Joe Santo Hits the Jackpot

This two month-ish movie quest began as I got inordinately excited about it while engaged in a typical stream of consciousness email to JAY!!. As will be revealed in some short order, we econverse pretty much on the daily. Hooray technology! The summer of action was spawned out of a number of factors:

• The Expendables is coming out, which is awesome. I don't know how the movie is going to be, but just that it's coming out, that's awesome right there.
• Since I moved 2000 miles from the Exquisite Brigitte and my fat and becoming-fat cats, I have a considerable amount of free time. During my nightly free time I watch a lot of movies. After six months of watching a lot of movies I was starting to get to a pretty weird place in my quqeueueeeueueue where I was watching a lot, I mean, A LOT of foreign movies. So I was open to suggestions, shall we say.
• I thought it would be fun to collectively produce some form of entertainment with my fellow contributors, as we are downright hilarious any time we're together. However, aside from Jay and Joe, none of us technically live in the same city. (Yes, Jay and Dream Joe, you win the proximity contest. The Viceroy and I are a mere 5.9 miles from each other, but in are governed by different local agencies.) So the web, and a loose theme, seem a good place to start a collaboration.
• I was really excited to watch a bunch of classics that I shamefully hadn't seen, to make fun of Sly's awful acting, Arnold's terrible accent, and the lame plots of Jason Statham movies, and I was excited to see a lot of people get kicked in the face and have stuff gloriously blown up.
• And as I built my SoA ququeueueuwueuuwwue, I was tickled every time I added an early-career movie by Sly or Arnold. I like quality films, but as evidenced by my crush on Best of the Best 2, I'm 100% game for camp as well.

I have no idea where the Viceroy gets this "Son of Hercules" business, as from my trusty interweb sources Arnold's first credited role is "Hercules in New York." I saw part of this movie in college. It included the line "Hey, stop that chariot!" being yelled in the middle of New York. It was spectacular. However, due to his thick accent, Arnold's voice was dubbed right out of the film. The first Arnold movie available on netflix was "Stay Hungry". So under the guise of my last bullet point, I was elated to add it to my queueeeueueueue, and aside from some mid-week work fatigue and the after effects of laboriously recapping "The Fist of the North Star", delighted to receive it and throw it in my video disc spinner.

BEST OF THE 5Qs

Tonight: The Best of the Best

Who: Eric Roberts. You know him because Chet did such a fine job introducing him yesterday.
Also: James Earl Jones, you know him as the black dude with the awesome voice; Phillip Rhee, you know him as the guy who made his career out of "Best of the Best" movies; Chris Penn, you know him as Sean's fat younger brother, or from Reservoir Dogs, Corky Romano, Mulholland Drive, Footloose, shit I don't know it depends on your viewing habits; various Korean actors.
What: The preparations for and action of an international karate tournament between the American and Korean national teams.

This is getting too intense

Surgeon. Soldier. Arctic fisher. Oil driller. Rene Zellweger's personal assistant. No. These are not the toughest jobs. The toughest job is trucking. Trucking puts you on the road, all to yourself. For so long. You have to drive treacherous mountain passes and groom yourself in the reflection from your truck's chrome. Trucking makes your toy-empire-wealthy father in law cut you off from the family. Or it makes you desert them to deal drugs. It's not entirely clear, but it definitely has a profound effect on your family life in one of those ways.

Grounding. Spanking. Forgetting a piano rehearsal. Diddling his girlfriend. No. These are not the most difficult transgressions for a father to atone to his son for. The most difficult transgression to atone for is deserting your family and never writing your son. Or writing your son and having your sonofabitch toy magnate father in law keep your son from getting your letters. Hundreds of letters! It doesn't help either if you're a trucker and therefore on a completely different social scale. Muscles aren't everything, after all.

Darts. Pinball. Drinking. Getting VD from truckyard hookers. No. These are not the most hardcore passtime of truckers. The most hardcore passtime is arm wrestling. It's the true test of just how enormous your triceps have become. The true test of how effective your in-cab weight pulley is. And thankfully, when they have big arm wrestling tournaments, you get a second chance to be harcore, because the tournaments are double elimination.

But if one hardcore trucker dude spends enough time with his alienated son, Lincoln Hawk might just be able to teach him a thing or two about muscles. About competitive fire. About believing in yourself. About being a better person. He might be able to begin to atone for being gone for twelve long years and driving his rig so slowly that they miss the passing of his son's mother. He might even be able to teach his son how to drive, which could theoretically come in handy. And by being hardcore and patching things over with his son, he might find the will deep within him to be the best at the most hardcore trucker passtime, to beat Survivor's Rupert at the table, and to win a critically needed new rig in the process. He might find a way to go

OVER THE TOP

May I remind you that arm wrestling tournaments are held in a double-elimination format.