Author: Jared

The MTV Movie Awards, 2011

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OK, OK, I know what you’re thinking.  When I did last year’s post on the MTV Movie Awards I said that it would be my last.  It wasn’t the MOST useless award show I blogged about (that honor goes to the Daytime Emmys), but it definitely felt like a waste of time.  But you know what?  Apparently my time isn’t all that valuable, because here we are again.

As usual, my wife Johanna is mixing us a themed cocktail.  Tonight she’s going with a somewhat hastily thrown together offshoot of the cosmopolitan.  Some vodka, cranberry juice, and since we don’t have any orange liqueur and we live in North Carolina where the state-run liquor stores are closed on Sundays, orange juice.  I KNOW, I KNOW, it’s not really a cosmopolitan, but in the wise words of Adam Sandler’s screenwriter, “Just go with it!” [DRINK UPDATE ALERT!  I was later informed that, in addition to the previously listed ingredients, the drink contains blueberry-pomegranate juice, lime juice, and seltzer.  Fancy!]

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She chose this because it’s red, like blood, which is perfect because TWILIGHT!!!1!!!!11!  Speaking of, did you guys see that Vanity Fair article about Robert Pattinson and how he is conflicted about his fame and his crazy fans and he can’t go to a bar without bringing in the police for crowd control and basically seems really depressed, but not in a cool goth vampire way, just in a sad human being way?  Anywayzzz, Johanna named the drink the “Bloody Bella.”

Also as usual, we’ll be competing in a winner-picking competition.  I’m pretty sure these awards are based entirely on online fan voting, which is always fun.  Particularly when the people voting are in a completely different demographic than I am.  I miss being in the 18-24 demo so much!  It was a lot of fun.  To paraphrase Kanye West, no one demo should have so much power.  Particularly when it’s such a stupid demo.  Remember how stupid we were?  Yikes.

Categories and winners will be in bold.  I’d like to ask you all to send your prayers and goodwill out into the world for Johanna, because she really needs the win.  I’m worried she’s going to lose interest; she’s already threatening to boycott the ESPYs.  The ESPYs!  Can you imagine?

All right, let’s go!  Take it away, Jason Sudeikis!  I’ll just be sitting over here mentally preparing myself to hear my wife talk all night about how much of a crush she has on the host.

9:00 – MTV starts off on the wrong foot with me with the reminder that Chelsea Handler hosted the VMAs.  You’re better than this, MTV!  Oh, wait, no you’re not.  I think I’ll zone out for this opening bit.

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9:05 – Not as good as last year, MTV Movie Awards!  I like you, Jason, but you’re no Aziz.

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Also, no one in this audience cares enough about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infidelity to warrant one joke, let alone six of them or whatever you just did.

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Desert Storm Trading Cards

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So with the Arab Spring and our twelve or whatever ongoing wars and the death of Osama bin Laden and everything, it seems like an appropriate time for me to revisit some of my favorite souvenirs from the heady days of my early-nineties trading card obsession.  That’s right, the 1991 Pro Set Desert Storm card collecting abomination.

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This is very Nineties, right?  This predates when we started painting toy guns orange, and also predates when we realized it was ridiculous to make a set of trading cards about an event in which a bunch of real life human beings were shooting and bombing each other, apparently.  I mean, maybe there was a set of trading cards made about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?  I’m not sure.  I CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THE EVER-CHANGING, FAST-PACED, HIGH-STAKES WORLD OF TRADING CARDS, OK??  But, if so, they are certainly much more below-the-radar than these cards were.  We all had them!  I’ll trade you two Colin Powell’s for your Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, AMIRITE?  People who were up in arms about drunk GW kids celebrating bin Laden’s death outside of the White House should remember that we used to encourage young children to collect pieces of cardboard about this stuff.

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The Big Love Finale

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I totes should have written this post last night right after watching the show because it seemed like I had lots of thoughts then that I can’t remember now, but oh well, I’m lazy and thems the breaks!

I should start by saying that I know that you hate Big Love.  Everyone hates Big Love!  But I was always sort of fond of it.  It was basically a soap opera with high production values, right?  And that’s fun, I think?  It seems that most of the problems people had with it were story-based, and that is completely valid.  Because like 83% of the stories this show chose to introduce and explore were really stupid.  I get it.  But I always saw it as more of a character-driven show than a story-driven show, and while I wasn’t really in love with any of the individual performances, these were some pretty compelling and well-drawn characters, IMHO.  It was always in the Entourage vein of HBO shows, in that it’s really stupid, but I can settle in and distractedly enjoy it every week while I try to get through my Google Reader.  And, unlike Entourage, at least it had a little bit of forward momentum, even if it was stupid forward momentum.  Entourage has, like, backward momentum.  I suspect I’ll miss Big Love a bit.

