Fanboy.com February 2002

the fanboy book shop:

Love Is Hell : A Cartoon Book, by Matt Groening
It's the 10th Anniversary Edition of Love Is Hell! A book that's been in the making for a solid decade! This medium-sized guide is now available to the public with extra bonus fun-pages never-before-included in previous volumes of the same name!

Slightly less scrawny than the original Love Is Hell, this behemoth-style handbook is jam-packed with all the info YOU need to keep your love-fight burnin'! Frankly written and profusely illustrated by famed cartoonist and merchandising monarch Matt Groening, Love Is Hell is the answer to all your Quandaries de l'Amour, or, as we say in American, Love Quandaries. Inside, you'll find handy tips on everything from Getting the Love You Deserve to Getting Your Heart Broken into Millions of Tiny Pieces. Plus so very much more. Why, we've even included a brand-spankin'-new intro by the author himself, written especially for this incredible 10th Anniversary Edition!

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating and Sex by Joshua Piven, David Borgenicth, Jennifer Worick, David Borgenicht
The authors of the best-selling The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook are back--and they've brought a date. Whatever your own dating nightmares are, take it from the professionals, things can get worse. Just in time for Valentine's Day, here are dozens of scenarios covering every phase of the romantic--or not so romantic--turn of events. Learn how to remove stubborn articles of clothing, slip away from a blind date, and get rid of unsightly stains. Discover the secrets of dealing with a bad kisser and of surviving a meeting with your date's parents. Hands-on, step-by-step illustrated instructions help guide you through these and many more perils d'amor. Tasteful and useful, and with an appendix of great pickup lines, breakup lines, and all-purpose excuses, this is the book you need when you wake up next to someone whose name you can't remember.

The Bad Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want
by Cameron Tuttle, Susannah Bettag (Illustrator)
Deep down, every woman wants to be a Bad Girl. But after living a life of sweetness and light, it's sometimes difficult to stray from the path. Cameron Tuttle (author of the riotously funny Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road) points the way in The Bad Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want.

Tuttle offers up tips to help even the saintliest soul find her inner Bad Girl--and then use that power to get better dates (date yourself for a while first, until you're ready to dive in the dating pool); a better job (don't just settle for job satisfaction, aim for "job jubilation, job nirvana, job titillation"); and better parking (pray to Gladys, the universal parking goddess). With its sassy, iced-lavender cover--just the right size to slip into your purse--the Guide is jam-packed with practical and not-so-practical-but-funny advice, including excellent answers to one of life's most pressing questions: What do you do with old bridesmaid dresses? "Drench with ketchup and dress up as Carrie for Halloween"; "Sew into board bags for your snowboard and surfboard"; and, best of all, "Make your bridesmaids wear them in your wedding." Remember: it's great to be a girl, but it's even better to be a Bad Girl.

Sexual Chemistry :
A History of the Contraceptive Pill
by Lara Marks
Often regarded as "one of the most important landmarks of the twentieth century," the contraceptive pill has achieved both more and less than its original early 20th-century advocates had hoped. Medical historian Marks, a senior lecturer at Imperial College, University of London, shows how concerns about population growth, along with the West's post-WWII faith in scientific progress, led to the century's first "designer" or "lifestyle" drug. She explains how new developments in chemistry and the discovery of hormone-yielding wild plants made birth control pill research possible, and why it took so long to develop. She also shows how cultural factors affected women's eagerness or reluctance to try the new method of contraception. Though much criticism has been leveled at the medical establishment for rushing the pill to market without sufficient testing, Marks points out that experimental protocols were vague during this period, and argues that contraceptive researchers were stymied by the difficulties of testing the pill outside of strictly controlled lab conditions. Marks is evenhanded in her treatment of sensitive issues, such as the Black Power movement's perception of birth control as racist, and the Catholic Church's theological objections. Though the pill has proved too expensive for widespread use in developing countries, it has been embraced by middle-class women and has made possible career and lifestyle choices we now take for granted.

Incredibly Strange Music (Re/Search ; 14)
Re/Search continues its exploration of the tackiest, most bizarre, most outrageous artifacts of the recently bygone vinyl era. Rescued from garage sales and thrift stores by dedicated (and disturbed) collectors, these oddball treasures reflect such genres as ethno-exploitation (e.g., fake Polynesian exotica music); celebrities-gone-wrong (The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy); occupation-specific albums by singing policemen, singing wrestlers, and the one-of-a-kind Singing Logger (Where Walks a Logger, There Walks a Man); right-wing folk music (The Goldwaters Sing Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals); and the unclassifiable (unspeakable?), such as an entire album of flatulence (incredibly strange, to be sure, but music?). The second helping offers more interviews with some of the artists responsibleamong them, blue comedienne Rusty (Knockers Up!) Warren, word jazz artist Ken Nordine, synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, and legendary five-octave vocalist (and purported Inca princess) Yma Sumacand chats with prominent collectors. Adding to the fun are reproductions of the covers of dozens of camp classics, from Jerry Falwell's Where Are the Dead? to a Barry Whitestyle disco single by Louis Farrakhan.

