around another alien is waiting for him, juices dripping from its second grinning mouth, and Corporal Hicks goes, “Aw, gimme a chance, James Cameron!” and James Cameron’s voice, thundering down from the heavens, proclaims, “Just this once, Michael Biehn.” and then Corporal Hicks exclaims, “HUZZAH!” and shoots the alien through its second tiny mouth and then Ripley says to Paul Reiser, “That’s what you are in the My Two Dads universe, the second, tinier, slimier mouth.” and Corporal Hicks is like, “Nice one!” and Ripley and Corporal Hicks high-five one another and there’s a single skim-milky tear flowing down the plastic cheek of Paul Reiser?

That scene was awesome.

Remember that scene in Doom when The Rock is like “Ooh yeah snap into a Slim Jim can you smell that I’m a Stone Cold Nature Boy WOO Hulkamania!” and some other dude from some other sci-fi/action movies—who named his dog “Ire” because of Bob Marley’s “Uprising”—says, “Yeah, we do need more guns.” and then squints at The Rock and then The Rock squints back at him as they stand in front of this cheap sweaty metal door that’s in the shape of an octagon because all sci-fi doors have to have more sides than a rectangle because the more sides a door has the more Future the movie has and you start wondering did the guy who does all those Resident Evil movies—who always puts Milla Jovovich in them because they’re married and because his middle initials are “W. S.” which means “Work Spouse”—make this movie too? because those movies have lots of cheap sweaty metal and octagonal doors and then you realize, Holy shit, I seem to know a lot about the sets of video game adaptations but you didn’t actually realize that per se—just as you didn’t really wonder if Milla Jovovich’s husband made this movie because she hasn’t appeared in the past half-hour and gone all MMA on some lizard-Venice-Beach-musclehead-cross-breed—because you knew it all along because you always put those movies on when TBS and TNT and the like play them every single weekend night while you’re writing but really you’re not writing all that much because you’re paying attention to these movies and the cheap sweaty metal rooms with octagonal doors and the swinging fluorescent tube light bulbs and the putty-faced zombies who jump out and get riddled with bullets from chunky toaster-looking machine guns and you’re like, Goddammit, why am I not writing? why am I stalling? but you don’t need to ask yourself those questions because you know why and it’s because you’re just like the scrawny guy who’s always in these movies who’s always shaky and seemingly-out-of-place but actually does have his place and it’s somewhat for comic relief but mostly just to provide a body to be eaten or torn apart early on and he knows it and they know it and you know it and that aura of fear glows on the cheap sweaty metal?

That was awesome?

Remember that scene in Lionheart after Jean-Claude Van Damme’s brother and fellow U.S. Senator Claude-Jean spontaneously combusts during the debt ceiling negotiations and Jean-Claude goes AWOL from the Senate and wanders around the capital and cries tears the shape of fists that pummel the ground and leave two canyons in his wake and he goes to the Senate parking garage to get into his trusty Timecop time travel bike and go back in time so that he can give a solid roundhouse kick to all the Senators when they were young so as to knock some sense into them but finds the parking space where his bike was empty except for a note from Professor Shengwang Du of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology that reads “Sorry, JCVD, no dice.  Photons.” and Jean-Claude screams something in Belgianian that shatters all of the car windows around him and then he falls to the ground and starts punching the ground until he punches a hole through the cement revealing a no holds barred bare-knuckle fight club on the floor below him and so he jumps through the hole and ducks behind a car and checks out the crowd and it’s all of the Senate but they all have long black hair either greased back behind their ears or in these sleazy ponytails and they all have coke crumbs in their nose hairs and they’re watching with their fat black pupils as Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid slap each other around and Jean-Claude just goes fucking nuts and goes running into the ring and McConnell and Reid stop to turn on him and both try to kick him in the face but Jean-Claude grabs each of their feet with one hand and then punches both of them in the balls with the other and they fall into a heap and Jean-Claude goes into this speech about how all of them are letting down the American people and there’s this really awesome Survivor song playing in the background and you’re all like, “Fuck yeah, Jean-Claude!” but then the speech ends and all of them start laughing at Jean-Claude and Jean-Claude gives this look like, “Goddamn you, Professor Du!  I could be Timecopping the shit out of these assholes!” and then someone yells “Silence!” and they all shut up and then the crowd parts and in struts a shirtless John Boehner looking like a rotting pumpkin pumped full of steroids and he’s all cocky and shit and he challenges Jean-Claude to a fight and is like, “If I win, you die.” and Jean-Claude’s like, “What if I win?” and Boehner just grabs his belly and laughs and then all the other’s join in and Jean-Claude’s just thinking, “You’re seriously going to take your eyes off of me?” and then he roundhouses Boehner right in the face and Boehner drops like a sack of ancient sweet potatoes and the members of the Senate start balling and Jean-Claude says, “Shut up you fucking babies and take care of the debt ceiling!”?

That was awesome.