I've got the scoop. Let me show you definitively, correctly, who in Hollywood has signed contracts in blood with Satan himself in order to secure fame, fortune, and an undeserved career in entertainment. There's no other possible explanation. Check it out!

 

TV  Tinheads

Sarah Silverman is supposedly an edgy comedienne. But just about everything she does involves shock value. Stuff about gays, and Jesus, and Jews, and shit. Ooooh, I'm shocked. But I ain't laughing. She's NOT FUNNY. In fact, she sucks rocks. She went so far as to make an unfunny movie, and then an unfunny sitcom on the Comedy Channel. Let's say it again. She ain't funny. She sucks rocks. Ain't funny, sucks rocks. Yeah, she's kinda good-looking. But she ain't funny, and she's sucks rocks. In 2007 she did the MTV Movie Awards, which itself is a poor excuse for a show, and she was hit or miss. She thinks that shocking equals funny. Sorry, you sorry-ass broad, but Monty Python knew how to do this. You don't.
 

Cartoon Network has some morons in the board room. It always bothered me when they converted the night shift to "Adult Swim." Whenever I've had to stay up with a sick kid, Cartoon Network was a life-saver. Not any longer. And then in January 2007, they hired some P.R. folks to post lightup pictures of a late night cartoon character all over public places in a bunch of American cities. This picture showed the character flipping people off. THERE ya go. Put up pictures in public with the middle finger. And in Boston, where the locals freaked out, the P.R. guys who did the deed were long-haired wackjobs who would only take questions at their press conference that pertained to their hair. Good job, assholes. 
 

Who really gives a shit if people get insulted on "American Idol?" The so-called judges are paid to be insulting. Nobody would tune into this piece of crap show if all they said was, "Yeah, well, thanks, but not quite." That said, these talent-free assholes doing the judging aren't exactly geniuses. Simon Cowell, the limey jerk producer, has had as many misses as hits with his performers. Randy Jackson, the fat black guy, apparently got tired of trying to sound nice, and now thinks it's hip to be as much a dick as Cowell. And then there's Paula Abdul, who showed up for a January 2007 TV interview wasted, then denied being wasted. Forget it. After a lame career choreographing the Laker cheerleaders, she had a lame career as a pop star, during which her most notable performance was dancing with a cartoon cat. In another video, they deliberately stretched the image to hide the fact that her ass had gotten fat. This qualifies her to judge other people's talents, or lack thereof? When the revolution comes, these three will be the first ones against the wall, or sent to the salt mines.
 

ABC obviously hasn't read the 9/11 report, like many Americans, including me, have. Their made-for-TV debacle "Path to 9/11" just plain made up shit. ABC/Disney says they "fictionalized" parts, and that it shouldn't be taken as fact or a documentary. But look at Rush "Dipshit Pill-Popper" Limbaugh, who started calling the movie an "indictment of the Clinton administration" even before it came out. Conservative wags seized on this thing, saying that the fictionalized bits, based on events that never happened, show that Clinton and his crew failed to act against Osama Bin Laden when they had the chance. So right-wingers never miss a chance to lie like hell, or advance the lies of others, when it suits them. This is the party of values?
 

American Idol? These people are useless. It's all bad pop music. Can anybody name three of the last four winners? Aren't most of them eating out of dumpsters now? It's not music, it's shit. 
 

My contribution to reality TV:   I am suggesting a show called The Mexican Rag Dance, in which two contestants each take hold of the end of a rag, and are each given a knife.  They try to snuff each other.  The first one to let go of the rag is shot by the referee.  Instead of waiting weeks, you get fresh contestants every episode.  In fact, you could have a new one every commercial break.  Such a deal.

About the dumbest damn gameshow around is "Deal or No Deal," hosted by the completely talent-free Howie Mandel. Not only is this piece of crap show nonsensical, it features this lame would-be comedian doing what he does best, namely standing around not being funny. At least it keeps him off The Tonight Show.
 

Reality TV is not reality. Nobody really hangs from a Toyota suspended 500 feet above the Vegas strip, nobody really crosses the United States on five bucks and a pogo stick, nobody really eats rats on a deserted island filled with cameras that the residents are supposed to pretend aren't there. The American Idol folks like to say they're the only true reality show, but c'mon. They purposely push through some of the most retarded singers in the world, just so they can make fun of them. That's reality? I mean, outside of my wife's family?
 
 
 

Maybe people will f-f-f-forget that I'm an asshole It's really too bad Jay Leno lost his sidekick, Edd Hall, who was actually kinda funny, and had a great voice. Leno's bandleader, Kevin Eubanks, is the worst straight man in the world. Leno replaced Hall with "Stuttering" John Melendez, a weak-voiced, UNFUNNY former sidekick of Howard Stern's. Melendez used to bait unsuspecting celebrity victims and ask them disgusting things. He actually asked a sixteen-year-old girl at a party if she checked her breasts for lumps. He regularly got clocked, or had stuff dumped on him, as he deserved.

I   s-s-s-s-s-suck.

Leno probably figured he could prop up his younger audience, which essentially doesn't exist, by recruiting a slug like Melendez. But people who want "hip" in their late night comedy mostly watch Letterman, where the writing is better and the jokes nastier. So Leno's lost out there. And Melendez, who built his reputation on edgy crap, has basically left his balls at home taking the Leno gig, and really, truly sucks, both as an announcer and in his cheesy, unfunny, taped bits. Even his lead-in at the start of each show is weak. When introduced, he raises his coffee cup. Ooooh, there's a hip signature move. So if you count the audience, this is a loss-loss-loss. 
 
 

Look out, I'm gonna blow Chungs !

Connie Chung forever doomed her credibility as a legit news person with her softball interview with Gary Condit. She showed that she was completely incapable. Her credibility has long been suspect, because of her marriage to TV sleazeball Maury Povich. THEN they did a show together. So not only did they suck individually, they also sucked together. It's a triple whammy.

June 2006: Their cable show got cancelled, and not a minute too soon. It was frigging awful. At the end of each show, they did a horrendous, pandering point-counterpoint bit that showed how neither one is intelligent enough to have real opinions. Then for some wacky reason, Chung decided to do this bab chanteuse thing in an evening dress, attempting to sing. When it turned out as badly as one would anticipate, she said it was all just for fun, but the fact is, it was an incredibly embarrassing end to an incredibly embarrassing career. Check out this abomination.
 
 
 

Sweep It On Outta Here

Sure, plenty of sh_t makes it onto the small screen during sweeps. But NEVER in the history of airwaves has anything so bad been put out for the sake of ratings as the TV remake of The Poseidon Adventure. You just had to know it would be bad when Steve Guttenberg showed up in the cast. But the entire movie was preposterous, the acting, writing, special effects, and everything else about this turkey were incomprehensibly awful. There are so many things wrong with this piece of crap that it's not worth listing them. At least it was unintentionally hilarious in several parts. Unfortunately, Steve Guttenberg survives the movie. Of course, the reason the boat tips over in the first place is because Guttenberg's resume' falls overboard, creating a giant whirlpool that sucks the boat under.
 

