Samantha Baker Can't Believe They F**king Forgot Her Birthday; I Can't Believe John Hughes Is F**king Dead

And I have to suspect that I share that sentiment with anyone who grew up during the 1980s and cares at all about movies.

"Life moves pretty fast..." et cetera.



[YouTube]

John Furia, Jr. - 1929-2009

In terms of modern celebrity, there are two kinds of artists: those of widespread fame and those who are subjectively famous, known primarily to students of their particular field and/or work.

Screen and television writer John Furia, Jr., who passed away on Friday, falls firmly into the "subjective celebrity" category for me. Had I not the privilege to know the man personally as well as to be taught by him, it's likely that I wouldn't know his name.

But I did, so I do...and I will remain forever grateful.

Here's to you, Professor Furia.

The Acquittal of John Wilkes Booth

"A bullet to the head didn't kill Abraham Lincoln. It was...

[dramatic music]

"CANCER!"

[crowd gasps; monocles drop into mint juleps; several women "get the vapors" and faint]

That scene or one like it will be included in the never-to-be-produced revisionist screenplay that will be written if Dr. John Sotos' theory turns out to hold water.

Reading Comprehension Begins at the Stable

It's been two days since 50-1 longshot Mine That Bird stunned gamblers, hicks and rich hicks alike by winning the Kentucky Derby, and I have yet to solve the mystery of the gelding's seemingly misspelled name beyond the discovery that it is a combination of his sire's name, Birdstone, and his dam's, Mining My Own (I've also learned that "sire", "dam" and "gelding" are fancy horse-talk names for "dad horse", "mom horse" and "horse with his nuts chopped off", respectively).

Optimistically, I hope that whoever named Mining My Own was a miner. Realistically, I am concerned that the person responsible meant to name the horse "Minding My Own" but spelled it wrong. If the latter scenario is accurate, not only did/has that dam live(d) her whole fool life oblivious to her egregiously misspelled handle, the error was passed down to her foal ("baby horse")--compounded, even, by the opportunity missed in the adjustment from the present participle to the present verb form.

Unless his dam's owner wasn't an excavation enthusiast and his current owner is (which would be one hell of a lucky coincidence), Mine That Bird is setting a terrible example for young horses everywhere by furthering the delusive notion that if you're good at sports, your education doesn't matter. He is in effect the Kobe Bryant of horses (save for the raping, of which MTB is incapable for reasons mentioned previously).

Then again, perhaps Mine That Bird isn't solely to blame. After all, he is a horse and therefore might have--in comparison to the humans around him--no idea as to where is or what he's doing or what the hell is happening at any time, ever; if that is the case, I'm glad that dumb sonuvadam has his wealth to rely on. (The horses get most of the money earned from their races, right? Because horse racing is a "sport" and they--like Floyd Mayweather Jr. in boxing and Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s car in car racing--are the essential participants? Maybe I'll look that up, too.)

Cinematic Illiterate to Publish Word Books

Only the most astute of cinephiles would have watched films as emotionally complex and thought-provoking as Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3 and realized that the director behind them was merely using motion pictures as a canvas upon which to cry out for his true passion, his destiny, his muse: the written word.

At long last, Brett Ratner is a book publisher. The question of his reading comprehension skills is moot; all that matters is that he made a X-Man movie and he knows Robert Evans.

[via Gawker]

Oscars for All Women Who've Made Terrible Life Decisions!

It appears as though there is no end in sight to the fallout from the cultural apocalypse that was Diablo Cody's Oscar win. According to the New York Post, strippers are, heartbreakingly, viewing their former colleague's achievement as an achievement for all of them. A plaque has been hung in Rick's Cabaret in New York that reads, "Dedicated to Diablo Cody, who has taken our calling to new levels."

No, strippers. No, no, no. Diablo hasn't raised stripping to a higher level; she's lowered screenwriting to stripping's already established one.

Don't believe me? Perhaps my friend George Washington will convince you.

Super Deluxe Suicide Prevention

Although this is far from the funniest parody video in the world (or even of the last three days), it does help to ease the pain of Sunday night's unforgivable affront to humanity.



Thanks to Jesse for the tip.

The 80th Annual Academy Awards Honor 'The Sopranos'

When ABC cut to black just as Harrison Ford was about to announce the winner of Best Original Screenplay during Sunday night's telecast of the Academy Awards, I was surprised how long it took me to realize that it was not a technical glitch, but a deliberate (albeit somewhat dated) homage to the 'Sopranos' series finale.

