Pregnant Naked Retouched Britney

How did I manage to go this many posts without mentioning Britney Spears? Also notice I avoided some variation of the "Oops...I Posed Naked Again" or "...Baby (With Baby) One More Time" tired joke that will be used as a headline for this picture. Click the link to see the cover. It's a good picture (especially now that she is a brunette). At least she doesn't look like a sideshow attraction on Coney Island.

Which would be where the retoucihng came in. If you saw any pictures from her recent interview (in which she was pleading to be left alone, but now she's posing naked on magazine covers), you know she looked like a train wreck that fell over a cliff.

Britney is going to have her own wing in the pop culture hall of fame. I can't think of an artist whose career is similar to hers, (Don't say Madonna, it's not true) especially since her initial rise took place as the average American was getting comfortable with the internet. She's really the first 21st century megastar, even though her career took off in 1999. Her career trajectory is unique and unpredictable, which is why at some level people are interested in what happens next.

On one hand, I am grateful her initial sunny cheerfullness chased off the pathetic "rock" acts popular in the day. Anyone still playing their Hanson CD's? When's that next Semisonic tour passing through town? How about Smashmouth? Britney (and also the teen boy bands) brought forth a younger audience willing to spend money (their's or daddy's) on younger artists singing pop songs. I would rather listen to the well assembled in the studio "...Baby, One More Time" than an earnest Jewel singing oh so seriously about her hands. You do not become an artist just because you sound serious about something.

But the trend Britney started never (in a macro-sense) went away. Now we get the Ashlee Simpsons and Hilary Duffs of the world trying to recreate the first phase of Britney's career. No one has figured out how to shift the focus away from teen acts and onto another type of music. You may get a few months of a trend, but never a complete shift.

Which is why I think people still pay attention to what Britney does. She is still the leader of the trend, so acts still look to her for guidance (although guidance is about the last thing she seems capable of today). Until someone knocks her off the pedestal, she's the blueprint of the 21st century star.

And's she's been on that pedestal for seven years now...

Star Jones Clucks Off From The Hen Party

Lisa de Moras is my favorite TV critic. She covers the issues with the amount of reverence (or irreverance) that the topic deserves. And she's consistently hilarious. Click on the title to read her summary of Star's supernova and all the fallout that ensued on Day 1.

I can't believe these 4 magpies have been cawing away on TV for 10 years (well, they have mixed a few different magpies over the years). Have they ever discussed anything of importance? Or is it all self-important drama where they make pronouncements about themselves and how they are feeling that day?

Sleater-Kinney on "Hiatus"

A hiatus is never good news. I really enjoyed this band's music, but their last CD featured a new sound that I never warmed up to.

Also, Lou Reed reissues with bonus tracks. As Cartman would say "Sweet!"

Frasier's Dog is Dead

Not that I care, but it made me think about this highly overrated show.

Frasier was always given respect like it was an Oscar Wilde play. Just because they threw in a few references to opera or Greek Mythology, people acted as if the comedy on this show was sophisticated. The erudite Frasier Crane meant "intelligent" comedy (and, in turn, the audience felt "intelligent" because they watched). The show won 37 Emmys.

It was all a sham.

You will certainly remember a show called Three's Company. In every episode of this show, some version of the following happened:

Janet got up early, and went into the kitchen to make an omlette. She went to the refrigerator to get the eggs. She opened up the fridge, but there were no eggs. She would then say out loud: "Oh my, no eggs! I am completely out of eggs! What will I do?" As this was happening, Jack was just ready to enter the swinging door to the kitchen, but Janet's loud voice made him stop. He heard what she said, but instead of entering the kitchen and addressing the matter at hand, he turned around and ran into Chrissy's/Cindy's/Terri's bedroom. He annouced to whatever blonde that was on the show at the time: "I just heard Janet say she's infertile! She can never have children! And she doesn't know I know!" Then everyone would jump around on pins and needles for the next 20 minutes, and do a lot of over-the-top stuff to avoid revealing the "secret", until finally the secret was revealed, everyone realized it was all a big "misunderstanding" and they all hugged.

Three's Company is not considered "sophisticated" for many reasons, but mainly for this reliance on contrivance to set the show in motion.

