March 8th, 2006
In an unprecedented case in the realm of online social networking, Mission Viejo teenager Austin St. Claire, has sued Myspace.com for false advertising, claiming that contrary to popular belief, Myspace is NOT a place for friends.
“Austin has been subjected to unbelievable amounts of mental anguish, thanks to this insidious plot being waged upon us by News Corp.,” St. Claire’s attorney, Noah Mandelbaum said. “When he contracted into a deal to be a member of the Myspace online community, he was promised that Myspace would be a safe haven where he could develop nurturing and caring relationships. Sadly, the reality has been anything but.”
According to Mandelbaum, the 18-year old St. Claire had been a normal teenager until getting lured into what he deemed, “the greatest time suck since the ancient Greeks invented philosophy.”
“It’s not like I went into Myspace expecting to have my life turned topsy-turvy, just maybe to meet some girls and reunite with people I’d lost touch with.” St. Clair said having been instructed by his attorney that “topsy-turvy” is a good word. “They promised me a place for friends. I haven’t met any friends. I’ve just been messaged by a bunch of shitty bands. How am I supposed to be friends with a band if they can’t even play a note.”
But St. Clair added that the constant pressures from having to decide whether or not to add a band or not were the not the only reasons for his psychic strain.
“It’s tough,” St. Clair admitted. “At first, I added a bunch of really hot girls in bikinis and everything was going great, but then it seemed like other girls that didn’t have photos of themselves in bikinis were intimidated or something by all the hot girls I was friends with. I mean, if they can’t handle that Tila Tequila and I are such close friends than I probably wouldn’t want to date them anyway.”
MySpace.com founder Tom Anderson was unavailable to comment, but issued a written statement about the case.
“Somebody needs to tell Austin St. Claire to mind his f****-ing business. He needs to shut up. We’ve got a good thing going on here over at Myspace and he needs to ruin everything,” Anderson wrote. “What’s wrong with him? Does he not understand the concept of metaphor? It’s not “really a space for friends.” Besides, it’s not our fault that he doesn’t have any game.”
But according to St. Claire, the suit has nothing to do with money and everything to do with dashed dreams.
“I went to Myspace for the purity. For the love. For the fact that I could customize my page with Thomas’ Myspace Editor V3.2b and believe that it expressed my individuality to the full depths of my soul,” St. Claire said. “Sadly, that reality is no longer true. If only it were a place for friends then perhaps I wouldn’t have had to sue. But what’s done is done. I’m trying to look at things on the bright side. After all, deleting my Myspace account actually spurred me to go to College. That way I can get a Facebook account. I wouldn’t have known how else to live.”
Posted in The Fakest News in Town | 6 Comments »
March 7th, 2006
Crash wasn’t just the worst movie that was nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. It was the worst movie to ever win Best Picture in my lifetime.
Now I haven’t seen each of the last 24 best picture winners, but I’d be willing to bet my life that Crash was by far the most heavy-handed, crass and straight-up racist of the bunch. Period.
You’re probably thinking, how can a movie about the perils of racism be racist in and of itself, but please allow me to explain. I’d also like to innoculate myself against any potential charges of racism just because I hated “Crash.” Just because one loathed the film does not make them racist, this is similar to people who want to paint non-Brokeback fans as homophobes. The truth is liking or disliking a movie does not have anything to do with racism, even though there are thousands of pleased actors in Hollywood right now who are ecstatic with their asanine limosuine liberal selves just because they gave “Crash” best picture.
I’d also like to preface my argument by saying that just because you liked “Crash” does not mean you are inherently stupid. While it is true that many of the dumbest people I know liked “Crash,” I have known several intelligent souls who for reasons beyond belief liked this film. The truth is that while liking Crash does not necessarily indicate a lack of intelligence, it does mean that you are guilty of having your emotions cheaply manipulated by a hack director who should be beyond the camera of After School Specials and not feature films. More on this later.
Perhaps the hardest type of film to do is one that weaves together several disparate narratives and characters, while managing to sustain narrative arc, character development and produce ultimate emotional satisfaction in the viewer. I can only count a handful of films that I have seen that manage to do this succesfully: Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, Traffic are the names that immediately pop up. As one can see from the aformentioned titles, when a director has the skill to make this type of movie, it is perhaps the paramount expression of one’s artistic abilities. However, when a director lacks the talent to perform such a feat, everything comes out carictured and flat, characters have no time to develop and the writer/director is forced to tack on harried and unsatisfied resolutions to make everything tie together in the end. In my opinion, this fits Crash to a tee.
