Pete Wentz Apologizes For Swoosh Haircut

Breast milk-taster/Fall Out Boy frontman Pete Wentz has come out with a list of gripes and loves for 2009, and on the list of gripes is the swoosh haircut popularized by, well, Pete Wentz:

6. the “swoosh” hair cut
i apologize for my participation. god, these pictures are gonna be like ones of my dad from the 70’s when he had long hair and a beard, just bad. i have no excuse.

I'm sorry, but Pete Wentz apologizing for his "participation" in the swoosh haircut phenomenon is like an arsonist apologizing for his "participation" in the burning down of your house. The house, in this metaphor, being my eyeballs. Alas, Pete, the damage is done, which you would have known if you had walked past a high school or mall any time in the past two years. Damage. Done.

Time Warner to Stewart/Colbert Fans: Sucks to Be You!

Time Warner Cable decided to give its customers a special New Years treat: cutting off their access to all Viacom channels. Without Dora the Explorer, what will stoned fratboys watch at night? Oh, no worries, Viacom doesn't own Cartoon Network. Aqua Teen Hunger Force to the rescue! Anyway, Nikki Finke has all the details here if you are inclined to read the whole back and forth.

This time last year, this might have upset me. But these days I'm calmer, wiser...and I switched to Comcast in June, so whatever, not my problem. I'm inclined to side with Viacom on this one, though, even with their shitty business practices, because Time Warner is kind of a pain in the ass. When one of my crazy roommates wanted to get cable in her room, instead of letting her get her own account they made me put it under my account (that I had opened a year prior) because of how our building was zoned or whatever - there couldn't be two accounts or something like that. I don't know, they didn't explain it well and after two hours on the phone I finally said screw it and authorized the charge because I had stuff to do and my roommate was whining. And though she was never late with her half because I scared the bejesus out of her - you thought I didn't see you crossing yourself every time I walked past like I was Rosemary's damnassed baby strolling down the hall, and yes, I was also surprised to learn that "Whore of Babylon" doesn't have a direct translation in your language, either that or you wanted me to hear you say it. I'm sorry that American girls wear pants and tops that are not full-on turtlenecks and makeup and jeez! Chill! - it was still annoying.

Also, they would update the software on the cable box, like, every week, and the TV would be unavailable for a few hours in the middle of the night, which was the only time I had to watch TV at that time so that sucked. And the resetting would mess up my Tivo because the cable box would be off post-resetting and I wouldn't notice for a while because the whole point of Tivo is to not have to watch live TV, and that glitch made me miss the final sign off of the WB network that my Tivo was supposed to record, and yes, it was a bunch of programs I'd already seen a million times before but it was the signing off of the network I'd spent most of my formative teen years watching, and I would have been home to watch it but my magazine meeting ran late because my EIC assigned the cover story to a literal crackhead who smokes crack and, big surprise, it came out like it was written by a crackhead and since I was the editor I had to spend the whole night at the office trying to figure out which interview quotes were with real people and which ones were with the voices in my crackhead writer's head! And then rewrite the whole thing so that it no longer looked like it was written by a crackhead! That was awesome!

So yeah, I don't really care who's right and who's wrong in this Time Warner/Viacom imbroglio. All I know is that Time Warner sucks. If you're geographically able to, I highly recommend you switch to Comcast. Their customer service is awesome. (That's the non-sarcastic "awesome" this time - you can tell by the lack of italics.) Last week, I called to drop down to the basic package on account of being unemployed and brokeass, and the guy instead found me a promotion that lets me keep my HBO/Showtime/Starz and pay the basic rate. And if I had a psycho roommate now, I bet Comcast wouldn't make me share an account with her crazy, hatin' ass.

2008 in Television: My Picks

2008 wasn’t exactly television’s best year ever. The writer’s guild strike shut down television for a few months, and the ripples were felt all the way into the fall season, which had little in the way of interesting new fare to offer, and promising 2007 shows lost either their audience (Pushing Daisies), their creative drive (Dirty Sexy Money), or both (...Dirty Sexy Money) in the downtime and never recovered. But a few episodes did manage to stand out in this rocky year. Here are my picks:

30 Rock: “Believe in the Stars”
Oprah’s guest turn was everything I wanted it to be and more. As hilarious as the first twenty minutes are (Tracey in whiteface! Leia Liz!), it’s the final reveal that makes this episode a classic.

