Talladega Saturday night

#20-21

The bar on the corner is filled with chicks waiting for the Justin Timberlake concert at The Q, but I'll be damned if I'm going down there. It's 8 degrees outside and my face froze into a Joker-like grimace when I went to the drug store earlier. Even walking 75 yards to Flannery's invites frostbite. You know Lillian Gertrud Aspland, the longest-living American survivor of the Titanic, who died last year? I would never have been her. If walking nearly the length of a football field in 8 degree weather makes me want to curl up into a ball and die, imagine me in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic as a gigantic ship sank into the depths. Hell, I wouldn't even pull a Leonardo DiCaprio and die while hanging onto the edge of a hot chick's makeshift raft, even one as hot as Kate Winslet. Cuz no matter how hot Kate Winslet is, she wouldn't make my toes and nose and fingers and eyebrows not freeze. Give me three comforters and a glass of hot cocoa, please!

So there will be no Flannery's tonite, and sexy won't be coming back, and Super Bowl XLI isn't until tomorrow, and it's nice and warm inside. So how about a double-feature, boys?

And Will Farrell's NASCAR comedy "Talladega Nights" provides the perfect fire for this frigid February night. There's something to be said for the context in which you watch movies, and watching this movie with my upstairs friends Joe and Bob provides the perfect context. It's a perfect DVD movie, good for watching from the couch while throwing back a couple adult beverages and while joking along with the flick. Bob did not enjoy his previous Talladega Nights experience -- he had seen it in the theater -- but this time he liked it much better. And believe me, "Talladega Nights" is not Shakespeare. Repeated viewings, while they help you better memorize the lines ala "Caddyshack", "Fletch", "Animal House", "Napoleon Dynamite", "Old School", etc., don't really help your understanding of this movie. But repeated viewings could help you discover the right context in which to watch the movie. And for this, it's on the couch with your buds on a frigid Saturday night while repeating "shake and bake" over and over and bumping fists.

It was so much fun we couldn't stop with just one! Onto "The Hudsucker Proxy" a Coen Brothers classic which now has us repeating Paul Newman's phrase, "Sure, sure" over and over. So that's our new thing -- bumping fists while saying "Shake and bake" and "Sure, sure." One of these days we'll be communicating solely in movie lines. Then we'll be real men!

But we'll still never be at a Justin Timberlake concert.