12/23/2007

Fanfare for the common slug

Many moons ago, I went on one of my frenzied rants about that idiotic show According to Jim, which as of today, has been on the air for six years.

Today, I got a letter of response to that post from an anonymous reader. Hurray! Everyone knows I love to get comments, and it always floors me when I not only get one from someone I don't know (and therefore can't hound incessantly to read my blog) but when I get one in response to a post I did a long time ago. Thanks, anonymous!

Anyhoo, Anon sent the following thoughts on According to Jim:

I actually looked for this board as I watched a few shows on the ABC instant viewer -- and was just appalled at the level of stupidity of this program. There is nothing intelligent or witty about this at all. No, I cannot believe a woman like the blonde would marry Jim, but this show plays...or appears to play to blue collar males who feel alienated and think that despite their poor hygiene, fatness, anti-intellectualism, self-indulgence, incompetence and sex obsession, they really are ok guys. Jim is another Homer Simpson every man/dumb idiot.

This show is a disgrace, but I can imagine it appealing to uneducated, loser types. The epsiode I watched featured Jim talking about his major goal in life -- which consisted of getting laid in all 50 states...and his having to rush home from his conquest with his wife in order to tend to a neighbor who thinks she is in labor but is actually suffering from farts.

Ohhhh kaaaay.


Is this for real? Can you imagine the morons who wrote this sitting around the table coming up with dialogue/plot points? "Hey, what if Pregnant Barb wasn't really in labor, but actually just had bad gas? HAW HAW!!! The yahoos will love it!" Un-fucking-believable. If this is what the Writer's Guild is coming up with for us, then I hope the writer's strike lasts for all of eternity.

Anon's points about the show aiming for the lowest common denominator are spot-on. Just the other day I saw a billboard advertising reruns of this dreck that had Jim and Courtney Thorne-Smith on it with thought bubbles over their heads. He's thinking, "When's the game on?" She's thinking, "Where's he taking me for dinner tonight?" HAW HAW AGAIN! I bet there's a Christmas episode where Courtney gets Jim a thoughtful gift (probably some kind of giant grill) and he gets her a sports bloopers DVD that he wants. 'Cause he's just a stupid schlub, and she loves him anyway!

For more haw-haws, I looked up the episode list on IMDb. Here are just a few of the hilarious eps you may have missed:
• Dana needs to buy a new car and Cheryl offers to go with her, but Jim says chicks are no good buying cars by themselves, because they'll get distracted with other less important things like mirrors or cup holders.
• Jim debates on how to tell the family that he doesn't think the family pet is worth an operation.
• It's Cheryl and Jim's anniversary, and one of them forgot, which prompts a show full of flashbacks.
• Jim's plan to watch a big fight is jeopardized by Cheryl's romantic plans, until he plies her with wine to make her pass out.
• Jim's Halloween horror: His four-year-old son wants to go as Cinderella.
• When Cheryl feels unappreciated, Jim offers to cook Thanksgiving dinner, confident she'll step in to take over and make it perfect.
• After taking the girls to a scary action movie, Jim tries to hide it from Cheryl, who blames herself for their lingering fears.

Oh my god, I'm annoyed just reading this. Who wrote this shit, John Gray?? She's an overworked harpy, he's a clueless asshole. She wants him to be more sensitive, he just doesn't get crazy women and their crazy mood swings. And did they really do an episode where he tries to knock his wife out so he can watch boxing?? HAW HAW...hilarious! While we're at it, why don't we just go all out on stereotypes? He gets knock-out pills from a Mexican street hustler, gets overcharged buying sandwiches from the Jewish deli and then gets picketed by some women's rights dykes when the word gets out. And at some point, a mincing gay tries to give Jim a makeover and a loud black woman screams at Jim that something is "funky." C'mon, it's funny!

Remember the scene in A Hard Day's Night when George is mistaken for a teen model and the TV guy wants his opinion on a stupid show with a giggly teen host that is geared toward George's age group? George says, "The lads frequently sit around the telly and watch her for a giggle. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things." I certainly hope that most of those watching this show are sitting there shaking their heads in disbelief of its stupidity. I guess if you need a little escapism into the world of super-fun stereotypes then According to Jim is as comfortable as your favorite pair of slippers and ratty robe.

Although, I have to say that the wine/boxing match idea is pretty disturbing. Anyone know of a serial rapist in LA with this MO? If so, check the Writer's Guild and you may find your man.

Thanks for the note again, Anon!

12/20/2007

Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown

"I'm a celebrity and I can do whatever the fuck I want!"