Yet no one ever seemed to notice that sophisticated Frasier relied on the same contrivance. The wellspring for comedy on that show was that someone misunderstood someone else, and it all went from there. I remember one terrible episode where something like 4 of the characters went away to a mountain chalet, and they all somehow got the idea that one person in the group wanted to screw a different person in the group, so they spent the episode misunderstanding every comment made. The chalet managed to have 4 bedroom doors that could fit into one shot, so we were "treated" to characters running in and out of doors like this was some 1930's picture.

Three's Company uses this device, and it gets ridiculed. Frasier uses the device, throws in a joke about "The Ring Cycle", so Niles can compare his latest visit with Mavis to Gotterdammerung, and the audience (and critics) think Frasier is genius.

Classic Movies It's OK To Hate

The people at The Onion do a great job of thinking up interesting topics of lists. I am glad I am not the only person who does not worship "The Shawshank Redemption".

I would like to add a note about "The Exorcist" regarding the"Where's the subtext?" comment. Dude, get your head out of your ass. Stephen King nailed the subtext in his essay on this movie in his non-fiction book on horror and pop culture "Danse Macabre" (the book is a Beukey "get"). King states that during the social upheaveal of the 60's-70's, parents thought their kids were becoming monsters, "The Exorcist" (the movie) takes this theme to a literal extreme.

You could write a doctorial thesis on the various interpretations of "The Exorcist" (as a book, as a movie, and the differences between the two). However, the best horror movies are explorations of a society's fear at a certain time. Because of this, most horror movies don't age well, and what one generation finds horrifying, another generation finds hilarious. It is hard today to watch "The Exorcist" with all its over-the-top head spinning, cursing, and vomiting and not find it all somewhat silly.

Saw X-Men 3 This Afternoon

With inches of rain falling the last few days, and travel somewhat limited, I went to the movies this afternoon. I am not "comic book guy" I have never read an installment of the X-Men, Spiderman, Superman, etc., so my comments will not wander into the movies vs the comic book debate.

The movies was OK. It had its high and low points. Even for a comic book movie, the dialogue was cliche (after a female ex-mutant betrays the other mutants, the actor playing the President actually says "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"). The special effects were pretty good. I am also not a special effects guy, but if I am going to see a special effects movie, I would rather see it on a big screen than on HBO. But there was one special effects royal screw-up that I can't believe no one noticed. At one point, some of the mutants attack a laboratory on Alcatraz. To do this, in broad daylight, Magneto moves the Golden Gate Bridge so it extends to Alcatraz. Once the bridge is moved, the sky inexplicably becomes as dark as it would at midnight, and stays that way throughout the fight. I can't believe no one editing the movie noticed this. For the most part the movie moved along, and it didn't get bogged down in that "I love you, but I can't love you and be a superhero" crap that bogged down the Spiderman movies. Who gives a shit about how Spiderman feels?

They ran a few movie promos, her are the instant reactions.

"My Super Ex-Girlfriend" Luke Wilson (of the perpetually unfunny Wilson family) dates and dumps psycho superhero Uma Thurman. So she stalks him and does a lot of shit to make his life miserable. Oh, yeah, this is a comedy. Why are movies about girls stalking guys supposed to be funny, but no one would laugh at a movie where a guy stalked a girl?


The new "Superman" movie: Before the preview, I had no interest in seeing the movie. But the promo looked pretty good, so now I am mildly interested. The director seemed to reign in Kevin Spacey (he is Lex Luthor), so that is a major plus. Spacey has turned into a Pacino, if the director doesn't sit on him, he will chew the scenery to the point where he ruins the movie. The guy that directed "Superman" also directed X-Men 2, which is easily the best superhero movie ever.

"Ghost Rider" This looked really cool. But the whole promo consisted of skulls, and skeleton motorcycle riders with wheels on fire and their skulls on fire riding bikes through the sky while using a huge chain as a whip. How could that movie not be cool, Beavis? Easy. Make Nicholas Cage the lead.

"Pulse" The girl from "Veronica Mars" stars in some J-horror (or K-horror) remake. Dead people live on the Internet. Sometimes they are being tortured, sometimes they are watching you.

There were a total of 6 people at this movie. A guy with his two sons were sitting in front of me, and he felt the need to put the "Ozzie Guillen" seat between himself and his kids.

What I Get, What I Don't Get

For those of you that don't know me, this would be a good time to introduce you to what I like (get) and dislike (don't get). That way you can get an idea of my tastes and see how similar (or dissimilar) they are to yours.

