Rembrandt's Gallery

In keeping with talking about football stuff, I'd like to mention really quick that yesterday I contributed to the podcast Rembrandt's Gallery, which is a (I think) bi-weekly football discussion. I recorded a segment for yesterday's edition in which I discuss who I think should win (or should have won) all of the major official NFL awards this season, and I created 8 or so awards myself. I tried to spread it around and discuss the league as a whole, but it inevitably ended in me singing the praise of the Colts and spewing hatred for the Patriots. Predictably, my segment ends with me masturbating on the air.

You can download it here. My segment starts a little after the 19:30 mark, but if you're a football fan I suggest you listen to the whole thing. If you can forgive the inside jokes about the message board that Rembrandt and I met through and use frequently, not to mention Remmy's delightful Georgia twang, you'll find some good stuff. Check it out.

Hating on the Indianapolis Colts

I don't know if you're familiar with the football comedy blog Kissing Suzy Kolber. It's a dick-joke filled extravaganza that fucks every sacred cow that the NFL has to offer. I go to it most days of the week and it makes me laugh my ass off. I would erect a monument for its writers as some sort of six-headed Mount Rushmore of internet comedy until I realized that Big Daddy Drew is the only writer who's funny on any consistent basis.

One of the other writers on Drew's coattails is Christmas Ape, real name Michael Tunison. He was a writer for the Washington Post until he revealed his identity on KSK and was immediately fired for being associated with such a godless piece of internet tomfoolery. Ape's main contribution seems to be a Hines Ward character that is an offensive Asian stereotype. The entire joke is taking normal conversation and switching the L's and R's around. "I will run a flea flicker" becomes "I wirr lun a frea frickel." Rinse and goddamn motherfucking repeat.

This is Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward. He was born in South Korea. Isn't that the most hilarious thing you've ever heard?!? He's Asian! I mean, what's up with that??? There's barely any Asian people in the world.

I was okay with leaving Ape alone because he isn't hurting anyone, and you have to have at least a little respect for his commitment to dick jokes which is so strong that he was willing to lose a job with a newspaper with daily circulation over 650,000 just to make them. Also, his tiresome and painfully unfunny Hines Ward character is balanced out by his frequently hilarious Ben Roethlisberger character. Unfortunately, I can leave him be no longer. As as 12-part series he's doing rundowns of all 12 NFL playoff teams, and his take on my Indianapolis Colts made me throw up in my mouth just a little bit. I'll just post the most egregious parts and what I have to say about them. Hopefully by the end of this we'll learn that having ungodly extreme hatred for something can be funny when you actually have a reason.

If you find yourself confronted with an NFL postseason without a rooting interest and unmoved by Don Cheadle soliloquies, you must draw from the well of that most powerful of human emotions. Ok, well, lust probably won’t do here. But the second most powerful, hate, will serve as a fine proxy. This is one in a series of posts filled with bile, spleen, vitriol and all-around nastiness toward all the teams involved with the sordid roundelay we know as the NFL Playoffs.

People sure do like to think about sex, huh? Ha ha ha. You're promising an angry hate-fest from a young, enraged man, but it's in the writing style of a college essay about F. Scott Fitzgerald. After the introduction Ape follows by posting a Youtube video of a shitty white boy rap group from Indianapolis and uses it as evidence for his broad sweeping assumptions about what a piece of shit city Indy is. This is great logic, because we know that Indianapolis is the only place in the entire world that has stupid white kids who think they can rap.

Let me wrap it up be saying Colts fans are cordially invited to shut the fuck up about Peyton being MVP. “Oh, he performed pretty well at times after holding off on getting surgeries he should have had earlier in the off-season!” Die.

I don't know where all of these bragging Colts fans are. I know I don't go up to people and troll internet forums about how awesome I think it is that Peyton Manning is MVP. I talk about it a lot on forums because people call me out and say stupid shit like "Chad Pennington deserves MVP more than Manning" and I have no choice but to argue back, but we're really not assaulting people with gloating over it. By the third time you can start to act like you've been there before.