I should also say that my wife Johanna and I had some conversations as the season built to the finale about the way the show should end, and it mostly ended, in word if not in spirit, exactly how I thought it should.  I wanted Bill to die (BELATED SPOILER ALERT!!1!).  Bill needed to die.  And Bill died.  Also, I wanted to get confirmation that the story was really always about the wives and their relationships with each other, and I got that confirmation.

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OK, all that said, this finale was terrible.

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This Derrick Rose and Katy Perry team-up is making me reconsider my “Buy American” stance.

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So at some point, perhaps when I was the owner of a Chrysler dealership while they were going bankrupt (Believe it or not, that is not a joke!  That is a thing that  actually happened!), I got it in my head that I should be one of those “Buy American” people.  One way in which this manifested itself was in my half-baked decision to only wear, like, Nike, Vans and Converse shoes and no longer support Adidas or Puma.

My aversion to Adidas was even more pronounced because I have an inherent distrust of German corporations, mostly because I assume they all used to provide material support to the Nazi Party.  UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIM BASED ON ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMATION ALERT!  When I brought up this attitude about the Germans to my wife’s father and told him I was thinking of buying a Ford instead of, say, a Volkswagen because of it, he pointed out that Henry Ford was a noted anti-Semite who exchanged correspondance with Adolf Hitler.  Or something.  So there’s that.

Another way in which I’m an idiot is that clearly all of these shoe companies are global corporations at this point, and they’re all manufacturing the sneakers in the same Indonesian sweatshops, and blah blah blah, I know!  I know, OK?!  I just said RIGHT AT THE START OF THIS PARAGRAPH that I’m an idiot!  Do I contradict myself?  Very well then I contradict myself, I am a large hypocrite.

Anyway, this new Adidas commercial features both my singer crush, Katy Perry, and my basketball crush, Derrick Rose, so I’m thinking of switching allegiances.  Sorry, Phil Knight!  And yes, I know, you hate Katy Perry, but I don’t care.  She’s really hot, you guys.  Plus, I know you hate her husband Russell Brand, too, but that doesn’t stop me from also really liking him.  So there.

As for the commercial itself, I think it might be slightly too frenetic for my taste, but the new Justice song it uses is pretty awesome, and it really makes me want to go care about something/work hard/never give up!  I’m not sure I’m going to go out and buy a new pair of Adidas shoes, though, because pretty much every pair that I’ve ever owned has sort of hurt my feet.  But if anyone could convince me to switch brands it would be Derrick Rose, on whom I currently have the biggest sports crush I’ve had since the heights of my Pujolsmania.  He’s so hard-working and humble and unselfish and amazing!  Did you see this article?  How could you not love him?!

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Speaking of my current love of Derrick Rose, I really need someone to talk NBA with.  None of my friends care, and my wife, God bless her, tries her best, but I get the sense that she’s just daydreaming about Kyle Chandler while I’m blathering on about how maybe the Bulls are better off with the 2 seed in the East as opposed to the 1 seed because then they would probably face the Heat in the second round of the playoffs instead of the Magic, and I really think they match up better against the Heat in a seven game series.  What’s that?  You’ve already stopped reading?  OK then, I’ll show myself out.

The Academy Awards, 2011

/ Jared / 2 Comments

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OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG you guys it’s the Oscars!  We can finally stop pretending to care about all these other shows, because the Oscars are here!

Seriously though, I’ve made a lot of jokes about award shows, but I clearly enjoy them.  Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve realized that this is the only one that takes its job at all seriously.  I mean, the only other award show that even seems like it is moderately trying is the Emmys, and even then approximately two nominees in every category are totally ridiculous.  But nine out of the ten nominees for Best Picture here are really good movies.  And the tenth isn’t really all that bad (Just so you know, the odd man out here is The Kids Are All Right, which was, at best, all right.).  This is a show that respects itself!  And for that, I respect it.

And yes, you did not misread me; I have opinions on all ten Best Picture nominees.  Because I saw ALL TEN OF THEM.  I did my homework!  This is, I’m pretty sure, the first time I have seen all of the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars.  And I am therefore full of opinions on ALL TEN OF THEM.   This should be fun.

Detracting from the fun is the fact that a lot of these categories seem preordained.  As always, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition here, and I’m worried that we’ll end up in a tie like we did with the Golden Globes. One can only hope that the costume/sound/editing categories will allow one of us to differentiate ourselves.

Johanna is, as ever, in charge of drinks.  She’s got like a thousand things going on right now, so I’m not going to make her try to come up with something crazy.  I think we’re just going to go with gin and tonics, because it’s a classy drink for a classy evening.  We’ll be upping the classiness to astronomical levels by referring to them as “The Meryl Streep.”  Also, it was 78 degrees outside today!  Warm weather drink alert, whattttt!

