Quiet You

Two people who need to shut the fuck up this week:

OSAMA BIN LADEN

Osama Osama Osama.... baby, you are looking desperate. This is the 32nd tape you've put out since 9/11. That's about four per year. People still hate you because you are a big-lipped, shit-spewing asshole. But your act is tired. Is there anybody in the world who ISN'T Satan? You went from looking like this bizarro Malcolm X type guy to some panhandler standing at a corner raving about how the stop signs are the antichrist. Your need for attention is approaching Roger Clemens/Pete Dougherty-like proportions. (Although I'm still not convinced that you are more of an asshole than Clemens is. Might be a dead-heat.) You are a very sad man ... although not as sad as you will be when they finally find you. Ouch, that's gonna be a rough one!

WILLIAM KRISTOL of the Weekly Standard

He said this week: “Only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.”

Sweetheart, when you have been wrong about EVERYTHING THAT YOU HAVE SAID in the last eight years, you lose your seat at the table to gloat. First of all, let's explain why the media is usually more liberal: it's because throughout history, the political regimes that have been the most unkind to the media (locking them up, torturing them, etc.) have been extreme right-wing governments, such as Soviet Russia, East Germany, North Korea, etc. That is why most "Hollywood types" tend to be liberal too: because it's the conservatives who are mostly in favor of censorship. (The "Reverend" Al Sharpton and his hair-trigger minions excepted.)

He said notably, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular." (2003, source)

Eric Alterman notes the following prescient predictions by Kristol:

• In the opening moments of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Kristol insisted, "We are now in the final days." He intoned, "If the President lied to the American People...he's finished."
  
  
• When the Starr report was issued, causing almost universal revulsion among Americans, Kristol wrote a cover editorial for his magazine that headlined the report Starr's Home Run, portraying its author as Mark McGwire and calling for Clinton's immediate impeachment.

Not to mention sloppy misquotes, out-of-left-field comments and an epic 2003 C-Span interview that you might think was conducted by The Onion or Phil Hendrie.

Billy Boy, you really are George Costanza: a guy who would be right all the time if he just did the opposite of what his instincts tell him. Since you are wrong about just about everything that you say, you just need to shut the fuck up for a little while. Thanks bud.

Aries Spears - Also a Good Impressionist

Okay I know this is old but it's still awesome...

Jay Mohr is Goddamn Hilarious

I never knew that Jay Mohr was the greatest impressionist of our generation.

The Battle Within

So I saw Transformers 2 last week. It wasn't a great movie ... in fact, it wasn't even a good movie. But I have to admit that I felt some genuine, palpable moments of excitement. And I attribute 100% of those feelings to my pre-existing love for all things Transformers.

We all know that Michael Bay is not just a shitty director, but he may be THE SHITTIEST director in all the land. Sure he's made a couple decent movies like The Rock and the first Transformers movie two years ago. But he also made both Bad Boys movies (and not the one with Sean Penn), Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, and the would-have-been-good-if-Michael-Bay-didn't-fuck-it-up The Island. If it weren't for Brett Ratner, James Toback, Uwe Boll, McG, Rob Cohen, Kevin Smith and Rod Lurie, he would clearly be the shittiest director in movies today.

But I realized that with Transformers 2, Michael Bay did something that he does in all his movies, and it just worked for me. He tapped into the juvenile child that I once was.

If you look at really any of MB's films, they are all just a celebration of machismo and being a man's man. He always has the dramatic 180-degree semi-circle camera shot, usually filmed from dick-level pointing upward, showing the sun in the background and group of determined capital-M "Men" ready to unleash their own brand of manly revenge.

Since I am a manchild of class and distinction, I have rarely fell for the rouse, scoffing at such neanderthal impulses, and opting for the more erudite, lyrical films of Frears, Lumet, Stanley Kaufmann, Egoyan, Noah Baumbach and the like.

However, because of my aforementioned connection with the Transformers brand, Michael Bay was able to bypass my cynical filtering mechanisms and successfully elicit a genuine adrenaline response.

If I may digress for one moment, I did see the film with my good friend D.Blakes, who is a unique movie-goer. D.Blakes is an African-American, and he treats any movie theater as if it were his own living room. So when Optimus Prime was taking on five Decepticons by himself, D.B. let out a high-pitched "WHOOOOOO!" When someone said something rude to one of the Autobots, D.B. -- at a silent moment -- said, "Oh shit, that nigga bout to get smacked in the mouth for that!" Thank God he's huge or else we would have had people shushing us the entire time.

So it turns out that most of the excitement that I felt in my chest came not from the storyline itself, or from the explosions being shown on the screen, or even by the mildly-attractive Ms. Megan Fox. No, it came from my extensive knowledge of the Transformers Generation One storylines.