Speaking of Pey-Pey, expect yet another chastising of the O-line should Indy fall to San Diego Saturday night.

Yet another? You make it sound like this is a weekly occurrence. Sorry, but a 30-second clip from one postgame press conference doesn't encapsulate a man's entire personality, you cunt.

Peyton long ago joined the Favraro Club of getting a free pass from the media to act as much a sniveling dicksmack as he likes and never get called out on it (fitting as he and Favre will each retire with one ring).

Yeah, he's such a sniveling dicksmack. Maybe he'll do a Favre-like attention whoring annual retirement contemplation medley 4 or 5 years from now, but for now all Peyton Manning really does is obsessively pore over game film until 2 in the morning and practice. He doesn't have enough of a life or interact with other humans enough to cause any trouble or snivel or smack dicks.

Could you imagine what the reaction would be if, say, McNabb did that? He’d be reamed by every sportswriter in America.

Yeah, could you imagine that? Boy, that'd be a big deal. This is a great point because Manning, who is arguably the best quarterback in the NFL and de facto offensive coordinator of his team criticizing the play of some of his teammates is the exact same thing as a wildly inconsistent quarterback like McNabb doing that.

You would think the football public would immediate gravitate to liking the Pats’ biggest rival but we can’t. Because you’re just that fucking annoying.

Why aren't people all across the country abandoning their hometown teams for the Colts because they're the rival of an unpopular team? Why in the world aren't 49ers fans taking an active rooting interest in games the Colts play against the Titans? It must be because they're fucking annoying. Get fucked, Christmas Ape.

Luckily you got rid of a home field that was actually difficult to play in, not that you have any home games this postseason.

Yeah, the Colts who went 6-2 at home played horribly in their new stadium. Still, that second part is a really sick burn. We're the five seed in the playoffs. Ouch, good one. We started the season 3-4 and went on a 9-game winning streak. We're feeling really fucking raw about how the regular season went for us, aren't we? You're so good at hating, Ape.

Baseball is a beautiful sport!

This is Babe Ruth, the greatest man to ever play the sport of baseball. I'm writing this post because baseball is the great American pastime, and it's being ruined by the modern era. With players using steroids, free agency making people play for ludicrously huge contracts instead of a love of the game, and so many stadiums being named after corporate sponsors, it's destroying the integrity of the most magical sport in the world.

I want baseball to be the way it was. The time when names like Ruth, Mantle, Gherig, and Maris inspired a nation. The days that huge contracts and cheating were nowhere to be found and we were captivated by the purity of the sport. The amazing moment in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The 50 or so years before that when black people weren't allowed to play in the same stadiums as white people. The ten years after Jackie Robinson when black people still weren't allowed to play for the Red Sox.

The collective memories of a nation should be preserved. Remember the year 1919 when the World Series was fixed? Remember the 1920's when immortalized baseball hero Ty Cobb ran into the stands and beat the living shit out of a one-armed man? Remember when Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD? Remember the 80's when over half of all major league players were addicted to cocaine? Remember the time that the most prolific hitter in the history of the sport was banned from the game for life because of illegal gambling? How could we forget all of those magical Babe Ruth home runs that were helped by corked bats? What about the long and storied tradition of rampant cheating in virtually every era in the history of the game? Where has that gone?

Baseball has a long history of proud, beautiful tradition, and to see it being sullied by players making money and cheating in new and interesting ways is.... well.... it brings a tear to my eye and a pit of sadness in my American heart.

It's Christmas, and here's a new video I star in

To be fair it's a video that I unwittingly starred in. I don't think I've ever mentioned it on this blog, but when I was in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade I triumphed in the LaPorte County Spelling Bee three consecutive years and earned three consecutive berths in the National Spelling Bee, which is the shit you've probably seen and laughed at for a little bit on ESPN and ABC. I never made it far enough in the bee to appear on national TV, but I did briefly appear in the Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, and while a majority of my footage was left on the cutting room floor, you can see a whole six minutes of footage of me at the age of 12 on the special features of the DVD.

