Sammy Davis, Jr. to Bush’s Nixon, Dennis Miller is profiled in today’s Times by Bernard Weinraub:
The Joke Is on Liberals, Says Dennis Miller, Host of His Own Show Again.
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what unspeakable thing happened to this man?
Month: January 2004
Categories
Must-Blog TV
In response to being included in New York magazine’s “Best of New York” balloting this year, the proprietor of greg.org posted a rather sheepish and self-deprecating series of analogies to a few of his competitors in “Best New York Blog”:
“I’m afraid if there’s a weblog equivalent of Sweeps Week programming, I ain’t got it. At best, I’m IFC to Gawker’s Fox; Sundance to Gothamist’s NBC; Jon Favreau to Jarvis’s Aaron Brown; James Lipton to Aaron’s that guy from Full Frontal Fashion. I’d better start drafting my congratulations speech now.”
With that in mind, we took his cue and flushed out his analogies a bit more, even daring to venture outside the five boroughs of New York (it is still called the “world wide” web, right?).
low culture‘s Special Education and Popular Culture Correspondent Nikki logs this report:
“In the high-stakes heist at the heart of The Perfect Score, due in theaters Jan. 30, six young thieves conspire to steal the biggest prize of all: the answers to the SAT.”— USA Today, Jan. 13, 2004
Tagline: “The SAT is hard to take. It’s even harder to steal.”
Other films coming soon:
The Queens Regents (alternate title, Bored of Regents):
Six 9th graders in Astoria conspire to steal the answers to the English Regents exam.
Tagline: “Pass the tzatziki, son. And pass the Regents exam.”
It’s Elementary:
Six 2nd graders conspire to steal the answers to the Stanford Achievement Test.
Tagline: “All they wanted was a 6th-grade reading level.”
My Big Fat Jewish Bar Mitzvah:
A 13-year-old Jewish boy hires his cousin to write his Bar Mitzvah speech for him.
Tagline: “He thanked God, Rabbi Lonstein, his parents—but most of all, his
cousin Jeff.”
A Tale of Two Two Year Olds:
Dramatization of the Jack Grubman/92nd St. Y scandal.
Tagline: “It’s fun to stay at the YMHA, but first you have to get in.”
Rainbows and Waterfalls:
Little Michael’s IQ test score was good… not good for his mother—Susan Smith.
Tagline: “Getting away with murder is even harder than getting into
preschool.”
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America, Prepare to get Kahn’d
Joseph Kahn and Warner Bros. are betting $30 million that you are stupid.
Torque opens this friday after some minor delays. Apparently the geniuses at Warner Brothers decided that not only would no one want to see a movie about a stubbled, pretty boy biker framed for murder, but also that no one would take a movie with a name like Torque seriously. Warner Brothers had a big marketing powwow, discussed the shortcomings of the film, the challenge of selling the same tired story once again, and they decided, after interminable minutes of debate, What the fuck—let’s throw this piece of shit at 1200 screens and see if it sticks.
I predict a $20 million opening weekend.
Torque is helmed by Joseph Kahn, a director with the distinction of sharing Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham‘s music video pedigree while possessing none (not a whit) of their visual or storytelling talents. Kahn has directed clips for Eminem, U2, Moby, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Garbage, so you know he’s ready to graduate to the big time and direct some big screen, um, garbage. After all, it’s every music video director’s god-given right to tackle a major motion picture: Spike and Michel have found successful second careers on the silver screen. Earlier, David Fincher, Antoine Fuqua, F. Gary Gray, Hype Williams, and others made the leap with varying degrees of success. What do those losers have that Joseph Kahn doesn’t? (Talent for one thing.)
What Kahn has, which those guys never will, is the insane envy of his former high school classmates. Check out what someone named Cinema Lover wrote on the IMDB‘s message board:
I went to high school with Joseph Khan back in the early 1990’s. We were both at Jersey Village High School in Houston, TX back in the early 90’s.
Man Joseph must be getting some crazy p*ssy these days, what with being a reputable music video director and now a director of a major motion picture like “Torque”. He’s directed Britney, Beyonce, Jaime Pressley….DAMN! I remember he was a little goofy looking, and kinda ugly Asian dude, but we all know that Power==Hot P*ssy.
Like Tiger Woods, I imagine Joe having sex with tons of hot blonde women on a big pile of cash.
Jesus, when I think about it I feel so freakin’ small. To think this dude was in my history class, he always had a camcorder with him, and his passion for filming people obviously paid off. Though even back then he was probably getting a lot of p*ssy, just because even in the early 90’s he was directing up and coming hip hop acts in Houston while he himself was still a teenager.
Damn I feel small.
(Cinema Lover? Playa Hater is more like it!) Maybe Kahn won’t win any gold statuettes for Torque, but he already has something a whole lot better: the glare of the green eyed monster. (Oh, and all that Hot P*ssy!)
I’m betting that like its Diesel-burning older brothers The Fast and the Furious, XXX and the stinky cinematic skid marks 2 Fast 2 Furious and Biker Boyz, Torque is a visually-dazzling but completely incoherent exercise in rapid-fire editing, leaden sub-porn film acting, and relentless product placements. Boo-ya!
If that’s the case, why not go for the other Tork—Peter Tork of the Monkees— and rent Head from your friendly neighborhood indie video store this Friday. Written—between hits of the kindest California bud available in 1968—by Jack Nicholson and directed with an “ah, whatever” attitude by Bob Rafelson, it’s the antidote to the slick, Hollywood youth-oriented releases that glut multiplexes mall-over America like so many Mrs. Fields’ cookies full of arsenic.
Actually, who am I kidding? Head is a piece of shit. But it’s probably better than Torque and at least it’s been remembered 36 years years after its release. Oh, and you can be sure Bob Rafelson’s high school classmates are eating their hearts out over all the p*ssy he got in the 70s, what with being a reputable film director and all.
Damn, I feel small even pointing it out.
“Look, I didn’t know anything about the gay community when I signed the civil-unions bill. I grew up in the same homophobic milieu that everybody else did. I was told the same thing about gay people that all heterosexuals were. And most gay people were told the same thing themselves— by parents, ministers and everybody else. I was uncomfortable, and I said so. And I got a lot of flak for it. But I still thought it was the right thing to do.”
— Howard Dean in the Feb. 5, 2004 issue of Rolling Stone
Howard, I thought we talked about this last week!
As expected, the most secretive administration in recent U.S. history has moved into attack mode in the wake of President Bush’s former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill’s possible “leaking” of “secret” documents to author Ron Suskind for the publication of his long anticipated book (by “long anticipated”, I mean, as of yesterday, when news of O’Neill’s comments initially broke) which is now destined to be an immediate, though short-lived, bestseller, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill”.
O’Neill, appearing on NBC’s “Today” show this morning, has denied any wrongdoing, saying that
the documents were given to him by the Treasury’s chief legal officer after he requested them to help former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind write a book on O’Neill’s time in the Cabinet.
“I said to him (the general counsel) I would like to have the documents that are OK for me to have. About three weeks later, the general counsel, the chief legal officer, sent me a couple of CDs, which I frankly never opened,” O’Neill said in Tuesday’s interview. He resigned under pressure a year ago in a shake-up of Bush’s economic team.
O’Neill, the first major Bush insider to criticize the president, said he had given the compact disc with the documents to Suskind.
“I don’t honestly think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 sheets,” said O’Neill, adding only the cover sheet shown on television bore the words “secret.”
President Bush, a notorious baseball fanatic, must be doubly disappointed by the behavior of his former cabinet member, as the flap over O’Neill’s comments inevitably knocks Pete Rose’s revelatory text down a few notches in the cultural radar.
In the interim, Bush (or more accurately, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett) may want to begin boning up on some responses to this issue for the presidential debates this fall, since these off-the-cuff comments don’t function very well as an adequate and logical defense of his foreign policy of late:
Speaking in Mexico, Mr Bush rejected Mr O’Neill’s claims that he had planned the Iraq war within days of becoming President, and not as a result of the terrorism that shook the US.
“No, the stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear,” he said. “Like the previous (Clinton) administration, we were for regime change. And then all of a sudden September 11 hit,” Mr Bush said in Monterrey at a press conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox.
