A terrible movie I will only watch 5 or 6 more times
A few words about one of the best worst movies I've seen in years and various other useless things.
Very often I will spend anywhere between 45 minutes and 72 hours looking through Netflix for a movie to watch. Sometimes I will search for so long that by the time I’ve settled on something it’s gotten too late to start it so I just go to bed. Usually I will watch seven or eight movie trailers before deciding that you know what actually I’ll just watch the first one I guess. But recently a rare thing happened. I was shown a movie trailer that hooked me within the first ten seconds.
The movie—sorry, let me start over. The FILM is called Homie Spumoni and it stars Donald Faison and Jamie-Lynn Sigler. I am something of a Bad Movie enthusiast, and even hosted a shortlived, monthly Bad Movie night at a bar in Brooklyn years ago, but somehow this movie—sorry, FILM—escaped me. It was released in 2006 and there is very little information available about it. In fact, as far as I can tell, everyone involved has actively tried to pretend it never happened.
But as an Italian-American, Homie Spumoni is my Schindler’s List. I could write a thesis on the myriad of things wrong with this film but I don’t think I could do it any more justice than your imagination after reading its IMDB description, grammatical error and all:
So, whatever you’re imagining might happen with that premise, whatever zany fish-out-of-water shenanigans you can conjure, whatever culturally insensitive notes you might anticipate, you are CORRECT. In fact, take whatever you’re picturing and make it 20-35% more racist. The entire thing is on YouTube if you’d like to watch it. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I will just answer a few quick questions.
-Does NSYNC member Joey Fatone have a prominent role in it? Yes.
-Does he almost drop an N-bomb in it? Yes.
-Does his character have a baffling reveal at the end of the movie? Yes.
-Is there a scene where he does the hole-in-the-popcorn bucket trick with a woman at the movies? Yes.
-Is Oscar-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg in it? Yes.
-Is Paul Mooney in it? Yes.
-Is it racist towards Asian people? Yes.
-Is it racist towards Irish people? Yes.
-Is it racist towards Black people? You saw the title, right?
-Is it anti-Semitic? Yes.
-Is it offensive towards disabled people? Yes.
-Is it racist towards Italians? Not sure if possible.
-Does the entire film seem like a Cum Town bit that came to life? Yes.
-Does it have the vibe of a film that was made as a means of laundering money for the mafia? Yes.
Perhaps the most perplexing part of the movie, though, was that Donald Faison and Jamie-Lynn Sigler were right smack in the middle of very successful runs on Scrubs and The Sopranos, respectively. They didn’t have to do this! I like to think this was Faison’s way of competing with the success of Zach Braff’s Garden State.
So, anyway, I watched this insane film and then the following morning, once I had assured myself that it was in fact a real movie I’d watched and not a racist fever dream my brain had conjured up, I tweeted the above screenshot of its IMDB page. It got around the internet, especially after comedian Jaboukie picked it up. I rested easy knowing I had done my part to unearth this movie that I’m sure everyone involved in would be happy to keep buried forever.
Then yesterday, my friend Rob, who works on Desus & Mero, gave me a heads up that the guys might be talking about the movie on that night’s show. So I did what any rational Bodega Boys fan would do with that information. I sat in a chair and stared at television for ten hours until the show came on.
For the record, Desus and Mero are the funniest people alive. You know how Jackie Chan used to get accused of speeding up the film on his fight scenes to make his martial arts skills seem faster than they really were? Desus and Mero are the joke equivalent of that. Their brains are just constantly creating a never ending flood of jokes. I’d always see them around the office and they had no ego about them. Just incredibly approachable, funny dudes who would go outside and smoke weed at the exact same time every single day (4:42 PM). (I also interviewed them once if you’re interested.)
Then at the last minute, Rob informed me that the Homie Spumoni bit had been cut from the episode. I was bummed, not least of all because I had grand visions of my tweet getting a shoutout and Mero doing a Staten Island-voice enunciation of my name. But I did hear about the segment and apparently it got cut primarily because they sat in stunned silence while watching the trailer, which typically does not make for engaging television. Apparently they went on a riff about how they want to remake this movie wherein Ray Liotta and Scarlett Johannson are their birth parents. Then they asked the audience if they would watch this movie and there was more uncomfortable silence. So that’s the kind of movie this is—one that makes two guys who crack jokes about the most culturally problematic things feel like they’ve gone too far.
Some Slightly Less Offensive Recommendations
“Hey, Dan, can you recommend something that’s not, you know, terribly racist?” Hmm, I guess so. Let me see if [extremely exaggerated Italian stereotype voice] I got-a some-a things you might-a like, capisce? Ayyyy.
