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.
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.
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.
At one point did Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am become hip-hop's voice of political conscience and Native Tongue depth? Has the genre become so polarized by self-involved pseudo-artistes like Kanye and unabashed eccentric braggarts like Lil Wayne that there's no middle-ground representative with enough commercial appeal and grounded perspective to suddenly soundtrack the historical moment of Barack Obama's ascendency to President?
Just to review, the constantly sunglasses-adorned MC spent the late '90s and early 2000s as main mouthpiece for the Peas, known more conversationally as the poor man's Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul/et al. Then, like a sitcom struggling to stay afloat, they added a new character, in the form of big-bootied crystal-meth addict Fergie, who provided will.i.am with new leverage and credibility as a producer and solo artist, which resulted in shit-tastic affairs like Songs About Girls, which turned out to be as surface and vapid as its potentially ironic title indicated.
With the immanent ascension of Barack Obama from anointed President-Elect to full-fledged messiah, our country can now certainly begin to take the first, few tentative steps towards not being The World's Asshole. (You know, that guy at the party that drinks too much and keeps playing grabass, but no one can really do anything about it because you know he's strapped?) However, like stale vomit stains on the couch and a mysterious stench coming from god-knows-where, painful remnants of the last eight years still exist in the form of one Jack Bauer, the so-called hero of Fox's zzzzzzzz-inspiring 24.
Ah, Keifer Sutherland. Ladies love him. And ladies love Jack Bauer. His smoldering eyes. His towheaded virility. The fact that he's a fucking torturer whose not only used to justify the worst excesses of George Bush and his administration of morally-bankrupt dicklickers, but is somehow a beloved role-model, is fucking criminally insane.
At a time when America's collective fat ratio is perilously disproportionate, and the only people with a booming business are cardiac surgeons and pharmacists, there's nothing our nation needs more than Food Network "star" Guy Fieri celebrating the wonders of low-priced, artery-clogging T.G.I. Friday's appetizers every fucking 30 seconds.
You know the guy: He won that Next Food Network Star competition and then launched a series of programs revolving around down-home, no-frills food to ensure immediate gratification and even more instant mortality. And edge-ified the channel with a burly personality that befit his raspy voice, Hot Topic Hair and a shit-eating goatee.
I guess I'm not inherently adverse to the culture of crappy eating he promotes, nor the fact that he's cashed in on it with a soulless endorsement for a flavorless gourmet fast-food chain. I'm just generally allergic to any publicly visible personality who patches together an aesthetic out of second-hand, adolescent symbols of awesomeness and attempts to ooze his coolness juice all over something that was either helplessly mundane, or had plenty of inherent charm for anyone without a completely crippled attention span or insecurity in their individual sensibilities.
Fuck that guy. That Guy Fieri even. He sucks. Click here for the Sucks archive.
While I was online searching for pictures of Pokemons with human female breasts, I happened upon the trailer for an upcoming film named Miss March, which written, directed and starring members of The Whitest Kids U Know. To say it seemed generic is an understatement, but the fucker came packaged in a plain brown box with a Toucan Sam rip-off emblazoned on its front. SLAM! Dozens, bitch!
The utter thatness of that trailer's existence is, however, indicative of the sketch group as a whole. They are there. They exist. You can point in their direction and watching their show elicits peels of "Mmmm, ok." Generic. Generic isn't necessarily bad. It's just... placing your palms upward and shrugging your shoulders.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Brody Jenner is like a multi-headed monster of suck. He's a Medusa of mediocrity with snakes of suckage prowling from outside his skull, swallowing both his pride and pop culture's self-respect whole like a rat inside their slithering skin.
There's the fact that he sucks on the most surface, spoiled-douche socialite level, attaining third-hand notoriety as the son of a famous athlete (Bruce Jenner, although athlete is surely in quotations there), the stepbrother of a sub-Paris Hilton nightlife diva and the carefully cast friend of a "reality" queen, Lauren Conrad of The Hills.
Then there's the magnanimous suckitude of his new MTV show, Bromance, which, fittingly, apes Ms. Hilton's My New BFF but replaces it with uncomfortably homoerotic dudeism. The premiere felt like the opening episode of a Real World season, when everyone parades naked into the hot tub for drinks, high-pitched shrieking and cavorting, except with the girls conspicuously missing an invitation.
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.
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.
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.
While slogging through VH1's autopiloted, best-of '08 (i.e. best of their coverage of '08) programming during the last week, I made it through a few more of their I Love The... and Top 100... clips shows. During one such marathon, a segment featured the best air-guitar song of that year, with celebrities and professional air guitarists alike superimposed over, say, a Judas Priest clip, wah-wah-ing and soloing away on their imaginary axe.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I just say professional air guitarists? Excuse me while I get my dick out of my hand until someone gives me my paycheck for professionally jerking off. I think what I actually meant to say was unemployed loser who lives in his mom's basement and makes a living through some mundane postmodern form of theater that lands approximately in between a Rock Band jam session and the early audition stages of American Idol.
Firstly, all the value from air guitar histrionics has historically been derived from it being a private endeavor, something that, a la singing in the shower, is vulnerable to shame and embarrassment if caught on tape or by accidental interruption.
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.
A flu, nay!, a scourge, a pall of sickness has descended upon us. Because that's where plagues come from. Above. Not below and not from the left. Not sideways, and not from Sideways, that film about wine and the lady from Arli$$. But rather from above, where New Zealand has been hovering ever since the Great Earthquake of 2046 shunted it back in time, and like that island from Lost, it now floats halfway upwards our stratosphere. At least that's my theory about the Lost island, but I created a website and have combed through every season so far to prove my point, and you can see my findings here.
Anyway, that scourge that has floated down from above is the second season of Flight Of The Conchords, a sickness for which, like Babe Ruth's Disease, there is no cure. Except not watching it, I guess. I suppose that's where the metaphor breaks down. Anyway, why so unserious about those two gits from The N.Z.? One word: They're not funny, and it rankles my ankles for dopes to dote over their hokey one-note, three chord ditties.
While one might think I'm just so-called "hatin," or whatever slang roustabouts are known to utter in these time-quadrants we call the 21st centuries, it's more than that. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good, and in this case, base hatred is called for, summoned up from the very depths of Q'lippoth, The Kingdom Of Shells and poured over Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement like molten steel over a Terminator.
With the recent release of Rivers Cuomo's second CD of home recordings, a nostalgia has been drizzled over our beings like Christmas spirit over the dinner ham. Or whatever it is that gentiles eat. Cookies or something. Regardless, a fondness for a former age, a period where Weezer wasn't a pale parody of its previous self, is upon us like carolers preying upon a fresh plate of ham-flavored cookies.
The beckoning nostalgia spurs us on to try and recapture the feeling Pinkerton gave us, with its vaguely crazy songs about obsession and creepy Sinophilia. However, like the childhood you're so desperate to recapture but never can, and so you grow into a twisted man-child unable to form adult attachments, that feeling is forever lost, much like the possibility of Rivers Cuomo ever writing another decent song with Weezer. Oh spirit of music past, show us the True Enlightened Path Of Splendor!
In all, or at least a minimal amount of, seriousness, what makes Pinkerton such a great album (even more than The Blue Album), is that it's completely and absurdly earnest, and like Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway know, it's important to be that. (According to them though, it's also important to end your life as a shriveled shell of your erstwhile self. Or just to end your life period.)
With the passing of Rock Of Love Charm School, we also mourn Riki Rachtman's re-exit from the revolving door of pop culture's spotlight. For now. For a moment. Until some other opportunity arises for him to continue his improbable, two-decade tenure as a parasite on the buttocks of heavy-metal culture, during which time he's used his inflated status as backstage hanger-on extraordinaire to get consistent visibility on MTV and VH1.
Rachtman was always a clueless, over-quaffed nitwit on Headbanger's Ball (especially when making the awkward transition into the grunge years). And as evidenced in The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, was an even more egregiously 'do'd dipshit during the formative years of his Cathouse proprietorship (the rock club, not the HBO brothel).
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.
