Category Archives: Pop Culture

HIMYM Does Not End. HIMYM Never Ends.

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Apparently the season finale is Monday. I’m not going to watch it until Tuesday at the latest, because I only watch HIMYM on the web. I’ve been marginally involved this season. Everything has felt really tired. The only episode that didn’t feel like warmed-over Season 5 was the “Time Travel” episode, and even only impressed at the end.

Buzzfeed has a speculative post with spoilers at the end, which I did not read. I’ll leave that up to you.

Someone spent a lot of time on this.

It includes a couple of disturbing fan theories:

  • The Mother is Dead When Ted Starts Telling the Story. That would explain why he’s spending so much time telling the kids all about her. Except it doesn’t, because he’s been telling them about his single life before he met her. And it doesn’t explain why the kids have been sitting there, respectfully patient, but clearly bored out of their skulls. If these were children of a dead mother, they would want to know everything about her.

  • The Mother is Tyler Durden. Which is to say, there is no mother: she is a figment of Ted’s imagination. So are the kids. He’s sitting there, miserable, rambling to no one in particular. Of all the possible resolutions, this one would irritate the most, because it would make everything we’ve watched utterly irrelevant. Sure, Newhart did this, but no one really cared about Newhart, least of all Bob Newhart. 

The scenario I consider far more likely:

  •  We Almost See the Mother, But Don’t Quite. We spend the whole episode at Barney and Robin’s wedding. Cliffhanger at the train station. She sits next to him, he looks up. Fade out. The throwaway scene has Barney, Marshall, Lilly, and Robin. Closing credits, possibly including the words “HA HA SUCKERS!” or “TROLOLOLOLOLOLOL” or some such.

And Now For an Article in Which The Writer Pretends to Prefer That Harrison Ford had Stayed a Carpenter

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The picture at the top is better than the article, but the article’s not bad.

Fame on that level closes as many doors as it opens. Few superfamous actors have ever seemed as uncomfortable with superfame as Ford always has. (Actual Google hit count for “Harrison Ford reclusive”: 28.7 million.) Maybe it was that the break came relatively late for him; maybe the years he’d spent being knocked around the studio system prior to that left him with a cynicism about the business that no amount of success could erode. Maybe he really is cripplingly shy, the way people say; maybe that’s why he’s such a curiously flat-lineish talk-show guest. Or maybe he’s just a guy who hates his job.

Whatever. Ford could have gone back to carpentering any time over the last thirty years. Maybe we shouldn’t psychoanalyze him based on whatever he says in the part of his job – talking to the entertainment press – that every actor hates.

Yes, at some level fame is always less fun than the not-famous imagine. In some ways it has to be a pain in the ass. But it sure beats working for a living.

What Raging Rebecca Martinson Should Have Written

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Like a majority of college students, I didn’t belong to a frat or sorority. And like a majority of those, I had attitudes and prejudices about those that did. They weren’t terribly original, and I won’t recount them. I don’t have them anymore. Looking back with a bit of wisdom, Greek Life has a certain logic to it. It provides an extended family, with pertaining duties and obligations, to those who have just stepped away from their original family. It provides a social calendar and the support of one’s peers, at a time when those things are handy. A well-run frat or sorority provides leadership opportunities, academic standards, and service to the community.

But for people who never went Greek, a lot of the inside-baseball, hyperdramatic hysteria of Greek life – rushing, pledging, judging, competing — seems exactly that. Which may explain why Rebecca Martinson’s email rant to her sorority sisters has gone viral (scroll down to read the full text of the email). It’s the towering rage, with expletives used as punctuation, juxtaposed with the insignificance of the subject — her sisters failing to show adequate Sorority Spirit – that prompts hilarious reposting and now, even dramatic readings by actors.

Embarassments like this only have one kind of ending, and today Martinson resigned from her sorority. I likewise hope that Martinson learns from this, and that we all find someone else to abuse now that she’s paid the price for Internet notoriety. But when I read the email, I find myself wondering, did she have a point? Was there something, however trivial, that her sisters should have been doing, that they were not? And could she have found a way to express that which would have a) made clear how serious she took it, b) gotten the email’s recipients to respond in a way she thought positive, and c) NOT prompted anyone to make it public?

