Author Archives: Hal

Bitch, you almost made me break character

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Lexicon. Wild rephrasing of the original from the movie Chasing Amy:

“‘What’s a Nubian?’… Bitch, you almost made me laugh.”

Now, in my defense, this may have been a mashup with a story from my college days. Professor Leonard Pronko put on one of his periodic kabuki productions, this one titled Lancelot Bewitched. The lead, Kevin Costello, was teased by a number of my friends (Mark Vargas, Cathy Kerry, Topher Jaworski, others). Imagine the following delivered to Kevin in the exaggerated style of kabuki:

“Threeeee times! You broke character threeeeee times! And weeee saw you!”

So I may have taken the laughing and the breaking of character, and merged them.

It’s a theory, anyway.

“The New Cruelty”

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Lexicon. Derived from this bit in Steve Martin’s 1991 movie, L.A. Story:

L’Idiot is the hot restaurant of the moment, and pronounced as if French (as one might expect from the apostrophe). The phrase is generally used when someone is being a dick.

“I see Congress has cut Medicaid spending.”
“Part of the New Cruelty?”

Interestingly, the New Cruelty also shows up with lightning speed in this deleted scene that featured John Lithgow:

Publishing

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“And that’s what’s wrong with publishing today.”

Lexicon. Mild reworking of a bit William Goldman has in his foreword to Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride:

WHEN I WAS twenty-six, my first novel, The Temple of Gold, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Which is now part of Random House which is now part of R.C.A. which is just part of what’s wrong with publishing in America today which is not part of this story.)

Usually used to illustrate something being overly intricate:

”That restaurant is run by Fussmucker, but it’s owned by Muckenfuss, which is really a part of Gilded Octopus, LLC.”
”And that’s what’s wrong with publishing today.”

Archive.org Movies

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It’s somewhat amazing what one can find in the Archive.org site these days. Lately I’ve been stumbling on full movies. Here are some examples (subject to changes and additions):

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927
Man With a Movie Camera, 1929
Harvey, 1950
The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014

Akira Kurosawa:
Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), 1954
The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru), 1960

(Tony Zhou, “The Bad Sleep Well (1960) – The Geometry of a Scene”)
(Tony Zhou, “Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement”)
(Tony Zhou’s “Every Frame a Painting” account on YouTube)

Hence the fucking name

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From Denis Leary’s 1997 comedic routine/record/video Lock ‘N Load. Lexicon. Re-worked from the original (“You took the donut, you dunked it in coffee. Thus the fucking title of the place!”), as he explains why Dunkin Donuts is called that.

Used when it can explain a tautology:

“Turns out Hal’s Tavern is owned by a guy named Hal.”
”Hence the fucking name.”

(YouTube isn’t letting me embed any of the many videos with his Lock ‘N Load “Coffee” segment. Hence the fucking link. [see?] Not sure why the curly quote algorithm is broken in that line above, but I’m out of spoons for what I thought would be a quick entry.)