When you are the kind of music nerd who enjoys dissecting the minutiae of pop culture—you know, the sort of person whose favorite December landmark isn’t Christmas or New Year’s Eve, but the release of everyone’s year-end wrap-up shows and articles—Top 10 lists occupy a lot of your time. I am, sadly, one of these people. I spend hours cataloging the Top 10 Singles of the Summer or the Top 10 Reissues Released Before Memorial Day and other, equally asinine superlative categorizations. Generally I do this for my own amusement, like the character Rob in High Fidelity, or because I feel compelled by some unknown force to write down the 10 Best Singles by Women on a Debut Album, but the best part about my job as a rock critic is that sometimes someone will even pay me do it professionally.
When I was in kindergarten, I won an impromptu drawing contest against a first-grader. My teacher made a big deal about it, but if you had asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you, “A truck driver, a race car driver, or a fire fighter.” The proof was in my drawings. My sketchbooks were filled with trucks, race cars, and firemen on ladders. I was in the habit of drawing absolutely anything that interested me: cowboys, tree houses, Spider-man cartoons.
I was under the impression after the scenes from the next OC last week that last night’s episode was going to be exciting. I mean, I caught a glimpse of Scrawny Johnny wielding a gun, I had a reader suggest that SJ was going to pull an Oliver and try to kill himself in the name of Marissa, and I saw with my own eyes a bar mitzvah celebration with Ryan at center stage. How can you possibly go wrong with a holiday table setup like that? That’s like skipping the roast beast and just tearing right into the Yorkshire pudding. Mmm. Unfortunately, my dinner was again ruined by a show with a wimpy script that took very few chances, made very little sense, and probably offended a lot of Jewish people.
So I looked over at my bored friend while we were watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin DVD the other night, and I said, “Dude, I have friends who really love this kind of humor. I guess I just don’t get it.” Take Anchorman, for instance. Great cast. Hilarious lead man. Zero plot. All about how funny Will Ferrell is and his off-color one-liners. This movie strikes me as very similar, though Steve Carell, former Daily Show funny-man, is the lead. Carell plays Andy, a forty-year-old whose co-workers find out one night that he is still a virgin. For the rest of the movie, this rag-tag group of characters—including a guy I was almost positive was Screech from Saved By the Bell—make it their mission to get Andy de-virginized.
Read Nina’s review of the new film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or enter the strange and wonderful world of Narnia now: download a free, printable PDF version of our FlashChart on The Chronicles of Narnia.
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In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four English children tumble through the back of an old wooden wardrobe and into a magical world where fauns live and beavers talk, where it’s always winter and yet never Christmas, and where everything seems to make both more and less sense than in the so-called “real” world they’ve left behind.
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