Well, let’s imagine that world. Let’s imagine that Martinson had angrily typed out her rant in, say, Microsoft Word, rather than an email browser, and then let it sit for a day, and then came back to it, and then revised her thoughts to something professional.

It may have looked like this:

Continue reading →

Rule #1 Of Conservative Media: Don’t Suck

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Iowahawk  and Lisa DiPasquale echo Ben Howe in making a basic point that we have not yet internalized:

So, to paraphrase Ben Howe’s point, if you want to make a good conservative movie, first, make a good movie. The same rule applies to humor: funny first, politics second. When it comes to gauging the impact of a satire bit, 100 praises or retweets from fellow conservatives aren’t as valuable as a single grudging “I hate your stupid wingnut politics, but I laughed.”

We don’t do this, because we don’t study the arts, and we don’t study the arts because we think them namby-pamby careers. Because artists are overwhelmingly progressive, conservatives don’t want to study the arts.

We need to get over this.

Rocking the Links

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A few things to read that other people wrote:

Finally, this guy worked very hard to reverse the gender roles of Donkey Kong so his daughter could play as Pauline (and if you knew that the girl in Donkey Kong was called Pauline, you know way more than I did about Donkey Kong)

Calvin and Hobbes Animated!

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Calvin and Hobbes is the greatest thing that has ever appeared in newsprint. Period. End of discussion. It’s better than every other comic strip, ever, by orders of magnitude. I could rhapsodize about it for hours. So watching this was a fearful experience:

Why? Because I sat there thinking, much like Josh Kurp at Uprox, that I would have to hear Calvin speak, and such a thing would be dreadful. Because I was a boy during C&H’s heyday, therefore Calvin sounded like me. To hear another voice would, if not quite taint the memory, diminish it, and then I’d have to be one of those abject nerds intoning “The comic strip was better….Man….” I would just have to.

Comic strips would seem to make good TV shows, but they don’t. Dilbert, although a funnier show than I remember, still didn’t quite work. Garfield shows were puerile. The structure of a comic strips is much the same as a Vaudeville gag: setup, delivery. And while C&H continuously broke new ground in the comic strip format, switching to TV would require backtracking, re-writing, adding elements that would wreck the boy-and-his-tiger simplicity. It would annoy me.

I hope that all fans feel as I do. The comic strip was good, kids. Let it be.

Besides, everyone knows that Hobbes grew up to be Tyler Durden.

Let’s All Get Pissed About the Oscars!

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Or, you know, not…

Salon has decided that there’s nothing more important going on than taking apart the yearly market display of that Factory of Fabulous on the West Coast. First, the Onion tweeted something about a nine-year-old girl that, even if you get the joke, is absolutely dreadful. Then, Willa Paskin had that epiphany that progressives occasionally have: the realization that Seth McFarlane is kind of a dick.

The lady-dissing jokes didn’t stop with the ode to breasts: MacFarlane cracked that Jennifer Aniston was a stripper. He sexualized the young Quvenzhané Wallis: “It’ll be 16 years before she’s too old for Clooney,” which is, somehow, only the second most offensive thing someone said about the adorable 9-year-old last night. He also described Jessica Chastain’s character in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the ultra-driven women who through sheer force of will made the raid on Osama bin Laden possible, as “a celebration of every woman’s innate ability to never ever let anything go.”

All of which was fine when it was aimed at conservatives (Nazi Uniforms with “McCain/Palin” buttons, lazy insinuations of anti-semitism aimed at Rush Limbaugh) and conservative women (cheap shots at Sarah Palin’s mentally handicapped kid), but never mind, welcome to the party, Willa. Now you can freely observe that Family Guy Sucks at Political Humor. But then things get odd:

But even while Adele and Michelle Obama and Jennifer “Cinderella” Lawrence were creating the show’s highlights, Twitter was doing something even more unsettling than MacFarlane — it was going absolutely HAM on Anne Hathaway and Kristen Stewart, the one for appearing to care what we think too much, the other for caring way too little. Even people who hated MacFarlane’s performance could find fault with Hathaway and her trembling theater girl thing or with KStew and her refusal to find a comb or look like she gives a shit. (People even made fun of her for walking funny, until they realized she’s been using crutches after seriously slicing her foot. A perfect little encapsulation of what drives folks so wild about Hathaway: Last night she told Stewart to “break a leg … oops.”)