Asked if he regretted going to war, given that nearly 500 Americans had now been killed, Mr Bush defended his “tough” decision, saying “history will prove it’s the right one for the world”.
Oh, and as an afterthought, Brit Hume weighs in on the O’Neill matter with some entirely irrelevant, Roger Ailes-inspired logic over at FOX News:
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was forced out of the Bush administration in 2002, has criticized the president on everything from his demeanor in Cabinet meetings to the war in Iraq this week. But these recent attacks contradict statements O’Neill made in a television interview just after his ouster. O’Neill told KDKA Television in Pittsburgh last January — “I’m a supporter of the institution of the presidency, and I’m determined not to say any negative things about the president and the Bush administration. They have enough to do without having me as a sharpshooter.”
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You’re a good man, Harvey Weinstein
With the recent release of Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein has been coming in for some serious bashing lately. It’s easy to take shots at Harvey: if ever there was a big, slow-moving fish in a barrell, it’s Miramax’s bully-boy king.
But what about Harvey the Nice Guy? Harvey who tackles even the smallest of tasks. Harvey who relieves his overworked underlings and does things like calling to ensure that packages made it to their recipients. Harvey who just called to say “I love you.”
To find that Harvey, you have to read Sharon Waxman’s article Lobbying for Golden Globes Is a Hollywood Ritual in today’s New York Times:
Three days before the close of voting on the Golden Globe nominations last month, the phone rang at the home of a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the people who vote on the awards.
“This is Harvey Weinstein,” said the voice on the other end of the line, the member said. “I’m calling about Bad Santa. ”
The member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the caller, who was the co-executive producer of that film and the Miramax co-chairman, “Mr. Weinstein, I loved the movie.”
“Oh,” came the reply, then a click.
If you think that sounds like Bad Harvey-style intimidation, you are wrong! Very wrong. According to Amanda Lundberg, a Miramax spokesperson quoted by Waxman, Harvey was just “confirming their receipt of late-arriving cassettes, which in our case was Bad Santa. If members told him what they thought of the movie, he didn’t ask for it. It was an unsolicited comment.”
Take that, Harvey haters! He was just being polite, on-the-ball, and decent. Why would we ever expect anything less from him?
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Celebrity Nerd Showdown
It’s revenge of the nerds night on Bravo.
How else to describe the lineup on Celebrity Poker Showdown of Willie Garson, David Cross, Richard Schiff, and Paul Rudd. (One of these things is not like others, it’s true: but despite Rudd’s good looks, his status as every indie girl’s heartthrob—he was soooooo adorable in Wet Hot American Summer!!!—makes him a nerd by proxy. They’re also playing with Nicole Sullivan late of Mad TV who’s also something of a nerd.)
Maybe the producers of Celebrity Poker Showdown were inspired by Ben Mezrich’s geeks versus card sharks bestseller, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Or maybe they’ve run out of good-looking stars who know the rules of the game. One thing’s for sure: a lot of makeup was required to get the shine off three-fifths of the players’ pates tonight.
Tune in at 9PM EST to see which nerd triumphs and which cry all the way to the Tri-Lam house.
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Palm Friction
What is the deal with Quentin Tarantino and masturbation? Why does the musky odor of onanism hover around the Kill Bill director like the visible stink lines that emanate from Peanuts‘ Pigpen?
Last week in “The Year in Movies,” Slate‘s raucous film critic caucus, the conversation between David Edelstein, A.O. Scott, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and Manohla Dargis practically devolved into a circle jerk about whether or not Tarantino is jerking off on film.
Sarah Kerr of Vogue spanks Tarantino first in an entry headed “Quentin Tarantino’s Masturbation”:
On to Kill Bill for a moment. Jim, do you really think Tarantino is a victim of the system? I think we’re a victim of his not writing a screenplay, indulging in a quite boring obsession with his leading lady, and essentially masturbating on screen, with the gall to invite us back for a second installment. I hated Kill Bill not in a tsk-tsk, scolding way but because it induced boredom to the level of panic—a desire to flee the theater—and self-pitying rage that work required me to stay put.
David Edelstein, Slate‘s resident critic and “Year in Movies” host busts off his own critical nut graph, dense with particularly loaded imagery:
As is often the case, Sarah, you nail Kill Bill but you end up on the wrong side of the equation. You say that Tarantino is “essentially masturbating on screen, with the gall to invite us back for a second installment.” I say it’s rather entertaining to watch this guy’s masturbatory fantasies, especially when they’re epic. N.B.: This is NOT a general principle, but for some artists, masturbatory fantasies and art are very close-knit.
(Let’s assume he’s referring to Brian De Palma—a filmmaker whose very name recalls a naughty reference to masturbation—whom Edelstein has taken a number of well-deserved whacks at over the years. The fact that all those reviews contain references to math or trigonometry may bespeak the critic’s own particular fixations, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Manohla Dargis shoots her own load with her response: “I don’t want to watch anyone’s masturbatory fantasy unless I’ve specifically skulked in and out of my neighborhood video store or am watching pay-for-view in my lonely Lost in Translation-style hotel room and have nothing better to do.”
Since “The Year in Movies” ran every day last week, the Slate crew continued their critical beat-down of Tarantino’s cinematic beat-off sessions for another two days, always with the smirking, knowing tone of those who know that there’s a thin line between criticism and its pathetic cousin, wankery.
So, I ask again, what is it about Quentin Tarantino that makes dirty minds of all these high-minded folks? Certainly it’s the 10 minute sequence of Uma Thurman’s feet in Kill Bill and the fact that Tarantino is not only unabashed about his love of exploitation flicks (veritable booby parades when not displaying acting so bad it could be used as a “how-not-to” teaching tool for aspiring thespians) but celebratory to the point of ecstasy.
But maybe the real stain comes from creepy comments like the ones Tarantino made while stroking Lost in Translation at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (here quoted by Page Six): “At some point, I got a crush on the movie… I’ve seen it five times and every time I’ve seen it I’ve had a little date with myself.”
So, Quentin, here’s some free advice if you want to avoid being seen as the film world’s answer to Alexander Portnoy: keep it in your pants, man. Maybe people won’t think you’re such a wanker.
Categories
Economic Sanctimony
Though this will come as no surprise to those who regularly read the news, the latest actions by the United States government once again reinforce the notion that the flimsily-defined conceit of so-called “intellectual property”, or IP, has taken a greater precedence in political and diplomatic relations than, say, human rights, poverty, or feminism.
While it’s highly unlikely that modern-day IP expert Lawrence Lessig is booking the next flight to Seoul to better examine these issues, those in South Korea who profit in the trade of bootlegged Tom Cruise films and G-Unit compact discs are being closely watched by U.S. trade officials. Correction: “priority watched”, which is the official term given by the American officials, who feel that the nation’s relative inattention to policing the trade of copyrighted-but-bootlegged works falls short of the desired standards, to say the least, and could potentially lead to the United States’ enforcing economic sanctions against South Korea in the near future. “Economic sanctions”, of course, are the punitive trade policies against which pundits on both the left and the right customarily speak out.
If you failed history and/or geography, or just have trouble locating smaller nations like Burkina Faso on a map, bear in mind that while South Korea is in Asia, it is not China, the most prominently piracy-prone nation on the continent (but we can’t go about enacting bold economic sanctions against our pseudo-communist, secretly-capitalist cheap-goods trade partner, right?).
In that vein, the gist of the complaint seems to be leveled against “online piracy” moreso than the old-fashioned street vendor system. While it’s understandable that the American entertainment industry would want to protect its own interests, it’s nonetheless hard to empathize with the record labels and studios of late, what with all those lawsuits against music fans and increased ticket prices and screener bans and “fair use” violations.
South Korea, remember: you’re on “priority watch,” lest you wind up in the “Axis of Sanctions,” joining your neighbors to the North, as well as Syria, Libya, and Burma, to name but a few.
Because, of course, it’s only fair to group IP violations with human rights issues, right? And that’s why the United States is considering sanctions against China, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, et al. Oh, wait…the U.S. is not considering sanctions against these nations?
I’m sorry, I must having been too busy watching my illegally downloaded double-CD DivX copy of “The Mirror Has Two Faces” to have expected the United States to have a consistent set of values in its multilateral relations.