I know almost 10 this time!

I desperately need to start renting movies.

I just can’t bring myself to go to a movie in the theaters. Paying $10 a ticket is idiotic, IMHO. Plus, it would wind up costing me way more, due to the bail money necessary when I get arrested for punching Mr. Cell Phone Talker Guy in the pyloric sphincter (MAN I love the word “sphincter”!!). I absolutely friggin’ despise people who have no common courtesy or respect for other people, especially with regard to their cell phone usage. Maybe I can whine about that in an upcoming post.

Anyway, there really has been nothing in at least the last 6-8 years, if not double that, that I’ve been SO dying to see that it would justify taking out a loan for a night at the movies. I mean, I kinda wish I would have been able to go with Mrs. Johann and L’il Johann #1 when they went to see “Cars” in the theater, but I just don’t feel any less fulfilled for not having seen it, or anything else, “on the big screen”. Mrs. Johann and I saw “Toy Story” at the Esquire dollar theater when we were dating (roughly 1997-ish), but the last movie I saw in the theaters besides that was “Dances With Wolves”. That was 1990. Eighteen years ago. I have been married, divorced, re-married, fathered two children, gone through four cars, and been hired for and consequently left three jobs since the last time I saw a {first-run} movie in the theaters. It’s kind of weird to look at it that way, now that I’ve typed it all out.

Only thing is, I really don’t watch movies period anymore. There are several that, upon seeing them on TV, I’ll watch just because I enjoy them. For example, I’ll usually catch “The Shawshank Redemption” when TNT has one of its semi-annual 72-hour “Shawshank”-a-thons, even though I hate watching movies on TV, not so much because of the commercials but because of the editing. It’s not that I necessarily “enjoy” bad language, graphic violence, or gratuitous naked boobies.

Well, okay, I do really, REALLY like the naked boobies.

I just would rather see a movie- especially one I’ve not yet seen- the way it was originally presented. I understand why it gets watered down for TV, and that’s fine. Again, it’s not like I get off on hearing F-bombs and such, but it really kind of takes away from enjoying or sometimes even concentrating on the movie when every 7th word is bleeped, muted, or worse yet, they use an often-lousy voice impression to dub in TV-friendly words. Makes me think of that awesome Orbit gum commercial (”Who are you calling a cootie queen, you lint licker?!” and “What the French, Toast?” are my two favorite lines). Folks, if you have to bleep out that much dialogue (or completely remove entire scenes, as is the case with some movies I’ve attempted to watch on regular TV), then maybe it just shouldn’t be shown on TV. I don’t have HBO or Showtime or even Skinemax, so I can’t even go there to catch unedited movies, not to mention how I have missed out on some apparently really good series. I’ve never seen a single minute of The Sopranos, for example.

The big problem is, however, that I don’t rent movies, either. I can blame some of that on my past work schedules, and that I have two kids in the house, in front of whom I really shouldn’t watch movies that aren’t made by Pixar. But, to recall my first couple of paragraphs, there just really aren’t that many films for which I’m even willing to pay $2 for a five-night rental. I really don’t care for Will Ferrell or Owen Wilson, nor the screamfest movies (”Saw”, “Cloverfield”, etc.) we’ve been inundated with in the last few years, and nothing else has really tripped my trigger enough to want to rent.

What does all of this have to do with anything? Probably nothing.

Other than the fact that I used to consider myself somewhat of a “movie lines” guy. Surely you all have some annoying assbag at your job, your school, or elsewhere in your life that incessantly rambles off quotes (if not entire scenes) from movies, and/or has a “relevant” movie quote for every possible situation? That used to be me. I used to be the guy that actually got many of the more obscure references to movies made in other movies, TV shows, and elsewhere. Now, I can’t even watch the parody movies because I haven’t seen most of the movies they are lampooning to be able to “get the joke”.

And then my buddy Nick, who does an outstanding job as A&E editor at the SJ-R, introduced the Movie Quotes Quiz. Ain’t nothin’ like a good bitch-slap back to reality. Like I say, I used to think I’d seen a lot of movies and knew a lot of dialogue. And honestly, I have and I do. But Nick very quickly made me realize that I still don’t know shit. I can appreciate that he purposely makes the quizzes at least somewhat difficult (i.e. eliminating the obvious, such as “you’ll shoot your eye out“, “well, this is not a boat accident“, and “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning“, among many others), and I admire how he tries his hardest to safeguard at least a few quotes from interweb searches. Personally, I think looking the lines up is cheating anyway, but that’s just me.

But holy crap, I am but a flailing, bleeding fish in the shark-infested waters of movie quotes knowledge. Take last year’s quiz: upon seeing the answers, I realized that I’d only heard of a fraction of the movies from which Nick took the lines, and of those I’d heard of, I’ve only seen a fraction of them, and of those, I was able to recall the lines from a fraction of them. I really have got to start watching movies again, even if they don’t appear to be remotely watchable.

Today’s A&E section contains Movie Quotes Quiz V. I was absolutely ecstatic when I discovered I knew around 10 of the 50 quotes listed, and a couple of those were, at least in my mind, somewhat obscure. Yay me!! Even so, I’m still not going to send in an entry. I was never a very good student in school, but I’ve never gotten 20% on a quiz in my life. I have my pride to think about. And I refuse to use the interweb to scavenge for answers. If others choose to do that, more power to them. They’ll be collecting those 24 free movie admissions and free DVDs, and I’ll be sitting at home trying to decide if I can force myself to sit through tripe like “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” and “Napoleon Dynamite” and others to try to better arm myself for future MQQs.

Nick, I salute you and curse you at the same time. The MQQ is one of the many reasons I look forward to Thursday’s paper every week for the A&E section. Keep up the great work.

Maybe I should come up with the Movie Quotes Quiz For Dummies (And People Who Haven’t Seen A New Movie In Twenty Years).