The second week of President Barack Obama's (yeaaaaah, it feels good, doesn't it?) tenure in Washington left a few less casualties than usual in Hollywoodland. Unless you count Steven Adler, but his exploits on Sober House were technically filmed a few months back.
It was mostly a week for celebration, as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie unveiled their finest work yet, two nauseatingly adorable children, to the entire graduating class of a Japanese photography school.
But it was also five days of serious social commentary, courtesy of Ashlee Simpson and Kim Kardashian.
So without further drawn-out teasing of content that will ultimately be more succinctly stated than its lead-in, here are the top five things we learned this week:
5. Whether Tyler Perry's films offer something unique for an underserved demographic or actually pandering nonsense is debatable. But what's not up for argument is that someone should raise Jim Varney from the dead and give him some of Medea's royalties.
4. Jennifer Aniston likes to pretend getting naked on the cover of a magazine that sophisticated men jerk off to is somehow more noble than displaying airbrushed areolas for a publication less discreetly aimed at teenage boys and male divorcees. Then, again, what do you expect from a woman who's first major film role was in Leprechaun?
As that gleaming behemoth Hollywood slouches towards irrelevance, the winds of change must begin to blow in from somewhere. And where better than the so-called blogosphere? Like the polit-o-blog revolution, the great pitches of tomorrow ain't going to flow from the bloated butthole of some Hollywood hack, but rather from the proletariat. So welcome to NCDSUV's newest feature, The Slow Pitch, where we play a little game of would-be screenwriter wish-fulfillment. And viva la revolución!
Gentlemints, today I have an idea for you that's so funbelievable, that's so fuckcredible that you'll be shitting your brains for a millennium. Now, this being tax season and all, I've been having my CPA look over the books. Here's the thing: Did you know that after you ignore all the creative accounting, the only flicks that made bank last year were all those Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer joints? You know, [Blank] Movie, and you can fill in the blank with whatever: Disaster Movie, Epic Movie, Date Movie, Meet The Spartans,uh, Movie. And so on.
When I got the news from the number freak, I flipped my lid collection. But right as I was about to pass out, an idea so monumental came to me that it can only be the product of divine intervention. Or a combination of orgasm and a lack of oxygen. But, you know, either or. And that idea is:
Guy Ritchie may have made out like a cockney-accented pulp-movie bandit during he and Madonna's divorce settlement. But she's heading back to the States with their two little tots, Rocco and David.
Or at least that's the word on the street. But it's been raining all morning and the sidewalk-chalk isn't really legible anymore, so who knows.
But presuming this information is accurate, one hopes Ritchie will be making occasional custody visits to ensure the safety of their tiny innocents. Because although it's a little known fact, Madge maintains her tightly wired figure and muscularity by draining the life's blood out of cute young boys in a scared Kabbalah ritual.
What do you think explains her relationship with Justin Timberlake?
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
Yesterday, we did some private investigating and discovered Tom Selleck turned 64, and today we made good on our French connections and unearthed it to be the big day for a guy with great acting genes who's anything but a hack.
Here we go with another ridiculous Films From The Cable Afterlife. As usual, we scour the cable movie listings and turn up some diamonds, and lots of the rough. For best results, watch both. Your life may improve! 8. Mystery Of Monster Island (1981) Fox Movie Channel, Wednesday, February 3, 4am Unbelievable pile of crap by Juan Piquer Simon, one of the worst directors of the 20th century (he's also responsible for X-rated chainsaw slasher Pieces, MST3K fodder Pod People and K-Tel Films release The Supersonic Man). How a major studio found their way around distributing this one is anybody's guess (a series of blowjobs, perhaps), but you will never see Terence Stamp look more embarrassed. Watch if you dare.
7. DOUBLE FEATURE ALERT Pumpkin Karver (2006) The Movie Channel, Saturday, January 31, 12am Pumpkinhead (1988) IFC, Saturday, January 31, 1:35am The stars have aligned: two pumpkin-related horror movies back-to-back on the same night. Different networks, but still, work with me here. Friday Night Lights' Minka Kelly stars in the serial killer/Juggalo-style horror dumper Pumpkin Karver, while Lance Henriksen conjures up a demon to kill bikers in Stan Winston's minor classic Pumpkinhead. It's "Pumpkininny!"
6. Booty Call (1997) Cinemax (@MAX), Sunday, February 1, 8:05pm; Cinemax (WMAX), Monday, February 2, 6:50pm; Cinemax, Tuesday, February 3, 8:30pm Boisterous, offensive and couthless, Booty Call is actually one of the funnier comedies of the late '90s, and deserves another look. Jamie Foxx and Vivica A. Fox (playing characters named Bunz and Lysterine, respectively), join Tommy Davidson, a fake Indian guy, a dog that barks "Nigga Please!" in subtitles (and one Gedde Watanabe, willing to take any role no matter the stereotype, saying "Nigga Preese" in a Chinese restaurant), some hilarious orange pants, an incident with Saran Wrap as dental dam and some dude named Ug Lee. There's no one who won't be upset in its 79 minute runtime, but I don't think it'd work any other way. Watch it and pick your jaw up off the floor.
5. Ladies And Gentlemen The Fabulous Stains (1981) Turner Classic Movies, Saturday, January 31, 2am I hope that now this one has finally made it onto DVD, and not from some bootleg version that's been duped a thousand times from a Betamax that caught it on Showtime in the '80s, that we can see this legendary unreleased film for what it is: kind of a stinker. Still, there's never been anything like it before or since, and it's a fun time with a message. Teenagers Diane Lane and Laura Dern start a makeshift punk band that lands an opening spot for the fake real punk band The Looters, featuring Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook, The Clash's Paul Simonon and fronted by actor Ray Winstone. They create a media circus and have it all collapse on them within days, but it's a good enough time, also starring Fee Waybill from The Tubes and a special (awesome) appearance from Black Randy and the Metrosquad. Join the professionals!
The rumor runnin' round the old cherry-blossom tree today is that Jennifer Aniston turned down $4 million dollars, with built-in sales incentives to pose for Playboy. Because the Viagranator himself, Hugh Hefner, dug her semi-nude airbrush fest in GQ late last year.
Of course, the news that Hughey missed is that the former Mrs. Brad Pitt will apparently only undress under the naughty guise of faux-sophisticition. Hence the subtly positioned tie around her abusively spray-tanned frame.
And am I the only one who occasionally stares at tabloid covers of America's reigning sweetheart and wonders how we come to romanticize one-time desperate Hollywood scream queens so quickly?
(And as an aside, notice how blatantly that hyper-linked trailer for Leprechaun rips off the promotional campaign for cult classic Evil Dead.)
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
Yesterday, we swore we weren't no joke to hip-hop legend Rakim, and today we whip out our Magnums for a steamy night of celebration with a mustachioed '80s sex god.
It is because I am filled with love and gratitude for David Cross that I must savage him like a wild beast tearing apart a carcass. Yes, call me a cruci-verbalist, because I've got some cross words for this actor/comedian. As Freud notes, we must kill the ones we love in order to overcome them. And the ever-watching paternal eye of Cross gazes out at me from the screen as I watch Mr. Show and Arrested Development. Or when I hear the Daniel Stern-like lilt of his voice as it whispers out to me from the Nick-At-Nite reruns of Oliver Beene, the greatest entry in Cross' oeuvre, a shining... wait. What the fuck. Oliver Beene?
OK. Cross has been in a stinker here and there: Alvin And The Chipmunks, School For Scoundrels, She's the Man, Men in Black II, Scary Movie II, Dr. Doolittle 2, Small Soldiers, etc. He's a working actor, and as I've detailed before, unless one is independently wealthy, one takes shit jobs to survive. The problem with Cross isn't so much that he acts in crap, but rather that he's so brutal in his criticism of other Craptors ™. No. That's a terrible portmanteau. It sounds like feces-contaminated dino DNA from Jurassic Park.
I haven't seen this much fervor over the glimpse of a newborn baby since Jesus emerged from a pile of divine afterbirth. But alas, the regally christened Knox and Vivienne, kin of ones Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, have surpassed the fascination with Suri Cruise and become a point of obsession for paparazzi and pop-culture obsessives.
And finally, the little tots were unleashed before the salivating lenses of crafty cameramen.
You can view the pics here. Some folks are saying they're adorable. I personally don't get suckered into the ideology of infant adorableness by default. You gotta work for my kiddie kudos. Or at least develop into a toddler without regressing into something akin to, well, the father himself toward the conclusion of Benjamin Button.
As the kind of white, bourgeois jackass so famously captured in Weird Al's "White & Nerdy," I'm about as much Tyler Perry's demo as Gleeb-Kra, my tentacled friend from Dimension 12. Yet, cynical hucksterism and naked commercialism transcend race and class lines like a love of fudge or mozzarella sticks, or fried fudge sprinkled with cheese bits. And when as in the case of Medea Goes To Jail, when your most iconic character Medea starts sharing movie titles with the Ernest franchise, something has definitely gone beyond the pale enough where pale pieces of shit like myself feel the eternal critical duty to stand up and scream into the void. Know what I mean, Vern?
Like the Bush Administration, I ignored all the signs of terror... until it was too late. As Perry flew his latest vehicle into my eyes, the aesthetic center of my brain collapsed. And yes, conspiracy fuckwads, the melting temperature of aesthetic cognitive modules is consistent with the NIST reports of my neuro-meltdown. However, as my brain fell apart, the history of black cinema flashed across the horizon, and while I can understand Perry's ascent, I cannot condone the shape it's taken.
In spite of overplayed, holiday-themed claims to the contrary, there is nothing wonderful about the wintertime. The weather outside is frightful and the snow is anything but fucking delightful. It just flat-out sucks. And now that Christmas and New Year's are well behind us, there is no silver lining left to get us through this long, bleak period . As we head into the icy heart of the season, we can turn to the movies for some solace and to indulge in a little heartwarming schadenfreude. Old Man Winter may be opening up a can of whoop-ass on you at the moment, but he drops an entire barrelful on the characters in the following snowbound nightmares. So use those frostbitten fingers and count your blessings.
9. Fargo Between the shitty climate and the shittier accents, if hell were to actually freeze over, it would probably look a lot like Brainerd, Minnesota. With nothing to do but work, eat at Arby's and scrape ice off their windshields, it's no wonder the folks in this inert burg are so prone to lethal violence. If you lived here, you'd be making a beeline for that wood chipper, too.
8. Misery Wintertime driving is brutal. From frozen engine blocks, to black ice, to the inevitable blizzard-induced, life-altering accidents, it's a treacherous endeavor regardless of how prepared you think you are. But who needs AAA when you've got the Annie Wilkes Roadside Assistance Program? She'll take you in, feed you, tend to your wounds... and give you new ones when you don't do exactly as she says. Heed those severe storm warnings and stay off the road, or you might end up taking a sledgehammer to the ankles like Sonny Corleone.