Immortal words from you, Blohan! You screamed these lines while on a coke-fueled bender that ended with you in cuffs by the end of the night and in a posh Club Rehab by the end of the week. Who do you think you are? Neeley O'Hara? If you've ever actually seen Valley of the Dolls you'll recall that after ripping the wig off the head of the woman who made her in a bathroom catfight, Neeley ended up drunk, strung out and sobbing in an alley, friendless, fanless and career in shambles.

This year, many celebs channeled their inner Neeleys with award-worthy meltdowns. Some actually had to pay for their actions. All were laughed at. Here are the years best and brightest.

13. Anna Nicole Smith
I've got big love for Anna Nicole. Poor thing ended up doing herself in after her son's death. My question is: whatever happened to her assistant Kimmy? I want to know where she is in all this. I'm actually kind of surprised she didn't come forward and claim to be Dannilynn's father.

12. Paris Hilton
Call me crazy, but I actually felt for this poor little simpleton when she was being toted away in the back of a police car sobbing like a poopy-pantsed toddler. I even felt a little bad for her when she wrote her fluffy little notes from prison, simpering about how frightened she was and how the bedsheets were itchy. But then when she sauntered out of the jail like she was walking a Heatherette show and then went right back to her uselessness. I was duped! Never again, Hilton, never again.

11. Joe Simpson
OK, so Jessica and Ashlee's creepy dad didn't actually have a breakdown, but he is so fucking ooky that there's no way he should be skulking among us. He is so hot for his own daughter that he will do anything to shine up her tarnished little star by foisting her upon us in horrible movie after horrible movie that all end up going straight to video. My guess is that he's got a basement full of heads, an attic full of dildoes and a few connections to missing kids, all who have dissed Miss Jessica at some point in the past. Next year, expect Ashlee and Wentz to disappear in the Rockys on a private flight.

10. Chris Crocker
This will be the last and final time I ever mention this douchebag on this blog because god only knows we should all immediately forget about "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! SHE'S NOT WELL RIGHT NOW! YOU'RE LUCKY SHE EVEN PERFORMED FOR YOU BASTARDS! WAAAAAAA!" even if it was pretty fucking funny the first time.

9. Vanilla Ice
The Surreal Life: Fame Games was destined to make TV history in some way. One of the most outstanding was Vanilla Ice's batshit breakdown when Ron Jeremy voted him off the show. He threw a total shit fit and destroyed the set, tossing drums at Ron's head and cymbals at a giant lit up "Vegas" sign. Stop, Rob! Collaborate and listen! You're bananas.

8. Jenny McCarthy
Jenny's been going around to all the requisite talk shows blaming her son's autism on his childhood vaccines. Don't forget this is the chick that got famous for picking her nose and eating it on a regular basis on MTV. (For the record, this bitch is an idiot and she is spreading dangerous conspiracy theories that are being validated by the likes of Oprah, Queen of the Hausfraus. Learn more here.)

7. Heather Mills
Late this year, the former Lady McCartney went on a frenzied smear campaign against the beloved Beatle. She claimed on any talk show that would have her that the guy that wrote the immortal lyric "The love you take is equal to the love you make" called her a "one-legged bitch" and drove her to suicidial thoughts. Her little Pity Party Media Tour only succeeded in making everyone hate her more.

6. Dog
I don't want to talk about it.

5. Owen Wilson
Poor Hansel! Who knew he was a tweaker? And who knew someone like Kate Hudson could have such a death grip on someone's manhood?

4. Lisa Nowak
Official announcement: starting in 2008, February 5 is Diaper Drive Day! Celebrate by donning some Huggies and driving from Houston to Orlando. No need to actually kidnap someone, but it does help to have a desperate crush on a hunky astronaut.

3. Blohan
Never minding the coke-fueled bender, frantic partying and speeding SUV chasings, what was up with her hooking up with that ugly dude in rehab? What was she thinking? Also, now she's boring. I never thought I'd want the crunked out Blohan back because I was so fucking sick of her over the summer, but I at least expected her to be knocked up before Ritchie. Someone needs to catch up.

2. Winehouse
I kind of love Amy Winehouse, sort of the same way I love Mary Kate Olsen. I just want to pick her up and put her in my pocket and keep her as my little pet. I'd comb her hair into a little tiny bouffant and draw little tiny Cleopatra batwings on her eyes. I'd give her little tiny hits of crack and take her to the little tiny jail so she can visit her crackhead husband Blake Fielder-Civil. But it wouldn't be my fault if she wandered around London at 5 in the morning in only a bra sobbing or being arrested for fraud, because she's little and tiny...AND CRAZY.

