Monday, January 31, 2011

Let's talk L O V E, shall we?


So, ALMOST-funny story....

Actually - "funny" isn't the right word. Ironic? How about that - an ironic story.

Went to see "Blue Valentine" on Friday evening. Don't want to toss out too many spoilers, so I'll just say that it was EXCEPTIONALLY conversation-provoking and would be especially poignant for couples to watch together. There was plenty about the characters that I identified with, having lived through the decay of a relationship awhile back that felt in many ways quite similar to the one decaying onscreen. There were points at which I wanted to tell the Michelle Williams character to see the red flags ("Don't marry the guy! You'll resent each other before you know it!) then points at which I wanted to tell the Ryan Gosling character to cut his losses and walk away ("Dude. She's not worth the pain no matter how much you love her....."). It made me wish I could reach through the screen and counsel them - er, honestly, to hand them a copy of "The Five Love Languages" and force them to face the expectation gap in their little love story - differences between what she expected of him and what he was prepared to give her - differences between their ideas about whether or not love should conquer all or whether they should have to work at fixing things. Differences about affection, about work ethic, about how early in the morning he starts drinking....lots of conflicting expectations....

So, we watch their relationship flounder over the course of the movie, which cuts back and forth chronologically between the falling-in-love and the falling-apart aspects of their story, and finally culminates in a wedding moment posited alongside the "I think we're over" moment that made both all the more powerful.

My mom and I both left the theater feeling like we wanted to rush back to our gentlemen and snuggle up to them and let them know how much we appreciated what was GOOD about our relationships. Nothing like watching lovers crash and burn to make you grateful for stability. Trouble is, when we're on an emotional movie high, it's tough to explain exactly why we come home clingy....

Either way - the best I could do when I got back to Mr Wonderful that evening was explain that it was a really terrific movie, and that I loved him a lot.

And, apparently, SIGH heavily when he asked me for a back rub that night.

Gee - nothing says "I love you and appreciate you and am glad to be with you!" like acting put out when he asks for some affection. Wish I realized this at the time.....we've both established that physical touch is a CRITICALLY important expression of love for both of us - so being told, "Fine, if I HAVE to," via my reluctance was pretty much tantamount to saying, "No, I won't love you, and your request to be loved is an imposition upon me."

Ouch.

And right on the heels of my movie-watching indignation about the characters' arrogantly poor communication and patent lack of willingness to see their situation from the others' perspective.

Joke's on me for falling prey to the same arrogance - the bonus, in this case, is that Mr Wonderful is a fantastic communicator and is committed to talking about things when they come up - when he feels a rift between us, when he feels under-appreciated, when he feels unloved - so rather than just turning bitter and resentful on me, we talk about it.

Er, sure, truth-be-told I'm always caught off guard whenever he honestly admits to feeling unloved - I get indignant - "HOW can you feel that way?!?!?!? I DO love you - and since I love you, how could that ever be misinterpreted????? OBVIOUSLY I love you - I'm not DELIBERATELY trying to make you feel bad - how dare your feelings be hurt?" And - yikes - I get defensive and accusatory and the whole thing becomes unnecessarily messy - my age-old "fight or flight" mechanism kicks in - I always default to "flight." I was trained that way. Taught (whether directly or accidentally) by dad that you don't bring it all to the table when you're emotional, you back off, re-group, re-evaluate, cool down, then come back when you're ready to talk like a calm, normal person. HOWEVER, on the receiving end, Mr Wonderful is left with this: "I say I'm feeling unloved and like there's distance between us and you want to LEAVE on me?"

It's ugly.

And invariably I end up busting out the big alligator tears, feeling threatened and accused and surprised and feeling confused that it's even possible when I love him wholeheartedly to ever slide off track and leave him feeling otherwise. Alas.....it happens.

Also - sorry, Mr Wonderful, for the probably unnecessarily personal glimpse into Us, but it seemed relevant.....OR, it was fitting timing that on the heels of being convicted about the delicate, precious nature of love, I can be as callous as a movie character any day.

SO - Blue Valentine.

This was one of those films that forces you to evaluate your own relationships and to hope against hope that you're not so arrogant OR so comfortable with the state of things that you completely mistake your comfort for healthiness or assume that because your needs are met, that the other person's are as well.

It reminded me that it's a good idea to do a "love-check" every now and then - to take each others' temperature and make sure both people's needs are being tended - because - as in this movie, it's all too easy to let time pass, wake up one morning and discover we resent the other person for not fulfilling us (when the reason they're not fulfilling us is because they're feeling neglected themselves), and we expect that the things that make us feel healthy and loved are the same things that make our partner feel healthy and loved. Guess what: they're usually not. 

And just because a love affair BEGAN effortlessly and desires seemed perfectly aligned and everyone was thoroughly, blissfully happy from the outset doesn't mean it can CONTINUE effortlessly, and to mistake the ease with which we fell in love for the ease with which that love will be maintained and strengthened would be, um....a grievous error.

But we make that error all the time........

ALSO - there was a line toward the beginning of the film that I've been pondering for several days. The Ryan Gosling character says, while philosophizing about romance with some work buddies:

"I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married we marry, like, one girl, 'cause we're resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think I'd be an idiot if I didn't marry this girl she's so great. But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option... 'Oh he's got a good job.' I mean they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is gonna stick around."

Something about the way he delivered this just made it sound SO true......I had to wonder whether or not men and women really DO approach marriage this way.....I guess I've probably bumped into my fair share of both who seem to fit this stereotype. But while I can't speak for men who've met the girl who changes their minds about forever after-hood, I think I can provide an explanation for the "Oh, he's got a good job" line.

Our Prince Charming changes.

When we're 18, our idea of the Perfect Man is this sort of James Bond meets Eddie Vedder meets Mr Darcy meets Indiana Jones meets Mr Big meets Paul Rudd in Clueless amalgamation who will hold our purse in the mall and write amazing love songs about us and save us from every threat of danger, be the envy of our friends and our swashbuckling soul mate and look good in a suit, in a cowboy hat, in a flannel shirt, or in nothing at all. We don't much care what he does for work or about his relationship with his family, or whether he prefers cats or dogs, boxers or briefs, wine or beer, well done or medium rare, toilet seat up or down, kids or pets, beaches or ski slopes, Adam Sandler or Eddie Izzard -- whatever. We're looking for a caricature.

And then we grow up a little.

And Price Charming becomes the guy who will be a compassionate father. The guy who will be a dependable partner. The guy who gets along well with your dad and your grandmother and your cat. The guy who makes a great companion. The guy who also really knows how to kiss. So, yeah, the guy with the good job who is gonna stick around. And that's not saying we're settling or that we give up on romance, just that we're realistic about what we want for the future.....and realistic about the fact that sustaining romance means finding someone we can feel safe with....

Either way - interesting to hear a character in a movie take the "in defense of men as hopeless romantics" stance......because I think I do understand what he's saying in the male regard - you spend your first several decades ambivalent, and then meet someone about whom it's not possible to feel ambivalent and decide you don't want to lose that girl or that feeling, so you better lock that down before....uh, before she changes her mind, maybe? Finds "something better?" I mean, sure that attitude bothers me because it assumes that women are fickle and constantly trolling for a better offer (not true! not true!), but fear and love do tend to, unfortunately, go hand in hand, so stands to reason there's a certain amount of trepidation that having found a girl worth keeping means that she won't want to be kept......

