New: Old Britney

Last night, Britney Spears attempted a comeback, performing on MTV's video awards, the name of which only serves to remind us of the days when MTV showed videos. *sniff* Excuse me, I'm getting a little verklempt...

Brit was widely panned for being out of shape, forgetting her own lyrics, having her hair weave come undone, being outperformed by her own backup dancers, and generally looking and acting as confused as we were.

But! BUT, I say! These critics simply don't get it. See, Britney could have gone out and done a rehash of her stage career as it existed through the end of 2003. A "Young Britney" moment, full of faux-lesbian makeout sessions, horny writhing across the stage, and competent vocals. But that would be living in the past. Been there, done that!

No, instead she chose the more daring route- jumping straight to the "Old Elvis" stage of her career at the ripe age of 25! She even chose to kick it off in Las Vegas, where a similarly paunchy, drugged-out King twilighted his career trying to keep his breath while belting out "In the Ghetto" in gaudy sequins. And look! Britney has gaudy sequins too! Let's make a chart, for comparison's sake.

• Flabby belly? Check! (Although Elvis didn't expose his.)


• Dazed and confused look of incomprehension? Check! (Yes Brit, we know it's called "Music Television", even if their schedule is entirely My Super Sweet 16 reruns.)


• Unkempt appearance? Check! (Although Elvis' hair was real.)


• Slumping over from exhaustion, and having to be hoisted around by helpers? (Wait, even Elvis didn't need that...)


• Driven from venue in tears by Sarah Silverman's mocking? (Elvis never let Don Rickles follow him on stage.)

Forget matching the second phase of Elvis' career, she's topped it! And while Elvis croaked soon afterwards, all signs point to decades of innovation from Ms. Spears ahead of us. Where will her bright, shining star lead us and the industry next? I can't say I know for certain, but here's a hint- look out, Natasha Lyonne, there's going to be a new girl in the sewer!

Road House 2, or, Why I'm an Atheist

Jenn tivoed Road House 2, which was airing on Spike at 2 in the afternoon today. You know a film is bad when you can't even convince Patrick Swayze to come back in a cameo. This is a straight-to-video fiasco of epic proportions. We tried to tackle it sober (Jenn is now fixing that situation...) and, as she mentioned in her post, we've managed to survive Battlefield Earth in its entirety. We only made it through about half an hour of RH2 before deleting it and popping in the original as a palette cleanser.

How bad is it? It's like aliens, completely ignorant of our culture, somehow got their hands on the original movie and decided they would communicate back to us using a similar, but entirely foreign duplication of the film. These aliens concentrated very hard on recreating every scene exactly, often using the same dialogue line for line, but missed the part about making it somewhat watchable. No more than thirty seconds can pass before a character knowingly spouts a familiar phrase, then looks at the camera and all but winks. Tee hee! We're in on it!

A loving god wouldn't allow such an affront to a classic of cinema. The original Road House looks like Citizen Kane in comparison. The classic RH had Ben Gazzara as a drunken, pink-bathrobed criminal mastermind. The sequel gives us Jake Busey (Gary was busy, but the Busey brand of insanity is well-known) sporting a Flock of Seagulls haircut and bling. The original had Jeff Healey as a blind guitar savant in the house band. The sequel gives us a soundalike band with a dancing midget. The original gave us Patrick Swayze as single-named philosopher-turned-bouncer Dalton, who had a man-sized mullet. The sequel gives us his mulletless son Nate, a DEA agent-turned-bouncer, who reveals his dad's first name was "Jack". That's like finding out Darth Vader is really just Steve, from Accounting.

Why, oh why?! If it was absolutely necessary to continue Dalton's saga, could it have maybe been done by technically competent people, who know how to place words together to form sentences? Who can frame a shot by placing the actors in front of the camera? Who would beat the living crap out of anyone who tried to pass this abomination off as being in any way linked to the cherished 1989 classic?

Excuse me, I have something in my eye.

Britney Shears

Overnight, a weepy Britney Spears (fresh from a grueling hourlong stint in rehab) was videotaped harassing the staff of a tattoo parlor and confiscating the clippers from a stylist to shave her own head bald, all the while while muttering about "people touching her" and acting erratically. What "erratic" means when one is referring to Spears is anyone's guess. The girl let K-Fed stick his you-know in her hoo-ha. Did I mention the Nyquil stains all over her clothing? Well, there. I just did. It's a look!