Well, at yesterday's family get together my cousin asked me if I was aware that I was on College Humor. I replied that I did, because last March my video Smoke Stoppers 2 was featured on their front page. He told me that he wasn't referring to that, but instead was talking about a video in which two guys pretending to be judges intercut themselves with old footage of the 1999 National Spelling Bee, ripping on the kids and saying horribly inappropriate things to them. Maybe part of it had to do with me being all kinds of Christmas drunk at the time, and the fact that it was me, but I probably laughed the hardest I've ever laughed in my life at this video. I'm the third kid, and it's safe to say I get it the worst:



All I have to say is goddamn. I could see somebody getting really hurt and offended by that. However, I thought it was awesome. Also, if any of you know who made the video, could you do me a huge favor and e-mail it to me? College Humor doesn't say who submitted it, and the three versions posted on Youtube are rips of CH's video, and searching my ass off on Google found nothing, so I'd love you forever if you helped me out on that. I want to congratulate them on a job well done and I think they'd be surprised that I do sketch comedy now too.

Terrible the Paper: Volume 4

Chad Pennington Completes Desperation Heave for Ten Yards


Miami Dolphins quarterback Chad Pennington, who has received as much praise for his efficient play as criticism for his lack of arm strength which has only been exacerbated by shoulder injuries, celebrated as he ended the first half of his team's 38-31 win over the Dolphins with a desperate heave completed to receiver Davone Bess, for a ten yard gain.

"The game was tied and I really wanted us to go in there with a lead to build off of, so I just put everything I had into that ball and let that sucker fly," Pennington told the press as he struggled to lift and open a can of Mountain Dew. By throwing the ball as hard as he could, the quarterback who could enter the Pro Bowl as an alternate confidently drove his team to their own 40-yard line in the closing seconds of the half.

Although the game ended in a thrilling victory for the Dolphins, a bizarre locker room incident after the game gained the most attention. Upon hearing that linebacker Joey Porter was making lewd comments about "tearin' up" his wife's "sweet, sweet azz" Pennington swore he would "knock that stupid motherfucker out" and punched his teammate in a blind rage, a gesture that Porter interpreted as a soft and friendly pat on the shoulder.

Why they call him Solid Snake

COLONEL: Good job infiltrating the docks. Now for the purposes of this mission, you will be known as Solid Snake. Are we clear?

SNAKE: Crystal.

COLONEL: Good. Now do you see a waypoint to penetrate the defenses? I repeat, can Solid Snake penetrate?

SNAKE: The air ducts on the north and south ends of the facility look promising.

COLONEL: The enemy compound may look impregnable, but under the snowstorm you should be able to do it. I want Solid Snake to impregnate. (stifles a giggle) Do you copy?

SNAKE: Colonel, why are you talking like that?

COLONEL: I don't (starts laughing audibly).... I don't know what you mean

MASTER (To Colonel): Hey, can I talk to him? I've got a good one.

COLONEL: Snake, I'm putting Master Miller on the line.

MASTER: Snake, are you absolutely sure you brought the correct weaponry for this mission?

SNAKE: One hundred percent.

MASTER: And you have the correct ammo?

SNAKE: No doubt in my mind.

MASTER: So Solid Snake is not firing blanks. Do you copy?

(Colonel starts laughing hysterically)

SNAKE: No, I'm not.

MASTER: No, I want you to say it.

SNAKE: Why do I have to say it?

MASTER: It's.... uh..... it's like an official military protocol thingy. Just say it.