I know that Optimus Prime is the baddest mo-fo this side of Cybertron. I know that Megatron treats Starscream like Michael treats Toby on "The Office." (Toastie's line, nuff respect due.) I know that Bumblebee and Sam (Spike in the cartoons) have a very special relationship. And I know this because I was obsessed with these stupid little plastic things when I was like 8 years old.

In fact, I think back to about 1984 or so, trying to imagine the amount of hair that would have spontaneously sprouted on my smooth boyish chest if I had seen so much as one minute of the Transformers 2 trailer back then. That such a thing could exist was inconceivable. I had envisioned a Transformers Atari 2600 game back then, but I couldn't decide whether the red button on the joystick would shoot a gun or make the robots transform into vehicles (or vice versa). Watching Optimus Prime stand up for the first time would have made my head explode.

These movies tap into something very primal (no pun intended) that is embedded in my psyche. And because of that, I was so willing to forgive all the terrible dialogue ("Mean robots suck!" "Punk-ass Decepticon!"), iffy acting, loud kabooms and completely incomprehensible plot. I mean the Matrix of Leadership turned to dust and then re-materialized? What the eff? Also, they could have shown all the "Primes" but instead just gave them one blurry, cursory scene! And sweet lord, don't you think that Megan Fox would have gotten a little bit of dirt or sand somewhere on her face or body at some point after running through the desert for two hours??!??!?!

But yet, I check my intellect at the door. As much as I know the movie is terrible, I still liked it. I would totally see it again. It's like the culmination of my youth, writ large. It's the same reason I gave Watchmen a pass, as disappointing as that was, and it's the same reason the G.I. Joe theatrical trailer gave me something akin to goose-bumps. And I wasn't even a G.I. Joe fan when I was a kid! (Sidebar, I'm a Judd Apatow fan, but that new Adam Sandler movie looks like a steaming pile. They practically gave away the entire plot in the trailer.)

These Hollywood assholes have finally found a way to crack through the veneer of us Gen-X film snobs. These bastards give us something that made us really happy when we were kids, update it, and then force us to try to hate it.

So bottom line, if they decide to make updates of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Go-Bots, M.U.S.C.L.E. wrestlers, Voltron, M.A.S.K. (that's Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, not the Eric Stoltz film), Thundercats or Super-Friends, my ass will be in the theater.

Of course, they did ruin Spider-Man, X-Men (the third one) and Star Wars for me in my later years so I suppose they can ruin anything.

Holy Shit!

The King of Pop is dead. Long live the King! (By which, of course, I mean Jamie Foxx.)

Poor Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. Talk about bad timing.

But the upside is, Paul McCartney is getting the full Beatles catalog back!

HIMYM, Save Thyself

I hope you'll indulge me, hyperanalyzing a TV show, but it helps keep my brain sharp. Plus, HIMYM is a good show overall, and I'd hate to see it end with a whimper like other promising shows (Samantha Who?, My Name Is Earl) that lost their way after only a few seasons.

The show How I Met Your Mother has been one of my favorites over the last three or four years. I have enjoyed the writing, the characters and the dialogue. But like all things I like, I fear for it.

This past season was classic pre-Jump the Shark behavior. There were more than a few episodes that weren't just sub-par, but godawful and contrived. ("Ten Sessions," "The Possimpible.") But it's not beyond repair, and the way that it can be saved is by diagnoising its fatal flaws, and fixing them pronto. Let's take a look:

1. It's Too In Love With its Own Gags. A few seasons ago, HIMYM unleashed a wonderful little gag known as the "slap-bet." It goes like this: you make a bet, and whoever wins gets to slap the other one across the face as hard as they want. It was a hilarious little wrinkle in the plot. There was also a payoff seven full episodes later, which is one of the best "walk-off" endings in the show's history.
   
   But then they got greedy. What was at one time a rather ingenious little subplot to the "Let's Go To the Mall" episode then became "Slapsgiving" (season Three), in which the entire episode was a countdown to the third and final slap that Marshall was finally going to give Barney. The slap itself was fine, but then it ruined it. Rather than ending on that note or having a brief denoument, Marshall had to sing a song called "You Just Got Slapped," with Barney joining in on the chorus! Gone was any tension that had existed up until then, and all the time they had put into the slap-bet concept went from TV lore to tepid and instantly forgettable.
   
   This show has a tendency to become infatuated with its own humor, such as when Marshall was wearing a nightshirt, and Barney let off a rapid fire litany of jokes -- none of them funny -- about the attire. (Which, by the way, is a lazy tool of comic writing: make someone's appearance foolish, and then make other characters make comparisons or say "You look like the grandfather from 'Willy Wonka.'")
   