Of course, the one criticism that every0ne has of “Crash” is its lack of subtlety. Clearly, this is a valid criticism, as the the movie starts out with Don Cheadle’s completely ridiculous monologue about how in LA people want to crash into each other because they are separated by race among other things. First off, who recites racial philosophy in the first second after getting into an accident. I’m not asking a movie to be absolutely believable, but you can’t ask a viewer to suspend his logic in the first frame of the movie, unless the protagonist is wearing an “S” on his chest and flying around fucking Metropolis. Second of all, good movies don’t generally give away the entire theme to a plotline in the first three sentences.
By scene two, an Asian woman and a Mexican woman crash into each other and immediately leave their car and start spewing racial epithets at each other. Now I’ve lived in LA my entire life and it’s safe to say that here things don’t work this way and anyone who has lived here will tell you the same thing .
Racism in Los Angeles, as everywhere, remains persistent and I don’t think anyone will give an argument that racism is not a terrible thing.
However, the racism depicted in Crash is of the sort that you might have seen in 1945, or perhaps you might see anywhere outside of LA or New York. But as Los Angeles is one of the most liberal cities in America, you couldn’t exactly get away with being a complete bigot on the surface, an idea that “Crash” wants you to believe. In truth, racism works in subtle ways, and if Paul Haggis, the film’s writer/director had explored how people might be decent on the surface towards one another but continue to harbor racist beliefs beneath, that would’ve been fine with me. That would’ve sent a message. Needless to say, Haggis writes characters just like you’d expect from a rich, balding white former tv writer who was inspired to write the film when a black man carjacked him in his Porsche.
So while you may believe the film to be a statement against racism, it actually reinforces racial stereotypes worse than anything since “Birth of a Nation.” First off, let’s examine the Asian characters in the movie. The man is a human trafficker, the woman speaks in fractured “Me Love You Long Time” English. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Am I supposed that all Asians are human traffickers and speak a fractured version of the language? I don’t think so. Where is the other side of the Asian people? Not shown. All you get is base carictures. You half expect the Asians to come out in a karate Outfit and serve you sushi. It’s patently ridiculous.
Then there are the Persians in the film, who are depicted as cheap, violent and partially heartless. Oh, but the daughter is a doctor. I know nothing about them at all. I don’t end up caring about them. I just generally think the older man is a complete prick. In fact, this is one of the only motifs that I generally agree about in the film: most people in Los Angeles are in fact, assholes.
The Whites: all of ‘em are racist and calculated. Brandon Fraser, playing the Los Angeles DA makes jokes about how it isn’t politically viable to take a picture with a heroic Iraqi fireman named “Sadamn.” The truth is a talented filmmaker would’ve had Fraser’s character take a photo with “Sadamn” for political gain to prove how not-racist he was, then quickly discard him like a political prop. What does Hackis do? Make a joke at the Iraqi’s expense.
And then there are the cops, Matt Dillon and Ryan Phillipe who fill the generic good cop/bad cop stereotypes to a tee. Somne might say that Matt Dillon’s character has the closest thing you see to a narrative arc as he ends up saving Thandie Newton in a car accident, despite having been a complete racist the day previous. However, Dillon’s character remains a racist, but in a cheap emotional ploy the director tries to make you think that he isn’t solely because he saved a black woman from a burning wreck. Unlike many other things in life, racism can’t just be measured in actions, it is mainly measured in thoughts. Just because a cop did his job does not make him Martin Luther King. Do I really need to elaborate on this?
The Black People in the film are also nothing more than cardboard stereotypes of what black people “should” be like. Ludacris (by far the film’s best performer…seriously) goes on and on about how Sandra Bullock clutched her purse tightly because she saw a black man then about two minutes later proceeds to rob and carjack her. In what way is this supposed to deflate racism? To me, it seems more like the director is saying “this is how black people behave.” How is this not supposed to be racist in and of itself?
Additionally, Haggis attempts to show the perils of racial profiling and racism by the aforementioned scene involving Thandie Newton, where racist cop Matt Dillon fondles her in front of her husband, Terrence Howard. However, if Haggis really wanted to make a point about profiling and deflate racial stereotypes he should have switched the Terrence Howard and Ludacris characters. If Ludacris were the the rich television producer driving in a Range Rover, yet still dressed and spoke street, then it would help to demonstrate that appearances are indeed deceiving. Or if the well-dressed and well-spoken Terrence Howard were really a street criminal, it would certainly give one pause the next time they racially profiled someone.