Entourage: “The All Out Fall Out”
In a season that was hit or miss creatively and stuffed to the mercury-laden-gills with filler, this episode, which featured Ari throwing down against his rival Adam Davies with hilarious results, stood out.

Fringe: “Same Old Story”
The creepy giant baby medical mystery that showed just how intriguing – and gross – this new show could be.

Gossip Girl: “Woman on the Verge”
I was torn between this episode, “New Haven Can Wait” (for alma mater pride – no, not Yale, Columbia! Which played the part of Yale! Unconvincingly, for anyone remotely familiar with the look of either campus!) and “It’s A Wonderful Lie” (for delicious Chuck/Blair sniping), but I finally settled on this episode from the end of Season 1, for the wonderful, “less judgey Breakfast Club” rare show of camaraderie among the Upper East Siders.

House: “House’s Head”/“Wilson’s Heart”
I haven’t been a fan of other House episodes that made a cast member into a patient (like the Foreman episode from a few seasons ago), but this one works beautifully, and the ending makes me cry every time. Farewell, Cutthroat Bitch, you will be missed.

Lost: “The Constant”
If this episode – featuring Des and his long lost love Penny in a head tripping time travel love story – didn’t make you tear up even a little, you have a heart of stone, my friend.

One Tree Hill: “Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.”
One Tree Hill, against all odds, has actually gotten better as each season goes on. (Then again, most of Season 1 left it with nowhere to go but up.) This completes the trifecta of television episodes that wrenched my heart out this year as the OTH gang dealt with the senseless shooting death of one of their friends.

The Office: “The Surplus”
This was the first episode in two seasons that reminded me how effing funny this show can be. Pam’s passive-aggressive notes were classic.

Pushing Daisies: “Comfort Food”
I had a hard time narrowing it down to one episode of the dear, delectable, dead-as-a-doornail Daisies, but I settled on this one because it featured an appearance from Beth Grant as Marianne Marie Beetle, reprising her role from Daisies creator Bryan Fuller’s other tragically-cancelled-before-its-time show, Wonderfalls.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: "Samson & Delilah"
The second season started with a bang - a lot of them, in fact, as the Connors fled from Cameron gone rogue. Also, John lost his loopy locks, and Shirley Manson made her debut as the freakiest urinal/robot to date.

Weeds: “Lady’s A Charm”
Nancy makes her first, hilarious run down to Mexico. A great ep in an uneven season.

So that’s it! My best and worst movie lists will be delayed until 2009 because I want to see a few more of the recent releases before I finalize my picks (though I doubt anything will knock Cloverfield off the #1 spot), which, by the way, my 2009 movie wish list includes fewer studios packing all the good stuff into the last two weeks of the year. As for my 2009 television wishlist, I’d love for some miracle to save Pushing Daisies. I’d love for 30 Rock, The Office, and Gossip Girl to remain as strong as their past few episodes have been. And I truly hope that Dollhouse isn’t a complete mess.

Have a safe and happy New Year, drink too much, and sleep it off tomorrow!

2008 in Music: My Picks

I don’t listen to a varied enough swath of music to do any kind of definitive Best of ’08 list. I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff that I don't listen to. All I can do is offer up a few of the albums that made me ridiculously happy this year, and a few that didn’t.