As was discussed recently on NCDSUV, Jay Leno's questionable appointment (mirroring many of Barack Obama's cabinet picks) to a daily 10 p.m. slot is possibly the least progressive move NBC and Ben Silverman, its co-chair of Entertainment, could make. Desperate to hold onto their bland, ghost-white cash cow (or perhaps bleached-white steer skull, as Leno's humor is devoid of flesh, muscle and vitality, leaving merely effluvia and bones), they struck some expedient bargain.
It's admirable that they want to keep their contractually-enforced agreement with Conan O'Brien, but his show (at least in its present form) has no business being on at 11:30, even though it's quite great. Furthermore, forcing Leno to an earlier timeslot just means that the crypt-keepers that watch him will now migrate along, leaving 11:30 a desolate negative zone.
As TV critic Alan Sepinwall noted in his Star Ledger column, Silverman, the enfant terrible of the executive asshole class, said, "[The allure of this is] having the stability of Jay on every single night, on that lineup, driving what the NBC brand is, which is a comedy brand, and is a brand of true talent, and that's what Jay is."
Or as Leno then quipped: "What Ben's saying is we barely have six hours of programming." It's still a joke if you say something with a straight face and no one laughs and everyone nods and someone in the back purposely says, "How true," right?
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.
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...
My name is Kevin Smith, but I am not that guy. I'm not the world famous Kevin Smith. I did not write and direct such films as Clerks, Chasing Amy, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back and Zack And Miri Make A Porno. I share an incredibly common name with more than 10,000 people in this country, one of them being a well-known entertainer.
His often-told tale is another example of the great American success story. A boy grows up in squalid conditions (New Jersey), dreams of making a mark on the world with his art, gets the resources together and makes a movie that would bring him well-deserved fame. Back then, he was a source of witty dialogue and DIY ingenuity. Now, he seriously sucks.
Where did he turn wrong on the path? After Clerks, Smith followed with Mallrats, a whimsically enteraining take on disposable '80s flicks, and Chasing Amy, the classic tale of boy meets lesbian and changes her sexual identity. Sure these flicks had some faults, but in their hearts they achieved a welcome blend of insightful musings, engaging characters and poop jokes.
But as any good parochial student will remember, after pride comes the downfall. And Smith's pride brought us Dogma, which was neither deep nor funny, but was profoundly boring. Gone was the snappy give-and-take, replaced by shiny trinkets like Alanis Morissette portraying God to distract the audience from the movie's dull platitudes. Then he followed that sanctified clusterfuck with Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, which regurgitated tired gags for his two favorite nitwits on a zany adventure in Hollywood land. And next up was Jersey Girl, the family man dramedy that no one was asking for, staring the insufferable Ben Affleck.
A lipogrammatic Sucks in honor of that Gallic wordsmith and, also, this following shit:
That iniquitous logo that brands my TV's bottom third and also is a brand upon my brain, what opprobrium must I toss at it such that my wrath will vanish. Poof! Away agitation! How much? What words? What might I say that can possibly accomplish this goal?
And such a taint (pull your minds out of that filthy gully, folks) E!'s diaphanous glow puts upon all around who watch. My TV. My room. My cats. My body. All humans caught within its appalling radius grasp for a gun to shoot: to blow our own skulls apart or possibly just smash that logo into bits with slugs from that gun. That is, any who can look upon a TV (so no blindos). Humans missing sight can, at minimum, avoid that logo's brutal scrutiny.
My point, I think, is its point. Its final point, that is, which follows that sick symbol, fifth in our linguistic array (a to z, if you catch my drift). And that fifth! I cannot bring my mouth to say it or my hand to push that button (on top of "D" and right of "W"). My animosity robs my body of that ability to apply its particular, pragmatic charm. But an inquiry for us to rack our brains upon (that is, why I scrawl this crap today): Why do famous fucks solicit (nay, command!) so much hubbub? A stick on top of a dot (this: !). It stands for a world of buzz, a world abuzz with much ado about nothing. Such furor! Colossal amounts of hullabaloo about what?
This one's for all your college kids out there, suffering through O.A.R. (aka Of A Revolution, which sounds more like a shitty new line of "edgy" denim wear at Macy's than a band with any depth) as their generation's Dave Matthews Band. You know, the kind of band that kids of the download era spread around with each other bootleg-style after going to one of their shitty stadium shows at the corporate-subsidized arena 10 minutes from campus.
You know, the one that's fronted by an earnest and down to earth-but-just handsome enough frontman and buoyed by a bassist that compensates for lack of charisma with a crappy haircut, flip-up collar and rhythmless bounce on his hind foot.
The kind that you'd first assume was a Christian rock band of the Nickelback variety, where religion doesn't explicitly motivate their music but implicitly informs its faux-inspirational soulless anti-anthems.
I'm not sure these guys are what The Beatles had in mind when they were talkin' bout a "Revolution," or what The Clash intended when they rallied their fans around the "Revolution Rock." But what I do know is that man, do these guys suck.
Well, I figure while we're on the subject of The Hills, and while I've subsequently emasculated myself but also made myself out to be a perv in the same four-post span, it's about time to take aim at Audrina Patridge's on-again, off-again, hair-long-again, hair-short-again, faux-surfer, sort-of-wannabe-rebel-badass, second-rate Spicoli boy-toy Justin Bobby.
Now, I'm not about to get on some punk rock high horse. My association with outcast fringe culture was likewise cultivated in suburbia (Long Island to be exact), but dating back to the authentic outgrowth of the hardcore scene, there's always been something unsavory about how West Coast dudes adopt the skater aesthetic. A bro-ham, fraternity-pledging, peer-bullying sort of vibe that befits their lack of exposure to the hardened shifting of seasons and mean urban streets of the Midwest and East Coast.
For those uninitiated with the possibly government-hired, male-brainwashing juggernaut of world domination that is ESPN, one of their legacy anchors is Chris Berman. You know, the beefy, somewhat-balding guy with the slightly raspy, burling baritone who makes a living off of groan-inducing puns (and if anyone loves a worthy play on words, it's us) like "Jake 'Daylight Come And Me Want To' Delhomme" (his way of flattering Carolina Panthers QB Jake Delhomme).
Or when not contorting players names into outdates movie references, overcompensating for his lack of descriptive color football commentary with lots of high-squeaked, Batman-worthy onomotopeia emissions ("Whooop!"), and supplanting his dearth of authoritative baseball insight by charming us with patentedly stuttered home runs calls ("B-b-b-b-b-b-ack-ack-ack-ack, gone!").
It's somewhat tough to rag on Demetri Martin. Especially when I'm on the rag. Or at least my feminine side is. Or at least that's the excuse she keeps giving me in order to avoid coitus. But now the only red wings I'll earn are a bucket of Mild 'n' Spicies down at Jimmie's Chicken Shack, which I was given as payment in lieu of monetary remuneration for being their manager. I guess the only thing I managed though was fuck up their careers. Which is sadly the only fucking I've ever done.
But Deme (or is it Deme?), just because you've been laying low lately developing a celluloid career doesn't mean the long arm of the Sucks law (a disfigured, leprotic limb of mottled flesh) can't grab at you longingly. But, like I noted above, it's a bit difficult to really let Martin have it. He's no magnificent asshole like Craig Kilborn, nor some political ovary coat like Bill Maher, and some of his jokes are rather wry. However, the bad bits outweigh the good to a significant degree, and like the scales of blind, lady justice (the juridical symbol, not the stripper that refused to give me a handjob, regardless of how much cash I threw at her ingrate feet and one great rack) the tipping point has emerged. And from on high, a judgment is handed down, "Marty, you stink like gangrene."
In a dream I once had, I asked Craig Kilborn why he was so smug. "Kid," he began with an arrogant smirk and a cocksure glint in his eye, "When you've got a dick as big as I do, and balls the size of colossal limes, you can be as smug as fucking Ra, the Egyptian sungod, and nobody can say nuthin' contrariwise. Now stop askin' impertinent questions, and get me another mojito stat."
"But Mom," I replied frantically, "Why do you have a dick?" Then I woke up. My analyst said this all had something to do with my castration fear fighting it out with my penis envy for control of my psychic terrain, but I think it's mostly because my parents beat me when I was a kid.
