Outrage Begets Outrageousness

There is a phenomenon referred to by the great cultural leaders of our time as the Outrage Bandwagon. Ok, mainly it's just me who says that. Anyway, the Outrage Bandwagon is what happens when some sort of event happens and people trip over each other to see who can be more outraged by it. This is especially true if you have access to a national audience, be it through print, television, or whatever. If, say, a pre-operative transsexual announces that "he" is pregnant, various thinkers, pundits and professional gasbags piss themselves in outrage and try not to slip on their own piss as they run to their columns, blogs or cable news talk shows so that they can tell the world how men don't get pregnant and list the various ways in which the very concept will destroy society as we know it and that we should all just hide in a cave because before the whole "pregnant man" situation somehow turns the human population into flesh eating zombies. After a week or so goes by and the zombies fail to emerge, we all calm down and come out of our caves only to be driven back into them a few days later when the next event happens and the Outrage Bandwagon starts up again on its perpetual tour. One of big problems with the Outrage Bandwagon is that it's almost always about something that, in the scheme of things, is fairly innocuous and forgettable. The other one is that it causes a lot of smart people to say some really stupid stuff. Today's best example of that is Bonnie Fuller at the Huffington Post opining over this week's occupant of the Outrage Bandwagon.

This week, the Bandwagon is beating its chest over Miley Cyrus and her "topless" photos. Note the quotation marks. When I first woke up Monday morning and the main headline in Yahoo entertainment news telling me about the controversy over the existence of topless pictures of the 15 year old Hannah Montana star, I assumed that these would be like the Vanessa Hudgens pics that came out last summer where she took nude photos of herself for the private viewing of her boyfriend and they wound up on the internet. But no, these were taken deliberately by a major photographer for a well known magazine, Vanity Fair. When I went to their web site and saw the "topless" picture, I assumed that everyone was talking about something other than this. Because, how do I put this, SHE'S NOT TOPLESS!!!! At best, she's backless. She's not showing anything you wouldn't see at the beach and was, from what they've said, she was wearing a top underneath that sheet that was covering the part of her body that would have to be showing in order for this picture to qualify as topless.

It is a little more alluring than it should be when you consider that she's only 15 and, if you're a columnist or blogger who has nothing else to write about that day, you could fill a few column inches calmly questioning how appropriate it is to portay such a young girl in even a mildly sexual way. But "calmly questioning" is pretty much the exact opposite of what's been happening the past few days. Instead, the Outrage Bandwagon has unleashed its usual stupidity best exemplified, as I said above, by Bonnie Fuller. The stupidity starts right with the first sentence and actually reaches a stupidity climax with the second paragraph:

Is it OK to sexualize a fifteen-year-old if it is in the pages of a high falutin' magazine and her parents seem OK with it? Or is this really not much different from parents in a cult acquiescing to having their teen daughters wedded and bedded?

Yes, Bonnie Fuller, there is a HUGE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between a professional singer and actress taking a publicity photo in which we can see her back and a polygamist cult forcing teenage girls to live as second class citizens in a compound where they are separated from society and be knocked up by men old enough to be their grandfathers.

Fuller then goes on to say that Miley's parent, Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus, should learn a lesson from the parents of Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. It would have been awesome of Fuller to tell us what this lesson should be. Jamie Lynn, as most of you already know, is the pregnant star of another kids show. Unlike her more famous sister, Jamie Lynn never had any pictures taken of her that could be interpreted as provocative yet she is now a pregnant teen, unlike her sister or Miley Cyrus. I guess the lesson to learn here is that if teenage girls are busy showing off their bodies to cameras, they don't have time to become underage mothers so she should do one of those Maxim layouts where only her hands are covering her breasts as soon as possible.

She then goes on to dismiss the claims of regret and embarrassment made by both Miley and her parents and uses the time tested technique that hack columnists love to use. This is where you ask questions that also serve as accusations since there's no one there to answer them:

So what exactly were the Cyruses thinking? Is it part of the Miley career plan to sexualize her at 15 as a way to wooing an adult audience that will see her as more than Hannah Montana? Are her parents worried that she might never be able to make the crossover? Isn't a billion dollars of Hannah Montana revenue in 2008 alone enough to give the girl a break and just let her be a teen girl?

All that from one picture that showed the same amount of her back you would see if she wore an evening gown and that she and her parents say that they wish hadn't been taken.