I could probably ramble on dating theory for pages, however - so I'll just cut this short and say:

GO SEE BLUE VALENTINE.

And then come back shoot me some comments about whether or not you agree - are men more hopelessly romantic?

OH, and I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't reference the quickly infamous, much-discussed scene that nearly netted the movie an NC-17 rating? The oral scene. My take: meh. It was definitely more explicit than its Black Swan counterpart, but, I thought, less disturbing or...uncomfortably graphic than a scene between the older version of the characters where wife deigns to have bathroom-floor sex with husband in the most pathetic, pitying sort of way, that, since they're both drunk, leads to utterly, convincingly uncomfortable moments of hurt feelings and threats of violence and all-too-realistic tension between the two when the husband wants his wife to want him, and she just wants to get him out of her way.......that was more difficult to watch than a happy girl with her pants down. Just my take. The greater shock came from context.

So there you have it.

Friday, January 28, 2011

The Fox lost the hotness. This is hardly breaking news.

I think the moment we all REALIZED that she was no longer even moderately relevant was when we watched the De Niro acceptance speech at the Golden Globes where he made a joke about her and we all cringed because he was so obviously....out of touch. A joke about people wanting to feel up Megan Fox? That's odd and outdated. We don't WANT to feel up Megan Fox anymore - doesn't the old guy know that?

But then I saw these pictures of her today and thought, "hmmm - so not only is she pop-culturally irrelevant, she's not lookin so hot these days, either."

Some of that MIGHT (might!) have had to do with the outfit she's wearing up there in that picture (more photos here). Usually I love these sort of thrown together, "watch me strut my funky boots," out-and-about-pumping-gas sort of looks......But seriously? Weird little sailor shorts and washed out looking grey hosiery with some weirdo clunky not-quite-ankle granny wedges? It's just...off. Check out the big-headed/large-footed perspective:


And it's not just that she's gotten so thin, I rarely accuse celebs of needing to gain weight, I figure being unnaturally skinny comes with the famous territory - BUT - she tends to look anemic these days. Wan. Washed out. In need of a good Mystic session or three.

She "tried" to pull it together for the Globes - but there was something "fresh off the surgeon's table" about her face - she looked immobile, waxy, her makeup  looked like a mask.....she looked limp and listless and pained.


And then there was the Jonah Hex premier last year where she looked like a fish-lipped skull with a wig in a poorly-fitting dress and some bolt-on mammaries. The hotness hit the skids. Incidentally, so too has her career.



It's all a far cry from just a few years ago when her 2008 red carpet look screamed "By the way: I'm the hottest chick on the planet. And we all know I crawled outta bed looking this way"


So what'd she do with the hot?????? She got married, for one, but that's no definitive kiss of death. She lost her part in the Transformers franchise to a Victoria's Secret model, but that franchise was pretty well dead the second the Bumblebee Camaro sprayed car-jizz on Isabel Lucas. And I think most of us would have preferred to see Megan come back and dead-eye her way through another blue-screened cheese-fest rather than have to deal with the "story line" surrounding her new, blonder replacement.

Anyway - we know she's ridiculously self-impressed in interviews, we know she runs her mouth off and gets herself in trouble with directors, but what we don't know is: can she get the hot back?

Methinks no.

She's dabbled with cosmetic surgery, so her 2008 face can never come back. So the face itself is wasted. She can add five pounds to her frame and spend a few weekends on a beach towel to get the voluptuous back. Seriously: check out this before and after (the before was from back in 2004). Let's keep in mind: this chick is BARELY into her twenties. A 23 year-old should NOT look like this after just a few short years of "fame."


Brings up another point that's really resonated with me recently: with the exception of Demi Moore (who denies really having anything but a little lipo done), I've NEVER seen a woman look better AFTER elective cosmetic surgery. Lips injected with filler NEVER look like normal lips. Cheeks implanted with Lord knows what NEVER look like normal cheeks. Foreheads stretched and pulled and brows jammed with Botox NEVER look like normal foreheads and eyebrows. Nose jobs never go unnoticed. Reshaping your chin always leaves you looking like you went under the knife. A messed up face ALWAYS looks like a messed up face.

Trouble is, this girl had all the right equipment to BEGIN with. She was absolutely, completely, UNFAIRLY gorgeous.

And now she's a washed up starlet with a jacked face and knobby knees who turns into the butt of bad Robert De Niro jokes.....

Anyway - first step toward getting the hot back: ditch that horrible sock-boot combo. Your hair looks too good to be seen in public with those legs dressed the way they are.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Oh, the old "briefcase full of cocaine" trick [UPDATED]


So, I sort of hate to glorify bad behavior. I try not to mention any of the Kardashians any more than "necessary," I didn't jump on the Lindsay Lohan rehab gossip bandwagon, I'm reserving judgment on the celebrity status of the various "Teen Mom" stars, and I've been so -- honestly -- patently DIS-interested in the rapid decline of Charlie Sheen that I haven't even had it in me to mention any of his stupid, drunken, coke-antics.

BUT - now he's hospitalized, his mother and father are by his side, doctors are saying "...it's serious" and I'm finally going to just come out and say it:

Charlie - would you just OD and die already?

Please?

Because I don't think I can handle more years of "hookers and blow" stories while he struts around in a cheap fedora looking like warmed over, sweat-stained jaundice in complete denial of the utter mess he's become.

He's web-stalking hookers now. And before he was raced to the hospital this morning with that severe abdominal pain, TMZ reports that "After hours of drinking...a person showed up to the house with a designer 'briefcase' -- that contained multiple 'bricks' of cocaine."

I'm just going to assume that "briefcase" still means briefcase. That it's not some sort of ironic euphemism for "barely legal hooker's cleavage" or other such nonsense. In which case, it sounds like he's in the sort of radically amped up decline toward which serial killers are so disposed right before they target the main cop character in a crime novel and personally mark them for death. That's the same point at which they usually make their one -- ultimately fatal -- mistake that leads to their downfall and probably ends in a shootout in an abandoned cabin.

In Charlie's case, I think he'll just die.

You can only go on so many sex-and-coke benders before the liver (or pancreas or kidneys or stomach or any other number of important organs) throw all their chips on the table and declare the hand too rich for their blood.

Because the day he seeks LEGIMATE rehabilitation is the day we actually start eliminating the enemy by shooting chickens out of crossbows.

And I think I can handle a few solid weeks of Charlie Sheen retrospectives where we catch a lot of "Wall Street" and "Platoon" clips and we catch lots of quotes from Emilio "Hey, whatever happened to him, anyway?" Estevez and we re-watch "Hot Shots!" and we feel poorly for his children and army of ex-wives and we lose interest in social-climbing "escorts" with fake blonde hair and names like Jordan and Candi and we NEVER HAVE TO HEAR ABOUT ANOTHER TRASHED HOTEL ROOM AGAIN.

Because I can handle a brief bout of intense "it's so sad - he just needed help" fluff news stories and I can handle seeing his photo in the Academy Awards memorial segment and I can handle a few moments of nostalgia for the days when I had a life-sized cutout of that Shooting Chicken From Bow scene on my bedroom wall and a legitimate crush on Topper Harley and then we can all MOVE ON.