However, this was my introduction to Craig, as a constituent of the subliminal dreamscape, 10 years before he was ever some shitty, sexist egomaniac on SportsCenter, 14 years before he was ever some shitty, sexist egomaniac on The Daily Show, and 16 years before he was ever some shitty, sexist egomaniac on The Late Show. There's a pattern here, though I can't place my finger on it. What is the same in all these instances? Hmmmmmm. There's something. Some... thing. Oh, right. He's an asshole regardless of the context. Like Newton's Absolute Space, except here, replace "space" with "dickhead."
I realize this isn't the timeliest Sucks tangent, as the singer formerly known as Alecia Moore released her Funhouse record several weeks back. And perhaps it was spurred on by her new single, "So What," being perennially pumped at my local gym to the point where I'm considering purchasing a Soloflex.
But regardless, I can't help but cringe to the depths of my soul when I hear the former flame of Surreal Life vet Corey Hart sneer and growl her way through four more minutes of faux-riot grrrrl ranting.
Releasing albums with exclamation points and backwards Zs, occasionally flashing your tits as some pseudo-empowered gesture, employing soulless session musicians and former frontwomen from shitty '90s alt-rock bands to craft something ultimately derivative of Kelly Clarkson, and namechecking such cutting-edge femme-ragers as Rihanna as inspiringly badass chicks in music doesn't make you an authentic shit-starter, nevermind the second coming of Janis Joplin crossed with Joan Jett.
Which is unfortunate, since you have a genuinely powerful voice. But all your antics and clueless stabs at credibility have you more closely resembling Ann Wilson during her fat stage crossed with some kind of Hot Topic weekend shifter gone postal.
Why must we be punished for our love? What crimes are these? The world rejects the blissful critic and instead demands biomechanical contraptions dripping acid-like acrimony. As it is our duty to kvetch instead of kvell, we are forced by the stinky dick of Fate herself to dwell on the dreary, to pull up a loose floorboard and find beneath it a withered mappa mundi detailing shitty celebs and cultural albatrosses, or even to create our own, cartographers of pestilent and venal art.
And thus Chuck. Charles. Chester. Chuck. Palahniuk. A sin, no soul. Pah-lah-nee-yuck: three plus one segments that trip down the tongue; a torpid, fat and uncouth gent, spilling down a stairwell, laid out splayed at the foot, neck snapped. A prose style so sterile, its reproductive parts are dust. Barren of ideas, as of competence, for Chuck, words fill a quota, bereft of all craft and grace, simply soldiers taking orders. Well, welcome to Nuremburg.
Stilted Stiller: fulminating goofball and Baron of Mediocrity. To have sprung from the genetic froth of actual talent, namely Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller (yes, even King Of Queens had some amiable charm), should prove something to the legions of sociobiologists that flap their wings and words with so much airless poppycock. The E.O. Wilsonites, their fetid, craggy fingers scratching out tomes that turn our lives into chromosomal horse trades, upon encountering Stiller learn once and for all that the social is not the stuff of spunk.
But neither is it merely fun and games and structures and handshakes. For if our lives were passed down purely from our forerunners, then surely Stiller would have picked up a pointer or two. But one, one would have been a start at least. Perhaps timing or joke-craft would have been a practical primordial soup for a so-called humorist to erupt out of, instead of an Earthen fissure of ineptitude. Thus, it is no surprise that Stiller's greatest gains have been during the President Bush era, where incompetence is de rigueur and Inspector Clouseau-esque murder our semi-official foreign policy.
Plato is often blamed for getting Western civilization started on the whole extreme rationalism kick we've been on for the past few millennia. You know, where every human is seen as a self-interested, rational actor with no ties to other people. This is of course the elitist view of the world, or as I like to call it, "What assholes who know dick about shit think."
Whether it's fair to hold some dead skeleton accountable for all the ills of Western life is questionable, but there is one think we can call Plato's rotting ass out on: his hatred of entertainment. Yes, folks, if Plato had his way, our cities would be ruled by a cadre of Philosopher-Kings, and all the poets and writers would have been kicked to the curb, assuming the curb is the city limits. And daily conversations would go something like this:
Andy: Ahoy there, Callicles, wherefore art thou headed on such an elastic morn?
Callicles: Why are you talking like a Shakespearean actor having a seizure?
Andy: Uh...
Callicles: I was headed over to the Agora to get some Skittles. You want anything? Some stew?
Andy: No, I'm ok. I had stew last week. However, I was wondering if I could ask you something?
Callicles: Why did you ask that like a question? Shouldn't it be a statement? "I was wondering if I could ask you something." Anyway, what?
Andy: If you see Plato, can you tell him that I'm going to do a
dramatic reading of Homer's Illiad tomorrow and see if he wants to go?
Callicles:
That prick? You do not want to invite him to a poetry recital. He
fucking hates poetry. Poets, playwrights, reality TV...
Bill Maher: King Straw Man and blowhard, setting up easy marks to bust through like the Kool-Aid Man breaking up a brick wall. However, where the latter doles out sugar water to turn our children into obese pieces of feces, all Maher churns out are half-assed specious arguments that, like mad cow disease, turn our brains into Swiss.
Now, as far as whether his butthole-iness is engendered by his libertarian beliefs, we'll leave that to future historians writing their dissertation on schmucks who lived right before the world fell apart into blodclots. However... wait a second... straw man? Blowhard? Both describing Maher? I guess you could say he blows himself! The height of wit!!!
Let's look at Maher's new up-bore-eous documentary Religulous, a portmanteau of "religious" and "ridiculous." In the same spirit, we can say "Maher" is a portmanteau of "malice" and "hernia," both for the ill-intended spite he spits like a foul-mouthed cobra and also for the fact that he is a pain in the groin. A horrendous, bulging pain that you cannot treat because you have no health insurance. (That insult was incredibly tortured. I'd be indicted if people actually were punished for gross violations of U.S. and international law.)
What, you thought I wasn't going to remark on the "eloped" nuptials between hideous Hills tandem Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt? Does a bear not shit in the woods after it has several extra servings of beef stroganoff? Maybe not, but I bet Spencer took a hot honeymoon dump on his now-wife's chest as part of their voodoo ritual to ensure world domination and waves of resentment amongst recession-impacted Americans.
But fuck it. I think I'd trade in my mundane middle-class existence for at least a day in order to leap from one nest of privilege to the next, ultimately landing in an overwhelmingly underserved position of fame, riches and multi-million-dollar magazine covers.
And ultimately, this gets at the genesis of this Sucks feature in the first place. It's about uprooting the everyman's simmering resentment over celebrity superiority and calling famous folk out on receiving their charmed exsitence and adulation without merit.
Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, is a man who Billy Walsh, that terrible fucking fictional director on Entourage, would have labeled a suit. And rightly so, even if the Walsh character should have been sliced from gullet to groin. However, even though McPherson is an an empty automotive ghost whose sole purpose is to create vehicles for the accumulation of more capital, to his credit, he has been in charge of a number of interesting projects during his career.
NewsRadio, Scrubs, and The Ben Stiller Show were all created under his helm, and while the latter died a quick death, freeing up Stiller to make a long series of flat, one-note films, the first two hold up as rather good sitcoms. And for these things, he should be commended. However, there's no feature on NCDSUV called "Commended." And even if there were, some uncreative fleshframe in a tailored Nicole Farhi wool single-button slim slight sheen suit would be last on the goldang list, right behind Harmony Korine and Colonel Murder, the inventor of homicide.
So instead of veneration for his few interesting projects, we pile on anti-veneration for the recent decision to cancel Pushing Daisies, one of the last remaining creative scripted shows on network television and a carrier pigeon of whimsy so majestic that, for one hour a week, our lives didn't feel like they had been impaled upon the shit-smeared punji sticks of despair.
Jonathan Safran Foer? More like “Jonathan Safran Boer”! Right?! Ugh. Alright, try this one on for size: What’s a mohel’s favorite routinely postmodern author? Jonathan Safran Foerskin! No? How about this then: What do they yell out on a golf course when the author of Everything Is Illuminated walks by? “Hey asshole, move your fucking nerd face out of the way. We’re trying to golf. Oh, you write novels? You sold the rights to one? Who gives a shit? I’m the big cheese of a multi-million dollar corporation. Now scram, you dumb dora, before I box your ears.”
