Paul Rudd Shouldn't Play Leads

If you've watched any of the most popular comedic movies produced in the past decade or so, you've probably seen one with Paul Rudd in it. And you've probably laughed. A lot. Because he's funny. He's not only funny and he's also pretty good looking, two things that don't always go together.

Suck it Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill.

Probably the best thing about Paul Rudd is that he plays Paul Rudd in every movie. Some people can get away with it, because it's awesome. Just like Tracy Morgan and Tina Fey play themselves on the constant Emmy winning "30 Rock", Paul Rudd keeps it real, staying true to himself. His "acting" is about as much of a stretch as Snoop Dogg playing a drug aficionado, pimp, or rapper in...well, every time he's ever been on screen.

Were you expecting Shakespeare?

My room mate and I, along with a few friends, have stumbled upon a shocking truth. We call it the "Rudd Corollary". I don't know if you're aware of this fact or not, but Paul Rudd is not funny as a leading actor. He's pretty damn funny when he's in the supporting cast, but once he gets more than 23 percent of screen time he just magically becomes less funny.

Let's just start off with the facts.

Most people first met Paul Rudd in his break out role in Clueless. He plays the older step brother who was initially a dick to (and then we assume later put his dick to) Alicia Silverstone. Now, that movie might not have beat Apollo 13 (97% on Rotten Tomatoes) out for Oscar nominations, but it's 83% certainly doesn't lump it in the same category as another film released that same year.

I'm looking at you Stallone. 15%

Sure, he had a sitcom that was canceled out from under him after like three weeks, but not even Wikipedia knows anything about this alleged "Wild Oats". Fact is, it was canceled before it even ran a month. As one of the two male leads, I can guarantee that he had more than 23% screen time. But, by doing some research I found out that every other actor connected with the show was doomed to toil in obscurity. The second most successful one is the voice of Chuckie from "Rugrats". Let that sink in.

Rudd is the only one who escaped.

After a few more years of minor roles and TV bits, Rudd managed to become part of the ensemble cast in what turned out to be a "Who's Who" of comedians: Wet Hot American Summer. In a performance rated the 4th Most Irreplaceable Performance in Comedy Films by cracked.com, Rudd "attacks every scene of this movie with the soul-crushing apathy of a hitchhiker handjob". And he is hilarious. Nearly every line out of his mouth makes you chuckle. Every time you see him in the background, he's funny.

Moving forward.

He had a recurring role on "Friends". A show that was pretty much hot shit back in the day. It had Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, and four other people. Guest stars included Tom Selleck, Reese Witherspoon, Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin. He might not have stolen the show, but he was good enough to be kept around for eighteen full episodes. Never getting more than 23% of the screen time.

Boom!

2004 hits, and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy drops, and proceeds to blow the collective mind of teenagers and college kids everywhere. Perhaps one of the most quotable movies ever, Anchorman had Rudd's mustachioed performance as Brian Fantana. And we loved him for it.

"60% of the time, it works every time."

Boom!

2005 comes around, and The 40 Year Old Virgin hits screens, bringing further hilarity to the 13-30 age movie goer demographic. Rudd's turn as the pathetic yet humorous David certainly made us giggle a fair amount. He was funny. He was wry. He was only on screen for about 20% of the movie.

"You know how I know you're gay?"

After a year of doing bit parts in movies and TV cameos, Rudd brings it back in 2007's Knocked Up, where he plays the occasionally disgruntled family man to Seth Rogen's loser stoner. The way he plays off Leslie Mann's shrewish, neurotic character is classic Rudd. Indifferent yet quirky. Sneaking off to play fantasy baseball, or watch a movie by himself.

He's a perfect sarcastic, laconic father.

And that's where it starts to go downhill. The 23% screen time limit that defines the Rudd Corollary is derived from Knocked Up. That is as close as he can get to being on-screen and simultaneously funny.

His role as a laid back surf instructor who was inexplicably unhelpful to Jason Segel's stressed out character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall still got him some laughs, largely because he was only on-screen for about 10 total minutes. The best example was his line to Russel Brand's character: "You sound like you're from London" complete with strange face and terrible accent.

Having a terrible accent makes it classic, right?

Co-starring in 2008's Role Models with Stiffler is tough to call unfunny. Because the movie is damn funny. The only problem is that Paul Rudd isn't. The cast is great. Especially McLovin, Jane Lynch and especially the black kid who loves boobies.

"If you white, then you Ben Affleck."

Unfortunately, the only time Rudd makes me laugh independent of the other cast members is when he says that he rocks and rolls every night, and part of every day because he normally has errands to run, and after Jane Lynch calls him and Stiffler Mr. Bullshit and Dr. Full-of-shit and he wants to know which of them has the Ph.D.

