Love Note to Liberal Hollywood

Last week our Nation's finest young film historian sparked a Repo Man quote cascade. As usual I was late to the party and nearly all the quotes had been snapped up by his gang of smart, youthful, and funny commentators. I hate every last one of 'em.

I wasn't stumped, though, because I had an idiosyncratic favorite up my sleeve: when Lite puts a cassette tape in the player and tells Otto, "I was into these dudes before anybody. Used to party with 'em all the time. They wanted me to be their manager, but I said bullshit on that."

I was stumped, however, by the fact that I had to quote it from memory (forgot the second line, substituted "guys" for "dudes") because my copy of Repo Man is on Beta.

There's no manual for this stuff, so just take my word for it: by the time you reach solid middle age you'll be caught in debates which were rendered moot thirty years earlier, something you may have noticed is a central feature of this blog. So, anyway, I went this evening to get a DVD copy, and along the way I happened to check in on something my Poor Wife had told me about last week: the Alec Baldwin Best of Saturday Night Live.

Although I haven't watched SNL since the day Adam Sandler took over, Baldwin is wonderful, and I salute whoever came up with the idea of giving him his own DVD (he always made me wish it began in the 60s so they could have gotten Cary Grant). But I bought it for one specific sketch, which, thankfully, was illustrated by one of the pics on the back of the box. He played a denim-clad, mirror-shaded cowboy who comes into a breakfast diner and flirts in code with waitress Jan Hooks ("Look at 'im! Sittin' on that stool like he's doin' it a favor!" she says). It may be the wittiest thing that show ever did. It's completely atypical, a throwback to Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, rather than a search for the next big catchphrase. It's worth the price of the disc.

We just skimmed the thing this evening, and I caught his De Niro impression which I'd only seen a snippet of before. It appears to be missing his bit as Garbo's secretary, where she pantomimed excuses not to come to the phone while he tried to guess them like he was playing charades ("She's asleep. She's dancing. She's...on a plane! Yes! She's flying to...Europe!"). You do get to see him french kiss the dog in "Greenhilly".

The only question it raises is, "Who finds Adam Sandler funny?"