The Bad Movie Maven
Submitted by jim on Mon, 08/23/2004 - 08:53
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Joe Queenan prays Vin Diesel does Hannibal:
... what warmed the cockles of my heart was the news that the chrome-domed, musclebound Vin Diesel was to be cast in the lead role. As someone who never goes to the movies without entertaining the hope, however slight, that he might finally get a chance to see the worst film ever made, I could not have been more overjoyed to learn that the star of The Fast And The Furious might now be appearing in The Furious And The Not So Fast. Here, at long last, Hollywood was going for broke with a film that could be the very worst motion picture in history. I could hardly keep my knees from quaking.
« via Movie City News »
Today (8/23/04) is the 120th anniversary of Will Cuppy's birth. He wrote about how Hannibal lost every battle in which he used elephants. He did write other things. One of them was this-
"During his fifteen years in Italy, Hannibal never had enough elephants to suit him. Most of the original group succumbed to the climate, and he was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what had he done with the elephants they sent before."
-- Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
Y'know, I have been meaning to read that book for the longest time. I just ordered it from Amazon. Thanks for the nudge!
You'll be so pleased. Cuppy also wrote about animals ("How to Become Extinct", "How to Attract the Wombat" and "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes"); I'm sure he was talking about someone else:
"A sunfish sometimes lays 300 million eggs. What are they trying to prove?"
"Armadillos make affectionate pets, if you need affection that much."
"Never make a pet of a bear," a zoo keeper once told me, with what struck me as needless elan. I make wrong moves from time to time, but I have never even come close to making a pet of a bear."
"The Howling Monkey is confined to South America but seems to escape. The back of his head is straight up and down. His howl is caused by a large hyoid bone at the top of the trachea. It can be cured by a simple operation on the neck with an axe."