{"id":3675,"date":"2018-03-23T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T14:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.pages.roanoke.edu\/?p=3675"},"modified":"2018-03-23T10:00:38","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T14:00:38","slug":"california-reviews-southern-exposure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/?p=3675","title":{"rendered":"California Reviews Southern Exposure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Leilani Doneux<\/em><\/p>\n

I think it was the sideburns, or maybe an accented, homoerotic Sacha Baron Cohen telling Will Ferrell that he tasted of America. Either way, <\/span>Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby <\/span><\/i>is the intrusive thought that I have been having since I first stepped foot in a Sheetz. Ricky Bobby is a regional cult-of-personality that is the binding factor for men of a certain humidity. He is omnipresent at every house party, in every NASCAR joke, and I honestly thought the movie was based on a true story for a good two months before I realized that he was simply a deep-fried fever dream, a simulation of regional stereotyping held together by two pieces of Wonder Bread. I would miss entire subconversations with my friends before I saw the movie; this was my olive branch. Twenty minutes into the film and I had to refrain from linguistic slips of the tongue that brought me back to my own roots, namely how a child of California pronounces the word \u201cexcellent\u201d ever after their inaugural viewing of \u201cWayne\u2019s World\u201d. Ricky Bobby is a battle cry, a fist pump, like the Duke brothers, but probably Jewish. I found myself wanting to \u2018shake and bake\u2019, or make out to Journey in an Applebee\u2019s, and I didn\u2019t hate it. <\/span>Talladega Nights<\/span><\/i> is a love story bound by family, alcoholism, and burning rubber, much like the California ethos up until Google started to gentrify the South Bay. If nothing else, who doesn\u2019t hate the French? A quick shot through Google Translate and I realized that \u201cIf you\u2019re not first, you\u2019re last\u201d is the cultural equivalent of Dionne Davenport having a panic attack merging onto the 405, or the conceptual \u201cPerfect Wave\u201d, the term coined from the movie <\/span>The Endless Summer<\/span><\/i>, itself a California totem that just barely makes up for an entire shoreline drowning literally and figuratively in coastal elitism. Dennit Racing, too, is the Alfred Coffee & Tea (of \u201cBut first, coffee\u201d fame) of the South, a capitalistic gamut that is too crazy to die. As Dave Barry wrote for the Washington Post in 2004, \u201c<\/span>Do we truly believe that <\/span>all <\/span><\/i>red-state residents are ignorant, racist, fascist, knuckle-dragging, NASCAR-obsessed, cousin-marrying, roadkill-eating, tobacco juice-dribbling, gun-fondling, religious-fanatic rednecks; or that <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> blue-state residents are godless, unpatriotic, pierced-nosed, Volvo-driving, France-loving, left-wing communist, latte-sucking, tofu-chomping, holistic-wacko, neurotic, vegan, weenie perverts?\u201d The answer is \u2018yes\u2019, and <\/span>if you don\u2019t chew Big Red, go f**k yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Leilani Doneux I think it was the sideburns, or maybe an accented, homoerotic Sacha Baron Cohen telling Will Ferrell that he tasted of America. Either way, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is the intrusive thought that I have been having since I first stepped foot in a Sheetz. Ricky Bobby is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}