Headlocked

November 2005: Eddie Guerrero, a professional wrestler, died in his hotel room. Apparenly he went through a lot of booze and drugs, then cleaned himself up. But all the obits said that he'd turned his life around enough to "capture the world heavyweight championship." I read one that said he had "won the championship belt."  Okay, let's get this straight: he didn't win a damn thing. The script said he won, so he "won." He didn't "capture" a thing. It's not just escapist fiction in the form of a macho soap opera, it's all pretty bad, redundant crap.
 
 

American I-diots

This American Idol garbage gets way more press than it deserves. So what if another faceless, useless wannabee makes it big singing forgettable pop nonsense? Spring 2005, it gets even less interesting, with one former contestant claiming he slept with Paula Abdul, in advance of publishing a book and getting on TV for talking about it? Abdul denies it, she's threatening to sue, and now in a pre-emptive strike, she's coming out with her own tale of pain and suffering because of spinal injuries she suffered years ago. The war in Iraq is still going badly, the economy sucks, the president is a moron. Why is so much space devoted to these people? Here, they got a couple of hundred words right here, that should be more than enough.
 
 

Tell me again, what does the M stand for?

MTV was supposed to be wall-to-wall music, way back when.  But it's devolved into the most mind-numbing dreck on cable.  You have to be a brain-dead 14-year-old to want to tune in to their ridiculous game shows, unreal "reality-based" shows, their endless countdowns, and their banal celebrity guest shots (Adam Sandler, for example, mumbling his way through a supposed showcase of funny videos; he didn't put any effort into it, looked and sounded like he definitely didn't want to be there, and adding nothing but a talking head to the exercise).

The Real World is anything but.  These kids are so screwed up, you gotta wonder what halfway houses MTV scours looking for cast members.  The most obvious solution to the myriad problems these losers have is napalm.
 

We opened Al Capone's vault, and found no brains

Really, I mean it,  I'm a serious guy. Seriously.

dropped his drawers on TV (behind a curtain that showed his pants around his ankles), had fat removed from his ass, then had that same fat injected into his forehead to remove wrinkles filmed a show in the nude before an audience at a nudist colony got his nose broken when a fight broke out between Nazis and civil rights guys got into another brawl on film, cuz he likes to look tough wrestled some girl in a kiddie pool filled with jello dug around in "Al Capone's vault" and found, um, NOTHING wrote an autobiography detailing various sexual encounters, including those with women who claimed he never touched them (eg. Bette Midler) and it just gets worse

A couple years back, Rivera featured on his show the "sport" of extreme catfighting.  And then he wonders why Tom Brokaw had an unwritten rule disallowing any of Rivera's stuff on his newscasts.

This is the clown who called Kurt Vonnegut (whose daughter Rivera was married to, and whom he cheated on) a "racist." This is the guy who recently said that Jerry Springer is disgusting. This is a guy who's been married for years, but also has a kid from an affair. This is a guy with his head up his egotistical ass.  Ah, well, finally she divorced him.

November 2001: Everybody's laughing again, cuz Geraldo's headed for Afghanistan.  Watch out for that friendly fire, Jerry.

Geraldo Rivera finally jumped ship, running over to Fox because they offered to send him to Afghanistan.  They might as well have sent Carrot Top.  Geraldo's favorite subject over in Afghan land was Geraldo. Look, I'm carrying a gun, look, I'm eating crap, look here, it's cold and nasty here but I'm holding up.  Look, I'm climbing down into a cave.  Look, some of our own troops are shooting at me now. 
    What was really hilarious was Geraldo's self-description, which included his chest and waist size, apparently in an effort to show that he was best-equipped of all journalists to be there.
     Geraldo also reported from one spot, saying it was "hallowed ground" where American troops and Mujahedeen had been accidentally killed by friendly fire.  As it turns out, Geraldo was hundreds of miles from the spot of the incident he described.  Later, he and Fox tried to clarify, saying he had confused it with another friendly fire incident, one which it turns out occurred three days after his original report.  So he really screwed himself twice.
    In Iraq, Geraldo showed how truly, incredibly stupid he is, by actually drawing a map of Iraq in the sand, then drawing the location of the outfit (101st Airborne) he was with, showing their location, then also indicating where they would head to next.  He gave away troop positions.  Before he could be expelled by the military, he left Iraq on his own.

Speaking of Arsenio, he's about as despicable as it gets. He settled out of court with Howard Bingham, Muhammad Ali's longtime associate, for inviting him on the show, only to have some goons physically hold him offstage while Hall dragged Ali in front of the cameras. And when he comes on Leno, whoever has to follow him has to listen as Hall upstages him, and generally shoves his very unfunny nose into every conversation. Launch this piece of crud on the next shuttle mission, and open the pod bay doors, Hal.
 

Here's a great idea to spice up free TV: Resurrect Battle of the Network Stars, schedule the cast of Friends versus the cast of MTV's Real World, and make them compete with real guns.

I have recently been re-elected president of the Society for the Prevention of a "Full House" Reunion Show.
 

Katie Couric is reading the news? Christ. And sure enough, she sucks at it. Bad idea. Bad idea. As of March 2007, she's a distant third. Come home, Dan Rather, all is forgiven.
 

Cue the idiots

NBC5 News in Chicago has long been known for their on-air gaffes. Constant stumbling by the anchors, taped bits that aren't there after being teased by the talking heads, wrong graphics popping up, etc. In 2004, they cashed in on the Queer Eye For the Straight Guy buzz by putting them in a feature. A very looooong feature, during the nightly news. I sent them an email complaining. I didn't have a problem with them putting gay guys on the news, although I thought the use of the word "queer" on the news was a little wacky. No, my problem with it is that the news is for NEWS. You wanna do the water-skiing squirrel once in a while, fine. But you don't spend ten minutes on it, which is what they did with the Queer Eye stuff. One of the anchors wrote me back, saying that she agreed with me, and that it wouldn't happen again.

May 2005, NBC5 does an interesting bit about how your private info might very well be available on free search engines. Then they said, "For more information on how to protect your private information, visit our website, at NBC5.COM."  So this I did, and found the well-hidden link to the story. And when I clicked the link, it said that I should come back tomorrow for the full story. Thanks, guys.

November 2006, and they've got a new sports chick. On the night that the Blackhawks win their first game under new coach (and former Hawk player) Denis Savard, she gives that bit of nifty news a three-second mention at the end, after putting on a three-minute fluff piece about how Bears kicker Robbie Gould takes care of his kicking foot. Two nights later, she actually mispronounces Savard's name.
 