My Favorite Albums of 2008

The Glass Passenger – Jack’s Mannequin
It’s hard to remember a time when Andrew McMahon’s music wasn’t in my life and my ears. Actually, it’s not that hard – it was 2002 and the musical landscape was so bleak that I had actually completely turned away from popular music to the glittering embrace of showtunes for seven or eight years straight. But then a friend sent me an mp3 of Something Corporate’s “Konstantine” and I was effectively lured out of my Broadway cave. (This dovetailed nicely with the bleakening of the Broadway landscape, when movie musicals and jukebox musicals were starting to take over.) When Andrew moved over to his side project, Jack’s Mannequin, I was worried that the sound I had enjoyed on the first three SoCo albums would be destroyed. That became the least of my worries when Andrew was diagnosed with leukemia in 2005. It hit home because here was someone my age, someone who was so young and seemed so healthy, diagnosed with the same disease that had ultimately killed my grandmother (she technically survived breast cancer, but the chemo had caused leukemia, and her body was too weak to fight off a second horrible disease). Instead of doing the press tour for the first Jack’s Mannequin album, Everything in Transit, he was in and out of the hospital getting treated. When EIT finally dropped in August, I was instantly in love, but it was also difficult listening to the frothy, bouncy, Southern California sun-infused songs knowing how much the songwriter’s life had changed since writing and recording them. But Andrew bounced back, and I was lucky enough to be at his first post-treatment concert in New York City at Irving Plaza in April 2006. It was an emotional experience on both sides of the stage, as Andrew had received the leukemia diagnosis while in New York, and he commented several times throughout the night about how difficult it had been coming back to the city that held such dark memories for him, but how being in a room filled with friends and supporters was doing much to turn his feelings around. So we come to The Glass Passenger – the first album Jack’s Mannequin has released since then, the first one that reflects his battle with leukemia. And don’t worry, it’s still the classic Jack’s/SoCo sound, but if his earlier work sounded like a Southern California day, then this is a Southern California night. A cooler kind of warm, beaches still pretty but with a foreboding edge, neon replacing sun. From the moody/sexy “What Gets You Off” to the classic SoCal pop-ditties “Suicide Blonde” and “Miss California” to the you’ll-get-through-this anthem “Swim” to the album ending one-two emotional punch of “Orphan” and “Caves” – there’s not a bad track on this album. And Jack’s Mannequin/Something Corporate does something that I personally find amazing: each album improves on the last. Every time I think “This is as good as it gets,” I get proven wonderfully wrong. And I look forward to getting proven wrong again and again, as long as Andrew keeps writing. Especially if he gives me lyrics like these, from “Hammers and Strings (A Lullaby)” – I can think of no better rallying anthem in these troubled times:

"I need something to believe in
A breath from the breathing
So write it down,
I don't think that I’ll close my eyes
‘Cause lately I’m not dreaming
So what’s the point in sleeping?
It’s just that at night I’ve got nowhere to hide.”
To the sleepless, this is my reply:
I will write you a lullaby.

You’re Awful, I Love You – Ludo
It’s hard to believe that this time last year, I’d never heard of Ludo. I feel like I’ve loved them forever, but in fact, it wasn’t until “Love Me Dead” was used in a House promo that I heard of them. But I fell hard for the band, this album, and their back catalogue to boot. “Good Will Hunting By Myself” off their debut self-titled album is the meanest, funniest breakup anthem ever. And The Broken Bride is that rare concept album that’s as tuneful as it is moving. But You’re Awful, I Love You is definitely Ludo’s best album to date, from beautiful songs like “Mutiny Below” and “Streetlights” to quirky fare like “Go-Getter Greg” and “The Horror of Our Love” to my favorites, “Topeka” and “Lake Pontchartrain.” These guys also put on a fantastic live show, and I’m happy to say I’ll be starting off 2009 right by seeing them in concert in February.

Raise the Dead - Phantom Planet
How sad is it that Phantom Planet can release the best album of their career and break up in the same year? If this is to be the last call from the band that gave us “Big Brat”, “Knowitall”, “The Local Black and Red”, “In Our Darkest Hour”, “Nobody’s Fault” and, oh yeah, that other song, then at least they’re going out at the top of their game. Raise the Dead is technically a concept album, but the songs all stand alone, and each one is catchier than the one that preceded it. "Raise the Dead" and "Do the Panic" are dead infectious, while the moodier songs like "Quarantine" and "Demon Daughters" will crawl under your skin and stay there. This is what Phantom Planet does - did - best, mixing bright cheery pop with unsettling, darker fare. Viva La Planet.

