Vox Question of The Day: What’s your favorite foreign accent?
Antonio Banderas. No, not Spanish in general, not Málaga, Spain in particular, but specifically, uniquely Antonio Banderas.

Everything is better, funnier, wittier and sexier if you say it like Antonio Banderas.

This discovery all started with a really bad movie that had nothing to do with Antonio Banderas. I’m not sure this will seem funny to anyone else, and even though I was there, I’m not sure how Antonio Banderas was brought into the equation, but one lazy Sunday some months ago, I came across this movie on the Sci-Fi channel that has to be one of THE. ABSOLUTE. WORST. movies ever. This was a movie so bad that I enjoyed it immensely and laughed a lot, even though that was probably not the reaction for which the filmmakers were hoping. It was called Mansquito and starred (I use the term loosely) that Parker Lewis kid as a grown-up detective. There was the totally cliched science-lab experiment gone awry, which is performed on a convicted criminal who then goes on a rampage fueled by his new scientifically-bestowed powers - stop me if you’ve heard this one before - oh, and the detective’s girlfriend is also the scientist who is handling the experiment, which also backfires upon her. So the escaped criminal is fused with mosquito DNA and he’s half-man, half-mosquito (Mansquito, get it?) and the final big finale has the detective yelling, “Hey! (pause) Mansquito!” to get Mansquito’s attention before blowing him away. Oh, damn, hope I didn't spoil it for you there.

Why the guy, whose name is Ray, and who has been busy on a criminal rampage and therefore presumably not watching the Sci-Fi channel, answers to "mansquito" in the first place is a mystery not fully explored in this treatment, but which I hope may be properly addressed in the sequel. Still, it fits right in with the overdone melodrama of the shouted, "Hey! (pause) Mansquito!", trust me. At some point during the movie, we started lamenting the fact that Antonio Banderas was not featured - I’m not sure why we thought that would help - this flick was so cheesy not even Antonio, Sean Connery and Val Kilmer together could save it. Somehow that evolved into us pronouncing ‘mansquito’ not as “man-skee-toe” like the cast of the movie and the Sci-Fi channel announcer did, but rather as “mon-skweee-toe” as we imagined Antonio Banderas would.

Ever since then, when he wants to make me laugh, or simply when he'd like to see Diet Coke come out my nose, Alan will say, in his deepest, best Antonio Banderas imitation, “I. AM. MONSQUITO.” Since my voice isn’t deep enough to do a good Antonio Banderas impression, I pretend to be a commercial and offer something like, “Tonight at 8PM! Antonio Banderas! Is! MONSQUITO!”

If I ever won the lottery, I would probably spend it all on a big-budget remake of Mansquito, starring Antonio Banderas. And Gerard Depardieu! And maybe Selma Hayek.