Playmania!

On the flight back from vacation, I ran out of things to watch on the seat-back TV after Cops ended. Mind you this was about an hour into a six-hour flight that ended near dawn eastern time (although we got home around midnight thanks to the zone difference.) The TV's were on the eastern feed.

Mind you, at 2am you take what you can get. And what I got was PlayMania. Let me tell you, gentle readers, about PlayMania, a marathon quiz-show aimed at nerds. Only more so than other quiz-shows.

PlayMania takes a page from the Book of Spike and G4. That is, if you have it hosted by hot chicks in tight clothes, and peppered with enough sound effects to drive a Foley artist to suicide, desperate trolls living in their parents' basements will watch devoutly and think they're as hip as the hosts, and that they have some sort of chance of fucking them. PlayMania is hosted alternately by Token British Woman (the Brits pioneered this field by having Cat Deeley host everything they broadcast over there) and Shandi Finnessey, former Miss USA, right-wing pro-war crackpot, and failed Dancing with the Stars contestant. Shandi fails to bare her oiled-up midriff like the did on Dancing. Although, in her favor, she appears to be quite drunk throughout the ordeal.

Here's how it works. Audience members at home (on eastern time only- it's live) pay good money to enter random contests via IM or a 900 number. Some of them are chosen to play along with our hostesses, doing things like guessing letters a la Wheel of Fortune, or identifying the missing parts of pictures (one of these was actually a cartoon car missing wheels, and yet several callers couldn't notice this either due to inebriation or retardation). For this, they almost earn enough money to cover the fifty calls they placed through the night trying to get on the air and mack on the girls.

Every once in a while, a buzzer rings, barely audible over the constant thumping of bad dance music that Shandi is waving her arms and freaking out to. That means it's e-mail time, and time for Shandi (Token Brit was largely absent- I later learned she was only in taped footage, since she quit and fled back home to England just a couple weeks ago) to read messages from viewers. The messages that make it to air are always slightly embarrassing, accompanied by pictures of the 40-year-old dweeb who sent them, and probably heavily censored. I'd hate to see what Shandi gets shielded from.

Even as a captive viewer (it was this or infomercials) PlayMania only became tolerable after I muted it. I could still follow along with the games visually, but didn't have to listen to the terrible techno incidental music, Shandi's bizarre whooping and squeaking, or the virgins calling in to propose to her. I could still watch her whoosh her arms around like she was batting away tiny elves, and can only guess that there are certain things she must do to stay awake at that hour, or that she was trying to hypnotize us. I don't think hearing her speak would have enlightened me on the subject.

Sadly, after two excruciating hours, the show ended and I had to spend the rest of the flight actually watching infomercials. That means PlayMania weighs in about six hours shorter than Sabado Gigante, but twice as long as people can stand being exposed to Howie Mandel. And unlike Howie, Shandi is doing this every damn night. That's a lot of desperate nerd calls.

Spamalot

Last night we saw Spamalot, the musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This meant that the audience was packed with die-hard Monty Python fans who could recite lines and burst into laughter minutes before something that was going to happen actually did, and who probably should have been restrained.

This being the Vegas production, it was abbreviated to fit into 90 minutes, which they do for every show here. Jenn advises me that the cuts to Phantom have made it even less sensical than in its original format, and that disturbs me. But anyway, onwards to the Grail.

Our production starred John O'Hurley (J. Peterman from Seinfeld) as King Arthur. We were in the third row, about ten feet away from the stage, looking upwards at a sharp angle to see under the showgirls' skirts. Before the show, we (the audience) were crammed into the very small "Snackalot" area outside the theater, where water was $5 and Grail Ale was something more expensive.

The plot was pretty simple. Arthur recruits Knights. Galahad is vain, Lancelot is closeted, Bedevere is flatulent, and Robin is a coward (with chicken insignia on his robes). The Knights who say Ni won't let them pass to find the grail unless they stage a Broadway musical. but there are no requisite Jews to cast in medieval England. Hilarity and musical numbers ensue. Play ends much more coherently than the original film.