Fast Times At Barrington High - The Academy Is...
Unlike Jack’s Mannequin, I’m sad to say I actually love each new The Academy Is... album a little less than I loved their first one, Almost Here. But I really, really, really love Almost Here, so I still really love Fast Times At Barrington High. For their third album, TAI went back to high school for inspiration and came out with songs about first love and second love and cougar love and all that good stuff. Now that that’s out of their system, I can’t wait to see where they’ll head to next. This album has some solid tracks including “After the Last Midtown Show” and “About A Girl.”

Honorary Mention: Folie a Deux – Fall Out Boy
It sometimes takes me a while to get into a new album by one of my favorite bands. I’m one of those listeners who often has to hear a song quite a few times before I truly like it. (And sometimes, songs I love quickly are ones that I tire of quickly as well, so it’s usually in a band’s favor if I take a while to warm up.) And since this hasn’t been out for even a month, I haven’t fully cleaved to it yet. But the first single, “I Don’t Care”, is classic FOB rocktasticness.

I Wish I Loved This More: Pretty. Odd. – Panic! At the Disco
It’s funny, back in June I emphatically recommended this album, and to be sure, I listened to it for most of the summer. But as soon as the air cooled, so did my feelings towards this album. The same thing happened with their first album, too, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. For me, Panic! albums are like perfect summer crushes – heady, intense, and over in a month or two. No staying power but fun while it lasts.

And Then There’s...: Vampire Weekend
My friend recently downloaded some songs by Vampire Weekend. Shortly afterwards, his computer died. Mere coincidence, or early signs of AI self-awareness with the ability to commit suicide?

My 2009 Music Wishlist:
I’d love to hear some new stuff by Head Automatica, OK Go, We Are the Fury, and Franz Ferdinand. I would also like Phantom Planet to un-indefinite their hiatus.

Movie Review Index

2009

Friday the 13th
My Bloody Valentine 3D

2008

Australia
Blindness
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Diary of the Dead
Doubt
The Duchess
Eagle Eye
Frost/Nixon
Funny Games
Ghost Town
Hancock
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The House Bunny
The Incredible Hulk
Iron Man
Lakeview Terrace
Midnight Meat Train
Milk
Mirrors
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Pineapple Express
Quarantine
Rachel Getting Married
The Reader
Repo! The Genetic Opera
Revolutionary Road
The Ruins
Saw V
Sex and the City
Shutter
Slumdog Millionaire
The Strangers
Tropic Thunder
Twilight
The Visitor
Wall-E
Wanted
The Women
The Wrestler

You can access this list any time from the side bar on the main page.

Movies: Milk

Some movies have a message, and some movies have entertainment value. Many have neither! (Doomsday, I’m looking at you, you exorable piece of dross.) But a few, those happy few, have both. Milk comes at a time when something hateful like Prop 8 can pass, when gay marriage and adoption rights are not the no-brainer they should be, when we’re not as far away from Stonewall as we might like to think we are.

As a movie itself, Milk manages what many true stories turned cinema don’t, which is to keep the tension in a narrative we all know the outcome of, whether from history itself or from the movie’s press junket. And as a message movie, well, it’s hard to ignore the parallels between now and thirty years ago, though even if you were inclined to ignore them, director Gus Van Sant expends no small amount of energy hammering that point home.

The movie has an awful lot going for it. The performances across the board are nuanced, crisp, and unexpected. Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is flawed and realistically rendered, while Josh Brolin’s Dan White is sympathetic even as he’s committing unforgivable actions. Brolin plays White as a man constantly on the brink of being good, choosing right, not doing what you know he will do. It makes his final act all the more heartbreaking as you wonder what small act might have prevented this tragedy. James Franco does solid work as Milk’s longtime lover Scott Smith, though his part as written is so even-keeled that it doesn’t give the tack-sharp Franco any real chance to spread his glorious wings. His performance earlier this year in this summer's Pineapple Express is actually more a credit to his acting abilities than this one. Emile Hirsch gives the real scene-stealing performance as Cleve Jones—his frenetic energy onscreen is something to behold. Victor Garber also makes the most of his few scenes as Mayor George Moscone. The film is a visual marvel as well. There’s one scene of Dan White playing with his baby, seen only in the reflection of a television tuned to Harvey Milk speaking to a reporter, that easily ranks as one of the best shot scenes you’ll see all year. And Van Sant deftly weaves archival footage in among the movie scenes so seamlessly it’s not always possible to distinguish between the two.