If you're not smarter than him, just give up.

Securing his downward spiral as a leading man, Rudd starred in the flop that was 2008's Over Her Dead Body, which got a 14% approval rating. I won't even dignify it with a picture or a plot summary.

2009 brought us I Love You Man, a huge let down from Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, two men who I thought were pretty funny. Let's put it this way: when I look back at IMDB's quotes from the movie, there aren't any from Rudd that make me laugh besides his awkward muttering of things like "Joben" or "menjay". It got decent marks, but was still not a winner for Paul. He was definitely side-lined in his own movie.

Sadly, Paul didn't learn from that mistake, and signed on for what could essentially be called a spin off of The 40 Year Old Virgin: Dinner for Schmucks. Steve Carell has weird hobbies and annoys Paul Rudd. Just subtract a lot of laughs and the hotness that is Elizabeth Banks. And I'm not the only one who thinks it was bad. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 43%.

And half of that was Zach Galifianakis.

And that brings us up to his most recent leading man role: How Do You Know. This time he doesn't even bother to try and make a good movie. Chick flicks or any film that involves living your life are inherently not the type of movie that a sarcastic, indifferent guy should be in. I like Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson, but this movie can go eat shit and die.

You know how normal movies include all their funniest parts in the preview, so you go see it and are subsequently disappointed? Well, the only two bits that I laughed at involved Owen Wilson. So far the critics have been kind to it and let it off easy with a 35% rating. It was produced for 120 million, but hasn't even made a fourth of that in the box office. Somebody needs to put it out of it's misery.

Owen is wondering why Paul even considered that movie.

Seriously though! What the fuck Paul Rudd? I hope that you, or your agent, or somebody sees this post (but doesn't sue me or something) and gets back to what makes Paul Rudd great. And that is being Paul Rudd. And being on-screen for 23% or less of the total film. Science like this isn't just for nerds.

Okay, yeah. I guess it is...

Movie Mashups

If you've hung out with my room mate and me anytime in the past week or so, you've probably heard a bit about a game we've been playing. And by playing, I mean obsessing over, and spending a lot of time doing research, typing things up and brainstorming. The game is "Movie Mash Up", and it is exactly what it sounds like.

I was watching "Cougar Town" (Don't judge me. That show is pretty funny and Courtney Cox is still hot.) while at work one day, and realized that this game was totally awesome.

Thanks, Courtney.

The rules are pretty simple: you take two movies that share a word, then combine them. You then create a plot tag line and describe it to your friend, who tries to guess the two movies that went into it and what the combined title would be.

For example: "A fat orange cat who loves lasagna hears voices in his head and decides to build a baseball field." You think about the first part, and arrive at "Garfield". Then you think about the second part and get "Field of Dreams". The combined title is "Garfield of Dreams". See how the movie titles run together?

"If you build it, they will come."

Well, since my room mate and I both watch a lot of movies, love mental games of all sorts (especially word play or inside jokes) and enjoy telling funny stories to friends, we realized this game would be awesome. And the madness began.

At first we were pretty bad at the whole "last word of one movie is the same as the first word of the other movie" bit, and we stretched the rules a bit. Also, I have to admit that I stumbled frequently when trying to come up with a tagline for movies like "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead".

"I want to hold your brains?"

So here are some of the best ones we've come up with. Some make sense, some sound like actual movies that might be produced if you whisper the plot to the right studio executive. Some are bat-shit crazy, and would a lot of fun to watch, but make no sense.

My room mate came up with the first one that really made us laugh, so I'm going to start the list off with it. Here goes.

#1) "Richard Gere has a huge dick, and a beach house in North Carolina. He starts banging this old lady who wears roller skates, and they film it. They exchange letters back and forth afterward, but he dies in the end. But he shows his junk."

Guess it yet?

"Boogie Nights In Rodanthe"!

Nick Sparks and Marky Mark's bastard love child.

#2) An all male jury must decide the fate of a young teen accused of murdering his father...while at the same time protecting Earth from aliens.

"12 Angry Men in Black"

Henry Fonda makes this suit look good.

#3) John Cusack owns a record store, and is really upset about his girlfriend breaking up with him. Then his really smart friend dies, so John rolls his ashes in with a joint and smokes it. Then he receives an admittance letter from Harvard.

"How High Fidelity"
It's definitely on the top five list of college movies.

#4) Hillary Swank is a struggling female boxer who needs some extra money...so she rents out her uterus to Tina Fey, who does not approve of things that her surrogate does, like boxing while pregnant. Hilarity ensues.