7. The Day After Tomorrow How much worse would your walk to work be if you had to deal with wind chill factors of 150 degrees below zero or worry about being chased by timber wolves? When the Ice Age hits New York City (and without a single celebrity voiced mastodon or saber-toothed tiger in sight), Dennis Quaid and a pre-Gyllenspoon Jake Gyllenhaal find out what it would feel like. If the idea of a greenhouse-induced, never-ending winter doesn't scare you into buying reusable bags and getting a Prius, then nothing will.
6. The Sopranos: "Pine Barrens" Although it was technically televised, each episode of The Sopranos always seemed more like a feature film (remember, "It's not TV, it's HBO"). "Pine Barrens" is one of the strongest and most cinematic installments, as Christopher Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts battle the elements, a Russian assassin and each other while lost in the middle of the woods. Being stranded in frigid temperatures has a way of rendering everything else in the world meaningless. So in spite of their hit turning into a total disaster, they are cruelly reminded that getting out of the cold is more important than anything: money, duty, respect, even Tony's approval.
5. Snow Day Imagine for a moment that you're a balding, middle-aged, barely employed snow plow operator with bad teeth and a crow as your only friend. And on the rare, snowy occasion that you actually have a lot of work to do, your truck gets jacked and you're attacked by a horde of schoolchildren led by an odd little girl who communicates with action figures, a flatulent fat kid and a boy who makes snowballs out of jelly and urine. Sounds like a horror story, right? Well, for Chris Elliott, it is.
Well, ladies and gents, we can now move ahead toward a time of economic prosperity and racial harmony, because Barack Obama has been sworn into office. What's that? You're still unemployed and your boss keeps referring to you by prejudiced terminology? Oh, bummer. Guess one man can't change everything.
But even if you haven't been swept up in Obama-as-Messiah fever (ironic given his presidency signals an end to high government as guise for holier-than-thou demagoguery), we can all agree it was pretty sweet to see George W. Bush (and don't call him Prez) sent off on that helicopter one last time.
Not as sweet as seeing the likes of Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz get sliced and diced by the Razzies of course. So without any last-minute presidential pardoning, here are the top 5 things we learned this week.
5. Katy Perry may pretend she likes to kiss girls and is preciously cute when calling other people gay, but apparently she'll settle for nothing but the straight dish when tabloids report on her sex life, or lack thereof.
4. Britney Spears is somehow being raked over the coals for the suggestive phonetic pronunciation of her new single. Meanwhile, no one raised an ounce of cain over Van Halen's non-too-subliminal epithet placement within the titular acronym of their 1991 album. Guess parents were less afraid of Sammy Hagar gettin' their teenage tots in a heated lather.
As that gleaming behemoth Hollywood slouches towards irrelevance, the winds of change must begin to blow in from somewhere. And where better than the so-called blogosphere? Like the polit-o-blog revolution, the great pitches of tomorrow ain't going to flow from the bloated butthole of some Hollywood hack, but rather from the proletariat! So welcome to NCDSUV's newest feature, The Slow Pitch, where we play a little game of would-be screenwriter wish-fulfillment. And viva la revolución!
Wakey, wakey, time to makey some kwan, you slugabeds. Yeah, I dunno what that word means either, but my mistress got me one of those vocab calendars and I glanced at it before tossing it in the incinerator. Anyway, I got an idea for you that not just going to fill our coffer's to the overflow. Yeah, like Uncle Scrooge's money bin in Duck Tales. But it's also going to revolutionize movies. Wait, I mean money. It'll revolutionize money. Who gives a shit about movies?
So, I've noticed that show with Donny's son (yeah, Donald Sutherland... Christ, keep up) is getting a lot of column inches lately. Keifer! Ha! Keifer Sutherland! How much pot do you think D.S. smoked before thinking that one up. I remember on the set of S*P*Y*S, him and Elliott Gould used to huff gas just to stay interested in the film. Wait, maybe that was just what I did last week when I was trying to watch it. What a piece of shit.
Following in the grand tradition of great outsider-reformation works, from The Elephant Man to A History Of Violence to Who's The Boss?, London Boulevard (yes, loosely based on Sunset Boulevard) has cast Colin Farrell as an ex-con trying to make good by working as a handyman for presumably snooty thespian Keira Knightley.
Only in this one, instead of Knightley donning corsets and push-up bras for a period piece, she will actually be unable to copulate with Colin until the film's final act due to an onset of her time of the month.
Actually, that last fact is completely unsubstantiated.
Farrell, of course, just scored a Golden Globe for In Bruges. And with Boulevard, will continue his quest to make us think he's weirdly been around Hollywood much longer (and in more significant work) than the eight-year tenure he referred to with needless frequency during his Globes acceptance speech.
More Cable Afterlife, because you demanded it. You beat down my door. You followed me home. You took my seat on the subway. You cut in front of me in line. You better watch ... these movies. On cable, this Friday through next Thursday, like always. (All times in EST.) 8. Shanghai Surprise (1986) Encore Love, Monday, January 26, 10:30am As Sean Penn gears up to possibly win an Oscar for one of his best performances (as the titular Harvey Milk), it's high time to see him in one of his worst, and I'm not talking about I Am Sam. No, this is the spectacular flop he made with Madonna while the two were married. I dare you to finish it. P.S. It's heavily steam. I've said too much. Or have I?
7. Bullet (1995) IFC, Tuesday, January 27th, 12am As for said Oscars, Mickey Rourke's on the ascent with his role in The Wrestler. Check him out as he was careening to the bottom, out-acted by Tupac Shakur in this ruff-n-tuff action thriller, directed by Julien Temple
.
6. Luv (1967) Turner Classic Movies, Thursday, January 29th, 8:15am Jack Lemmon's about to jump off a bridge when he meets old friend Peter Falk, who pawns off his wife (Elaine May) on him so that he can be with his girlfriend. You can't pass on that cast, nor will you want to miss this rarely-screened Clive Donner effort from the peace-n-love era. Expect awkwardness, and a cameo by a young Harrison Ford as a longhair.
5. Funny Games (2008) Cinemax, Saturday, January 24th, 10pm It hasn't yet been determined if Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his own cinematic paradigm---the movie so brutal and heartless, it dares you not to watch and in effect judges you for how far along you've endured it---fulfilled whatever sort of Hollywood traction he may have been going for... because nobody's seen it, really. Here's your chance to.
Sorry I took so long to respond to this morning's Oscar announcements. I was busy telling other people that they should pretend they were drying their hair to avoid pertinent obligations.
In any event, we've all soaked in the 2009 Oscar nominations by this point, letting it roll around our epidermis like a hot Aveeno bath. And while most people are bemoaning the exclusion of Dark Knight in the Best Picture competition, I, for one, am celebrating a hat trick of unexpected and spectacular choices in the individual acting categories (and yes, expressing serious misgivings about The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button's Best Picture nod.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Heather Graham and William Baldwin battling to the death over dwindling paper route territory, today the Cable Guide helps bring the mundane preoccupations of reality dating-competitions to the big screen.
Trudging through the subway, my eye often dances along the graffiti scrawled across those shit ads on the walls. Like a modern day Bayeux Tapestry filled with swears and crude penis drawings, the hasty scribbles of know-nothings are a glad distraction from the dull and endlessly empty horseshit being peddled to the captive audience. Like that new Renee Zellweger and Harry Conick Jr. joint which looks just... well, words fail. Or Steve Martin's latest family friendly tragedy: The Pink Panther 2.
Seeing said poster I idly contemplated mirroring Martin's creative trajectory by diving headfirst onto the tracks, but then who would feed my eight cats (Jerry Mungo meows now for a treat!)? The facts are these though: The man responsible for The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains, revolutionized stand-up in the '70s (along with Albert Brooks), and wrote Cruel Shoes now mainly flop sweats his way through detritus like Cheaper By The Dozen and Bringing Down The House. Maybe some implausible thimblerig from David Mamet here and there, but mostly not. Mostly the forgettable. Mostly melancholy.
Let's be honest. Much as we adore celeb ass-kiss fests like The Golden Globes for their red-carpet do's and dont's and self-involved on-stage theatrics, the only ceremony where the actual nominees and recipients capture our rapt attention are The Razzies, which celebrate the year's biggest stinkers. And like a giant Hollywood catheter, drain the piss out of La La Land.
And per usual, they're both on point with the obvious selections (like Mike Myers and The Love Guru spearheading the pack via seven Razzie nods), and remarkably, and hilariously, observant in highlighting some of the most talent-deficient "thespians" that still somehow incur our adoration (Mark Wahlberg, Kate Hudson, Cameron Diaz).
Of course, they left out one unconventional nod for Worst Movie of 2008, which would be the surreally overrated NCDSUV Sucks recipient, The Wrestler. Ah well, no use having sour raspberries.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
Yesterday, we hid all NCDSUV's staplers in jello in honor of Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight Schrute's, 40th. And today we say "Yah Baby!" to a woman who helped Spice up our lives in the late-'90s.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw poor Michael Caine getting pushed around because of his less-than-desirable liquor-shelving feng shui, today we see a metaphor for the tension surrounding the failing newspaper industry acted out on the rough streets of suburbia.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while Friday saw Tony Danza and Mercedes Ruehl making swimming sexily with the fishes, today Michael Caine gets some Misery-style treatment because of his feng shui preferences.
When we heard why Milk scene-stealer James Franco, who won our hearts years ago as bad-boy Daniel from Freaks & Geeks, was missing at the Golden Globes last week, we were agog. It seems Franco was busy studying poetry at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, where he is enrolled in the school's MFA For Writers. The image of Franco eschewing fancy Hollywood award ceremonies to brood over his coffee-stained notebook of post-confessional free-verse, or linger over a glass of sweet tea, clutching a dog-eared copy of Mark Doty's My Alexandria... um, it kinda made us swoon. But it also got us wondering: What other charmed boldfacers would we love to see insert themselves into the raging creative class?
7. Sarah Palin Remember the lady with the glasses who ran for that political office that one time? She seemed to have some trouble, er, collecting her thoughts, on occasion. "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C." Palin once told a crowd at a fundraiser many moons ago. "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation." She's like the next Edward Albee, no?
6. Christopher Walken It's quite possible C-Walk would be even less popular describing his process in a workshop than the Palinator. Can you... imagine... listening... to... him... discussing... his... character's... inner... monologue... and... psychosis... this... slowly? And what if he wrote exactly like he speaks?
5. Sean Penn Somewhere, right now, Penn is seething with jealousy over Franco's secret taste for the literary arts. They can't both do it! Penn, of course, got his byline on the cover of The Nation last month for his oh-so-astute international reportage. So why not attempt to best his younger, immensely attractive co-star and tackle a creative writing MFA while he's at it? We'd adore listening to his justification for turns of phrase like, "He was God's pessimist."
