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Not-so-good ol' boys.

2005-08-11 - 8:30 p.m.

Tuesday night J and I went to see the new Dukes of Hazzard movie. If you don�t want to read any spoilers, stop right now and check out old entries.

As was the case for so many my age, the Dukes of Hazzard television show was a huge favourite of mine back in the day. The Duke cousins made my little heart go pit-a-pat. I had a poster of Bo and Luke Duke at the foot of my bed and their eyes followed us as we moved throughout the postage-stamp sized room we shared, and yes, I may have even kissed Bo Duke goodnight once or twice. My sister like Luke so there was no squabbling over which one of them would have liked which one of us; clearly the one we liked was the one that would have reciprocated our tender feelings. We even, for a brief period, were inspired by the Dukes� prowess with flaming arrows to fiddle around with archery.

So it is with a heavy heart I must report that the new movie is a big stinker. I don�t think anyone�s ever said this of the Dukes of Hazzard, but if anything the acting in the original was much more subtle than what we saw on screen this week. It was like, in some ways, they�d become parodies of the worst aspects of the original characters� and that�s the best that could be said about them because in other ways the only manner in which they resembled the originals was that Bo was blond and Luke was a brunette.

Luke was some tomcat ladies man, which I don�t remember to be the case as much in the original. I certainly don�t remember him being that more successful with the ladies than Bo was. Uncle Jesse wasn�t the wise, respected senior member of the community but was instead a moonshine runner that couldn�t or wouldn�t stop cracking off-colour jokes. Roscoe had moved more into the realm of ominous and evil than his old persona of being a bumbling Flash-the-dog-lover; Boss Hogg wasn�t short or fat, and rather than just being greedy and blustery was given to being downright mean. Daisy was her usual sex-kitten self but knew it WAY too much in this one and manipulated men with an underlying arrogance instead of sweet southern charm. I was particularly upset with how they warped my beloved sunny, innocent, clean-cut Bo into a perma-stubbled, car-obsessed dork who is completely inept with the ladies. He even fainted when the girl he had a crush on kissed him. Whaaaa???

Where were Bo and Luke�s trademark respective yellow and blue shirts? They couldn�t even have them for one scene? Why were Daisy�s shorts short but not as tight as they were famous for being? At one point Bo and Luke drove to Atlanta; what happened to them being confined to Hazzard County limits �on probation�? Where did all the swearing and smoking up come from? And what the heck was with the guy in the armadillo hat?

If you�re a fan of the current flavour of adolescent humour � la Road Trip, and that�s what you�re going to the theater to see, you might like this movie. If you truly enjoyed the original series you�re in for disappointment. I count myself among the latter.

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Midwife visit today. It went off without a hitch and I didn�t really learn anything new.
We also met with my bank to talk about the possibility of moving once we have a small mobile creature in this non-child-friendly house. We got some good news on this front and it looks like we can afford to get something decent, even in today�s house market.

We�re unreachable this weekend and we�re taking an extra couple of days. If all goes to plan I�ll next be writing on Tuesday evening. In the meantime, archives await!

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