Not being a Python fan, I was still somewhat amused, although wicked annoyed at the guy behind us who had the movie memorized and felt the need to prove it, vocally. Cute pixie redhead in front of me provided extra entertainment when the showgirls weren't on stage. O'Hurley delivered his part in the Peterman persona, as the public will not accept him in any other role. It worked. You can rarely go wrong performing any part as J. Peterman.

So, this was our first non-Cirque show in quite a while. We've run out of Cirque shows, thankfully. No more mimes will prod us to help them take the lids off their jars of rainbows before shoving their spandexed crotches into the air. Unfortunately, there's really nothing else of note left playing here at all. We have officially used up Las Vegas.

Cirque du Blasé

Another day, another Cirque show. This was "O", our fifth Cirque production if you count "La Nouba" from our honeymoon. The rest we've seen here in Vegas.

I'm getting really jaded about these shows. People on fire, million-gallon water tanks with moving platforms, death-defying acrobats. None of it fazes me now. I was incredibly bored through the whole thing, and wishing I had a bingo card to check off all of the rote Cirque trademarks. Annoying mime pre-show, check. Black guy sent out alone to stomp the yard for ten minutes while sets change, check. Planted "audience members" invited onstage and turning out to be acrobats, check. Do we have any takers for people riding on enormous animal-shaped head floats? How about people whose sole job in the show is to lurch around slowly and vogue? Yes, and yes!

Yawn.

I needed "French-Canadian performer asks audience member to remove lid from jar of rainbows" to get bingo, and I almost had it, since there was a book called "Colors on Parade" in the gift shop that was full of wacky tightrope walkers playing with rainbows. Whimsical! Less so was the book on the Cirque du Soleil method of achieving proactivity in business, or some such cheese-moving executive inspirational nonsense. I guess after $15 mugs, $12 programs, $24 soundtrack CD's, and $50 T-shirts, their paradigm was the last thing left to sell. Except maybe the little Asian gymnasts, but you have to remember to put air-holes in the box and never feed them after midnight.

Do you think I'd really get in trouble if I punched one of the mimes? If so, how much? It might be worth it.

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?!

Mystere

So last night we ventured out to see Mystere, one of about 368,000 Cirque du Soleil shows performing in town right now. The conceit of this one is that French-Canadian acrobats are re-enacting the dreams of a demented baby. Baby is played first by a cooing spotlight in a carriage, and later by a woman into infantilism.

As you can imagine, those French-Canadian circus babies have scary, frightening dreams involving giant inflatable snails on a turntable stage, muscular men sweating buckets while positioning their heads into each others' crotches, and trampline women dressed in rainbow-colored pregnancy suits replete with strap-on dildos.

Seated next to us by coincidence was one of my coworkers. Jenn thought he was drunk, but I later explained that he was quite in character, as I'd dealt with him earlier in the day, when he wore his clubwear into the office and disabled the ceiling fluorescents, opting instead for mood lighting he'd brought in. I can best describe the guy as a ladies' man of indeterminate Turkish-ish origins, drenched in bad cologne, shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, and hair piled high with gel to mimic what one would wear to a dance club circa 1997. He kept screaming, "NO WAY!" as a reaction to everything that happened onstage. Example: "The muscular guy lifted the other muscular guy with one arm while twisting himself into a ball, and then put his face in the other guy's crotch?! NO WAY!"

Apparently the muscle guys' act was lifted out of Zumanity, where it was deemed too erotic to exist in a musical about gay men having sex while being beaten by dominatrixes. Instead, Zumanity was changed so that muscle men instead fight each other in a cage and then make out, and Mystere got got the balancing act, only now the muscle guys wear pants instead of g-strings. Got that?

Oh, French Canada. Full of wonder, and whimsy, and colorful homoerotic infantilism. When will you declare your independence and set up your own nation dedicated to the quadruple ideals of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Weirdness?

Sell My House, Please

I remember a time when the A&E network was about old movies and Peter Graves narrating the biographies of people from old movies. Now, times have changed. People don't want to see old movies or Peter Graves, they want to watch gay designers suck the life out of homes while operating on an obscenely tight budget.