And if that's callous, then how about this:

Get your ass in rehab, Charlie. Because they'll never let you borrow a new liver otherwise. Not Hollywood Rehab - but ACTUAL treatment somewhere in....North Dakota where there are no porn stars to distract you and the hookers look less like last year's prom queens and more like Women From North Dakota.

And then, when you're out, you can go live in a home you built with your own two hands somewhere in Wyoming, and you'll surface every few years to make a touching Lifetime movie and your E! True Hollywood Story actually has a decent ending.

Don't be the next Anna Nicole.

Do it for Topper Harley.

(UPDATE: darn - it's not acute bodily failure - it's some sort of stomach hernia that causes "stuff" to back-up into his esophagus and cause extreme pain........darn. He'll live to party with porn stars another day.....)

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

File this under: SO. HIGHLY. UNNECESSARY.


I remember about a year ago a girlfriend and I went to one of those "yes! we'll serve you booze here!" movie theaters a few days before Valentine's Day to see the year's most unapologetic chick-flick, "Valentine's Day." No shame here. I like girl movies. I like ensemble casts. I like to make fun of Topher Grace. I like to heckle Ashton Kutcher. I like to contemplate Jessica Beal's impressive thighs. Things like that.

We got there early, we ordered up our drinks, we stood in line with 152 other women, giggling about the fact that none of them could convince their men to come along -- even with the promise of Scotch brought directly to their seat.

Turns out they over-sold the show. We had our drinks. We didn't have a seat. Oh, except they could pull a chair "into the doorway for one of us if one of us would like to watch the movie."

Screw that. As much as I love the idea of watching a movie from a "vestibule"  while seated in a plastic chair sipping overpriced bubbly, I'd only do it if the BOTH of us could sit in the vestibule on plastic chairs together. As there was only room for one plastic chair: we begged unsuccessfully for a refund, guzzled another cocktail and split.

Off to another theater -  one of those megaplexes with lots of screens and plenty of show times and a real, actual parking garage. We ordered popcorn. We stood in another line. A line that wrapped all the way through the theater lobby. A line of hundreds. A line including three men.

The ratio looked about like the show Ryan Gosling's band "Dead Man's Bones" played not long ago - except in this case, a little less exciting of a crowd to watch because girls didn't have their racks out like they thought if their cleavage looked good enough in the dark Gosling would track them down after the show and insist on taking them back to his hotel where he and his cuter band-mate could make her the filling in their musical man sandwich. This was just a "dateless Friday night at movies with girlfriends" crowd. The ratio of skinny jeans and boots to all other attire was still tipped heavily in the skinny jeans direction, but basically - a lot of girls and a lot of giant vats of diet Coke.

The movie was fine. I mean, each member of the giant cast probably got their six minutes of screen time. Every body lived happily ever after. Jennifer Garner got to wear cute little kindergarten teacher dresses and Jamie Foxx dropped by to be annoying. It was forgettable. Bradley Cooper was gay. Taylor Swift was insufferably shrill. Nothing special.

BUT, thanks to Gary Marshall's severe hangup with saccharine movies starring women desperate to get married, we're getting a sequel to "Valentine's Day." It opens this December. It's called "New Year's Eve." Oh boy.

Even better: Bon Jovi signed on to play a "rock star."

Who else is in the already-too-star-studded-to-allow-even-six-minutes-of-screen-time-per-actor cast? Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Lea Michele, Robert De Niro, Abigail Breslin, Zac Efron, Ashton Kutcher, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank and Sofia Vergara.

I see that list and think, "Um, Robert De Niro and Zac Efron better really bring the big guns, because, uh, there aren't nearly enough boys on that list to pair each of those actresses up with "true love" by the credits."

And we're getting new reports of new people added to the cast daily, so I can only imagine that by the time this mess hits theaters nearly a year from now, there will be 174 people signed on and the movie will have to be nothing but one big musical montage that parades them all through the streets of New York for a few seconds at a time and leaves the rest to our imaginations.

I do love a good musical montage.

Anyway - mark your calendars. December 9th.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

He must be great in bed...???


First up - Jason Sudeikis. The new David Spade. As in "he must smell really great, or give really great....um....COMPLIMENTS....or have something fantastic going on south-of-belt" because I can come up with no other reason why this man gets up-close-and-personal with as many A-listers as he does.

I know, I'm blinded by the fact that he has fluffy hair, so I can see no further, I'll admit that much. I kept trying to put my finger over his hair in that picture to decide if he would look any better bald (trick question: of course he would), but then I get this sort of "goofy Bryan Cranston a'la Breaking Bad" vibe which doesn't really help much, either......though I do love Bryan Cranston.....

Back to the Dork at Hand: first off, he's a funny enough guy. I enjoy him on SNL, though there's nothing particularly memorable or spectacular or all that original about his schtick. But he's good. HOWEVER - in the past year he's had his name (and other things) associated with Jennifer Aniston, January Jones and NOW: Scarlett Johansson. And he accomplished all of that BEFORE that "Hall Pass" movie even opened. You know - THIS movie:



Okay, I actually chuckled a few times during that preview. The chloroform bit - decently amusing.

Now, the ScarJo camp has issued bland but reasonably believable denials. "They're just friends," and "They became buddies during Scarlett's SNL hosting gigs," or "They have mutual friends," but my guess is that she actually might be slummin it with The Sudeikis when she thinks no one's looking. Because he's probably one of those "cute once you get to know him" types that surprises you with some impressive.....um....SINCERITY.....er....behind closed doors.

Anyway - he just finished up a 6-month run with January Jones and apparently "tried" dating Aniston - so he's got a "Bland and Blonde" type that he likes.  He was married to 30 Rock writer Kat Cannon before the Series of Aniston Denials, but I have to wonder if this isn't the beginning of a long line of head-scratchingly high-profile girlfriends for this guy....

I just don't get it.

So I won't try. 

Moving right along.

Also under the SLUMMING heading we have the next installment in my "Heather Dreams Celebrities are Embarrassed to be Seen With Her BUT They Can't Stay Away" series.

This time: Jason Statham. He probably popped up because the Daily Mail had some non-story about the fact that he and his Victoria's Secret model/girlfriend have finally returned home from their Extended Caribbean Holiday and can get back to that business of playing house in their big, new, fancy American Mansion. 

New twist: my mother was nowhere in sight to berate my lame flirting skills in this dream. Which wouldn't really have mattered because last night, Senor Statham was quite drunk. And we were in some sort of post-apocalyptic London which was mostly flooded. There was trash floating all over the place.

But on one little floating concrete island we had the home of his current model/girlfriend Rosie Huntington-Whitely and on another little floating concrete island we had Casa de Heather. And as much as he loathed himself for it (therein: the slumming), he just couldn't stay away from MY little floating concrete island in the wasteland of neo-London. He couldn't help himself, he wanted a soggy piece of me. This made Victoria's Secret Rosie very mad.

