A Note To Paul: "Birthday...RIGHT AHEAD!"

I still covet the TITANIC souvenir cup Paul Suarez bought at the Plaza movie theatre with the wrong release date on it. Can you even imagine how much a cup like that - in mint condition - might fetch on eBay today?

It really doesn't matter because I'd give him twenty lashes with a wet noodle if he ever sold it. TITANIC (HEAT being a close second) is probably the movie that I associate most with Paul. When it came out - more than ten years ago now - we instantly started running lines from the film just about every time we ran into each other whether it was at the Plaza for the midnights or anywhere else. And when Paul escorted me down the steps at La Venta Inn on my wedding day, he even found the perfect line from the movie to whisper to me just before we started walking.

I tried to find my favorite TITANIC moment on YouTube - the moment when Rose looks up at the Statue of Liberty after she's survived everything and is on her way to safety - but it was nowhere to be found. It's funny - and more than a little ironic - that moment contains no dialogue whatsoever but still manages to capture the grandeur, hope and tragedy in the movie for me.

When Dave was running the movie over at The Village he'd let us slip in and watch parts of it here and there. No matter what point I entered the film I was immediately taken up into its story. And there's nothing quite like being able to share something like that with other people who love movies just as much as you do.

Happy Birthday, Paul.

P.S. At least the trailer was online:

Movies in 5 Minutes - A Personal Fave

You've probably all seen the different versions of movies in fives minutes created by a YouTube user. Just thought I'd share my fave of them all:

Having A Movie Moment: "Do I Look Like I'm Negotiating?!"

Sometimes when I'm out in the world I long to fling a line as finely written as those in some of my favorite movies. Lately, one of my eBay transactions is recalling a triumphant moment in MICHAEL CLAYTON.

You see, I wanted to buy this limited edition Starbucks MLB Chicago Cubs Bearista for Rob for Valentine's Day. They've been "out of print" for years and there are two versions of the bear. I already have one. Some...person...on eBay still has the other one even though I paid her for it on February 7.

I've sought to come so some kind of agreement for more than a month and I've finally taken it to the next level through PayPal by asking them to launch an investigation of the transaction and get my money back. I only wish I could have sent that email to the seller with a video clip of George Clooney from MICHAEL CLAYTON.

The key line comes about 3:15 into it:

Martin Scorsese Shines A Light

I've been bad today. The internet helped me. A nice story about Martin Scorsese's SHINE A LIGHT made it even more fun:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/28/bfscorsese128.xml

How about some trailer porn?

Festival of Books - On Page & Screen

A blogger named Ron Hogan who I met after he and Tom McLean did a panel on (you guessed it) blogging at Comic-con will be moderating a panel at The LA Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27. The panel will be about books and the film industry and according to the Festival of Books website it's scheduled as follows:

PANEL 2021
10:30 AM
On Page & Screen
Moderator Mr. Ron Hogan
Mr. Tom Epperson
Mr. Mark Frost
Mr. Gary David Goldberg
Mr. Chris Miller

Check back closer to the event for location/room info if you plan to attend:
http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/2008program_panels_sun.html

His blog is: http://www.beatrice.com/

Still Hanging At Eleven: "Voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain."

This morning has been a little doomy and gloomy because I was reading the Wall Street Journal online and then a column over at Yahoo!Fianace
(http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/richricher/69637). This whole business of economic yaya in a voting year made me think of another film that ties for the eleven spot - REDS.

I know. I know. Again with the journalists! But this one has has history, tragic romance and exotic foreign travel during wartime. It is also one of the most beautifully written, heartfelt and fantastically acted films I've ever seen.

This film is thick with the romanticism of thinking you can make a difference in an impossible situation (Russia at the beginning of the last century)and ride out an ill-fated romance (Jack Reed and Louise Bryant) no matter what at the beginning. As things devolve, all the characters sink along with their ideals.

It's Diane Keaton's face in the picture above - as she looks out of the train she's taken to see Russia's real internal struggles - that says she knows she's gone too far but there's no going back now.

REDS seems so timely now because it's also about the passion for political change that will really help people. The movie calls into question whether Americans are really capable of making real forward progress in their politics in one clever, clever line -

Emma Goldman: Voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain.


I'm hoping we do much more than deaden the pain this coming November.

Correction: Kittens are *very* cute

A funny thing happened on the way to posting this post. I meant merely to do a "quickie" in which I seconded the observation by Eric - our charming and talented friend - that "...kittens are cute." In fact, I meant to enhance his statement by saying I felt they are/were *very* cute.

But before all of that happened I reached for my Sobe Lean and somehow brushed the keys of the laptop in the process and WHAMMO. I had published a post with absolutely NOTHING in it.

