It would be a standard trivia question type of game show, but with a little twist: the contestant puts his very testicles on the line.

Round one would consist of a set number of questions. Each question answered correctly is worth some cash. For each incorrect answer, the contestant has his nuts squeezed in a Christmas style nutcracker.

The second round is a little different: the contestant must correctly answer ten questions to move on to the next round. In the allotted time, the host will ask as many questions as necessary. But it isn’t just a ticking clock you have to worry about, no sir. At the start of the round, the contestant’s balls are placed in the mouth of the nutcracking soldier. When the timer starts, the nutcracker begins gradually squeezing tighter and tighter until:
A. The contestant gives ten correct answers
B. The contestant’s gonads explode
You’ve got to keep your wits about you in this fast paced round!

The third and final round is similar to the first in that each incorrect response yields a crunch from the nutcracker. The third-round twist is that the contestant must also answer the questions while holding a lit Roman candle in his ass; if the firework falls out, you get another nut squeeze, the round instantly ends, and the player forfeits all his winnings up to that point.

You’d watch a show like that, right? I know I would! And believe me, people would play it. Shows like Fear Factor proved that people will do just about anything if the prize is good enough. Heck, people will even compete fiercely when the only prize is the chance to be Bret Michaels’ girlfriend, which I’d say is more like a penalty than a reward.

So check your local listings for You Bet Your Balls.

So you probably also know all about how Facebook wants you to “Like” everything by clicking on a little link, and then once you Like some things it will tell you about some other things you might like to Like, based on other people who Liked the same things that you like.

Here’s one it gave to me recently. The suggestion for something I might like was “action movies.” A little generic, perhaps, but okay, sure, I like some action movies.

Now here’s the justification it gave for suggesting that to me:

Many who like L’Avventura like action movies

That’s a head scratcher, I have to say. Yes, it’s true, I like L’Avventura and I like my fair share of action movies. But, starting with one, it’s something of a leap to reach the other.

If you’re not familiar with L’Avventura, allow me to explain. It’s a 1960 film from director Michelangelo Antonioni, and the first in a thematic “trilogy” that includes La Notte and L’Eclisse. I like all three films, though I think L’Avventura is the best of the lot.

What’s it about? Well, it’s sort of about this woman who, while on holiday with her lover and friends, goes missing. Except it isn’t about that at all, because once she disappears everyone basically forgets about her. This isn’t a movie about plot. What it’s really about is the emptiness in the lives of the idle rich, their inability to feel anything or to have meaningful relationships. There’s a scene where two characters—lovers, ostensibly, though the word is hardly accurate—kiss and embrace, but only as long as a bellboy is watching; once they don’t have an audience, what’s the point? They’re only going through the motions of passion because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

It’s a movie where nothing really happens, and that’s the point. Nothing “happens” on screen because nothing is happening in the characters’ lives. Not for nothing have critics referred to “Antoniennui.” The film is all about world-weariness, emotional emptiness, and loneliness in the midst of a crowd (if these people can be said to even feel enough to feel lonely).

It’s about as far removed as you can get from big bold action movies, and each time I see the suggestion on my Facebook page (it keeps coming up again and again) I laugh.

But I also see a glimmer of hope. After all, it did say that many who like action movies also like Antonioni’s deliberate, thoughtful meditation. Maybe there’s hope, after all, that inside every slackjawed audience member sitting breathlessly on the edge of his seat during Transformers, there’s a true lover of film waiting to break out, if only he could be exposed to something that would challenge and, most importantly, respect him as a viewer.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Now, I love this movie. But when I was a child, one of the movies I watched over and over and over again, as children do, was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is also an excellent picture. But because it was such an important part of my early life as a viewer, any time Kathleen Turner opens her mouth to speak, I can’t help but think: Jessica Rabbit!

With that in mind, the sex scenes in Body Heat take on a disturbing tone, don’t they? I mean, you kinda can’t help but think of Roger Rabbit taking the place of William Hurt during all those passionate encounters, and that’s just plain wrong. Roger Rabbit should not be doing that!

I was also watching the retrospective documentaries on the Body Heat DVD, where writer/director Kasdan talks about how he loved the film noir of the 40s.  He lists several titles, and the posters from those movies he lists and others appear on the screen. Noticeably absent from both the string of posters and Kasdan’s lists is Billy Wilder’s 1944 Double Indemnity. Because, you know, the plot of Body Heat definitely has no similarities to the plot of Double Indemnity, no sir. As different as night and day, those two!

Another picture I watched recently was The Ten Commandments, because who doesn’t love some Chuck Heston. A lot of discussion of this movie in today’s hip, detached atmosphere focuses on the film’s kitschy aspects, looking at it is as something of a guilty pleasure. (Edward G. Robinson doesn’t actually say “Where’s your Messiah now,” but he could.) And that’s sort of true, but it also has many genuine pleasures. If you can’t take genuine pleasure from Heston, Yul Brynner, Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, Lily Munster and that lady who brings Spock back to life, then the hell with you.

The movie also, as you might expect from a Moses biopic, has a scene where the infant deliverer is placed in a basket and set to float among the reeds. The basket the baby is put into has a hinged top and is shaped oddly like a space pod. Watching the sequence I couldn’t help wishing for a shot of what Moses sees inside the basket as an image of his father Amram tells him all about the responsibilities he’ll have, as the last son of Krypton, when he finally arrives on Earth.

This would work especially well in light of the famous scene later in the movie when Moses flies through the air carrying Nefretiri and a helicopter.

“Prediction: memory enhancement.”

(P.S. I know that taking ginkgo biloba doesn’t actually do anything. But Ginkgo Balboa definitely would.)

Then, in 2002, came Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s last outing as 007 and one of the five worst movies I’ve ever paid money to see in a theater. I was absolutely repulsed by the movie’s oppressive badness. The experience of watching that movie was like when you’re a little kid and a bully pushes you down and farts on your head, except the bully was thirty feet tall and the fart was in deafening Dolby surround sound and lasted for 133 minutes.

Now, I’m usually of the opinion that the reboot of a series of long standing is a pointless and often lazy technique, but when it was announced that the next Bond movie, Casino Royale (2006), was going to be a back-to-basics restart of the Bond franchise, I thought perhaps it was the only thing that could redeem Agent 007. Still, the taste that Die Another Day left in my mouth was so foul that I didn’t see Casino Royale until two years later. Yes, Die Another Day was so bad it brought an immediate end to my years-long policy of rushing right out to see the next Bond movie. When I did get around to seeing it, I was pleasantly surprised by Casino Royale. I didn’t love it, but it was pretty good—an enjoyably average entry in the series, and a breath of fresh air after the previous one.

In 2008 came the ludicrously titled Quantum of Solace, and though Casino Royale had somewhat restored my faith I still didn’t bother to see the movie until about a week ago.

And, guess what, it sucked. It was such a waste of more than 100 minutes of my time that, coupled with the still festering bad feelings generated by Die Another Day, it pretty much turned me off of the whole James Bond series. While it couldn’t wrest the coveted title of Worst James Bond Movie of All Time away from Die Another Day, it was still asinine enough to make it so I truly don’t care if I ever see another 007 adventure.

In case you didn’t see Quantum of Solace (and if you didn’t, I envy you), let me tell you a little something about it. The main villain, in the tradition of Bond-film megalomaniacs, has a dastardly plan only Bond can stop. You don’t even find out what that plan is until about half an hour before the end of the picture, but when you do, hoo boy. Are you sitting down? You had better be sitting down and holding on to your testicles because I am about to tell you the details of the evil villain’s master plan, and it is a plan of such world-shattering import that you might pass out. What he’s planning to do, for reasons that are never entirely clear, is take control of some—but not all—of the water supply of Bolivia.

OH, NO!

Okay, in a Bond movie we expect the villain’s master plan to be ridiculous. Sure, Blofeld is smuggling diamonds because he is using them to build a giant laser gun in space. That’s crazy, but he’s doing it so he can take the entire world hostage for gobs and gobs of money. That’s what a supervillain does. He doesn’t take over part of the utilities contract for one South American nation. I mean, honestly: when’s the last time you heard anything about Bolivia? If a bad guy strapped the entire country to rockets and fired it into space, would you even know that it was gone? Outside of Bolivia itself, would anyone?

I wish it were only the underwhelming plot that made Quantum of Solace a bad movie. But let’s consider the pre-credits car chase. Bond is in a black car, driving fast. He’s being chased by some people (who? why?) in another (or possibly more than one?) black car. A keen observer may have already spotted the problem here. For a hint, let’s consider the car chase through the streets of Las Vegas in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. On that occasion, Bond was pursued by standard black and white police cruisers, while he drove a bright red Mustang. Are you getting the picture now?

When your car chase involves heroes and villains driving what amounts to precisely the same car, you can’t tell what in the hell is going on! The problem is only compounded by the fact that the average shot length in this sequence is about .000000004 seconds, with the camera shaking the whole time. The cuts come so fast and furious you never get a chance to tell what or who you’re looking at or why. Maybe some exciting stunts are happening, but who can tell? Maybe they’re real, but they might as well be faked because you never get a good solid look at them.

Contrast that with this stunt from The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).

So, you’ve got incomprehensible action, you’ve got Judi Dench as the dignified M saying “I don’t give a shit,” and you’ve got nothing happening for 75 minutes until you find out that Bolivia’s water supply is sort of partly in danger, and then you’ve got nothing else happening for the next 30 minutes.

I’m not going to take that from you anymore, 007. That was your last chance and you blew it. I’m done with your movies forever.

The only part I had seen is the famous sequence where Gene Kelly dances with Jerry the Mouse. I rather suspect this is the only part most people have seen, and they probably couldn’t even name the movie it came from. That’s too bad, because it’s really pretty good.

It isn’t up there with your big-time classic musicals like My Fair Lady and Singin’ in the Rain, though it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but it’s a hell of a good time. I personally liked it much better than the more critically lauded (at least nowadays) An American in Paris.  It’s got plenty of good songs, a charming though light-and-fluffy story (but that’s what we expect in an MGM Technicolor musical, right?), and Gene Kelly’s always wonderful dancing. A dance with Kelly and Sinatra, who ably keeps up, to the song “I Begged Her” is my personal favorite.

And then there’s the dance with Jerry Mouse. Though it’s unfair that the rest of the movie seems to have been forgotten, this scene deserves every bit of love audiences have for it, and more besides. The dancing’s great and the animation—from the team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera before they became synonymous with cheap TV cartoons—is wonderful; look at Jerry’s reflection in the polished floor! That scene alone could be the most fun you’ll have watching a movie in a year’s worth of watching movies.

Fortunately, Anchors Aweigh, isn’t two hours of deadwood surrounding one highlight. It’s light, breezy fun, the kind of pleasant diversion they don’t make anymore in the era of $100 million explosion-fests. If you like good times and singin’ and dancin’, you owe it to yourself to watch Anchors Aweigh.

As an example, let’s take the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. It’s the true(ish) story of some British runners in the 1924 Olympic Games, it won a slew of awards (including the Oscar for Best Picture), and it’s beloved by critics and moviegoers everywhere.

Not by me, though.

It’s not a movie I’m prepared to come right out and say is bad. I think it’s probably just as good as people say. But, for whatever reason, I can’t get into it at all. I’m not sure exactly why I don’t like it, but there are a few possible reasons.

Most obviously, the movie’s about running. In terms of physicality, my lifestyle is more akin to Jabba the Hutt’s than Carl Lewis’s, so a celebration of the runner’s art isn’t exactly up my alley. Yet I don’t think this is the reason I don’t care for Chariots of Fire; the movie’s about running, sure, but it isn’t actually about running, any more than Rocky is actually about boxing, Breaking Away is about cycling, or The Deer Hunter is about hunting deer. Olympic races are just the pegs on which the characters’ stories hang, and I’ll take any such peg if the story on it is good enough.

The characters in Chariots of Fire do have stories, with their own personal motivations and triumphs and all that, but they never move me. I don’t care which of them wins any of the races, or if any of them win at all. If none of the main characters had participated in any of the film’s climactic for-the-gold races, I wouldn’t have minded or even necessarily noticed.

This isn’t a fault of the characterization, or the script, or the direction, or any of the things you can usually look to when you don’t like a movie. I’m pretty sure it’s just me.

It could be that I’m not British. This movie is British, and it loves being British, and it wants you to know just how great it is to be British and love being British. It revels in English and Scottish traditions and life. It gives you Gilbert and Sullvian’s “Carefully on Tiptoe Stealing,” with its lines about remaining an Englishman, as though it were the most stirring, awe inspiring thing in the history of man. I, alas, do not hail from the United Kingdom, and what’s more I find this kind of intense pride in accidents of birth to be rather silly. So it’s possible the disconnect between me and the picture comes from my lack of understanding of English nationalism.

Granted, lots of people who loved the movie aren’t British, either. So that’s probably not it.

What am I saying here? I guess I’m saying that I don’t like Chariots of Fire at all, but the odds are you will, so why not watch it.

BONUS NOTE: One thing I do like about the picture, and like a lot, is the music by Greek composer Vangelis. You’ve heard it a million times since in other things, but it’s great, so jam on it:

Attention, the makers of laser-encrusted picture wheels! You should be listening! It’s not just I who demands the following changes.

