MasterChugs Theater: ‘Black Dynamite’

The spoof (aka broad parody) sub-genre is a schizophrenic beast. At its best, the spoof can treat you to something as sublime as Airplane!, as mindlessly amusing as the Scary Movie series, or as stunningly worthless as Epic Movie. It takes skill to make a movie bad on purpose, but movies that are bad by accident can be a lot more fun. But the spoof remains the comedy sub-genre for filmmakers who are also movie geeks. Basically, you need to have seen a lot of Airport movies to write Airplane!, and you need to have some solid experience with blaxploitation movies to produce something like Hollywood Shuffle, I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, or the newest arrival: the worthy Black Dynamite, which aims to do to Shaft and Superfly what The Naked Gun did to police procedurals.

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Interesting choice of battle there

The Republican Party’s had a rough couple of weeks. They lost the fight over health care reform. They had some trouble outright condemning death threats and failing to distance themselves from racist lunatics. The Pentagon’s trying to make the military more gay-friendly. The President even co-opted their idea to expand oil exploration off the mid-Atlantic coast.

Through all of that, the faithful have remained …

… that is, until LesboStripperGate 2010!

After it was revealed that the Republican National Committee funded a $2000 field trip to see How Lesbians Work, family values “expert” Tony Perkins, Sarah Palin and others have announced that they are boycotting the RNC and encourage others to do the same.

Really? Strippers are the line? They do realize that there is no–none–sex in the champagne room, right?

All the same, we’d like to officially welcome the GOP to the third party ghetto now.

Richard Dreyfuss is still terrified of red circles

DOON DOON DOONDOONDOON DOON-DOON.

Oh, like you’re any better at phonetically spelling the theme to the X-Files?

An alleged UFO that zoomed over the city of Luque in Paraguay sounds very much like the strobing, disco-like UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s being reported that many people in the Luque area saw the object:

According to their story, the sighting involved a large object with several lights whose colors changed constantly.

Raul Torres explained that his sister informed him of the object’s manifestation. He went outside for a look and realized that it was an object moving slowly across the skies, with lights that changed colors.

“It wasn’t your ordinary star. It moved and then remained still,” added Selva Torres. “Its bright flashes, and its colors, impressed us all. Many of us here were watching.”

I hope for the sake of our future that these ships were the real thing. Why? Because I’m a greedy man that desperately wishes Will Smith would greet them with a rousing “WELCOME TO EARF!”

100 years of bouncing it across the plate

On Monday, there will be a new presidential tradition that has been around for 100 years. That’s right, in less than a week, President Barack Obama will throw out the ceremonial first pitch when the Washington Nationals host the Philadelphia Phillies.

This tradition dates back to 1910, when President William Howard Taft, the heaviest president we have ever had, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a base-ball match sporting event. Now, a black, gangling president will throw out the pitch. My how times have changed. As they did 100 years ago, the press will be critiquing the president’s form and trying to interpret what his throw could mean should the Russians and the Japanese choose to tear up the Treaty of Portsmouth.