It turns out - YES - you can do that.

On the Express Train to Dorktown,

The Kitten
P.S. You can read Eric's full post here:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=70641915&blogID=370739842

This One Also Goes to Eleven and Might Even Go All The Way To China

I can't walk away from talking about films with journos that I love without mentioning THE CHINA SYNDROME. It's another one that fell off the list but still deserves a mention, I think, because it shows the evolution of the mistrust of government in the 1970s. And it kicks ass.

It's more than half a decade after ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. No one is shocked any longer when there are accusations that a large company is trying to cover up some kind of evil deed. But adding the complication that women in the workplace were still fighting stereotypes (Jane Fonda plays a reporter who always gets assigned the "Fluffy the Cat" story) and so the accusations of Fonda's character were not immediately taken seriously ups the cultural ante in a pretty interesting way for me.

This is more a story about what we're willing to believe depending on who says it to us - and our own prejudices about that person - than it is about journalism or anything else. I must give mad props to Michael Douglas for producing it, James Brooks for directing it and Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda for acting the crap out of it.

And, in case you're wondering, the writing - done by Mike Gray, T.S. Cook and Brooks - isn't bad either:

Jack Godell: What makes you think they're looking for a scapegoat?
Ted Spindler: Tradition.

This clip really only shows the opening credits of the movie and some great shots of SoCal roads in the late 1970s. I'm including it just as much for the time capsule it provides. I was astonished to see all those freeways with almost no one on them.

Deep Throat Says Our Lives May Be In Danger...or Another Installment of "This One Goes to Eleven."

One of the best things about doing a couple of internships at some big daily papers (The Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News) was working with some of the old guard, hard-drinking journos who had a knack for keeping politicians and any shady business types on their toes. There was a relentlessness and an idealism about them and they were very fond of repeating the rules - about conflict of interest, about fighting the good fight and most of all about giving a crap about every story no matter how small.

Because I heard those speeches over and over again, I assumed everyone heard them from someone with a drink in one hand and an AP Style Manual in the other at some point in their professional development. Oh, how very, very wrong I was.

It's safe to say we live in more of a NETWORK world than an ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN world. But the first time I watched the latter (fullscreen VHS, no less) was the moment the importance of accurate, trustworthy information and the role of journalists in providing it started to seem incredibly meaningful to me.

This movie perfectly captures a generation in a sort of free-fall of disillusionment. The way the two reporters stumble onto clues that reveal the story is far bigger than they could have imagined says a lot about how much the public has come to distrust government in the last 35 or so years. At the time this movie was made the full extent of the scandal was still shocking to most people.

And given the timing of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and the state of the country and the world at the time, it makes perfect sense Woodward gave his primary secret source the name of a legendary porn film. I'll let you make up your own joke about "stripping" away illusions here.

It's also magical that Robert Redford used his youthful hotness powers for good through this movie. I'm sure there were plenty of people who went to see the movie to spend two hours with the Cute Cuterson of the day. Hopefully they came away with a greater understanding of the Constitution and the powers who have little or no interest in guarding it.

Awhile ago I realized that since we're in a digital, webby world I'll never be able to fulfill my fantasy of yelling "Stop the Presses!" If I ever uncover something so scalding hot it has to get out there right away some code monkey will just update the site linked to the print version.

I know it's immediate. It's just not very sexy.

Hoping you'll dig this original theatrical trailer:

NUMBER SIX: "I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see."

Somewhere Paddy Chayefsky is truly laughing long dead ass off. When NETWORK opened in 1976 people looked at it as a kind of prophetic farce, from what I gather in the reviews written about it at the time. Great art. But, no, things aren't that bad. And isn't this a great warning of how bad things could get if we aren't careful. The headlines from the L.A. Times over the last year must have a horrible, delicious taste to Mr. Chayefsky, wherever the old, cranky bastard might be right now.

Though nearly every word in this screenplay is golden to me, one speech by Howard Beale feels especially important lately. If you switch out a few of the words (maybe change "Russians" and replace it with "terrorists") you see we're where we've always been as Americans, television viewers and bad citizens of the world:

Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

Before things get too down, I have to talk about Faye Dunaway. She was not just a fabulous babe of the day. She was a real badass. Look at her choices: CHINATOWN, BONNIE AND CLYDE, NETWORK. Damn. Can you imagine having a haircut as fine as the one she had in BONNIE AND CLYDE and being able to run circles around Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson? IMHO, her work here as the ruthless programming executive with an emotional maladjustment no episode of Oprah could solve is her best...and certainly among the best I've ever peeped - actor or actress - on the screen. She's so good you begin to feel sorry for someone who is fundamentally a hollow, selfish a-hole. And then, in my case, you wonder where she bought those amazing boots.