 

Diann Burns hopped from WLS-TV (ABC Channel 7) in Chicago to WBBM-TV (Channel 2). She was all over the news for weeks because of this. It was like she was some amazing treasure of a newsreader, and Channel 2 just had to have her. What I couldn't figure out was, WTF is so damn amazing about her. She regularly stumbled over her words (still does), and was just another talking head. She's completely underwhelming as a news anchor. She even tried putting together a black boycott of her old station. She doesn't hesitate to play the race card when it helps her. May 2006, she and her husband are suing the contractor who worked on their house, claiming that the contractor is guilty of "racism" in cutting corners, thinking that a "black couple" wouldn't notice his shoddy work. He denies the work was bad, and certainly denies the racism. HOW IN THE HELL can she prove that somebody who allegedly did crappy work did it because his customers are black? Holy crap.
 

Chuck Goudie of Channel 7 Eyewitness News (the Chicago ABC affiliate) was tracking the  killer Andrew Cunanan a few years ago, and located the flophouse room the guy had been renting.  Instead of calling the police, he started rifling through things, drawers and such, possibly disturbing evidence.  His latest bit of sweeps-related stupidity  came in May 2001, when he went to Las Vegas to cover the story of an 11-year-old Indiana girl who ran away with her 28-year-old school principal.  After the pair had been found, Goudie weaseled his way into the motel room the pair had last rented.  The police had gone over it and the motel had cleaned it.  But Goudie found a condom wrapper in the garbage can, and almost went nuts on the air, proclaiming loudly on camera that somehow the police had missed this "key evidence" while sweeping the premises.  It turns out the pair had never even entered the room.  It also turns out that the principal had in fact been having relations with the girl, and Goudie made sure to turn up the volume on the sleazier side of the story.  Also, while the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers finally stopped printing the girl's name and picture (having done so originally only to possibly help in locating her) in order to avoid any further invasions of privacy, Goudie's station and others continued plastering the poor girl's face on the screen.
 

Mike Adamle has got to be the biggest sports whore in Chicago.  He went to pieces years ago while covering sports in Chicago, then made a comeback as sportscaster for NBC Channel 5, tries relentlessly and unsuccessfully to be funny while on the air, then announced for  American Gladiators (not realizing that this sorta blows the credibility thing), and then served as an on-field doofus for the XFL.  He snuck in various XFL teasers during newscasts, and even slipped in a mention during a promo for the Chicago Auto Show.  Most egregiously, he invoked Walter Payton's name while covering an XFL game.  Apparently nothing is sacred to this guy.  Does he have massive credit card debt or five kids in school, such that he'll do just about anything for a buck, including selling his soul to Vince McMahon?
 

Fox Nightly News in Chicago is incredibly creative with their lead-ins.  Here's an actual example from one particular evening: a murder, a police chase, a child drowning in an unprotected construction site, and, oh yes, the travails of a girl trying to  become a supermodel.  Nice segue.

Several years running, Chicago's WBBM-TV, the local CBS affiliate, showed Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown (whose main theme is that commerciality can't ruin the holiest of holidays), and just as the credits rolled and the Peanuts gang began singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, they'd do a voice-over to promote another show or newscast.  One memorable year, the voice-over was a teaser for the news, specifically regarding "a gruesome murder."  Da wife and I called to complain, and were told they'd been swamped already.

Way to screw up the franchise

My entire family LOVED the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, including me. Then da wife and kids went to the theater to see the sequel. They all came home less than overwhelmed. We got it on DVD for Christmas, and I saw what they (and just about every movie critic) were talking about. It SUCKED. Joyless, pointless, depressing, violent, confusing, and badly-edited. Everything that was great about the first one was missing in the second. How could they screw up so BADLY? Well, they obviously didn't learn from their mistakes, because the THIRD movie sucks rocks even more. Spielberg and Lucas figured out how shitty the second Indiana Jones movie was, and corrected themselves for the third one. The Pirates guys did NOT.

Of course, nothing in the franchise-killing department beats George Lucas and Star Wars. Great first two movies. In fact, "Empire Strikes Back" greatly enhanced the first one. The third one was great for the first forty-five minutes or so. And then THE EWOKS STRIKE. Good Lordy, what the hell was this shithead thinking? And t hen the second trilogy was boring, horribly written and acted, infested with inane special effects, inconsistent with the first three, and, in general, shitty. 
 
 

The Passion of the Wacko

July 2006: Mel Gibson has finally shown his true colors. He's previously disavowed anti-Semitism, but not very well. His dad is a Holocaust-denier, and Gibson won't disavow Dad. Then this month Gibson was nailed for DUI, and went on a Jew-hating rant against the arresting officers. He quickly issued an apology, but there's no way he can clean up from this one.

Mel Gibson has been perceived as this enlightened, spiritual guy since filming that chainsaw massacre known as The Passion of the Christ.  The whole idea is based on ONE SHORT PHRASE in the Bible, which says "Jesus was scourged." Then the rest came from the psycho ramblings of a Medieval nun who hated Jews, and which were turned into a play meant to stir up anti-Semitic feelings. When a critic of the movie, Frank Rich of the New York Times, took a shot at the flick, Gibson replied to reporters, "I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog." Rich replied, "I don't have a dog."

Gibson also said that Jews don't like his flick because "modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church." Sounds just like his own rampantly anti-Semitic dad.

And before you go thinking that Gibson is a real die-hard Catholic, look at this last few movies BEFORE the Passion, and the TV show he produced directly after. They're just as typically sleazy and sex-crazed as you'd expect from the entertainment industry. This guy turned Catholic for the length of the Jesus movie's run, and that's about it.

Apocalypto has got to be one of the most gratuitously violent pieces of shit ever. This piece of dreck outdoes even the chainsaw massacre Jesus flick he did, and with no apparent point whatsoever.
 
 

GEORGE LUCAS HAS FLUSHED HIS LEGACY. THERE HAVE BEEN TWO GOOD "STAR WARS" INSTALLMENTS, AND FOUR CRAPPY ONES.
 

Too much monkey business

I kinda dug the remake of "King Kong." My wife was cool enough to get me the remastered DVD of the 1933 original, and even the kids loved it. The new one made me appreciate the old one even more. The special effects are great, BUT ....... much as I love Jack Black, he wasn't very good in the new one. It was hard to believe that Naomi Watts would survive more than two minutes of being flung around as much as she was. Didn't buy it. And the damn thing went ON AND ON AND ON AND ON. Okay, I get it, there are monsters on the island. Jesus Christ, with all those monsters, how is it that half of them haven't already been eaten by others? Peter Jackson could have cut out half the creatures, and still had an interesting flick.

The scenes of running around in New York also went on way too long. This movie needed a serious trim. The side story of the black guy and his sidekick was useless. And exactly how many crew members do you need on a little steam ship? Jackson's a good movie maker, but he ain't Orson Welles. Give that man an editor.
 
