GET IT??  Bananas!

If you haven’t seen The Super Secret Project‘s “Granite State of Mind” New Hampshire tribute (and Jay-Z send-up), go do that, quick, because it’s amazing. Then check out their recreation of the Perfect Strangers opening, Boston-style…. (They also did the Good Will Hunting Louder “remake” we posted a while back.)

Next up, maybe they can do Step by Step, but on the Green Line instead of a roller coaster?  Terrifying!

Tired of hearing about the iPad?  Everyone loves it!  Everyone has a complaint about it!

Among the over-hyped complaints about the revolutionary new Apple device is that certain accents and regional pronunciations make the terms “iPod” and “iPad” indistinguishable.

Cult of Mac blogger John Brownlee writes:

I wanted to point out quickly why I think this is such a terrible product name. I’m from Boston originally. We have an interesting way of pronouncing our a’s.

Call up a friend with a Boston accent and ask them to say “iPad.” They might just pronounce it pretty similarly to “iPod.” We’re weird that way. Or as Jake von Slatt just said to me: “Here in Boston, we’d say ‘Do you haave the big iPohd or the little iPohd?’”

Even if the pronunciation is different for everyone, though, iPad still seems a bad choice. A one letter difference makes for a lot of possible confusion.

The following send-up of the product uses good ole Good Will Hunting to elucidate this point. (And at last, someone jokes about the iPad and steers clear of feminine hygiene.)

Enjoy.

According to Wikipedia (famous last words, I know — the source of this information has not been cited but Williams Goldman corroborated the details in a WGA seminar in 2003), Matt and Ben’s original story for Good Will Hunting was that of an FBI thriller.  If this is true, it likely stokes the flames of rumors that Matt and Ben weren’t the “real” screenwriters.  (But really, isn’t this sort of questioning of authorship innate in all collaborative, commercial works?)

Affleck and Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner’s request, noted screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film’s climax ought to be Will’s decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar (Driver) to California. Goldman has denied widely spread rumors that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.^[1]

Everyone loves a good Brokeback to the Future-esque mashup, so here’s one for Good Will Hunted — a peek into what Good Will Hunting perhaps could have been.

It’s been interesting to see how much attention the guy with the ponytail in the Harvard bar scene is getting these days — he’s a spokesman for a gold reseller, and seemingly everybody cares. Every day on Twitter someone mentions his ads for Goldline (and describes him as the dude from the Good Will Hunting specifically).  This blog has been getting a decent amount of traffic for people searching for “good will hunting guy goldline ads” and similar searches.

Also, Winters (ponytail guy) is hardly just an actor in a role for Goldline; he has described himself as a “long-time client.”  It’s not hard to conflate his Harvard Ponytail Guy persona with his identity as a public figure — in short, a pompous, wealthy conservative.

Stephen Colbert recently did a spot-on send-up of the recent right-wing paranoid rush to stock up on gold.  I was criticized for poking fun at Winters and his gold commercials.  It’s nice to have Colbert and John Slattery chiming in.

I always forget that Matt & Ben really got their break from Kevin Smith (Good Will Hunting co-executive producer, creator/writer/director of Chasing Amy and, as seen above, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) .  I haven’t seen Jay & Silent Bob, but have to admit, this scene is masterful.

Were Ben-Affleck-self-mocking a film genre onto its own, he’d be buried in Oscars.