"Million Dollar Baby Mama"

"Blergh! I want you to jab, right in the tits!"

#5) Wesley Snipes may or may not be an android who hunts vampires in a dystopian future.

"Blade Runner"

"There are worse things out tonight than androids."

#6) Nicholas Cage provides the voice of a golden retriever wrongly imprisoned for killing a man, but soon finds himself trapped in a prisoner transport plane when the convicts take control. How will he ever make it to his basketball game in time?

"Con Air Bud"

"Nobody move, or Buddy gets it!"

The list goes on. Here are a few of the mashed up titles, think about some of the tag lines yourself, or just contact me and I can send you the five or six pages worth of movie mashups we've managed to brainstorm and type up.

- Freaky Friday After Next
- Tomb Raiders of the Lost Ark
- There Will Be Blood Diamond
- I Am Legends of the Fall
- Into the Wild Wild West
- Dirty Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (not a porno, I swear)
- The Empire Strikes Back to the Future
- Big Momma's House of Wax
- Blackhawk Down With Love
- She's the Man on Fire
- The Little Mermaid in Manhattan
- The Princess Bride Wars
- Deep Blue Seabiscuit
- Air Force One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- Free Willy 'Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

And, we've also come up with some movies that we like to call "Triple Word Scores". These Triple Word Scores are three movies that link up together. They're tough to think of, so we've only got two. But they're pretty freaking good. Unfortunately I don't have the photo shopping skills to make even moderately convincing posters for these movies.

The closest I'll get to a TWS image

#7) "Billy Bob Thornton plays a gravely voiced day-walker who may or may not be a retarded android that hunts down vampires in desolate future where animal life is rare."

"Sling Blade Runner"

#8) "Johnny Depp has to care for his younger brother and obese mother...in the dustbowl of Great Depression era California...while fighting against a genetically engineered superhuman."

"What's Eating Gilbert Grapes of Wrath of Khan"

Think you've got a great movie mashup? Let me know, and maybe we'll add it to our list. If you can, think of a creative tagline to go with it, because that's half of the joke.

*Update*

I came up with a four part movie mashup recently, and I have to say that I'm more than a little proud of it. No idea how to come up with a tagline though. But here's the title and corresponding images. If you've got a plot, let me know.

#9) Total Recall of the Wild, Wild West Side Story

I really have no idea how to write a plot for this...

Car Problems, Part Two

After my car broke down the other week, and the terrible yet rather funny experience with the worst mechanic known to man, I was fairly certain that my car troubles were over for at least a few days. I had my car parked in front of my apartment, my room mate had just come back from his med school interviews, blaring "Where the Party At?" on his car speakers.

Happy days!

Life was good. I figured that my troubles were going to be held at bay for at least a few days. I mean, how much could go wrong with my car in the next 24 hours? I don't know why I even bother to think that anymore.

Seriously though.

I drove my car to class that night, and as I got out of class and turned my phone back on, I saw that I had a text message from my room mate saying that his car had a dead battery and that he'd appreciate my help jumping his car. I thought, "Sure, no problem."

So I got back to the apartment, parked my car and walked inside. Turns out what had happened was that since he has a keyless start, he had accidentally left it in idle after turning it on briefly to roll up his windows. No big deal. It's a pretty new car, so we figured it couldn't be that big a deal to jump it and didn't get out there right away. We ate some dinner and watched like forty-five minutes of television and then decided it was time to go outside and jump his car.

This is when things begin to go downhill.

Perhaps I should have realized that my battery might not be the strongest. For one, it's probably the same battery that came with the car when it rolled out of the factory in 1999. Also, it had been loitering in a public library parking lot for an entire week while that rocket surgeon of a repairman tried to find and then subsequently fix my car.

What I'm getting at is that my battery was dead.

My room mate decides to call University Transportation, because as part of our status as tuition payers we get some decent perks, like somebody to come jump our car on campus. And we live so close to the medical campus that there's normally no problem with a request like that. Well not this time.

Not only did the person we got on the phone somehow not know where the medical campus was, she couldn't comprehend that we live on the same street that runs right next to the regular campus and she didn't understand that there were two students, each with a dead car. She wasted nearly ten minutes of our time asking for our vehicle make, model, license plate numbers, telephone numbers, student ID numbers, mother's maiden names, etc before we finally hung up in frustration.

"I just told these two grad students to shove it"

No problem, right? We've got friends. Some of those friends have cars. Some of them are even reliable enough to help us out. So we sent out some texts desperately begging for help. But in a dignified manner.

Hey, we've got our dignity.

