Spliced

I tried to watch the movie Splice. I was unsuccessful. I can't even tell you if it's a good movie or not, because I found the "male lead" so unappealing I simply couldn't continue. Was it the greasy, stringy, Severus Snape hair? Or the endless procession of uber-hip t-shirts? Or the ironic hip of him driving an AMC Gremlin? Whatever, he aggravated me to the point of anguish and I flipped to an old Western instead, where nobody wore any uber-hip t-shirts or drove a 1970s piece-of-crap car as a statement of ironic style.

My first car was an AMC Hornet, which was basically a Gremlin with a trunk. And I can assure you, there was nothing hip about a Hornet, then or now. They say people develop an emotional soft spot for their first cars. I didn't. My Hornet was a rolling mass of issues, including chronic electrical problems and torque converters that wouldn't stay together. My second car was a Ford Pinto, which was, if anything, even worse - it is impossible to think tenderly about a car that developed two horsepower (I'd tell dates "Hang on, I have to use both horsepowers now!").

The first car I really liked in any real way was a late-1970s Chevrolet Nova, mostly because when you stepped on the throttle, it would actually do something. The Hornet just vibrated; the Pinto spit and coughed. But the Nova would at least move. It wasn't a muscle car and wasn't meant to be, but it would at least get out of its own way.

The use of an AMC in Wayne's World was funny because the main characters were either too dumb or too self-absorbed to realize it wasn't hip. But the guy in Splice drove an AMC apparently because it was retro. But so are outhouses, and I don't notice a strong movement toward outdoor toilets as an expression of personal style.

I seem to have a pretty low threshold of pain when it comes to ironic retro hipness in movies. And I'm okay with that.