1. The most beautiful fall of them all
Ah, Britney. You've taken over my blog—your biggest accomplishment of '07. Among your other achievements this year, you:
• shaved your head and beat up cars with an umbrella,
• performed several "mini-concerts" by way of comeback and fucked all of them up royally,
• appeared on the VMAs in what was perhaps the most important show of your career and fucked it up royally,
• offered an exclusive, my-side-of-the-story interview to OK magazine and fucked it up royally,
• "fought" for custody of your kids and fucked it up royally,
• took your clothes off and romped in the Pacific for the paps in your bra and undies,
• exchanged clothes with strippers then puked all over yourself in the same night,
• got naked in a hot tub with some random frat specimen,
• performed multiple traffic violations, all captured on film,
• filed a restraining order against your mom,
• rambled incoherantly on your official website,
• made the lamest video ever,
and et cetera ad nauseum. Congrats, kook, and keep it up! I'm like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome falls through this beautiful disaster. Can't wait to see what '08 brings!

12/17/2007

I know what sent Blohan on her coke bender!

I Know Who Killed Me! If my name had appeared anywhere in the credits of this movie (gaffer, key grip, bee wrangler, whatever), I'd be on a death-wish binge, too.

First, I should note that I've seen Glitter voluntarily. I saw Torque in the theater. I own Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. So it should be of no surprise to you that I've been dying to see I Know Who Killed Me since I heard the hilarious review on the Reel Horror podcast in the hopes that it's really as bad as everyone says.

This is the movie that Lindsay Blohan took stripping lessons for and was famously unable to promote due to her coke-fueled bender, arrest and subsequent rehabbing back in July.

Well, I finally saw it and my consensus of it is pretty much the same as Reel Horror's: that the reports of this being the worst movie ever made are grossly understated. I have so much to say about this and I'm just going to let it fly. If you really want to be surprised, my condolences, but you can save yourself the agony and just read my spoilers here.

The "plot"
Blohan plays Aubrey, a smarty-pants high school student who plays piano and lives in a mansion with her parents, Neal McDonough and Smilla. After Aubrey is kidnapped by a serial killer who cuts his victims' hands off, she's found in a ditch alive and claiming to be Dakota, a poor, homeless stripper. Dakota is bad. We know this because she smokes and says "fuck" a lot. Is Aubrey just delusional or is Aubrey really bad girl Dakota or are these really two separate girls?

And does anyone care?

Oh, also, Aubrey/Dakota has a hairless cat. That isn't fixed. Know what I'm saying? The cat has the biggest balls ever. Made even more prominent by the fact that the cat is hairless. A hairless cat with huge balls! Brilliant. D&G should use that in their next campaign.

The acting
The world in I Know Who Killed Me is populated entirely of people with Asperger's Syndrome. Nobody reacts in a realistic, rational manner. When Blohan gets on a bus with blood literally pouring out of a gaping wound on her hand, she notices a guy casually staring at her and asks, "Don't you want to know what happened?" and he says, "People get cut. That's life." With blood POURING down her arm and smeared all over her face and clothes. The bus driver doesn't offer to take her to the hospital? The only other passenger on the bus isn't horrified? Even Blohan herself seems unfazed. Which is even weirder when I tell you that the gaping wound was caused by her finger turning black and FALLING OFF right before her very eyes!

I wish I was making this up, but, yes. Blohan plays a character who is missing a hand and a leg. Which brings me to...

The prosthetics
Also in the I Know Who Killed Me world, you can learn to walk on a prosthetic leg and use a mechanical prosthetic hand in a matter of hours (or minutes—who knows with this movie?). The artificial limbs are hilarious. They're like, twice the size of regular hands and feet. They may as well have put a giant Mickey Mouse glove and shoe on her. Additionally, her prosthetic leg needs to be "plugged in" at night so the "battery doesn't die." You heard me: her bot leg is battery-powered. Yeah, that's not going to come back later in the plot or anything.

Anyway, like I said before, Aubrey was allegedly the victim of a serial limb chopper-offer. However, "Dakota" claims that her hand and leg just fell off. This is shown in the aforementioned hilarious scene in which her finger rots off. Her reaction is like she burned a pot roast. "Oh! My! God! Ooh!" So what does she do? She picks her finger up...AND THEN SEWS IT BACK ON.

You may be wondering if I smoked crack before writing this post. That wasn't me. It was Jeff Hammond, the guy responsible for writing this screenplay.

The bizarre reactions
No one in the movie seems to be fazed by anything that's going on, except that Aubrey/Dakota's kidnapping and subsequent handicap seems to be a huge inconvienience to everyone. McDunnah and Smilla find out the latest news about their kidnapped daughter when they're laying on the couch flipping channels and see it on the news. No shit. These two should have been the number one suspects in Aubrey/Dakota's disapparance.

In addition, the FBI agents investigating the kidnapping are convinced that Aubrey/Dakota knows who chopped her hand and leg off and that she's covering for them. Wait, what?? It simply doesn't make any sense. Why didn't they just get Smilla to use her sense of snow to solve the crime?