SNAKE: Hugh.... okay..... Solid Snake is not firing blanks

(Master and Colonel both start laughing hysterically)

SNAKE: Okay, what's so goddamn funny? I'm trying to get briefed on the mission and you're all laughing and making jokes. This operation has been too long and hard for me to get the shaft.

(Master and Colonel laugh so hard that tears stream down their cheeks)

SNAKE: It wasn't easy getting to become Solid Snake, and I sure as hell don't want this Solid Snake thing to blow up all over my face.

(Milk squirts out of Colonel's nose)

OTACON: Hey Colonel and Master, what's so funny?

COLONEL: It's nothing, Otacon. Go away

OTACON: Are you making Snake say dick jokes again?

MASTER: Yes, now go away before you ruin it.

OTACON: Oooh, guys! I've got a good one! Put me on, I've got a really good one!

COLONEL: Okay, Otacon, you know that one guy in a group of friends who completely ruins a joke by being way too obvious about it?

OTACON: No...

COLONEL: You don't know, because you are that fucking guy. Please leave us and go jerk off to Neo Sega Genesis Evangelism or something.

OTACON: It's Neon Genesis Evangelion

MASTER: Fag

COLONEL: Just please leave us alone

OTACON: I'm doing it.

(Otacon hacks into the Codec system, silencing Master and Colonel's frequencies and patching himself on the line with Snake)

OTACON: Hey Snake, could you say "I'll try not to blow it in anyone's hair" for me?

SNAKE: Why would I say.... oh, I see what you guys are doing.

COLONEL: I knew you'd ruin it.

MASTER: Fuck you, Otacon!

A Kentucky family experiences the first snow of the season

Mr. Johnson: Guys, I'll tell you what! There's nothing I love more than perfect Kentucky weather with my family. Riding bikes with you is such a joy! It's never lost on me how lucky I am to have you.

Mrs. Johnson: We love you too, honey!

Timmy: Dad is awesome!

Susie: Go dad! Go Johnson family!

Mr. Johnson: Nothing can go wrong today!

(Weather suddenly gets a degree and a half colder)

Timmy: Dad, what just happened?

Susie: I'm scared!

(A single slightly unpleasant looking cloud rolls in)

Mrs. Johnson: Oh Jesus Christ! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!! It's going to happen! It's really going to happen! We're going to get snowed on!

Mr. Johnson (Abruptly slaps his wife): Calm the hell down, woman! I don't ever want to hear you say the "S" word again! It's too fucking horrible to think about, let alone say out loud!

Susie: Daddy, what's snow?

Mr. Johnson (Slaps little Susie in the face so hard that half of her head is covered with a large throbbing red handprint): What did I just say? We never talk about it!

Mrs. Johnson: Honey, the pain is too great for one man to bear. It's time to finally come clean about what happened.

Timmy: It's okay dad, I think I'm ready.

Mr. Johnson (Draws a long, deep breath): I was there for the light five minute flurry of 1991. A lot of good men were slightly inconvenienced on that day! I was driving when the horror began. The roads were so slick that my car slid for literally two seconds when I stopped at a red light. (Screams in terror)

Mrs. Johnson: You very briefly lost control of your car and sat there helpless as your car skidded at a completely non-dangerous speed? My god, I never knew it could be such a terrifying ordeal!

Susie: Daddy, I'm.... I'm sorry

Mr. Johnson: I can only thank god it's over. My family, my lovely family, I'm so sorry I flew off the handle like that. Perhaps you now understand my pain. Oh well, it won't snow today, I just know it. I think we were worrying a little too much about the 'ol weather cooling off. (They all laugh, but their revelry is interrupted by the sudden appearance of snow so light that it wouldn't even bother the Wicked Witch of the West)

Timmy: NO!! OH JESUS NO!!!

Susie: MOMMY!! DADDY!! HELP ME!!!!!

Mrs. Johnson: WHAT DO WE DO? WHAT IN THE HELL DO WE DO?