I didn't see this movie until many years after its release. Our advisor to the Arizona Daily Wildcat - a seasoned journalist who'd worked all over for Sports Illustrated and the daily papers in Arizona - insisted one day that I watch it before I decided to work any longer even as just a student journalist. More than anything I remember one particular moment in the movie which seemed to foreshadow a horrible trend in journalism - newspapers becoming corporate properties rather than being run by local upstarts with a sense of making some small difference in their community - and I still wonder today how it's all gonna shake out based on this speech:

Arthur Jensen: It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. THAT is the natural order of things today. THAT is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU WILL ATONE. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

And Ned Beatty is really not to be missed in his role as Arthur Jensen:

I was all set to do another post to this list when two things happened: The evil empire known as TIME WARNER yanked my chain with a cable modem outage and ConsumerSearch.com emailed me another assignment. It's funny (not funny "hah hah") how your world can go from day to night with a simple outgoing message from your internet provider saying they are "working to solve the problem of this service interruption."

Of course, the real insult is that even when our cable modem works, it's not as good as the bloody free WiFi at Coffee Table (http://www.coffeetablebistro.com/) over in Eagle Rock. So I packed it up and headed East into a land where there's little if any sign of gentrification.

Our friends Tom (he has a rad comics blog at http://weblogs.variety.com/bags_and_boards/) and Jessica live out there and they introduced us to the wonders of Coffee Table's delightfully quirky menu. Tom met me for coffee since he lives around the corner and told me about scheduling an onset visit to a popular soap opera for a piece he was writing. After spending the day there in coffee heaven, I walked across the street to meet Rob for dinner at The Oinkster (http://www.oinkster.com).

While I reveled in these unique food experiences, the one from the night before was even more fab. Rob and I were at HOME in Loz Feliz (http://www.homelosfeliz.com/) digging the open air patio dining scene after watching a performance of RUTTLEMANIA. HOME is the perfect place for an intimate or couples dinner in the evenings. After negotiating sharing an odd number of jalapeno poppers as our starter, Rob turned to me and said, "This is why we live in Los Angeles."

Los Angeles is a thousand little experiences that can't happen anywhere else. This city is actually dozens of little cities bound together by a spider web of freeways, highways and surface streets. I know everyone reading these entries because of this city and as the winner of this year's Best Actress Oscar intimated, there are most certainly angels in this city.

It's also so very groovy that while I was writing this entry I flipped over to Ez E's blog (www.myspace/ericstormoen) and noticed he and the Letinator were having the same sort of L.A. bliss these last few days.

THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN: THE FIRST OF FILMS THAT DIDN'T QUITE MAKE THE TOP TEN

Last night Rob and I were at the ArcLight in Hollywood. I wandered over to the magazine racks in their delightful gift store and immediately let out a laugh/snort that cleared the area around me as it echoed throughout their cavernous lobby. The cover of Vanity Fair featured three lovely, funny ladies - Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. And Amy had her had cupped on Tina's booby. God bless them. God bless them, everyone.

For whatever reason this made me think of another hilarious babe and two movies that didn't make the top ten. They're both movies worth mentioning just the same and the films I'll talk about in "THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN (or films that didn't hit the list)" - what I'm sure will become a recurring sidebar as I make my way through those films that hold a rank.

Madeline Kahn worked it silly and sexy in BLAZING SADDLES and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. Both of the movies are comedy classics and would not be the same without Ms. Kahn's divine stylings. The sight of her strutting across a bedroom floor with her hair done up a la BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and then making a sizzling noise after she touches her just wetted finger tip to her arse in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is funnier every time I see it. Her bizarre "Lili Von Shtupp" in BLAZING SADDLES makes a delicious mincemeat of prejudiced attitudes toward interracial relationships. She is/was aces at making comedy fun and important. It is/was so sad she died in 1999 at just 57.

And this seems like a good place to say I'm generally dismayed films which fondle our funny bones often get pushed aside as not meaningful or artful or significant. I think this is because somehow everyone thinks it's easy to be funny. Anyone who has had a joke bellyflop can tell you it's not.

In a screenwriting class I took about a year ago at Media Bistro we were workshopping scenes. I was lucky enough to get a belly laugh (in a good way) during one reading. Then - after reading another scene on the same night - I received an unfortunate din of silence. The instructor after being positive, supportive and talking me down from the ledge said something pretty fabulous: "You can't fake funny. If people don't laugh at what you've written you can't be bullshitted into thinking it works."