Now, I never want to be the reason a supermodel is pissed off and resorts to tossing supermodel glares across the swampy city -- BUT -- I can't deny the smug gratification I had when I became "The little ordinary girl [that] could." Anyway - dream commenced. The Statham kept getting tossed out of bars. He was trying to drink himself back into the Supermodel arms, I can only suppose. And every time they tossed him out of a bar, he ended up on my flooded doorstep. Ehhhhh, maybe it's because she looks like THIS without makeup on......(sorry - cheap shot, couldn't help it)


So yeah...my dreams are good to me. And in dreamland, Mr Conflicted didn't even have booze-breath. Just a lot of aggression. Because - uh, he's Jason Statham. I refuse to believe Jason the Man actually goes shoe-shopping with his model-girlfriend. Who are we kidding - Jason the Action Hero totally hangs out in dark basements doing pull-ups with his pinkies and getting pumped to kick someone's teeth in.

And I'm not a girl that likes a tough guy. So the whole "I'm ANGRY - I'm DRUNK - I don't know if I wanna nail you or send my FIST through that WALL!" routine is no good, even in dreams...now shoe shopping....shoe shopping is good.


In other news - Oscar nominations are out! This is my NFL post-season equivalent. I'll issue my "wishes and predictions" in a few weeks - for now, it looks like I've got some movie-watching ahead of me.....


Friday, January 21, 2011

Ha - !!! I mean....uh.....litigiousness knows no bounds.



Yeah, um, this is straight out of that SNL skit "I didn't ask for this." You know - the one with the Jon Hamm "Best Cry Ever" (which, by the way, I see has been made into an actual ringtone....geez, I need to get my hands on that). The skit involved a fake talk show starring the victims of random incidents caught on camera that become "epic web fail" vidoes. Like Kristen Wiig's character getting hit over the head with a hammer, which then gets mixed into a hip hop video. Or Jon Hamm "crying" (a sound that's less "cry" and more "dying baby whale") which gets auto-tuned and goes viral. And the subjects whine and moan about how they "Didn't ask for this" while the producer and host of the show try not to laugh in their faces.

Pretty entertaining.

Anyway - this is pretty much a real-life version of that....a woman was walking through a mall. Woman was texting while walking. Woman didn't notice a giant FOUNTAIN in front of her. Woman falls into fountain.

It's glorious, actually. Don't watch where you're going while texting and you'll end up face down with all of those grimy Mall Fountain Pennies that people let their kids toss for good luck......

So, it gets better.

She got a lawyer.

The attorney is conjuring righteous amounts of vitriol over the fact that it took mall security 20 minutes to find out whether or not she was okay. And that's not acceptable. And "what if she'd been elderly?"

Let's pick this apart a little bit, shall we?

First: it was HER FAULT. When you walk into doors and windows and fall down stairs and drop things on your toe because you're NOT PAYING ATTENTION, it is NOT the door's or the window's or the stairs' or the rock's fault. It's YOUR FAULT.

That's like saying, "oh, oops, I was texting and driving and ran into this here wall. Geez! I might have been an old person and run into this wall and died! And what took the police so long to get here and tow my car away - I might have been suffering! I think I'll SUE!"

Seriously. It sounds that ridiculous.

This article breaks down what happened and why she's holding the mall responsible for their slow response (they took 20 minutes to track her down - she'd left by that point I guess). Um, a little hard for mall people to find your @$$ when you immediately climb out of the fountain, mutter "ain't no thang....." and book it to your car out of embarrassment. What did she EXPECT the mall people to do?????

In her words: "My issue is I don't think security was professional because they didn't send anyone to check on me until 20 minutes later and I had already left."

Because you fled the scene. Ya eeeeeedyote. 


(That's "idiot" with an accent, by the way). 


Further: this would NOT have happened to a senior citizen. They don't text and walk. They don't! They're smarter than that. They are! The average senior citizen would not attempt to do ANYTHING else while walking, let alone focus their eyeballs on a tiny screen or the tiny keys of a cell phone. They wouldn't!


Anyway - hopefully she's learned her lesson. And, if not, I think I should start up the real life version of the 'I Didn't Ask For This" show and toss her up there as my first guest.



Thursday, January 20, 2011

Spooky. And annoying.



So, had an absolutely bizarre dream last night.

In the dream, my mother and sister both died within one week of each other. Sad, in its own right - but in my dream, the ghost of my now-dead sister followed me around and gave me the, uh, ghostly gift of being able to see through her eyes, right before she died.

This is quite spooky.

Particularly because, in the dream, she died of a gunshot to the head while playing an alcohol-fueled version of Russian Roulette. She was with old high school friends. Drunk, old high school friends, I guess.

So through her eyes, I got to glimpse her dying moments, spent laying on a linoleum floor, bleeding out while her friends partied on, obliviously. It took awhile for anyone to call for help - took awhile for any help to arrive, and in the end, I lived through visions of my sisters last minutes, spent in a pool of her own blood, staring at the floor, under a bed, watching her friends' ankles and feet move past her, not realizing she was there...DYING.

Yeah, it was very "I see dead people."

And then in my dream, after experiencing my death through the eyes of my sister's ghost (oh - and Ghost of Sis was very particular about not wanting my thoughts to linger in the room where she'd died because "she'd just spent too many hours there on that floor"), I still had to talk my boss into giving me a few days of bereavement leave. To mourn my sister AND my mother.

And in my dream, aside from being terrified to show any emotion in front of my decidedly anti-emotional boss while alternately rationalizing that there's no time like DEATH TIME to really bring out the big emotional guns, I was alternating between being PETRIFIED to tell my mother my sister was dead, then remembering mother was dead, too, so how would she know about my sister...? WHO would tell her about my sister???

Man, I woke up from that one in a cold sweat. Heart thumping. It was about 4am and I'd NEVER been so glad to wake up from a dream.

Did NOT particularly want to fall back asleep after that.

Sheesh.

But anyway.

Gaga's Remix of the Not-Yet-Released Single and it's accompanying "mini-movie" is not quite as spooky as that dream.

HOWEVER: my dream did NOT involve people with their head tattooed like a skull wandering down a runway in flowy clothes.

Why, skull on runway is almost as spooky as dead sister on linoleum.

Almost.

I'll say this, Gaga: you better seriously bring it when this song drops for real, because based on this mostly-German brou-haha: I'm NOT impressed.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

It's that time again already?!


My thoughts this afternoon became "save the tax refund. Car repairs can wait - Coachella can't."

(Other thoughts this afternoon:
  • Oh gee, this Friday is "muffin day" at work. This makes people in my department inordinately excited. Like the promise of Costco muffins and a sales pitch is enough to get these middle aged men out of bed in the morning. 
  • I now agree with Mr Wonderful - Subaru drivers are among the most passive-aggressive on the road. Probably second only to those driving a gold-colored Lexus. Dunno what it is about those cars, but they're a speed-up-pass-you-slow-down driver's dream-come-true. Get out of my way and let me drive 90, thanks!
  • Driving 90 scored me a speeding ticket on Christmas Day. No love for the speeding drivers on Christmas, huh? Nasty Cop. Who my sister wanted to date. 
  • Christina Aguilera got trashed at Jeremy Renner's birthday bash and passed out in his bed. He wasn't in it at the time. Her boyfriend was there to rub her head and generally permit her drunk lunacy. Jeremy apparently didn't see the humor in this.
  • Mila Kunis eats. Tacos. Sometimes. 
  • Ha!! Taylor Swift has an arch-rival. In the form of Camilla Belle. Team Camilla! I have no idea who she is or why she's famous, but there's some sort of "feud" between the two. I didn't know Taylor feuded. I thought she drank coffee, picked apples, dreamed of princes and starved herself. No? Hmmm. There's more to this girl than meets the eye. Either way - Team Camilla!
  • People can be mean. Like the people who read the article suggesting that "Conservatives support Ricky Gervais" and decided to comment on that article by saying "it's because they hate the jews." Pardon? Where are the moderators? Ban those sorts of pointless, inflammatory comments. How disgusting.
  • It's legal to drink and ride. On horseback. In Montana, anyway. Which should probably be a good talking point for PETA in the future. Don't crash your horse while drunk
  • I spend way too much time on Celebitchy).
Notice my creative (and probably improper) use of parentheses? Scroll up. There is it.