   The show has to learn to glide gracefully past even its more ingenious jokes. When it spends too much time on them, it makes it look like it's trying too hard. Just make the joke and move along now. Don't wallow in your own supposed comic genius.
   
   
2. The Sentimentality of Ted. More often than not lately, the show has relied on ending on some kind of a dramatic or sentimental note. Now, from the first episode, Ted's character has been a kind of, for lack of a better word, pussy. He told Robin he loved her in the first episode, and is always talking about this ideal of "true love." That is, after all, the point of the show ... the backstory of how he met his future wife.
   
   But the problem is that these elements, which worked so well because they were the subtext, have become the ... well, text. Instead of Ted just being, we are constantly told what he is, by other characters and by voice-overs. A hopeless romantic, someone looking for a soul-mate, etc. All right, we get it.
   
   Problem is, Ted spends so much of his time fucking moping around and searching for this "true love," that it loses all of its power. There was an episode early on where Ted fell for a girl named Victoria at a wedding. They agreed they would never speak again after the wedding. Later on, when he finally tracks her down, the catharsis worked, because it wasn't telegraphed.
   
   Now, we have contrived pap like "Ten Sessions," in which Ted very consciously tries to wear down the woefully miscast and thankfully jettisoned Sarah Chalke over the course of ten medical treatments. This might have worked if it weren't so goddamn phony and contrived. And that two-minute date they had at the end of the episode was about as authentic as a 1980s porno. (Unfortunately, this was also the episode that Britney Spears was in, which means it was the one that most newbie viewers were exposed to.)
   
   Let's get the fun Ted back out there, the one that is sarcastic and doesn't take himself or his life too seriously, or come off as a "cool guy." (He might be the protagonist, but sometime's Ted is a borderline douchebag.) Because when the show validates his character, yet his character is doing something wussy/unlikeable/dickish, it undermines the whole framework of the show.
   
   
3. Barney's Radical Character Shift. I shouldn't have to tell this to professional TV people. When you take the funniest character on a show, and make him a sentimental ass, or too vulnerable, you take away the best part of a show. They did the same thing with Chandler Bing on Friends right before he got married to Monica, before thankfully re-installing his testicles by the time the show ended. Scrubs was also in grave danger of doing this with Perry Cox, the show's resident misanthrope. His seriously-toned, "he's really a good guy after all!" monologues -- which were initially a nice dab of humanity in an otherwise cynical character -- became all too frequent, before the show's switch to ABC restored his balls as well.
   
   For the better part of three seasons, Barney has been the one standby. If Marshall is the innocent in Ted's life, then Barney is the devil on the other shoulder. This dynamic opposition has given the show much of its needed tension. Barney could always be counted on to act selfishly and with complete nihilism. He would always be in control and always be one step ahead.
   
   But at the end of Season Three, inexplicably, the writers made Barney fall in love with Robin. First of all, can you think of a worse match? Who the hell decided "we have to get these two together!"
   
   Barney should never be in love, not while the show is still on. And God forbid he ever does, it should be with someone conniving, mean ... borderline evil. Anything less would seriously compromise the character that this show has so successfully built into its best asset.
   
   
4. Stella. She needs to move away to a distant city never to be seen or heard from again. Sarah Chalke is fine on Scrubs; she was abysmal on this show. Cousin Oliver crossed with that asshole who was Rory's boyfriend on Gilmore Girls. (So I watch a lot of TV, fuck you.)
   

So anyway, I think this show has the potential to be a so-called "klassic komedy," and would hate to see it go the way of "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," "Joey," "Life on Mars" or other shows with decent concepts that shat the proverbial bed.

Black Eyed Indeed (Wocka Wocka!)

No one hates you because you're gay, Perez Hilton Mario Armando Lavandeira. They hate you because you're a piece of shit. Is it okay to use the word "fag" now that Perez did it?



Perez is lucky it was just will.i.am that she called a "fag" and not Suge Knight. He would have gotten a bullet in his face instead of just getting his meat lumped.

I've never really read much of this guy's stuff, but from what I've seen, he self-righteously hides behind the rainbow flag, all while using Microsoft Paint to draw penises and semen on the pictures of celebrities. Then he talks about dignity and respect. Sorry, bitch, can't have it both ways. I read somewhere that Mario is the gay Uncle Tom. Hmmm.. I think I like the sound of that!

The worst part? He's right about the Black Eyed Peas shitty music and has forced me to take their side. Fuck you Mario!

Kobe

Dear Mr. Bryant,

You may have four rings, but you will always be a prick.