Author: matt

It’s time for another one of low culture‘s trademark specious pop culture comparisons, the better to raise the ire (or, more likely, benumb the yawning indifference) of casual readers and insane commentators alike.
And this one has the added benefit of me not even having seen the movie in question, Mona Lisa Smile. Starring America’s Sweetheart emeritus, Julia Roberts, and a pride of her 20-something replacements–in–training, Smile tells the story of an unconventional, inspirational teacher at a staid, upper-crust school. It’s probably a lot like Dead Poets Society only… prettier.
As a Wellesley alum myself, I felt the need to point out some similarities between the film’s stars and some of the school’s most famous former students. (Seriously, no shit: I spent several summers of my formative years at this camp, playing college student while other—so called “normal”—kids attended soccer camp or simply hung around the house being bored for two months.)
Let’s check out some of the film’s stars and their sorta kinda real world analogs, shall we?
One of them went on to become a famous television anchorwoman, a legend in her field.

Another became one of the best humor writers—male or female—of her generation and then went Hollywood with a string of movies no one admits to liking but everyone can quote. (“I’ll have what she’s having.”)

The last one, well, I’m not so sure what she’s done… something pretty good, I bet.

Yes, these women didn’t all graduate the same years, it’s true. But when you make a movie, you tend to fudge over things like dates and continuity. All of these women, like the characters in the film, attended Wellesley during a time of shifting gender roles in this country and went on to become successful and famous in fields that would’ve been closed to then upon entering college. (And if we go by the old “rate a woman’s success by the man she married” formula, these ladies didn’t do half bad: a two-time Oscar winner and multiple nominee; a great journalist and an Oscar nominee; and, oh, the two-term President of the United States.)
Since Revolution Studios, the film’s production company, has shown an acute interest in prurience for prurience‘s sake, I’m wondering how they’ll manage to work in what Ron Rosenbaum has memorably dubbed “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal”.
[Confidential to M.W.: There is no special prize for being the first one to respond to this. Might I suggest using those typing fingers for another activity?

Sometimes in a columnist’s career, there’s one story that’s like his great white whale: it’s his passion, his obsession, the thing that keeps him going. And if that columnist is lucky, that story winds up on the frontpage of the newspaper and on the evening news. Finally, all those years of obsessive toiling, of chasing down leads and cultivating sources pays off and he becomes the go-to guy on the subject, the writer other writers look to for breaking news and critical context.
Take Friedman, for instance.
No, not Pulitzer Prize winning Times op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman. I’m talking about FOXNews 411 columnist Roger Friedman. (To belabor the Friedman/Friedman comparison a minute longer, both men have branched out into movies: Thomas with Straddling the Fence, Roger with Only The Strong Survive.) While the war in the Middle East has brought Thomas his moment of glory, Roger’s got the Michael Jackson case and all the mini scandals that flow from it like tributaries from a raging, crazy river.

Hilton at the premiere of The Simple Life; Diddy shynes in white.
One last Hilton post (we all hope): Let’s say you’ve just done something you feel really bad about, like appearing in a homemade porn video or allowing your protege to shoot up a New York nightclub. How do you tell the world you feel remorse but that you’re untouchable, above the charges, and so fresh and so clean?
The white suit, of course! Long favored by plantation owners and Southern law men, the white suit is your best option for conveying, you know, innocence.

What more can you say about Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s sojourn to Altus, AR on The Simple Life? They’re possibly the most malignant thing to hit a heartland family since Dick Hickock and Perry Smith visited the Clutter family in Holcomb, KA in 1959. (In this context, FOX becomes not unlike that other alternately priggish and obsequious society chronicler, Truman Capote, except that Tru cleaned up his act and got serious to bring us In Cold Blood, while FOX only gets serious when it’s chasing America’s Most Wanted.)
I’ll leave it to others to deconstruct Paris and Nicole’s every utterance—as we speak, somewhere high atop Rockefeller Plaza Amy Poehler is practicing saying “I’ll puke” while Maya Rudolph is being fitted for a blond wig—but I do have a bone to pick with one of Hilton’s favorite epithets: ghetto.

It’s no secret that Tracy Morgan is something of a folk hero around here at low culture. It may be too much to ask that Morgan be awarded the The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor, but I guess he is still at the start of his career, right? Maybe we can somehow get today declared National Tracy Morgan Day? Or is that overkill?
His show premieres tonight at 8PM EST on NBC. I know I’ll be watching.
Good luck, Tracy. And don’t forget us when you’re a superstar.
Sidebar: What’s with the logo NBC is using for this show? Kind of a bit Brady Bunch for my taste.