 

Their kids will really suck at this biz

David Duchovny was good at one thing, and that was The X-Files. Most of everything he's done since has sucked rocks. He even made his own movie, House of D. Painful to watch. Worse yet, he's married to the very untalented Tea Leoni, who makes crap movie after crap movie. She was the worst thing in the already lousy Adam Sandler movie (I know, that's redundant), Spanglish. Together, this couple will surely breed very lovely, very stupid children.
 
 
 

Those who can't do, critique

Roger Ebert's always been a bit of a windbag, but he comes off even worse when paired up with his dork of a critic partner, Richard Roeper. When Roeper was nothing more than a lame youth columnist for the tabloid (in format AND content) Chicago Sun-Times, he had the job only because he was young, and they were pandering (they picked several of their writers that way, including their awful advice-mongers). The late, great Mike Royko once said of him, "The kid doesn't have it." Well, it's many years later, and he STILL doesn't have it. What he has is a cushy job flogging an art form he can't come close to hacking. Ebert couldn't get Rex Reed, or SOMEBODY with talent, who isn't a complete drip?
 

My neck is as red as my face

The idiot who wrote the crap script for the Starsky and Hutch movie also wrote Dukes of Hazzard. Guess what? As predicted in this space, the Dukes movie is crap. Worse than crap. Why does Hollywood keep remaking these old TV shows into movies? Why can't anybody come up with an original idea any more?
 
 

Bad Translation

Will Ferrell has NOT made a good migration from the small screen to the big. He was occasionally brilliant in sketch comedy on SNL. But his movies blow. A Night at the Roxbury was dreadful. Old School is DUMB. Bewitched is lame. Somebody stop him before he films again.
 
 

Who did he sleep with?

Every single one of Adam Sandler's movies sucks. Okay, so The Wedding Singer actually is mostly good, but once the action moves to the airport, from there to the end of the flick, it stinks. Quick rundown:

• Big Daddy -- dumber than hell; the last little bit about Hooters is especially stupid
• The Wedding Singer. Y'know, this thing is actually halfway decent in places. Then in the last fifteen minutes, they murder it.
• Happy Gilmore -- not only dumber than hell, but downright humiliating for Bob Barker
• Mr. Deeds -- a terrible remake of a good movie
• 50 First Dates -- rip-off of Groundhog Day, and ridiculously sappy when convenient
• Little Nicky -- parts of it are cute ..... the bulk of it is NOT.
• The Longest Yard -- this is arguably one of the worst remakes ever. The original is too damn good, and this one is too damn bad. He just smirks his way through it. The original, in fact, is a serious movie with a lot of laughs. The Sandler debacle is supposed to be a comedy, but it BLOWS.
• Spanglish. He tried doing another serious movie (Punch Drunk Love was a noble failure), and it SUCKS.
• Click. It's a one-joke movie. The first hour-plus is so banal and bad, the last little bit, which doesn't suck nearly as bad, can't redeem it. After his attempt to do a real movie bombed, it was right back to the crapper.

I'm tall, I'm handsome, I suck rocks

Matthew McConaughey must have it put into his contract that any movie he works on has to suck. The writing, the production, the plot, EVERYTHING has to suck, to cover up for the fact that this smirking doofus can't act. He's not funny, he's not believably romantic, he's not good enough to do straight drama. he just plain blows. The only thing he was ever decent in was Reign of Fire. Otherwise, he's toxic.
 
 

Back to school with you, missy

Julia Roberts doesn't put out art, just product.  Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.  With Mona Lisa Smile, it's just misguided dreck.  It's a rip-off of Dead Poets Society. Edgy, ahead of her time professor tries to liven up an uppity girls' school in the 1950's.  Problem is, it's based on a school that was already actually ahead of its time.  This rebellious storyline is so hack and overdone, it can be spotted from a mile away.  Sorry, but you're not teaching anybody anything new.
 

Don't quit your day job (oops, too late)

David Duchovny, formerly of The X-Files, is going down the road of the guy guy who quit NYPD Blue to make flicks, and who disappeared.  Can't remember his name?  I won't remind you.  But he tanked.  I don't know why people keep putting Duchovny in film roles.  He plays one role, himself.  He's a frigging drip.  May 2001, he's on Leno to plug his sci-fi parody flick, Evolution.  The commercials look stupid.  It's Men in Black, five years too late.  He might be able to make fun of himself, but not for more than ten minutes.  He AIN'T FUNNY.  He has LITTLE PERSONALITY.  His movies SUCK.  He made himself scarce on X-Files, pissing on his producers, his co-stars, and fans of the show.  Other than that, y'know, he's great.
 

Duchovny got the budget for a vanity flick, the dreadful House of D.  He wrote, directed, starred. Oh, and sucked. He managed to make Robin Williams awful in it as well. 
 
 

Don't quit your day job  Part II

Ashton Kutcher is funnier than hell on his funnier than hell TV gig, That 70's Show. But all his movies are cancerous. Every single one of them. One of them was so bad, it was held from release for about a year. Maybe Demi Moore will give him an allowance.

Oh, and before you think that all Holllywood types are environmentally sound, check this out .... Kutcher is the proud owner of an  International CXT. it's a truck, nine feet high, weighs seven tons, and gets seven miles a gallon.
 Jay Leno owns one as well.  Thanks, guys.
 
 
 

Captive Audience

On an April 2001 vacation to Maui, da wife and I were subjected to the inflight movies Family Man, What Women Want, Finding Forrester, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  The last one was great, Forrester was almost tolerable, but the first two were frigging AWFUL.  Mel Gibson ain't funny, no way no how.
 

Oh no, it's Russell Crowe

I'll never understand the hub-bub about Gladiator. It just wasn't that good. It was a standard sword and sandal flick, nothing original. And Crowe was just his usual mumbly self in it. Tom Hanks was MUCH better than Crowe that year, in a MUCH better flick, Castaway.

Crowe is also in need of psychiatric care. he's constantly getting in fights, and not just with photographers. June 2005, he got PO'd about the phone in his NYC hotel room, so he brought it down to the front desk and threw it against the wall.
 
 
 

Don't quit your day job (Part 3)

Robert Redford and Whoopi Goldberg are among the luminaries requesting clemency for convicted murderer Leonard Peltier.  Obviously, they haven't read up on the facts.  They need to keep doing what they do worst, which is make movies.  Check out the Correct Opinion on Leonard Peltier.  Meantime, outgoing President Clinton wisely chose not to grant Peltier clemency.  This was the correct decision.

Sandra Bullock is great to look at.  Her career is not.  She shouldn't just fire her agent, she should have her agent launched into space. Speed 2, Hope Floats, 28 Days, Forces of Nature, The Net, Miss Congeniality (and its bad sequel), OUCH.  Julia Roberts does a lot of crap too, but occasionally sneaks into My Best Friend's Wedding or Erin Brockovich.
 