Anyway - back to my first point:

It's that time of year again. The time when I completely inundate myself with a whole lot of bands I'm marginally familiar with to find those "ooh! love them!" diamonds in the rough and become entirely, compulsively obsessed with making a pilgrimage to Palm Springs to warm up and dry out at Coachella.

Ah yes - it's here again already.

And guess who's gonna be there: KANYE!

Oh - but that's not all....

The National!
Robyn!
The Black Keys!
Animal Collective!
Interpol!
The Strokes!
Kings of Leon!

And Duran Duran. Yep.

So, once again I'm doing number-crunching and (truth be told) outfit planning, dreaming of blue skies and hot sun and palm trees and dry, dusty earth and days and days of glorious tunes. And I'm thanking God that he gave me very camping-friendly hair that can go days without washing and look precisely as it did the day before. Because things like 3 days of camping can destroy a "normal girls" beauty routine. Not this girl. I have good camping hair.

But that's neither here nor there.

What is there:
Jenny and Johnny!
The Felice Brothers!
The Swell Season!
Best Coast!
Arcade Fire!

Seriously.

Check out the lineup here.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

And we wonder why I was underwhelmed with "boys my own age."


First crush of my life was on Jameson Parker's AJ Simon character on Simon and Simon.

I didn't realize at the time that the show was terrible. I was seven. They were detectives. It was like McGuyver Goes To the Office. It didn't get any better. Handsome crime solvers. Ooooh, ahh. Such was borne, apparently, my lifelong hangup with police procedural television, the love of which knows no bounds.

But more about that AJ Simon.

My mother has repeatedly informed me since that "I picked the wrong brother. AJ was a priss. His brother Rick, that was the hunky one."

Gerald McRaney? Really? I dunno, AJ may have been a priss, but he wore "suits and ties." So, too, did my father at the time. And to my seven-year old self, dad was the ultimate paragon of class and authority, so how could a girl go wrong when choosing the hunky blonde detective who ALSO wore the suits and ties? It was a no-brainer. Real Men Wear Suits (preferably without Leather Elbow Reinforcements, but hey, sign of the times).

Anyway - when my sister and I would play our own imaginary version of "Simon and Simon" in the backyard, her younger-sister-sentence (handed down with great...aplomb....by my bossy older-sister-self) was that she be relegated to playing the Rick Character because he - heaven forbid - wore FLANNEL SHIRTS.

Where's the class in that? Flannel? To solve crimes?

Shudder. Mr Parker is nearly 63 now....wow, that makes me feel pretty old right there. First crush of my life is enjoying his social security benefits.

Right. So - second crush of my life was on my second grade school principal. Mr Gardner. Staged elaborate fantasy sequences (or, as elaborate as an eight year-old could fathom) that involved the school filling up with water and Mr Gardner swimming through the hallways in bright red shorts. I dunno, maybe AJ Simon wore red shorts to go swimming in an episode.

Segue into the high school years and my affections were locked on the Vice Principal. Mr Schultz. Mostly bald, of course. I think Jameson Parker was the only crush with a solid head of hair I've can recall having, period. Bizarre. And we wonder why my adolescent years flew by in a datelessly dry spell. No gentlemen suitors coming to call. No dates to school dances. I dunno, I probably could have tried harder, but at that point: none of them were Mr Schultz.

Hey kid, what's yer point?

My point: it stands to reason my expectations for gentlemen my age were a little high. Or, um, we were fed a steady television diet of High School Characters Played By Actors Pushing 30. How could the average sixteen year-old dude have possibly looked good enough when every show from 90210 to Dawson's Creek featured a parade of Grown Ups posing as something close to kids.

Glee does it.

Gossip Girl does it.

Grease did it.

Hollywood supposes that real, actual teens are awkward enough not to play themselves convincingly enough, so they enlist 26 year-olds to play more believable versions of high school students.

The list of movies and TV shows starring actors old enough to play their characters' parents (ok, not really) is long an illustrious - here's a slideshow I stumbled across today that got a good chuckle - it's called "Old People Who Played Teenagers:

A spoiler (one of these ladies was 28 when she played a high school junior).....

Monday, January 17, 2011

He was fine, movie stars just don't have a sense of humor.....

 

Remember LAST year's Golden Globes? When Ricky Gervais made fun of any and everything in Hollywood, the Hollywood people didn't understand his jokes, us "normal folks" at home giggled our buns off and thought it was too bad that his jokes flew right over their heads? He made Angelina jokes, Mel Gibson jokes (at the time, less heinous than today), Aniston jokes, cosmetic surgery jokes - subtle, dry, BRITISH-styled jabs that were apparently primarily lost on the famous people at the tables sipping their Moet et Chandon. Or not sipping. I swear I saw more un-touched bottles of bubbly on the tables than I did full flutes. THAT there is the travesty, not the Gervais. 

Anyway, they asked him back to dish up another helping this year, he pulled out the same stunts and got the same groans. Last year the question was, "did he bomb? will he be back again?" and this year the question posed by mainstream media (and the blogs that pander to stars) has become "did he go too far? Will the Hollywood Foreign Press Association BAN him forever?"

Please.

The moral of the story is that Ricky Gervais is a funny, wry guy with a definite grasp of the subtler goings-on in pop culture and he spins that wit into jokes that a bunch of self-entitled, smug movie stars can't handle. Because they can't appreciate (or even giggle at) the bizarre absurdity of their lives or recognize that for half of them, we associate them as much with their tabloid faux pas as we do with their movies. Or their television shows. Or whatever. 

Basically, he dared SAY what the rest of us were thinking. Stuff like this:

"It seems like everything this year was 3-dimensional -- except for the characters in The Tourist...I haven't even seen 'The Tourist' -- who has?"

Or when he acknowledged the "are they or aren't they?" orientation of Tom Cruise and John Travolta (take your pick....either man has had their name slung across tabloids in reference to trysts on the downlow this year) when he said about the film "I Love You, Phillip Morris,"

"two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay. So, the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then." 

I giggled. The crowd groaned. It was current. Bold? Ehhhh, maybe. But familiar to those of us who troll tabloid covers. 

He name-dropped Robert Downey Jr in the only old news, not-funny-anymore jab of the evening, but Downey is witty enough to defend himself, coming back with this already much-quoted retort:

"Aside from the fact that it's been hugely mean-spirited with mildly sinister undertones, I'd say the vibe of the show's pretty good so far, wouldn't you?"