Then there is the matter of the cheap emotional manipulation in the film. Several characters die or almost die, including the easiest emotional device of them all, a young girl who is nearly shot. This is just an easy gesture to get emotions out of the audience and convince them that they care. The truth is that none of the characters in the film are fleshed out. You don’t know their lives, their back story, and (for the most part) the reasons why they’re racist in the first place. If you don’t believe me, then please try to think of any of the character’s names in the movie. A sign of a good movie and a well-drawn character is that you can remember his or her name. I refer you to other ensemble movies like Pulp Fiction or Boogie Nights, who can forget Vincent Vega, Dirk Diggler or Marcellus Wallace. Name one character’s name in Crash.
These are the marks of bad writing, of a writer who doesn’t understand the human experience and therefore resorts to television and historical stereotypes that only serve to further divide and inflame people. The reason why people liked “Crash” is simply because they wanted to like a movie like Crash. People wanted a movie that would say something profound about racism and they got this piece of shit. As most movies are so unbelievably atrocious (as witness byu everything in the top 10 save for Chappelle’s movie), people mistakenly viewed Crash as sending a message. The only message it sends is what a rich white out of touch limosuine liberal thinks about racism. This man wrote Diff’Rent Strokes and the Facts of Life! While he may in fact know what Willis is talking about, he is by no means a deep thinker.
And as for this being the worst movie to win a Best Picture Oscar over the last 24 years, look at the stellar films that have won the award over that span, “Amadeus,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” (a subtle film that handled racism infinitely better), “Silence of the Lambs,” Schindler’s List,” “American Beauty.” Perhaps that one could argue that “Chicago” was worse than “Crash,” but the truth remains is that “Chicago” was a very good movie in a very bad genre, “Crash” was a terrible movie in a “very good” genre.
Ultimately, who really cares. Only in America, do we hold actors’ opinions sacred. Keep in mind that we are taking seriously the thoughts and beliefs of a tribe of people who lie professionally, most of whom do not have college degrees or even high school degrees. Despite what they might want you to believe, most actors are not very intelligent (with some obvious exceptions). So the next time anyone tells you why this “power-point presentation of a movie” is great (not my words but the best description of it I’ve ever read) then you’ll know why they’re wrong. And if not, watch it again. If you can stand to sit through the longest two hours of your life then I have just the DVD for you.
Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »
March 3rd, 2006
Being a journalost can lead you to being in some strange situations. Accordingly, in my mere three years trying to earn a living by writing, I’ve found myself in some of the most abnormal and ununsual situations imaginable, ones that will inevitably fill up an unbelievable novel one day. In general, I don’t discuss them on the blog because it prolly isn’t appropriate to discuss my assignments (I’m sure my editors would be none too pleased and if by chance one of them reads this I love you all) and also because I don’t want to ruin the weirdness that will inevitably ensue when I put these irregular experiences down on paper.
But occasionally while on assignment, I come across something too surreal for me to not be able to share it with the few readers that still tune into my rants. So the other night, I’m covering a charity event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. , the unbelievably gorgeous and hopelessly opulent hotel forever embedded in the public’s memory as “the hotel from Pretty Woman.”
The event was for some cancer charity, which one I’m unsure, to be honest all the charity events that I go to blur together. There’s nothing that these rich folk like more than paying $5,000 a table to go to a charity event and hobnob with “celebrities” while simultaneously assuaging their white liberal guilt. Everyone wins! This event in particular was particularly star-heavy, featuring speeches from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, congratulating Melissa Etheridge on her bravery (I think the event was in her honor).
It even had a “comic” monologue from Ellen DeGeneres. I hesitate to use the word comic when discussing DeGeneres because I’m pretty sure that she’s never made me as much as crack a smile. Needless to say, her routine included such hilarious topics as “granite, parrots and pirates.” The woman makes jokes for lobotimized and overweight women in Des Moines, Iowa who think it’s edgy that they’re watching “lesbian comedy.” Nuff said.
So picture the scene. This Black tie event, the most casually dressed attendee wearing an Armani suit. Not a person of color in the place. All elderly white men and their younger silicone plaything third wives OR their first wives who have taken on the typical Jewish middle aged woman look: i.e. they look like a sack filled with potatoes.
