Mystery Men

Hey Comrades!

Editor's note: The next few paragraphs, a blog complaining about a movie about a blog, do have a point. Anyone considering this hypocritical will be sent to musical Siberia.

I finally saw The Bourne Identity. WOW! A week later, my mom was watching Julie and Julia. I made the mistake of watching it too, and came down with a severe case of estrogen poisoning. Even mom thought it was a bit much. (For those of you who haven't seen it, it's basically a story of two very average women and a blog. To paraphrase an example of fine ciema, George of the Jungle, "Dude, if I wanted to see that, I would have stayed in a library!')

I so wanted an extra scene in the movie, sort of combining the action of the first one. It would go like so: The insufferably emotional blogger (Julie, not me) walks into a quiet kitchen with a frosted glass window...Looking around warily, she sees nothing wrong, until - a giant LOBSTER with a machine gun crashes through the glass, firing constantly. They have a big fight, where she takes the worst insult she can find, and verbally mortally wounds it and on it. The lobster runs off the balcony into a pot of boiling water.

Too bad that doesn't exist. That would be awesome.

In the meantime, I saw something almost as cool. Mystery Men was the name of the flick, and it was utterly stupid. I loved it. It was such a parody of a superhero movie, it was profound. Ben Stiller plays a wannabe superhero who's power is uncontrollable rage - except he's just pretending. His love interest, a waitress, thinks he's stupid. Man, I so relate to this guy. She finally starts to give him a chance, and asks him his name right before he's off on a dangerous mission. He makes up some silly sounding title, and she's just about to run off, when he says "Roy...It's Roy." She says "Just be Roy."

He goes back to his posse, and as they're riding into battle in an armored personnel carrier, he's just sitting there, with a silly grin on his face, and says "You know, I'm just not an angry guy!" His friends try to insult him to rile him up, to no avail.

In the end, when the bad guy is gonna kill his girl, he finds his inner rage, climbs up the wall with forks thrown by his friend, and saves the day.

I felt like that today. I realized I was groundless, with no belief of where I was going with music. I let it sit, and was terrified of the emptiness of not knowing what I stood for.

Then, later, when I half-threatened to rob the local bank of their way cool pens with magic wands attached, I realized my core and my belief of what motivates me to do what I do musically: Entertainment.

I guess it took a bit of floating in uncertainty to figure out the truly obvious. Now, per my previous blog post and that wonderful TED video (check it out if you haven't seen it!), I can operate from this core.

So, what's your core? Do you have any supposed superpowers that are an affectation, arbitrary, or a mask? It's hard to use your real powers, because if they're rejected, well, that means you are. Ouch.

But...No pain, no gain, comrade!

- Josh

PS. The best part about that movie: They went out to rescue the hero of the story, and accidentally killed him. The general reaction of the cast was "oops!" Refreshing!