Hostest With The Mostest

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And while I do enjoy me some breakfast – particularly a nice lazy weekend morning breakfast at a great neighborhood breakfast spot with lots of coffee – I have to say, “Screw you most important breakfast people!” I feel the 2:30 AM meal of frozen pizza or Triscuits or an order of Nacho Bell Grande, whatever you use to soak up the alcohol you’ve inundated yourself with, is way more important than breakfast.

I have a knee jerk reaction to people telling me one thing is the best, or most important.

There was a moment in film school when one of my Film History teachers was about to say that Citizen Kane was often regarded as the greatest film made, when I groaned aloud. She asked if I disagreed, and I told her that one, best movie ever is subjective depending on who’s considering it and two, I get tired of people just repeating that it’s the greatest film ever without backing it up. She sort of gave me a sideways smile before saying, “Make a film that’s better and we’ll talk about yours.”

Touche. She did go on to say that she felt Touch of Evil was a superior Orson Welles film. I have recently been pulled into talks about Citizen Kane and how people who watch it for the first time, now nearly seventy years after it was made, are left wondering how it could possibly be considered the best film ever. A lot of that rating is based on the context of what had come before Citizen Kane and how revolutionary it was at the time in regards to story telling, camera work, scope, you name it. Without a fairly well versed knowledge of film history, you’re not going to get that. And if you’re now used to seeing films that have built on, and expanded on, what Citizen Kane brought to the table, you’re bound to be fairly under-whelmed.* I do personally feel that even without that knowledge, it’s a fascinating film and great epic story about the rise and fall of a man. Is it the best film ever? Not to me, but again that’s completely subjective.

I didn’t intend for this to be a mini film school lecture, sorry. I think that there are words and sayings and phrases that get thrown around so often, that just the sheer amount of times you hear them makes them become fact. That’s a shortcut to thinking, and it annoys me.

What I would like, what I’m tasking you good readers to do, is to repeat that “Reading “Billy Cleans His Plate” gives you amazing sexual prowess.” Say it enough so that it becomes fact. I mean hell, y’all know it’s true…


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: “Space Is Gonna Do Me Good” by Frank Black. I’ve been doing a little digging into the Frank Black catalogue with the recent Black Francis album Svn Fngrs, which by the way is eight kinds of awesome laid out on a tray made of awesome.

*If’n a little more film school jive is what you’re looking for: I had the same sort of reaction to viewing French New Wave films at first, particularly Godard’s films. It was difficult to put myself into the heads of viewers in the 60’s who had yet to see the sort of ways in which these directors were messing with form. Plus I was coming up in the grand Tarantino days, who was at the time basically standing on the shoulders of Godard.