posted 01-02-2001 10:55 PM               

quote:

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(Judge Joseph) Wapner was a granite tower of dignity compared to the very hittable Doug Llewelyn. He looked a little like Franken Berry the cereal mascot, only with Wink Martindale’s hair. A black hole from which no charisma could escape, Llewelyn would collar peeved pet owners and dissatisfied blanket buyers as they left the “court.” As if their lives weren’t bad enough, forced to air the sad details of their existence in front of millions just for a sliver of recognition and a chance to recoup the thirty-three dollars lost on The Broken Hair Dryer, the people then had to be worked over by this cadaverous ur-man.

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It goes on like this, the tone slightly more brainy than what we came to expect from Nelson from watching MST3K.
Much of the time, it’s funny, and I laughed out loud several dozen times as I read this book. Occasionally, though, Nelson’s Mensa-esque ramblings come off as snobbery, and there were several instances where he attacked what I see as perfectly good films.
In a chapter on the Penn brothers, he mentions The Game, David Fincher’s post-Seven effort featuring Sean Penn and Michael Douglas. I thought The Game was a fine film – it likely won’t make it onto any top ten lists, but it was enjoyable and suspenseful, and Michael Douglas was not nearly as stiff and lizardlike as he is in most of his films. Nelson attacked it with the same abandon with which he attacked the sequels to The Mighty Ducks, which raised the question: What the hell does this guy like?
He also made enough pop cultural references to make Dennis Miller look like a central Iowa housewife. While I generally appreciate this kind of humor, it wore thin after a while, especially when used side-by side with Nelson’s tendency to exaggerate and take humorous liberties in describing plotlines. When it’s hard to tell the difference between something the author is making up and some obscure fact you might not know, it makes it easy to think the author is secretly snickering at you.
But Movie Megacheese is not a wasted effort. He mocks science fiction, the genre which arguably gave him his start, describing a wormhole as “an anomaly in space where… hell, I don’t know. I think it has something to do with Worf or Hobbits or something.” Such jokes make the occasional lapses in audience-awareness forgivable.

(Edited, and apparently you can't use coding in thread topics. Duh.)

(Edited by Dave to add Amazon link.)