Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Film & TV’ Category

What Do Your Red Carpet Looks Say About You?

Posted in Film & TV, tagged , , , on February 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

–*You are fashion forward.

–*You are fashion forward and you were snubbed in a major actress category.

–*Somebody rolled you up in a carpet and tried to kidnap you, and after you escaped, you thought you could own the rolled up carpet look.

–*Your water just broke.

–*You are truly curious about which appendage might fall off without blood circulation.

–*You are trying to embarrass Ryan Seacrest.

–*You are in violation of networks standards and practices.

–*You look best in bias cuts and 40 weight motor oil.

–*If Joan Rivers wasn’t abusing you, you wouldn’t know who you are.

–*Your ombre hair extensions make it highly likely you cheated on your SAT.

–*Shiny shiny I am 12.

–*The L.A. County Sheriff is aware of your movements.

–*Whale bone corsets in the early 1900s led to multiple health problems in women and why are we better than they are?

–*If it can hold my bait and tackle, it’s good enough for these Hollywood big shots.

–*You were comfortable enough with yourself and your success to wear a tie-dye and jams.

–*Your plunging neckline is a pleasing distraction from the fact that your movie defended codified torture.

–*I am Russell Crowe, and I am not afraid to go outside my comfort zone and take all of you with me.

–*I am Sally Field, and if you are a TV host who tries kiss me without my permission, I have a battery of lawyers who will crawl up your ass and start removing the contents like the crew from Ben Hur Moving Company.

–*You are comfortable around both couture and medical trepanning equipment.

–*You are a 31 in the legs, which means nobody makes anything for you and you do not deserve to be here.

Read Full Post »

Live Blogging the Golden Globe Awards

Posted in Film & TV, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 14, 2013| Leave a Comment »

What were some of the highlights of the 2013 Golden Globe Awards?

–*Jodie Foster took 50 years and what seemed like 10 minutes to come out of the closet.

–*In her speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille award, Foster begged for privacy and then said she was lonely and single and went into excruciating detail about how she liked her lesbian sex.

–*E! Entertainment television’s pre-show noted that the red carpet was thick with highly glamorous possible flu carriers.

–*Salma Hayek’s and Paul Rudd’s inability to improvise during a teleprompter gaffe cost millions of dollars in precious air seconds, time that they must pay back with their lives!

–*To get a Steven Spielberg movie made about him, Abraham Lincoln had to pay for it … with his life!

–*Former president Bill Clinton came to introduce the film Lincoln, about America’s controversial 16th president whose record is very mixed among historians.

–*Lena Dunham proves with her show Girls that if you’re naked a lot, on some level you can’t really be insufferably coy.

–*As we honor President Abraham Lincoln at an awards show, we must wonder if his last thought might have also been, “Hey, this is a pretty good show!”

–*Lena Dunham made a joke about the 2000 Oscars, which means she’s been watching these shows since she was 2.

–*Kanye West breathed a sigh of relief when he saw how badly Taylor Swift can behave at an awards show.

–*Tony Mendez, the hero of the film Argo, made a speech onstage about his Iran mission in very hushed tones, far away from his microphone, leading one to ask: “Did anyone tell Mendez the mission was declassified? They made a movie about it!”

–*”Adele!”

–*Kevin Costner once carried the moral authority of the masculine American on the big screen. But now everybody’s gay and we all think he’s a douche bag.

–*Tommy Lee Jones is a star. But he is a distant star, and when he laughs at a joke, unfortunately we will not see it for 2.5 million years.

–*Tina Fey and Amy Poehler show that when you insult Americans you better be an American, Ricky Gervais.

–*Look, we know Sacha Baron Cohen is making fun of us. The real surprise and delight comes from figuring out how he’s making fun of us. This can take days to work out.

–*Argo proves that Ben Affleck is no fluke as a director. His acting career, however, continues to be a fluke.

–*Zero Dark Thirty has been called controversial by those who say it implicitly supports the American policy of torture. Torture among teenagers is already up 30%, says a worried Ed Asner.

–*Meryl Streep couldn’t be here tonight because being lauded so much has finally made her physically ill.

–*Really, I don’t think I was kidding about that Kanye West thing. If he had a football right now, he’d be spiking it!

–*The Golden Globes has people hotly anticipating the Oscar race now that people know how many good movies accidentally got made last year.