For all Milk has going for it, however, there are a few flaws that keep it from outshining the other big ticket Oscar-baiting movies of the year. Many of the small, human moments are lost to the political machinations. There are two scenes of Milk speaking by telephone to a boy in a wheelchair. These scenes are stunning and let Milk the man connect with the audience in place of Milk the politico, who dominated the film. But these are only two brief scenes. Adding some similar interactions would have gone a long way towards giving some depth and variance to the story. Van Sant also underestimates the intelligence of his audience with several spoon-feeding gestures designed to deliver the message to audience members who were too busy texting to Get It. For example, there’s a ham-handed, blatantly foreshadowing scene early on with Harvey and Scott in bed, where Harvey says that he’s 40 and has never done anything important with his life, and wonders whether he’ll live to 50. Well, if you’ve seen any of the trailers you already know what part of that statement will be reversed and what part won’t. The scene itself is mostly forgivable, but what isn’t forgivable is Van Sant’s insistence upon rerunning the scene towards the end, as clearly the audience isn’t bright enough to make the connection between the end of the film and a scene from a whole hour and a half earlier.

But the one thing I can’t get past is the woman issue. Alison Pill as Anne Kronenberg is asked to represent her entire gender, and while she certainly does an admirable job, the nearly complete lack of women in the film is absolutely unconscionable. I cannot fully respect a film that’s trying to make a statement about one marginalized minority that completely cuts out another. When Kronenberg, an out-and-proud lesbian, makes her grand entrance into Milk’s circle, the boys boo and hiss at the appearance of a woman, even if it’s a woman who is fighting the same exact fight they are, who as a fellow homosexual is every bit as discriminated against. When she says that rumor has it Milk’s boys hate women, only Harvey makes a transparently weak attempt to refute it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen lesbians pushed aside in favor of gay men when it comes to the gay rights movement and visibility. Listen, I’ve worked in theatre and I’ve worked in publishing/media. I’ve met no small amount of gay men in my life, enough to know that gay men do not conform to any specific, predictable pattern of behavior any more than do their straight counterparts. That being said, I have met a few that conform to the fun, bubbly stereotype of female-empowering, boob-grabbing, glittery balls of awesome. (And, confidential to straight men, if you ever want to have a bit of fun, go to a gay bar one night – if a straight woman’s in there accompanying her gay BFF for the night, you can usually grab her breasts and say all sorts of lewd things to her, and get nary a knee to the balls for it because we’ll just assume you’re one of the boys having fun!) But I’ve also met a few who conform to that other, less flattering stereotype – the gay men who are just hateful towards women (like Stylista’s DyShaun) and would be happier living in a vagina-free mantopia. Which is a ridiculous stance to take because there are plenty of hateful straight bigots who would love to live in a gay-free world – so I don’t understand how anyone who has been the subject of hate and prejudice could turn against another marginalized group in a similar way. I’m aware that I come from a position of relative privilege. I’m white, and I’m straight, and though my family is solidly working class with no completed college degrees on my father’s side, I clawed my way up into and out of a good school (with a mountain of debt to show for it) with the vague hope of getting some upward class mobility for myself, something I would not have even had the opportunity to do had my background been, say, solidly lower class. But I am trying to break into an industry that clearly favors the male gender. And while I haven’t been mutilated, forced to wear a burqa, or prevented from driving, I have been in situations where I was fully cognizant of the fact that I was being treated differently – often worse – solely because of how I was born. It wasn’t pleasant and it is not anything I would wish to turn on any other person who’s been made to feel less because of their gender, sexual orientation, religion, or skin color. No movement for equality can effectively advance over the backs of others – that will only result in a lot of trampled bodies littering the ground while the majority remain the majority.

Milk comes close - very close - to being a great film. But with one entire half of the human population underrepresented, it’s only a good movie.