Now, the question you all might be asking yourselves is: Where did you go wrong in your lives to end up so far from the people you wanted to be, your dreams buried alive in an unmarked grave beneath a picnic table, slowly suffocating? That question I cannot answer, but another question that’s rattling around in your ennui-laden brains is: Why bother attacking Johnny Foer? What’d he ever do to you?
Well, for one, he gave my dad a busted lip in a bar fight. Dear old, smelly, drunken, decrepit, whinging, smelly, stinky, smelly pops had that one coming though, so I can’t really hold Foerier Transform accountable. OK, that's not entirely true. My father's never even stepped foot inside a bar. However, I can hold him accountable for his rote writing. And also, that movie of his one book with Frodo in it. Or was it with Spider-Man? I get those two actors jumbled up in my brain-part sometimes.
Sure, she's hot. And yes, "I Kissed A Girl" had its infectious qualities. Until it became predictably overplayed as some kind of subtextless anthem for female teenage empowerment. And before Perry began fetishizing her own retro-burlesque image. And dating the singer from Gym Class Heroes.
Look, Ms. Perry, I was willing to give you a pass on your Christian-leaning, Matrix-produced, Alanis Morrisette/Incubus-inspired (ugh) past as a failed mid-2000s recording artist, because the redeemable prospects of your one-hit wonder status seemed a fair tradeoff on that kind of cognitive dissonance.
But if you're going to insist on putting out single after single of desperately edgy, faux-electro-pop and fashioning 2008 as the True Blue stage of your Madonna-like trajectory to world domination, then I have to call you out on your shit.
If drawing come on things were a skill, than Perez Hilton would be the grand champion, wandering through Washington Square Park going from table to table with a white MS Paint marker screaming “Checkmate” at his dimwitted opponents. A dash here and there on Miley Cyrus’ face nets him a rook and a knight, a splash over Angelina Jolie’s breasts and seven pawns are removed. How masterful! With a move known as “Jackson Pollock’s dick,” he passes straight to the endgame. And, ah, “The Postmodern Gambit”─how risky… and risqué! ─the screen entirely white and underneath the Desperate Housewives. Mate in two!
Of course, it’s not a skill. It’s barely an action. It’s something that happens when your hand slips in Photoshop. “Hey, that kind of looks like…” But to stick with the chess metaphor, whomever is Hilton’s boyfriend is sure a fool’s mate. BAM! Taking it down a notch!
Alright, alright. A little while ago, it was alluded to here that Hilton has notoriously bad musical taste. (And by “alluded to,” I mean, “Clearly stated with absolutely no ambiguity.”) However, it should also be noted that he also has notoriously bad taste in, well, everything.
If you followed this site during the Jennifer Hudson tragedy, then you'd know I have something of an issue with the CNN Headline News program Showbiz Tonight, which tends to cover mundane doings in the world of pop culture with the faux-seriousness of an actual news magazine befitting its parent network's moniker.
Most recently, my ire has been raised at two sources of continuing coverage: their relentless reporting on the Jennifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie public dust-up, otherwise known as "Uncoolgate," and their sympathetic segments about the Paula Abdul fan suicide, which occasionally remember to give cursory condolences to the actual family of the deceased.
But in the middle of this shitstorm of tabloid television masquerading as professional journalism is A.J. Hammer, a man who changed his given Semitic surname of Goldberg to adopt a Hollywood-approved moniker that makes him seem more like the protagonist of an '80s detective drama than a flesh-and-blood human being.
You may recall Mr. Hammer from his days as a VH1 VJ, counting down the best videos on the '90s modern-rock landscape, or as a host/correspondent on the E! channel and Court TV, where he hypnotized viewers with his chiseled jaw (presumably a source of inspiration for his ludicrous last name) into a state of concern about various famous-folk chicanery.
If Penn Jillette (the more portly half of Penn And Teller) is guilty of anything, it is a treacherous betrayal of the world of comedy magic. And if he’s guilty of everything, then he’s been rather busy, and I’d like to talk to him about getting my stolen chaise lounge back. I sewed some very important documents into the cushion, and I’ll never get my socks back from the dry cleaners without that hidden ticket.
The facts of the case are this: PJ is an enjoyable lug when his only goals are legerdemain and bearing naked the chicanery surrounding said tricks (I mean, illusions). He and Teller's early books and specials are enjoyable romps into a world of nerdery, but the great perfidy—the knife in the back of the audience who just wants to see two freaks fake some card shit—enters as Penn’s politics begin to wind their way into their schtick. And no, the knife in our backs is not an illusion, though it is a metaphor.
Green water is an ecological term for the water in our biosphere that nourishes plantlife. A green economy is a way of organizing the market so that it takes into account the entire ecosystem and not just the parts we humans find exploitable. However, a Green Seth, er, a Seth Green, contains no nurturing connotation, no growth of being or spirit, but in fact promotes quite the opposite: a decimation of life, of vitality, of the very soul of existence.
Where “green” as an adjective means mostly to denote these things that foster a healthy environment for all, when coupled to the name “Seth,” it only brings to mind a wasteland of thought or a post-apocalyptic terrain of scorched ideas and toasty notions, their hair falling out in clumps, radiation shadows seared into the landscape like some parodic Banksy prank.
The problem with Green is twofold. Imagine a suit of armor representing the entertainment world. The great helm is the realm of the beautiful and useful. The aventail are those below the line, protecting the neck of the freaks with the cash that hang out in the weird helmet, doing coke all day and fucking with abandon. And then there’s the codpiece. A shiny, metal exterior, and inside, a dick. If you’re not following the metaphor, that’s Seth Green.
For years, I spent my Sunday nights in front of the small screen, armed with a nice bowl of ragù, relishing in The Sopranos. And in no time, the cast became one of the most respected and beloved Italian-American extended crime families in decades.
Being the juggernaut that it was, the show eventually spawned tie-ins from every direction, from board games and cookbooks to stock in the wine market, all undying testaments to their faithful and fervent fan base. And as the sad story often goes, fashioning your own brand of scented toilet water is the next step in the evolution of many a Hollywood B-Listers’ descent into selling their name, souls or, in the case of Tony Sirico (aka Paulie Walnuts), scent.
Packaged under the questionable slogan, “Make It Known You Mean Business,” and at $64 a pop, Sirico’s Paolo Per Uomo (“Paul for Men”... ingenious, Mr. Walnuts) makes him the next in line to milk the show's posthumous, proverbial prostate. The fragrance makes no claims as to whether you’ll smell like you're sleeping with the fishes, but it does boast the magic of cognac, the preferred drink of mobsters and hip-hop elite alike.
Of course, it goes without saying that many share a great respect for this man, one whose created onscreen persona has appeared in some of the most beloved American films to grace the silver screen (Goodfellas immediately comes to mind). But what is about Mr. Sirico’s branding of a cologne named after one of his gregarious/menacing alter-ego that irks me so?
It’s difficult to really put the screws to Seth MacFarlane, even though by now he’s thoroughly screwed the TV pooch by driving a screwdriver into America’s mind with his drivel. It’s difficult because there really is a lot to enjoy in The Family Guy, and despite his success, MacFarlane himself doesn’t come off as a shitlick. His being does exude a kind of blasé blaze of monotony, but that doesn’t seem like a mind-crime worth breaking of his spine of self-respect with the quill of criticism. Uh, the quill, ahem, the quill also weighs, like, uh, 200 pounds. So, you know, that’s pretty heavy. One can figuratively break a person’s metaphorical spine with that heft. Ahem.
But there's no denying that he's created a vast swamp of bellowing nimrods who would rather jam gimmicks down our gullets, trading on shared memories, instead of putting the time in to write actual jokes. At any lark den or laugh hut, there will be a parade of finks reminding you about the wrestling stars of our youth or how Smurfette must have fucked a lot or some other loutish quip that either directly repeats some bit of the past with no alteration other than an ironic smirk that makes you want to amputate their faces. Or even worse, a remark that sexualizes cartoons or points out leaps of logic in kids shows, as if the plot holes in He-Man fucking mattered.
