Battle of the Titans

I’m generally not a comment whore but I feel that this issue is too important for any of us to remain idle. I mean come on, we’re at threat level Orange! I get confused, does threat level Orange mean we are supposed to run around screaming at the top of our lungs, begging for mercy or is it when we are supposed to pile a bunch of heavy furniture against the door and sit in the dark with an iron skillet in one hand? Just remember to keep shopping.

A question that has bothered me, make that haunted me, over the course of my entire life still remains unanswered and may very well be unanswerable. Far greater minds than mine have grappled with this philosophical quandary and have come up with double doughnuts, doodly squat, nada (would this sentence of negligible humoristic value get better or worse if I added several dozen more words that mean zero? I think I’ll error on the side of caution and end this.).

I realize that the philosophical quagmire that my intellectual Hummer has been sunk in up to the doors is probably not a suitable mental exercise for a fairly normal heterosexual male. Sure, I could leave it for others to ponder but I’ve never been one to take the easy way out of a problem. I could let others decide who would make a better boyfriend, Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing or Kevin Bacon from Footloose but I feel this is too important an issue for one group or another to decide on their own. I think that the only way to settle this is to put the matter to a national, nay an international plebiscite.

Please leave all votes in my comments box. The results will be officially tallied by an international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands and posted on January 1, 2004. May the best man win!

If you really want my honest opinion I have to honestly say that for me it’s a coin toss. I know that sounds like a total cop-out but that’s what I’m going to do right this second to finally end my many years of anguish. Here goes…oh, but wait. It’s one of those funky Euro coins without a dead white guy’s head on one side so I’ll skip my vote and just go with whatever the mob decides (Hasn’t the European Economic Union gone off the gold standard and on to the dead white guy standard like the USA?).

It has been my experience that most women prefer to have Patrick Swayze as their boyfriend while most heterosexual males prefer Kevin Bacon. Why?

P.S. I just came up with the idea of a single sequel for both of these two fine films entitled Dirty Feet or Loose Dancing or something even more clever. Lord knows Hollywood comes up with brilliantly clever names for sequels that leave us mere mortals scratching our heads in wonder, asking our collective selves, “How do they come up with this shit?” I could only imagine that such a sequel would make The Lord of the Rings, in comparison, look about as profitable as a public service announcement for dandruff. Look over into the left hand margin where it says “a place where ideas are born.” You're damn right ideas are born here and you heard this idea here first.

P.P.S On a sort of different but related tack I have wondered why both of those movies had so much violence. I thought that dancing lead to sex, not fist fights?

Too good for the crappy little comments box:

Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, hands down. And I'm not just saying that because "all women go for the older, unattainable bad boys" or however the saying goes. It's all about the way he handled Penny's abortion.

Bess
..................................................................................................................................................................
I don't mean to come across as being callous but you shouldn't consider Kevin Bacon any less dreamy than Patrick Swayze just because he didn't have some knocked-up tramp to rescue. I have continued my poll to include all my ultra-hip Seattle acquaintances and every hetero guy chose Kevin. The gals--except a couple of tom boys--all went with Patrick. I think we boys just find Patrick’s hair too much of a stumbling block to actually date him. Hetero guys don't want to have a boyfriend with prettier hair than they have.

The Management
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Part I:

Come on now...Kevin's sweaty dance scene through the old factory, clad only in tight jeans and a stained wife-beater T-shirt...why, even a perfectly straight macho he-man got a little wood from that one. OK, OK, it was a stunt double, and Mr. Gap-toothed Mullet-boy did all his own dance scenes in Dirty Dancing (all the more reason to hate, hate, hate him), but Kevin (or Ren, his character in Footloose) had all that groovy, Sting-like, early-80's Punk edginess about him, which was cool.

Meanwhile Swayze was a 80's-esque, mullet-haired, Miami Vice dude playing a character in a film set in the early 60's! Where's the fucking authenticity there? So what he wore a Fonzi black leather jacket to give him that greaser edge! He still looked like the same cat he played in Red Dawn, Roadhouse, and that stupid hockey flick with Rob Lowe. Like, come on, Mr. Sex Symbol of the 80's, at least cut your fucking mullet and LOOK like a hip greaser from the early 60's. Didn't you at least look at old photos of Dion, Fabian, or Frankie Avalon to see how 1962 hipsters wore their hair in cheesy ducktails?

I don't know any self-respecting, straight male who liked Dirty Dancing in 1987. Sure, we took our dates to see it (my German girlfriend in 1987, Tanya, forced me to see it three god-awful times--thank the stars for cheap Lebanese hashish in 1987 Germany!), but we hated every minute of it. That flick was every loser fat chick's fantasy, but in reality no whiny, rich, butt-ugly JAP broad ever scored with a hunky stud like Johnny Castle. What a fucking fairly tale.

Mat


Part II:

Footloose, on the other hand, stunk to high holy hell, but we all related to Bacon's character, who just wanted to dance and party and get some ass from that tall, skinny, awesomely beautiful preacher's daughter. Ren was the shit. He fought those Jesus freaks and won! And who knew every kid in Bible-thumping, Oklahoma was an expert break dancer, as we learned in the epilogue dance scene. And how about that star turn by Chris Penn as the two-left-feet, doofus farmboy who, with Ren's help, turns into a veritable Ben Vereen by the end of the film! Now that's finger-snapping fun, kids.

So fuck yeah, it's Kevin Bacon all the way. Ren was a cool dude who was out the change the world and boff that poor man's Daryl Hannah chick who played the preacher's slut daughter. Ren was a stud! He rocked! He was a man's man.

Patrick Swayze played a sensitive, hot-dancing greaser (G-A-Y all the way!) who uses that whiny, butt-ugly JAP as his beard so he can keep his job at that Catskill resort. You know the epilogue: Her wealthy father buys them a cool apartment in the Village, she attends Columbia while he dances on Broadway, and within in a year he runs off to San Francisco with a tattooed truck driver named Big Joe, then eventually settles down with a wealthy old Hollywood queen who keeps him as his buttboy. Meanwhile she gets hooked on painkillers and marries a dentist named Hyman and lives a miserable and depressed Republican lifestyle in Scarsdale the rest of her life.

Mat