Archive for the ‘The Telly’ Category

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Why I don’t like Mad Men.

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s an excellent show, with super-sexy actors wearing great costumes. My problem is is this: First of all, it’s about advertising, and I live the advertising life all the freakin’ time, so it’s mighty depressing to watch a show where so very little has changed since 1960. Hey, treating women and minorities like crap, hooray! The good things never die! The second thing is that it’s so morose. Everybody’s dissatisfied with their lives, and stifled, and bitter, and disappointed. It makes me miserable. I look to my television to do one of two things: educate me (Dirty Jobs, Modern Marvels) or entertain me (House, Scrubs, The Smoking Gun Presents). Mad Men doesn’t really do either. So that’s why I don’t like Mad Men. The end.

Addendum on December 10th: Okay, Season Two is better. It’s growing on me. Less depressing, more dramatic.

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I swear I am not making any of this up.

Friday, June 26th, 2009

I turned on the TV five minutes ago and on TLC there is a brand new program called Paint Misbehavin’, about a paint company. A really edgy paint company that, you know, invents paint. It’s owned by a tattooed yellow-goatee-ed guy named Steve (okay) and there are various other Gen X people working there (still okay), an Indian scientist named Arup with a really heavy accent and an obvious toupee (wha…?) and a voice-over guy. With a pronounced lisp. How, HOW, I ask you, am I not supposed to laugh at this? First, the Indian guy sounds exactly like every stereotypical Indian in every movie, and then the voice-over guy comes on and tells us, “With all these thetbackth, Thteve may not make hith deadline.” I’m trying really, really hard not to giggle.

http://www.hardlifestyle.com/paint_misbehavin_tlc_discovery_show.html

Could someone go and watch this show, and tell me you chortled to yourself as well, so I don’t feel so bad about myself? Thank you.

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Two things I am undecided about.

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

1. As you might know, I work in the bead-and-sparkly-rhinestone district of New York. I see a ton of tacky excessive things on my walk to work (remember this image from a previous post?):

necklaces1.jpg

Now a new hat shop has opened on my route. I had glanced into the window briefly, but one day I took a moment to really look. And aside from seeing these (SO BAD!):

hat1.jpg

On the top shelf was a large conical straw hat covered with plastic apples and pears. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where you would wear it. I mean, we are in the fashion district and this is something an extra would wear during the “We Welcome You To Munchkintown” song in the Wizard of Oz.

hat2.jpg

Now, most of me is like NO NO DON’T SELL THAT, SOMEONE WILL BUY IT AND WEAR IT, but part of me is I WANT TO BE THAT PERSON GIMME THE HAT. I know it’s wrong and bad, but it’s also awesome in a Carmen Miranda way. And the theatrical drama nerd in me wants to wear it while singing showtunes. Loudly. I feel dirty for even considering the possibility of the hat. Bad hat! Tempting Jessica like that.

Also, in case it doesn’t match your outfit, they have one made just with green pears.

hat3.jpg

2. The TrueBlood logo.

trueblood2ad.jpg

I love handwritten fonts and it’s nice to see someone not relying on computer-generated typefaces for everything, but it also looks like they spread out the word “true” and then realized they had not budgeted enough space for the word “blood” and the writer said, “Okay, okay, not a problem, I’ll just squoosh ‘blood’ into skeeeeny letters and everything will be fine.” Ergo the indecision.

Also, in a completely unrelated note, did you see the pictures from Tim Burton’s remake of Alice In Wonderland? They look beautiful, but everyone says the Mad Hatter is played by Johnny Depp, and I am convinced this is a picture of Elijah Wood. Look at it. It looks just like him.

deppx-large.jpg redqueenx-large.jpg alice-topper.jpg

Addendum: The fruity hats are gone! Either they have been sold or burned in some kind of produce-based ritual. I don’t care, I’m just glad the temptation to buy idiotic headware is gone.

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I’m not proud of this.

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I was watching Best Week Ever a while back, and they had a clip of the “sing country songs” American Idol episode, where FallOutBoy Wannabe slash Unknown Sexual Orientation Guy sang “Ring of Fire”, but he sang it with an Indian twist. I’m sorry to say this, but it was kind of awesome. So I looked it up on YouTube, and indeedy, it is pretty cool, especially for Merkin Idol, which is not exactly cutting-edge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-NULFMky4s

And to keep my hard-earned street cred, here is a Ukrainian band covering “Hot ‘n’ Cold” by Katy Perry. With an accordion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1upZz3a-7iM

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Two things.

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

1. I was watching the Ace of Cakes marathon on Monday and kind of half-paying-attention while working on other things, and Duff was talking about making something and probably giggling (he does that) and… wait, is that a jellyfish cake in the background?!??

jellycake.jpg

Dude. AWESOME. I don’t care for many of Ace of Cakes cakes because I find them too cartoony, but seriously, that jellyfish cake is super-rad. I realize only the dome top part is edible and the rest is structural, but who cares? JELLYFISH CAKE. I bet Snorth is cursing herself right now for not having that as her wedding cake.