Mr. Johnson: RUN FOR SHELTER! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

(Frozen with despair, Timmy looks up and a snowflake lands in his eye)

Timmy: AH!! OH JESUS CHRIST, A SNOWFLAKE FELL IN MY EYE!!

Mr. Johnson: NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Mrs. Johnson: NOT MY BOY, NOT MY PRECIOUS, SWEET LITTLE BOY!!

Timmy: Oh god, oh god, oh god. I read in Popular Mechanics for Kids that snowflakes have slight trace amounts of dirt in them. THAT CAN'T POSSIBLY BE GOOD FOR MY EYE!!

Mrs. Johnson: Susie, get away from your brother! He's infected!

Timmy: It's over for me. SAVE YOURSELVES

(Mr. Johnson pulls out a huge Bowie Knife)

Mr. Johnson: HYAAAAAAAAAGH!!!

(He drives the blade into Timmy's skull, instantly killing him)

Mrs. Johnson: HOW COULD YOU???

Susie: What's that red stuff coming out of Timmy's head?

Mr. Johnson: I did it for his own good. He was gone as soon as the snow touched his eye. I just sped up the process.

(The snow suddenly stops. The surviving family members lay on the ground panting for five minutes before regaining their composure and standing up)

Mrs. Johnson: We handled that a lot more calmly and rationally than I thought we would.

Mr. Johnson: Yeah, seriously.

Rock out with your c--k out

Like 99% of America, when I'm at my job I'm as mentally far away from work as possible. Today I spent the first four hours of my shift intently focusing on coming up with variations on the popular term "Rock out with your cock out." I came up with 18. And if you stay with me I'll include a special bonus phrase for the ladies.

1. Rock out with your cock out
2. Hang out with your wang out
3. Zone out with your bone out
4. Stick out with your dick out
5. Space out with your mace out
6. Flip out with your tip out
7. Veg out with your hedge out (Note: This one only really applies to guys with enormous quantities of pubic hair)
8. Fill out with your dill out
9. Wing out with your ding out
10. Point out with your joint out
11. Fade out with your blade out
12. Wipe out with your pipe out
13. Strike out with your pike out
14. Freak out with your beak out
15. Run out with your gun out
16. Black out with your sack out
17. Roll out with your pole out
18. Wig out with your twig out

And a bonus one for the ladies....

Jam out with your clam out! (My coworker Brandon came up with that one, not me.)

6 old-school TV vehicles in which you're likely to get raped

If there's one thing that made TV from the 60's, 70's, and 80's awesome, it was huge colorful vehicles as iconic as the people who drove them. Unfortunately, watching these vehicles kick ass also came with the knowledge that we should probably stay far away from them if we saw anything that even remotely resembled them in real life. Much in the same way that the characters on Friends realistically couldn't possibly keep their enormous New York City apartments or jobs when they hang out in a coffee shop all fucking day, TV isn't real, and there's a good chance if you hung around these vehicles for too long without a gun, taser, pepper spray, or a particularly burly friend, getting sodomized or sexually humiliated in some way by a flabby caped vigilante psycho and his hotpants wearing male nubile teenage companion is really the only inevitable result. (Did I just give away which car is #1? I'll give you a clue: It's the Batmobile)

6. The A-Team Van

Why in the world would I think any rape could possibly happen in this vehicle? It's just a large black windowless van owned and operated by these guys:

In the back we've got Howlin' Mad Murdoch who was declared legally insane and spent the first four seasons of the show living in a mental institution, on the right we have B.A. Baracus, a perpetually angry, screaming, violent man, in the front we've got Hannibal, a man donning a creepy smile and black gloves, and on the left we've got Faceman, a guy who looks as much like a pedophile as someone could possibly look without being photographed with his dick actually inside a kid. I see nothing suspicious about this group. Sorry to have wasted your time.