You might recall NCDSUV recently bulldozed ColdPlay's Chris Martin for his gauche stage antics during an SNL performance of "Viva La Vida," in which he clodhoppingly gyrated his distended frame around the stage. But, as the old saying goes, Martin is not the only swollen frontman who pontificates with a stodgy underwhelmingness.
As evidenced in the above clip, the Killers’ critical darling, Brandon Flowers could use some stage presence lessons himself. With their plain-vanilla rendition of Cyndi Lauper's anthemic, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” Flowers and co. can now join the ranks of the following prolific cover artists: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Weird Al Yankovic (“Girls Just Want To Have Lunch”), Miley Cyrus and, of course, Cybil Shepard.
During all three stripped-down songs from this past weekend's Little Noise Sessions at London’s Union Chapel, the always Mormon, sometimes-mustachioed frontman skittishly danced near motionless while his celebrated trembling croon showcased his transparently boring, inflated image.
On The Big Bang Theory, there is a moment that opens up between the end of a joke and the beginning of the canned laughter, an infinitesimal space so minuscule as to be measured in atomic quadrants, quarks and whatnot. And it is within this space—a glacial, expansive nowhere; a-a-a frozen moment of frigid air that chokes your throat and brittles your bones—that you begin to feel the emptiness of the show, a kind of loneliness manifested as a pure, unfiltered diminution of the self as if by watching you fade into the horizon of abnegation.
And then with a rush of air, the counterfeit chuckles flood in and the moment is all but lost, except for the hollow hopelessness which lingers. As the half hour progresses, you begin to feel each in-between moment more acutely, until the creature that results is but a diffident shell of your former self.
What is it about this show that can turn ordinary humans into whispering screams? Johnny Galecki stole our hearts as Darlene's boyfriend in Roseanne, but what has happened in the interim to produce this insipid shit? And the rest of the cast—uh, that guy who was in the knight costume in Garden State and uhhhhhhhhhhh, the female lead in...fuuuuuuuck if I know. Wait, wait. 8 Simple Rules About My Teenage Daughter's Junk. She was in that. That's the show that killed John Ritter with its mediocrity, I think.
Sure, NCDSUV is no stranger to the hideous anti-charms of VH1's morning-video program, Jumpstart, but the college-freshman-dorm-friendly, Starbucks-approved clip show is an endless wellspring of all things musically mediocre, so why not dip another bucket in and see what comes up?
Jason Mraz has had my ire for quite a bit of time. Along with contemporaries like Jack Johnson and Colbie Caillat (who actually sites Mraz as an influence on her MySpace... ugh), the singer-songwriter is part of a long line of wannabe laid-back folkie fusionists who grew up by the beach listening to Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and The Beastie Boys, distilled the backbone of all three to into dust, channeled it through their venom-less vanilla instincts, and created gutless, coffeshop fluff for sorority girls in search of something soulful.
Now, I assure you, I'm not suddenly becoming some kind of conservative advocate for the sake of being contrarian (for those of you recollecting my praise of John McCain's concession speech). But Ralph Nader's beginning to suck just the slightest bit.
The irony is, we just ran an item yesterday about the dearth of worthwhile TV news anchors, epitomized by a corresponding image of FOX News mouthpiece Shepard Smith. And as you likely are aware, he smugly bullied Nader around about the Green Party hero's suggestion that Barack Obama will need to avoid being an uncle Tom to corporate America (video above, in case you missed it), more or less less proving the aforementioned op-ed's point.
That being said, Nader still made the remark. But the problem, unlike what the FOX team hilariously asserted with self-righteous incredulity, wasn't the innately controversial nature of the expression. The issue was that Nader is still fixated on interrupting the inevitability of partisan politics at a time when a voter-friendly candidate for movement back toward the middle is healthier for America than futile efforts to jar us toward the extreme left.
Is there anything more obsolete than the modern-day news anchor? After closely watching the election-night shenanigans, it's apparent now more than ever that the current of model of broadcasting is about as useful as an appendix for your pinkie.
Getting your news the traditional way, with some talking head “presenting” it to you like a waiter reading items off a menu, might be nice, but reading it yourself on the Web is faster, cheaper and a lot more efficient.
Names like Walter Cronkite, Ted Koppel and even Peter Jennings used to command respect and provided an air of authority and expertise that people came to expect, bringing to the national table a level of intellectualism that most could not necessarily find on their own.
Nowadays? We’re left with the likes of Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson, names that elicit about the same amount of awe as a local affiliate team out of Omaha.
How easily manipulated are we, really? Suddenly it seems as if everyone's talking about how Ben Affleck is so much more subversive and talented than we gave him credit for after his Alec Baldwin and Keith Olbermann impersonations on SNL. All things considered, the guy came out of last weekend's program with a more refurbished image than special guest John McCain.
Now, the fact that what I saw in Affleck's impressions was boilerplate mimicking at best is nearly beside the point. That should be a given to any loyal NCDSUV readers who share my refined sensibilities. But there's two aspects of this goodwill fest that are preeminently disconcerting.
We've expended a lot of energy on this site telling you what Sucks, and an equivalent amount of our blogging brainpower ruminating the many facets of the presidential election. So as our loyal (read: super awesome, attractive and intelligent) readers try to exhume the spirits of the Bush administration once and for all this Halloween weekend, we felt it was important to offer a more hopeful message.
Or at least to rely on a bunch of pre-teens to stay positive and remind us what our nation's primary tenets are theoretically all about. If you haven't seen this clip of the kids from Ron Clark Academy reinterpreting T.I.'s "You Can Have Whatever You Like" as "You Can Vote However You Like," it more or less speaks, dances and raps for itself. (Although make sure not to miss the dorky white chubster in the back, cause he's kind of hilarious.)
Grown pop stars should arguably have more of a backbone to make partisan endorsements, rather than fulfill their civic duty and merely encourage voting in some glorified PSA. But educators should absolutely be imbuing their school kids with the principles of fairness and objectivity, and imploring them to look at all situations from both sides, so that by the time they grow up and can take ownership over the political process, they make decisions out of both heart and intellect.
So kudos, Ron Clark Academy, for reminding us that Democracy doesn't suck.
Ode on a Fecean Loeb
Oh woe is Loeb!
A man whose hands are ham and heavy
A meal for the fat of mind
Subtleties escape thee
But then are caught and slaughtered
Buried in a mass grave
Called Smallville
The less said about his comic career the better, but just to touch: Reputation has a slow decay rate. Let that be the lesson. Write a few things of worth and coast forever on the slipstream of goodwill and mis-remembrances past. His latest atrocities upon the comic-buying public are so Ultimately unspeakable as to be tantamount to grammatological genocide. We await the ICC's indictment.
To mention his comic writing serves a point: In the world of TV and films, it's difficult to discern who fucked the bug and later gave everyone West Nile during the gangbang. So many cooks, most of them with barely an understanding of how to butter bread, stick their sickly fingers in the mix that it's a surprise anything at all of interest ever makes it out of Hollywood.
Thus, to blame him for the terrible aspects of Smallville and Lost, both of which he wrote and produced episodes of, or Heroes, of which he is a co-executive producer, would seem specious... if there was not a more undiluted example of his doggerel. And that would be his comics, which are produced less by committee than the television his awkwardly paws in the backseat of his parents' car until he accidentally ejaculates while trying to remove his belt.
You know who gets to play the same character in every film? Woody Allen. He gets to. He gets to by the very force of the film persona he's created and its cultural cachet. You know who else? Dustin Hoffman. Al Pacino. Someone else famous who I'm too mock-angry to think of. But you. You! The guy whose most famous character was defined by being the son of a MILF.
The fact that in writing about you, Seann William Scott, I am obliged (nay, forced by the very beckoning tit of Lady Literature) to type out that loathesome acronym, a word that ranks second on the Family Feud board for things repeatedly mentioned at a frat house (right behind "date rape")... for this offense alone I damn thee to the very depths of a shallow, unmarked cinematic grave on the side of I-80.
Anyway, pseudo-death threats aside, I did dig him in that Richard Kelly clusterfuck Southland Tales, but maybe I was just awed by the insanity of it all. Regardless, let's get's back to the prevailing inanity.