Read Full Post »

Cheers, Vonnegut

Posted in Books & Literature, Film & TV, tagged , , , on September 30, 2012| 1 Comment »

I don’t know why this struck me. I was skimming a GQ article on the 30th anniversary of the TV show Cheers. The article quotes Kurt Vonnegut saying that he would have rather written that show than his own books. This is twofold funny to me for very personal reasons. One of the main reasons I gave up watching television, at age 17, was that Shelley Long left Cheers, and the other main reason was that I had discovered the book Slaughterhouse-Five, the literary masterpiece of one Kurt Vonnegut, who single-handedly launched a love affair between me and books that my father had fruitlessly tried to force on me at a much younger age.

Why did Shelley Long play such a big role in my intellectual development, forcing me away from Starsky & Hutch and into Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce? Does she really deserve such responsibility? No. It was probably just the right time in my life. My parents, big readers that they were, let me watch far too much television when I was younger … so much that I eventually burned out on it. To this day, watching regular TV for more than an hour at a time makes me a bit nauseous.  Cheers was the last TV show, for many, many years, that I watched religiously, compelled not only by its comedy but by its soap opera. Love is such a fraught topic for teenagers, that I, too, pinned some sort of  ineffable hope on two fictional characters, neither one of whom I’m like. Or perhaps I just thought Shelley Long was pretty. In any case, the show beat that dead horse of Sam and Diane’s on-again, off-again romance for so long, that by the time I was 17 I was starting to see through the pastiche and melodrama not only of television but the way it was somehow mimicked in real life. People get drunk on drama as easily as teenagers sipping cooking sherry. There’s a better life out there, and there’s better art. More timeless literature that makes you think around a subject and find affinities instead of jerking you around every Thursday night for cheap delectation.

I have been wondering recently whether to haunt the Cheers bar again on Netflix, since my impatient and image-thirsty son has sort of forced me into a compromise with TV time again. From what I can tell so far, my feelings were justified. I understand why Cheers was a good idea on paper, but many of the jokes have worn thin over time. I think it might have been an ambitious show at first, but it traded its wit for melodrama too often, traded smart gags for dumb ones and certainly reached mediocrity even before Shelley Long left. I stand behind my oft-repeated claim that if you’re going to look for a truly great sitcom from that era, you must look no further than the Cheers’ crew’s previous show: Taxi. This, in my mind, is a timeless TV show (if there is such a thing) where life’s absurdities and heartbreaks and the collisions between generations and social groups could be examined and laughed at in ways that we realized were important after the fact–and without dime store titillation. I still feel the writing on that show stands up 30 years after its own abbreviated five-year run. I’m not sure why it doesn’t get yanked onto the pages of GQ more often. Maybe another 30 years will offer us more focus. Of course, you’d have to be one of Kurt Vonnegut’s time-traveling heroes to know. In fact, I highly recommend that if you haven’t, you go read Slaughterhouse-Five right now.

Read Full Post »

The Rebirth of Candy Rocks

Posted in Film & TV, tagged , on September 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

It is with great joy I announce that one of my very first screenplays has emerged from its yellowing state in a drawer to make the semi-finals of a film festival. Not just any film festival, but the Austin Film Festival, a major confab with big name producers, some of whom have generously placed my script among the top 20 in the comedy category out of some 2,000 entries.  The screenplay, called “Candy Rocks Doesn’t Grow Up,” depicts the rise and fall of a 10-year-old rock star.

This script has been around for a long time (I originally conceived it when I was 26) and I’m thrilled that I’ll finally get to tell producers about it!

Read Full Post »

Introducing My Friend, Oscar Nominee Gigi Causey (And Husband Andrew Bowler)

Posted in Comedy, Film & TV, tagged , , , , on January 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Years ago, when I was the associate entertainment editor for the University of Texas college newspaper, The Daily Texan, this incredibly cheerful ex-cheerleader from El Paso would hang about in our office chatting with people late into the night as we waited for final proofs. I lost touch with Gigi for several years until, in a totally chance encounter in Tribeca, I found her working at a film production company that had asked to see one of my screenplays. I was looking for somebody else in this dark, hip office but was startled to instead find my long lost friend. I peered through the dark at a familiar figure, no longer a former cheerleader but a harried film producer, and said with head-slapping incredulity “Gigi?????”