But nothing so outrageous it warranted responses from the HFPA such as this item purportedly whined by a member: 

"Ricky will not be invited back to host the show next year, for sure...For sure any movie he makes he can forget about getting nominated. He humiliated the organization last night and went too far with several celebrities whose representatives have already called to complain...He definitely crossed the line...And some of the things were totally unacceptable. But that's Ricky. Any of the references to individuals is certainly not something the Hollywood Foreign Press condones."

Aha. And therein lies the real complaint. 

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is having to apologize to representatives from miffed stars who got their feelings hurt. The stars call their handlers and whine because they were the butt of a joke, the handlers call the HFPA, the HFPA issues broad, blanket statements to placate the famous handlers, the blanket statements trickle down to the masses who laughed at the jokes, and all of the average joes at home read this the next day and think, "wow - those famous people really can't take a joke...."

So, I wanted to learn a little bit more about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I'll leave most of the history aside -- you can find it here -- and say that the organization sprouted in the 1940's during World War II and the Golden Globe awards are presently their most recognizable contribution to the broader entertainment industry. Here's their mission statement:

The mission of the HFPA is:
 To establish favorable relations and cultural ties between foreign countries and the United States of America by the dissemination of information concerning the American culture and traditions as depicted in motion pictures and television through news media in various foreign countries;
 To recognize outstanding achievements by conferring annual Awards of Merit, (Golden Globe® Awards), serving as a constant incentive within the entertainment industry, both domestic and foreign, and to focus wide public attention upon the best in motion pictures and television;
 To contribute to other nonprofit organizations connected with the entertainment industry and involved in educational, cultural, and humanitarian activities;
 To promote interest in the study of the arts, including the development of talent in the entertainment field through scholarships given to major learning institutions.

Soooooo - what part of making fun of The Tourist is in direct violation of their mission to promote interest in the arts? Are they afraid that The World At Large will perceive the Gervais jokes to be sanctioned by The Association and somehow serve as a DISincentive within the entertainment industry to focus on the "best in motion pictures and television?" HARDLY. If anything, he pointed out the glaring holes in the Association's function - they nominated films that no one even watched, let alone the BEST the industry has to offer, mostly in order to guarantee the major A-listers would have to show up. 

There. That's my theory. They nominated a lot of these movies and stars so that the stars would be sure to be there and the ratings would look better. 

And so if Ricky Gervais wants to call out the obvious jokes about Bruce Willis being Ashton Kucher's dad and Tim Allen having no real credits to his name, then have at it. It'll nab ratings, too. 

If anything, I'm going to call bull on all of this - I'm going to suggest that the HFPA suggests in their own mission statement that they're out to further awareness, promote themselves through entertainment and garner interest in Hollywood around the globe. What better way than to have a host from the UK make a bunch of Hollywood stars mad enough to rant to the Association and force the association to issue press releases? 

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but, uh:

I smell a rat. 

And not just the one that made a nest on Scarlett Johanson's head last night. 

Friday, January 14, 2011

Uh oh. Girl in her underwear. Hide your children. SIGH.



So, I'm moody today.

Sigh. Work's been a busy pain in my ever-expanding @$$.....AND....I saw some pictures of myself from two years ago and realized the steady weight gain I've been allowing this year is disgusting and needs to stop.....AND....I'm wearing uncomfortable pants....AND....I didn't get my coffee this morning....AND....I'm having one of those "why do I look so TIRED?" sort of days where I can't pin down what's OFF, but something about my face is DEFINITELY off.....

Take your pick.

OH, also:

Olivia Munn on the cover of Maxim is generating all sorts of righteous indignation from people who are afraid of seeing girls in lacy panties, basically.

Here's the scandal:

Olivia's undies are sort of see-through.

AAAAAAAND Fox News' entertainment blog found some guy named Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business & Culture at the Media Research Center, who is making a huge deal over this, squawking about how the cover is "disgusting" and suggesting that "Any store could have children coming in. If I were a parent, and I walked into a store and saw that cover, I would make a scene until the manager hid it." 

And then the snippet goes on to explain the history of Walmart's decision not to sell the magazine in it's stores.

I was explaining this entire debacle to Mr Wonderful last night and he started chuckling before I'd even finished my rant. Said he could imagine himself being one of those disturbed parents who didn't want their kids to see celebrity camel toe while waiting in line to buy the dog food and the Gatorade. I got typically obstinate (ugh, major weakness....) interrupted and blabbed about the fact that she's so PhotoShopped you can't even see anything in the first place, but that's just a tangent. My real point:

I have three issues with this sort of underwear fear-mongering and the Uptight Fox Response:

One: this Dan Gainor fellow must never have seen a Maxim cover before. Because guess what, Dan? THEY FEATURE SEXY LADIES IN TINY CLOTHES. How ELSE are they going to sell pages of Fossil ads and boring faux-articles about hoverboards to bunches of dudes without the promise of serious cleavage on the inside? If you're going to make a big to-do about THIS cover, you'd better be prepared to make a big to-do about EVERY Maxim cover.....

Two:  And warning - my whiny soapbox is about to become ten feet tall here - WalMart has NO problem exposing your child to FIREARMS, to ammunition, or to violent video games and films. BUT, a girl in sheer undies is NOT an option. Cleavage and shiny abs are NOT an option. One of our nation's largest retailers will jump up on their moral platform about sexually suggestive material, but they'll let your kid buy startlingly realistic video games in which they get to practice killing people. WHY IS SEXY WORSE?

Actually, this is a pretty pervasive American cultural phenomenon. Two examples. First is personal. I remember being a little kid on a family vacation - maybe 9 years old? The family was watching the movie "Dragnet." There was a scene in a strip club where a woman wearing nipple tassels crawls along the bar. My  uncle jumped up and dove for the TV where he stood strategically in front of the screen until the offending scene was done. BUT, when tanks roll through town wreaking havoc and pagan rituals are on screen and guns are blasting - no problem. Because starting out kids out with violent images at a young age is OK. Sensuality is NOT.

Same thing happened on a larger, international scale when an ultra-violent French erotic film called Baise Moi was released. I've not seen the film, but read that it was WIDELY banned in MANY countries (the UK, Canada, Australia). However - the US was the only country to ban it due to sexual content. France went so far as to ban the film from theatre release as well - in fact, it was the first film they banned in a solid 28 years. BUT, they deemed it too explicitly VIOLENT for release.

So, the standard in American Cinema is that we're prepared to subject movie-going audiences to extreme, gratuitous violence, but sex - not so much. Now, in the spirit of transparency I have to give the caveat here that most of the sex in the film was also exceptionally violent. There was a rape scene. The "heroine," if we can call her that, went on a vigilante revenge rampage killing men following her attack. SO - it's a flawed example because the movie was gratuitous in MANY ways - BUT, the rationale behind banning the film was telling. Americans didn't take exception with intense violence the way other nations did.

THIRD - The very act of bringing this up is drawing more attention to the cover and selling more magazines than saying nothing, Mr Dan Gainor. Notoriety is still a great marketing tactic. Maxim doesn't care if people buy the magazine because they want to read about the nations best beers or if they buy the magazine because they want to see more pictures of Olivia inside OR if they buy the magazine because "someone said there was a big deal over it in the media." A sale is a sale. I can't see many folks saying, "well, I was going to buy the magazine, but since Fox found this guy who thinks its inappropriate, I think I'll hold off....."

