Back last September, Zman and I found ourselves on the same flight from Newark to Tokyo. It was unusual. And it allowed me to take one weird stalkerish pic.
As he may (or may not) remember, the flight's wifi crapped out on us. This is a suboptimal turn of events on a 13-hour flight. So I had to hunker down and dig into my meager Netflix downloads. But I did not like Bloodline, even though I've had a crush on Linda Cardellini since her Freaks & Geeks days. So I started perusing the movie selections on the flight.
You take a different mindset when you are alone on a flight with no responsibilities for the next ten hours. You're essentially looking for mindless entertainment. The screen is small and the audio is poor, so you don't want to have to think too hard. On recent flights, I dug into Deadpool and the newest X-Men movie. They were both fine. But I couldn't find one to tide me over...until I found Johnny Dangerously.
In the early days of HBO, they seemed to have ten movies on replay over and over again. I saw The Outsiders and Red Dawn about a million times. And Johnny Dangerously was in that mix as well. It's important to remember how iconic that move is. It ages fantastically.
Here are my seven favorite things about that move, which, at 34 years old, is older than my future second ex-wife.
1. Michael Keaton - god damn, he had his comedy fastball working in this. He was great. It's nice to have him back around these days.
2. This was Dick Butkus' second greatest acting effort after his role in Hamburger U.
3. Raymond's dad played a mafia boss and it made sense at the time. Rest in peace, Peter Boyle
4. Weird Al did the opening credits song. This was before his meteoric rise to fame from Eat It, although I will fistfight with any man, woman or child who denies that Rye or the Kaiser is his best tune.
5. Your Testicles and You. Still epic.
6. There are some tremendous cameos in this movie: Mr. Hand, Taylor Negron, Dom DeLuise and Chuck Woolery, to name a few. That's a random group of 80's name that have zero resonance with the millennials.
7. Roman Moronie. Holy crap is he the best. The actor who played him (Richard Dimitri) did very little of note before or after this movie. But he hit it out of the park with this role.
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