All of us are dining on filet mignon and unlimited wine and liquour and chocolate souffles made by Spago. I’m relatively certain that I wasn’t even supposed to be eating at the event, but fuck if I was going to let all that good food go to waste. Seriously, when you don’t work full time, you’ll take free food where you find it, particularly gourmet free food. So there I am feeling terrifically uncomfortable, talking to two other journalists who surprisingly weren’t abject swine (not to demean journalists, it’s just that it’s Los Angeles and I’m generally wary as to why anyone would want to be here if they didn’t HAVE to be).
Then it happens.
“Ladies and gentleman…we now present your entertainment for the evening…the Black Eyed Peas.”
Oh no, I think to myself, this CAN’T be happening. But it is and suddenly, a thunderous roar of applause emerges from this elderly crowd who I’m pretty sure have no idea who the Black Eyed Peas are. Now I’m sure one can infer my opinion on the Black Eyed Peas without me having to say so, but if you’re interested check out this post I did a while back. Needless, to say, I’m not a fan.
Predictably, they got things started with, well, who woulda thought? “Let’s Get it Started.” The four Peas ran onstage like a Benetton Ad gone terribly terribly wrong and started rapping to the crowd. But at first, the reception was a bit staid. The old white people didn’t know what to do, save for about 30 or so young men and women who rushed the stage. The dancing men looked like they list date raping as a hobby, real Patrick Bateman “American Psycho” types with slicked back hair and a lust for “accidental” breast grabs. The women were a tribe of blonde banshees with glazed eyes and ambitions to be “the bestest publicist in all the land.” But as for the rapacious robber barons in the expensive seats, they were playing it cool.
For the next thirty minutes, the Peas waged an all-out assault on my ear drums, terrorizing me with their hysterical shrieks of toxic bubblegum rap. I can’t even believe that people can write lyrics that bad. I don’t even think I could if I tried. At one point, Fergie started interpolating “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” into a song, doing Axl’s solo. Because clearly, nothing says rock n roll more than a chick who pisses in her pants and goes by the name “Fergie.” Nothing. And as for that Taboo character in the group. I’m not sure what he does. He might’ve rapped about 10 words all night, most of the time just doing dance moves that could prolly only be best decribed as “doing the Humpty.”
In between songs, Will I. Am., the leader/Kool-Aid distributor of the group started delivering messages to the crowd about cancer and the state of the LAUSD. At one point he told them, “we need to do something about these high schools. Because the children are our future and without
them we won’t have any more doctors and scientists and then we can’t cure cancer.” To which the crowd responded with an emphatic “Awww..” and every rich white man whispering to his bejeweled wife and prolly said something condescending like “that young African-American lad is right, by jove, he’s right.”
But then it started to happen. Slowly but surely, the crowd started to come alive. One by one, people started getting out of their seats and dancing. And when I say dancing, I mean doing a body heave set to a drum beat. These phonies were loving it. By the time the concluding song, “Where is the Love” came on, you would’ve thought that you were at Soul Train. If the people on Soul Train were all white, elderly and somehow even had less rhythym than Don Cornelius
It was horrifying. I saw one presumably 63 year old bespectacled Jewish man get behind his wife who was built like a wheelbarrow and start grinding against her. All across this swank Art Deco ballroom, people in tuxedos started flailing spastically off beat to these musical charlatans. It was truly appalling. At that moment, I just wasn’t ashamed to be white, I wasn’t just ashamed to be Jewish, I was ashamed to be human.
I slowly retreated out of the door, holding my head down, shaking it uncontrollably at the idiocy of our nation, of the lack of talent that rappers are seemingly allow to coast on, on the record industry for allowing glorified minstrel shows like the Black Eyed Peas to sell millions of records at the price of their own integrity, and I slowly walked out of the doors of the hotel, only to enter my car, turn on the radio, to hear, what else, “My Humps.” But inside my head, there was only one song title that continued to waft through my consciousness, a kind little tune by a great rapper named the Notorious BIG, it’s title: “Somebody’s Got to Die.” Because for this abomination somebody’s got to die. Seriously. I don’t care who, but somebody needs to be held accountable, damnit. If anyone needs my help in meting out punishments to the guilty parties, I will be available, just look for the whiskey-besotted 24-year old with wild hair screaming “Why!! Why!! down Sunset Blvd.