Movies: Australia and Changeling

As with most Baz Luhrmann movies, Australia will only be truly appreciated by a small group of fans, and probably not until long after it has left the theatres. (Which, at least in my area, it already has.) While this three-hour epic isn’t as visually creative as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, the big beating heart under the rough and tumble western façade is pure Baz. The movie feels more like a sprawling miniseries than a movie, which may explain why it did so poorly in the theatres of our ADDled nation, where viewers rarely have the attention span to digest one thoughtful story, let alone three packed into one. But Australia is well worth your time – all three hours of it. It’s as lush a love story as you’ll see in years. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s relationship is more adult than Baz’s other star-crossed lovers, but no less passionate. And for once, you won’t use up an entire box of Kleenex watching a Baz movie. You’ll use up half a box in the middle, sure, but for once Luhrmann leaves his audience with hearts intact, and I think the movie is no worse off for ditching the sucking-air-from-chest impact for a bit of hope. This is easily one of my favorite films of the year.

And then there’s Changeling. I had great hope for this movie, but it fell irrevocably flat in the second half. The first half, driven by Christine (Angelina Jolie)’s search for her son and fight against a male-dominated, corrupt justice system, zips along nicely with good tension and acting. Jolie’s performance is not very layered – she see-saws between a wet-eyed, plaintive “I want my son back” to a snarling, animalistic “I WANT MY SON BACK!” for the duration – but has its effective moments. But the mystery is resolved with half the movie to go, at which point the film completely deflates. I understand when you’re working with a real life story and you want to cover certain events, you can’t always work with a traditional climax, but I feel like someone of Clint Eastwood’s skill and verve could have found a way to keep the tension going through non-linear narrative or something of the like. The ending itself is a bit of a sour note, too, as a text overlay tells you how Christine spent the rest of her life in false-hope limbo. Not exactly uplifting or giving of closure. Still, it’s in the least a historically interesting story, an unflinching look at the difficulty women had – and sometimes still have – navigating a patronizing legal system.

Lyons and Mankiewicz Desecrate Corpse of Siskel, Laugh

Earlier this year, Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert were booted from their syndicated movie review show At the Movies and replaced with Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies and the embryonic Ben Lyons, who comes from E! but whose best credential for the job comes from being the loinfruit of film critic Jeffrey Lyons. While Richard Roeper lacked the dearly departed Gene Siskel’s gentle intelligence that was a nice balance to Ebert’s tottering loopiness, Ebert and Roeper were at least solid reviewers whose show was entertainment in its own right. Then came Ben and Ben.

I put a finite amount of stock into movie reviews to begin with because my own taste runs idiosyncratic to most mainstream tastes, and the things I love tend to be universally loathed by critics and even my friends. Someone recently suggested I have bad taste, and I countered that maybe I’m a maverick, and they counter-countered that maybe I’m a maverick with bad taste. Fair enough. Either way, it doesn’t make movie reviews very useful for me personally. I like Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, because their reviews are informative and well-written even if I don’t ultimately agree with many of their verdicts, but they’re about the only ones I can stand. And yet, as I’ve mentioned before, every week I watch At the Movies. Why? I can’t fully answer that question myself because this show is just terrible, and there’s not even the schadenfreude value I derive from, say, certain Fox News shows.

Then again, that’s not fully true. After all, it is kind of fun to watch Mankiewicz and Lyons snipe at each other like passive-aggressive little bitches for thirty minutes a week. Lyons, who’s about two decades Mankiewicz’s junior, for example, has lately taken to calling his co-reviewer “Mank” and “Manky” on air. Next week, I swear he’s gonna tweak Manky’s nose. It’s amusing to see the vein in Mankiewicz’s forehead throb a little every time Lyons does that. And Lyons has always been ludicrously soft in his reviews, mostly because he clearly has his eye on being more a part of the movie world than just dishing out reviews. To be an effective reviewer, you really do have to euthanize your dreams of actively participating in the field you’re reviewing. But this week, Mankiewicz took Lyons to task after he positively reviewed Bedtime Stories (which is produced by Disney, which produces At the Movies, FYI): “I don’t know where to begin. I didn’t like one part of this movie. You weren’t right, I believe, about any single point you made in this entire review.” To which Lyons chuckled in the vacant way frat boys tend to when you’re verbally castrating them, and they’re confused because you’re using hard words and, hey, bro, can’t we just hug it out or am I gonna have to roofie you again?