 

Oh, but he was such a snappy dresser

I wonder if John Amos and Mickey Rourke ever lie in bed and think about what idiots they were in being cheerleaders for Gambino crime boss John Gotti. Didn't it bother them to be part of a useless PR campaign to legitimize a guy who had people killed, who ripped people off, who drove up the prices on legit goods by stealing from the honest businessmen who produced them? 
 
 

Mutant studio execs strike

Having been a huge comic book fan throughout my boyhood, I was big on the X-Men, one of hte quirkier and cooler titles out there for many years.  And so I was supremely disappointed that the movie of the X-Men SUCKS ROCKS.  The script is putrid.   Halle Berry is great looking, yeah, but unfortunately untalented, and miscast as Storm.  The guy they picked for Wolverine wasn't bad, but that's about it.  Why can't these guys ever get these comics-to-movies transitions right?  I hate to say it, but it still stands that one of the best screen versions of a comic hero was CBS TV's The Incredible Hulk, at least for the first couple of seasons.  And that's ancient history.  The movie version of The Hulk was good and bad, mostly bad.
 
 

Yo mama wrote SUCH a bad script, that .....

Fill in your punchline here.

Martin Lawrence seems to enjoy making shit movies.  So he must be in heaven right now, cuz  Big Momma's House was excrutiatingly bad.  Bathroom jokes, fat jokes, you name it.  He's a cop who goes undercover (sounds awfully damn familiar) as a large woman, in a town where people have known her for years, and none of them figures it out, not even the great-looking chick for whom the real Big Momma has been legal guardian.  For years.  These are pretty stupid people.  Or else that's mighty fine makeup.  How stupid does the screenwriter think an audience is?  Apparently pretty stupid.  But hey, there are PLENTY of stupid people out there, judging by the healthy box office receipts.  Too bad they couldn't come up with something that doesn't completely rip off the earlier-conceived but later-to-the-theaters Eddie Murphy flick, a "Nutty Professor" sequel.

So what does he follow up with?  Black Knight, a truly awful piece of sh*t.  Bad Boys II was also crap.

Summer 2005: Lawrence comes back with a cliche-ridden rip-off called Rebound, where he's a troubled ex-NBAer who's forced to coach a kid's team. This has been done and done and done.
 
 

I've got time off of Purgatory now .....

...because I just finished watching the Kevin Costner epic The Postman on cable.  Holy crap, just when I thought nothing could be worse than Waterworld, or more of a downer than Wyatt Earp, I set myself straight.  Somebody take away Costner's frigging megaphone, stop him before he directs again. 
 
 
 

Just the facts, ma'am, or maybe not

You gotta hate movies with a cause.  Case in point: The Hurricane, the supposed biopic of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.  It allegedly tells the story of how Carter was dogged through his early life by a racist cop, was robbed in a title fight, was framed for a crime he didn't commit (shooting to death three people in a bar), and served many years in prison til a handful of supporters got him freed.  Unfortunately, the movie plays fast and extremely LOOSE with the facts:

• the racist cop is an utter fabrication
• the film ignores Carter's criminal youth
• the film ignores evidence that relatives of the victims believe still implicates Carter.
• the longest fight scene shows Carter knocking the crap out of former middleweight champ Joey Giardello and being screwed on the decision, when most observers, including the venerable boxing historian Bert Sugar, saw Giardello easily winning the fight
• the people who banded together to get Carter freed were condensed from many into three

Obi-Wan, I feel a disturbance in my wallet

Finally rented the latest Star Wars flicks.  Ho-hum, and boy was it dumb.  Here's my stargate to the Episode I Marketing Galaxy.
All that budget, and none of it for a decent script.  Now here comes another, with the same bunch of geeks without lives drooling at the prospect.  Does Jar-Jar Binks get gutted with a lightsabre in this one?
 
 
 
 

I swear, if Robert Downey Jr. comes out of prison and tries to start a program for drug offenders, I'll personally shove his last syringe up his smack-happy ass.  Oh wait, can the twelve-step nonsense, it's winter 2000, and he's done it again.  Who the hell thought that taking an obviously weak-minded individual and putting him back in the TV show grinder would help?  Probably the same geniuses who figured that putting Darryl Strawberry back in baseball right out of probation would help him too.  Oops, and spring 2001 he's busted again, and finally they fired him from Ally McBeal.  This was the best thing for them and him.
 
 
 

The Blair Witch Pitch

A wise man named Tully has drawn my attention to the "uplifting ending" of The Blair Witch Project, "showing how the world managed to rid itself of three film students. "  Otherwise, if you're looking for a few cheap thrills, YOU WON'T FIND THEM.  Word of mouth on this flick makes you think this is the scariest thing on film since Pauly Shore.  But IT'S NOT.  There are a couple of creepy parts, and the last two minutes are a bit chilly, but otherwise, it's about three kids lost in the woods.  I went to be frightened and got only popcorn stuck between my teeth.  If you were scared at this flick, you must be French.  And quickly there was talk of a sequel.  And I have the perfect plot.  In Blair Witch 2 : Revenge of the Suckers, the millions of people who wasted perfectly good afternoons attending this over-hyped film school homework assignment kick the crap out of the many idiot reviewers (including Peter Travers of Rolling Stone) for once again plugging the shit out of an indie film for one goddamn reason : it's an indie film.

January 2000: the creators of the Blair Witch planned  two followups.  They acquired  budget, and a semi-big-name director.  And I came up with a new angle for them, something to take the series to new dimensions:  make the next one SCARY.   Oooooooooooooh.
 Fall 2000: The Blair Witch sequel  came out, and the most frightening thing is that it SUCKED.
 
 

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune movie critic, should share whatever he's smoking.  He says that the new movie version of The Haunting includes more of Shirley Jackson's book. Huh?  In the book, you're not even really sure there IS a ghost, and the psychological terror is palpable.  In the original, and very scary, movie version, the only special effect I can recall is a breathing door.  The new version is jam-packed with digital special effects.  And as we've seen with American Werewolf in Paris and other so-called scare flicks that rely on computer monsters, there's really nothing all that scary about them.  Rent the original Haunting, or visit my in-laws with me sometime.

After a year or so of lame tryouts with film school dropouts, Roger Ebert finally selected the very untalented and not terribly personable Richard Roeper, hack columnist for the hack Sun-Times, to take over Gene Siskel's TV seat.  Roeper was originally picked as a columnist for his age, not for any ability.  He was supposed to relate to younger readers.  Didn't work.  His column stinks.  As Mike Royko said yeeeears ago, "The kid doesn't have it."  Just like with the GOP picking Bush to be their man, I would have to say to Ebert, "this is the best you could do?"
 