It was strange enough that I suddenly found myself in the back of an ambulance, but the situation has grown even weirder: every time I ask someone to tell me who won for Best Original Screenplay, time seems to jump forward and I find myself in another location--all within Cedars-Sinai Hospital, at the time of this writing. I still haven't found out, and it's starting to get annoying. (Not nearly as annoying as that poorly-written movie Juno, naturally, but annoying nonetheless.)

So, seriously...who won?

Honest to Blog, Our Standards Are Low

Its merciless public relations onslaught aside, Juno is not a horrendous film. Off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen movies released in 2007 to which it is considerably superior.

Nonetheless, it is an extremely unlikable film, for both the well-documented, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard faux-hipster dialogue that permeates it and, concurrently, the slobbering praise it has been receiving since even before its release. Public Enemy Number One on both counts is ex-stripper Diablo Cody, as skilled at self-promotion as she is overrated as a screenwriter. With the help of her hardworking publicist, she has positioned herself as the cool-kid commodity du jour in Hollywood (at least for the next 14 minutes or so)--and one need look no further for evidence that she is more image than substance than her ridiculous self-applied moniker. "Brook Busey" apparently didn't ring false enough for our lady's tastes, so she became "Diablo Cody"--a name so obnoxiously stupid for a human being that it might as well be "Crunchwrap Supreme".

On Saturday, Crunchwrap disappointingly won the WGA Award for original screenplay, proving that even writers have not remained immune to Juno's ubiquitous PR snowblower.

Everyone involved with Juno--especially those on the marketing side (and I include Crunchwrap in that group)--wants us to believe that it's an "outsider" movie that defiantly bucks tradition with an unlit pipe clenched in its teeth and a jug of Sunny D hanging loosely from its fingertips. But the truth is that simply eschewing explosions and Sandra Bullock in favor of the Moldy Peaches and hamburger phones does not classify unconventional storytelling. Beneath its surface, Juno is just as much of an assembly-line product as a piece of crap like Transformers is, only it came off a line of a different sort: the realm of cookie-cutter quirk (much like its equally overpraised predecessor, Little Miss Sunshine). I did not find a single moment in Juno to be unexpected (except for, perhaps, the discovery that I had it in me to want to slap a fictional 16-year-old pregnant girl for talking like a fictional 29-year-old screenwriter), right down to the red-alert copout of turning Jason Bateman's otherwise likable character into a lecherous would-be pederast for the sole reason that Crunchwrap couldn't figure out what to do with him. You'd think most voting members of the Writers Guild of America would have least keyed in on that--alas, they did not, and the phony-baloney Crunchwrap Supreme train rolls on toward the Academy Awards with a full head of steam.

Crunchwrap winning a WGA Award is equivalent to Mira Sorvino winning an Oscar. Should Crunchwrap win an Oscar, it will be equivalent to Milli Vanilli winning a Grammy. And just like the Recording Academy did with Rob and Fab, one's only hope in such a scenario will be that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will later realize that they were had and revoke Crunchwrap's undeserved prize.

In the meantime, let's just sit on a stoop and expeditiously commence an acoustic duet. 'Cause that's real, homeskillet. That shit's real.

Golden Globe Awards Canceled; Streets To Be Choked With Blood of AMPTP Negotiators

Now you've gone and done it, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

It's no secret that you don't give a rat's ass about the needs of the hardworking men and women who write the films and television shows that stuff your bottomless coffers with unimaginable amounts of cash; otherwise, the Writers' Guild of America would never have been forced to go on strike to begin with--or, at the very least, the work stoppage would be over by now instead of at nine weeks and counting. You've all but spit on the reasonable demands put forth by the WGA since day one, mockingly forgoing counter-offers in the name of jousting gay porn stars and cruel sociological experiments that test the limit of how unfunny a human being can possibly be (as well as some things that aren't on NBC), growing ever more confident in your belief that television--the medium more immediately impacted by the strike--doesn't need writers, that the world will lap up whatever regurgitated gruel you serve it with a smile on its face. (As for movies, you likely figured you wouldn't have to worry about those until the end of the summer.)

You almost got away with it, too...but you failed to consider the impact of the strike on a product near and dear to the consumers of popular entertainment: awards shows. Now that the official stance of the Screen Actors' Guild to not cross WGA picket has led to the cancellation of the Golden Globe Awards ceremony, your goose is cooked.

