Sep

14

Why I Hate Columbia House

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There’s no good reason in the world to expect a profit-driven company to send you a bunch of free stuff without attaching little strings to every item.  Such is the paradigm vortex in which I find myself tonight.

Because I have a life, a career, and a social calendar…  Because I see no particular need to set my clock to that of a major entertainment distributorship… Because there are so many more important choices to make every day when I roll out of bed, the very last thing on my mind is to tell Columbia House not to send me their absurd “Director’s Selection” every month. 

First of all, the Director of WHAT?  Director in Charge of Perpetuating Banal and Utterly Mindless Pop Culture?  Director of Lobotomies with a Hand Shovel?  The Director of Half-Eaten Twinkies Floating in Bong Water?  The Director of FEMA Who Used to Raise Thoroughbred Horses but Decided It Would Be Fun to Manage Federal Emergencies Instead?  Frankly, any of them would be an improvement over the current selection tsar. 

Oddly enough, they have only themselves to blame for my gas.  They set the bar too high.  I recall a time when the aforementioned purveyor of mediocrity would at least let you assign yourself to a category.  When I got my 13 free CDs, they at least let me tell them “I’m kind of a jazz girl.”  I knew there were idiots at the switch whenever the current spit bubble from Kenny G arrived at my door, but the rest of the time I could generally count on something tolerable showing up if I’d happened to have missed my No Thanks window.  Let me tell you, friend: No such categorization buffer exists in the DVD department.

Some brilliant MBA obviously walked into Columbia House and said, “Hey, options are bad and they cost you money!” Or maybe it was “consumers don’t really know what they like, so we need to tell them!”  Well, I know precisely what I like, and it’s the opposite of Spiderman.  The movies I enjoy wouldn’t even share a theater zip code with American Wedding (the desperate attempt at a follow-up to the absurd American Pie).  Other shit stains include that crazed monkey boy Tom Cruise in Collateral, Tom again in The Last Samurai, and the even bigger monkey boy Keanu Reeves in a weird thing called Constantine.  I couldn’t even get beyond the menu screen on that one.  The arrival of each was about as welcome as salmonella poisoning on Christmas.

For as bad as they were, I’m afraid none of them prepared me for the half-plucked turkey I found rotting in my mailbox today: Talladega Nights.  Don’t get me wrong!  Nobody does Big, Stupid, Hairy White Guy like Will Ferrell.  But it’s clinically proven impossible to endure 121 minutes of it.  A ten-minute comedy sketch with Will in a cheerleader outfit is the most normal humans can take.  Getting beyond that qualifies you for any number of jobs at the White House because your tolerance for idiocy is clearly unnatural.

Considering a possible run for office, I decided to watch.  It’s hard to pinpoint what was so gut-wrenchingly bad.  The flavor of awfulness was pervasive, and had an oscillating quality to it much like sitting next to your smelliest uncle on a hot day with his Wal-Mart fan wafting toxic body odor into your nose and eyes with its perky little plastic flags a-fluttering, all impervious to the stench that’s slowly removing your facial flesh.  In fact, it was probably much like the smell to be found on any summer day in Talladega.

Now don’t fool yourself for one minute into thinking that this bleeding heart liberal simply resents the chronic stereotyping of lower-middle class America as stupid, shallow, and feckless.  On the contrary!  I LOVE it.  Especially when they’re all polling republican.  I’m going to start getting legislation in place to move elections to mid July, and all my problems are over!  Nope.  I say, “Gentlemen, start your engines and bring out the Girls Gone Wild,” because it’s the best way to keep all y’all in one place for when Iran finally sends that nuke over here.  I don’t think bin Laden will target us wine-slurpers in Sonoma.  He wants you red, white, and blue-blooded screaming assholes getting a chubby watching cars drive around in circles real fast burning up all of his oil.  But I digress…

Ricky Bobby is a carbon copy of every other Will Farrell character we’ve ever seen.  John C. Reilly does what he does best, which is to play the hapless second fiddle.  Unfortunately for Farrell, the second fiddle frequently upstaged the top banana.  There were only two factors that saved this DVD from the doom of my microwave:  The goofy quotes on the box praising the movie (“America is all about speed.  Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.” — Eleanor Roosevelt), and Sacha Baron Cohen as the Euro-trash Formula One driver bent on proving his alternative view of superiority.  I admit to being disappointed at finding my hero in this retched movie, but then it began to make sense… in a sick, witty, and entirely Sacha B. Cohen way, it all made sense.  But I doubt it’s what the producers had in mind.

So I hate Columbia House because it propagates the lowest common denominator of taste.  It kicks the witty, intellectual kid in the balls while clumsily fingering the cheerleader’s panties.  Columbia House takes the absolute worst aspects of American “culture” and splashes it in your lap with some salsa and chips. 

But what the hell do you expect from people who give you stuff for FREE?  Shut up and eat your Fritos.