And yes, I’m quite aware they are not called jellyfish anymore, they’re called jellies. But “jelly cake” means something totally different. For those of you kids playing at home, starfish are now called sea stars and seahorses are now called… something else. I forgot. I can’t keep track of politically correct ocean nomenclature.

2. I saw Slumdog Millionaire. I saw it based on the reviews I read. You can read one here. Note the words they use in the review: “beautiful, sad, sweet, uplifting, and thoroughly entertaining”. Yeah, sounds lovely, doesn’t it? I’m going to totally ruin the movie with a mess of spoilers right now because no review I read did that and that caused me to have to choke back stomach acid while watching this film. IT’S AWFUL. The first half is disgusting and the second half is boring and a bit silly, plot-wise. Let me first clue you in on the disgusting bits: Jamal the Street Child lives in absolute squalor in Bombay (it’s still Bombay at that time). He is defecating at the local lavatory (a shed over a pit) when his favorite movie star lands in a helicopter nearby. His brother locks him in as a prank, so to get to see his movie idol, Jamal pinches his nose and drops himself into the pit of human excrement, then crawls out underneath completely covered and rubs his liquid-filth-encrusted-self on members of the crowd surrounding the movie star in an attempt to get to the front. I’m turning green just thinking about it. Shortly afterwards, we see Jamal and his brother and mother washing at the local watering hole, when apparently a religious riot breaks out and Jamal sees his mother get whacked in the face with a hunk of wood and die. Jamal and his brother see other people being torched and killed in front of them, and on their way back, they see their mother’s corpse floating in the water. Wait, it gets better. Jamal and his brother are living at the local dump when a man shows up and offers to take them in. He teaches them to sing so they can sing on the street for money. However, blind children get twice as much money, so when he finds a particular child with good singing skills, he drugs them and blinds them with boiling hot water and a spoon. OH MY GOD. This is all in the first half-hour. How can no one mention this in any review anywhere? The rest of it is all about finding the one true love of your life you are destined to be with and fate and all that whatever and it ends with the lovers being together and a bollywood dance number. Aside from Dev Patel, who plays the adult Jamal and is excellent, this movie blows and if it wins a slew of Oscars I’m going to be very, very unhappy.

Addendum: I am very, very unhappy.

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Dirty Jobs, Part II.

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Seriously, what is going on with Dirty Jobs? Last week I saw an episode with the cow recycling, this week: recently-shot duck and goose plucking and dressing factory. Mike Rowe is really with the “dead animal having it’s dignity ripped away at the hands of the humans” thing, eh? No, literally. Mike was using a plucking machine (it resembles a car washing rotating brush, you hold the fowl under it and it rapidly brushes off all the feathers), he accidentally let go of the duck he was de-feathering, it shot around the brushes and he was left holding the duck’s head in his hand, like Perseus with a tiny, non-threatening Medusa (bone up on your Greek mythology, people!). I suppose it’s a nice change from poo (Dirty Jobs should really be called Interactions With Poo), but it makes it difficult for me to come home from work, all tired and stressed, get into bed with my cocoa and soy milk and relax with a little TV. I still love it and I’ll still watch it, but I guess I’m just a little traumatized. I’ll be okay. As long as Mike’s next trip isn’t to a charnel house or anything, it’ll be fine.

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Dirty Jobs and Gelly Rolls.

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Sorry about the lackadaisical posting. You know how it gets with work sometimes. But do not fret, I’m making quite a variety of cool stuff which I will be sharing with you shortly. In the meantime, a story: I got home from work on Tuesday night at 1:10 a.m. (not kidding about work kickin’ my butt ovah here) and I wanted to fall into bed and slumber, but for some reason I flicked on the tube and Dirty Jobs was on and it was an episode I had never seen before, about recycling cows. Really. See, on farms with thousands of cows, a portion of the cow population dies of natural causes. Then the “dead truck” (their name, not mine) pulls up with a winch and winches Kicked-the-Bucket Bessy onto the truck and off to the cow recycling plant. Here’s the point where I couldn’t turn it off. If the cow is fresh enough, they use the skin for leather, but in order to get the skin off of the cow, they cut a small hole, stick a metal tube in there, and fill ‘er with air to pull the skin away from the muscle. Which looks exactly like what you would expect it to look like. Ole Bess there went from a dead cow to the world’s most disturbing Thanksgiving float in two minutes. The guys who’s job is to skin swoop in there and put the hide in the basement and cover it with salt, and then they stick the remaining skinned cow into a gigantic wood chipper a la Fargo and chip her. That also looks exactly like you would expect it to look like, which is why I will not describe it to you. The only thing about the episode that irked me was how many times Mike said, “So you separate the meat and fat, and the meat goes into farm feed, while the fat goes in cosmetics.” He kept saying “cosmetics” like you and I would say “stanky gas station bathroom”. Hey, buddy, I’ll have you know on your high-and-mighty horse* that cosmetics include soap and lotions, so you’re smearing Essence of Bessy all over yourself too. Which is why if this shkeeves you out, you should use soap made from vegetable glycerin. If it doesn’t say vegetable glycerin, chances are it’s animal-based.