For some reason, we were watching Sell This House, one of about fifty shows to follow this cheapo home makeover theme. It's a show with a simple, yet exceedingly annoying concept. A homeowner is sitting on a half-million dollar home. It hasn't sold immediately in a flagging housing market. Obviously, it's because the doorknobs are out of date! And if you're going to plop down half a million dollars, $70 for new paint and doorknobs is out of the question. And as an owner, you're clearly too stupid to do it yourself! Only reality television can can save your sale.

Sell This House invites a busty hostess and her musclebound gay designer into the homes of the desperate, to remove any trace of evidence that anyone has ever lived there. Hidden cameras are set up to observe what potential buyers think of the place. Without fail, the would-be buyers complain about the color of the paint, age of the doorknobs, the amount of stuff the owners have collected over the years, the fact that there's dirt on the lawn, oxygen in the air, etc. This is all used as evidence to convince the sellers to let Chesty LaRue and Muscles McBearGroin destroy years of memories. Let the fun begin?

Chesty and Muscles strip out anything personal in a home, like an insatiable tag-team black hole of persona-suck. Bye-bye photos, collectibles, even furniture... In the episode we saw, Muscles said the dining room chairs were creating clutter, and removed them. Now the sellers have to stand to eat. Curtains are also a bad thing. It's always better to tear an old bedsheet apart and drape the remains up on an unadorned spray-painted rod. And who needs artwork when you can take sticks out of the lawn and put them into a crappy vase? Can't Muscles just do one single room without putting some sticks in a vase and calling it "design"? I have sincere doubts as to his gayness. Real gay men would slap the crap out of him for doing this to people, and aesthetics in general.

When the house is painted completely pastel (to "open it up") and all of the electronics, chairs, art and tables removed (to "open it up") and there's no soul left (to "open it up"), the work is done.

Total cost of tearing everything out and tossing it into a woodchipper? About $70. The cost of lost emotions, treasured souvenirs, and essentially the lives and humanity of the owners? Priceless.

God, this show makes me bitter.

Zumanity

So, yesterday was our fifth anniversary, and we went out to see Zumanity, or as it's also known, Porn: The Musical! Picture naked whip-wielding dominatrixes doing acrobatics hanging from silk sheets thirty feet in the air. Now make them dance, and interrupt every once in a while for cabaret/burlesque segments. That's pretty much the show.

Is it just that we're so jaded, or that we know a lot of other pervs, or is Vegas just astonishingly easy to shock? Most of the audience asides from us was repulsed by the simulated gay sex. And then there was the nudity, spankings, appearance onstage of large dildos, lesbian orgies. The poor woman behind us gasped and barely held back her rage at what she saw, even though the tickets clearly state it's an 18+ show with nudity and for "people with open minds only". She vocally complained to her boyfriend, who was no fan of the gay sex himself. People yelled out "Eww!" at various points and some got up and left.

After the show, there was polite applause, but mostly angry people storming out saying they couldn't recommend it to anyone they knew. We shrugged. Topless dommes? Men making out? Yawn. Do these people not even watch basic cable? We thought it was pretty tame. It was also short for a Cirque show (90 minutes, the maximum Vegas attention span). Next time we want to see that sort of thing, we can go to the fetish club. Maybe even bring a souvenir performer home.

Jenn absolutely adored our usher, a foul-mouthed pixie who told us we were in row "D for Dildo" and flirted with everyone as they came in (scaring the vast majority before the show even began). "Oh, B for Bondage!" she told one couple as she escorted them to their seats. They cringed, yelled back, "Bondage?!" like they'd heard this was something sickos in New York did but never imagined would infest such a wholesome community as Las Vegas, and looked at the door. The lucky ones in "A for Ass" were seated in love seats in the front row, where they were molested by the cast. At least a couple of the lothario clown characters bore much passing resemblance to my lecherous immigrant character Akmal.

What's more surprising still is that this show was at the New York-New York, a casino specifically aimed at LGBT vacationers and marketed mostly in gay magazines. How these people in the audience wound up there to be offended to begin with is a mystery.