When South Park debuted, it seemed like just another piece of gross out media that fit in well with the late-'90s visceral zeitgeist, which included the Farrelly Brothers and that program about the people who ate vomit for a living. However, like the early years of any show, these were merely birth pangs, and the giant, bloody placenta of sure-footing was to follow as the show entered its fourth season.
But like the ruins of ancient Rome which bespeak of its golden age or like the rotting corpse of an investment banker slowly dissolving in his empty Hell's Kitchen condo, South Park too fell into disrepair. Its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone— high on their own success, wasted on their sense of self-importance and intoxicated by their rebel status—soon had their heads wedged up their asses so far that they began to resemble crap-coated Mobius strips.
Mysteriously placed within NBC’s formerly watchable Thursday night lineup, this grating, aggressively obnoxious test of patience stands out primarily because it leaves one contemplating a series of deeply philosophical, possibly unanswerable questions. For instance, “Who the hell is this show for?”
Target audiences are almost always clearly spelled out. Reality shows are for humiliation junkies, nighttime soaps are for sexually frustrated, wannabe fashionistas and police procedurals are for unimaginative serial killers looking for ideas. But this “comedy” doesn’t fall into any recognizable audience (which could be interpreted as a good thing, if it didn’t suck so very much).
I realize this particular epiphany may sound a bit belated, but hey, we're a relatively new website and have some backdated inventory that needs to be archived.
So, let me be clear here: I'm not suggesting Jackass the show or its movies, or Wildboyz as actual cable programming, are what suck per se. They're creative, well-produced bits of entertainment that have every right to be aired in primetime. I just take issue with the personalities that inhabit their prank-fueled parameters to begin with.
Skater culture is a nut hair away from utter alpha-male jockism, where brutish masculinity somehow implicitly compensates for massive displays of homoerotic behavior. And where bonds seemed to be forged out of antagonism and mean-spiritedness as a result of all the pent-up tension that doesn't resolve itself through more substantive man-on-man rapport.
If you've ever been to the Illadelph, you know it to be a cripplingly decrepit shithole brimming with racial tension, governmental corruption and, in general, a sullen, dyspeptic anger that suffuses itself throughout the humans and concrete that make up this dying, specter of a city.
On the Broad Street train before any game, the air is electric with rancor, infecting everyone around, like that hate virus from "The Return Of Optimus Prime" episodes of Transformers. But unlike Prime's techno-magical MacGuffin curing the universe of its ire, the only thing that will heal Philadelphia is its complete and utter annihilation.
It's fitting then that a city as livid as Philly is would produce a sitcom as hateful as It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Of course their hate is good natured, and that's fine, but the real crime the cast is perpetrating isn't against a group of people or a progressive ideal, but rather against comedy itself.
Well, maybe that's a bit harsh. I get the sense that as a person he's nice enough, and there should be some kind of nerd-comic solidarity contract on this site. But it's a good thing I qualify much more convincingly as the former half of that dynamic.
Here's the thing: When you're a recurring talking head on VH1's I Love The... retrospectives and Hal Sparks seems wittier than you, and even Weird Al is better at distilling the subtext of nostalgic residue, it might be time to rethink your shtick.
There's a performance aspect to Rocca's pop-culture-expert cable appearances that distances the viewer from his authentic sensibilities and charms. He's satirically inhabiting the characteristics of a traditionally conservative pundit, but not really offsetting it with a great deal of subversive commentary. And all you're left with is a nails-on-the-chalkboard response to his droll, nasally inflection—a moment of scrutiny that would easily be overlooked were there greater substance to his material. Hell, it's not like Bobcat Goldthwait's screeching prevented the guy from developing a fiercely loyal fan base.
But mostly, for continuing to get high-profile TV work, despite consistently relying on delivery over pointed punchlines or above-obvious observations, Mo Rocca kinda sucks.
During a particularly claustrophobic night of reality TV watching last night, it dawned on me: When John McCain, the girls from Rock Of Love: Charm School and the cast of The Hills are the most visible white people in mass culture, we have officially jumped the shark.
I swear, there are a few of us left who aren't spoiled teenagers, slutty B-level porn stars and barely breathing presidential candidates. But I have to say, non-white America at large, I would not blame you for one second if you took a good long look at the media and political landscape and said, "Hold on a fucking second, these are the people possessing a disproportionate amount of influence and privilege in our society? And they're still bemoaning the lyrical content of hip-hop?"
I realize this is a sports-wide phenomenon, but it's particularly pronounced in baseball, a game (that for the record I love, hence my sadness over this recurring issue) still dominated by cornfed white jocks who are probably wondering when they'll receive their Major League varsity jacket and get pumped for the game by listening to nu-metal and Three Doors Down.
From Tampa Bay Ray/American League Championship Series MVP Matt Garza to Phillies starting pitcher Brett Myers and, most notably, the Phils' Jayson Werth (pictured above), the World Series is littered with soul patches, "edgy" goatees, chinstraps and all manner of facial accoutrement that says, "I'm a little bit date rape, he's a little bit modern rock." As for Werth, that particular fashion statement is usually better suited to a stripper's vagina, but I digress.
When I saw the initial FreeCreditReport.com ad, featuring a guy in a silly pirate outfit plucking a ditty about getting his credit hacked, resulting in a dead-end job at a themed seafood restaurant, I was confused and relatively amused.
However, three subpar emulations of hipster Volkswagen ads in the vernacular of some acoustic alt-hip-hop band later, and I'm getting overwhelmed by that icky, "You guys are giving white people a bad name" feeling. These things are a step away from the cringeworthy cultural dilution experiment that was last decade's Flinstones/Fruity Pebbles rap ads.
Joe The Plumber. Joe. The. Plumber. Joe The Plumber, you motherfucker. Who the fuck are you that you've got the ear of not one, but TWO major party presidential nominees? What powers have you secreted within the folds of your overalls? What monies have you amassed to allow you command of such influence? What alien frequencies emanate from the antennae soldered to your skull, radio waves that paralyze the minds of all those trapped within the nefarious radius?
Oh, the obsequiousness on display!
After the final presidential debate last night, where Joe was not only the focus, but the main interlocutor for the nominees (to the chagrin of Bob Schieffer, who is known the world over for his neediness), I decided to put my correspondence degree in investigative journalism to work and find out just who this presumptive ne'er-do-well really was. If he is to wield so much influence over the government of the people, for the people and buy the people, should not the THE VERY PUBLIC he is to lord over not know the basic details of their master? Oh, your imminent Eminence! Prithee, thouest must not crush us lowly mortals beneath thy golden feet when thouest have ascended to the seat of omnipotence!
Josh Schwartz, if you haven't been paying attention to the trades, is the wunderkind behind The O.C., Chuck and Gossip Girl, although a better Deutsche description might be "scheisechild." Or fuck it, let's hit France where Schwartz is known as "l'enfant de merde" and "Senator Mots Faux," or go to Poland where they refer to him as, "That Jew, you know, the one who produced two good seasons of The O.C. and then shit the bed by artificially introducing drama instead of letting it naturally grow out of the characters. Yes, yes, that one. The guy who continued to shit the bed with his next two shows until eventually the bed was just shit, which at that point, he began to shit the shit."
"Shoot the shit?"
"No idiot, shit the shit!"
"Sooooo, what's your problem with that American showrunner again?"
Now, I realize this might be the least groundbreaking "Sucks" entrant this side of Frank Caliendo, but sometimes we, the TV-addicted public (fine fine, I'll speak for myself) get complacent in our inexplicable rage toward people who voluntarily engage in daily contact with despite their existing in a more or less alternate universe.
So for those of you who checked out of Debbie Matenopoulos land post-The View (ya know, all those middle-aged women who come to this site) and haven't endured her each evening on E!'s The Daily 10 entertainment-news roundup show, you've been caressing the less terrifying side of the pop-culture mountain.
Before the impertinent howls of the readership grind my ears into envelopes, let's get a few things straight: James Bond is a shitty character, the films are formulaic and boring, and the only redeeming things about the entire franchise are some of Fleming's novels and Goldeneye for the N64. Here's the plot of every Bond film ever made in a nutshell:
1) Big action sequence that probably has nothing to do with the main plot. 2) Theme song written by a lame pop star of the day. 3) Something minorly sinister happens that clues MI6 onto the trail. 4) Bond meets and fucks a woman with a name so sexually subtle as to make Tila Tequila look like Proust. 5) Bond follows a trail of vague clues to various locales. 6) Jane Vagina either betrays or helps him defeat the bad guy. 7) I've never read Proust before, but he seemed like a good author to namecheck.
