Don't you just hate it when some old geezer starts to whine and moan about how great things used to be and how shitty things are now? Well that geezer is right, and I'm that geezer.
First off, I don't know if you noticed but the sitcom is dead... even the New York Times says so. I like sitcoms, they get a bad rap these days but they were often quite good. Some episodes of "Good Times" were brilliant and poignant. Some episodes of "Three's Company" had me laughing to myself for weeks. Some episodes of "The Bob Newhart Show", "All in the Family" and "Cheers" rivaled a Neil Simon play. Sure, they could often be stupid, like "Gilligan's Island", but then not everything needs to be high art - sometimes being entertaining is good enough.
We are so jaded and cynical these days. Take a good look at contemporary comedians - they're basically a bunch of sarcastic bastards. I recently saw the latest Harold and Kumar movie where Doogie Houser does more drugs and Kumar has a fantasy about having a threesome with a girl and a bag of marijuana. Ha, ha, ha, ha, I get it. The shock. The awe. How over the top. (Read everything in yellow with a cynical sarcastic tone, and you'll understand my opinion of the movie.) Don't get me wrong, I laughed. But we've come a long, long way from The Philadelphia Story, and it kind of makes me sad.
Here's how much of a geezer I am - I didn't even like The Dark Knight. I thought Ledger's rendition of the Joker was brilliant, and the story was pretty good, but I was begging for it to end! What was it, five friggin' hours long? I remember watching Return of the King and begging Frodo to throw the damn ring in the volcano! Throw it dammit! End this movie so I can get out of this stinking theater and go cut my grass! At least they had intermission back in the day, so I might have made it through The Sound of Music. (I would make a horrible movie critic.)
Is it me, or is everyone hanging around the comic book section at the bookstore over thirty? When did comics become primarily for adults? When I was a kid snagging the latest issue of The Avengers , I don't remember a bunch of adults huddled around the stand. Not that there's anything wrong with adults reading comics (I just bought an expensive hardcover collection of Superman comics), but where's the kids? Reading Manga?And don't even get me started with the music scene. Almost every song in the top forty for the past six or seven years has been R&B/hip-hop. If that's your thing, that's great, you should be in hog heaven right now. Me, I'm in hog hell. I can't stand anything new - and that's the very definition of geezer. Don't tell me indie music is where it's at, and it just doesn't get radio airplay it deserves. Death Cab for Cutie and The Shins are just plain awful. I'm no rock snob either... I'll take ABBA or Andy Gibb any day of the week. It's as if we've run out of original melodies.... in fact, when you think about it, there is only a finite amount of possible melodies in pop music, and we may have tapped it dry. Sounds like a good topic for my next miserable rambling post.
