Auld Lang Syne

Just before the ball dropped, some random generic talking-head newsbimbo was filling airtime spewing on to Carson Daly about how 2006 showed anything was possible for anyone, and spoke of the YouTube sale to Google that made the founders billionaires. I thought of good ol' K-Fed, a former unknown backup dancer who parlayed his marriage to a pantiless slut hack diva into to a, um, rap career-ish sort of non-career.

How can we truly have a "Rockin' New Year's" without K-Fed, symbol of 2006's empowerment of the common man, ringing it in with us? After all, as one of the 300 million people in America, he was Time Magazine's Man of the Year! He showed us that no matter how little talent you have, you can make yourself something if you just put as little effort as possible into it in this new era of talentlessness and undeserved fame and fortune. K-Fed should be front and center, threatening to go all Popozao on 2007's ass, screeching his inane lyrics over the Times Square PA system, reminding us that, no matter how much we deceive ourselves, it can get much, much worse.

Happy New Year. Word to your mother.

Touched by Eragon

We went to go see Eragon, despite our run of bad luck with dragon movies. We suffered through Reign of Fire a few years ago, the only good part of which was that it marked the beginning of the end of our association with a couple nutjobs we met on Livejournal. We rented Dungeons & Dragons, when we could have just gone to a friend's basement and experienced more whimsy and sorcery, and a much more coherent plot. Now... Eragon. Sigh.

Eragon is based on an unfinished trilogy of books written by then-teenage author Christopher Paolini. The screenplay and direction were apparently done by teenagers as well. The jury is still out as to whether they were severely mentally retarded or merely autistic. I found it telling that, when the movie started, there was no studio logo. It's like they didn't want to be associated with it.

Here's the plot. Some where in the land of Milk of Magnesia, or something like that, John Malkovich was in desperate need of a paycheck and became the villainous king of the realm. He killed off all of the dragons and those who rode them, saving everyone from falling dragon droppings that constantly bedeviled the townsfolk. Malkovich gets such winning lines as, "I suffer without my stone". But then our hero, Eragon, stumbles across the stone- a big blue Tylenol gelcap in the forest. Eragon is full of blandness, blondness, and a penchant for homoerotic wrestling with his cousin.

Of course, things go downhill from there. The big blue pill hatches into a dragon, various scenes are stolen in their entirety from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Brokeback Mountain and Road House, of all films. Everyone thought our hero "would be bigger". Our bored, yearning, gay-wrestling farmhand watches the sun set, hoping he'll soon save a princess from a breathy villain and destroy the hated Empire. Stormtroopers come and kill off his uncle, looking for the pill. Eragon displays an uncanny knack for magic, and earns himself an oddly-shaped scar. He has to set out across a rugged landscape to recruit the help of elven folk.

And so, Eragon, a drunken Jeremy Irons (so desperately in need of a good dragon movie after his appearance in D&D) and the telepathic, perkily-voiced dragon head off to find the elves, who will train him to be a Jedi, or a dragon rider, or whatever. After about ten minutes of bad stage combat training, during which Irons and Eragon beat each other with wooden sticks, the movie decides he's ready to ditch the elves and take on the imperial army by himself. Luckily, there are only twenty guys in the army, not counting a bunch of obviously cut-and-pasted copies of them on the blue screen in the background.

Rather than listening to sound judgment, he goes off and does something rash (like make a movie out of Eragon?) He sets out to save the elf princess who sent him the dragon egg for safekeeping, and soon finds himself up against Robert Carlysle doing his worst impersonation of Rutger Hauer in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. Saved by deus ex machina in the form of Emo Guy, who really identifies with Vincent Valentine when he plays Final Fantasy, he escapes with Princess Anorexia, whose really pointy cheekbones threaten all they've worked so hard for. Jeremy Irons dies a drunken, useless death. Princess Anorexia needs Elf Medicine(tm) to survive her poisoning.

They arrive at Elf City, and get Elf Medicine(tm). Emo Guy redeems himself a la Christian Slater in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and the army of twenty pretty incompetent soldiers is driven off by the dragon's fire. They hadn't seen that coming... We did, forty-five minutes earlier. Eragon gets himself a new costume with very obvious sequins (costume credit should go to the Bedazzler), flirts with Princess Anorexia (avoiding her cheekbones) and sequels are strongly insinuated. Keep in mind this was all done back when sequels seemed likely. The possibility of sequels died when the cast snuck out of the premiere in shame.

