I’m sure some of you can identify. Ever check the daily newspaper staple that notes what celebrities are sharing a birthday–and the revelation makes you feel like an alien in your own culture? Who the hell are these people? After Betty White and Harrison Ford, you’re clueless.
Then there are reviews of movies, especially summer fare, that you’ll never, ever want to see.
But sometimes a contrarian mood will prompt me to read about something that I will definitely not be seeing at Tampa Theatre nor ordering from Netflix. Case in point: Piranha 3D. Saturday’s page 2B of the St. Petersburg Times was devoted almost entirely to Steve Persall’s glowing review of Piranha 3D.
See if anything seems incongruous to you. “Rating: R; graphic gore, gratuitous nudity, strong profanity, sexual and drug content…Rating: A. …The most irresistibly sick movie in years…giddy, gory and gleefully tasteless fun.”
And, no, I’m not picking on Persall, who will simply delight in accusing me of not “getting it.” (And better yet, “not getting” what I haven’t gotten around to seeing.) As in, it’s a Jawsesque “spoof,” and there is no such thing, apparently, as a bad, gratuitous spoof. For what it’s worth, I “didn’t get” The Blair Witch Project either. I called it a “hoax” and the “cinematic version of Piltdown Man.”
Steve and I have been in periodic correspondence ever since.