Things I Get: Heathers, Ghost World, Fight Club, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV version), Natural Born Killers, Blue Velvet, Futurama, The Velvet Underground, The Grateful Dead, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Chuck Klosterman, Horse Racing, Professional Wrestling (although it's in a down period)

Things I Don't Get: Oprah (and any other "self-help" show that peddles the same advice day-in, day-out), The Dave Matthews Band, Why anyone finds Will Ferrell or Owen Wilson funny, Bill Murray (and why any discussion about his genius in movies overpraises his mediorcre movies like Lost in Translation and ignores things like Charlie's Angels and the Garfield movies), commercial fiction, why anyone cares about the Oscars or decides to see a movie solely because it won the "Best Picture" award, why people will watch/buy any piece of crap that Disney attaches its name to.

If you can make a coherent (and short) arguement as to why I should "get" anything in the "don't get" list, please post a comment.

I could go on and on with this list, and probably will in a future post.

Stupidest TV Show Ever

General wisdom has it that "Gilligan's Island" is the stupidest TV show ever, it is commonly cited as a low point in the medium. But that show has been of the air for nearly 40 years, and certainly dumber things have come and gone. Things that were less humorous, more poorly conceived and executed, and asked us to stretch credibility beyond the point we had to to accept that 7 people lived on an island without killing each other or sleeping with each other. Like Mr. Howell didn't try to get Ginger on the casting couch with some vague promise of bankrolling a major motion picture starring her when they got back to society.

I am only counting TV shows made at a national level, there are far too many local shows to sift through, and in the end their faults are venial.

Before naming the show, let me state I was never a fan or a regular viewer of this show. I am not going to, or feel the need to, watch all the episodes before I make this choice. But I did come across an syndicated episode of this (I had no idea it was being syndicated, but the channel was so far down the chain I was not surprised they ran this show), and it was so bad it brought back all the repressed memories of this televised piece of excrement. Which by the way, was shoved down our throats, we were always told how funny this show (and particularly, the star) was, so much so that people today accept this judgment.

The show was "Mork and Mindy". The "funny star" was Robin Williams.

What makes this show so stupid is that to buy into the premise, you had to believe that an alien came to earth to 'interact" with humans and to report on them to his home planet. And the human chosen from whom this alien could learn something was some woman in Boulder, CO with no life and no friends. And the supposedly superior alien race sent someone who had no idea how to interact with people, so excuses had to be made for his erratic (and supposedly humorous) behavior.

But this was all a big set-up so we could watch Robin Williams be "funny". He could talk in the funny voice, and wear the funny suspenders, and make the frenzied hand gestures, and we were all supposed to find this funny because...well, I could never figure this out. Pop culture just decided that he was some new brand of comedian, and if you didn't find him funny, then there was something wrong with you, you didn't "get" modern comedy, and you should be watching a Bob Hope special with your grandmother.

Instead of getting a comedian, we got a 2 year old doing anything to get daddy's attention, and we are supposed to find this funny. Instead of writing scripts for this show, we got minor plot points around which Robin could do his improv.

This show was so ill-concieved that they had to change direction a few times. In the first season, Mindy seemed to spend all the time hanging out at her parents music store. Then some suit thought it was really odd that an attractive 20-something had no friends, so they made up some friends that worked at a deli. There was no on-screen chemistry with Mindy, so the friends disappeared and the concept kind of drifted back to the parents. Then someone decided they should fall in love, get married and have a kid, but it would be really funny if the guy got pregnant (how original), and the "kid" is a full grown adult that acts like an infant, and hey, let's have have that adult kid role played by Johnathan Winters (I guess the bottom left Hollywood Square was closed for repairs), who is kind of his generation's Robin Williams. And when things get boring, we'll give Mork a pet, a thing that looks like a Tribble and scoots across the floor and makes funny noises (what was with this show and funny noises? Didn't anyone every tell the writers to write dialogue for this show?).

And of course, we had to learn "lessons" when watching this show. Like having emotions is hard and messy but it's part of being human. Actually, we probably just got that lesson over and over.

Say what you want bad about "Gilligan", but at least they actually wrote jokes and tried to make us laugh without the need for a "lesson". Nowadays, you could sit through a "Gilligan's" episode and laugh, and all the episodes are on DVD. "Mork and Mindy" is painful to sit through.