So, what does this tell us about Bonnie Fuller? Is she a certifiably brain damaged idiot or merely misguided? Should she quit writing all together or just stop for a few years? Is she doing this because she hates all that is great and wonderful about our world or does she just hate the great stuff while sort of liking the wonderful? I don't know. all I know is that I'm outraged.

Mama Mia

The title may fool people because this is a review of the new Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama but later on this summer there will be a movie released called Mamma Mia with Meryl Streep. I don't know what the hell I'll call that review but that's a problem for the future. With a little luck, Meryl Streep has a previously unknown addiction to freebasing cocaine, will do so in the processing lab that makes the prints of her new movie and all copies of Mamma Mia will burn up and I won't have to deal with this situation at all. A man can hope.

Anyhoo, I didn't write a review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall but I'll say now that I thought it was very good which makes this an amazing situation where I see good comedies two weeks in a row. There is simply no movie genre harder to pull off than the comedy, a statement proven when so many of them end up sucking. I go into a comedy assuming it's going to be the cinematic version of feces coated slime monster that crawled out of the bowels of hell to wreak havoc on all that is good and holy. I'll usually give it points if it's coated with just a little bit of feces and only wreaks havoc on the good, skipping the holy.

Baby Mama is not as good as Sarah Marshall but it's way the hell better than my "feces covered monster" standard. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler make a great comedy team. I've seen some people compare them to Lucy and Ethel but in this case The Odd Couple is a better comparison. Tina Fey (in my opinion, one of the funniest people currently living) plays Kate, a woman in her late 30s who put off starting a family to advance her career as vice president of an organic foods company. At age 37, she realizes that she'd best have a baby before she gets too old to pick it up but discovers that, due to her narcissistic mother's use of dangerous liver spot medication while pregnant with Kate, her chances of conceiving a child are almost impossible. Thus, after discovering that it would take years before an adoption could be finalized, she decides to hire a surrogate mother. Enter Amy Poehler's character, Angie. Angie somehow managed to pass the background checks of the surrogacy agency that Kate hired despite the fact that she and her husband are uncouth, immature, dimwits who con and hustle their way through life and are just doing this for the massive amount of money that Kate is willing to pay to rent out her uterus. From there, hilarity ensues.

One thing that Baby Mama has in common with Sarah Marshall is that they both have great supporting characters so the movie isn't 100% dependent on Fey and Poehler for laughs. A good opposite example is Wedding Crashers. Except for a few lines from Isla Fisher's crazy girls character, almost all the laughs in that movie came from Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson and it suffered for that. I've seen plenty of movies starring folks like Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler where all the humor comes from the star and those are almost always bad movies. In Baby Mama, however, we get people like Steve Martin's Barry, the pretentious New Agey owner of Kate's company who, instead of explaining himself through a prospectus or Powerpoint presentation, talk about auras, energies and essences and, at one point, rewards Kate's especially good work with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact. We also get Sigourney Weaver playing Chaffee Bicknell, the owner of the agency that handles surrogate pregnancies. Not only is she as pretentious as her name would suggest but she is also freakishly fertile, still having babies far past where most women would have gone through menopause, a fact that she often throws in Kate's face. There are also Angie's husband and Kate's doorman, played by Dax Shepard and Romany Malco, who both provide many laughs.

Baby Mama is not a great movie that I'll remember fondly as the years go by but it's a good one that gave me some good laughs and didn't once make me think of feces, slime, monsters or hell. I don't feel I can ask for much more than that.

Things I've Learned From Watching Movies Part 16

If a masked vigilante is running around a major city using expensive, advanced technology, it won't occur to anyone that the guy under the mask might be a prominent billionaire who's around the same height and shape and owns a company that makes expensive, advanced technology.

Things I've Learned From Watching Movies Part 15

I never would have suspected this, but getting hammered and waking up next to Cameron Diaz is a bad thing. I'm so glad I found this out now as I've always thought there was an excellent chance of this happening.

Super Duper Ultra Mega Important Movie News You Must See Now!!!

An awesome trailer for a new movie just showed up on YouTube. This looks fascinating to me though I don't think it's for everyone. The link is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Go ahead and watch it, I'll give you my thoughts when you get back.

Back? Cool.

GOTCHA FUCKERS! DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, DID YOU! THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER DONE IN THE HISTORY OF AWESOME THINGS AND I DID IT TO YOU, STOOPID NOOBZ! KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? I WIN THE INTERNET! I WIN THE INTERNET!

If you don't get why this is funny, tough.

Have a nice day.