As that gleaming behemoth Hollywood slouches towards irrelevance, the winds of change must begin to blow in from somewhere. And where better than the so-called blogosphere? Like the polit-o-blog revolution, the great pitches of tomorrow ain't going to flow from the bloated butthole of some Hollywood hack, but rather from the proletariat! So welcome to NCDSUV's newest feature, The Slow Pitch, which will interrupt your normally scheduled Sucks programming every Friday to play a little game of would-be screenwriter wish-fulfillment. Viva la revolución!
This week, I am going to make you freaks so much money that the concept of cost won't even make sense anymore. Now I know your ganglions are whispering inside, "How am I going to make that moolah materialize on your ledgers?" Two words: Bride Wars. Yeah, Anne Hathaway and, uh, the blonde. The one who used to be married to that living Giacometti statue from The Black Crowes. Kate Hudson. Yeah, her. With their latest film, those two opened a door to a void at the very center of humanity. A void that represents the negative end of the existence spectrum. And ladies and gentlemen, we are going to fuck that void in its black hole until it comes molten gold.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw the title of a Chris Farley vehicle taken may a teeny bit too literally, today we get down and dirty amidst some fish guts with the ever-sexy Mercedes Ruehl and Tony Danza.
January seems to be the month where cable TV networks, short on original series yet aware of an audience that's probably staying out of the cold, seem to air out their most interesting slates of movies and film programming. Films From The Cable Afterlife recommends a handful of these each week: some to watch, some to avoid. Here's some more suggestions for your pleasure, or lack thereof...
8. Prey (2007) Cinemax, Tuesday, January 20, 4:50am (and On Demand) People have remarked on the bad fortunes of The Weinstein Company ever since their acrimonious split with Disney (who walked away with their Miramax brand), but I say let 'em go. We haven't had this good of an exploitation studio since New World shuttered in the late '80s. Continuing with man vs. nature gore a la last week'sRogue, here's a safari horror flick in which Bridget Moynihan and Peter Weller, along with their children, are stranded in Africa and become Lunchables for a pride of hungry lions. Ivan Tors, we hardly knew ye.
7. Strange Hostel Of Naked Pleasures (1975) IFC, Saturday, January 17, 1:30am It's a Coffin Joe movie and it's outside the cycle of the three originals (At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, etc.), but watch it anyway. It is loaded with the kind of brash, earthy shocks Mexico has staked its reputation on, and it likely will offend you. That title is no joke.
6. Assassination Tango (2002) Monday, January 19, 9:45pm; Tuesday, January 20, 4:20am My colleague Andrew Earles has been harping on this movie since its release, a bizarre, faux-seductive tale of hitman Robert Duvall (who also directed) stuck in South America, falling in love, and learning how to dance; a more ridiculous plot you couldn't ask for, and a more stilted, awkward performance by Duvall you won't find. Also starring the omnipresent Latin-American singer and actor Ruben Blades. This is a warning!
5. Bedazzled (1967) Cinemax (5STARMAX), Sunday, January 18, 2:40pm, 10:30pm; Cinemax (ActionMAX), Wednesday, January 21, 5am For the entire time I've been writing these weekly rundowns, I've been utterly frustrated at cable's propensity to air the forgettable remake of this soul-selling comic allegory instead of Stanley Donen's superior-in-every-way original. That wrong has been righted. You may have been stuck on an airplane or in a waiting room watching Brendan Fraser sell his soul to Liz Hurley, and yeah, that might have angered you. But you NEED to see the genuine article, starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, one of the funniest comedy teams ever to grace a stage. Everything about this movie is great. Go watch it now.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw a less-than-memorable John Waters flick transformed into something a bit weird, even for him, today the cable guide treats us to livestock anthromorphised with the features of Chris Farley.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
Yesterday we said happy Apollo 61 to Carl Weathers (and today also said goodbye to recent, and beloved, Awesome Celebrity Birthday honoree Ricardo Montalban), but today find our way back out through The Fog of Rocky's glory days to commemorate one of horror's most storied filmmakers.
Ricardo was one of the smoothest screen presences around, an advocate for Mexican-born actors and had fought through some intense physical maladies for the last 15 years of his life, but stuck it through till the verge of 90. And we are merely glad to we got a chance to acknowledge his 88th and final birthday with proper NCDSUV homage before he died. He will be missed.
Even amidst semi-legitimate websites and all-inclusive gossip blogs, one thing has remained resoundingly clear about the Internet: It was designed for the proliferation of booby pictures. OK, and maybe an occasional facial (NSFW) or finger fuck. But the "candid" celebrity shot and red-carpet nip slips that fill out headlines like implants in a waterbra have truly captured our cultural zeitgeist. Although the tried-and-true movie-still compilers, like Mr. Skin, still possess a necessary function for cyber-pervs the world over.
However, like a record-label A & R rep indiscriminately scouring MySpace for hot acts, the wider the net is cast, the more likely you're gonna catch a few stinkers you'd rather throw back in the ocean.
So for reasons no less superficial than these images' original publication, and if anything, to take the piss out of folks dangled on high as the beautiful ones, we present the 10 least arousing nude celebrity boobs (10, of course, as in five pairs of two). And in the interest of being an equal-opportunity sexist, we may even produce a sequel to this feature that reappropriates its, ehem, titular meaning and breaks down the most orgasm-killing male Hollywood mimbos. And suffice to say, virtually every link from here on out is NSFW, meaning we expect a hearty boost in page views between the hours of 6 p.m. and midnight.
10. & 9. Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice
It's hard to say which one of Posh's not-so-perky perforations deserves more of a honest, cups-off assessment, number nine or 10. Oh, heck, we'll call it a wash. But the bottom line is, for all her preening around in the newest haute coutoure, push-up-undergarment abuse and implicitly demeaning infrared glances at the rest of Earth's female populus, we wouldn't want to hop in the shower and soap up those plump-yet-shapeless post-pregnancy glands.
8. & 7. Teri Hatcher
Memo to Seinfeld's fact-checkers (and yes, we are contractually obligated to incorporate a Seinfeld reference in every other post): They might be real, but they're not exactly spectacular. When the would-be glamorous Desperate Housewives queen bitch bared all in cheapo flick The Cool Surface, someone should have ordered some hot maple syrup, because those babies are what those in the know refer to as pancake boobs.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Anthony Hopkins improbably embody the role of a speed-freak biker dude, today we head into decidedly weirder Waters.
OK, am I the only one who read the gossip from Star magazine about Matthew Broderick supposedly sleeping around behind Sarah Jessica Parker's back and thought, "Really, but wasn't Ferris Bueller her Broadway beard?"
I mean, not to be crass, reductive, insensitive or anything else that may as well comprise the story tags for our archives, but the notion of SJP (incidentally the original acronym for Stone Temple Pilots when they first christened themselves Stone Jessica Pilots) seeking respite in a separate home because of her husband's philandering seems, at the very least, a bit backwards.
Then again, the Sex And The City starlet does kind of resemble a cross between Ruth Buzzi and post-Kabbalah-era Madonna, so I could kind of see why Matty boy would make a run for less pruneish pastures, regardless of their what they're packing between the thighs.
Nothing has curdled my stomach more in the last few days than grown-up screen brat Jason Hervey introducing the cast of VH1's Confessions Of A Teen Idol to a focus-group segment they were about to endure. Something about his little monologue reeked of the kind of self-satisfied, Napoleonic smugness that can only exude from one's paean pores after decades of portraying total douchebags both onscreen and behind the scenes of Hollywood.
Let's review: After peddling countless commercial goods in the early '80s with his bland precociousness, Hervey not coincidentally nailed the entitled man-child antics of a kid actor as Kevin Morton during the movie-within-a-movie climax of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Stunt casting, perhaps?
And then, of course, on The Wonder Years, Hervey was the human embodiment of the demonic older-brother caricature every terrified nerd carried with them throughout childhood. His contribution to the show seemed to be almost method in execution. But Hervey was no prodigious thespian. A la with Pee-Wee, it was evident that his authenticity as Wayne Arnold stemmed from a blurry line between reality and fiction. Art imitating douche.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw that dastardly Info-Bar try and lure us into its Poltergeist-like underworld via innocent patsy The Rock & Roll Kid, today the Cable Guide cribs a page from Cypress Hill and asks, "Do you want to get high?"
Welcome to NCDSUV's splenetic, embittered new weekly feature, Overdressed & Underclassed, which with each installment will dissect a different aspect of celebrity fashion with the enthusiasm and exactitude of a taxidermist suffering from the second clinical phase of rabies (caution: We have reached the contagious stage).
Flicking on the television or going online no longer offers a brief moment of respite from your hectic day, so when I tuned into red carpet portion of the Golden Globes I was hoping for an indulgent, preferably 24-carat-gold gilded respite from reality. I wanted a scene of shameless, tacky, hedonistic, materialistic display along the lines of (for the men) diamond-and-ruby encrusted boleros and (for the ladies) hot-pink, satin 10-inch-high stiletto heels that clash with the red carpet and light up when they strut. Was I expecting too much? Of course not. This is Hollywood, where dreams come true. Here's the eight most delightfully gaudy debutantes and dudes from last night's ceremony.
8. Lisa Rinna Never one to insinuate if she can noisily promulgate, the TVGuide' network's red carpet host (and soon-to-be-second-time-Playboy model) treated us to more than her usual heaping handful o' cleave. This year, we got to three inches of pectoriloquy to ogle as she giggled inanely, fumbled over her script and beat the brows of whichever celeb had somehow happened to fall into her arthritic clutches. Lisa captures many of the qualities cherished by profligate lovers of all things skin-deep: a laser-like commitment to superficiality that involves the excessive use of botox, facial fillers and Pilates machines; a love of all things low-cut and high-cut, preferably at the same time; a copious sprinkling of shiny things on and about her person; and silver sequins.
7. Olivia Wilde Olivia infused the red carpet with every starry-eyed 7-year-old girl's vision of elegance. She floated along in a strapless, floor-length pale lilac-pink Reem Acra confection that looked like it had been produced in a quiet forest glen by Cinderella's tweeting avian pals, with nothing but pink cotton candy, organza and buttercream frosting with which to toil. A giant pair of diamond snowflake earrings, an innocently smiley countenance and gleaming, shiny hair completed the nostalgic glance down princess lane.
6. Jennifer Lopez If a designer's producing a dress cut down to the navel, bless her heart, Jenny From the Block's gotta have it. J. Lo, with her trademark deer-in-headlights idiot savant pop enthusiasm, slathered on the razzle dazzle our quickly graying country is thirsting for. From her belly baring, elegantly draped gold Greek goddess Marchesa dress (which brings to mind the more innocent days of 2000. when she wore the infamous ab-flashing Versace) to her tasteful but still ridunkulously massive diamond drop earrings, J. Lo is La La Land. Calgon, take me away!
5. Debra Messing Her hair, pulled back into what at first glance appeared to be a smooth and elegant ponytail, but then ZOWIE! explodes like a hirsute B52 into a bloodshot tumble weed, is notable enough. But Big Red, as always, kicks up it up a notch, in the form of diamond and emerald teardrop (if Cyclops shed tears, they'd be about this size) earrings that threaten to unbalance her equilibrium and turn her dramatic sweep down the carpet into a slip n' slide. And let's not forget the chartreuse eye shadow applied with a trowel onto her entire lid. Her dress was the mottled color of a particularly painful bruise with an interesting set of pelvis-accentuating ruffles, which is perhaps an exciting and innovative new way to catch the boys' eyes.
The Uninvited, the impetus for Thursday's Sucks, spurred us on to excoriate remakes, though it might have very well delivered unto us another path for our club-footed tootsies to trot down: an execration of the entire contemporary horror genre. Not that there's a paucity of pegs to drape this commentary on. Besides The Uninvited, there's The Unborn, a particularly liquid dickpile that somehow weaves tales of Auschwitz in with absorbed fetal twins and Yiddish poltergeists. (A little annoying maybe, nu? But not as bad as what I was charged at the shoe repair place. Gonifs, the lot of them!). And don't forget My Bloody Valentine 3D, which moronically doesn't even open on February 14th and somehow centers around a murderous miner. Though the only connection I can make between the title and the killer is Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold."
Now, conventional wisdom tells us that the horror genre has been Gak-laden for a long time now, since the advent of what Joss Whedon calls "torture porn," which simply revels in some nameless authority plucking regular people out of their lives with no warning and torturing them for no discernable reason.
Regardless, the point isn't to beat off that dead horse, but rather to explain why the entire genre is the third-wave- ska of the cinematic world, i.e. utterly reprehensible and without any redeeming value. When a person is frightened of a horror film, what is it he or she is scared of? Something imaginary. Now, who is frightened by imaginary boogeymen? Answer: children and neo-conservative presidents. So for the gold-plated kewpie doll, what does that mean? If you're terrified by visages of draculas and murderers, you have the intellect of a mere babe. And I don't mean the good kind of babes. I mean kids.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Top Gun rocked into the rarified air of intellectually complex cinema, today we blindly follow the Info-Bar wherever it tells us to go, because we are mindless automotons enslaved by the hypnotic glare of our television.
They say that after the Super Bowl, more people call in sick due to hangovers than any other day of the year. Well, clearly they're not nursing the pounding headache we incurred from three hours of Hollywood rubbing their hobnobby elitism in our faces and engaging in in-jokey speeches and self-congratulatory asides.
Ah yes, the Golden Globes. What an evening it was. There were so many moments worth acknowledging, some of them even marinated with poignant merit (Steven Spielberg's speech was actually pretty great) and others soaked in giant barrels of ugh (In Bruges seems great Colin Farrell, but dating Britney Spears and having a sex tape leaked sort of undermines the credibility of your speech about artistic integrity).
Anyway, before the remaining parasites throughout the blogosphere feed off the remaining drips of blood from last night's broadcast, here's the top five things NCDSUV learned from enduring the awards ceremony.
5. After Kate Winslet's heeeelarious, Hilary Swank/Chad Lowe-worthy failure to acknowledge fellow Best Actress nominee Anne Hathaway (who was shown pre-envelope-opening giddily praying her life would be validated with a win), NCDSUV breathed a sigh of relief as big as Hathaway's bug eyes, because it was evident we're not the only ones who realize she sucks.
4. Tracy Morgan is legitimately a bit nuts, but at least his lack of filter provided the only comedic speech that wasn't overly scripted or reliant on alienating elbow jabs to fellow celebrities.
As that gleaming behemoth Hollywood slouches towards irrelevance, the winds of change must begin to blow in from somewhere. And where better than the so-called blogosphere? Like the polit-o-blog revolution, the great pitches of tomorrow ain't going to flow from the bloated butthole of some Hollywood hack, but rather from the proletariat! So welcome to NCDSUV's newest feature, The Slow Pitch, where we play a little game of would-be screenwriter wish-fulfillment, and viva la revolución!
Ladies and gentlemen, the Die Hard formula is a mathematical algorithm that goes back to the Greeks: Input a lone hero against a terrorist throng and output a golden colon of cash, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the days of idol worship. Just ask Homer. That blind bitch minted himself a fucking license to coin drachmas when he wrote The Odyssey. And now we too can get in on that action. Again. For the fifth time. In this series. Yippie-ki-yay, etc.
Now, let me say this straight: Just like the Harry Potter series (and fuck, that J.K. Rowling minted herself a machine that makes diamond dildos with that fucking franchise, although don't confuse that with David Bowie), the good Die Hards are the odd-numbered ones. And why are they good? The Gruber brothers: Simon and Hans. Hans, goddamn, that was Alan Rickman. That fucker plays Snap or Snip or whatever his name is in the HP franchise. Small world ain't it?
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Glenn Danzing and Mark Harmon make sweet, sweet poetry, today the Info-Bar takes flight with a young Tom Cruise.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
And while somebody peed all over yesterday's birthday candles in honor of R. Kelly, today we say "Damn boyfriend, you're almost 60?" to a glam-punk pioneer-cum-cabaret icon.
Films from the Cable Afterlife soldiers on for yet another week, highlighting special movies from special people. Laugh, cry, feel something, even if that feeling is embarrassment for having spent 90 minutes of your lives watching people get eaten by a tree. You heard right. Read on for the dirty details. (All listings in EST.)
8. The Guardian (1990) Cinemax (WMAX), Friday, January 9, 4pm; Monday January 12, 7:40am; Thursday, January 15, 2:45pm We're gonna bookend today's list with works from director William Friedkin, at his absolute lowest and his most recent heights. Might as well start from the bottom with this confusing, absurd horror tale about a nanny (Jenny Seagrove) who may just be some manner of wolf-like creature, as well as a druid. She's gonna sacrifice another baby, and hikers are going to get chewed up by a stump. One of the worst of the '90s, and it kicked off a string of forgettable, tawdry features from this one-time great. It would take years for him to get his groove back, but at least he turned it around on his own terms. Miguel Ferrer and Brad Hall co-star. Try not to kick a hole in your TV afterwards as you wonder how any network could bring itself to show this one three times in the space of a week.
7. Sisters (1973) IFC, Friday, January 9, 8pm; Saturday, January 10, 4:30am
Early, suspenseful Brian DePalma, back in his hungrier days. It's no Phantom Of The Paradise, but really, nothing is. Margot Kidder stars as a demure French girl with a horrible secret: Her formerly conjoined twin sister, hiding in the closet with a knife. Reporter Jennifer Salt is unlucky enough to witness the murder, and her investigation robs her of her personality. The scene in the mental institution where she squares off with a germophobe is positively unnerving, and overall this thing is far, far better than what the genre deserved.
6. Old Dracula (1974) Retroplex, Tuesday, January 13, 6:20pm David Niven takes a turn as the count, desperately trying to revive his wife Vampira after centuries in the coffin. The blood transfusion she receives turns her into a African-American. Dracula is bummed and she's out gettin' her thing on in the clubs of an avocado-green London. Can't make this up; couldn't even try. Clive Donner directs, from a particularly low point in his career. Look for Linda Hayden, the knockout Sabbath fan from Blood on Satan's Claw, presumably naked... again.
5. Terror On The 40th Floor (1974) Fox Movie Channel, Friday, January 16, 2am Legendary made-for-TV stinker, in the footsteps of The Towering Inferno. Office revelers John Forsyth, Don Meredith and Joseph Campanella are among the B-list talent stranded in a burning skyscraper at Christmas Eve. Will they survive? Will you?
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday weirdly saw the second Info-Bar appearance for Trading Places glutton Don Ameche, today the cable guide brings together the previously incongruous worlds of Mark Harmon and Glenn Danzig.
The truth of the matter is, Hollywood (like any corporation) loathes the people who give it money, and therefore condescends to a nation of shits by spoon-feeding them dioxin-laced cat assholes because that's all it thinks they can handle. Chief among this, though not limited to it, is the trend of taking foreign films and remaking them for American audiences, because goddamn, I didn't go to no movie to read no words.
With The Uninvited on the cusp of release (another remake of an Asian horror film), my lungs feel weepy. Not only is David Strathairn--a superb actor and a frequent collaborator of John Sayles'--wasted, but it's just another example of wasted time period. The people making the film, the people watching it, God and his cadre of angels for creating this misbegotten shithole in the first place, etc. Hollywood's infantalization of the movie-going public is short-sighted, as is the leering, drooling focus on short term-fiscal gain, but what the fuck do I know?
Man. First she ditches The Cosby Show to get naked and covered in blood with future Wrestler Mickey Rourke for Angel Heart, then she marries banal, pseudo-hippie rocker douche Lenny Kravitz, and now Lisa Bonet and boyfriend Jason Momoa name their kid Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha Momoa. But you know what they say: Momoa, Mo Problems.
Now, I mean not to poke thoughtless fun. There's spiritual intent behind the naming, and Lisa seems like a relatively substantive lady. But there's no way in hell this is getting exempt from the scrutiny we bestow upon any other celebrity baby christening, where the rule of thumb seems to be: There's a special energy that has blessed me with this universally appealing combination of talent and looks, and therefore that energy needs to be appropriately reflected and reinforced by making sure my kid's gonna get the shit beaten out of him every day until 12th grade.
Good thing all Momoa's residuals from Stargate: Atlantis should be able to cover at least part of Nakoa's medical bills.
Welcome to NCDSUV's splenetic, embittered new weekly feature, Overdressed & Underclassed, which with each installment will dissect a different aspect of celebrity fashion with the enthusiasm and exactitude of a taxidermist suffering from the second clinical phase of rabies (caution: We have reached the contagious stage).
In the spirit of the reincarnation mojo that comes with each New Year, we decided to take the opportunity to (for a change) applaud some much-welcomed progress in the wardrobe department of some of our favorite Hollywoodland targets over in Hollywoodland.
8. Angelina Jolie Unlike most of the rest of the planet, I remain resolutely unimpressed with Angel Angie. Yes, she's adopted a bijillion babies and has accomplished truly superb things as a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. Refugee Agency. And that whole Academy Award thing is nothing to spit at. But everyone else (including Angie) is so busy showering praise on her frail little shoulders, there's hardly room for one more accolade from the peanut gallery. I'm saving my accolades for her closet. She somehow managed to go from fright-night horror (all big lips, vials of blood, vacant eyes, witchy black hair tied with an oversized leopard-patterned ribbon and hideous jean jackets) to polished mommy glamazon (all big lips, purposeful gazes, yummy mummy beautifully tailored, tasteful and flattering clothes and much better accessories, Brad Pitt being the penultimate of course).
7. Jessica Biel She has managed to evade two major H'wood facts of life: People who star in family friendly crapfests on the small screen (7th Heaven) will never make it to the big-budget big screen (The Illusionist, Blade: Trinity, etc.) and that women have to dress like prostitutes to be taken (ahem) seriously by major studios. Biel embraced her down-home, super-casual style a touch too fervently, however, and I'm relieved to see she's eschewed the shapeless girl-next-door bell-bottoms and the random, ill-fitting shiny tops obviously slapped on her by a desperate stylist in a last-ditch attempt at glam for the occasional elegantly slinky dress that bares her impressive booty.
