Better Off Dead
Motto: "It's with a very young Cusack. Pretty much all gags,
but they're not bad gags. I think you might like it."
She was right, I did like it. Better Off Deadi is essentially a teenage Cusack (who was 19 at the time, and had starred in a coupla teenage-interest materia obscuraii) going through an hour and a half of mostly visual gags nominally and rather loosely set to the music of a typical "teenage discovery" blabla like the US keeps making for some god forsaken reason. You know the crap, guy thinks he loves a girl who's a total bitch while neglecting much sweeter girl but then comes to senses and so on.
The raisin thingiii is definitely memorable ; the "anti-highschool" where the kids are genuinely interested in the subject matter and actually good at is is indeed very close to the actual highschool I went to (yes - believe it or not that is exactly how school went when I was in school!) ; the monomaniac Korean brothers are comedically monumental and so on.
There are many possible things to do on a rainy day ; there are various ways to employ that pleasantly mellow half-day after drinking massively the whole night previous ; there's some things you can show a girl you just fucked just as well as your underage first cousin ; this list may continue as well as split into various sublists. Better Off Dead fits well in all the above, which is more than can be said about most other things. It's ubiquitously comedic, let's say.
There's worse things to be.
———- 1985, by Savage Steve Holland with John Cusack [↩]
- Putative productions that have been anecdotally shown to exist and are collectively believed to make up about five-sixths of all cinema. [↩]
- "I think we're all going to enjoy this little treat. I got the recipe from the Ladies' Home Journal. The mail got wet in the rain, so some of the pages ran together, but what I couldn't read I improvised with my own creative ideas. You see, it's got raisins in it. You like raisins."
This introduction precedes and forebodes an unbelievably tensile aspic of dubiously gray-pink aspect, which then proceeds to crab off the plate when poked. It's the food gag of all time! [↩]