Fast forward a few years, and I’ve watched Gigi with great admiration work tirelessly in the indie film world to get a number of really great projects off the ground, many with her extraordinarily talented husband, actor, director and producer Andrew Bowler. Occasionally we would have lunch and I’d ask Gigi, the seasoned film producer, for tips on how to play around with my own cinematic projects.

A couple of years ago she showed me a screenplay for a short film called “Time Freak,” written by Andrew. I’m not even sure why they showed it to me, unless it was just to hear me validate what they likely knew and say what everybody else likely did: “This is brilliant. Shoot it!”

I should have known that they would not only shoot it, but do it with real style and heart and cool. But they did far more–reached Olympian heights I dare say even they didn’t dream about: They this week found out they had received an Oscar nomination for best live action short film.

I had almost given up on this Oscars, especially after they started nominating 10 films for best picture. But this year, I’ll be doing it backward, and watching the middle of the show, not the end, rooting for my friend Gigi, who is still, though an older and much wiser ex-cheerleader, one of the coolest, nicest people you’ll meet.

The couple filmed their reaction to the news that they would, forever after and henceforward, be styled “Oscar nominated Gigi Causey and Andrew Bowler.” Here is the video, a suspenseful film with a highly satisfying conclusion.

Also, enjoy the “Time Freak” trailer. The entire film should be coming to the Web shortly, says Gigi.

Read Full Post »

Media Darlings Likes “The Retributioners”

Posted in Film & TV, The Retributioners, tagged , , , on September 18, 2011| 1 Comment »

Our friend Maggie Hames reviewed several new TV shows at the site “Media Darlings” yesterday and gave an incredibly nice shout out to the “The Retributioners,” calling Stephanie a “Mary Tyler Moore for the 21st century.” I love reading Maggie, who has helped ease me into the role of parent as culture vulture a bit more easily with such cool columns as “Apps For Babies.”

She also says that our show is miles above two new NBC sitcoms, “Up All Night” and “Free Agents.” I have to say, I’m a bit bummed by that: I was hoping that “Up All Night” might be a new show for me to fall in love with, not only as a new parent facing the same issues, but as a huge Will Arnett fan who has watched all the episodes of “Arrested Development” twice. But Maggie says the show lacks pragmatism. “Get a nanny!” she yells at the screen.

As for “The Retributioners,” we’re glad that the show keeps giving good karma, even though we haven’t put out a new one in a while. Maggie needs to write a new blog called “How to keep your Web series going when you’re a new parent.”

I’m trying to work the baby into the plot some how. Maybe an episode in which Stephanie gets even with Xander for her post-partum depression. You all like that? Raise your hands!

Read Full Post »

What’s On TV Tonight–Worker’s Party Edition

Posted in Film & TV on March 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

What bourgeois distractions on television are keeping us from developing a class consciousness?

60 Animal Planet
Cats with Wigs

60 Animal Planet
Meerkats With Wigs

5 MTV
Jersey Shore with Wigs and Pasties

5 MTV
Skins … with Just Skin

10 CNN
The State of Wisconsin

7 ABC
Katherine Heigl’s got a new hairdo to frame her big mouth

8 Fox
“Cops”: Suppressing Your Class Consciousness With Blackjacks

9 NBC
This David E. Kelly comedy-drama perpetuates the meaningless fiction of due process as prisoners continue to rot in Guantanamo

18 PBS
The “filmmaker” who invented the Acorn scandal convinces Newt Gingrich that there’s a whorehouse on Sesame Street and that all the Muppets have the syph.

10 CNBC
Anchor perpetuates the meaningless fiction of shareholder value by promoting stocks that likely pay no dividends

11 VH-1
Flavor of Luv perpetuates exploitation of Flavor Flav

12 Democracy Now
If it tastes good, it’s exploitation

15 TNN
It’s a rat, on a cat, on a dog! Brilliant!

13 Home Shopping Network
The brilliance of this gold necklace, which comes to you via the mercury poisoned blood of an artisan miner in Kenya

14 Fox News
Fox News, Now In Its 15th Year of Suppressing Your Class Consciousness

81 E! Entertainment Television
Dr. Drew’s Charlie Sheen Intervention-Palooza Featuring Kathy Griffin, Tony Danza, Snooki, Charo and RuPaul

Read Full Post »

Bernard Madoff Slams Franco’s Lackluster Oscars Performance

Posted in Business and the Economy, Entertainment, Film & TV, tagged , , , , on February 28, 2011| 3 Comments »

Incarcerated swindler Bernie Madoff proved once again he just can’t shut up on Monday as he railed from prison that Oscar host James Franco offered a lackluster and uninspired performance Sunday night at the Academy Awards, and that Anne Hathaway was trying too hard.

