A Fist Full Of Rebates

Iowahawk’s take on half time:

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. Okay, yeah, so this isn’t Detroit, it’s actually New Orleans. So sue me. We were supposed to film this in Detroit, but GM rented it out to film their Chevy Truck Apocalypse ad. But imagine this really was Detroit, with all its gritty inspiring he-man decay. When the chips were down we all pulled together, hosed down the streets, and turned up the dramatic shadow lighting. Now Motor City is fighting again – as the world’s cheapest location shoot for zombie movies.

Sure, I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. I was in ‘Every Which Way But Loose,’ for crissakes. There were times when we didn’t understand each other, because you complained that I sounded like an emphezema victim who gargled with Grape Nuts. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead, no matter how hard I squinted.

Goddammit, somebody get me a throat lozenge.

But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Did you see me bitch and whine after 30 takes with a smelly orangutan? No. I sucked it up and yelled ‘action’ one more time. Because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can’t find a way, then we’ll call the trainer and order another orangutan, one that doesn’t throw its turds at the union crew.

Go read it all. You know you want to.

7 thoughts on “A Fist Full Of Rebates”

  1. Not happy with Eastwood’s Obama add, but I’m also not liking the trashing of “Every which way but loose”. I like movies set in flyover country with a little joy in them, as opposed to the godforsaken bleakness of “Winter’s Bone” and its ilk. There was a time Hollywood knew it had customers that don’t live on a coast…

    1. Slim pickings acknowledged, however it remains a movie about an orangutan. Reflect on that: an orangutan. It’s is one step removed from “Ishtar” (I will allow our esteemed panelists debate over who in that flick was the orangutan.)

      1. Ishtar! Take that back. The movie was about the adventures of Philo Beddoe, a trucker who picked up extra money in the underground fighting circuit. Clyde the orangutan was a sidekick; an occasional bodyguard; maybe a life coach. But the movie was not about him. EWWBL was the second highest grossing movie of 1978. Ishtar was a black hole that lost 40 million.

  2. You’re seeing the results in innovative new cars like this pink Fiat 500 J-Lo Edition. Maybe it’s not a Gran Torino, but it’s made in Torino. Or Ontario, or something. The important point is this: you buy one of these Italian-Canadian babies, and you’ll be getting Chrysler the cash it needs to pay back the loans to the government that pays the bills for everybody in this whole city.

    Funny cuz it’s true.

  3. The most famous “Dirty Harry” quote has to be “Go ahead. Make my day . . ” The movie is “Sudden Impact”, and the scene is a hostage standoff with robbers in a diner, and the provocation is the robber wanting to shoot a hostage, with the implication that were the robber to shoot the hostage, maybe that action would give Harry Callahan a free field of fire to dismember the robbers with large caliber rounds.

    The next most famous quote after that is, “Do you feel lucky, punk?” from the movie “Dirty Harry”, where Harry Callahan is toying with a psycho killer. Harry knows perfectly well how many unfired rounds, if any, remain in his signature 44 Magnum revolver, and he is as much as taunting a criminal suspect to “draw” first so Harry can finish him off without it being murder on Harry’s part. I am thinking in the first encounter, Harry is out of bullets but in the second encounter (“In the excitement and all, I don’t rightly know how many shots I’d fired”), the scenario I outline plays out.

    The third most memorable Dirty Harry line, to my reckonning, has to be “Ketchup on a hotdog? You disgust me.” The movie is again “Sudden Impact”, the scene is that he and another detective are getting lunch from a hotdog stand, as we know that action-oriented police detectives always eat lunch from the nearest hotdog stand because they are action-oriented and don’t have time for anything else. The other detective was someone Dirty Harry was forced to work with owing to jurisdiction but whom Dirty Harry neither liked nor respected. The line is memorable because I always thought there was something a little off of mixing the somewhat sweet taste of tomato ketchup with the very salty and other savory seasonings of a hot dog.

    So will Halftime in America be the source of a fourth (Clint Eastwood but not Dirty Harry) memorable quote?

  4. And, speaking of hideous rusted clunkers from Detroit, please enjoy Madonna’s halftime show.

    You know, I was wondering how she managed to dress up as a Valkyrie WITHOUT wearing pointy metal cones, but now I suspect there was a wardrobe malfunction involving rust.

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