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How are we feeling about Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts?  I think they could be fun.  Or at least not boring.  Anne Hathaway is musical and funny and super hot, right?  And James Franco is also all of those things, except maybe musical.  I’ve never heard him sing, I don’t think.

So are we ready for this?  Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.  Let’s ease in here, folks.  As always, winners and categories and score and such in bold.

8:31 – Johanna is still agonizing over her picks as the obligatory “hosts romp through the movies of the year” montage begins.  These are always enjoyable.  I am not being sarcastic.

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The Grammys, 2011

/ Jared / 3 Comments

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God, the Grammys are so gross.  I make a lot of jokes about bad award shows, but this is the worst.  Not only are all the nominees just really aggressively out-of-touch and terrible, but half of this crap came out in 2009.  I could swear some of this same stuff was nominated last year.  Plus, there are the oddities like Arcade Fire being nominated in the Album of the Year category but not in the Best Rock Album category.  I don’t even understand what the rules are here.  This is either going to be a lot of fun to laugh at or one of the longest nights of my life.

As always, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition.  This should be an interesting one for us, because the list of nominees is so utterly bizarre that we’re guaranteed to not do what we usually do and pick the same people in every category.  I’ve got to tell you, picking winners in this disaster was painful.  It upset my stomach to have to decide between, like, Neil Young and Mumford and Sons.  And not because they are both so good.  [Update: Turns out Mumford and Sons = Not bad!] Johanna kept saying things like “Whatever, whatever, I don’t even care,” as she went over her ballot.

To help ease us through this living nightmare Johanna has whipped up an adult beverage consisting of vodka, cranberry juice, seltzer, and lime juice.  She’s calling it “The Chris Brown” because it really smacks you in the face.  YOU SHOULDN’T MAKE JOKES ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, JOHANNA.

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Sigh.  Are you all ready to be bored by Lady Gaga’s faux-edginess?  To suffer through some performances by Bruno Mars or someone?  To watch your grandparents’ favorite rockers take home some awards?  Then let’s do this.  In the words of Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, sit back, relax, and strap it down.

8:01 – This is weird.  Doesn’t this usually start with a big musical number?  Like, they just jump right into it?  I know last year started with the Lady Gaga/Elton John/My Nightmares mashup. This year Ladies Love Cool James strolls out to introduce a menagerie of women to sing a tribute medley of Aretha Franklin songs.

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The Super Bowl, 2011

/ Jared / 4 Comments

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OK, wait, just for one second let’s talk about the Puppy Bowl.  Did you guys see Two Face?  He was clearly the best and my favorite because he just wants to chill.

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I’m also probably going to be good friends with Oliver (and maybe his brother River) because we share a love of movies.

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But anyway, the Super Bowl.  So, this seems like it’s going to be a good game.  Most people that I’ve heard have been picking the Packers to win, but they aren’t huge favorites.  It should be close.  Plus, both the Packers and the Steelers have huge fanbases and storied histories.  There is a lot going on here.  And somehow, I absolutely could not care less.  I can’t remember the last time I was this uninterested in this game.

My desire to watch it is also hurt by the fact that the television rights this year belong to FOX, which means this is going to be really overproduced and will constantly pander to the lowest common denominator.  And will feature a robot.

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Wow, we REALLY didn’t know what the Internet was.

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This video of Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel discussing the internet in 1994 could probably best be described as astonishing.  I mean, I know it was all new and changing very quickly, but really, Bryant?  You don’t know what the @ symbol is?  Did the internet invent the @ symbol?

I find it jarring to hear them talk so ignorantly about the internet.  Jarring!  Can you believe we all used to be like that?  Also, can you believe how insufferable Bryant Gumbel seems?  I bet Katie Couric hates him.

[All over the place today, but I first saw it at io9]

Update: And the guy who uploaded this originally has been fired.  This man should be celebrated, not punished!  Also, I don’t know if he works for NBC or not, but if he does, and they’re the ones who fired him, they’re idiots.  It’s much easier to capitalize on something like this than it is to run from it, not that there is even anything to run from here.  They should have thanked him.  Plus, the only people who really look even slightly bad in this are Couric and Gumbel, and they both work for different networks now.

Another Update: Yup, it was NBC. Sigh.

OK, OK, Dexter is a BIT formulaic.

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Granted, I pretty much know what to expect from a season of Dexter at this point, but it’s generally fun enough to keep me watching.  When you see all of its repetitive plot devices and character tics recreated in one eighty second spoof, though, it does make the show look a tad ridiculous.

Great job, LandlineTV, whoever you are!  This is my favorite Dexter parody since Showtime aired that full, 12 episode fake season 3 back in 2008.

Wait, that was real?  The whole thing, even the Jimmy Smits stuff?  No way!

[Via Urlesque]