What a week, what a week. I'm personally all verklempt. Between the election race warming up, the economy cooling and down, and celebrities still indulgently frolicking around, it's been tough for NCDSUV to keep its panties unbunched. Or maybe that's just the fabric softener we've been using.
Well, in any case, from fetishizing the Obamas to taking a piss on your favorite movies and DirecTV scaring us with their tasteless Poltergeist ad, here's the top five things we learned this week.
Normally, that headline would be a statement I'd find a bit odd to utter. I quite like a good dose of ambiguity, and don't particularly like things to be revealed on the surface. But of course, I'm not speaking of the great art of tactful deceit or the spiritually enigmatic.
I am of course speaking about the preternaturally douchebaggy host of VH1's The Pickup Artist, a new season of which premieres this week.
This guy actually manages to besmirch the goodwill of several variants of the male species by combining a homo-goth aesthetic with a fratboy mentality about sex and relationships. He might actually be some Satanic apotheosis of Cro-Magnon man's unholy convergence with the evolved alpha male of the future.
But mostly, he sucks because he wears hats that even the guy from Jamiroquai wouldn't sport in public, fur coats that look like they were bought at an Oriental rug store and has a propensity for having all manner of goggles meshed in to the fabric of the aforementioned hats.
At the end of the day, you can bequeath all the shithead advice you want (note to Mystery and his legion, er, fingerful, of fans: all those seemingly foolproof tactics are filtered through the incredibly subjective universe of nightmare dance clubs where transparently vapid, faux-charismatic pickup techniques are generally favored over a more substantive approach that would be appropriate for the show's participants). And you can vomit up absurd soundbites in the Season 2 teaser about how they'll teach your Zen tactics to their children one day. But as long as you keep outfitting yourself like a deep-sea diver on his way to a Disturbed concert, you will suck in unutterable magnitudes.
Given NCDSUV's recent gander at Samuel L. Jackson's propensity for suckage, it's only fitting that we also roast the goose of one of his recent co-conspirators, director/playwright Neil LaBute.
Now, while I could lambaste him in his own putrid juices for drivel like The Wicker Man remake, the truth of the matter is, just making some shitty, silly film doesn't render one fit for being thrown before the lions of angry blog invective. If that was the case, then at some time or another, we'd have to parade out almost every celebrity in the known multiverse to be contemptuously dealt with from an unimpeachable position: The Universal Seat Of Judgement.
Playing Rhadamanthus in this tale told by an idiot, I sit in judgement of LaBute not because he's made a flop or two, but because he makes films that Seem Important, films that have Gravitas and Weight and that deal with Terribly Important Themes about relationships and racism and the existential nature of of the human condition and... No! Stop! I cannot keep this farce in play!
He is an empty a soul; a self-satisfied twit who wants to write about the Deep and Troubling aspects of humanity but can only write superficial stories about horrible people, because he thinks what it means to lay bare the soul of our times is to see the nasty, the unredeemable and the unrepentant without seeing all the other aspects of being human.
Thus, for LaBute, the grand crime is that of pretension, of throwing up the facade of importance when, really, all his films reveal is that inside he is sad and lonely and perhaps as a teen sat alone on a bench reading Nietzsche, misunderstanding every word and cursing the world around him. And at night he would read David Mamet plays and jerk off into the pages hoping to one day create a wordchild of his own. And it is because of this, Mr. LaBute, that you suck.
In a recent NCDSUV post, An American Carol caused us to question the cherished comedic ideals of our youth, but I think it brings up an even larger question: How fucking interesting is parody in the first place? Maybe if you're a newly minted teen, brain exhausted from just discovering masturbation, then the genre offers up a cornucopia of hilarity. ("Oh! That's like something I know, but kind of not!")
You get the warm, motherly embrace of the familiar, but it's not so foreign that you have to step out of the narrow confines of the existence your parents created for you. It's a straight shot to the grave from here, shitheads; hope you enjoy the dull, dull ride.
While Mad magazine and Weird Al and Airplane might have been staples of my youth as well, I've now had the staples removed, and the comedic membrane surrounding my body is healed, creating a stronger sensibility, one that enjoys satire.
If you're a regular visitor of this site, you likely have pretty refined taste in the high and medium brow. We don't really need to remind you why The Office is hilarious or Dexter makes murder more fun than an evening of naked cow-tipping. But chances are, you do need someone to finally take a stand and knock a few undeserving celebrities off their pedestals of reverence. Which is why we created out daily "Sucks" feature, which more or less distills a beloved famous folk's deplorableness into a tidy, generally merciless few paragraphs.
So in case you haven't been keeping up with the suckitude, here's the top five recipients of the prestigious appointment so far (and yes, we know the Michael Phelps post wasn't technically a Sucks entry, but it was more or less the muse for the idea, and he really, really sucks).
5. T.J. Lavin
Granted, this could apply to the entire cast of MTV's The Island, who may actually represent the first significant phase in human de-evolution.
But if that's the case, then host T.J. Lavin is nearly Cro-Magnon in his suckitude. Uncharismatic to the point of being unintelligible, emblematic of douchey skate-frat subculture and downright strange-looking, Lavin was always a distracting hurdle between viewers and the hypnotically deplorable cast.
But now (no doubt at the behest of producers, in fairness), he's taking on a more disciplinary role, sternly lecturing cast members like poor Ashley for trying to quit because of physical injury or lack of mental toughness.
He's like a maniacal confluence of your high school principal and the bully you'd tattle to the principal about. And has now gone from being a mumbling moderator to demonstratively inarticulate.
Oh, and if you don't think he sucks, then just listen to the clip above, in which Lavin (aka LAVS), raps to his peeps (i.e. himself) about what it's like to have "been around the world." I'd say Notorious B.I.G. is spinning in his grave, but I think we all know that would have to be one pretty damn big coffin.
4. Frank Caliendo
People often say that punning is the lowest form of humor (in which case I am the human embodiment of its nadir), but impersonations have to rank at least a hearty second. And somehow, we have cascaded down a slippery slope from Rich Little to Frank Caliendo, who's basically Kevin James if the King Of Queens monarch just put on a bunch of wigs and vaguely approximated the manneurisms of people more famous than himself.
It's been easy enough, however, to avoid Caliendo's paralyzingly surface anti-charm. It's a good deal easier to miss Mad TV and its fittingly lame-named spinoff, Frank TV, by accident than make a point of watching them on purpose.
But avoiding the onslaught of his new Dish Network spots, in which he generally lampoons the president (about as current a target for edgy comedy as Pee-Wee Herman jokes), has been a more complex task. And his latest ad (mercilessly embedded above) hits an almost sacrilegious low, as Caliendo articulates the illogic behind regular cable via the personas of Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza. As the latter, Caliendo more or less just gruffly blows steam and stomps around brattily, while his translation of Seinfeld amounts to high-pitched incredulity.
So, in essence, because Caliendo has reduced comedy to its basest capacity for titillation, he's decided to drag two of the most uniquely, subversively neurotic characters in TV history through the mud of non-hilarity with him.
Ever since The O.C.'s Seth Cohen peaked into public consciousness with the force of a tiny, almost-imperceptible hurricane, admitting to reading comic books has become less and less something one needs to hide from prospective dates. But there was a time when nerd-chic came and went in brief flashes, during which we put away our cultural obsessions with sports and manliness for a nanosecond and embraced power fantasies. That being said, overt misogyny bridges both outlets of the unconscious, so sports fans and comic geeks could have theoretically come together in a big circle jerk of sexism.
Which brings us to our Suck recipient of the day: graphic novelist/director Frank Miller, who's now careened from questionable gender politics to conservative pedagogy. I've already opined at length in these Web pages about 300 doubling as the Sin City scribe's jingoistic paeon to repressed homosexuality. But with the success of The Dark Knight and with Miller's The Spirit coming out in a couple of months, now seems as good a time as any to let loose a torrent of invective, the likes of which Miller will never see nor care about.