5. The General Lee

This is the car that brought the Duke boys all kinds of wacky southern fried tomfoolery and adventure. If you're like me and the only knowledge you have of what happens in the deep south is based on Deliverance, you know that families you come across in the backroads of the area are the most likely to be evil chainsaw murderers and sodomizers. You also know that the more southern they are the more evil they are, and you can't get much more southern than painting the fucking Confederate flag right onto your car. Oh, and don't expect to be saved by the police when you're thrown screaming into their trunk. The Duke boys are apparently pretty good at outrunning the cops.

4. The truck from BJ and the Bear

BJ and the Bear was a show about a trucker who traveled the country with his monkey in tow in search of women in distress. Look, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the restrictions and regulations that trucking companies put on their employees, but I'm almost 100% sure that keeping your monkey, who is liable to get curious and start fucking with dials and levers at the drop of the hat, in the cab is a huge goddamn no-no. That means it's pretty obvious that the oddly deranged looking man in the picture giving a thumbs up killed the real Billie Joe McKay on the northbound Interstate 25 and buried his body somewhere in the state of New Mexico and stole his truck and identity. Suddenly his behavior of drifting from state to state in search of women in peril looks like exactly what you'd expect a rapist psycho like him to do. That truck has a huge trailer, and that means a lot of space to string up bodies and do as he pleases with them. Thinking about how the monkey is involved in his twisted games is making me a little sick, so it's time to move on.

3. The Partridge Family Bus

This bus belongs in the same category as BJ and the Bear, as we should well know that drifters who travel the country in colorful modes of transportation are never to be trusted. It's even worse that we're dealing with a family here. There was another family that drifted from place to place too. It was the Manson family.

2. The Mystery Machine

Large windowless van? Check. Drifting from place to place without any apparent home to speak of? Check. A cast of characters that would never be friends under normal circumstances? Check. Implied rampant hallucinogenic drug use among them? Check. A dog food eating hippie who talks to his fucking dog? Check. Blood-curdling terror for any traveler unfortunate enough to lie in their wake? Double fucking check.

1. The Batmobile

Just look at that picture and tell me that anything but non-consensual sodomy is going to happen there.

Proof that Hollywood cares more about house pets than human life

The following is a sample that I pitched to Cracked.com for an article idea. It's the X number of scenes that prove that Hollywood cares more about pets than human life. Check it out:

Film: Independence Day (1996)

What happens:

The aliens have the world surrounded with their numerous saucer-shaped death ships hovering above every major city in the world. With the exception of Jeff Goldblum who has cracked the alien code with his all-powerful 1996 laptop that can detect and decipher alien attack codes and disable super advanced alien shields but would still crash if it tried to run a particularly active Starcraft match, the dregs of humanity have no idea what is about to transpire. Some run from the ships in fear while others stay behind and look on in wonder.

Will Smith's stripper girlfriend tries to escape Los Angeles with her dog but finds herself stuck in traffic and unable to get away. The alien ship opens up and instantly destroys the city with an enormous fiery blast. LA is changed forever, leaving behind a shattered wasteland filled with people barely surviving, their dreams shattered in a landfill for human souls. Okay, maybe it didn't change that much. Anyway, the stripper narrowly escapes the blast by jumping into a tunnel. Everything is sad and scary, but then the music suddenly crescendos into a happy, triumphant swell as her fucking dog joins her and escapes death at the last second.

Wait, what the fuck?

So let me get this straight, director and music guy: millions of people not just in LA but every major metropolitan area in the entire world are dying by having their bodies instantly melted, and even those who somehow managed to get out of the cities are still homeless, and you want me to jump for joy that the goddamn dog made it? Imagine if Schindler's List ended with a little boy with a cat in his arms going to a gas chamber, and happy lighthearted music plays as the cat jumps out of his arms and runs away. Now imagine yourself smashing your head into the screen in frustration at the moralizing of the American film industry.