Posted in It Got Weird, Didn't It? | 6 Comments »
March 1st, 2006
The IPod has been one of the most revolutionary innovations within our society, as it has allowed human beings across the globe to never become bored. Once horrific activies such as going to school and riding the train have become infinitely more pleasant due to one’s ability to select a soundtrack of their choosing. In short, it allows wanna-be anchorites like myself the ability to interact with other human beings as little as possible. Everybody wins! Right? Wrong.
As with any technological development, there will be a sub-set of humans too dim-witted to know how to proplerly use it. And you best believe that Los Angeles will be the vanguard of such obliviousness (see the Cell phone, the blackberry, the side kick,). Now as the majority of Angelenos aren’t in school and practically no one rides the subway, there are few places to use their new toys. Enter the gym.
Practically everyone in this town rocks an Ipod while at the gym, a fact that one might think would be ideal for me, I’d get to work out in peace and generally engage in my ritual of listening to old Wu-Tang, Bone Thugs and Mobb Deep songs while trying not to think of how “un hip-hop” I am for being a 24-year old white Jewish male doing the bench press at the Hollywood’s Gold’s Gym. (but seriously, am I really supposed to listen to Sufjan Stevens while doing bicep curls?)
At any rate, this would be all fine and dandy if not for the fact that all of a sudden people think it’s okay to start dancing in the middle of their workout. These people, primarily women, seem to forget that they’re in a gym with 300 other people who aren’t listening to fucking Madonna on their Ipods and don’t necessarily want to see some vaguely attractive women in her 30’s doing all sorts of crazy dance moves, twists, Saturday Night Fever-esque points, everything, ever–let alone while trying to get to the front of the line for water. And I’m not exaggerating; every time I go to the gym these days I see at least one or two of these wack jobs confusing space in front of the leg press machine with the dance floor at a Brooklyn discotheque circa 1977.
What kind of an ego does it take to think that it’s perfectly alright to start dancing to a song that only you can hear while at the gym. Is it too much to ask that for 60 minutes you can stymie your insatiable and feverish urge to dance? Seriously, if people want to dance go to fucking Mood. If you want to work out go to the gym and don’t talk to me, because the last thing I want to do is make any “gym friends.” (that’s a different type of a freak for a different post).
Now there are some shared characteristics of the gym dancers. As mentioned previously, they are almost always female and they are usually in their late 20s or early 1930s, as anyone younger than that would likely be rightfully too insecure to start trying to bust out the cabbage patch to “Like a Virgin,” rocking spandex at 11:17 a.m. on a Tuesday. And if they’re older than 35, they’re generally a bit too cognizant of their age to think that they can get away with such insipid behavior. In general, the type of women who do this are vaguely attractive, the type of woman that you’d tell your friends was “kinda’ hot and totally feeling you”after four beers. They are almost never beautiful woman because for the most part beautiful women are so inundated with cheesy come-ons from men that the last thing they want to do is get hit on any more at the gym. No, the women that do this are DEFINITELY seeking attention from you. They want you to watch, they want you to lust after them, they want you to approach and offer to buy them an expensive dinner, to which they will accept and order only a baked potato having mysteriously decided that they aren’t hungry at the exact time of the reservation.
I learned my lesson about these women early on. There was a girl that used to work out at the Venice Gold’s Gym and every day after work, I’d go in there and see her. She was almost gorgeous, (definitely the best looking gym dancer I’ve ever seen) with short pixie hair and a ridiculously good body that she’d show off in skin-tight gym clothes that ALWAYS somehow managed to show her flat stomach. My best friend and I nicknamed her “the French girl,” because of her short hair and almost European looks and the fact that she danced non-stop for an hour and a half at the gym. Every time that she switched weight machines she’d do some sort of new crazy dance that we figured only a European woman would do in a public. (this was in the early days of the Ipod mind you).
Then one day, we talked to a trainer we knew at the gym. Apparently, “the French Girl,” lived in a two million dollar Coldwater Canyon mansion with her real estate developer husband. She drove a Range Rover and she had grown up in Brentwood. Needless to say, our dreams had been shattered, leaving us with the cold hard reality of the true nature of the gym dancer. Nothing would ever be the same again.
In short, if you want to dance at a gym take a fucking dance class, I’m sure they have one going every ten minutes, or perhaps go a real dance studio where you can join the tribe of hip-hop dance ho’s, either way, the only dancing I want to see in a gym is that scene from “Teen Wolf” where Michael J. Fox comes to the dance and everyone starts doing a wolf dance to the song “Big Bad Wolf.” Now that behavior is definitely acceptable in my book.
Posted in It Got Weird, Didn't It? | 9 Comments »