Not that Mankiewicz is without fault either. He kicked off his review of Special with, “The name of the movie is actually Special, unfortunately, the movie itself is not.” That’s just...I can’t even.... I can’t. I can’t. Jesus, that’s bad. That’s the kind of clever line you come up with while on hour five of an all-night bender, and you write it down because it’s oh my god so brilliant you’ll make millions off this...but then you sober up in a day or two, look at it, and go, “Oh man, thank god I didn’t drunk text that to anyone.” Then you burn it. And scatter the ashes to the seven continents lest it reform itself. You do not say it on national television.

But Lyons is just the worst, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Two months ago, Ebert chided Lyons for, well, being an insatiable starfucker. Which again goes back to needing to separate yourself from whatever you’re reviewing. This is a problem with any TV show that reviews movies, though, because there’s usually some kind of ethical problem afoot when the same studio putting out a movie is bankrolling your cushy reviewing lifestyle. (This is, of course, becoming an issue in print media as well as more conglomerates stick their fingers into all sorts of pies, but it doesn't seem nearly as rampant yet.) But watching At the Movies, I sometimes want to break out a flowchart of who-owns-what to figure out why Lyons and Mankiewicz pan or praise movies seemingly arbitrarily. I’m sure following the moneytrail will clear a lot of that up. Lyons is just...unsettling. He looks like that intern you don’t ask to get you coffee because you’re pretty sure he’ll spit in it, or worse. He recently summed up his review of Yes Man with “I say ‘no’ to Yes Man,” which is almost as bad as Manky’s Special quip. He’s just vacant and entitled and...no.

There is one good thing about the show, however. Mankiewicz has taken up Ebert’s mantle of creepy overshares. He ended his review of Marley and Me with, “The film got sweet and tender and finally focused, and at the end, in a crowded theatre, I hugged a total stranger.” Thanks for the nightmares, Mank!

Morning Show Madness

What the hell is wrong with morning news shows lately? Back in high school I'd watch The Today Show every day while getting ready for school, and I seem to remember it being somewhat normal, with Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann having fun but acting like regular human beings, not Bellevue escapees. And then I worked evenings for a while, then went to college and scheduled all my classes around my nocturnal habits, so I went a long time without watching any television before noon. But my current internship requires me to watch a copious amount of morning TV, and holy heck is it all insane. Over on The Today Show, Katie's gone, Matt peaces out halfway through the broadcast, and they've added a fourth hour hosted by Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb that regularly devolves into alcohol-fueled shenanigans. And the other morning shows aren't faring much better, either. Here are just a few of the recent wacky morning show clips I've found and edited:

*On Good Morning America, a disgusting demonstration of a Baby Alive doll causes Diane Sawyer to double over in embarrassment while her co-anchor mumbles "I know this is important, it's not good television but I know it's important...". The producer then cuts suddenly and inexplicably to commercial.

*In The Today Show's hilarious fourth hour, Kathie Lee decided to teach the world all about Irish People when Enya comes to visit. Specifically how we all look alike, and how we can all play either the flute or the violin. I took lessons on both when I was a kid, and my kindest act of altruism to date has been the cessation of said lessons. I'm not completely musically hapless, however - I sing very well, which is more than I can say for Kathie Lee, whose lack of pitch doesn't stop her from joining in on a gleeful slaughtering of Silent Night! A week prior, she'd made a joke about rising to fame via the "casting couch" that suddenly doesn't seem so jokeish.