6. Kirsten Dunst Sharing your first kiss onscreen at the tender age of 11 with a vampire and then being launched into a brutal, multiple movies a year schedule would warp anyone. And Kirsten, like most child stars, failed or was never given the opportunity to develop as an individual. Obvious and tragic symptoms aside, (stints in rehab, troubled relationships), the perfectly cute, and totally underrated, blond starlet drowned her sorrows in an unforgiving sea of chipped, noir nail-polish, poorly executed updos, Jessica McClintock-like formal wear and outfits that look as if they were produced by frazzled clerks during a hold-up of the Salvation Army. But girlfriend got her groove back from whence it was hiding, and while she'll probably never hit the dizzying heights of chic, she's finally come into her own with brushed and styled (hello!) golden tresses, offbeat takes on downtown prep and the proud display of legs that goes for miles and miles and miles and miles...
5. Nicole Richie Forget Madonna. Richie has reinvented reinvention. She went from a slightly pudgy (but consummately cute) Paris Hilton sidekick in The Simple Life to a cadaverous L.A. beach bum, club troll and inmate to trim, suburban wife and mother in less time than it takes some people to get through Madge's Sex book. But almost invariably, Nicole manages to effortlessly pull off aggressively casual West Coast refinement (face-eating sunglasses and hair don'ts notwithstanding) like no one else. The only thing threatening her reign over the Valley was her Skeletor stage, hopefully a problem rooted firmly in her past.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday's Info-Bar muckup somehow turned Barton Fink into a more surreal misadventure than it already was, today things get tawdry with an early precedent for the suggestion of Satan's sexual duality made prominent decades later in the South Park movie.
Sometimes the jokes write themselves folks. And then require me to re-type them inside a Web admin program for public consumption. Anyhow, NCDSUV just wanted to give a big ol' congratulations to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner for producing a healthy baby girl yesterday (because what other kind might such a stunning celeb couple unleash out of their love nest?).
In fact, we were so busy debating the particulars of Nicollette Sheridan and David Spade allegedly knockin' befuddling boots that we nearly neglected to commemorate this momentous event.
Unfortunately, Bennifer Part II have yet to formally name the sister to their other daughter, Violet, but let me take a wiiiiild guess here that they're going to christen her something complementary like Rose or Hazel. Because like they say, roses are red, violets are blue, and watch out Ms. Garner, because once your hubby's acting offers invariably stop rolling in, he's going to be financially relying on you.
J.J. Abrams has some hard nuts to crack. While shows like Lost and Alias have their moments, and Mission Impossible III was about as tolerable as that series is going to get (and let's be honest, largely thanks to Philip Seymour Hoffman), most everything else he's touched has transmuted to gangrened gumbo. Though as the industry buzzes, one might think that gumbo was gold-flavored. However, for all his vaunted Midasing of TV and film properties, in the frankest of light, his ideas are really rather subpar, and since this isn't golf, that ain't good.
Or to be more accurate than a so-called smart bomb, let's narrow in a little further so that the good parts of Abrams aren't sprayed everywhere like civilian viscera. It's not particularly that his ideas are bad. Secret-agent turns double on an Illuminati-like organization, plane crashes on mysterious island, government investigators examine a giant pseudo-scientific conspiracy. These are well-wrought. However, the execution, like that of a Hamas rebel, is so sloppily performed that anyone or thing in the slightest proximity is obliterated in a blaze of ineptitude and violent ignorance.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
And while yesterday we said "OK, fine you're the boss, jeeeez" to ex-pre-pubescent Tony Danza sidekick Danny Pintauro, today we get ourselves in a fine Messina trying to put the icing on the birthday cake for a folk-cum-'80s-radio-rock stalwart.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Aracnophobia get reimagined as the tale of eight-legged creatures used as currency for farm mortgage so they can be sacrificed for a good harvest, today the Info-Bar gives us a serious literary workout, courtesy of the Coen Brothers, John Turturro (and John Goodman, in his second consecutive HCIBDOTD appearance).
Not since two number one college sports teams were upset on the same evening has there been such a shockwave of unexpected coincidental downfall in our cultural waters. Yes, yes, both Jennifer Love Hewitt and Patricia Arquette publicly announced (because why do such things privately when there's absolutely no one knocking down your door suspecting controversy?) their separations from fiance Ross McCall and hubby Thomas Jane, respectively (you know, the guy who was supposed toi be a next big thing but then starred in The Punisher) in the last 24 hours.
No more details have surfaced per se, although I suppose all the heat from Love Hewitt's "I'm not fat I just have super-fine lady curves" scandal must have worn on poor McCall. Or maybe he got tired of her singing "Bare Naked" in the shower all the time.
As for Arquette and Jane (or as I like to call them Janequette), the real victim here of course is their 5-year-old daughter, Harlow, who we imagine will be placed in a special celeb-splitup orphanage home with the rest of the babies bred by famous people lacking foresight. We're pretty sure Kevin Federline is the headmaster there. Should be awesome.
Clint Eastwood seems like a nice enough dude, but as Sucks is the self-styled gatekeeper of cultural inadequacy, our remit compels us to lambaste turkeys like Gran Torino and Changeling for their melodramatic claptrapishness and mawkish unidimensionality. Films like this are the epitome of Hollywood's distrust in the viewing public. "Forcefeed the plebes tripe," and like a fecal Marie-Antoinette they scream, "Let them eat shit!" But yes, gatekeeper and turkey-master are needed to bust Eastwood's balls for being the vessel of Hollywood's hatred for the common person. Let the crushing begin.
Eastwood's slide from Ernest Hemingway toughguy bullshit to bathetic cornball isn't so steep, for in reality they're just facets of the same childlike image of America that the media loves to sloppily gangbang in front of us all like freak exhibitionists. He is the well-meaning breaker of bureaucratic-regulations, that Dirty Harry is; the guy that gets things done by going outside the rule of law like it were some inconvenient set of dictates more suited to cleaning up spilt jizz than keeping sociopaths from destroying our society.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while Friday saw Child's Play 2 get reimagined as Chucky's enraged response to the marketing of his My Buddy-reminiscent doll, today the Info-Bar reinvents the contemporary methods of how home mortgages are financed.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
And while Friday's birthday candles went "Schwing!" for exotic Wayne's World hottie Tia Carrere, today we hesitantly say "Surprise!" to a slightly terrifying soccer thug-turned-unlikely Hollywood star.
Varied and conflicting reports surrounding the death of John Travolta's 16-year-old son, Jett, continue to circulate. Everyone seems to be secretly hoping that the actor's Scientology in some way affected his decisions regarding medication and proper care for Jett's Kawasaki disease, and the movie star's camp keeps refuting authorities' claims of the child being left unattended for a great length of time.
But whatever the case, we can all rest easy knowing that Tom Cruise put in a phone call to his friend/spiritual accomplice to offer condolences. Phew. Without that little sidebar I might have begun to wonder why I was otherwise going blind in an attempt to decode all the procedural mumbo jumbo around this story and have sought out harmless blog items on the Rock Of Love Bus premiere instead. That was a close one.
Back for 2009, here's some more Films From The Cable Afterlife, properly hung over for the New Year. It's a short week, so let's just get this over with and celebrate the end of a stinker, and hope for change as well as variety in our cultural diets. (All listings in EST.)
8. The Dead One (2007) TMC, Thursday, January 8, 4:30am It's not just your junk that's up for grabs when Wilmer Valderrama rolls up to your crew in this do-not-pass-DVD, go-directly-to-cable stinker. Fez puts on mariachi makeup by accident, then gets in an accident and sent to the Aztec god of death, to do HIS BIDDING. Oooooooooooh!
7. Skinwalkers (2007) TMC, Thursday, January 8, 6:10pm A product of a robust yet bloated market, Skinwalkers was yet another failure of a horror film, given theatrical release by Lionsgate. This one's about werewolves, and while the effects were decent, there's no buffing up the acting and the plot is nearly identical to that of Dane Cook's Employee Of The Month. Here' hoping the economic downturn keeps dog dirt like this out of production.
6. American Perfekt (1997) Showtime (SHO Beyond), Wednesday, January 7, 8:15pm A flip of a coin is all it takes for criminal psychiatrist Robert Forster to abandon all of his plans and go on a wild vacation with some psychotic women and a whole heap of trouble. Are Fairuza Balk, Amanda Plummer and Naked's David Thewlis interesting enough to get you to tune in? Flip a coin to find out!
5. Doomsday (2008) Cinemax, Monday, January 5, 10pm Last year, director Neil Marshall (The Descent) took a dump in the Thunderdome, and here it is, having baked in the sun for many months. Rhona Mitra leads a cast of Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell in a post-apocalyptic run 'n' gun of Scotland.
Ah, the innocent days of 2008. When recession, war and high-profile celebrity deaths became the glue to bond us together like societal Siamese siblings. But now it's 2009, a whole new era, a whole new ballgame. And not just for Washington, who will call Barack Obama their overlord, or the New York Yankees, who will take the field with C.C. Sabathia and Mark Texeira and still manage to lose the pennant to smaller-budgeted organizations.
It is the final stand for celebrity land in a decade that has alternately enthralled and repulsed us. It is a time for Hollywood to make its mark on culture and the planet at large, and really give 'em the good stuff we all cream for in the tabloids.
And we got off to an intermittently intriguing start, thanks largely to the birth of what could have been the First Granddaughter-in-waiting, and a certain wayward actress' parent who may love his share of his daughter's spotlight more than the woman herself. So without any pregnant pauses, here's the top 5 things NCDSUV learned this week.
4. Paul McCartney may have had to navigate Heather Mills' body sexually despite her prosthetic leg, but at least he didn't have to stick around till midnight to ritualistically spray-tan the thing.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw late-night HBO boob-festThe Beach Girls re-imagined as a fat-camp docudrama, today the Info-Bar devilishly delivers us to the lackluster sequel of an inexplicably appealing horror classic.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
On New Year's Day, Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci, led us in a comedic prayer for 2009, and today we say "Schwing!" to Wayne Campbell's one-time bass-straddling mega-babe.
Whether
it's viewed as a rite of passage, a holy sacrament or simply a match
made in heaven, most individuals enter the institution of marriage with
the very best of intentions. But as any good attorney will tell you, at
least 50 percent of the time those same intentions pave the way to the all
too familiar hell of divorce. As usual, we can always turn to the
movies in order to shed a little light on the kinds of issues and
behavioral patterns some unlucky couples may have to face.
In Sam Mendes' current matrimonial nightmare, Revolutionary Road,
we get a glimpse of what life might have been like had Kate Winslet
made a little room for Leonardo DiCaprio on that piece of driftwood
instead of letting him sink like a stone. Joining a long list of
terrible twosomes who should never have gotten together, Hollywood's
latest testament to staying single brings to mind the eight distinct
archetypes that failed fictional couples normally fall into. If real
people heeded the examples of these fake folks more often, maybe the
odds of having a successful marriage would add up to more than a
crapshoot.