I will always believe comedy's most valuable contribution is truth telling with a soft landing. Somehow farce can say things with a sharpness and precision that's more difficult to handle in a strait up drama. It's not a question of one or the other being better or worse...but the difference is interesting to note. The tradition of the Jester telling truth to the King or Queen or public in general through a series of jokes and sketches most certainly lives in places like Saturday Night Live. And it's thrilling to watch at a time when the Poehlers and Feys and Silvermans of comedy are taking their places amongst the all time greats.

NUMBER SEVEN: "That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go."

NUMBER SEVEN: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK



For anyone born between the mid-1960s and all the way into the early 1980s, STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK AND RETURN OF THE JEDI are cultural touchstones. Few works of art have been more successful at articulating a kind of belief or faith held amongst a generation that didn't depend necessarily on organized religion so much as it did on each person's own empirical and highly personal quest to walk their own path and discover their own meaning in this life.



Part of walking that path is confronting your own shit - some of it rad and some of it not so rad. So I would say just as Luke enters a cave in search of his own identity, so does everyone. The cave can be anything - a quest real or imagined, dealing with some random insanity that seems to fall into your life from nowhere - but Yoda's words will always be the same when one of us enters:



Luke: There's something not right here... I feel cold. Death.

Yoda: That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.

Luke: What's in there?

Yoda: Only what you take with you.



I find this scene so rad I quested for it myself on YouTube:

This movie is also eternal for me because it's just so much fun - even amongst all the muck of horrible discoveries and carbon freezing. There's almost nothing better than Han's reply to being told his tauntaun will freeze ("Then I'll See You in Hell!") or Han's farewell to Leia (Leia: I love you. Han: I know.). It's wonderful writing used to tell a story that means something on the screen when you watch it and then means something even more when you think back on it later. The people working on everything from the puppetry of Yoda to the visual effects that set a standard still rarely equalled also made this film the iconic thing it is. Part of the magic of cinema - I think - is that when you have an enormous group of people moving in the same direction with all their creative energies you really do come away with something that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

The Evil of the Slow Rollout - An Inevitable Sidebar

Initially it seemed like such a good idea to write about each movie on my list - one a day - as a way of getting the list done and not overwhelming what's left of my brain at the end of a work day with yet another task.

Something else entirely is brewing.

With all this time between posts I find myself continually tempted to change the order of the list, the things I plan to mention for each film...even the films actually on the list!

I think I've stumbled onto why this whole business took me so long in the first place.

NUMBER EIGHT: "If you think that Mick Jagger will still be doing the whole rock star thing at age fifty, well, you are sorely, sorely mistaken."

NUMBER EIGHT: ALMOST FAMOUS

There's so much about this movie that gets it just right.

The traveling circus environment that lives around a live show going from town to town. The beyond insane obsession that some fans come to own and live as they follow the music. And the bizarre relationship between reporters and artists under uncomfortable and unnatural setups that result from story assignments. Most of all this movie speaks to the love of music and just how much fun it is to be around other people who happen to love the same music.

For me the setup here works for a lot of obvious reasons. There's an innocence that happens when you start to dig any art form and when you start to make your way to your own art/career. Our main character is "deflowered" on a number of levels but his first moments backstage remind me of my feelings about concerts before the evil ticket-pricing scandals of the last few years and my belief in journalism before I had to scream at some a$$hole in payroll to get paid for a freelance assignment.

Philip Seymour Hoffman turns up at just the right time to foreshadow all these trials. His world-weary rock journo reminds me so much of the guys at the Houston Chronicle when I interned there. The guys were genuinely amused when I came in all freshly scrubbed and ready to blow the lid off the new album by Morrissey. They both kept telling me not to stop loving the music when the musicians or the business of music disappointed me.

Thanks to that advice, I still love film and music equally if differently. Cinema may be the world's dominant art form but music is its hippie, drop-out, butterfly-tattooed sister. More ephemeral. Harder to pin down. But she can smoke you out - literally or figuratively.

I've always thought live music - the kind with a huge stage show and some over-the-fucking-top production values - does what religion keeps claiming it can do. It brings people together for a positive, common experience. It creates a sense of community and sometimes even purpose. And the amount of the requested donation continues to go up at a near inexplicable rate. But mostly it's the first two things.

And I consider myself quite the lucky kitten to count so many music lovers amongst my peeps. There will always be something fabulously covert about either being hipped to a new artist by someone or doing the hipping yourself. I love that so much I married someone who had larger CD collection than mine and then asked if he could be the one to maintain, buff and Goo Gone it.

Lucky me.