Dan Ackroyd hasn't been funny for more than fifteen years. Howie Mandel has never been funny. Jerry Lewis is a much better dramatic actor than he ever was a comic. Norm MacDonald is funny maybe ten minutes a year. The only thing funny about Joe Piscopo is that he ever thought he was funny.  Andrew Dice Clay would only be funny as a statistic. If I was dead, I'd still be funnier than Pauly Shore.
 

The police recently fished from the harbor a depressed screenwriter. He had tied himself to Steve Guttenberg's career and thrown himself in the water.

Stephen King used to be a pretty scary writer, although most of the stuff he's done the last ten years has been quite lame. While Salem's Lot is one of the scariest and best made-for-TV flicks ever, his cinematic experiences have mostly been awful. About the DUMBEST thing he's ever gotten involved with was a made-for-cable remake of The Shining, which was a great-looking and fairly spooky flick by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson. So when King decides years later that this movie was no good, even though it was made by possibly the greatest director ever and starring one of the greatest actors ever, he has it remade starring one of the guys from Wings. Oh, now that was a good move. What, was Robert Goulet unavailable?

Physics quiz: if you dropped Carrot Top and Vanilla Ice off the Sears Tower at the same time, and presumably they both accelerated toward the sidewalk at 32 ft. per second squared, would anybody give a crap?

So, like, when's the remake of The Partridge Family?

It's not that the PUBLIC is getting cynical. It's that FILMMAKERS are getting cynical. The most recent example is the movie version of The Mod Squad.. Not only is it a pathetic movie, it doesn't even TRY to be good, doesn't even TRY to live up to the ideals (however hack) of the original TV series. All it is, is a vehicle for young stars to crossmarket clothes and music. The plot is completely unbelievable, the characters are all played as idiots, they somehow manage to show up JUST as the bad guys are explaining their whole evil plot (they manage this three or four times), Claire Danes sets an excellent example for a heroine by screwing an old boyfriend in a bathroom stall, and in general the flick has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They dress and act like chimps. Other than that, well, y'know, the producer should be shot and the director beaten with sticks. Next.

Uh-oh.  Here's what's next. Wild, Wild West.  This sorry-assed excuse for a Will Smith vehicle was dumber than New Coke.  I guess his handlers saw how an expensive, idiotic piece of crud like Independence Day could make a lotta dough with Smith, so they figured, ditch the script, stick a few monkeys in a room with a few typewriters and see which one bangs out dialogue first, then film it.  Smith is such a nice, photogenic guy, but they keep wasting him in dreck. 

Whoa, it gets worse.  Charlie's Angels  features some gorgeous chicks (although Drew Barrymore needs to do situps, but man, this movie reeks.  The kung fu stuff could have been interesting, but so much of it relies on the girls getting hoisted into the air with wires.  I hope Bill Murray got paid really well for this one.
 

Dianetics Chapter 3 : Care & Cleaning of Celebrities

Tom Cruise obviously can't perceive how badly he's embarrassed himself with his Scientology-fueled antics. He also hasn't done Scientology any good. Their influence obviously isn't a good thing.
 

John Travolta's second career seems to be shilling for the "Church" of Scientology. No matter that even the guy who started it admitted it was a great way to make a lot of money. John says he's happier and more successful now, plugging this giant scam that's so spooky that it's banned in Germany and scares the crap out of the rest of the planet.

Of course Travolta doesn't see the brainwashing and the way they push their followers away from family and friends. Of course he doesn't see how they drag you into the lobby, hook you up to a machine that tells you how screwed up you are and how they can fix you for ever-escalating fees. They're not gonna do that to HIM. He's their best spokesface.

John says his favorite saying by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology and an abysmal writer, is the one where he describes a world free of "criminality and insanity." He says no other religion has this as a goal. Well, of course not. I'm a Catholic, and everyone knows it's the stated goal of the Catholic Church to fill the world with crooks and crazy people.

He is right, however, when he says that L. Ron Hubbard hasn't just died, he's moved on to another process. That process would be, um, moldering.

Travolta's production of Hubbard's sci-fi claptrap book Battlefield Earth  opened to rave reviews ....... from CFCF-TV, WDFL-TV, and the heralded GEMS Television.  Everybody else, tho', thinks it STINKS.  The book was long and dumb to begin with, and the villains in the movie version do one thing, they laugh diabolically.  They do a lot of it, in fact.  Maybe they found the script unintentionally funny, as did most reviewers.  The old Theta Clear thing on the fritz, maybe, John?  Oops, yeah, it must be.  His next flick, Lucky Numbers, was just about as bad. In fact, the movie after that, about a divorced dad saving his kid from mom's new boyfriend, was also awful. 

The one I can't figure out, tho', is Kirstie Alley. She also claims to be an adherent of Scientology. She must not be very "clear," to use their terminology. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain all those crap movies (including the ones she did with Travolta), or that crap TV show she did for NBC, or the massive weight gain.

Jenna Elfman of Dharma and Greg is cute enough, but now she claims Scientology helped get her off a longtime pot habit. It's always one crutch or the other.

Juliette Lewis must not be very clear, in the parlance of Scientology. On the Tonight Show, she seemed positively out of it. Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was muddling her mind with psychic transmissions from wherever the hell he's rotting these days.

I also wonder what all these celebs think about their church buddies starving a woman to death down in Florida. I suppose they call that Theta Hungry.

The votes are IN!!!

My mistake, Daylight wasn't on the list.

One person wrote in, saying he'd never heard of Lock Up. A lady wrote in and said she'd never heard of Paradise Alley. These must have been especially bad. And I'd completely forgotten about his arm-wrestling flick, Over The Top.

May 2007: The CEO of Sirius satellite radio,, in comparing his company to XM, said "we suck less." He also had to defend giving hundreds of millions to Howard Stern, while simultaneously watching the company's stock tank. December 2005, Howard Stern moved to satellite radio. And what did this mean, exactly? It meant he could be as vulgar as he wants. He said he'd bring microphones into the bathroom. He can drop f-bombs all he wants. We then saw exactly how untalented he can be, because with the so-called freedom he has without censorship, the only thing he can think of to do is cuss more. I've been listening to satellite radio in rental cars on business trips, and the ONLY thing I hear different is more cussing. I have no problem with cussing, per se, but if that's the only difference, who gives a shit? Satellite radio still airs plenty of commercials, which, to me, defeats the purpose. And what did Stern spent most of his time doing, the first couple of months on his new satellite radio show? Ragging about his OLD show. 
 

March 2000, Erich "Mancow" Muller, disgusting and not terribly amusing Chicago DJ (with the usually juvenile schtick: sending goons out to do disgusting or annoying things, undressing women in the studio, nothing that Steve Dahl or Howard Stern don't already do just as boringly), caved in and settled a lawsuit with former Chicago Bear Keith Van Horne.  Van Horne had sued for defamation, including Muller's radio station and former employers.  Van Horne gets $1.6 million. 