So, Mr Gainor, you've just done more good for the big, bad, dirty magazine than you have good......

AND this ended up a lot longer than I'd planned.

An additional observation, however - she's been so airbrushed and photo-edited, she resembles a Barbie doll more than an actual human being, complete with sort of plastic looking lady-parts. So, how angry can we really get about exposing our kids to naked ladies when the ladies have no visible anatomy, anyway???? Right????

Monday, January 10, 2011

Pardon me for a moment, but.....POLITICS!

Okay, so I was thrilled to see this CNN Political Ticker bit this morning indicating that in a Gallup favorability poll, Ms Sarah Palin provokes the most negative reaction among Republicans. Palin snags the top spot for name recognition, but it's a name we don't like. 


Who was at the top of the net favorability ratings?


My man Mike Huckabee, Lord of the Fair Tax, King of the Goofy Grin, Champion of the Iowa Primary and All Around Decent Politician. 


Er, oops, did I just bare my political soul? 


A little. 

During the last Presidential campaign I would often feel rather like a stranger in an unholy land when identifying myself as a conservative 20-something in a very democratic urban area. My car was egged in my work parking lot the day I debuted a McCain bumper sticker. This was the second sticker on my car - the first one was ripped off while car sat parked in front of my office. SO, I'm a touch sensitive about bringing this up, BUT --


Here are some of the observations CNN made about the poll (you can find their ticker item here).


Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee appears to have the clear advantage out of the gate when it comes to the 2012 battle for the GOP presidential nomination, enjoying a significantly higher net-favorability rating and name identification among national Republicans than any other potential candidate.

According to the new survey by Gallup, Huckabee has a net-favorability rating (the difference between those who hold a favorable view and those who hold an unfavorable view) of 30 percent.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is six points back with a net-favorable of 24 percent with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney and former GOP presidential candidate Sarah Palin are close behind at 23 percent and 22 percent respectively.


Several more possible candidates, including dark horse favorite Mike Pence, Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, Rep. Ron Paul, former Sen. Rick Santorum and Sen. Jon Thune, registered in the high teens.

The survey also shows a clear divide in name identification - with Huckabee, Palin, Romney, and Gingrich considerably more well known to Republicans than the rest of the field - a fact that suggests their favorability ratings may be more static than those of the lesser know candidates because voters have already had ample opportunity to form opinions about them compared to those who are new to the national scene.

Moreover, in what is an ominous sign for Palin and Gingrich, the two generate higher levels of negative reactions than any other leading candidate, a factor that significantly decreases their net favorability rating.

In fact, Palin by far generates the most negative reaction among some Republicans, with 8 percent saying they strongly disfavor her. That compares to 1 percent who said the same about Mike Huckabee and 4 percent who strongly disfavor Gingrich.

The Gallup poll was conducted Jan. 4-5 among 923 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents interviewed by telephone. It carries a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

 Want to get more technical? Let's read some of the "implications of the poll" straight from the Gallup mouth (poll is published here):

The first actual votes in the Republican nomination process will be cast more than a year from now. Despite this, many potential Republican candidates are already hard at work making appearances, putting together campaign teams, raising money, and generally gathering momentum for a run at the GOP nomination and the right to oppose President Obama's presumed bid for re-election in November 2012.

At this point, five potential candidates have a decided name identification advantage among nationwide Republicans, largely because they ran for president in 2008 (Romney, Huckabee, and Paul), were actually on the 2008 GOP ticket (Palin), or were highly visible Republican federal officeholders (Gingrich). All of the others tested in this research begin the campaign process with significant name identification deficits. 

Presumably, one goal for this latter group of candidates during the coming year -- should they decide to pursue the nomination seriously -- will be to gain name recognition among GOP voters across the country and particularly in key primary states.

Huckabee generates the most positive net favorable reaction of any of the potential candidates tested. Palin and Gingrich generate levels of strongly positive reactions that are similar to Huckabee's, but also generate more strongly negative reactions, pulling down their overall net favorable scores. Romney has slightly lower strongly favorable opinions, but receives fewer strongly negative opinions than either Palin or Gingrich.
No candidate at this early point in the campaign can claim to generate strong reactions from rank-and-file Republicans. This suggests that one objective for these politicians during the coming year will be to create higher levels of enthusiasm if not emotion for their candidacies.

Gallup's net favorable measure in essence controls for the candidates' recognition levels and provides an indication of the potential appeal of a candidate if he or she were to become better known. At this point, none of the less well-known candidates tested in this research appears to have unusual potential based on this measure, meaning that none is generating unusually strong positive reactions among the smaller group of Republicans who know them.


 Now, I should clarify a bit about the journey that brought me around to this gleeful perspective. During the last round of presidential campaigns, I was an early supporter of and financial contributor to the Huckabee campaign. I wasn't all that shocked when he blew through the competition in Iowa, he's got a heartland appeal that most of the rest of the crowded field of GOP contenders couldn't quite muster. Plus, he's fiscally creative. Seemed smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. And, for lack of a more concrete description, on a somewhat more cerebral level, I just TRUSTED the guy in a way I WANTED to trust McCain, in a way I'd never trust Romney and in a way I think most of us conservative leaning voters would chuckle about when used in conjunction with the name Gingrich. Oh - is that just me?


Anyway - enter the McCain sprint (ha.) to the finish line and the addition of Palin as running mate. I was elated. I loved that she came from somewhere other than The Hill. I loved that she had a real family full of real kids. She seemed infused with a sort of wide-eyed, innocent sort of hopefulness over her cause. She was different. She had Newscaster Hair. She wasn't ashamed of being female or a mother on the campaign trail. I gave her an extended benefit of the doubt (which may or may not have had to do with the fact that she lived next door to some of my in-laws at the time so there was a sort of "aw shucks, she's our neighbor!" excitement that gave her an aura of familiarity). I defended her (on this very blog, in fact) against the onslaught of "get your family in order, then think about politics" jeers from mostly female voters who couldn't quite stomach the idea of a veep who admitted to lipstick and hairspray and misspoke from time to time.


And it just got uglier and uglier. 


She kept putting her foot in her mouth. Kept oversimplifying the desires of the American Voting Public. Seemed to forget that the entire country wasn't just a bunch of plumbers from the Midwest or farmer's wives or hockey moms. There were those of us who had a hard time forgiving oddly inflammatory rhetoric without the correct stats and information to back it up. 


I tired of the ubiquity. We couldn't open a newspaper or visit a website or channel surf without Palin popping up somewhere. Fox News took her on as a sometime-pundit. She wrote books. Then her kids got into the spotlight. We had to deal with baby daddy drama, with public breakups, with reality programming. She teamed up with Kate Gosselin and all of a sudden we had a team of the most publicly reviled moms in America obliviously subjecting us to their delusions of grandeur. 


I just wanted her to go away.

So, too, did the rest of the country. SO, cagey though she might have been over the past few months about her intentions for higher public office (oh heavens, no. Alaska is not a great representation of the temperature of the typical American Voter. Neither would be Fox News), if she's smart, she'll take a look at polls like this telling her that America does not like her. Her conservative base does not like her. Neither do we like accusations that images of rifle crosshairs on her website indicating congressional districts she'd like to "target" had anything to do with this weekend's shooting in Arizona - you start getting your name associated with "rhetoric that may have contributed to a mass shooting" and things get even uglier.

