Twenty for Twenty: Heart and Souls

The world has changed a lot since 1993. On the 20th of each month, Twenty for Twenty takes us back to the best of 1993 and shares some gems that are gone, but shouldn’t be forgotten. If reminiscing is your thing, feel free to check out my Ten for Ten or Thirty for Thirty posts — which are literally the exact same gimmick cheaply repurposed for a combination of my own amusement and laziness.

What if I told you we could put Charles Grodin, Kyra Sedgwick, and Robert Downey Jr. into the same room and watch them perform onscreen for two hours? You’d probably have to google two of those three names like I did. But luckily 1993 beat you to the punch, and produced the heart and soul warming movie, Heart and Souls.

If Downey had made this movie ten years later it would’ve been called Heart and Souls and a Coke Problem.

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The Gras is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Mardi

I was perusing the internet for…does it even matter? At this point in our society does one even need to qualify why one was exploring the internet? Isn’t it just a given 70% of the time (which is probably a lowball percentage)? Anyway it wasn’t porn and let’s leave it at that.

I was perusing the internet and came across a list of “funny words to help you write funnier stories” and I got about as far as the first three (in case you wondered: bamboozled, bevy, and bazinga —worth noting that the last one isn’t even an actual word) before I stopped reading and thought to myself: this is what people are using to create humor? No wonder Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men and Castle are in the top ten highest rated comedies of 2012 (via imdb). For that matter, NCIS (which for God knows why is listed as a comedy) is rated six spots higher than one of my favorite TV comedies, the late 30 Rock — which people tell me is just an NYC-inside-joke heavy, fast-talking “smart” non-comedy for pretentious assholes — but I suppose that’s what I get for letting my waiter make conversation with me when he should be in the back figuring out how to not mess up my drink a second time and what the hell he’s gonna do with a liberal arts degree in communication.

I’m hardly an expert on the matter, but to me using a list of funny words to help “funny-up” your writings is the equivalent of using a fart to open up your stand-up comedy routine — it probably gets a bit of a chuckle initially, but then people are just left with the stench of your actual content (both figuratively and literally in that example). Also, “fart” was shockingly absent from the aforementioned list of funny words, which makes me question the legitimacy of the entire thing.