The Monsters Take Manhattan -- Now With A New DVD Smell

Cloverfield actually manages the rare feat of being a better movie watching experience at home on your TV screen than on the big screen despite the fact that, at home, you don't have to take out a second mortgage to pay for popcorn and soda. You can't afford NOT to have a good time in a case like that. Viewing Cloverfield on the small screen also undercuts the now infamous "shakycam" effect, thus completely undoing the filmmakers' original intention to have as many vomit while watching the movie as possible that was easy to achieve on a theater screen. It was a bold artistic choice, I admit, but it was theirs to make.

There are two alternate endings on the disc that are about as "alternate" as telling the waitress at Denny's that you want crinkle cut fries instead of the regular straight cut fries with your burger.

I'm reposting my original review that I wrote back in February so as to give the illusion that there's lot sof original content in this post. Have a nice day and enjoy the DVD of Cloverfield.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Cloverfield -- The Monsters Take Manhattan
Posted by Michael Clear

Cloverfield is yet another one of those movies that gets a large segment of movie lovers interested and a small segment thinking, "OH MY FREAKIN GOD THIS WILL BE THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER," or at least the greatest one since the last time a Greatest Movie Ever hit the theaters.

Cloverfield has had the internet abuzz ever since they bundled their trailer in with Transformers last summer. The trailer was dark, difficult to understand and had a lot of people saying, "Wha...?" and, "HEY!" when they didn't even tell you what the title was. I'd like to think there was a time when this sort of marketing strategy would have been seen as the filmmakers extending a giant middle finger to their intended audience and caused such a backlash that not only would no one ever go see the movie but the people who thought to do this would be hunted down, have their homes burned and be buried up to their necks in anthills. However, as most of you already know, what happened instead was that many people, after watching the Transformers cross the galaxy to fulfill their sacred mission to help Shia LaBeouf nail the hottest girl in school, raced home to endlessly watch YouTube video of the trailer over and over trying to see where they missed the title. Since it is produced by Lost creator J.J. Abrams, the ensuing viral marketing campaign consisted of vague clues that really don't lead anywhere and numerous mysteries that are never fully solved. I'm not going to link to any of it since, in the end, it all really has very little to do with the movie.

Oh yeah, the movie. Here we are, three paragraphs in and I haven't yet mentioned how the movie is. Opinion of it mostly breaks down into two camps. The first camp consists of people who thought it was an entertaining movie about a giant monster attacking New York City. The second consists of people who got pissed off and became physically ill. They were easy to spot too as the sick people mostly sat in the front rows. See, the movie's greatest asset is also its greatest flaw. Movie aficionados got excited about this because, while it is yet another giant monster movie, it's told using the Blair Witch gimmick of having all the movie footage being shot by the characters themselves with a hand held digital video camera. This got people into the theaters and then drove them back out since, due to what I assume was an effort at "realism" in a movie about some crazed sea monster who rips New York apart, the camera often shakes so much that you literally get queasy watching it. I was ok but then again I sat in the back row. I heard at least two girls who sat closer to the screen complain about upset stomachs but, oh well, they knew the risks.

So, speaking as one of the people who did NOT immediately run to the restroom to throw up their popcorn after the credits rolled, I can say that it was an ok film with some really exciting stuff. A group of good looking young people get together to throw a going-away party for an equally good looking buddy of theirs who's going off to Japan to accept some sort of high level corporate job that someone his age would never get if he wasn't a character in a movie. It turns out that Rob recently convinced Beth, his hot female friend, to have sex with him after which he promptly cut off all communication with her even though he says he's always loved her. Rob does this because...well...I guess because he suffered some sort of brain damage off screen that the script never mentions.

The real reason he did it is because it provides a necessary plot twist when a giant monster powerful enough to rip off the head of the Statue of Liberty and throw into midtown Manhattan attacks the city shortly after Beth leaves the party and goes home. This gives Rob and his buddies a reason to go charging like idiots into the kill zone to try and save Beth so that Rob can have at least a chance of convincing Beth to take off her panties for him again.

This movie has a lot of very exciting stuff including an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge and a frightening extended sequence as they take a hike down a dark subway tunnel. Your experience with the film will be enhanced if you do the following things:

1. And I cannot stress this heavily enough, SIT IN THE BACK ROWS!
2. This is not the greatest movie ever no matter what sort of promises you think that J.J. Abrams may have made to you and
3. Be prepared for a less-than-satisfying ending. I know what they were trying to do, I just think it was the wrong thing.

Open Thread

Open threads are stupid. Feel free to post any comment you want, although I have shut down comments for this thread. That is all.