ALL OF WHICH is to say it's probably done Huckabee well to stay more or less under the radar this year - he raised money for HuckPAC, he did some television, but he managed to maintain enough goodwill that people like him better than they like the other names out there right now.

And that makes this little conservative kid sort of happy.

Go Huck.

Friday, January 7, 2011

So, um.......er....yeah.


Here's the deal, Oprah: you don't make sense anymore. No, I don't mean that in the sense of any larger cultural context, I mean that quite literally. You've been speaking a LOT lately and you've gone all Robert Downey Jr on us. Babbling in long sentences about cerebral-sounding concepts that sound OK when they're all strung together and coming out of your mouth, but when we try to break them down into something we can understand on a more concrete level everything falls apart - and that leaves me wondering whether you're actually that much more attuned to, oh, the cosmic, vibratory frequencies of mother earth than the rest of us groundlings OR if you're just completely full of it and enjoying the sound of your own voice.

I mean, maybe I'm a grinch for hoping her OWN network fails, (OH - and title is REDUNDANT, by the way - The Oprah Winfrey Network Network, right?) but when she issues statements like this to the Television Critics Association during a press tour..........I get the feeling she really thinks that she and her redundant Network Network are the next coming of Christianity. Basically.

Here's a snippet:

“So the evolving of consciousness is really what I’m about but I’m not telling people that’s what it is. All of us are here to become more of who we are, of who you really were born to be. Every single one of us in this room has that. That is how we are all equal, because I was born to be who the creator intended, whether you believe in the creator or not. Whatever you believe put you here, you were born to perform the highest expression of that coming. That is my goal as my personal self and it is also my goal to help other people see that in themselves. I fully understand that this platform that I have been given is a gift.”

What the--?

OH - and apparently someone asked her whether she watches television herself. The answer: I think it's a "hell no - !" but in OprahSpeak that reads like this:

"I don't want all that energy coming into my space; I want to control the energy coming into my space."

So the fools who couch surf over to her Network Network to watch Dr Phil or Dr Laura or Gayle King or one of her "Oprah All-Stars" or whatever are all basically just energy whores who aren't becoming all that our creator intended. We're allowing unregulated energy to come into our space, which is certainly part of what's keeping us from performing the highest expression of our own coming.

And I mean that in the least dirty way possible.

See - it's not just that I'm not part of the "Oprah Generation" (which is true, I'm not - I'm at LEAST a dozen years too young to have that "we grew up together, me, the remote control, the bunny ears, and Oprah did" mentality), it's that this entire venture is SOOOO self-indulgent to launch at a moment in history when television viewership is declining. It's an expensive gamble, and the TV Grinch in me thinks - "she could have poured all of that cash into her school in Africa." Or "she could have donated that to any number of charities," or, "She could have given that to ME." Because in an era of webernet TV watching, we don't NEED another expensive network to force feed us Suze Orman platitudes or some show called "Big Bowl of Love" or allow Dr Phil's moustache any more airtime.....

It feels selfish.

Sure, I get that she's a shrewd business person with more money than the catholic church. More than she can spend or donate in a lifetime. So why is she doing something that's been DONE TO DEATH? Television made her famous, television is her platform, television is what made her. So WHY, on the one hand, does she flippantly admit not to watch it at all, while turning around and inflicting more of it on us - on us wee little common folk who are squealing to be allowed to choose cable channels a'la carte, us plebeians who would prefer Netflix to give us more "Watch Instantly" options, us peons who are arresting our childrens' attention spans with too much time in front of the television...

America does not NEED another television network.

America needs salvation from the Comcast monopoly. From the current glut of "Real Housewives" storming the airwaves. From any show that revolves around Cakes That Cannot Be Eaten. From Little House on the Prairie reruns. From the likes of Doctor Phil.

America does not need another television network.

And Oprah needs to tone down the rhetoric. Because she's not making any sense.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

On makeup.

Quick little "happy New Year!" piece of fluff for us here because celebrities have been laying low this week....

I watched my first few episodes of "Millionaire Matchmaker" last night. Enjoyed it enough, just couldn't help thinking "really? aren't millionaires in NYC sort of a dime a dozen? Do they really need a "special" dating guru????"

Apparently they do.

The Millionaire in question for this episode was the woman above named Andrea Correale who owned a catering company and spent so much of her time making sure the glitterati of greater Manhattan dined in style at their big schwanky parties that she completely "forgot" to settle down and find herself a man. Until she hit 40. Then she remembered and panicked. There was a giant, 25 year-old list she carted around with herself that detailed all of the qualities required of her Mister Perfect, an eye-roller in its own right. 

At one point while we were watching the show, my own Mister Wonderful's mother commented that Ms Correale would look much better if she would "scrape most of that makeup off of her face."

I realized at that point that such a thought had never, ever, occurred to me before. Or, it dawned on me that I been brought up in such a "makeup friendly" household that the idea of looking at someone and thinking, "Get out the putty knife!" had never crossed my mind. Which let me to philosophize about beauty - more specifically, cosmetics -- off and on for the rest of the evening.

Here's my Treatise on Makeup, if you will:

If wearing a face full of lovely, sparkly cosmetics makes a woman feel good about herself, more power to makeup. If wearing some foundation, some bronzer, some eyeliner, some mascara, some finishing powder, some primer, some lipstick, some cheek stain, some eye shadow, highlighter, or WHATEVER gives her confidence a boost, everything else gets a boost, too. When we feel good about ourselves, life is better. If we use makeup to give us that extra infusion, so what?

But let's take this back to a dating example, since this woman had "put her face on" to snag herself a man. Same principle applies, I think. If she feels more attractive, feels like she looks pretty, feels confident in her loveliness, won't this just translate into a better date? Won't a self-confident woman have a better dating experience REGARDLESS of whether that confidence comes from eyeliner, a push-up bra or a completely internal, inalienable, organic, innate understanding that she's beautiful and desirable? What's the difference?

Sure - psychologically speaking, I understand that we could dissect this to high heaven, and that really loving yourself should come from WITHIN and not from Lancome, but when it comes to putting your best foot forward on a date -- a TELEVISED date on Bravo, no less -- who cares whether your eyelashes are real, or courtesy of Dior? When you feel good, you're going to be a better date.

Now sure, this is coming from a girl who LOVES all the trappings of being a girl. I love high heels and lingerie and cosmetics and curling irons and perfume and jewelry and, admittedly, see nothing wrong with using all of these to our feminine advantage. Also, admittedly, every female isn't walking around in high heels and mascara with too many bracelets, declaring their love for impractical panties and the perfect shade of bronze eyeshadow - and I'm certainly not attempting to drag anyone over to my beauty dark side - I'm just making the argument for pro-makeup girls everywhere. That is, if it makes you feel beautiful, do it. And don't expect those in practical shoes who don't value the mood-boosting properties of conditioning their hair or wearing eyeshadow primer to understand.

Because feeling beautiful is different for all of us. And a man who's attracted to a lady with plenty of face paint won't be turned off or put off by the regimen, he'll like the final result.

All of which is to say - more power to whatever makes a girl feel sexy.

And compared to some of the rather heinous lip collagen and face lifts and cheek implants making the rounds out there, eyeliner seems like a pretty harmless way to amp up the hotness.