The Angry Young Man

I’m dragging this over from that annoying and flaky SFist, because I’m curious – at what magical age exactly does a woman become a cougar? I know no one reads this crap anymore, but I’m soliciting your thoughts because I care.

Anyway, in honor of my personal gremlin, Tina Louise, I’ve decided to stop calling everyone Hitler and start calling them a cougar. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a real life cougar or not. None of you were really Hitler and none of you complained when I called you that…

Anyway, Van der Fah Fah the Cougar and I went to Roxie Cinema last night to behold the amazing spectacle of “Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness?” Junk Thief wrote about this brilliant film last week. By the way, I love the Roxie. It's always full of hardcore cineastes with bad hairstyles and no fashion sense, the kind of people who'd earnestly study Esperanto if they were any dorkier. Anyway, never heard of this fine piece of bad cinema? Sorry for you. It’s basically an autobiographical musical about some British 1960’s actor/pop singer no one remembers (Anthony Newley) having a completely conventional and thoroughly mundane midlife crisis shot on a beach in Malta in a style that’s supposed to evoke Fellini, but owes more to Russ Meyer. Read - boobies, boobies, nothing but boobies. That and Newley's hairy, fat arse. Being released in 1969, the movie was rated X. Hilarious.

The puzzler about this film is that it’s hard to determine whether it’s either the greatest piece of satire ever conceived or the excretions of an out of control egomaniac who really thinks his life was so fascinating and important that it warranted this sort of aggrandizement. It reminded me of a low market version of Kevin Spacey’s “Beyond the Sea” – a movie I really liked because Bobby Darin rules. Anyway, Van der Fah Fah the Cougar says its satire and I think Newley was being for real, if for no other reason that upon reading the script, Joan Collins, the actress who played Merkin’s wife in the film, Polyester Poontang, and Newley’s real life wife at the time, immediately knew that their marriage was totally over. If he was being authentic, I almost feel sorry for him. Only a shallow moron could possibly believe that this kind of unremarkable crap could warrant a film like this.

Satire or not, the movie completely destroyed Newley’s career, which is why none of you know who he is today. The New York Times described it as an act of professional suicide. Yeah, the funniest suicide I’ve ever seen. Seriously, I guffawed and cackled throughout the film. This scene had me in tears, it was so hilariously bad.

You all must see this before you die. I insist.