There's a lot that the masses will do without by way of entertainment (quality, logic, any sign of effort)...but if the AMPTP thinks it can take away their "famous people getting dressed up to stand on red carpets and talk about what they're wearing" and not face repercussions, it is in for a very rude--possibly violent--awakening.

I predict that, following a series of bloody protests enacted by average citizens against the AMPTP that will cost many lives, the writers' strike will be over by next Friday.

The Internet? Never Heard Of It.

If there is one upside for me personally to the Writers' Guild of America Strike (currently at eight days and counting), it's that it has given me a perfectly reasonable-looking excuse for not updating this blog. It's a phony excuse, sure, but it's reasonable-looking nonetheless.

In lieu of any original content (unless you're counting this paragraph and the one previous), enjoy the above video from unitedhollywood.com, which quietly suggests that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers maybe are being something less than completely honest with their claims to the WGA that there is no money to be made from online content.

Oprah's Going to Find This 'Joseph Pulitzer' and Tear Him a New One

You might think that the news that Cormac McCarthy's The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday would please Oprah Winfrey, given that the novel was her most recent pick for her book club. Perhaps, one could suppose, Oprah feels validated by the announcement, seeing her 2003 strategic maneuver to shift her book club selections from the likes of Indistinguishable Pandering Female Empowerment Novel no. __ to more bona fide and established classics (that James Frey hiccup notwithstanding) come full circle, as she had now beaten one of the world's most prestigious literary awards to the punch. Maybe Oprah is even narcissistic enough to believe that she influenced the Pulitzer judges' decision.

While these theories are certainly reasonable (especially that last one), there is one resultant aspect of The Road winning the Pulitzer that, once it occurs to Oprah, is going to make her very angry:

As is the case with any book that wins a Pulitzer Prize (or Nobel Prize, or National Book Award, or Booker Prize, el al), Knopf--the publisher of The Road--is going to issue a new printing of the novel whose cover advertises that fact. So do you know what that means the next edition of The Road is not going to include? The Oprah's Book Club seal.

Knopf is going to have the balls to sell a book on the merits that it won some stupid 90-year-old literary award and not because Oprah told people to buy it. This is a slap in the face to the supreme bellowing adjudicator of middlebrow culture, who has done so much for the publishing industry by successfully commanding her slavishly devoted audience of housewives, the unemployed and the enfeebled to buy books that the vast majority of them never end up finishing (or perhaps even getting past the first page of) because they're too busy watching "Oprah" (and probably "Ellen", and, let's say, "Grey's Anatomy") while they eat cookie sheet after cookie sheet of nachos...and there's no way Oprah is going to take it sitting down.

Don't be surprised if by this time next year, the Pulitzer Prize has--following a sizable financial transaction--been renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Award for Clap-and-Scream Recognition", with the severely altered guidelines allowing John Travolta to win for the next three years in a row, never once for writing a book.

Kurt Vonnegut -- 1922-2007

In losing Kurt Vonnegut, we have lost not only one of the most unique voices of several generations, but also, for my money, one of the greatest pessimists who ever lived.

To paraphrase the man himself, he has turned the semicolon of old age into a period...and the literary world is worse for it.

Lance Bass Gambling That Some *NSYNC Fans Have Learned to Read

Speaking of people who aren't astronauts...former non- Justin-Timberlake-member of *NSYNC and current homosexual-at-large Lance Bass has announced plans to have someone ghostwrite an autobiography for him. Scheduled for publication in October, the book will be titled--are you sitting down?--Out of Sync. Get it? 'Cause, see, the band he was in was called *NSYNC, and now he's out of the closet.


Nothing? Well, I'm sure you'll put it together later.

E! Online has managed to scoop (and for some reason decided to publish) the exact amount of pages that Bass' memoir will contain, declaring the total to be 256. If you figure each chapter in the book will run between 12 and 15 pages, bringing the number of chapters in at about 19, Lance Bass' life story will probably break down as such:

Chapter 1: Growing up in Mississippi.
Chapter 2: Joining *NSYNC and meeting Justin Timberlake.
Chapters 3-17: Justin Timberlake.
Chapter 18: The astronaut thing.
Chapter 19: I'm gay.

That is only a rough estimate, of course, as I personally hope Bass will dedicate a few pages toward the end of the tome to explaining whatever became of Spider Head.