It isn't lost on me that my pop cultural references stop at about 1993. For instance when I was writing about my theory of why bands run out of ideas and I used a sitcom analogy, the sitcoms I pointed to were Family Ties and Cheers. Maybe I should've said Scrubs, since that's the only current comedy I even know the name of. If people start talking about movies, I'm likely to start talking about One Hour Photo, since that was the last fiction movie I saw in the theater and that's from 2002 (I saw Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 in the theater and some might call those fiction, but I'm not counting them).

So I thought I should get my movie-viewing up to date and rented a movie that was recommended to me by three different people, Superbad.

Eh...one or two funny lines, but either I'm getting old, or they truly just do not make comedies like they used to.

I sat down to watch this one with my 73-year-old dad, which might seem ridiculous, but back in the old days we watched Vacation and Sixteen Candles together and he loved lines like, "You'll all be whistling Dixie out your assholes!," and the part where Anthony Michael Hall triumphantly presented Molly Ringwald's panties to his entourage of geeks. Within about five minutes he declared Superbad "too nasty," though, and got up and left. I'm younger now than he was when he was enjoying Sixteen Candles, though, and Superbad still just seemed too base to me. It's like in Fast Times at Ridgemont High when Spicoli says to Mr. Hand, "You DICK!," that's a big, thunderous punctuation in the movie. In Superbad that kind of line is going by 30 times a minute, barely broken up by other words like "the," "it" and "those." The result is that you drown in an ocean of "fuck" and "motherfucker," so asphyxiated in it you can hardly carry on within minutes.

Another analogy to this would be to compare `80's hard rock to contemporary hard rock. A song like Motley Crue's "Looks That Kill" just increases your testosterone and adrenaline levels from the first chord. Today's bands like Bullet for My Valentine use 500 lbs. of distortion on their guitars and scream like bobcats and play at 200 bpm trying to create that energy, but it just goes by as an unaffecting wash of noise. They're trying too hard. Same principle in movies.

Before Scott (who was the first recommendation) gets as agitated as when I said Black Sabbath was a gimmick band, I'm not saying I didn't get anything out of it. It wasn't nearly as crappy as The Usual Suspects, one of a handful of movies I couldn't tolerate beyond the first 10 minutes. One line I really did enjoy was, "On the night of our wedding, we had group sex. I wasn't in it, though, but I could hear it through the wall. She was great." Another good politically incorrect line was when Seth Rogen as a police officer questioning a robbery suspect says, "So you're saying he was a Jew? Hmm, that's interesting. They're usually pretty docile."

Actually I'm not as out-of-date on movies as I'm saying. Recently I've also seen Little Miss Sunshine and Talladega Nights. I recall Talladega Nights as having funny parts, but the only thing that's stuck to my brain was, "If you're not first, you're last!" Oh, yeah, and, "Crepes? Those little pancake type things? Oh, sure, why didn't you say so! I love those!" Sascha Baron Cohen ruined the end of that one for me, though. Nothing much from Little Miss Sunshine stuck in my mind. Is my funny detector getting mossy?

So I guess I'm saying I hope they saved John Hughes' brain so somebody can make some comedies I can really laugh at again.

At Best Buy I see there's a DVD set out that contains two James Brown concerts from the 1960's. Now that's a "Super Bad" I'm going to get that I'm sure I'll love.