Yeah, people sure seem to care about celebrities, I guess. And when people care, they find themselves driven to all sorts of unpleasant emotions. Personally, Kristen Stewart’s semi-punk, “I refuse to pretty myself up for your amusement” persona is the only thing about her that registers on my radar screen. I was going to say “the only thing about her that I like,” but that implies that there are other things about her that I dislike. And I don’t. Because I don’t care. Yes, she doesn’t quite have a terribly broad acting range. So? I’m sure she’s got a career-bending Role You Won’t Beleive in her somewhere along the way.

As for Hathaway…yeah. Don’t care. Nothing against her, enjoy her work, cannot be bothered to comment on whether she’s too eager-to-please at the Oscars. Because I don’t watch the Oscars. Because the Oscars are a dreary display of semi-interesting people doing uninteresting things. Or, as Thomas Fitz put it after the Emmys:

As near as I can figure, award shows exist to fan the rapidly dwindling notion that our entertainment industry is able to distinguish quality from crap, that there’s just something magical about such a dense mass of Fabulous. Meh. Identical dorks in identical tuxes paired with rail-thin formerly-cute divas competing for the most artful way to nearly show off their pudenda, all waiting around to walk across the stage and introduce each other. It’s like the DMV with better lighting.

The Star Wars Avengers

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L.Palmer speculates about a hypothesis that the Disney Star Wars films are going to take a page from the Avengers franchise:

There are, after all rumors of Boba Fett and Han Solo standalone films. I don’t disagree with these considerations. But I think the sequel trilogy — Episodes VII-IX, will not be those.

The premise of the Disney sale is that George Lucas is giving Star Wars to the next generation. So I suspect Episode VII will be precisely that handoff. If the rumors are true and Harrison Ford has indeed signed on for the next film, then we are going to see an old Han Solo.

This old.

If Hammil and Fisher and Billy Dee Williams (admit it, you want to see Lando Calrissian again) return, they will all be old as well. So the smart move will be to set Episode VII thirty years after Return of the Jedi, much as the last Indiana Jones movie was set nearly 20 years after The Last Crusade. And the purpose of this movie will be either to give our aging heroes one last ride, or to mentor the new generation (and probably, both). Then Episodes VII and IX can be about the new generation.

Who would this new generation be? Probably the children of the old (Ben Skywalker, Jaina Solo), and some other jedi, rogues, rebels, and villains. Lord knows the Expanded Universe is full of ideas. But I hope they don’t use too much, because I’ve always found the EU that touch too derivative to ever truly entertain. We don’t want to attempt to recreate the old movies, we want to pay homage to them, and move on. Give us a new story, a new villain, a new conflict, against which the old heroes can hardly find the strength to stand. Give us Beowulf against the Dragon, not against Grendel 2.0.

Alec Baldwin Denies Everything, NYPD Investigates

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He can’t be racist! He gives Money to black people!

“I find it ironic that my foundation’s last grant was $50,000 to the Arthur Ashe Learning Center,” Baldwin tweeted.

Which is to say, his foundation gave money to a charity named after a black person! So there!

TMZ says they can’t hear the racial slur on the audio recording, for whatever that’s worth.

The NYPost also wonders about the meaning of “Ralston,” referring to Miller (the black photographer in question), on one of Baldwin’s now-deleted tweets.

“Moments after I tweet about the Post, Ralston, the ex-crackhead ‘photographer’ shows up at my door w 1 of Murdoch’s nieces in tow.”

He also tweeted, “Ralston claims he’s ex NYPD!! That can’t be!!! Ex NYPD don’t become crackhead, ex jailhouse paparazzi!”

He removed the posts from his Twitter feed soon after.

It is unclear why Baldwin called the photographer “Ralston.”

I assumed that it was some kine of angered bastardization of “Rastus” the somewhat archaic anti-black slur referring to the guy on the Cream of Wheat box (“Ralston” being a different cereal company). A couple of commenters on DListed came to the same conclusion (scroll down). It may be a stretch but it fits the facts.

The actor has since made a hyper-anticlimactic exit from Twitter.

See Also: Holy Crap, is Alec Baldwin Racist.