Still, I'm glad she's found Krishna Consciousness. Hopefully her new career of handing out flowers in the airport will be much more fulfilling than any comeback attempt, and give her the structure and discipline she needs in life. Perhaps she can sit in with the Polyphonic Spree, or go into acting with "The Young Miss Kojak Mysteries" on the Family Channel. The point is, no matter what she does, it has to be an improvement.

Welcome to Rock Bottom, Brits! Population: Dustin Diamond and you.

Anna Nicole, W Wish We'd Hardly Known Ye

So, Anna Nicole Smith has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Now come on, seriously, who didn't see this coming? You? In the back? Were you not paying attention during the Train Wreck chapter? Not even during the filmstrip ("When Bimbos Attack", courtesy of the Fox Network)?

Actually, I prefer to think of it as her marrying off to that rich old white guy in the sky. Right now she's like, "Come on, Jesus, wanna watch me dance?" and in a few hours he'll be adding her to his will and giving her his whole inheritance (tablets, arks, all that jazz) and pretty soon will come the inevitable custody and paternity suits over whether her child is really the son of the Son of Man or not. So that's something to look out for in the future.

Do you know who the real loser in this messy affair is? No, not her infant daughter. Sheesh, people. Think of poor TrimSpa! They've been insisting their diet drug is perfectly safe and effective. Now their spokesmodel is dead, and all signs point to an Elvis-esque final visit to the toilet with a mouthful of pills. Faster than you can say "Phen-Fen," these people are going to be out of business.

Who are the winners? Well, the field is wide open for America's Next Top Crusty Aging Chihuahua-toting Bimbo Sweetheart. Will it be Tara Reid? Paris Hilton? My money's on Britney. As the only one of the three who spent her day denying rumors of lesbian heroin orgies, I think she's off to an excellent start.

The Ghost of Popcorn Past

WHAT THE BUTTERY FUCK IS UP WITH THE REANIMATED CORPSE OF ORVILLE REDENBACHER?!

At first they were content with doctoring his old commercials to change the product packaging, but now I swear they're cutting his face out and pasting it onto some sort of unholy CGI Jar-Jar thing and making him listen to iPods and dance around. Except it doesn't work right, so it looks like he's stretched out taut on a mesh skeleton, and his forehead is going to split open if he doesn't come through the TV and disembowel you first.



Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?!

He's disturbing! I don't want to buy popcorn from him, I want to run screaming, grab a shotgun, and shoot him in his zombie face before he eats my brains! Why are they doing this to poor Orville Deadenbacher? Oh, the humanity. Oh, the popcornity!

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."

The Goodbye Show

So in the past, I've mentioned Melanie, the PBS babysitter character who hosts the network's evening cartoon lineup. Good ol' Mel was an "enchanted babysitter" of some sort, who always overenthused with gusto about whatever obscure British short was on its way, before launching into a terrifying dance about crafts and teaching us bad sign language. She scared me.



Melanie has been absent for several days, and I was finally curious enough to find out why. For the past few weeks her stock had been rising on the network, and she'd even been filming new segments (they recycle heavily), joined by a new freakish puppet named Star. Why would she vanish at the start of a new season of segments?

Mel, as it turns out, starred in a video called "Technical Virgin". Some sources describe it as a spoof PSA, others as a full-blown Melanie-Does-Dallas foray into the world of anal intrigue. Whatever the case (help me, Google, find me the screen caps!) Melanie is no more, and now the cartoons are unhosted. At least, as a by-product, Star the creepy puppet is gone, too. See ya in hell, Star!



I'd always suspected there was something pervy lurking behind Melanie's spastic facade. But then again, children's television is all about the couched metaphor. Yesterday, Noggin was showing the jumping-the-shark episode of Blue's Clues where Blue started becoming a talking puppet and ripping off Elmo's World. A fairy godmother came to Blue, now a puppy teenager, and told her of her "greatest gift" and to find a hole that her key would fit into. When Blue finally found the keyhole (quoth the key, "It's working! I'm turning!") Blue was enveloped in sparkly blue ecstacy and found her voice. She eventually had to return to 2-D, but was told that anytime she put the key into the hole she could come back.

Um, yeah. Melanie's antics have nothing on the font of filth that is post-Steve Blue's Clues.