Says Muller, "I am not contributing a penny to this settlement, and will issue no apology or retraction.  I have defended my right to free speech for over half a decade in this case, and I will not abandon that most precious constitutional right."

That is just so much bullshit.  Fact is, if he felt so strongly about his right to free speech, Muller could have dragged this out.  And he shouldn't be proud of the fact that he didn't have to kick in any cash.  SOMEBODY had to.  He cost somebody else money with his imprudent remarks.  That's not something to be proud of.  Calling somebody "Charlie Manson who works out" and a "psychotic" is something he might have to think more carefully about.  But then again, this is a guy who talks dirty on the radio and calls it free speech, so there's not a lot of thinking going on to begin with.
 

Turn it off, turn it off again

Horror of horrors! March 2007, and the wretched "rock" group Genesis, which has had exactly two half-decent tunes in the decades since Peter Gabriel left, has reformed for a tour. What crimes did they commit against music, together and solo? Try "Invisible Touch," "In the Air Tonight," "Abacab," "Susudio," and on and on. You might also remember Phil Collins for that shit soundtrack he did for the animated Tarzan flick, the funeral dirge crap that he killed the Super Bowl halftime with. He ALSO should have been imprisoned for producing the shittiest albums of Eric Clapton's career. The "South Park" guys got it right when they did an episode in which the kids on Ritalin were spaced out enough to like Phil Collins, but once the Ritalin wore off, they knew that "Phill Collins sucks." This guy can't sing, and he once had the nerve to insult Peter Gabriel's voice.

Sound the alarms, run away screaming, use duct tape on your doors and windows, until this threat to Western Civilization goes away again.
 
 

Join us!  Or, uh, don't

For promotional purposes, I went to join VH1's website. It told me the username I'd chosen was already taken. So I tried a different one. Same result. Because the second one was pretty unique, I got suspicious. I tried a few more, using random letters and numbers, and even some pretty vulgar crap. Every single one came back as "already taken."  There's no "contact us" link. Their HELP section tells you, if you get that message, just pick another name. THANKS. So I sent some email to their admin and help addresses. One bounced, the other didn't. "Hey, your site is broken."  NOTHING.  Much like the shitty MySpace interface, these guys don't understand the simple concept of customer service. UPDATE: You have to clean out all cookies and other browser bullshit, and then it works. No idea why your old cookies would result in that particular error message, or why they can't tell you that.
 
 

Justin Timberlake has GOT to be the biggest retard in the entertainment biz. He says he longs for a time when the hip scene was all about cocaine and sex. Yeah, look what that got us. Of course, this is a guy whose "boy band" put out nothing but crap, and whose current music is just forgettable pop junk. Will anybody remember a single one of his "songs" five years from now? I'll give him credit for one thing: he's funnier than hell when he's on SNL. But musically, he's shit.

January 2007: Timberlake and Cameron Diaz put out a joint statement saying they're breaking up. Jesus H. Christ, how self-important ARE these assholes that they actually put out press releases about this crap? "Hey, look, I got a hangnail, where's the microphone?"
 

Super Crappy: The correct opinion about the Timberlake/Jackson SuperBowl mess

First off, here are the rather quaint comments I wrote in this space just a few years ago:

Super Bowl XXXIV  (34, for the Roman-impaired) featured perhaps the worst half-time show ever.  Phil Collins, Christine Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias, and Toni Braxton conspired to bore the snot out of us.  They should have kept the camera on the giant puppets. 
Of course, Super Bowl XXXV featured Aerosmith embarrassing themselves by performing with N'Sync and Britney Spears.  You boys need the money that bad?  Forget the difference between rock and pop?  Or maybe to you it's not art anymore, just product.

Okay, NOW let's check it out.  January 2004, we have seen the absolute nadir of Super Bowl entertainment, and possibly of good sense.  A very sleazy halftime show was capped off by Justin Timberlake ripping some clothes off Janet Jackson, revealing her her bare breast, including some fancy nipple jewelry.  Let's reduce this to bullet points, shall we?

• Timberlake and Jackson both apologized, first saying it was a "wardrobe malfunction."  You lying sacks of crap.  How dumb do you think everybody else is?  Timberlake later hinted that it might have been on purpose, but he wasn't in on it. 
• Jackson says her bra was supposed to be in place.  But then why was she wearing the nipple ring?  She's not only a liar, she's a bad liar.
• Timberlake sang (well, lip-synched) "I'm gonna get you naked by the end of this song," then pulled part of her jacket away.  So even if her bra was still in place, this was still a sleazy stunt, and therefore still in bad taste.
• Idiot rapper Nelly spent his crap slot on the bill grabbing his groin and bragging about "shooting seed," i.e. getting laid.  Why was this garbage part of the set?
• Bigger idiot Kid Rock wore a poncho made from an American flag, sang songs about drinking whiskey and grabbing girls' crotches, then took off his poncho and tossed it on the ground behind him.  Excuse me, jackass, but that flag means something.

So to summarize, regardless of the boob show, this was a tasteless, dumb, inexcusable exercise in sleaze.  If you want to show off in this manner, do it on cable.  I'm no prude, but there is no place for this crap on prime time, network TV. 

June 2006: It was announced that one of the Backstreet Boys is quitting. Wow. I didn't know they were still together.
 
 

Don't mess with the classics

Summer 2001: Steven Tyler of Aerosmith (a group so in need of cash, apparently, that it will sing at the Super Bowl with N'Sync and sell its songs for commercials), changed the words to the National Anthem at the Indy 500: "O'er the land of the free, and the home of the Indianapolis 500."  He was booed heavily, and replied, "I was just trying to add a little levity."  I used to like these guys, but their pandering for money is getting sickening.
 

Puffed Up

March 2001: Fairly lame rapper Sean "Puffy" Combs, his protege Jamaal "Shyne" Barrow, and his bodyguard Anthony "Wolf " Jones, were lucky to avoid a guilty verdict  in a trial in which they were accused of firing guns at a nightclub.  Combs was there with with now-ex-girlfriend, Jennifer "Big Ass" Lopez.  Assistant District Attorney Matthew "No Funky Nickname" Bogdanos told the jury that witnesses for Combs only offered "lies." 

Barrow was found guilty of various charges, and faces 25 years.

Combs obviously doesn't aspire to lead his rapping brethren from the gutter of ghettospeak to the heights of being understandable. As he once said, "We men, man.  We bad boys."

Somehow Combs got out of going to jail.   AMAZING.  Meantime, I finally listened to his Godzilla soundtrack tune based on Zeppelin's Kashmir. He attempts to sing in the middle of it, and does so dreadfully.  If not for sampling a great rock song, this would have been a disaster.  Face it, this guy's just not that talented.

Oh, and here comes Rod Stewart, February 2001, with another comeback tour, another failed marriage, another forgettable love ballad, another hair color, another set of wrinkles, another embarrassing performance on The Tonight Show.  Do something original, Rod, like write your first decent song in over 20 years, or stick with the same woman, or better yet, pack it in. Cuz man, you suck.
 

Xmas 2000: Gee whiz, look what's in the bargain bins.   A "best of" collection from ..... Kim Carnes.  The gravel-throated broad who gave us the annoying top-ten hit "Bette Davis Eyes," which was pretty damn dumb to begin with, never scored again.  And that was what, twenty years ago?  So based on a two-decades-old schlock song, she's put together a "best of."  Quite the stretch.  Of course, there's a worse one:  The Best of Asia.  These prog-rock dropouts had two charters in the early 80's, then toured endlessly based on those wretched synth-tunes.  Both hits, from their first album, are on this collection, and then a bunch of forgettable dreck.  They must really need the cash.  And I hope they aren't holding their breath waiting for it.  But hang on, here's THE worst: a best of Toni Basil.  Her one hit, "Oh Ricky" was a dreadful dance tune.  She put together a best-of anyway.  After one hit.  A million years ago.

It's a rap

Crap-rapper Eminem says he lets his four-year-old daughter listen to whatever music she wants, including his own expletive-filled rap dreck.  "She's four years old, so what am I gonna do?" he laments.  Well, you dolt, she's only four years old, so you could try BEING A PARENT.

Kid Rock says he tells his five-year-old to behave around Grandma, but when riding with the old man it's okay to flip people off.

Dr. Dre excuses the nastiness in rap, saying it's "just music .... it's just entertainment."  Yeah, and all you rap-jerks are just assholes.  That's all.

August 2000: at a rap awards show in Chicago, filmed for the tube, many of the acts trotted out the usual "motherf____r" choruses while performing their so-called songs.  And then a lovely fight broke out.

Face it, rap is generated by and attracts idiots. The most recent example is the literal stampede caused by gunshots which rang out at a rap "concert" by some clown act called Juvenile, in New Orleans. It has nothing to do with color; rap is occasionally clever, but mostly ugly, lacking in talent and originality, and it's often violent. White-boy dummy Eminem (the candy people should sue) has some inspirational rapping: "I'll strangle you to death and I'll choke you again, and break your f____ing legs until your bones poke through your skin." He's also put out songs accusing his mother of drug use, and talking about how he'd like to kill and mutilate his wfe.  Anybody who buys this drek is, well, an IDIOT. 

Summer 2005: Eminem and Fifty-Cent on tour. Live, they both SUCK. Eminem can actually be pretty good, on CD, but these two guys mumble a lot and can't remember their lines on stage. No presence, no energy, just FLAT. 

Summer 2006: A trio of rappers says that Oprah Winfrey is ignoring rappers on her show. Poor babies. Maybe she doesn't like all the talk about violence, shooting cops, "niggers," "ho's," "bitches," etc. 

Busta Rhymes has a new, lame-ass CD out. Even rap-happy reviewers think it's shit. And it's full of the word "bitches." No imagination.
 

Cookie Cutter singers

If you turned out the lights (and no fair feeeling for the fake boobs) and just listened, could you tell the slightest difference between Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera?   Hasn't over-production pretty much turned them into interchangeable video mannequins?  Aguilera is more notable for all the dramatic hand gestures she makes while singing, as if the pop crap she warbles has some significant meaning, than for breaking new musical ground.  She's great to look at, sure.  Can't she just stand there and shut up?

Winter 2002: Britney may very well be the first musical act to lip sync on Saturday Night Live.  She's gorgeous, she can dance a little, she can't sing, and her songs are crap.  She'd do well in Vegas, but otherwise, what's there?

The most well-known faker on SNL, though, must be Ashlee Simpson. Crap material, dreadful dancing, and a run of the mill voice. He rsister's infinitely better looking, but a ditz, married to a haircut, and with phony-baloney hand gestures with every song, as if what she's singing matters.
 

Oh, and you gotta love that  Mariah Carey video, which features underprivileged kids who've overcome drugs and HIV and bad home lives in order to better themselves.  The message comes across so much stronger because Carey spends the entire video in her underwear.  The kids must be so inspired.
 
 

Hi Instability

Kevin Cronin, he of the nasally godawful vocals and satanically bad lyric-writing from REO Speedwagon (referred to in high school as Oreo Speedcookie) said recently that the nineties were a tough time for older, 70's-based bands.  "We were obsolete overnight," he said, after grunge reared its ugly head.  Well, Kev, not exactly.  You were obsolete overnight after you clowns put out Hi Infidelity, a sappy, sugary, ballad-heavy bunch of crap in the early 80's, more than ten years before grunge.  So don't blame Nirvana; blame the horseshit you recorded before Kurt Cobain was completely addled.

Speaking of unstable, check out this guy R. Kelly.  He can't decide if he's a gospel singer or the porn star of what passes for soul these days.  Simulated sex and fiddling around in his own pants onstage doesn't exactly coincide with the sermons he gives during shows.  I guess this means his born-again phase is over?  June 2002 update: After a videotape surfaced that allegedly showed Kelly having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl in his former Chicago home, he issued a statement saying that the guy in the tape isn't him.  But after an indictment came along and he was arrested, his story changed to "that girl was eighteen at the time."  Well, which is it?
 

I went to a garage sale and bought The New Kids on the Block. No, no, not tee shirts or old CD's. I mean, I actually bought The Kids. They won't hold up as well as plastic flamingos, but as they rot, they're feeding my lawn.
 

Do they really need the money that bad?

It just kills me that Zeppelin sold Rock and Roll to Cadillac.

"I'd sell my SOUL for a shot at the big-time !"

And that's exactly what they did. The following flotsam and jetsam of the entertainment industry obviously signed in blood with the biggest agent of all, Lucifer. This is the only possible reason they have made it in their chosen profession. I mean, it sure can't be because of any discernible talent. The rewards are high, but temporary, and the percentage will surely get them. David Spade : has one setting, Annoying. Howie Mandel : that boneheaded giggle is nauseating Carrot Top : there's always five minutes left at the end of The Tonight Show Joe Piscopo : milking Sinatra's dead bones, but at least he stopped lifting weights Celine Dion : shove a doughnut in her, she needs the weight, and it will shut her up Adam Sandler : has become a multi-millionaire by phoning in lame performances in stupid flicks, every single one of which sucks rocks Bryan Adams : as described in the South Park movie, Canada has apologized for this talent-free clown several times.

Note to Steven Bochco: Just showing someone's ass on TV doesn't make your show good or cutting edge. It only cheapens the product. Unless maybe it's Mira Sorvino's ass.