The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, revisited

This is not a good movie. It is, however, a fun movie, from a genre lost in time. The “Diceman” comedy-club physical tics don’t translate well to screen close-ups, but otherwise it doesn’t take the character too seriously, and ends with him outgrowing it, much like Clay’s earlier film Casual Sex? (which Lea Thompson reportedly hated because they changed the ending to have “The Vin-man” redeem himself in her character’s eyes, and being a Good Feminist™, she wanted no part of that).

Clay has said that he thinks the film failed because of the orchestrated anti-Dice campaign that derailed his career. Yeah, I disbelieve; it wasn’t raunchy or edgy or quotable enough to satisfy his fans, and ended up just cheesy, with no rewatch value. And it debuted three weeks after Robocop 2, one week after Die Hard 2, and the same week as Ghost.

Actually, forget every other 1990 summer movie. Ghost was a monster hit that was still in more theaters in December than FF opened its three-week July run in. There was never a universe where FF was going to be a big hit, but it might have limped along for a while in a year without major competition for screens.

Anyway, have a dark-haired cigarette-smoking Italian-American in a studded leather jacket, sitting on a red convertible giving attitude:

(closest I managed to getting fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror; ZIT clearly doesn’t know what they are, and it was 50/50 what side of the car the steering wheel ended up on)

Grokking the negative

Pretty sure the AI-image bots flooding X in an effort to steal clicks from the bikini-photo bots have no idea what the letters “SFW” stand for, and are just applying the label randomly.

The last time I was in a work environment where the first image could have been displayed without complaint was in the Eighties, and it was a summer job that involved moving heavy objects. And even then, only because no women went back into the break room to hang out with the janitors.

NSFW

Seriously, the only images I see tagged “SFW” on X are the ones that aren’t.

Amazon ‘product support’

Wow, that was a tedious waste of my time. Ordered an item that required assembly and installation, found no instructions in the box or linked to the product page. Amazon insists that they handle product support, and sends me to a page that asks about the quality of the delivery. Twenty minutes of automated menus and chatbots, and the only thing I can do is return it for a refund as “defective”.

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