*They’re skinning the horse later.

And pertaining to my artsy-artsiness, I would like to give a shout-out to Gelly Roll pens by Sakura. I only recently discovered them, and they are terrific. They have nice tiny nibs, the ink flows smoothly, and they are waterproof to a certain degree, so you can put your lines in and then paint over them with watercolors without having the ink run and smear. I haven’t investigated the myriad of wacky variations of pens Sakura makes (puffy, metallic, flourescent, glaze, etc.), I’m only speaking about the basic Gelly Roll colors right now. Excellent pens. And they sell them at Michael’s, so I don’t have to go to the fancy art store to get them.

20713-group-1-3ww-l.jpg

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Two things I need to get off my chest.

Monday, January 12th, 2009

1. Within the last six months, I have seen two British films described as “romantic comedies” – Maybe, Baby and Dirty Filthy Love. I think we need to sit the British down and gently explain what a romantic comedy is, perhaps using a Powerpoint. Maybe, Baby is about a man and woman unable to conceive and how their marriage falls apart. Now, they get back together in the last minutes of the movie, but… not romantic, not comedy. Dirty Filthy Love is about a man who suffers from OCD and Tourette’s and how he loses his job and his wife and basically holes himself up in an apartment for months. He meets a nice OCD girl in his support group and they walk down a beach at the end after he has emotionally shattered into a million pieces, but… still, not romantic (since he spends the whole movie pining for his estranged wife) and DEFINITELY not a comedy. A person who would find this funny would find jokes about “retards” funny. I’m not saying that romantic comedies have to be all sappy and cuddly, but these are dramas with moments of funny in them. Totally different. A vaguely happy ending maketh not a comedy, so sayeth me.

2. OH DEAR GOD, have you seen any of the commercials for Rock of Love Tour Bus? It’s so, so bad. I, frankly, didn’t know women like this existed. I’ve certainly never seen them in person. Brief description for those of you who are lucky enough to have been spared until this point: Bret Michaels, lead singer of Poison, finds the Love of his Life while traveling around the country on a bus full of skanky trollops and OH, these girls are mind-blowingly skanky. Really. I work in New York, I see all kinds of people, but nothing like these women.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-Mynku1vq0

I don’t know why Bret doesn’t just go and date Amanda Lepore already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUfN7ZcF5wY

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., The Telly | No Comments »

I’ve been watching TV. I know! Shocking.

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

1. OMG, why is every other commercial for perfume? Perfume is a SMELL. You cannot smell anything on the talking picture box. So far, what I have learned is that if I buy perfume, I will smell like a non-smiling twenty-something lady model, or possibly Elizabeth Taylor, or a horse. Which is to say, I have no freakin’ idea what your perfume smells like, so quit it with the stupid commercials.

Actually, that’s not true. Mariah Carey has a commercial for her perfume, which has butterflies and rainbows on it. I can tell exactly what her perfume smells like. It smells like a girl. A girl who revels in the stupid stereotypes that are associated with women. Like this. Or this. If it wasn’t for her version of “O Holy Night” I would dislike everything about her.

2. Has anyone seen the trailer for the new Clint Eastwood movie? Where he says, “Get off of my lawn,” to a bunch of hooligans? How GREAT is that!?! Clint is an old gruff dude and he’s totally embracing that. I think he needs to incorporate more oldisms into all his movies. But not in a Grumpy Old Men way. Those films were appalling. The only way I think it would be alright would be if Clint said something stupid like, “I got coupons for the Stop and Shop!” but then he riddles someone with bullets. Then it’s okay.

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Four things I’ve noticed on television today.

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

1. Sean John/Diddy has a new perfume out and it’s called “I Am King”. I have low self-esteem and now I think I know where it all went. Piffy Puffy Poofy got it all, and maybe someone else’s as well. Goodness gracious, that’s a lot of narcissism.

2. While watching the Christmas commercial for Victoria’s Secret, I realized Heidi Klum can have twenty-seven kids and a stroke and she would still be the hottest woman in the whole freakin’ world. Heidi is HOTT, all caps, two “t”s.

3. Just saw a commercial for Jim Carrey’s new movie Yes Man. I don’t really want to see it, but there’s a scene where Jim goes to a Harry Potter costume party and for a split-second someone wearing a Dobby mask walks through the shot. Frankly, that’s kind of awesome. Now I think I’m going to have to see it. Oh, and I just watched the preview… yeah, I’m going to have to see it. Expect a review eventually.

4. Have you seen the recent Campbell’s/Progresso soup ads? SO MUCH DRAMA. Soup commercials used to be, “Our soup is delicious! Try it!” Now it’s like the east coast/west coast rap wars.

“7 out of 10 people prefer our soup!”
“No, they don’t, they prefer ours!”
“Your soup tastes crappy!”
“Well, your soup has msg!”
“Your mother has msg!”
“Oh, kiss my soupy-”
*bang bang bang*

People, it’s SOUP. It’s a wet version of “real” food. Build a bridge and get over it.

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