OK, that sucked. Sorry.

The stripping
Speaking of a sense of snow, Blohan was obviously plowing through a drift before filming the strip club scenes. A three-toed sloth on a eucalyptus branch is more exciting than this listless slug on a stripper pole. She's also the only stripper in the whole club who doesn't have her top off. If those scenes didn't turn you asexual, then this certainly will, as it is officially the unsexiest moment in movie history.

The "sex scene"
So your girlfriend has just lost her leg and hand in a horrific attack by an unknown assailant who is still on the loose. She also seems to be suffering from some kind of amnesia that's causing her to not remember anything or anyone, including you. You are seeing her for the first time since this accident and she appears in the doorway with her prosthetic leg off. What do you do?

Why, take her upstairs and fuck her, of course! Loudly! In the middle of the day! With her mom downstairs listening to the whole thing! And pretending to clean as if nothing is happening! Instead of storming upstairs, busting the door down and screaming, "Get the fuck off of my legless daughter!"

The dialogue
The real dialogue isn't much better than that. Some fun examples:
• At a high school football game on the same day that a student's dead body has been found, the PA announces: "As you know Jennifer Tolin's body was found and we'd like a moment of silence. [two seconds of silence] Now let's go out there and win this one for Jennifer! WHOOOOO!!!!"

• FBI guy: "He was done with her...left her by the road to die."
Police officer: "But he wasn't expecting her will to live!"

• Aubrey/Dakota to her boyfriend after having legless sex with him: "Did she ever fuck you like that? Did she ever fuck you at all?"

The twist
So are you ready for the big twist? It's a good one! Turns out Aubrey and Dakota ARE two separate girls. Smilla's baby died at birth and McDonut paid off a crackhead in the hospital who had twins for one of the babies! But that's not all—Aubrey and Dakota are STIGMATIC TWINS. So if one of them gets hurt, the other one feels it! Which explains why Dakota's finger fell off!
Is your mind blown yet? No? Then get ready for...

The grand finale
Dakota sees where Aubrey has been buried alive by the killer in a dream, and your first thought is, "When did she become psychic?" All of this could have been avoided if she'd been psychic BEFORE, but whatever.

Anyway, she grabs McDoody and tells him she knows where his daugher is. No cops for these two—they're taking the law into their own hands by going to the killer's house! The killer tries to grab Dakota through a hole in the wall and she screams "Fuck you!" and then CUTS HIS HAND OFF, while the killer doesn't even try to fight and essentially holds his hand out for her to sever.

McLovin gets killed at some point and there's a pointless struggle between Dakota and the killer and then a super-dramatic death scene (but amazingly, he doesn't "come back" after appearing to be dead like Michael Myers). Dakota then wanders into the woods and miraculously picks the exact spot where Aubrey is buried to dig. She uncovers a casket and then—wait for it—uses her fucking bot hand to punch a hole into the casket and free Aubrey. Of course, Aubrey isn't even blue yet. Dakota then climbs into the casket and snuggles up with her twin sister who was just freed from being buried alive.

And scene!

That's right: the end. This movie is barely an hour and 20 minutes long, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's like, how did this get the greenlight in the first place? And if they were going to go for it, why didn't they just give us a two-hour Showgirls extravaganza with more amputee sex scenes and more hairless cat and more Smilla and McGillicuddy finding out important things from news reports?

The bottom line of this rambling, incoherant review is: THIS IS THE FUCKING FUNNIEST BAD MOVIE EVER AND YOU HAVE TO SEE IT. Don't pay for it, though. Wait until you get your 10th rental free or something. That's what I did. Then get all your pals together, stock up on bottom-shelf liquor and laugh your asses off. If anything, you'll get a kick out of the hairless cat with giant balls.

12/05/2007

Bloodbath on isle 12

There are intense crowds on the day after Thanksgiving—led by the "doorbusters" who show up at dawn for early-bird sales.
—snopes.com

If you weren't too stunned by my announcement of The Pixy's engagement, you will probably remember that I referenced "the Doorbusters" and how much I hate them at the end of my post. A few people have asked me what the fuck "doorbusters" are. Linus, why don't you tell Charlie Brown what a Doorbusters Christmas is all about?

Lights please...

And there were in the same life-free jerkoffs abiding in the Wal-Mart parking lot, keeping watch over their watchess by night. And lo, the manager of the store came upon them, and the glory of the $899 plasma screen shone round about them, and they began to push.

And the manager said unto them, "Back up, the store opens at FOUR—NOT 3:56! Stop pushing! Christ the Lord, glory to God in the highest, you people are animals! Sir, please stop peeing in the decorative planters! Help, help, I'm being trampled! You're standing on my face! Help, help...nooooooooooooo!!"

Did this help?