Pictured: A happy scene

I pitched this to the Cracked editors, and one of them made the point that while the writing is fine, there's a huge problem with the fact that I'm essentially making the same point over and over of "We're supposed to care about animals when people are dying?!?" I was going to resort to my usual defense mechanism toward criticism and say "Fuck you! You're just too stupid to get it!" but I realized that he was absolutely right and I scrapped this idea.

I will f--k your wife for $5,000

Hi, I'm the guy who writes this blog, makes sketch comedy, writes essays, and works a long string of one demeaning, low-paying food service job after another. I am the Gentile Golem of Ron Mexico Productions, and I come to you with a one of a kind offer: If you hire me to do so at any time in the year 2009 I will fuck your wife for $5,000.

You might ask yourself why you would ever agree to that. The answer is simple: I am your best chance of getting her pregnant. Please send me an e-mail if your boys can't swim. Since you're undoubtedly seriously considering this offer, I've done the work for you of listing the Pros and Cons of hiring me to impregnate your wife:

Pros:
-I am 6'5"
-My SAT score was kinda high
-Small children find me funny
-It barely counts as cheating because I'm bad at sex and probably won't last more than 5 minutes.
-Seriously, it doesn't count as cheating if your wife doesn't even enjoy it
-Neither of us working up a sweat means you don't have to run another load of laundry to clean the sheets!
-I scored 180 on a multiple choice take home IQ test the second time I took it!
-I'm genetically likely to implant an athletically inferior ginger kid inside your wife. Since every shitburg between here and Sacramento has a popular dark-haired kid who's good at football, rest assured your little bundle of joy will be special in his own way

Cons:
-Yesterday at work I found a half finished brownie in the break room and ate it. Afterwards somebody told me that the person who took a bite out of it was a particularly slutty coworker, so I might have herpes.


Send inquiries to RonMexicoProductions@gmail.com!

How to pretend critics like your movie

First off, let me say that this is the poster for an actual movie. Directed by and starring Tim Carr, it is currently in "limited" release which actually means it was screened at the San Diego Public Library. I saw the trailer on Youtube, which consists of a bunch of text describing Ryan Leaf's career with a shot of a guy wearing a Ryan Leaf jersey shot with crappy film stock and was convinced that it was a joke. Then I read the story that this film was very much real, I came across this poster, and the inexplicableness (I know it's not a word. Fuck you) of the whole thing caught my attention.

First I have to wonder why anyone would want to pick Ryan Leaf for a topic for a motion picture. The long and short of it is he was a superstar quarterback in college, the Chargers took him second in the 1998 NFL Draft after the Colts took a little-known QB named Peyton Manning with the first overall pick, he failed miserably as a professional starting QB, putting forth quite possibly the most miserable string of performances in the history of the sport and being the most nightmarish asshole his teammates had ever seen. After getting released by the Chargers a couple other teams let him try out for them because they were impressed with his physical abilities and wanted to develop him slowly, but he failed horribly with them as well and he took his millions of dollars of guaranteed money from his original contract and retired at the age of 26.

The real-life story clearly lacks any sort of dramatic structure. Leaf is amazing in college and instantly fails as a pro and fades into obscurity. Anyone who has ever seen a decent sports movie knows that there's an entire act missing here. He needs to start as an underdog, rise to awesomeness, have a huge failure, and then overcome it and triumph in the end. Ryan Leaf's life story fills the first third of a movie at the most. Maybe the story would make a decent 44 minute football equivalent of an episode of Behind the Music, but it's baffling as a movie subject when I can name oh, only about five fucking thousand other sports figures whose lives would be much more interesting.

Hell, Ryan Leaf isn't even the best subject for a movie about an NFL draft bust. How about former wide receiver Rae Carruth? He started with an excellent college career and followed up by being drafted in the first round by the Carolina Panthers. In his first season he led all rookie receivers in receptions, yards, and touchdowns. After breaking his foot and missing most of his next season and a poor showing in the season after that, he plotted the successful murder of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, became a fugitive, and was found hiding in the trunk of a car by the police with $3,900 in cash, a cell phone, extra clothes, candy bars, and jars to hold his urine with him. He was then sentenced to 18-24 years in prison. Tell me that wouldn't be a shitload more interesting than a guy whose greatest claim to fame is not being as good as Peyton Manning.