One of our friends decided to help us out. So he shows up and tries to jump start my room mate's car. To no avail. Now, I had been thinking about getting a new battery for my car anyway, so instead of just trying to jump my car, we drove to Walmart and bought a new battery for my car. That should help our situation out, right?

So we get back to the apartment, install my brand new battery, so fresh that you can smell the acid (not really), in my car. Since it's a brand new battery, and I was already parked next to my room mate's dead car, we decided to jump his car with my car. Seems like it would work, right?

Wrong. It didn't work. His car showed less signs of life than a career path as one of those guys who light the whale blubber oil lamps. Or perhaps an elevator operator.

This guy knows what I'm talking about.

Since that didn't work, my room mate managed to convince our friend and me to try something that he called the "double jump". For anyone who might not realize what the double part of that phrase refers to, it means that we were going to hook up two cars to the dead car. Sounds like nothing could go wrong, right?

Surprisingly, nothing actually goes wrong with that part of the plan. What does go wrong is that when we attempt to position our cars so that both batteries were in range of the jumper cables, my car doesn't start. Not like, has problems starting. Like, won't even beep when you put the key in the ignition.

Seriously, how often does this shit happen?

Somehow my room mate's car managed to suck the very life force out of a brand fucking new battery. How is that even possible? Like seriously, how can an entirely new battery fail to produce enough power to jump another battery? It's not like we were trying to start an F-17 with a golf cart. It was car to car.

My room mate turns to our friend and says, "Try to jump my car with yours now." My friend and I both turn to each other and say something along the lines of "Hold up! We don't need to have three cars all with dead batteries."

Bump that noise.

Luckily though, we were able to line up a second friend with a car who would be willing to come try and jump our cars if my room mate's car managed to drain the soul out of our friend's car as well. So we used the friend's car to jump my car, and then lined up for the double jump. Both of our cars hooked up to my room mate's car, attempting to breath some life back into the black hole that is my room mate's car.

Somehow, his car managed to take the combined power of two batteries, two fucking batteries, being run pretty hard, without getting more juice than was needed to roll his windows up or down. This isn't just one battery that failed. His car was showing less life than... well... you get the point.

It's probably just taking a nap.

So the next day, he calls AAA to get a truck out to our apartment and jump his car. The truck shows up with one of those handy dandy portable jumper batteries. Big surprise, that doesn't work on his vampire of a car. This is like the fifth combined battery that has failed to power his car and I'm starting to think that maybe we should just start sacrificing virgins or something.

You didn't think I meant hot girls, did you?

So the mechanic asks to borrow my jumper cables, and hooks my room mate's car up to his tow truck. The truck has two batteries in it, each of which is more powerful than a regular car battery. At long last, my room mate's car rises from the dead with a roar. He let it run for a good fifteen or so minutes, and I swear I heard it revving it's own engine a few times.

That car scares me now.

Ballin' is a Habit Part 1

Most people who know my room mate and me know that from time to time we've dabbled in a sport or two. The purpose of this blog post is to share a few amusing stories from our time on the court/field. Sometimes we're playing well, sometimes...not so much.

As a bit of background information, in high school I played football while my room mate played tennis, and we each look like somebody who would play those sports. But over the years we've spent in college and just being guys who like sports, we've played soccer, rugby, lacrosse, frisbee, golf, basketball, racket-ball, softball, bad-mitten, volleyball, shuffleboard, boce ball, bowling, competitive eating, darts, running, swimming, paintball, martial arts...you get the point.

Ironically, this may be the only sport we've never played.

The point is that we're both pretty athletic and willing to try new sports, but certainly not professional grade athletes. We can hold our own in the average pick up game. I'm going to try and mix up the stories so that there aren't two basketball stories back to back, or two tales of woe in a row, etc.

I'm going to start off chronicling the most extreme sports challenge that we've both accepted: the Krispy Kreme Challenge. Now, for anyone reading this who doesn't know what the KKC is, or perhaps thinks they know what it is but are actually mistaken, I'll give you the run down on what might be both one of the most difficult and most unique sporting events known to man.

Outside of base-jumping/ironing that is.

Begun in 2004 at that illustrious bastion of academic and athletic prowess that is North Carolina State University, the Krispy Kreme Challenge is two parts race and one part competitive eating. Competitors begin at the Bell Tower, run two miles to the local Krispy Kreme, consume a dozen glazed doughnuts, and then run back to the start. Proceeds go to the North Carolina Children's Hospital and the event grows in size every year. Last year had a limit of 6,000 participants and received television coverage from local news, ESPN and newspapers around the nation. Over the years it has spawned several imitators, none of which stack up to the original.

