Is this like the Huey Lewis thing again?

The older, more out of touch, less relevant and dottier I get, the more I rely on people like Nick, Joe, Kris, Tom and Kendall to keep me current(ish). Even new movies that have some buzz drift on by as I stare out with dead eyes at a world that's passing me by. I fake “getting it” most of the time convincing the witless fairly effectively, but knowing all the while that most of you see right through me. I've stopped pretending with Joe and Nick and hope that they'll humour me long enough to make my escape to my moated castle redoubt in Owen Sound. Kendall puts up with me and Tom just doesn't understand how the ultra-cool Film Buff could possibly have had its genesis in a middle-aged lunatic that grabs his (Tom's) ass every shift. It stopped being funny months ago and has turned the corner toward creepy.... for both of us. Kris lives in a world I neither understand nor care to, being the consummate modern, urban techno-munnications expert of my small circle of regular contacts. His world is so of-the-vapid-moment and mine so of-a-nonexistent-past that we basically cancel each other out. He slices my head off with a smart phone laser just after I bash his skull in with a rock tied to the end of a heavy stick ...metaphorically that is.

One of my ongoing faux-hipster-charades is to scope out Joe's KRK delivery for the FBE each week, then order most of it for the FBW and pretend that I knew about them all along. Sometimes, if something's particularly cool, I just steal it out of Joe's order and put it in the FBW box and feign ignorance. Nick says and writes things like “def” that aren't real words but mean that same thing as their longer, former spellings. I'm working on peppering my verbal comm with these shorter versions.

This week I opened my conduit-to-film-hipness's FBE order box to discover this inside...


This is film No. 8 in the “Love Comes Softly” series and I'm uncertain what to make of it. Is it so square that it's hip like say.... '50s Broadway show-tunes are once again or is this a sign that a new, softer, queerer Joe is emerging? Is Patty Duke cool again.... or more accurately, for the first time? The rest of the order seemed normal (Joe-normal, that is). It had “Raw Meat” and “The Devil”, a banned 1972 Polish film about Jakub who, “goes insane and becomes a mass murderer” (from the blurb on the back of the box, a description, incidentally, that works for most of the films he orders). It also had, “From the creators of Kiltro”, Mirageman – starring Marko Zaror aka “The Latin Dragon”. I shit you not. (I took this one for the FBW, by the way).

One of these things is not like the others but I'll be damned if I can figure out which one it is. I'm flummoxed. The obvious choice, Love Finds a Home, is just too fucking weird not to belong to Joe's absurd purchase choices. About a year ago, just after I gave him the FBE store to play with like a train set, he reamed me out for not letting him order what he wanted, fearing the place would become a Rogers and they'd all have to wear little red shirts. Well, you have to admit that your fears were unfounded. The FBE catalog is now so off-the-wall only Jules understands it completely.




Sporgey.