for those about to rock

hey, scarface, inc.!!!

this day has served up a chafing frost cold enough to blue ball all those flaming libidoes lingering in the aftermath of last night's televised pageant of impossibly gorgeous women that you'll never have (cbs's "victoria's secret fashion show"). numbed by the cutting arctic gusts, and with a 100 dollar gift card to filene's (thanks, grandma) burning a hole in my wallet, i decided that today would be a fine day to take my first lunch break in about 2 weeks and venture out to downtown crossing to shop for a winter coat.

it's not that i don't already own a winter coat. there's a homely brown number i purchased last winter hanging neglected in my closet at home. it's just that when i pair said coat with my frequently-worn brown cordouroys and brown shoes, i ... well, there's no other way to say it: i look like a big piece of shit.

anyhow, filene's was a fucking madhouse. i spent about 20 minutes threading through crowds of frantic, bug-eyed shoppers (it's december 7. chill.) and wandering aimlessly before i finally stumbled upon the men's section. finding that my jacketing options were limited to puffy/puff daddy/sean combs/p. diddy/diddy/shit daddy-style coats priced at 165 bucks, i cursed at the waste of valuable lunch time and made haste for the exit.

i was thinking that i might chance popping my head into tello's to see about finding a good cheap coat, but thought better of it when i realized how much time i had left before i needed to get my ass back to my desk.

still, this passing whim reminded me of a post i was gonna write a couple of months ago when i first checked out tello's, which brings me around to a subject framed by the title of this post: the scarface section at tello's. yep, that's right, an entire section of the store devoted to all sorts of apparel sporting tony montana's sulking mug. they've got scarface tees, scarface headbands, scarface hats, scarface belts, scarface suspenders, scarface underoos.

scarface, scarface, scarface. you can wrap yourself up in all manner of scarface garments so that you can be good and ready to catch scarface when it airs on the spike network for the nine hundredth time.

tony montana is revered as an icon of ruthlessness in hip-hop, and manly-men media outlets like maxim magazine and spike tv put him up on a bloody pedestal as a paragon of machismo. all this scarface worship, unfortunately, belies two simple facts ...

scarface is a shitty movie. and tony montana is not so much a ruthless, macho gangster as he is a solipsistic and opportunistic asshole. a big baby with a gun, a coke problem and a loud mouth.

oh boy, he lets insane drug dealers hack up his buddy with a chainsaw. you know what? he's an asshole.

oh boy, he treats michelle pfieffer like shit. you know what? he's an asshole.

oh boy, he kills robert loggia, whose only real crime in the movie was minding his own business, having a good time and laughing it up at the club. you know what? he's an asshole.

scarface would've been ten times better if loggia had managed to snuff out that prick early on and then spent the rest of the movie at the club telling jokes with associates and laughing uproariously in between swigs of scotch and puffs off a good cuban (yeah, lame pun intended. it's late.).

posted by jomilkman @ 10:58 AM