“I know I’m no saint,” said the fraudster, now serving a 150-year prison sentence for bilking investors out of tens of billions of dollars. “But I really thought James Franco should have brought it. He thinks he’s all James Dean–that he’s above it all somehow. That doesn’t give the audience confidence. It just makes them hate you. He’s been doing that shtick since ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ and we’re not buying it anymore.”

Madoff also called the SEC a joke, said the entire U.S. government was a Ponzi scheme, and insisted that Anne Hathaway used too many costume changes to make up for her lack of charisma.

“She’s no comedienne,” said Madoff, whose hedge fund was a giant black box promising 10% returns with no underlying securities in it. “I don’t see why they can’t get Billy Crystal back to do the whole thing, not just some lame bit. He knows what comedy is. It means being willing to try anything for a laugh, being willing to fall on your face or use wit barbed with irony. Comedy doesn’t mean glamming it up for a lot of dead-behind-the-eyes teenagers and hoping your C-cups pass for personality.”

Madoff, who has ruined hundreds of families, wiped out billions in wealth and shamed his family, then turned his sights on Melissa Leo, who in an unguarded moment used the “F” word during her Oscar acceptance speech for “The Fighter.”

“This was your moment to shine, and instead you came off like a trailer-park mama with a jug head, bow legs and Vitamin D deficiency. You ought to give that gold statuette back to the artisan gold miner in Nicaragua who dug it out for you.”

Madoff also attacked the rules begun last year that allow 10 nominees into the best picture category.

“If you know the first thing about stock dilution, you know that it cheapens everybody’s share,” said Madoff. “Not that my fund was invested in any stocks, of course. I take full responsibility for my actions, unlike the Academy.”

The ceremony was watched by millions of viewers, including, allegedly, prisoner number 61727-054. It could not be ascertained by press time, however, if Madoff, who looked into the faces and televisions cameras and the eyes of regulators for years and convinced them he had a real business behind the Imperial granite and steel facade of the Lipstick Building, had actually watched the Oscars.

Madoff says he understands that Franco is a polymath currently getting advanced degrees while pursuing his acting career.

“That doesn’t impress me. It seems like he’s hyperactive and taking on more than he can chew. Why not do just one thing well, like acting, rather than jerking me off with your horrible Ryan Seacrest imitation and then pretending like you don’t care?”

Madoff also argued that the Twittering about the Oscars from the backstage and Colin Firth’s early anointment as winner further cheapened the awards.

“The magic is just not there,” said Madoff, who will spend the rest of his life eating jail food. “I don’t know if I’ll watch again next year. But I always like talking to reporters. It’s really lonely in here.”

Oscar Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Read Full Post »

America Tries To Drag Charlie Sheen To Bed

Posted in Film & TV, tagged , , , on February 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Los Angeles (API)–After watching him spin out of control in a bitter, drunken, profanity-laced tirade, America tried to put Charlie Sheen to bed on Thursday night, spending some 90 minutes attempting to pull him upstairs and take his boots off, reported TMZ.

Sheen started the night on a high note with mocking self-deprecation and a couple of Brandy Alexanders: “The picture of his old charming self,” said America, but suddenly the quixotic “Two and a Half Men” star began hurling abuses at America as well as the producer of his hit CBS television show.

“I have family-comedy magic spewing out of my cock,” yelled Sheen at America. “I’m a big titted hit and nobody can stop me ever.”

America, used to the abuse and bad behavior from Sheen, including his rampage in several New York and Los Angeles hotel rooms, tried to justify it, explaining that his alcoholism and tete-a-tetes with prostitutes and porn stars stemmed mostly from his great sensitivity as an actor and artist.

“Nobody understands Charlie,” said America. “He’s just a big kid. He’s really a good man and we just can’t stand to see him ache.”

Sheen had been doing OK until 8 p.m., when he told America to stop nagging him about his fourth drink, a mojito that America had garnished with fresh sugar cane, just the way Charlie likes it.