8. Mr. & Mrs. Suburban Nightmare: Lester and Carolyn, American Beauty
There's
something about the suburbs that frequently brings out the worst in
people. Maybe all that orderliness, uniformity and conformity gives
married folks too much time to gaze into their own dyspeptic navels and
eventually pick at each other's flaws and weaknesses like so many
scabs. When the weird kid next door with the thousand yard stare (who
happens to be fond of videotaping your underage daughter) is the most
normal person in your development, either it's time to talk or it's
time to move to the city. Pronto.
Honorable Mention To: Calvin and Beth, Ordinary People
7. Mr. & Mrs. "t's All His Fault: Jonathan and Bobbie, Carnal Knowledge
In
this day and age, couples counselors usually find a way to balance the
blame between both parties in order for them to share in the
responsibility of fixing their collective problems. But sometimes,
women just happen to shack up with the wrong guy. Naïve dim bulb Bobbie
(Ann-Margret) learns the hard way that Jack Nicholson's shallow,
self-centered, sex-obsessed Jonathan is anything but marriage material.
When she tearfully pleads that she wants him, he fires back, "I'm taken
by me!" Well, in spite of everything else, at least he's honest.
Honorable Mention To: Dan and Beth, Fatal Attraction
6. Mr. & Mrs. War of Words: George and Martha, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
Forget
what you've heard in the past, sticks and stones ain't got shit on the
caustic, lacerating words hurled by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
in this venomous condemnation of loveless matrimony. Liquored up and
pissed off, these old pros wield the English language like a weapon and
tear into each other with a viciousness seldom seen outside of divorce
court. Like the young couple who watch their soul-crushing vituperation
from the sidelines, these sparring spouses really force us to ponder
just how long the "ever after" must be
after the happiness is completely gone.
Honorable Mention: Lloyd and Caroline, The Ref
5. Mr. & Mrs. Homicidal Tendencies: Steven and Emily, A Perfect Murder
Modern-day sage Chris Rock once said, "If
you haven't seriously thought about killing a motherfucker, you ain't
been in love." In this cold tale about a relationship on life support,
Michael Douglas' scheming executive plots to put Gwyneth Paltrow's adulterous
character out of her misery quicker than you can say, "Coldplay sucks!"
To actually premeditate your beloved's murder requires a level of
contemplation that few outside the movies are familiar with. In real
life, no matter how bad the relationship is, snuffing out your
significant other is not an option. Besides, whether or not you get
away with it, it will always come back to haunt you. Just ask O.J.
Honorable Mention: Tony and Margot, Dial M For Murder
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw a Japanese, Dirty Dozen-style violent drama transformed into a male-bonding weepy, today we visit a would-be classic of straight-to-HBO worthy, late-night boob-bouncing nostalgia.
After absorbing the hype about Mickey Rourke's Herculean performance in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (supposedly a mixture of Godfather-period Brando, Rocky-era Sylvester Stallone and Jesus himself) and becoming intrigued by the campy-cum-heartbreaking premise of a has-been pro grappler trying to make good, I finally headed off to the big screen and witnessed Rourke's theater of pain.
And while reviews have brought expectations down to earth, citing the film (accurately) as an ultimately been-there-done-that re-telling of a tried-and-true fallen-warrior saga, nothing could have prepared me for the degree to which The Wrestler sucked. Not even the 35-page manual in my cupholder titled, Preparation Tactics For The Suckage Of The Wrestler.
As for the star of the main event, Rourke is the only aspect of the film that doesn't dwell in heavy-handedness. His performance is anything but showy, and doesn't need to be. Aronofsky lends the picture its poetics with his trademark style of uncomfortably gritty grotesquerie and tragic surrealism. But he and screenwriter Robert Siegel also turn The Wrestler into an exercise in manipulation that puts a stranglehold on your emotional and sensory thresholds. The outcome is predictable from the near get-go, but the filmmaking pair still mercilessly puts viewers through the formulaic paces of the movie's narrative arc.
We're first permitted a glimpse of hope during the mid-flick reconciliation with Robinson's daughter Stephanie (played with believably guarded gusto by Evan Rachel Wood) and near-consummation with stripper muse Cassidy (portrayed with a lack of naturalism distractingly antithetical to Rourke's immersion into Robinson's over-tanned-and-time-battered visage). And we're then subjected to our protagonist's rapid, perversely graceful descent into flatlined self-loathing and, eventually, a uniquely morbid kind of isolated martyrdom.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw High Fidelity re-envisioned as the tale of a man who can finally start living after recovering from a bizarre psychological condition, today the Info-Bar transforms a hitman-style thriller into a tour of male bonding.
The fullbore and boring backlash against Judd Apatow and his coterie of cloddish co-conspirators is well underway. Now, we could poopoo the manner in which he milks the Man-Boy Matures genre (Superbad, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, et al) until the cows come home, but that would be mixing our milk metaphors with our meat metaphors, and that ain't grammatically Kosher.
So instead of badly butchering the man, wheezing out a few tired sentences that sentence all reading them to The Pit Of Despair, we'd rather focus on the medium and not the message. To be Frank Gifford, I'd have to cheat on my shrew of a wife, but to just be frank, the message is basically adolescence writ large anyway, and rehashing it only envelops the proceedings in the smokecloud of obfuscation.
A quick survey of Apatow's cinematic oeuvre shows that "oeuvre" is a pretty pretentious word when it comes to describing the film properties he's helped to develop. What we have are a bunch of generically plotted, broadly acted, amiable comedies that feature incredibly-gifted improvisers.
I'm not sure what's funnier. That Matt Dillon was really in such a hurry to get anywhere of significance, that it's such a slow news day that this item made the top of most entertainment headlines, or that one website tried to provide their post with extra weight by leading off with the line, "Vermont police arrested Oscar nominee Matt Dillon for speeding overnight."
You'd think they were trying to lend gravitas to the marketing campaign for an indie film. Anyway, looks like the brother of Entourage star Kevin Dillon (ouch!) went... Over The Edge, as he was caught going a tidy 106 mph. Although he wasn't drunk, and his mugshot actually makes him look better than usual.
Hopefully the pace of celebrity misdoings will pick up its pace in the upcoming 24 hours of partying, eh?
Yes, friends, the cultural event of the season, nay century, is upon us, standing as a grand historical marker demarcating the end of our civilization's birth pains and ushering in of a glorious new utopia founded upon the principles of Dialectical Marleism. Yes, even in these early days of the 21st century, we can tell that all of history, like one of those wishing well thingees at the mall where the coins spiral inexorably to their philanthropic end, has been leading to this moment. The wars, the torture, the plagues, all so that HUMAN CULTURE could wanly ejaculate its wad in the form of a little film called Marley & Me, in order for it to warm our hearts just for a moment before we return to the mundane drudgery of existence.
That's all, folks! I'd be surprised if mass famine and holy wars fought in the name of Radical Marleism weren't incipient upon its final box office days and passing into the cinematic night. Sure, there's the DVD, but that'd be like owning a velvet portrait of Elvis Presley, rather than owning an oil one crafted by Thomas Kinkade, the illustrious Painter Of Light (TM, in all perpetuity, until the end days, under penalty of getting kicked in the dick).
And who is charting this dim course towards The New Dark Age? Why none but Owen Wilson, our Warrior King, our Chthonic Master, the Clown Prince Of Crime. No, wait, that last one's The Joker. Scratch it.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while Friday had Edward Scissorhands leaving a suburban town in stitches, today the cable-guide turns an Oscar-accruing animated classic into a Breakin'-inspired tale for the hip-hop generation.
While the rest of you lazy schlubs were spending the holiday week glugging down eggnog and making sexy eyes at that random third cousin whose bloodline connection feels tenuous at best, NCDSUV was still soaking in the pop culture rays.
Humorously enough, however, there was a conspicuous paucity of tabloid-friendly stories breaking over the last several days. This could lean one to hypothetsize that much of the entertainment world's daily headlines harbor hazy significance at best and are generated so the blogosphere merely has an excuse to catalyze conversation and ramp up page views.
But, of course, we're not that cynical. We are, however, newly educated on everything from Michael Jackson's supposedly deteriorating lung to Amy Winehouse's most certainly replenished bosom. Here are the top five things we learned for this final full week of 2008, in a very much specific order. 5. Despite our very keen eye for newly portly former sex symbols, Kathleen Turner's massive tumble into terrifyingly negative sex appeal slipped through a canyon-sized crack. She might portray a dog trainer in Marley & Me, but it appears her personal workout coach really screwed the pooch.
4. Just when we thought we were out.... Actually, it's Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt who are out... (wait for it, wait for it) of their minds! And in and out of matrimony, as they teased us with yet another wedding-related ratings booster on The Hills, only to hold off on an official ceremony as a presumed cocktease for their inevitable spinoff show. Hey, it's not like marriage has been a particularly sanctified concept in recent decades anyway, so these two nutballs may as well shit all over it to advance their careers.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while the previous entrant into the Cable Info-Bar pantheon was the suddenly somber documentary Borat, today we travel back in time to one of Johnny Depp's most memorable early roles. And no, we're not talking about his thankless offing as Heather Langenkamp's boyfriend in Nightmare On Elm Street.
Here's the last Films From The Cable Afterlife of 2008. Looking back, there were some great movies shown that I hope I turned you onto, and hopefully some more that you found on your own. Overall, I gotta let it be known that cable as a medium for showing movies is starting to slip. Movie packages change hands and the more creative programmers out there fall to the wayside, buried in an avalanche of cheap-to-air space fillers, the kind of sub-direct-to-DVD garbage that's 10 times worse than the lousiest drive-in/grindhouse garbage it replaced.
Movies are also getting squeezed out of formerly great networks like Sundance and IFC in favor of original programming (thanks guys, I needed to be reminded to recycle) and the on-demand diaspora only pushes a tighter net of weak movies into a narrower frame. You'd think that the shrinking margins facing cable would cause these networks to step up, but the thrills that movie channels once provided are competing with all manner of media and piracy issues, and fighting a losing battle. Only Turner Classic Movies, and to a lesser extent Fox Movie Channel and IFC, are keeping it real, showing a tacit dedication to their implicit tasks at hand.
I challenge cable programmers to show a little more pride in their work come 2009, and that they rise to the expectations of their viewership, the lazy, unmotivated herd that deserves to have their realm shattered by unbelievable examples of cinema. This time we're going to look exclusively at IFC and Turner Classic Movies for an example of two networks who get it right. 8. Twentieth Century (1934) Turner Classic Movies, Thursday, January 1, 7:15am One of the rules of Cable Afterlife was "nothing before 1967, please" but you know what? WHO CARES. Howard Hawks' knock-down drag-out comedy deserves to be appreciated by a new generation. Fussy director John Barrymore and his even fussier protégé actress Carole Lombard, who he made a star for nothing in return, slug it out on a train ride. It's hilarious and bitchy and biting, and the best we can do today is crap like Bride Wars. Please, do yourself a favor and watch this.