And so. Eragon. I think I shall avoid dragon movies until someone goes and does a feature film version of Touched by Venom. It seems really easy to get your dragon-themed movie greenlighted in Hollywood these days. I could defecate on a piece of paper with the word "dragon" on it, and someone will buy the rights. And it would still be better than Eragon.

EDIT: I forgot the pointless cameo by Joss Stone as a fortuneteller! It's like she showed up on set one day and they just gave her a part. "Wear these white contacts, but leave the nose piercing in. It's like, all medievally and stuff. Duuuuuude."

Hatin' the Love

So tonight we continued our grand tour of Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows with Love, the Beatles tribute production at the Mirage. Let me be perfectly frank on this: It sucked ass.

I had a bad feeling almost from the start. After being directed into the theatre by a faux-Liverpudlian dressed as Sgt. Pepper, we waited around about 40 minutes for the show to begin. If you've ever been to a Cirque show, you know that to tide the audience over, eventually a clown is dispatched into the audience to amuse them during the last fifteen minutes or so of the wait. Usually he wants you to help open the lid to his jar of rainbows, or merely to molest you.

We got the Fool on the Hill character, who was about as whimsical as Andy Dick. As in, he was hyper and babbling incoherently, and you wanted to punch him immediately. He got a chilly reception from our section of the seating, and promptly left. I watched him roam the theatre, being rebuffed by each section.

I must say, this show got the least amount of applause or enthusiasm from its audience of any of the Cirque shows I've seen yet. The crowd was mostly MGM-Mirage employees there for a fund raising benefit, and skewed grey. During and afterwards, I heard mostly complaints from them about being bored. I don't think I clapped at all except at the end, out of politeness and relief.

The production itself was almost entirely devoid of circus performances. There were a lot of dancers, who didn't really do much of anything except stalk slowly across the stage in the trademark Cirque style, or bop in place to the music and then walk away. A couple times, people grabbed onto ropes and were hoisted up, but they didn't do anything once they got up in the air except hold on tight. Your average high-school gym class has more rope-climbing action than this show.

One thing missing from this Beatles show: The Beatles! While there were plenty of barely recognizable characters from their songs wandering around on stage (not really doing anything, just walking), it wasn't clear what they were supposed to represent. Okay, the guy in the military uniform? Sgt. Pepper. The girls dressed as go-go dancers? Hmm. The people in bathrobes walking around aimlessly while the WWII bombing footage plays on big screens? You got me there. The big screens showed lame Flash animations that tried to mask the fact that the cast wasn't doing anything interesting. They didn't sing, because the Beatles music was piped in. They didn't jump or perform acrobatics. They kind of danced, and by danced I mean flailed their arms around briefly before returning to walking aimlessly. Um, yeah. There was lots and lots of aimless walking, like you'd do in a postapocalyptic wasteland while waiting to compete at the Thunderdome. Weird. There were usually no less than thirty of these characters onstage walking around at any given moment, all in strange costumes, but none really memorable or outstanding. They were just there. The Beatles themselves were never represented onstage. We saw silhouettes of impersonators projected onto screens, and faceless dwarfs in plastic mop-tops, but no footage of the actual band.

The whole point of the production was to accompany a remixed soundtrack of classic Beatles music. It was supposed to be a mash-up of their most famous tunes, heard for the first time digitally remastered (the band has never released restored, CD-quality versions of their albums, just like they've never put their music online). The sound was good, but the "remixes" were barely different than the originals. Wherefore art thou, DJ Dangermouse?! All of the re-imagining was done by the band's original producer under the watchful eye of their estates. People close to the original music are the last people on earth you'd want charged with altering it, because they're not going to add anything new, and will be the most timid in sticking to the original versions they hold dear. So you hear a single chord from one song, and then it launches into another similar song which you then hear in its entirety, unaltered. You'd be better off just getting the original albums, if they're ever released in decent quality. I doubt they will be anytime soon, otherwise there'd be no reason to buy this soundtrack.