Just to summarize, that is roughly 2,400 calories (what the FDA lists as a full day's eating) and four miles of running. All in under an hour. Not too bad you say? The record is 24 minutes and 31 seconds, held by Auburn Staples. That equals two sub six minute miles, twelve rings of dough and sugar in a few minutes and then two more sub six minute miles on a very full stomach. Not to mention if you're not a front runner, you have to dodge piles of displaced stomach contents.

All too often competitors end up like this on the way back.

My room mate has completed it once and I've finished it twice, but barely failed to cross the finish line in under an hour the first time. There are many different methods of training and competing that people utilize, but the most important part is to be sure you can pound down a dozen doughnuts and then waddle back to campus. Trust me.

This athlete uses the Michael Phelps Diet.

The first time I tried it I was just coming off a run conditioning class and had run a 10k the month before, and thought I was good at eating but the doughnuts really stumped me. The next time I competed I wasn't in running shape, but I was definitely ready for the eating. I finished twenty minutes faster and didn't even have to run too fast on the way back, even cockily accepting another doughnut from a bystander halfway back.

How I felt on the way back.

While I was in my undergrad, I played a lot of intramural sports. One of those was flag football. I have a love hate relationship with flag football. On the one hand, it is football and a competitive sport, both of which I love more than Hitler hates that Hannah Montana was canceled after only three seasons.

"How will I find out if Hannah and Oliver ever hook up?"

On the other hand, it is flag football which means there are silly rules, lack of contact and the ubiquitous shitty intramural referees.

The role model of choice for intramural referees.

I often played with other people in my scholarship program, which was a mixed bag. I liked most of them, but every time I played on a team with them a small piece of my soul died, so I was always sure to play on a dorm team in an attempt to salvage my love of the game. Crushing defeats, lack of practice, crushing defeats, not living up to potential and sometimes even forfeiting due to lack of team mates was a regular occurrence with them. Did I mention the crushing defeats?

Each year we won our first game handily, usually like 30-0, boosting our hopes and dreams for a successful season. And then we promptly proceeded to free fall down into the depths of defeat. Once, we lost a flag football game 74-0.

No, that's not a typo. We lost 74-0.

We were down 52-0 at half time, and so we asked the referee when he was going to call it on the mercy rule. He said that he couldn't call it until the third quarter was over because, and I quote "You guys could make a comeback."

Maybe if we had T-Mac on our team making it rain.

And the sport was basketball. And we were only down by four scores instead of seven. And if the referee would call any fouls.

Seriously? Who the fuck thinks that we could make a comeback from being down by more points at halftime than an average team scores in an entire game? And the other team was getting the ball first in the second half.

Icebox is not impressed with the odds.

Alright, enough failure. Back to winning. And winning big. And winning without class, style or grace. Which is the best way to win. Or is the only way to win? I'm often confused about what constitutes sportsmanship. So I just look to my role model.

Pictured: one step above the taunting we've dished out.

Although my room mate and I aren't the best at basketball, we aren't terrible. We have some games where we're just on. And sometimes we're just physically better than our opponents, like that time we played 2v2 against these two random 7th graders. If you think I'm just saying that, feel free to corroborate my story. Not only did we play them, but we beat them.

This was one of those times. It was a 2v2 half court game against two sophomores who both weighed in at an impressive 5'4" and 140 lbs or so. I'm 6'1", 230 lbs, give or take a half an inch and a few pounds. My room mate is 5'12" and about 165 lbs. Needless to say we were their physical superiors in a game where size (height especially) is important.

Not that big of a difference, but it certainly helps.

We played them once, and it was a fairly close game despite our height advantage. I think that the final score was like 10-7 or something. Since it was a close game, and not particularly physical, we decided to run it back. This time it wasn't so close. Final score was 10-4. Convincingly.

I might have mentioned in a previous post that my room mate dreams of being able to dunk a basketball. During our rout of the wee folk, I got down on one knee and placed my hands in the classic "boost up" position, calling out "Come on, dunk it!".

The wee folk were not amused.

Now one of the kids was a bit pissed. I guess he fancied himself a bit of a baller, and didn't exactly enjoy my room mate and myself not only beating him and his friend, but mocking them as well. He demands a rematch, which of course we give him since we've been mopping the court with them. He starts to play hard, setting picks, driving to the basket, really hustling out there. To no avail. Final score was 10-6.

Update:

Months later we were at the gym, playing some pick up basketball and one of the people on the other team was the angry little guy. We weren't sure if he remembered us or not. But he certainly did. I had the ball and was about to go up for a layup when my room mate yells "Look out!". Angry wee man packs the shit out of my shot. He remembered that day, and it had obviously been rankling in his heart.

"Vengeance shall be mine!"