Addicted to Bad: Dire Strait » FRED Entertainment

No question about it, George Strait is country. The man eats pickup trucks, breathes cattle drivin’, and sleeps dusty boots. And when he dreams, he dreams of belt buckles. Great big belt buckles, bigger ‘n the sky, because real cowboys don’t have the time to muss around with tiny belt prongs and itty-bitty holes, darnit! There’re cattle rustlers afoot, and sticks to whittle! At any moment, someone could start doing the Cactus Cha-Cha, and by God, his belt… Must. Be. Ready.And that, my friends, is why George gets to call his movie PURE COUNTRY. Not “Sorta Country” or “88.5% Country and 11.5% Country By-Product.” No! This is pure, uncut country, man! Industrial-grade country! Do you have any idea what the street value of this movie is?!

Pure Country Poster In PURE COUNTRY, country music megastar George Strait plays country music megastar Dusty Chandler, who is definitely not George Strait because he has a ponytail. Also, “Dusty” is written everywhere, even on his clothes, as a friendly reminder that he is Dusty, not George. Which is good, because George definitely looks like he could suddenly forget and slip back into George at any moment. And then, how would viewers know who he was? Thank goodness the filmmakers took this valuable and potentially life-saving precaution.

Every night Not George gets on stage in his trademark rhinestone-studded, white “Dusty” cowboy suit with his 12-piece band and his pyrotechnics and lighting rigs, and he sings irony-free songs about being modest and hard-working out in the country for thousands of middle-aged suburban moms with enormous, aerodynamically unsound bangs. If you thought that dressing up like a freak and performing for scores of women each night would make Not George happy (hey, it worked for Wilt Chamberlain), you would be wrong: Not George would much rather be doing the things he sings about; or, at the very least, he would rather sing about them in a slightly less fruity manner.

jacket His manager/girlfriend, however, will have none of it. Dusty is just giving the people what they want: Men in awful, awful clothes who sing while things blow up, apparently. And she’s right: Take a poll of the average American, and watching fashion-challenged men sing during explosions ranks just above kickboxing but below home videos of testicle trauma. But Not George knows that his shows have not been Pure Country, but rather Artificial Country Substitute, and he will have none of it. He storms off the tour and heads back to the Heartlandâ„¢ where he promptly gets drunk, picks up a bar skank, gets in a fight, oversleeps, and misses work. Yep, that’s pure country all right.

The next day, he wakes up on the bar skank’s ranch, and as he and her leathery father watch her milk a horse, he realizes that she is the bar skank that he wants to spend the rest of the movie with. But what about his career as a rich country star, beloved by bar skanks everywhere? Well, back on the tour, Dusty has been replaced by the absolute dumbest guy on the road crew, and no one seems to have noticed, so everyone’s happy.Unfortunately, however, the skank of his dreams is about to lose her ranch unless she can win first prize at the big rodeo. Not George, being a multimillionaire country star and all, gives her $50 to give him some riding lessons, which is much better than giving her a non-useless amount that could, you know, save her farm. They live cheaply ever after, until his evil manager/girlfriend shows up and tells the skank that Not George actually has boatloads of money. So she does the only logical thing to do: Break up with him. The end….

No, of course not. Instead, it all builds to a suspenseful climax (if, that is, you find being bored and annoyed suspenseful) in Las Vegas, because that’s where country singers go to “get back to their roots,” I guess. It’s there that Not George will unveil his new, even purer show. And I know what you’re thinking: How is it possible to make something so pure even purer? I don’t know, but he found a way, and he did it without changing one single thing about the old show.

Wow. If they gave Nobel Prizes for Country, surely George Strait would win, because he just blew our minds, man.

ATB Update: Since the release of PURE COUNTRY in 1992, Not Dusty has chosen to focus on not acting, only he’s no longer letting people film it. Which is a shame, for the world is currently at an all-time “explosions near badly dressed singer” low. In spite of continued war, famine, and natural disasters, and pleas from world leaders, there are currently no plans for a PURE COUNTRY II: PURE HARDER.

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