But you know what? I could be wrong. I'm wrong pretty much all the goddamn time, so I'll admit that I could be completely off the mark here. Who am I to say that Ryan Leaf is a retarded choice for a feature film? After all, would I have ever thought that a movie about a fucking moron sitting on a bench and telling strangers about how he accidentally involved himself in historical events of the 60's and 70's and changed the course of history by being so fucking stupid would win Best Picture and be regarded as one of the absolute best films of the 1990's? Hell, let's say it was 1998 and somebody told me they had an idea for a movie called American Beauty about a middle-aged suburban dad who changes his life for the better by smoking pot and having fantasies about fucking underage cheerleaders. I would have told him to get the fuck away from me, and a year later I would be crying when I saw that guy win Oscars for his work.

So I'll reserve my judgements about the wisdom of making a fucking Ryan Leaf movie and instead focus on something I can tangibly rip on: the poster, and more specifically, the praise from critics printed on it. I'm very suspicious of quotes from critics on movie posters in general, because pretty much anything with the exception of "Two Thumbs Up" from Ebert and whoever he's paired with this week can be completely taken out of context and bullshitted. I'm extra suspicious when people appear to be lining up to praise a feature film about a quarterback who had a career passer rating of 50.0, which for you non-football fan readers is equivalent to being asked by your high school English teacher to write an essay about F. Scott Fitzgerald and stabbing yourself in the neck with the pencil before you even write a word. So for that reason I decided to investigate the three quotes from the poster and see what was really going on.

1. "A curious tale that cinema buffs and football fans would love to relive"
-FootballOutsiders.com

My first reaction to this was "Holy shit, Football Outsiders reviews movies now?" I searched the football news website's archives to find where the quote was taken from and found it to be from this article. Since you probably don't care to read it, I'll just tell you that the article was written while the film was being shot and therefore it came out long before the movie was released and the author never saw the movie. Here is the context for the quote:

"Carr is banking on Leaf's story as a curious tale that football fans and cinema buffs would love to relive."

Basically the article said, "Carr hopes this movie is good" and for the poster he chopped off some words and left it with "This movie is good." I wish I could be that completely selective and full of shit when I tell people stories. For example, an ex-girlfriend of mine could say, "Cody tried to convince me that he has a huge penis, but it's actually the size of a french fry," and then I could tell everyone that she said "He has a huge penis" and just disregard everything else about that sentence.

2. "Exceptional"
-NFL Total Access

This one actually comes with a video clip. The part where the "Exceptional" quote comes from is at the 1:46 mark in this video:



When he called it exceptional, it was clearly a sarcastic reaction to the fact that somebody would ever even get the idea to make a Ryan Leaf movie, it came from fucking Dhani Jones, and he obviously didn't see the actual movie. While I don't think this Leaf film will pan out and become a hit, I will say it will live on in history as the first and only movie to ever pass off a New Orleans Saints linebacker's sarcastic reaction to the trailer as critical acclaim.

3. "This is a story that should be told"
-The Washington News Journal

After ten minutes of Google searching I still can't find any evidence that a publication called the Washington News Journal exists, but I will say that this quote sounds a hell of a lot like the first.


So there you have it. Maybe this movie is awesome and poor Tim Carr just couldn't get any of the snooty real critics to watch his work and truly appreciate his brilliance. Maybe this will prove to be our generation's Forrest Gump. Maybe in a few years Hugh Jackman will star in a Broadway production of Leaf with the black guy from Derrick Comedy playing Rodney Harrison. It's altogether possible I'll someday be proved horribly wrong, but from where I stand I'm just about willing to call a turd a turd.