*I've written before about some of the insane stuff on Fox News that I have to watch for my internship, but my favorite by far is their morning show, Fox and Friends. The anchors simply do not give a shit what they say, they're just there to have fun, man! Don't harsh their buzz! Like all media everywhere, they did a piece on Twilight the day it was released. Unlike all media everywhere, they claimed that 81% of all females - "better known as babes" - planned on seeing the movie. They also claimed that most teen girls were turned on to the series by their mothers, which, no. But I found my new favorite Fox and Friends clip on Friday, when a Hooters girl came on to promote something for the restaurant and the anchors pretty much kidnapped her and made her read half the sports update, then dragged her over to the couch for a segment. The girl clearly looks terrified, and as soon as they cut to a graphic for the "annoyance law" segment she flees, and the male anchors instead turn their attention to their female cohort. They begin literally poking her for an awkward amount of time. Later, she has what sounds like some kind of seizure on air while doing a voiceover.

By the way, in case you can't tell, one of my favorite parts of making these videos is finding the perfect still teaser screencap to encapsulate the insanity contained within the clip. If you want to see all the clips I've pulled for Gawker to date, I've been keeping a list here. That list is a mix of clips I was assigned to pull for the editors who needed them and clips I found and pitched myself that the editors chose to pick up for the site, but all of the morning show antics I linked to in this post are ones I found myself.

But that's not all! I put two Fox and Friends clips I pulled that didn't get used up on YouTube. This one is from November 21st, featuring a "new craze" (a dubious claim at best) called chain surfing, which involves jumping on a chain and trying not to fall off. It's about as safe as it sounds and I can only assume the F+F crew is trying to force the hand of Darwin and kill off some of their less intelligent viewers. (Does Fox even believe in evolution?) At any rate, the best part is at the end, when one of the anchors calls the weatherman "white boy" which serves only to confuse the oft-confused weatherman:



This next one is from December 12th, when Fox and Friends took a moment out of reporting the "news" to reassert their douche supremacy. Apparently, McDonald's put an anti-Starbucks billboard in front of Starbucks HQ in Seattle, and the Fox and Friends anchors would like to remind you that they pulled the same lame move first, with CNN, in Atlanta, back in who the hell cares because these people are insane:



I don't know when it became mandatory for morning news show anchors to drop a boatload of peyote before going on air, but clearly it's something that reaches across all channels. Look for Fox and Friends to do a trend piece on it in 2009.

I'm Dreaming Of A Christmas Where I Don't Fall On My Ass

I think this is the first white Christmas/December 25th we've had in the northeast in a while. And frankly I don't find it all it's cracked up to be since my natural klutzery combined with evil sidewalk conditions led to me sliding so epically down an ice sheet on Tuesday that I only avoided luging into oncoming traffic by grabbing onto the bumper of a parked car. So I didn't get mangled or anything, but in the brief, icy moments where death seemed absolutely imminent, I couldn't help but think: "Crap. I'm going to die wearing purple boots with little yellow ducks on them."

Next year for Christmas, I'm asking for soccer cleats.

But hey, you know who does love the cold weather? Late night comedians! Or so it would seem, judging from last Thursday's dispatches from David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, and my new favorite, Craig Ferguson. Because they all told cornball jokes about the weather. (And only the rakish, devilishly handsome Ferguson seemed in on the joke of the joke.) I put together this clip, which will probably get TOS'd off YouTube any minute, so enjoy it while you can:



I also uploaded this clip I filmed at a The Academy Is... concert at Roseland Ballroom last month. It's William Beckett performing their new holiday song "Winter Passing" for one of the first times in public. It's a partial clip because my camera is lame and only does video in 60 second increments, and it's shaky because I tend to bop around a lot, but it should give you a nice woozy just-enough-vodka feeling that's perfect for whatever holiday you celebrate (or don't):



You can also see the less-vodka-y official video here.

Anyway, if you're lucky enough to not have familial obligations (or can get out of them) tonight, you can always head to your local cineplex and catch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which opens today, or Slumdog Millionaire if you haven't already. (And if you haven't, why the hell not?) As for me, I'll be loading up my car with presents and German girls (well, okay, just the one German girl, my dear friend who is spending the holidays with us) and driving out to Pennsylvania, where I'm more likely to hit a deer than luge into oncoming traffic. Really not sure whether that's a win, loss, or wash. As long as I survive long enough to see Benjamin Button (and don't perish while wearing dorkish boots) I'll be happy.