< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
The Hollywood publicity mills have just assured us that the comedy hit of the summer with be Ghostbusters II.
At least there is something, such as a film, to evaluate. The predictions that are truly amazing this time of year are the college football forecasts. Teams have yet to take the field, even for practice, and yet you see that CU is thrilled to be already ranked in the Top 20. How do they manage that? Don't sportswriters have anything better to do than concoct meaningless lists? Don't we have anything better to do than read those lists?
Anyway, sequels are seldom as good as their predecessors, and in the case of Ghostbusters, there were many good possibilities that the studio neglected. Our world is full of problems, annoyances, irritants and aggravations that are far more irksome than mere ghosts and phantasms, and I'm sure that you too would enjoy some of these movies:
·Borebusters. They call on your phone and provide hours of ennui about who winked at whom at their exciting workplace, an insurance claims processing center. When you hang up, they appear moments later at your door, babbling interminably about wallpaper and yard care. No matter how you try to steer the conversation, they always turn it back to something which interests them -- and only them.
In this hilarious revenge megahit, a special team of Borebusters takes on the powerful worldwide conspiracy, the Tedium Distribution Network, by giving them a dose of their own medicine. Bores are tied to straight-backed chairs and given drugs to make their eyes stay open as they are forced to watch paint dry. They have to listen while you prattle about how Sears shipped you the same wrong thing on three straight tries, and nod encouragingly while you speculate as to the likely causes for five or six hours.
They're tortured with CSPAN reruns when they fall behind while memorizing laundry lists. In the grisly, horrifying climax, the Borebusters catch the Head Bore, some fellow named G.H.W. Bush, and make him watch vacation slides and home movies for 49 straight hours, until even he cracks and says something interesting.
· Snobbusters. You know who they are. They're
everywhere, and nothing's ever quite good enough for them.
The snide comments slide easily from them in an endless
torrent of sneering little put-downs: It's too bad you
don't have more time to work on your lawn,
or You
know, your house has some real possibilities.
The next time somebody disparages your pet or your car, or acts like his weekend of rock climbing was vastly superior to your weekend of drinking beer on the front porch, don't hesitate. Call the Snobbusters.
Cholesterol-free cuisine snobs suddenly find themselves standing in line at McDonald's. The BMW driver immediately is standing next to the highway on a sweltering day where his '49 Studebaker pickup has just thrown a rod. The house snob finds herself under a bridge in the railroad yards. In the electrifying finale, a literary condescension artiste is locked in a room of Harlequins.
·Doltbusters. It started so innocently. They were
going to purify the corporate environment and thereby
improve productivity. First it was a drug-free
workplace,
but then they discovered that half their
productive people had been strung out most of the time. So
they imposed the smoke-free office,
and learned that
that was no improvement, either.
It was time to go to extremes, so they called the Doltbusters.
In the resulting idiot-free workplace, productivity skyrocketed as memos were reduced to a minimum, and those that remained were brief and easy to understand. No one ever had to stop work to go over and fix a colleague's machine by plugging it in. Nor did jobs have to be done three or four times before they were done right.
Doltbusters even has a sequel, which isn't quite so funny. In Doltbusters II, the productive company's dolt-infested competitors file complaints. When that doesn't work, the bad guys set up a PAC and buy some legislation. The U.S. Congress passes a law requiring the affirmative action hiring of incompetents, and the world goes back to normal.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >