A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"How can you be so blindly pro-Bush?"
"I like his wife Laura... I used to buy weed from her at SMU."

The only real problem I have with Weeds is that the intro song "Little Boxes" is, fundamentally, one of the most annoying things ever written. Even when Elvis Costello or...Engelbert Humperdinck is singing it.

That and I'm not really enjoying Nancy's recent sexaholism. She sure is putting the 'ho' in Showtime. Am I right?

Anyway, it's a good thing Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Nealon are so good. Who can argue with lines like:

It's a weed wonderland, Nancy. It's like Amsterdam only you don't have to visit the Anne Frank house and pretend to be all sad and shit.

And while Dana Delany isn't in any real danger, Elizabeth Perkins is hotter than she ever was in Big.

"Nobody likes the list guy."

Crossposted from Blog 9...because terrorists have hijacked my sense of originality.

You don't know it, but I'm on to you. You whine and complain about the crap that fills your local movie theater every week, yet you keep coming back for more. Hopped up on Hollywood's goofballs, you're desperate for your next fix.

Case in point, this recent survey of American moviegoers shows that people are still chomping at the bit for 2008's anticipated blockbusters:

A recent survey of U.S. moviegoers ranked which films people are most looking forward to seeing. We wanted to see how Search compares to the survey, so below you'll find the 2008 films that got the most buzz over the past seven days. We're hoping at least 10% of 'em live up to the hype.

Here's the list, my "hilarious" commentary included.

1. Iron Man - I'm intrigued that director Jon Favreau has cast the likes of Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges for his superhero movie. I've seen the trailer, and it definitely looks promising. Count me in for this one.

2. The Dark Knight - This one too. Batman Begins set the benchmark for comic book flicks that Superman Returns fell well short of. If Christopher Nolan and company can keep from slipping into Joel Schumacher territory, we should have another winner.

3. Indiana Jones 4 - Admittedly, I thought Raiders of the Lost Ark was about that big boat (give me a break, I was 10), but Temple of DOOM? LAST Crusade? Those were titles, man. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sounds like our sexagenarian swashbuckler will be plundering knick-knacks in some New Age gift shop.

4. Speed Racer - On the plus side, it can't be any more nonsensical or ridiculous than the original cartoon. The Mach 5 looks pretty freaking sweet, however.

5. Get Smart - I suspect this survey was conducted among folks who haven't yet seen Evan Almighty and Dan in Real Life. Come on people, The Nude Bomb wasn't enough?

6. The Incredible Hulk - Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, and Nick Nolte are out. Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, and William Hurt are in. Marvel elected to "reboot" the Hulk franchise after Ang Lee's 2003 effort failed to gamma bomb the box office. It's an interesting strategy, and one that only slightly reeks of desperation, but rumor has it Warner Bros. will be doing the same thing with the next Superman movie.

7. Narnia: Prince Caspian - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a surprising family friendly hit, and Prince Caspian is the first of two sequels based on the C.S. Lewis novels. Look for more bloodless combat and further stealth marketing to evangelical churches by Disney.

8. Wall-E - A Pixar release is still something to look forward to, even if Cars proved the studio wasn't exactly infallible. Hopefully the absence of Brad Bird won't spell doom for this one, which so far reminds me of nothing so much as Short Circuit.

9. Cloverfield - We're three months away from the release of J.J. Abrams' mysterious monster opus, and so far all anybody knows about it is the release date (01/18/08) and the faux title "Cloverfield." As marketing strategies go, it can't be beat. Time will tell if the finished product is worth the wait.

10. Star Trek XI - J.J. Abrams strikes again. The good news is, he's wisely opted to do a prequel of sorts, and the cast - including Simon Pegg, Heroes' Zachary Quinto, and Zoe Saldana - looks up to the task. The bad news, it's an odd-numbered entry, and we all know what that means.

All in all, a pretty formidable list. Still, no Rambo IV? No Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? No The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (speaking of unwieldy titles)? What are you guys looking forward to?

"This is the greatest injustice in the history of the world!"

Reasonable people can disagree about most things, but I hope we can all come together around the proposition that Joe Francis is the 21st century equivalent of Nelson Mandela:

The smiling founder of the Girls Gone Wild video empire stands shoulder to shoulder with President Bush, the White House in the background, in a series of online advertisements running on newspaper Web sites from Pensacola to Tallahassee.

Joe Francis, 34, engineered the ad campaign to gain support from any audience that will listen to his twisted legal story, which began in Panama City Beach in 2003 and now has him in a Nevada jail cell.

"Marketing is what I do best," Francis told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Francis, who makes at least $29 million a year from his videos of young women baring their breasts and in other sexually provocative situations, says he's now in a marketing fight for his own freedom.

"I have been vilified," he said.

He said he has been treated like a terrorist and likens himself to an enemy combatant in legal filings. He says that is why he chose to feature a picture of himself in the ads taken during a 2004 White House visit - a campaign donor's perk.

I'm no marketing expert - like Francis - but it seems that referring to oneself as an "enemy combatant" when you haven't actually done any...combatting...might not be the best way to drum up sympathy for your cause

Francis, who became famous in the late 1990s after he came up with the Girls Gone Wild slogan and began filming spring break debauchery, has been in jail since April when he was cited for contempt after yelling at attorneys during mediation in a federal lawsuit brought by women who were underaged when his production company filmed them in 2003.

That lawsuit has since been settled, but Francis' bond was revoked on criminal charges related to the 2003 filming when he was charged with having contraband - $700 and prescription anti-anxiety medication - in the Bay County jail.

Federal officials then extradited him to Nevada to face tax evasion charges.

Francis could bond out of jail on the federal charges, but would face extradition back to Florida to face trial on four felony charges related to using minors in a sexual performances and two misdemeanor prostitution charges. The charges are all that remain in an original 73-count indictment in the 2003 Spring Break filming.

Francis would rather stay in jail in Nevada than return to Florida.

A cunning strategy, until you remember how they got Al Capone. That's what happens when you start pinging on the Feds' sonar, though.

In a prosecutorial misconduct motion, which [lawyer Roy] Black filed Tuesday, Francis asks his case be dismissed and alleges Bay County officials have a vendetta against him dating to 2003 when he successfully sued Panama City Beach for First Amendment violations after the city threatened to ban him from filming Spring Break.
[...]
Francis says his legal fight is about more than his own freedom, it's about bringing freedom to the people of Bay County.

"I want them to rise up against the good old boys," he said. "I filed a lawsuit standing up for my First Amendment rights and these people came after me. I believe I was set up."

Even if Francis' resolves legal case, he has other legal fights ahead.

A former sales representative of his Mantra Films Inc. and Girls Gone Wild filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against his companies and him in July.

The federal indictment handed up in April in Nevada alleges his companies - Mantra Films Inc. and its marketing arm, Sands Media Inc. - claimed more than $20 million in false deductions on the companies' 2002 and 2003 corporate income tax returns.

The indictment also charges that Francis used offshore bank accounts and entities purportedly owned by others to conceal income he earned during the same time.

This, along with all the money, pretty well illustrates the disconnect between middle-class shmucks like myself and gazillionaires like Francis. Here's a guy who amassed a vast fortune by doing little more than convincing drunk women to flash their goodies on film - which most anybody else would enjoy for a while before insulating themselves against charges like he's facing now by hiring nothing but attractive coeds to do the camera work while spending the bulk of their time in a king-sized hot tub filled with Cristal and Pop Rocks. This whole story, however, is a testament to the guy's delusional megalomania.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and the discontented masses of Panama City are just waiting for a firebrand like Francis to incite them to rise up and defend their right to see boozy barely legal teens degrade themselves on tape.

Francis also is charged with misdemeanor sexual battery in Southern California for allegedly groping an 18-year-old woman at a birthday party in Hollywood.

And then there's that.

"Nothin' cracks a turtle like Leon Uris."

Every so often, you see a headline that completely eliminates the need to read the article itself. For example:

Kid Rock jailed in Georgia waffle house brawl

But what the hell, I read it anyway:

The rocker, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, and five members of his entourage were charged with simple battery after the predawn fight with a man police identified as Harlen Akins. The fracas erupted as Kid Rock and his crew pulled up at the Waffle House restaurant about 5:15 a.m. after a gig at The Tabernacle in Atlanta.

Akins, 39, got into a shouting match with a female friend who was accompanying Kid Rock's posse and then got into a physical fight, police said.

Akins allegedly broke a window at the restaurant and suffered cuts from flying glass that required treatment at a local hospital.

I was going to make some snide comment about how Harlen/Harlan/Harland must surely be a Deep South name, and was going to rely on some extensive internet research to confirm this:

Harlan Ellison - Born in Cleveland, OH
Harland Williams - Born in Toronto, Ontario
Col. (Harland) Sanders - Born in Henryville, IN
Russell B. Harlan (cinematographer for such movies as Blackboard Jungle, Rio Bravo, and To Kill a Mockingbird) - Born in Los Angeles, CA

So much for that.

Apparently those memories were in the "adults-only" section of the Pensieve

So...it appears Snape was guilty of a hate crime:

In front of a full house of hardcore Potter fans at Carnegie Hall in New York, Rowling, sitting on the stage on a red velvet and carved wood throne, read from her seventh and final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," then took questions. One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling as the audience erupted in surprise. She added that, in her mind, Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald, Voldemort's predecessor who appears in the seventh book.

Man, I love J.K. Rowling. No sooner has the hype for Deathly Hallows died down when she finds a way to bring the franchise back into the headlines. If this little strategy yields a significant rise in book sales, look for the following revelations in coming weeks:

- Harry had a three-way with Cho and Ginny Weasley
- Minerva McGonagall seduced Ron (you could totally see it coming during the dance scenes in Goblet of Fire)
- Hermione aborted Viktor Krum's baby
- Like a certain other evil overlord, Voldemort is rumored to have only one testicle
- Harry's foot was in the crease when Hogwart's won the Quidditch Cup

Anybody else?

I hate the internet

I'm a big Ryan Adams fan, and "Sweet Illusions" is one of my favorite songs of his. This, however, will teach me to do random searches for his videos:

Level with me: how prevalent is this kind of shit? I usually only check out YouTube for clips from sporting events and Martika Slayer videos, and I don't want to stumble across a montage of Lara Croft and Aya Brea from Parasite Eve set to Warren Zevon's "Mr. Bad Example."

My sense of old man's righteous indignation might not be able to take it.

EDIT: Addressing Scott's comments, I have as much reason to loathe Adams as anybody. I attended a Whiskeytown concert back in the late 90s with The Brother-In-Law here in Houston, and it was excruciating. Adams was - shockingly - drunk as a lemur, and he finally tired of insulting the audience and flipping us off and decided to lay down and play feedback on his guitar for 20 minutes.

But he seems a lot more contrite in interviews these days, so I'm willing to cut him some slack. Is he still an asshole? Probably, but in the words of Major Grant, he seems more like my kind of asshole.

"Why don't you all just f-f-fade away?"

ABC News has a story on their evening broadcast tonight about how the first of the Baby Boomers (Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, born 12:00:01 AM on 1/1/46) has applied for Social Security benefits. There were the usual comparisons between the post-war generation's saving habits versus those of their parents (the Boomers are better at it, probably because nobody who lived through WWII expected humanity to avoid annihilating itself) and the ominous theorizing about the deleterious effects of 76 million people draining the nation's SS trust fund. Casey-Kirschling herself was interviewed - in front of her new boat - and attempted to adopt a somber tone when discussing her children's futures, just before she sailed out to international waters to enjoy some choice Peruvian blow.

I can't speak for anyone else of my generation, but my retirement saving strategy was implemented with the assumption that Social Security wouldn't be around when I finally called it quits (at age 87, by current economic indicators). Obviously, certain other family considerations have caused us to recalculate some things, but so far we're looking okay.

But ABC misses the point (or - more likely - selectively ignores it). The primary negative ramification of our rapidly aging population isn't the future depletion of our nation's retirement coffers, but the present-day horror of TV advertising. Thanks to this, I now know how to medicate myself against physiological horrors both real (hypertension) and imagined (restless leg syndrome). The phenomenon is so pervasive I now have to pause my DVR for 10 minutes at the beginning of Adult Swim (on the Cartoon Network, of all places) so as to avoid the Cyclopean horror of "Bob" from those Enzyte commercials.

And then there's this:

Jesus christ on a pogo stick. The sight of doughy 50-somethings "jamming" at some mythical roadhouse miraculously bereft of blue collar alcoholics and speed-addled bikers before roaring off to give their undoubtedly weary wives a right good rogering is one of the worst things I've ever seen, and I review Brett Ratner movies.

Part of me finds it endlessly amusing that the generation that once rallied to "Hope I die before I get old" is now desperately trying to stave off its advancing decrepitude. And I say this as someone whose own age cohort will someday have to answer for Vanilla Ice and the Star Wars prequels. But the other part desperately wants to watch Sunday NFL games and the MLB playoffs without being constantly reminded of the grim specter of death.

Or impotence. Whatever.

"'Cause the Devil's got a charcoal pit
And a good fire down below"

"And the lucky winners are..."

On the album No. 2 Live Dinner, Robert Earl Keen uses the intro to his not-at-all overplayed "The Road Goes on Forever" to describe the apparent spontaneous combustion of a number of automobiles (including his own) at Willie Nelson's 1974 4th of July Picnic, held at Texas World Speedway south of College Station. The destruction of his car was captured on the cover of his 1997 album Picnic.

Curiously enough - REK was apparently on stage during this incident:

A grass fire in a parking area at a country music festival engulfed more than 20 vehicles, fire officials said. There were no injuries.

Authorities say the cause of Saturday's fire is under investigation. The two-day Big State Festival at Texas World Speedway carried on with acts including Lynyrd Skynyrd and Robert Earl Keen.

As Austin resident John Boston parked on Saturday afternoon, he said, he noticed smoke coming from under the car.

"I instantly knew what was going on and got back in the car to start it," Boston said. "When it wouldn't turn over, I just got out of there."

Before firetrucks could arrive, the blaze had spread to almost every vehicle in the row.

Maybe Keen should stick to concerts in West Texas, where there isn't any grass to ignite.

"It's true, it's true...we're so lame."

"See white guys, they drive like this."

You ready for another list demonstrating who unhip you are? If so, here's the 10 Rap Songs White People Love:

10. Positive K - I Got A Man
9. Digital Underground - The Humpty Dance
8. Biz Markie - Just A Friend
7. Young MC - Bust A Move
6. Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock - It Takes Two
5. Naughty By Nature - Hip Hop Hooray
4. Tag Team - Whoomp (There It Is)
3. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby
2. House of Pain - Jump Around
1. Sir Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Back

Vanilla Ice? You wound me, sir. I mean, at least throw Snow's "Informer" up there. And "Nuthin' But a G Thang" has to rate as well.

I can personally state that #s 10, 5, 4, and 3 are pretty much false. "I Got a Man" is largely forgotten, The Naughty By Nature song should be "OPP," and "Whoomp" is only popular if you count people sitting in the stands at football games as active Tag Team fans.

And "Ice Ice Baby" is easily as loathed by the teeming masses of honkies as anyone else.

As for the others: "The Humpty Dance" is admittedly still pretty catchy, my dad is an avowed fan of Young MC, I had to hunt far and wide for a CD copy of the Rob Base CD for The Wife, and I still occasionally listen to House of Pain's first one.

And "Baby Got Back" is unassailable. I say this because I've seen it in action, at a now-defunct C&W joint called (*sigh*) the Longhorn Saloon. I don't remember the circumstances that took us there, probably one of The Wife's work-related functions. I drank a few beers, made some feeble attempts to two-step, and watched in horror tinged with hysteria when the entire population of that bar flooded the dance floor for Sir Mix-A-Lot's magnum opus. I guess hip hop is safe when it sticks to asses and the like.

"Doctor. Doctor. Doctor? Doctor."

Finally, a chance to break out the Spies Like Us quotes.

I found out yesterday that the grand total of Nobel Prize Laureates I've met is up to one:

U.S. citizens Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies and Sir Martin J. Evans of Britain won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a technique for manipulating mouse genes.

The widely used process has helped scientists use mice to study heart disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis and other diseases.

Capecchi, 70, who was born in Italy, is at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Smithies, 82, born in Britain, is at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Evans, 66, works at Cardiff University in Wales.

They were honored for a technique called gene targeting, which lets scientists inactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.

My father did his postdoc work with Mario Capecchi at the U of U back in the 70s. I was just a snot-nosed kid with little knowledge of what they were up to beyond the fact that I wasn't allowed to touch anything in the lab, especially anything with that orange trefoil design on it.

Being that young and stupid, I also had no idea what the guy had gone through:

Long before Mario Capecchi helped find a way to silence genes in mice and help spur drug discovery, he wandered the Italian countryside as a hungry child.

Capecchi, born in Italy and now at the University of Utah, joined two other researchers yesterday in winning the Nobel Prize for medicine. As a youth, he endured four years of homelessness during World War II that ended on his ninth birthday, when his mother, released from a Nazi concentration camp, found him starving in a hospital.
[...]
Capecchi's mother gave a neighboring family in the Italian Alps money to care for him while she wrote anti-Nazi poetry during the war. When that money ran out and his mother was imprisoned, he wandered the countryside, malnourished and ill, eventually coming to rest in a hospital in Reggio Emilia.

``The way they kept us there was they wouldn't give us any clothes,'' he recalled. ``I had a lot of time to concentrate on ways to escape and I tried many things.''

Hours of plotting escape from the hospital, along with the self-sufficiency that came from surviving street life, gave Capecchi the courage to go ahead with gene targeting, he said. He used funds that had been granted for other projects to support his work with mice.

I'd think that those early experiences would give you the courage to go ahead and do just about anything. Regardless, I hereby apologize for breaking those test tubes. Congratulations, Doctor.

"That's what he takes us for: two boobs."

Film Threat's list of the Fifty Best Breasts in Movie History is up. Though it says "by the FT staff," I'm not taking any credit for it. I threw out a bunch of names - almost all of which were included - but contributed nothing in the way of actual commentary. In retrospect, it's probably better that way

Anyway, here's the list:

Mae West
Jane Russell
Marilyn Monroe
Dorothy Dandridge
Jayne Mansfield
Sophia Loren
Elizabeth Taylor
Brigitte Bardot
Ursula Andress
Honor Blackman
Raquel Welch
Chesty Morgan
Tura Satana
Uschi Digard
Pam Grier
Jennifer Connelly
Monica Bellucci
Rosario Dawson
Scarlett Johansson
Eva Green
Jennifer Tilly
Asia Argento
Thandie Newton
Helen Mirren
Jessica Rabbit

Along with the obvious (Russell, Loren) are some left field choices, a few of which I agree with, and some that are a bit puzzling. I maintained when the list was being cobbled together several months ago (and continue to do so) that Green and Argento's frequent nudity doesn't necessarily constitute legendary chestage, and I insisted on the caveat about Connelly's unfortunate skeletonization, but they kept Mirren and Grier in, so that's something. I guess

So who'd they miss?

"Excellent work, Frothingslosh."

The title of this entry makes no sense, except as an in-joke to parents subjected to repeated viewings of The Backyardigans and as a means to make light of the reaction I had to the news of yet another of my favorite movies getting remade (via Cinematical):

Sam Bayer is in negotiations to direct "Near Dark," the remake of the cult vampire movie Platinum Dunes is producing for Rogue Pictures.

Like the 1987 original by Kathryn Bigelow, the remake centers on a young man who reluctantly joins a traveling "family" of evil vampires after the girl he tried to seduce bites him and turns him into one.

Christopher Landon ("Disturbia") is rewriting the script.

Platinum Dunes' Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller are producing.

Bayer, one of the big names in music videos and commercials -- he directed Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" clip -- recently won a MTV Video Music Award for helming Justin Timberlake's "What Goes Around Comes Around" video that starred Scarlett Johansson.

This is almost too perfect a storm of crapitude: Grand Offalmeister Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes, a company created for the sole purpose of strip-mining existing horror properties (coming in 2009: The Birds!), has gotten the guy who wrote a note-perfect ripoff of Rear Window and a director who - dare I dream - may even bring the vacuous Johansson on board to complete this fiasco.

One of the commenters on the original entry was right: can't these fuckers go and remake a shitty movie for once? Take a stab at Food of the Gods or Howling II. At least then they could argue they were improving it.

I hope everyone involved with this gets hoof and mouth disease.

Happy Friday. Go see Into the Wild.

EDIT: Sweet jesus, it never ends:

A few months ago, we reported that Len Wiseman was in negotiations to direct the Escape from New York remake and also Gears of War.

The big news today, that started over at AICN, is that Len Wiseman will no longer be directing Escape and that Brett Ratner has replaced him.

The IESB contacted a source over at New Line, the studio behind the film, and was able to confirm the story which is no longer a rumor but instead 100% fact. Brett Ratner will take over directorial duties on the remake.

Awesome. Maybe Chris Tucker can play the Duke of New York.

Goddamned TiVo

So what happened on Heroes after Claire picked up Mohinder's book in the driveway? Floaty Boy was just hovering above her, wasn't he? Wasn't he?