1. That shit at the beginning—FBI warnings and such—should always be skippable. DVDs from some studios will let you and those from others won’t, but all of them should. Home video is not exactly a cutting edge idea; we’ve all seen the warning a billion times, we all know what it says. We should be able to skip gaily past it because we fucking know already, leave us alone! It gets even worse when you can’t skip all the other legal disclaimers (Paramount, I’m looking at you right now). You know, the message about how “the opinions expressed in the interviews and commentary” yadda yadda yadda. We’ve seen that so often we all know it just as well as the FBI warning. Throwing it up on the screen in multiple languages, each as unskippable as the last, is just pissing us all off.

2. DVD menus should be as quiet as the grave. We don’t need a repeating fifteen seconds of music, we don’t need loud-ass clips from every episode of whatever show is on the disc (this means you, Family Guy), and we for damn sure don’t need the eternal screaming that comes with the menu for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We just need a quiet, unmoving screen with easily differentiated choices: “Play Movie,” “Scene Selection,” “Special Features,” “Setup.” BAM! You’re done.

3. If your DVD package includes two discs, and all the special features are on disc two, don’t give the menu on disc one a “Special Features” button that only yields the message “Insert Disc Two to Access Special Features.” What is that shit? If there aren’t any special features on disc one, just don’t put it on the menu at all.

4. Nobody is buying a DVD because they can’t wait to be entertained by the menu screens. They don’t need to move around and perform all kinds of tricks every time you select something. The Star Wars movies are particularly egregious examples of this. Any time you select anything, the menu has to swoop around and show you something fancy. WHO CARES? If I want to see moving cameras and exciting spaceships, I’ll watch the goddamn movie, and your damned menus are only postponing that activity. God help you if you want to use the scene selection on a Star Wars movie. There are a certain number of chapters on each screen (four, I think), and each time you move to a different set of four you’re treated to some bullshit where the background picture moves around. I don’t need this! Granted, in this case each movement only takes about three seconds, but considering it should take exactly zero seconds it’s very annoying.

5. If you’re watching a black-and-white movie with subtitles—Wild Strawberries, for instance—and the subtitles are white, it turns out you can’t fucking see them. Yellow subtitles on a black and white movie, guys. Common sense!

6. Finally, it goes without saying that the makers of those DVDs where, if you try to skip any of the million unnecessary legalese screens it goes all the way back to the first and makes you sit through them all again, should be executed.

This is another one of the last kind.

See, I watched Superman II today and wasn’t exactly surprised to find that, though I enjoyed the film in my childhood, it actually pretty much sucks. But I also realized something else as I was watching the movie: This whole secret identity thing is completely stupid.

Remember that scene in Superman II where Lois Lane is convinced she’s figured out that Clark Kent is actually Superman? She’s so sure of herself that she throws herself into the Niagara River, where she’ll surely be killed unless Superman intervenes.

But rather than risk exposing his secret, Clark Kent nearly lets Lois drown before coming up with a way to clandestinely keep her from spilling over Niagara Falls. And this is the guy that loves Lois, remember? Yet keeping the whole “Clark Kent = Superman” thing a secret is so important it trumps saving the life of his sweetie.

All of which is total bullshit. There is absolutely no reason for Superman to maintain the Clark Kent identity at all. The whole pretense is an utter waste of time. This isn’t like over in Gotham City, where Batman is just a dude in a suit. Batman needs all kinds of resources that billionaire Bruce Wayne provides.

Superman, on the other hand, actually is Superman. It’s Clark Kent that is the assumed identity; why not just shed it entirely? Couldn’t he just be Superman all the time? Of course he could. He gains nothing and protects nothing by prancing around as a butterfingered reporter half of the time.

Supes, seriously: Stop it.

But the consarn thing always makes me get a trivia question wrong!

See, my friends and I frequently play this Trivial Pursuit-style board game where all the questions are about the movies and theme parks and television shows from the Walt Disney Company. We play it a lot, so repeated questions have a tendency to pop up.

There’s one in particular that I always seem to get. It asks the name of Bambi’s girlfriend. And every time I’m asked, my mouth immediately opens and pours forth the word “Clarice.”

Then, about a second and a half later, I scream “DAMMIT!”

This happens every single time. If I’d allow myself a moment to think, I’d undoubtedly come up with the correct answer, which is Faline. But when asked to name a lady deer, my brain immediately fires forth Rudolph’s girlfriend Clarice, and all other lady deer are just going to have wait in line.

Which is as it should be, really. I like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer a lot more than I like Bambi.

That’s right, I said it.