Breakup Girl to the Rescue! :
A Superhero's Guide to Love, and Lack Thereof by Lynn Harris, Chris Kalb (Illustrator)
"Saving Love Lives Everywhere, It's--Breakup Girl to the Rescue! Only one superhero fights crimes of the heart, stops dating indignities, and helps you get your stuff back: Breakup Girl. Knowing and generous, Breakup Girl combines superpower and savvy in refreshingly witty relationship advice, drawing on real letters sent to the award-winning BreakupGirl.com Web site. Whether you're in a relationship, ending one, or just trying to get a second date, Breakup Girl to the Rescue! guides you through that crazy, messy thing called love. Or that even messier thing: the lack thereof."

You don't need a current hole in your heart to profit from Breakup Girl's sly and provocative wisdom. Don't be deceived--she is much more than Dear Abby with better hair, a delicious sense of humor and probably a Mensa card. Breakup Girl is a shrewd chronicler of urban angst and The Way We Are Now. Her talent for capturing complex feelings of need and entitlement in the Millenial variety of relationship issues never fails to amuse (e.g. on Long-Distance Relationships--"If you really loved me, you'd take the Concorde.")

the fanboy DVD store:

WarGames
Cute but silly, this 1983 cautionary fantasy stars Matthew Broderick as a teenage computer genius who hacks into the Pentagon's defense system and sets World War III into motion.

All the fun is in the film's set-up, as Broderick befriends Ally Sheedy and starts the international crisis by pretending while online to be the Soviet Union. While the Broderick/Sheedy romance is a sub-plot it does make this film a good choice for romantic dates that have a high geek factor! Even non-geek dates can get into the 80’s nostalgia.

George Lucas in Love
A hilarious and affectionate parody of both the Star Wars films and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, George Lucas in Love provides more wit and intelligence in eight minutes that most full-length feature films do in 90.

It's 1967, and George Lucas (Martin Hynes) is only three days from graduating from film school. The "agricultural space tragedy" he's been working on isn't going well at all. Taunted by his asthmatic rival (who wears a black cape), flummoxed by his adviser (who speaks in backwards sentences), he's at wit's end, until inspiration arrives in the form of the comely Marion (Lisa Jakub), the leader of the student campus rebellion who sports a distinctly familiar hairdo featuring twin buns. Funny without being too in-jokey, and clever but never full of itself, George Lucas in Love is a perfect example of the short film parody: it never wears out its welcome.

Sid & Nancy - Criterion Collection
It’s a punk story of love gone wrong and a harrowing look at the bizarre, self-destructive, and curiously compelling relationship between British punk rock singer Sid Vicious (of The Sex Pistols) and American groupie Nancy Spungen in the 1970s.

Director Cox achieves a masterful level of docu-realism, then laces it with allegorical dream images, with striking results. At the core of the film are two remarkable performances, by Oldman and Webb, who don't seem to be performing at all: they are Sid and Nancy. A downer, to be sure, but fascinating. Keep an eye out for geek-godess Courtney Love in a very minor role!

Pin Up Queen
Betty Page was the top pinup queen of the '50s, fabled in poster and postcard, featured performer in three burlesque films, and probably more we can only dream about. This disc features numerous exotic dance films Betty did between 1951 and 1956, serving as something of an historical record of the burlesque arts as you're not likely to see elsewhere.

Clips of Betty abound from the films of Irving Klaw (you can't make up names like that), including Varietease, Striporama, and Teaserama, and six 8mm or 16mm shorts that have all the resolution of a Muybridge motion study. Although the provocative nature of the dances is quaint by modern standards, Betty has the kind of quality that stands the test of time, making this collection indispensable for aficionados of our erotic past. It's funny, sassy, catty--an important cultural-historical record and a quaint fantasy aid all rolled into one.

The Bride of Frankenstein
It appeared, at the end of the epochal 1931 horror movie Frankenstein, that the monster had perished in a burning windmill. But that was before the runaway success of the movie dictated a sequel. In Bride of Frankenstein, we see that the monster (once again played by Boris Karloff) survived the conflagration, as did his half-mad creator (Colin Clive). This remarkable sequel, universally considered superior to the original, reunites other key players from the first film: director James Whale (whose life would later be chronicled in Gods and Monsters) and, of course, the inimitable Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein's bent-over assistant.

Whale brought campy humor to the project, yet Bride is also somehow haunting, due in part to Karloff's nuanced performance. The monster, on the loose in the European countryside, learns to talk, and his encounter with a blind hermit is both comic and touching. (The episode was later spoofed in Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein.) A prologue depicts the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, being urged to produce a sequel by her husband Percy and Lord Byron. She's played by Elsa Lanchester, who reappears in the climactic scene as the man-made bride of the monster. Her lightning-bolt hair and reptilian movements put her into the horror-movie pantheon, despite being onscreen for only a few moments. But in many ways the film is stolen by Ernest Thesiger, as the fey Dr. Pretorious, who toasts the darker possibilities of science: "To a new world of gods and monsters!" Absolutely.