Category: Shallow

Formerly hard-hitting, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jimmy Breslin once again takes on one of the most important issues… well, ever: why he hates dogs:
“[W]e know that dogs walked by their hideous owners on city streets are repugnant. They turn the place where you walk into an outdoor bathroom. They should be curbed, which means they could be out there among the buses. That is no loss as dogs have no souls.”- “Those Bad Dogs,” Newsday, Sept. 21, 2003
Breslin fans may remember he said something similar earlier this year:
“Out on the streets of the city there is the revolting sight of people walking along with their dogs and then bending and picking up after them. They humiliate themselves in public, and I cannot understand why a person, having done this, can walk with his head up and even look you in the eye if he catches you staring…On the same sidewalk, a woman dressed for the business day was bent down and picking up after a dog so small that he deserved to be crushed and the woman, after making such a sight of herself, should have been shunned.”-As quoted by Gawker
It should be noted that Mr. Breslin has had extensive surgery to his brain in the last decade, as if you couldn’t tell.

Further proof that all DJs are losers. Tasting the Foie Gras, Listening to the Jam, by Glenn Collins

I fantasize about being married to Jennifer Garner, too, but I don’t tell The New York Friggin’ Times:
“Mr. Wilson proudly showed off photographs of Ms. Plame, calling her a real-life Jennifer Garner, the actress who plays a spy on ‘Alias’ on ABC-TV and whom the C.I.A. has enlisted as a spokeswoman to appeal to recruits.”
Life imitates art which is also imitating life. Is the whole world a big Charlie Kaufman film?

Coupling once again temporarily fills the 9:30 PM timeslot tonight on NBC. This is like one of those nightmares where you wake up only to find you’re still in the nightmare. Memo to Zucker: Super-size Friends and Will & Grace and drop this thing before we lose more of the world’s esteem.

George Will shows off some unsurprisingly corny pop culture knowledge (what does Maureen Dowd think?) by wasting his opening paragraph with a drawn-out references to Witness. Are we to believe that Witness is the only way Will can discuss integrity? Why not The Indiana Jones Trilogy?
George Will, film buff and closet Harrison Ford fan. Who knew? I guess now we know posted all those Hollywood Homicide raves on Ain’t It Cool News.

Knut Royce.
Huh, huh, huh. I said “nut.”

It’s a truism that you can tell everything you need to know about a publication from its choice of headlines and sub-heads. (What? It’s not a truism? It is now.) With that in mind, let’s look at a couple of magazines’ and newspapers’ coverage of the same thing, namely, actor Peter Dinklage and his breakout role in The Station Agent.
“He’s taken small roles to great heights — and now with Sundance fave The Station Agent, this up-and-coming actor is livin’ large”
Does your magazine like to use multiple, overlapping puns in their subheads that signal irreverence and a willingness to make nice to celebrities and their handlers? Hello, Entertainment Weekly! (requires subscription)
GET SHORTY AN OSCAR
Does your newspaper pride itself on looking out for the underdog yet have an unhealthy affinity for crass humor? Greetings, New York Post!
THE BIG TIME
Did your magazine agonize over whether to make a pun about your subject’s size and then decide to do it anyway? The New Yorker, you rock!
Actor Peter Dinklage lives large
Is your publication Canadian and therefore exempt from coming up with anything even remotely clever? Oh, Canada.com!

“Still, the awkwardness passes, and the sight of Joe wandering cheerfully into the shot, munching a bowl of cornflakes, or whatever, and hailing the baffled husband without concern, is my favorite encounter in the movie.”- Anthony Lane, The Current Cinema October 6, 2003

Reasons why I can’t stand K Street:
-Bragging in the second episode about the impact of James Carville-feeding Howard Dean his line in the first. (Not only do we make news, we shoot and edit the show as fast as the news cycle!)
-Being forced to imagine just what it might be like inside the Carville/Matalin marriage.
-Watching journalists like Joe Klein and Howard Kurtz giggle and smirk (respectively) through their cameos. (Yippee! I’m on TV and it’s not even Sunday morning!) (Incidentally, Klein described a Carville-like character in his pseudonymously published book Primary Colors as looking like he’d been conceived during the love scene in Deliverance. Meow!)
-Not being able to read the newspaper anymore without wondering what stories will make their way into the show next week. (Of course, Mary Matalin’s continued consulting with Dick Cheney will certainly limit or change the tone of coverage.)

Reasons why I enjoy K Street:
–Roger Guenveur Smith is an amazing actor and maybe this show will finally bring his one man show A Huey P. Newton story to a wider audience.
-The little Soderberghian touches like the phantom woman who keeps appearing to John Slattery (shades of Solaris?).
-The name of the imaginary lobbying/consulting firm is Bergstrom/Lowell, which is clearly a reference to muckraking former 60 Minutes producer (and occasional Times investigative pinch-hitter) Lowell Bergman, memorably portrayed by an over-the-top Al Pacino in The Insider.
-Knowing that George Clooney gets to be a politician without giving up his movie star lifestyle.

Yes, it’s painfully easy to rail against George Steinbrenner and his disdain for salary caps and smaller market baseball cities. But why should we exclusively scorn the Yankees’ bossman?
It seems as though his uber-capitalist TV-revenue-seeking mindset has spread to his employees as well. Listen to NY’s celebrated/overrated slugger Jason Giambi’s pullquote contribution to a Washington Post article about the celebrated matchups in this particular baseball postseason:
Jason Giambi can see why there’s so much enthusiasm.
“The teams that are in the postseason – the Cubbies always have great support. These playoffs should be great, a lot of TV viewers.”
Maybe George’s mouthpiece is anticipating a raise, what with all the exciting licensing revenue sure to come in this fall!