Esquire ran a good, non-racist profile of Huey Lewis that was part heartbreaking and part inspiring. I didn’t know this but apparently he developed a condition that prevents him from hearing amplified music which, for a musician, seems like it might be a minor hindrance? I found this paragraph about Huey being influenced by punk rock to be a fun lil tidbit:
He left the West Coast after high school to busk around Europe for a year. “I played harmonica until my lips bled,” he says. Then he was off to Cornell University in upstate New York, before dropping out sophomore year in favor of more travel and more busking. (His father approved: “You need to woodshed on that harmonica, man,” Huey remembers him advising, well into the late eighties. “That’s something they can’t take away from you. This Huey Lewis shit is here today, gone tomorrow.”) He went back to London for a longer stay in the mid-seventies with his country-rock band Clover, just as punk was about to rip a hole through popular music. “Almost the day we landed in England, Johnny Rotten spit in the face of the first NME reporter, and the game was on.” The music wasn’t for him, but the punk spirit was. “With the punks, I saw these kids just thumbing their nose at the music business. They were just going, We don’t give a shit what you guys think. We’re going to sing our own songs our own way. And I thought, How liberating. And I vowed if my band ever broke up, that’s what I was going to do. Go back to Marin County and surround myself with my favorite R&B-based guys, and we’ll just play our local pub and see where the chips fall. That’s exactly what we did.” And that’s how I found out the guy who wore a polo shirt and black jeans to the beach in the “If This Is It” video was influenced by punk rock.
Speaking of Huey Lewis, which is a phrase I wish I heard more often, Jimmy Eat World drummer Zach Lind recently rocked a Huey Lewis & the News shirt on the band’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert and even got a shoutout from the man himself.
Since I’ve gone several paragraphs without mentioning MY BOOK, I will note here that Zach is a prominent figure in one of its chapters. So if you are a fan of JEW and/or me, get excited! The day I interviewed him for it was the final day of the band’s tour with Third Eye Blind, and the next morning on Twitter he went scorched earth on 3eB frontman and reputably slimy human Stephan Jenkins. All my years working in The Music Biz and I’ve yet to hear a kind word about the dude. Throw this on the pile:
But uhhh… good luck to Saves The Day on their upcoming tour with Third Eye Blind! Also, why are the ticket prices for that tour priced this high?:
Speaking of the NPR Tiny Desk (these transitions are F.L.A.W.L.E.S.S.), I can’t think of something that has moved me emotionally as much as Laura Stevenson’s recent performance. (Homie Spumoni excluded, of course.) I watched it the other day and got lost in thought about how long I’ve known Laura which is probably seven years at this point and how much she has grown as a musician in that time and how little I’ve grown as a writer in the same time and how she is the most talented person I know and how inspiring it was to watch her hit this career achievement while pregnant and how life goes by so fast and one day you’re hanging out with your friend Laura at an overpriced Brooklyn pie restaurant and the next you’re watching her get married and then before you know it you’re seeing her spread her beautiful gift to the world while at the same time growing a human life inside her body and you just get weepy thinking about the enormity of it all. One of those moments, you know? Mercury in retrograde, amirite??? So please, watch that if you haven’t:
Also, I can’t stop thinking about this tweet. A perfect little short story, it is:
I have added to my Bernie Thanking Bands For Their Music thread with tweets about Lucy Dacus, Soccer Mommy, and Sparta. (Hey, speaking of Sparta, Jim Ward is also a prominent figure in MY BOOK!)
This Shirt Kills Sexism
OK, last thing.
One of the most common forms of lowkey sexism that happens in music is when women are put on the spot about their music knowledge just because they’re wearing a band t-shirt. I am a man who owns a collection of roughly 9 grajillion band t-shirts and have been questioned about the sincerity of my fandom of said bands exactly zero times. But it happens to women all the time.
I remember comedian Scott Aukerman getting flamed a few years back for joking that “the girl wearing a Joy Division t-shirt never wants to actually talk about Joy Division.” It’s especially irritating because most of the women I know in this industry have developed encyclopedic knowledge about music minutiae to combat this stereotype yet still hear stuff like this.
Look, I wish this was not the way the world was, and I wish it would stop. But the truth is that this problem is just going to keep happening and I’m not smart enough to suggest ways to end decades of rock sexism. But! I did come up with a solution that will at least help counterbalance it. I figure, if we can’t end the misconception that women are ignorant about music, the least we can do is prove how dumb as hell men are. I would like to volunteer my services as a man who both wears band shirts and is dumb as hell.
I recently acquired this Pat Benatar shirt at a flea market because 1. It fits my misshapen body, 2. It objectively rocks, and 3. Pat Benatar is cool. But I will fully admit that my knowledge of Pat B is very surface-level. I know her hits. I can sing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” at karaoke. I can get through “Heartbreaker” on Rock Band. But beyond that, I wouldn’t say I’m much of a superfan.
So I’m going to wear this shirt around. If you see me in it, feel free to quiz me on her catalog. I will be woefully ignorant and you can drop a snarky tweet about me later. Ask me to name three of her albums. I won’t know. Ask me what my favorite song is and I will confidently say “I Hate Myself for Loving You” like a tremendous dipshit. Ask me if I borrowed this shirt from my girlfriend and I will let out an uncomfortable laugh.
Please, expose my ignorance and together we can end the stereotype that men know what the fuck we’re talking about regarding anything. Thank you.
Jacked