I'm really so much better with the TicketMaster.com thing and talking security into making an exception than with putting CDs back in their place.

NUMBER NINE: "The story of life is this: Static."

In the long line of pretty damn amazing Spike Lee Joints, DO THE RIGHT THING stands alone for me. The movie summons up a community of people - from Sal, the owner of a local pizza parlor, to Sweet Dick Willie, a street corner poet of sorts - who feel the forces of a hotter than hell New York summer and simmering racial tensions. All of them struggle in some way with their own prejudices and the prejudices others hold against them. And the whole thing errupts into some of the most alternately disturbing and hilarious writing ever done for film, IMHO. Maybe the height of it all is a kind of hate speech montage that outs everyone for their biases. And - in turn - their speeches are undercut by the rants of others which are full of the biases held against them:

Mookie: Dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath, pizza-slingin', spaghetti-bendin', Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsingin' motherfucker.

Pino: You gold-teeth-gold-chain-wearin', fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin', monkey, ape, baboon, big thigh, fast-runnin', high-jumpin', spear-chuckin', three-hundred-sixty-degree-basketball-dunkin' titsun spade Moulan Yan. Take your fuckin' pizza-pizza and go the fuck back to Africa.

Stevie: You little slanty-eyed, me-no-speaky-American, own-every-fruit-and-vegetable-stand-in-New-York, bullshit, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Summer Olympics '88, Korean kick-boxing son of a bitch.

Officer Long: You Goya bean-eating, fifteen in a car, thirty in an apartment, pointed shoes, red-wearing, Menudo, meda-meda Puerto Rican cocksucker. Yeah, you!

Sonny: It's cheap, I got a good price for you, Mayor Koch, "How I'm doing," chocolate-egg-cream-drinking, bagel-and-lox, B'nai B'rith Jew asshole.

Mister Senor Love Daddy: Yo! Hold up! Time out! TIME OUT! Y'all take a chill! Ya need to cool that shit out! And that's the double truth, Ruth!

I love these rants because they show how absolutely ridiculous it all is. I remember Spike Lee being criticized by some members of just about every community for this language. And - years later - Sacha Baron Cohen found himself defending the same kinds of artistic choices at a press conference after winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for his performance as Borat.

People kept asking Cohen how he could have something like "The Running of the Jew" in his movie when he himself is a Jew. After making a few flip comments he got around to explaining that the point for him was to show that prejudice is a delusion - a delusion that others are different and a delusion that you are better than someone else for no real reason at all.

Now, I'm not sure that Don Rickles - a.k.a. "Mr. Warmth" - would describe his standup as some sort of hyper-intellectual deconstruction of prejudicial language...but that won't stop me from doing that here. I think he makes people uncomfortable - and laugh - because he holds a kind of linguistic mirror up to people and the odd, complicated beliefs that might be hiding in the folds of their cerebella.

DO THE RIGHT THING was released during the height of the academic movement we've all come to know as political correctness and I think that's pretty important. Originally "Political Correctness" was a term flung as insult during the Marxist revolution in Russia. It meant someone who'd ceased to think for themselves and just given into the party line...on everything.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I think the reinvention of "political correctness" as a means to treat others with respect and kindness by establishing sensitivity in language was genuinely noble. It fell apart for me when members of the "political correctness" movement on campus attempted to suppress any dissent or discussion about what exactly that meant and targeted DO THE RIGHT THING as destructive and tried to ban it from playing at the campus movie theatre where they did a kind of second run/discount house combo operation that allowed students to see amazing films for just $1 each. They argued they were only trying to protect (?!) college students from the language.

The most wonderfully brave thing in this film is its ambiguous, painful third act. For those of you who haven't seen it yet - SPOILER ALERT. The next few paragraphs are all about specific plot points.

When Mookie stands outside Sal's and watches the crowd start to broil into a near murderous frenzy he makes a decision. I think it's a decision that saves the lives of Sal and his sons. Mookie realizes *something* must happen and the resigned way in which he marches over picks up a trash can and throws it through the glass window at the pizza place says to me he'd rather see the crowd take it out on the building than on Sal. It's a beautifully muddy and heartbreaking moment.

Radio Raheem gives a spotlight speech about the fight inside of every person (symbolized by the rings he wears) between their better and lesser instincts - the struggle to (you guessed it) DO THE RIGHT THING. For me these words are the best part of the film and the reason it hits the nine spot on my list. I hope you dig 'em:

"Let me tell you the story of "Right Hand, Left Hand." It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: It was with this hand that Cane iced his brother. Love: These five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand; And the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that's right. Ooh, it's the devastating right and Hate is hurt, he's down. Left-hand Hate K.O.ed by Love. "