Overall, I think I could have done a better job of creating this show. And I say that as a person with no music inclinations at all, who can't even whistle, let alone play an instrument. But I had it all created in my mind before I went in, and that version was far, far superior to what I saw. This looks like it was all just thrown together to capitalize on the soundtrack album, and to get that onto the shelves quickly in time for Christmas and before some punk DJ tries to remix it all on their own again without permission. They didn't have time to choreograph anything decent, so everyone walks around. They couldn't convince the band to do anything fresh, so they did the bare minimum to call the songs mash-ups. Why and how is this a Cirque show? Why is it playing in Vegas, and not in a dinner theatre in Akron?

Why am I still writing this? I'm going to bed.

EDIT: Jenn has a point in her review, as well. The dancers weren't hot at all. What the fuck, Cirque? Did Quebec finally run out of good-looking people?!

The Horrors of the Preschool Music Scene

There was a time when, as a preschooler, you had very limited musical choices. You had Bert & Ernie, or Ozzy Osbourne, depending on the type of household you grew up in. Today's kids have choices that are much, much more frightening than Ozzy.

The kids bands of 2006 are divided into an east coast/west coast rivalry that's based on the network they're affiliated with. Disney has the Wiggles, the Doodlebops, and Dan Zanes. Noggin has Laurie Berkner, who serves as that station's house performer.

Let's explore all of these, and why each is scary.

You all know The Wiggles. Four middle-aged Australian men, apparently rejected from Thunder From Down Under, who now encourage your children to "wiggle" rhythmically. They're accompanied by a pirate with a tickling fetish, a stoned octopus, and a dog whose ever-changing cheap costume seems to be the font of all continuity errors. One of the Wiggles recently retired due to blood pressure problems, but it doesn't matter. As long as the new one wears a yellow shirt, no one will be the wiser.

The Wiggles' Monkees are the Doodlebops. Three twentysomethings in grotesque day-glo plastic costumes and face paint, they're driven around Canada by their white-rapper bus driver who stole his moves from Vanilla Ice. They are all incredibly gay. In the Canadian children's television tradition of You Can't Do That on Television, one of the characters gets water dumped on him in each and every episode. But trust me, you don't want to see each and every episode. Once is enough to understand why Canadians, each and every one, are mentally retarded.

Dan Zanes (and Friends) does not have his own show. Instead, he exists in the five-minute void at the end of each half-hour where commercials would air, if they were allowed during preschool programming. Dan's Friends are a band of hip young retrosexuals who allow him to live out his fantasy of fronting the Talking Heads. Dan's schtick is that he invades a Manhattan townhouse and holds a mini impromptu party for the kids there and then leaves. Locking your doors and not buzzing him in should prevent this.

Ralph, a newcomer to the scene, also has no show of his own. He pops out of a suitcase, flops his long hair around, and sings peppy but banal tunes while his tweenage daughter is forced to wear a "My Dad Rocks" T-shirt next to him. Ralph isn't too convincing as a children's act. It's like he got kicked off a college radio station at the ripe age of 40 and decided kids were the only market that wouldn't see through him. But they do anyway.

I've only seen these guys a couple times, but the Imagination Movers are a group of college-age guys in matching jumpsuits, who think they're much, much more entertaining to families than they actually are. During their videos, the camera pans out to the audience, and it's always half-empty. The few people who are there are visibly bored, not clapping, and sometimes yawning. I haven't seen enough of them to really get what makes them notable except for the jumpsuits, but I think the suits speak for themselves. And the tomatoes from the audience say things best not spoken in front of preschoolers.

Across the dial on Noggin is the Laurie Berkner Band. She may be Noggin's only catch (they lost Dan Zanes to Disney) but they certainly put her to use. Asides from forcing her to sing to puppets on Jack's Big Music Show, they also use her in all of their ads, specials, public events, and ice-capades. Laurie churns out dozens of identical music videos, which feature her, her husband, and their female friend bopping around a world of solid secondary colors. You just know they're having a threesome offscreen, because no couple who hangs out with their female friend that much isn't having sex with her. Laurie invariably wears really tight shirts, but she also invariably wears a bra, because come on, this is preschool.

So now you know. The best, nay, only choice for your children's sanity and well-being is to lock them up, away from all music (preferably in a small closet underneath the stairwell) and board up your windows lest Dan Zanes try to kick through and stage an uncalled-for beach party in your living room.