7. Heaven's Gate (1981) Turner Classic Movies, Wednesday, December 31, 2am A few years back I found myself stranded in a condo with my family in Naples, Florida over Christmas vacation. It was raining, and I didn't have access to a rental car (not that there was anything to do anyway). In an ultimate act of masochism, I brought my GreenCine rentals with me, and decided to roll through the early oeuvre of Michael Cimino, from Magnum Force and Thunderbolt & Lightfoot to The Deer Hunter and this, the movie that bankrupted United Artists and sullied Cimino's career once and for all. TCM presents the long, restored version of this giant catastrophe, peppered with moments of unfettered brilliance and an extravagance that you don't see much in films anymore. It's hard to sympathize with anyone in this movie, the ultimate '70s downer and one so large it carried through to the '80s. Rich kid baron Kris Kristofferson shuns his Harvard graduating class and protects the interests of immigrants in this overblown retelling of the Johnson County War. Ugly, mean, bitter and melancholy, with great turns by Christopher Walken and Sam Waterston as the ultimate heel/coward. This year sucked anyway. Watch it run down the drain the right way.
6. Surf Movie Marathon Turner Classic Movies, Tuesday, December 30, 6:30am-8pm TCM is down to show surf movies without fail every few months, and it's always nice to get a massive dose of such irreverence thrown at you in such a manner as this; over 12 hours of beach action, slumber parties, Von Zipper chop-busting, very off-color race gags (an Asian guy named "Cholly"? Come on!), and killer musical appearances by garage and R&B bands of the '60s. Running top to bottom, we have the following:
• Pajama Party (some nonsense about an alien learning about girls, bound to be fun with Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello on board) • Winter A Go-Go (teen turns abandoned ski lodge into music venue) • For Those Who Think Young (teens fight developers who threaten to shut down a beachside hangout; starring Paul Lynde, Nancy Sinatra, Bob Denver and Tina Louise) • It's A Bikini World (rad drag-racing beach/surf monster with Deborah Walley, Sid Haig, The Animals, The Gentrys and The Castaways) • Ride The Wild Surf (more surf-oriented than most, with Fabian and Shelley Fabares hitting the waves in Hawaii) • Don't Make Waves (Tony Curtis and the late Sharon Tate mix it up with The Byrds out by the shore) • Beach Party (the original; Frankie and Annette battle Von Zipper, with Dick Dale shredding on guitar) • Muscle Beach Party (the kids fight the bodybuilders, featuring music by Brian Wilson, Little Stevie Wonder, and Dick Dale, with extra insults by Don Rickles)
These movies are where pop culture exploded into music, and provided some of the fuel to fire up the '60s youth rebellion. Must-watch, even if you think you're beyond this type of cheese.
5. Never Die Alone (2004) IFC, Saturday, January 2, 12am Chilling, violent modern film noir, based on street-hustler-turned-Iceberg Slim-protégé Donald Goines' novel. DMX's finest role, and David Arquette is no slouch either. You probably missed this joint when it hit theaters, so catch up now and feel the burn.
Those of you who are really, truly loyal NCDSUV readers (thanks mom and AA sponsor) will recall my abject horror at the notion of Mamma Mia!'s theatrical release, particularly the forced attempt to turn it into a midnight-movie sing-along classic.
And how I specifically would only go endure it if there was enough of a movement on the comments board. Well, Jesus himself could become resurrected (and oh yeah, happy holidays and thanks for reading this year and stuff by the way) and demand my purchase of the DVD and I wouldn't get within 100 bags of Swedish fish of this Meryl Streep disasterpiece.
Why? Because the commercial for it insists that guys like myself should, "Be a man, buy her a musical." (Full disclosure: Above clip is from theatrical trailer. Was unable to unearth said TV ad for DVD.) Which may get the gold medal for most repugnant gender-stereotype-reinforcement in a holiday-season ad over the ESPN-friendly Nutrisystem spots with recent Sucks honoree Chris Berman and his once-portly sportscasting pal Mike Golic.
How about I be a man and save whatever limited cash I have in this recession and ensure I have money to feed my family in '09 after lavishing them with superflous Santa-time offerings.
OK, I don't actually have a family to support. And I'm Jewish. But you get the idea. Although I suppose it's not as offensive as urging me to buy, say, Streep's celebrity perfume.
Yes, the commercials for Owen Wilson/Jennifer Aniston's holiday bank-buffer Marley & Me are almost offensively noxious. But you can get so distracted by the cuddly shenanigans between Wilson, Aniston and their precocious pooch (goddamn Owen, what happened to Bottle Rocket? No wonder you almost ended it) that you almost miss the rigid wildabeast who appears midway through the trailer, aka, the artist formerly known as raspy sex symbol Kathleen Turner.
It's a shame that we published our feature on most jarring mid-career celeb weight gains before Marley bobbed its way into theaters, and it's also doubtful the aging sultress packed on the pounds "for the part."
All I know is, with masterbatory muses of my youth like Turner and Colleen Camp getting older without maintaining any MILF-y mystique, and today's pop culture poontang represented in the hollow plastic shells of debutantes and CW starlets, it's a sad, sad time for horny young men in search of ripe, ravishing female icons.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw D.B. Sweeney and John C. McGinley finding the fountain of youth in an Eddie Money pit, today the cable bar manages to contort a subversive comedy for the ages into a soberly investigative piece of cinema.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday reimagined a Ben Stiller updating of The Heartbreak Kid as a tale of kismet assholes falling in fated love, today we take a fantastical roadtrip to the fountain of youth with a couple of B-level leading men.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while Friday saw a creepy stalker thriller get reimagined into Heather Graham's journey of personal redemption, today we clicked around until we stumbled upon a rather flippant summation of a rather half-assed remake of a kind-of awesome comedy.
Once upon a time, there was a land ruled by a King who liked to bang his intern in fucked up ways, like with cigars and shit. Despite his ridiculous sexcapades though, he left that Law Of The Land intact, and the only constitution that got tore up was the intern's carnal constitution. That didn't mean the King was a good dude, but it just meant he wasn't a unrepentant monster, who should be hanged for war crimes.
Now in this mythical land, there also lived a dwarf named Jeremy Piven whose sardonic schtick endeared him to all in shows like Cupid and Ellen, as well as cult classic films like PCU. Of course, by "cult classic," we mean, "movie that used to be run 300,000 times a second on Comedy Central." This of course, created the temporal nexus knows as the Piven Hole, a theoretical object that sucks Emmy awards into it regardless of whether they are deserved.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's
favorite daily features, where we acknowledge
another turn of the calendar for a member of Hollywood land, even if it's a
celebrity who often goes overlooked by the rest of the blogosphere, and
regardless of whether we have a huge affinity for their body of work.
On Friday, we blew out Flashdance(r)
Jennifer Beals' still sizzling birthday candles, and today we're reluctantly
strapping on our party hats for an elderly over-sharing enthusiast.
With Doubt's Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep chewing the fat and the scenery in their latest piece of Oscar bait, it seems that audiences never grow tired of stories featuring religious types falling from grace and getting down and dirty like the rest of us filthy mortals. Overzealous dogma, lapsed vows and broken covenants almost always make for intriguing material, especially when the characters involved are expected to be holier than thou. Throughout film history, these wolves in cleric's clothing have souls as dark as the uniforms they wear. Bless them Father for they have sinned... a lot.
7. Sister Bridget, The Magdalene Sisters Scores of free-spirited teenage girls were sent to do hard labor at the Magadalene Laundries simply for acting the way free-spirited teenage girls do (and without even the benefit of a follow-up appearance on Montel). With all the beatings, scoldings and general abuse being doled out by the Palpatine-esque Mother Superior and her minions, their convent/laundromat has more in common with your average women's prison than with any coin-op Fluff & Fold. If this monochromatic dictator ran the world, any woman dressed in less than a turtleneck would be burned at the stake.
6. Archbishop Gilday, The Godfather: Part III Although Sofia Coppola is still the most offensive presence in the Corleones' lackluster finale, the Archbishop's less than virtuous extracurricular activities (larceny, embezzlement, pope murder) make him a close second. The ecclesiastical egomaniac teaches the Don a thing or two about ruthlessness and shows that underneath his shiny silk vestments beats the heart of a cold-blooded gangster. Don't let the robes fool you. At the end of the day, it's just business.
5. Reverend Shaw Moore, Footloose A lot of people forget just how intense the pre-3rd Rock John Lithgow could be. Twenty-four years later, his intolerant rants against the "gospel of easy sexuality and relaxed morality" preached by that evil rock 'n' roll music and unholy books like Slaughterhouse-Five can still be heard in some form or another in much of what Sarah Palin calls the "real" America. A lot of small towns seem to share the fictional reverend's myopic point of view and would rather keep their little enclaves culture and Bacon-free. Oh well, maybe Zac Efron can change their minds in the remake.
Ah, the last week before the Christmas-time blitz of abusive commercialism and schmaltzy, ceremonial sentimentality. A time for celebrities to get one last headline blast before the world pretends to care about religion and family more than the dogma of tabloid culture for a few days.
Fortunately for us, there was no shortage of boob-flashing, divorce scuttlebutt and rehab-hyjinks. So without further prolonged pause, here are the top five things we here at NCDSUV (and we hope you as well) have learned this week:
4. Tara Reid, not to be outdone by her more youthful underlings Lindsay Lohan et al, finally went into rehab for undisclosed reasons. We're guessing it's because she's been chronically addicted to an illicit co-dependent substance, but what the heckfire do we know?
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw River's Edge transformed into a one-act stoner response to Stand By Me, today we go to a mystical, magnificent stop on the Info-Bar express where Hope really does float.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features,
where we acknowledge another turn of the calendar for a member of
Hollywood land, even if it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by
the rest of the blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge
affinity for their body of work.
On Thursday, we wished happy 65th to a guy who spent much of youth 69-ing with young, tourniquet-equipped groupies, and today we gather together in an a cappella chorus of "I Need A Hero" for the star of both a cult '80s film and an equally culty '00s Showtime drama.
Have yourself a cable-ridden Christmas. Watch your fill of crap. Every now and then a great movie falls in your lap. (All times in EST.) 8. Glow Ropes: The Rise And Fall Of A Bar Mitzvah Emcee (2007) TMC, Monday, December 22, 11:35pm Faux documentary regarding what the title implies. Piss-poor acting and pacing, but man, such a great idea. I should have copyrighted my concept for this movie when I came up with it. Someone's reading my thoughts!
7. Meatballs (1979) SHO Family, Sunday, December 21, 6:25pm Don't shower, don't shave, don't even bother changing out of your night clothes. Anytime Meatballs is on, it's totally chill to drop everything and vegetate. Bill Murray keeps it together through the loosest narrative possible, and Chris Makepeace all but defines emo as "Wudy The Wabbit."
6. Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007) Cinemax, Monday, December 22, 12:45am Squick factor 10! Aliens, predators and "Pred-Aliens" land in Colorado, destroying humans and face-humping pregnant women and little kids. Features Fox TV stars from Rescue Me and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I dare you to tell me what's happening in the rubber-suit fight scenes. You can't sit far away enough from the screen.
5. Kuroneko (The Black Cat) (1968) IFC, Sunday December 21 8am Samurais murder two women, whose spirits live on to avenge their deaths. Fits in nicely with similar Japanese horror offerings Kwaidan and Onibaba. Get ready to get skeered.
I can almost assure you the rumors suggesting Eddie Murphy will play The Riddler in the next Batman sequel will prove false. For one, his career has shown no indication of taking that kind of subversively resurrected upswing. Secondly, I can't fathom Christopher Nolan expecting his audience to see the sinister artist lurking beneath Murphy's long-standing facade of middling cash-in fare without there being at least a few finer works than Meet Dave and Norbit to buffer the intervening period.
And from a more general standpoint about the nature of conjecture, this is like paying attention to early fall reports about what baseball free agents will be relocating to which teams. Because of course, in reality, the end result of feverish business negotiations will prove drastically different than what some attention-grubbing source told some story-starved writers.
Should Murphy get the nod, however (especially over fellow rumored role-seekers Johnny Depp), the increasingly dark and minimalist franchise would suddenly appear to be flying in a suspiciously Batman And Robin-esque direction.
It's that time of year again. Holiday-shopping season. That apocalyptic assemblage of weeks in which retail outlets become surrogate synagogues and major corporations push unnecessary product rollouts on a discount/one-of-a-kind-gift-hungry public.
Which means it's also time for celebrities to shill themselves with all the grace and pride of a struggling sitcom during May sweeps. And in particular, it becomes ground zero for the marketing of celebrity fragrances. Over the last couple of weeks, you may have seen ads for perfumes and colognes bearing the name, likeness and, presumably, grundle odor, of super-famous hotties and hunks.
Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Hilary Duff and, yes, even Tim McGraw
(whose "McGraw" cologone is fashioned to resemble, you guessed it, a
cowboy hat) are among those in the fray-grance.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday saw Dazed And Confused get reduced to a pedestrian slacker-stoner piece of teen celluloid, today the cable guide manages to likewise diffuse the complexity and originality of underrated and disturbing '80s teen-flick-of-sorts.
Welcome to NCDSUV's splenetic, embittered new weekly feature, Overdressed
& Underclassed, which with each installment will dissect a different aspect
of celebrity fashion with the enthusiasm and exactitude of a taxidermist
suffering from the second clinical phase of rabies (caution: We have reached
the contagious stage).
This week we address Bridesmaid Fug. Just when we thought it
was safe to peruse US Weekly again in
the checkout line at the Big K, safe from the wedding-related Hollywood terror of
2006 and beyond (Katie Holmes & Tom Cruise, Anna Nicole Smith & J. Howard Marhsall, Pam Anderson & Kid Rock,
Avril Lavigne & Deryck Whibley, Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban, etc.) the most wretched, the most
insidious and the most unavoidable component that crops up in every nuptial cocktail,
from Boise to Bel Air, is upon us.
For some utterly inconceivable reason, celebrity starlets have taken it upon
themselves to don bridesmaids' dresses to red carpet events. Was the trend
launched by a Machiavellian PR maven in a bid to surreptitiously lather us into
a matrimonial-obsessed frenzy right before the premiere of Bride Wars? (The stars of the movie, Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway,
bless their hearts, have not embraced the fad.)
Can ossified updos sprinkled with baby's breath and
Diamonique clips be far away? A SWAT Team has been sent to the Hollywood
& Highland
mall to investigate and is expected to report back any moment now...
*(P.S.: Links to the below red-carpet nightmares are located, mercifully, with the commentary for each entrant.)
8. Scarlett Johansson Scene Of The Crime: The Spirit promo in Paris. ScarJo generally likes to sheath herself in princessy, fussy garments while prancing down the carpet, and when it's good, it's very, very good. But when it's bad, it's horrid. Cue this horrifying vision in black and white. We have the bridesmaid-tastic, delicately frayed tulip edged bodice, the figure-truncating cummerbund, cutesy keyhole embroidery detailing and a homely burst of white tulle peeking out from under the tragic mid-calf no-go zone of hemlines. Her priggish black satin shoes with giant toe bows complete the look.
7. Alicia Witt Scene Of The Crime: The Australia premiere in New York. Pale redheads the world over generally quake in fear when "invited" to participate in their friend's big day. One of the many unwritten rules of bridesmaid dress is that its material must be spun in an unworldly, blindingly bright hue that will sear retinas and make fair, and God forbid, fire-tressed maids look like anemic Raggedy Anns. But Alicia actually opted to wear this specimen. Is it possible that, upon dressing and gazing at her countenance in a mirror, she actually said to herself: "Yes. This beaming purple sateen get-up with a bizarre strip of ruffles where my boobs should be, a baggy cummerbund and a knee-length skirt that may or may not conceal a family of hedgehogs in its flouncing, mysteriously billowing canopy-like space, will help me look impossibly chic when standing next to perma-perfectly coiffed fellow redhead paleface Nicole Kidman"?
6. Beyonce Scene Of The Crime: The Kennedy Center Honors in New York. Perhaps the generally faux-pas-proof Beyonce was channeling her alter ego, Sasha. Only that fierce lady or a bride with a laser-like focus on "having a really classy wedding" (you know, the one who insists on entering her reception hall in some sort of mechanized snow globe mid-smooch with her husband while the strains of Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me" are blared into traumatized guests' ear lobes) could be responsible for the multitude of sins slathered on Her Bodaciousness. A) The black lace top outfitted with not one, but two bows: one tulle number that resembles a Venus Flytrap and one satin ribbon that needs to meet an iron, STAT. B) The circulation-annihilating, floor-length satin black mermaid-style skirt. C) The 6-inch tall updo. D) The crazy "I'm trapped, SOS SOS" expression in Beyonce's eyes, trademark of all Bridezilla-victims.
5. Wendi Deng Scene Of The Crime: The Australia premiere in New York. This dress is a perfect example of too many chefs spoiling the soup, another pesky problem even the most opinionated bride faces when selecting the perfect(ly awful) bridesmaids dresses for her closest pals. Needy and vocal mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters and sisters-in- law are the most frequent saboteurs, and Deng's dress embodies the chaos that ensues when they all "just try to help!" Her bipolar outfit would be fine if the fun, bouncy black bottom half or the elegantly ruched, sleeveless satin top-half were allowed to rule the day. But together, and paired with granny-sheer tights, excessive bling and Payless-esque black pumps, it looks like the product of two mutually exclusive minds: the "I want you to be able to wear this dress again someday so just grab this LBD at J. Crew" school of thought and the "I want to pretend I'm the empress of the galaxy and you are my slaves for the day, suck up the damn the $600 price tag" mindset.
Steve Coogan is bothersome in the same way fellow Sucks honoree Demetri Martin is bothersome: There's something distasteful about his artistic choices, and when left to his own devices he produces shit like it was going out of style (thanks to government-imposed constipation). However, he has been part of a number of good, rather, great endeaovers and has generated enough goodwill that, well, that's the problem right there.
An artist can genuinely be engaging and act in well-wrought films but also produce shit-for-pay, but only if that person truly produces shit. Heaping, massive piles of dung. Great monuments of twaddle. Monoliths that stretch out to the heavens and rain claptrap upon our heads like manna from God's butt. But pass above that threshold to the point where your artistic choices are in question, well...
Was that headline gross? Eh, maybe? Kinda? Yeah. Well, now that we have your attention, it is our civic duty to report, like many other conscientious blogs, that Halle Berry had a bit of an on-set Janet Jackson moment (NSFW) while filming her latest, Frankie And Alice. And like Ms. Jackon's Super Bowl booby debacle, we had a very similar reaction: "Hmmm, that's not exactly as exotic a picture as I generally possessed in my imagination, or at least the one fueled by airbrushed magazine photos and the magic of digital movie trickery."
But unnecessary meanness and sexism aside, these images, and subsequent memories of Berry's breast-baring roles in Swordfish and Monster's Ball, couldn't help but bring to mind a more innocent time. You know, the days of Strictly Business and Boomerang, when the then bob-haired actress may as well have been a grown up Cosby kid with all the chaste charm she exuded. In fact, 'twas an era when Berry was representative of a certain class of thespienne that principally opposed superfluous on-screen skin.
However, one shitty James Bond flick, even more middling John Travolta action-thriller, super-creepy Billy Bob Thornton sex scene and mid-scene garment slip-up (and let's face it: that particular ensemble wasn't designed to avoid such revelations) later, and she's the new generation's Bo Derek.
That being said, better Berry's indecent exposure than more high-profile nudity from, say, Jason Segel.
Welcome back to one of NSCDUV's most beloved daily features, which takes aim at the most confounding, misleading or abruptly hysterical info-bar synopses of the day's cable programming.
And while yesterday invited us inside the whimsical tale of a talking dog with discerning taste in footwear, today we watch in abject horror as one of the '90s most significant American films gets disgraced as another tale of teens living a life in waste.
Welcome to one of NCDSUV's favorite daily features, where we acknowledge
another turn of the calendar for a member of Hollywood land, even if
it's a celebrity who often goes overlooked by the rest of the
blogosphere, and regardless of whether we have a huge affinity for
their body of work.
Yesterday, we wished happy 47th to a man who showed his Lethal Weapon at a ripe young age, and today we cherish the 62nd year of an actor who helped define an era of comedy, and became an unfortunate archetype for the paycheck-cashing character actor.
As you all know by now (since none of you, like me, go out on Saturday nights), Amy Poehler has fled the womb of Saturday Night Live, having fed sufficiently off its placenta before having a child of her own and finding leading-lady big-screen success with Baby Mama.
Which means that her birth canal isn't the only gaping hole in need of closure. The question now remains: Who, if anyone, will be her direct replacement on the program? Sure, the economy's tight and the show can just redesignate existing roles like any other organization would do. But it seems the perfect opportunity to give one of the following ladies the chance of their comedic lifetime. Unless, of course, they're satisfied with fleeting celebrity-roast visibility and shows that are perpetually at risk for cancellation. (And no, we didn't include Sarah Silverman. The last thing SNL needs is to be smothered with her snide, know-it-all irony.) 5. Lisa Lampanelli OK, even though they bill themselves as being not ready for prime time, the play-it-safe staple might not quite be prepared for the big, brash force of epithet-spewing nature that is Lampanelli. Renowned for her bawdy standup and willingness to endure jokes about her love of big black jock on several of Comedy Central's celebrity roasts, Lampanelli's skillset would need some rounding out to fit into SNL as a performer. But as pure, gender-barrier-breaking funnny goes, there's few femmes out there who do it better.
4. Jessica St. Clair Sure, this adorably freckled Best Week Ever
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