The DaVinci Code: Tokyo Drift

So last night we trekked out to Summerlin to catch The DaVinci Code. Why go to the extreme other end of the city? Well, we're apartment hunting now, and despite all its creepiness, Summerlin is home to tons of nice places. (It's also home to the sluttiest nine-year olds in the world, and they were in line in front of us at the theatre, blinged-out and yapping into their Razr phones. *shudder*)

So anyway, the movie. Ron Howard directed, and you can tell because everyone assumes the gestures, mannerisms, and poses of characters in Arrested Development. This means Tom Hanks channels Jason Bateman to play Robert Langdon, Indiana Jones' boring, mulleted cousin. Hanks has reverted to his Bosom Buddies-era hairdo, despite many reasons why he should not have looked back.

But I still haven't gotten to the movie.

I'm going to assume you've read the book. Because, like, everyone on earth has read the book. Except the woman next to me, who kept gasping in shock and awe at each revelation. "Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father?!" Sorry if I spoiled it for you. The audience was apparently also full of people who have never left America before. They laughed at the sight of fuel-efficient Citreon smart-cars, and were confused about the switching between London and Paris. Yes, yes, we get it. Europe is old. Shut up and eat your popcorn, sister.

So. An ancient order of watchdogs, headed by famous people, knows a secret: Jesus got it on with Mary Magdalene, and spawned a line of French royalty that, to my surprise, did not die out when Childeric III was deposed and sent to a monastery. Instead, the Merovingians fended for themselves, acting in Matrix films and trying not to be killed by Vatican extremists, who want to erase all evidence that Jesus got his groove on. The Holy Grail is the codename for this bloodline, and its last surviving member is Audrey Tautou, who's strangely hot in a pixie-sort-of-way, but also jarring to watch speaking English, especially when you can't separate her entirely from Amelie.

The movie takes liberties with the second half of the book. The sequence in space, the journey to the center of the earth, the simplification of the plot to cram it into 2.5 hours, etc. Ian McKellen is in the Gina Gershon role: that of the lone actor who knows the movie sucks and is reveling in its suckiness. "Yes, I am eccentic, old, and therefore evil. And I will bring you down, Tommy! Bwa ha ha ha ha!"

Side note: We saw the trailor for the Miami Vice remake, in which Colin Farrell has not learned his lesson to avoid blond roles. We also saw one for Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, so bad that Paul Walker even refused to return. I have a feeling that Tokyo Drift will go down in history as one of the worst sequel subtitles ever, along with Electric Boogaloo and The Quickening. They should have stuck to my idea for a name: 3's Fast, 4's Company.

Anyway, back to the movie at hand.

Removed is any hint of romantic feelings between Robert and Sofie. What we get in its place is a firm, hearty hug like you'd give your uncle at a birthday party after he gave you a tie. ("I get to spend the rest of my life on the run from church assassins? Yay. Just what I always wanted.") See, sex will get you an R rating, whereas self-flagellating monks coated in blood and lots of shootings will only get you a PG-13. Interesting that in a movie about the rediscovery of the sacred feminine, everyone dies by phallus.

Oh yes, the self-flagellating monk. Poor Silas is really the hero here- he tries to stop Hanks from explaining everything, and just kill him. Of origins hazily glossed-over in jittery flashbacks, Silas wants to do good for those who helped him escape his life of crime. And he also likes getting spanked. If only he'd been rescued by a dominatrix, he'd have been happy. Instead, he joins Opus Dei, an extreme Catholic splinter cult that will probably see an explosion in membership by albinos who need spankings after they see this film. No one in Opus Dei is happy. No one.

So how was the movie? Meh. I worked hard to memorize the book for a future Jeopardy! appearance, and they went and changed major portions just because. Opie goes out of his way to make sure no one can possibly be offended by changing Hanks' character into a skeptical voice of reason. A boring, long-winded voice of reason, who's going to quiz you after the film to make sure you got all his major talking points. Audrie Tautou isn't topless nearly as much in American cinema as she is in French. As in, any. And in 2.5 hours, you might just be able to read the book and get the full story. It looked nice, although the projector wasn't entirely focused so it looked fuzzy for me. The locations are authentic, except for Newton's tomb, which is out of place in Westminster Abbey, and clearly made of styrofoam. Kind of like Hanks' mullet.

Oh, and as to the secret of the Grail: Jesus and Mary weren't married. His last name was "Christ" and hers was "Magdalene". If they were really married, she'd have changed hers.