Polezilla – Review

website-polezilla200Polezilla

by Scott Hefflon

Chad Van Wagner reviews DVDs and websites for Lollipop. He recently moved to a place called Japan, which I’m told is very far away from my office/house/heavily-barricaded hideout. Chad didn’t send in many website reviews this issue because he’s been moved twice, can’t find a good Internet connection (“It takes a month or so for a foreigner to jump through the hoops to get their own connection”), or he just plain forgot. So here’s a review of his site, Polezilla.com (we also made it into a column called Cuture Shock). It made me laugh loudly a number of times. Late at night. With the windows open. Yeah, my neighbors hate me…

website-polezilla3photoPolezilla.com is simply laid out. Four categories are listed on the left – Shibuya and Ueno Park (5/3/05), Imperial Palace (4/20/05), Arrival (4/4/05), and Santa Claus (12/17/04) – and each pulls up a rather rudimentary page on the right, a rant with photos inserted, if you will. Ok, so it’s a travelogue page, much like every moron who goes anywhere makes and wants to show you, filled with crappy photos of things that might’ve been interesting if you’d been there (but you had to work double shifts while they were gone, and your social life consisted of alphabetizing your sock drawer and watching Turner & Hooch again), but Chad is funnier than 95% of the people you know, so his page doesn’t make you wanna punch his I-travel-the-world-and-you-don’t-even-leave-the-house face in.

Other cultures are fun to make fun of, especially if you do it behind their backs. They paint buildings purple. They have random sculptures in the middle of parks with no explanation. They have billboards and slogans and products and store names that seem funny to us. Hell, America must look pretty funny to outsiders (look at the tabloids and mainstream glossy crap mags at the supermarket and see what signals we’re giving off), but thoughtful Americans think American mainstream is a joke anyway, and non-thoughtful Americans, well, they’ll beat you up or blow up small chunks of your country if you tease them, so watch yourself. Free speech, my ass.

The step-by-step Santa Claus preparation is so simple, but so well-executed, it’s a wonder more people’s attempts don’t work as well.

So spend a few minutes on the site, watch Twinkie Man pose amidst the locals and locales, and bug Chad to update a little more frequently.
www.polezilla.com