“You just can’t cope with the rate at which I’m rehabilitating,” he told America. “And by the way, [“Two and a Half Men” producer] Chuck Lorre is a maggot who has to barf on his own food to eat it. My shit is his gold, and he can come scoop comedy gold out of my asshole if he’s got the guts.”

Sheen then knocked into a lamp and America said it was just an accident and that Sheen was having an adverse reaction to Sudafed. Sheen then asked a visiting reporter if he realized that thousands of Libyans were protesting to have “Two and Half Men” put back on air.

“This whole Middle East business is about me,” said Sheen, exhibiting classic signs of substance abuse, narcissistic personality disorder and likely the DTs.

“What America doesn’t understand,” said Dr. Thaddeus Evans, a Riverside, Calif. therapist, “Is that every time she laughs at one of Charlie’s jokes or tells him he’s great, she’s really just building up his resistance to treatment and intervention. His delusions of grandeur are a way of protecting a fragile ego that he hasn’t built up from within, and America is doing him no favors by protecting that false self image, telling him how great he is, or giving him back his 9 p.m. slot.”

“You all will milk comedy gold from my man tits!” yelled Sheen. “Chuck Lorre, if that’s his real Jewish name, will be knocked down by the big dick that I swing over all of Holly wood and the world. I call all of my fans to arms! We must get “Two and a Half Men” back on the air before America is further punished!”

America then asked a couple of TMZ reporters to grab Sheen’s feet after he passed out into a baby sapling ficus tree given to him by a porn star who sometimes lives on the premises and is known for her hit film “Eerie Canals.”

Read Full Post »

Eighty Percent of Americans Can’t Do This Anymore

Posted in Film & TV, tagged , , , , on February 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Washington, D.C.–Some 80% of Americans said on Tuesday that they “can’t do this anymore,” and made a dramatic exit from some marriage, situation, job, argument or film screening.

Americans everywhere have found refuge to this careworn phrase, one stemming from perhaps every movie on the planet from “Sex and the City” to “Traffic” to “Fight Club,” to express common frustrations of their everyday life and bring closure to some chapter of their lives. In many cases, they are ending a job or a relationship.

“I can’t do this anymore,” said Brayden Horowitz to his girlfriend Sadie Asher. “Haven’t we done too much damage to each other to continue this game?”

“I can’t do this anymore,” said Peter Wilhelm, a vice president at J.P. Morgan Chase Bank to his boss, Stanley Wheel. “The financial services industry is just too wrecked for us to go on.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” said Linda Splevin, on the verge of sending her 8-year-old son Tyler to military academy.

All across the country, experts admit, Americans just can’t do it anymore. The U.S. Happiness Index suggests that a steady dose of geopolitical turmoil, economic uncertainty, rampant unemployment and sexual frustration have led Americans to a dramatic need to take a stand like the one they see made practically every day on television.

“When Miranda on ‘Sex and the City,’ said to Steve ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she was really speaking for all of us,” said Lacey Weiss, a psychologist at Northwestern University. “People tend to view both their world and their own lives in a dramatic story arc. They love beginnings. They struggle through the middles. They enjoy the high points for as long as they last. But what we love most of all when we’re being dramatic is bringing everything to a sweeping conclusion, likely with music ringing in their ears and the crashing denouement, ‘No, really, I can’t do this anymore.’ It is not just a trite phrase. It is part of our self-mythologizing.”

Weiss said that she planned to give up on her doctorate degree later that month and go get a job learning Chinese.

“I loved being a psychologist, but how long do I have to wait around for an interview like this one to make it all worth while? I just can’t do this anymore.”

The new trend is seen most perceptibly on the MTV hit “The Jersey Shore,” where approximately 67% of the dialogue is “I can’t do this anymore.” (The other 33% being “She’s DTF!” and “Snookie in the house, bitch.”)

“I just can’t do this anymore,” said Hosni Mubarak to the people of Egypt in mid-February. Meanwhile, other people who haven’t been able to do this anymore are Ashlee Simpson, Sandra Bullock and Kate Winslet. Comedy superstar Steve Carrell will meanwhile be leaving his hit series “The Office,” also because he can’t do this anymore.

However, pundits have noticed a discouraging number of people who as of this posting can indeed still do this anymore–among them are Muammar Gaddafi, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Kim Kardashian.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »