I wish I could be more like them
There has been a lack of chatter on here lately, so I am going to sell my self respect and try and get something going. Think back about 18 years ago and picture a younger RTS in a dorm room watching Beavis and Butthead. I don't remember much from those days, but I do remember an episode where the two of them are sitting on the coach watching a Beastie Boys' video. Beavis said "Beastie Boys are cool." To which Butthead replied "Yeah, I wish we could be more like them." In the spirit of Butthead's insight, here is a list of movie characters that I wished I could have been more like when I was 10-18 years old.
#5 Louden Swain, Vision Quest. Louden Swain had a goal to cut enough weight to wrestle Shute, the best wrestler in the state. Along the way he nails some older chick. One, I was not getting any at the time and two I ranged from sucking at wrestling to being completely average. I was alright in the wrestling room, but I was a nut job in the head before a match. I have the balls now, that I lacked then. To this day I am much better dealing with an ambush, than a tricky situation that I know is coming down the pipe. My captain freshman year attempted a vision quest. He could have been a state champ at a higher weight but he cut down to wrestle Willy Short from Simley, hands down the best kid in the state. Willy kicked his ass in the state final.
#4 John Bender, The Breakfast Club. The rebel who landed in detention and did not care. I was not rebellious enough to land in detention for behavior nor did I care enough to shoot myself over a failed elephant lamp. John Bender was a poor man's version of characters normally played by Matt Dillon. If we ever post brush with fame stories on here I have a great one that involves Judd Nelson.
#3 Mad Max Rockatansky, The Road Warrior. He killed guys on motorcycles with mohawks in a post apocalyptic Outback. Do I really need to say more?
#2 Matt Dillon characters, take your pick The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, My Bodyguard or the 3 way with Denise Richards and Neve Campbell (when people thought she was hot and overlooked her gigantic head) in Wild Things. In most movies he was the troubled teen from the wrong side of 35W that I so longed to be while hanging out with the Woodhill crowd.
#1 Snake Plissken, Escape From New York. He was like Mad Max without the anti-semitic views. Really both are just rip offs of the man with no name western hero, but that still does not take away from how totally awesome they were. I really can't describe why he was so cool other than he kicked ass and took names. Interesting fact about the movie, it was filmed in a burned out part of East St. Louis. In essence East St. Louis looks like a futuristic abandoned city that has been turned into a prison. As Clark Griswald said "Roll 'em up."
14 Comments:
RTS - love it. Had a my own list that got erased so will have to re-work but it's coming.
March 4, 2011 at 11:42 AM
Mine are quite different. I guess this reveals something about our own character? Not sure what. Insecurities as a teenager?
I didn't put much thought into this so I'm only thinking of four at the moment, but I'm sure I'm missing a couple major/obvious influences.
4. Andy McCarthy's character in Weekend at Bernie's - had a devil may care attitude I always envied but could never affect.
3. Ty Webb - golfs every day, throws away $25,000 checks, skinny slides with hot blondes.
2. Indiana Jones - what's needs be said about Indiana Jones?
1. Ferris Bueller - the ubercool, self-assured, quick on his feet, worshipped by the girls, massively popular but still nice to everyone teen I assumed everyone wished to be. I wish for my sons to be Ferris. They will be at New Trier and have kind of an oblivious father, after all.
March 4, 2011 at 2:53 PM
Awesome list MCA. I think you hit the nail on the head about teenage insecurities as I was nothing like the people on my list. I think that the spur of the moment probably makes it more accurate. If we think too hard we might pick who we think we should pick instead of who we really would have picked. Your description of Ferris and Bracken are similar.
March 4, 2011 at 3:12 PM
Ok, my list doesn't really have to do with characters I wish I could have been more like rather they are characters from when I was 10 to 18 years old that I wanted to be, in some way or another. So MCA, let's talk insecurities, shall we?
5. John McClane - From all the Die Hard movies. Under "it's not about the size of the dog in the fight, it's about the size of fight in the dog" is a picture of McClane. Smart, crafty, and he smoked which I thought was tops. You had me at Nakatomi Towers.
4. Doughboy - Yes, motherf'ing Ice Cube from Boyz n the Hood. Mostly because Doughboy was tougher than tough and not scared of shit in a part of town that, to be honest, was frightening for me to imagine having to live in. Also, Doughboy got revenge for Ricky and kept Cuba Gooding Jr. from crapping his pants all the time. Solid.
3. Billy the Kid - not the one from history but the one that Emilio Sheen played in Young Guns and Young Guns part Deux. Lines like "I'll make ya famous," "Reap the whirlwind, Brady. Reap it!" and "Hey, Colonel Shithead. You can kiss my ass. Get President Hayes down here, then we'll come out" made riding around the Old West murdering people look so cool.
2. Stephen 'Bull' McCaffrey - Kurt Russell in Backdraft. RTS and I saw this movie and started hanging out at firehouses (well, not really hanging out, more driving by them and pointing them out to one another but I digress.) McCaffrey was "the hero of heroes." He saved children and fought the good fight all while surrounded by fire. . . fire! Sure, he dies pretty terribly in the end but all the great heroes do.
1. Jake Ryan (minus Molly Ringwald) - he drove a red Porsche, he was beyond popular, loaded (see red Porsche), cool, and could get any girl. If memory serves RTS once told me if he ever had a son his name would be "Jake" because you never met a guy name "Jake" that was a loser. Enough said.
Have at it Dr. Freud.
March 4, 2011 at 6:58 PM
There's really only one: cool hand lucas jackson. There's never been a cooler, smoother character.
March 6, 2011 at 6:49 PM
Oh, and to piggyback on jan's boyz n the hood fetish, I always fantacized of being O-dog. He doesn't take shit from anybody. Especially korean grocers, who I've never had any problem with but apparently in 90s black gang cinema are the russians to our 80s reagan era cinematic jingoism.
Wolverines!!!!
March 6, 2011 at 8:18 PM
FWIW, I've definitely met a couple Jakes who strain RTS's theory.
Good point on my consistency. Another one I didn't think of before, Marty McFly, falls in the same damned category. I guess we all know what kind of character I aspired to be in high school but failed because I was too damned responsible. I got the "doesn't give a shit" attitude figured out in college, courtesy of a C- in second level integral calculus my first semester freshman year), and had my uniform figured out by sophomore year, too (khakis, t-shirt, solid color sweater vest, scuffed up Sauconys). Amazing in retrospect how the "most popular dude on campus" status didn't quite follow.
I sense that Jan wanted desperately to rebel against his stoic Scandahoovian intellectual parents by copping a badass 'tude.
BG, what say you, Anthony Michael Hall?
March 8, 2011 at 6:17 PM
MCA - funny that you had Marty McFly on your list as I entertained putting him on mine but went for John McLane instead. McFly's "everyman(boy)" attitude and DeLorean that traveled through time were tough to beat.
I dropped Freshman year Calculus and upon my return home for my Summer break was told by my parents that if I was into dropping classes and getting poor grades I didn't need to go to the school I was attending and could just as easily transfer to something closer to home. I promptly got my shit together in fear of being a Normandale Lion. Funny how reality can quickly set in.
BG - I'm guessing Jimmy Chitwood is top 5, right?
March 8, 2011 at 7:25 PM
-Chitwood - no question. Straight laced kid who achieved the athletic status I never even came close to
-Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn - I mean, to think that women would just show up at your hotel room to have relations? Mind blowing...compltely mind blowing.
-Kaiser Sozay - A little after high school...but it blew my mind how quick on his feet that Spacey was (sorry to sound like Friend of Blog PW, who still has man-crush on Spacey)
-Dante from Clerks - Misery loves company, and this guy seemed to be the well-meaning guy who never caught a break. sort of the story of my adolescence.
Not a great list, but I am slammed here and this is the best I could do. And no, Anthony Michael Hall just didn't resonate...maybe because it hit too close to home.
March 8, 2011 at 7:37 PM
I too have a calculus story. My freshman year was rocky, so rocky that my dad suggested the military to me at the end of the year. The thought of the military scared the crap out of my, see the aforemention lack of balls. I had failed calculus before the final. I did not drop it because I had already dropped chemistry 414. The engineering weed out classes were weeding me out. My dad was pissed and told me to bring home the final so that he could teach it to me over the summer. I had to do an hour everynight before I was allowed to leave the house. Instead of taking the final, I went in took the back page off the test, wrote the questions down, stuffed the sheet in my pocket and turned in a blank exam 15 minutes after the test started. The TA and other test takers all looked at me like "what the hell is this kid doing."
I am so pissed at myself for being such a f'up that first year. I don't think the classes were too hard for me but I never gave myself a chance by putting in zero effort and getting wrapped up in so many of the pitfalls that doom so many freshman. I will never know though and that is the biggest regret of my life. The me of today would hate the me of yesterday if we met.
March 9, 2011 at 7:41 AM
RTS - I've known you for upwards of 25 years and that is the first I have ever heard of your biggest regret (there are probably 10 other things I could have come up with for you for your biggest regret before that.) I never knew that Randy had suggested the military for you, can't imagine a worse fit than you in the armed services.
I can guarantee that none of those classes you took were "too hard" for you, what was "too hard" was the fact all those classes got in the way of the fact that you were 18 and wanted to party your balls off. Quick anecdote that may shed some light - RTS was the first of our group of friends that went to college. I called him after his first night on campus to see how he was. RTS told me he had gotten so blottoed the night before that he had peed in his trash can in his room. He then went on to say that the trash can held all his rolled up posters he was waiting to put on his wall. RTS, the problem solver, relayed that he simply cut off the peed on parts and still hung the posters. This start to college may have something to do with how his freshman year went. Still one of my many, many, many favorite RTS stories.
March 9, 2011 at 10:31 AM
If it makes anyone feel better, I had a straight D going into the final in my aforementioned calc course. And I was a math DORK in high school - I tested into the UofM Talented Youth Mathematics Program in 8th grade, where you took Algebra II, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calc in a two year period with a class once a week on campus downtown. NERDS!!! So I took AP Calc in high school as a sophomore. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to go from there, so I was two years cold when I got to college. There were a bunch of Asian kids and guys with glasses in my class, who definitely were not in front of a keg four nights a week, and they kicked my ass to the curb and started thrashing me repeatedly.
I remember well calling my dad in tears of panic after getting about a 50/100 on the last pre-final test. I had hit my ceiling. I must have gotten lucky on the final to bring the grade up, but I immediately became a full time liberal arts student after that. Never took another math course, and shied away from even taking any college level Physics out of fear of the math. And Physics was a favorite of mine in high school and I had prior to that even considered majoring in it.
In other words, I gave up and pussed out when I ran into an intellectual challenge I couldn't easily surmount. End result was I ended up on a course that sailed toward law school instead of business school, and now a career where I work my nards off and make significantly less money than any number of jackwads with MBA's who add even less to the world than I do and get home before 7:00 on a regular basis.
So, yeah, regrets, I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention...
March 9, 2011 at 2:04 PM
Sniff, sniff, awww you guys sure know how to pick up a guy when he is down. Although, I am curious about the 10 things Jan thinks I should regret more. Please do not post them we can discuss over a beer sometime. I wouldn't mind hearing the story of the time BG's spreadsheet had a miscalculation and he almost got a B.
March 10, 2011 at 7:14 AM
It think it would be great to visit Blue Waters hotel in Antigua.
April 23, 2011 at 12:12 PM
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