On Gilmore Girls, Milo Ventimiglia's sullen anger as Rory's James Dean-y boyfriend Jess Mariano worked perfectly. He was asked to play an impertinent teen, and he delivered in spades. In hoes even, and many other varieties of gardening equipment. But soon it became rather obvious that this was his only mode and that his acting range was as colorful as a bag of skittles.
And now, as I watch each episode of Heroes, wondering how witless Ventimiglia’s character of Peter Petrelli will get, I often ponder whether it's the fault of hamfisted writers. But if the guy can only affect one emotion, how are the show's scribes supposed to work around that? Make his power shitty acting? I can see Tim Kring pitching it now: “Look, look, the kid has a pretty face. Girls get wet at the sound of the first syllable of his name. I don’t care if he can’t act his way out of a paper bag, the insides of which are a pocket dimension housing an acting class taught by the most revered actors in the history of theater. Get him to sign the fucking contract or I’ll murder your children. Capiche?”
If the now-Heroes star's obvious deficiencies as a thespian weren’t enough to damn him with faint hate, rip your eyes out and place them in close proximity to these words: He is dating, in real life, his co-star Hayden Panettiere. Firstly, Panettiere is 19 and Ventimiglia is 31. And they go by the collective tabloid surname of "Haylo."
It's been quite a Sabbath-cycle in pop culture land, as the world of celebretards met in a head-on collision with some surreal political doings. We hope you've been as entertained as we have by the last seven days of shenanigans, but in case you're a Chicago Cubs fan and have spent the past 48 hours buried in a pile of your own tears (sorry, low blow, but I'm a bitter Mets loyalist), here are the top 5 things NCDSUV took out of the week in mass culture that was:
Oh, Ms. Hathaway, you grabbed us by both our heartstrings and our erections as your endless smile segued from teenybopper fare like The Princess Diaries to mature, complex roles in Brokeback Mountain and cult fave, "white girls hang in the hood" cautionary drama Havoc.
But since that halcyon time, you've dated one of the decade's most notorious douchebags and begun to carry yourself in public and with the media like someone who's believing their own hype as future Hollywood royalty. Suddenly, that adorably pasty skin and paradoxcially bright red smile have gone from humbly perky to precocious and Machiavellian. It's as if your own personal celebrity arc has reflected your character's from Devil Wears Prada (one of your many transgressions, by the way).
While I shall reserve absolute judgment until I see this much-ballyhooed performance in Rachel Getting Married, I must say that, for the time being, you sort of suck.
Then again, she's at least forever left us with this memorable piece of (very NSFW) celluloid:
Granted, this could apply to the entire cast of MTV's The Island, who may actually represent the first significant phase in human de-evolution.
But if that's the case, then host T.J. Lavin is nearly Cro-Magnon in his suckitude. Uncharismatic to the point of being unintelligible, emblematic of douchey skate-frat subculture and downright strange-looking, Lavin was always a distracting hurdle between viewers and the hypnotically deplorable cast.
I used to love you Shia LaBeouf, but to paraphrase Axl Rose, I had to kill ya. Or at least relegate you to NCDSUV's "Sucks" annals.
You were so endearing on Project Greenlight, and I even felt you lifted The Transforners above its occasionally questionable material.
But barely 21, you have taken a Lindsay Lohan-sized nosedive (don't think I forgot about my LiLo boycott) into bad facial hair, reckless vehicular incidents, US Weekly-worthy dating shenanigans and fratty, homophobic slap fights with your friends.
Well, okay, the latter occurred before you were mega-famous, but even worse, it's potentially indicative of a simmering douchiness that was there all along. Which makes me feel both disappointed at your latest transgressions and manipulated that I ever went into your charming little word with benefit-of-doubt-wielding blinders.
So it is with a heavy heart that I decree you, Shia LaBeouf, to suck.
"Oh, you write humor? Have you ever heard of Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!"
"So, you say you really love Wonder Showzen, eh? Well, then, I have a show that's even better than that: Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!"
"What's that? You say repeating information in the form of a question is a tired device for imparting exposition? Well then friend, you have to check out the hottest new show, Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. It'll rip your face off with laughter!"
Perhaps my Jewish heritage has constructed me to be a contrarian. Historically, we've always been on the outside looking in, scads of goyische children devouring Easter candy with abandon as we sit quietly in the dark, noshing half-heartedly on a piece of desert-dry matzoh. In kind, perhaps I think Tim and Eric as an adverse reaction to the thousands of times I've been told variations of the above.
People often say that punning is the lowest form of humor (in which case I am the human embodiment of its nadir), but impersonations have to rank at least a hearty second. And somehow, we have cascaded down a slippery slope from Rich Little to Frank Caliendo, who's basically Kevin James if the King Of Queens monarch just put on a bunch of wigs and vaguely approximated the manneurisms of people more famous than himself.
It's been easy enough, however, to avoid Caliendo's paralyzingly surface anti-charm. It's a good deal easier to miss Mad TV and its fittingly lame-named spinoff, Frank TV, by accident than make a point of watching them on purpose.
But avoiding the onslaught of his new Dish Network spots, in which he generally lampoons the president (about as current a target for edgy comedy as Pee-Wee Herman jokes), has been a more complex task. And his latest ad (mercilessly embedded above) hits an almost sacrilegious low, as Caliendo articulates the illogic behind regular cable via the personas of Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza. As the latter, Caliendo more or less just gruffly blows steam and stomps around brattily, while his translation of Seinfeld amounts to high-pitched incredulity.
So, in essence, because Caliendo has reduced comedy to its basest capacity for titillation, he's decided to drag two of the most uniquely, subversively neurotic characters in TV history through the mud of non-hilarity with him.
You may remember a week or so ago when I posted an item simply entitled "Toastee Sucks," referring to the recently booted booty-shakin' porn model/cast member of I Love Money. Well, consider this the second installment in what may be yet another recurring NCDSUV feature. The idea being that such-and-such pseudo-celebrity just kind of sucks, and it merely needs to be said.
David Blaine sucks. Observing his antics, on prime time no less, is akin to watching an asshole jock from high school beat you up and then rub it in by climbing a skyscraper like Spider-Man to avoid getting caught by the principal.
Even when the guy gets broadcast hanging upside down for 60 hours over Central Park, he flaunts his arrogance by lamenting some botched bravura ending featuring helium balloons.
Admit it: We're all secretly hoping on one of Blaine's tricks will go disastrously wrong eventually. Not because we're bad people, but because he's so unlikeable our consciences have reconciled the tradeoff of him sustaining serious injury to edify our morbid curiosity.
And because he seems like a prick who uses "magic" on national television to ensure a parade of poontang wherever he goes. God, he sucks.
As alluded to in an earlier post today, I had some thoughts on my favorite television program (besides VH1's Fresh of course), I Love Money.
Well, mostly just one. And I realize this is a bit belated, both in terms of the season being well into lifespan and the most recent episode being a few days old. But hey, sue me if I actually still let some ideas germinate for a while instead of responding to everything in mass culture by the standards of real-time reader gratification. (Love you guys.)
Basically, Toastee sucks. Literally (Very very very NSFW), for one. She might actually be the most uncharismatic character in the history of humankind, nevermind television, scripted or otherwise. And yes, that's taking John McCain into account.
We told you so. A good few weeks ago in fact. Unlike Michael Phelps' Olympic opponents, everyone's finally catching up to speed and realizing pop-culture Michael Phelps kind of sucks. And was inevitable. Because he's 23 and cut like a statue and just achieved our greatest modern academic feat in front of millions while wearing a Speedo.
So lo and behold, he's been spotted feeling up Playboy bunnies and is now hosting SNL, complemented by his apparent favorite rapper, Lil Wayne. And America is visibly getting annoyed.
I guess at least he's embracing his fleeting mega-celebrity for all its indulgent spoils, rather than playing the innocent card and ultimately lashing out with a series of PR disasters (ehem, Britney). Unfortunately, Michael, by the time LiLo and Sam (not to be confused with Lilo & Stitch of course) decide to get married and someone pulls off a miracle comeback in the World Series, no one's gonna give a shit what's inside your Speedos or between your giant ears until 2012.
