25 Days Of Newman

by Linda Holmes

If you enjoy -- or do not enjoy -- a Randy Newman movie title song (like the Toy Story tune he's performing above), you'll definitely enjoy 25 Days Of Newman, a project where two comics are producing a new (sort of) Newmanesque movie title song every day.

Hat-tip to Metafilter.

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Baggin' On the Sea King, or: The Comedy Meme that Ate Atlantis

Sea monkey: Even Stephen Colbert can't resist taking a dig at Aquaman. Comedy Central.

 

by Glen Weldon

Aquaman. King of the Seven Seas. Swift and Powerful Monarch of the Ocean.

Dude can't catch a break.

In the popular mindset, he's become a quite literal joke, and a tired one.

And so to all those cut-ups, wags and wacky funsters who have helped to spread the now pervasive "Aquaman is Lame" meme, I say this:

Enough. Basta. Move on.

Credit where it's due, though: Thanks to you, said meme itself — the very act of pointing out that the highly specific nature of Aquaman's power-set would logically circumscribe his effectiveness as a deterrent of crime and administrator of justice (i.e., "The guy talks to FISH!") — is now officially the hoariest, hackiest arrow in the quiver of pop-culture commentary.

Qua humor, it is to our Internet Age what "And what is the deal with airline peanuts?" was to the skinny-necktie 90's.

It is not remotely fresh; it is fresh's antithesis, its polar opposite, its mortal enemy. It's what steps onto the Enterprise wearing a goatee after a transporter malfunction strands Fresh Himself in the anti-matter universe.

Stephen Colbert, bless him, recently managed to put a silly new spin on the Aquaman joke. (It's right around the one-minute mark). It's not bad, actually, as Aquaman gags go -- just dumb enough to crack Colbert up, which is fun.

But that's the exception. The rule itself is pretty grim.

After the jump, a short history of the Aqua-gag, involving Dave Chappelle, Craig Ferguson, Family Guy, Entourage, and the many others who've mistaken the Sea King's orange tunic for Komedy Gold.

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This Week In 'AIIEEEEE!': 'The Amazing Race' Edition

by Linda Holmes

Every now and then, you get a reminder that half of life is showing up.

And the other half is not losing your stuff.

This week on The Amazing Race, the highly likable mother-son team of Toni and Dallas had made it all the way to the final four, along with three less likable teams. In descending order of likability and the mutters of disinterest they inspire, those teams were: brother and sister Nick and Starr (eh), semi-feuding couple Ken and Tina (feh), and incompetent buffoon clown can-barely-find-their-own-feet pals Dan and Andrew (bleh).

The previous week, Dan and Andrew had given perhaps the worst performance by any team, in any leg, ever. Most notably, they had to quit on a task and try a different one, because Dan couldn't walk in formation. Not tango, not mambo, not limbo: just walk. Walk in a straight line in a rhythmic fashion. Couldn't do it. Don't believe me? See for yourself. It was like Elaine dancing on Seinfeld, if Elaine had only been trying to walk at the time.

More on morons, after the jump...

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Wednesday, December 3: The Discerning Viewer

Pushing Daisies: A scene from last week's episode, in which Ned shows off his talent for waking the dead -- but only for one minute.

by Linda Holmes

Join the final stages of grief: ABC recently pulled the (apparent) plug on Pushing Daisies (as it did with Eli Stone and Dirty Sexy Money), but there are still a handful of new episodes left. Tonight, a chef turns up dead at a cook-off. (ABC, 8 p.m.)

It's beginning to look a lot like tourists from Ohio: Last year at this time, I was actually working in Rockefeller Center, and believe me, it may be the most wonderful time of the year, but not if you are trying to get a peppermint mocha at the Starbucks in the underground concourse next to the skating rink. If you're doing that, it's nothing but a solid wall of people's backs. People who are not from New York, and therefore don't understand the Step Aside Rules, the Keep It Moving Rules, or the You Can't Just Stand There Where People Need To Walk Rules.

What I'm saying is that tonight's Christmas At Rockefeller Center (NBC, 8 p.m.) will not give you the real feeling of Christmas at Rockefeller Center, despite the efforts of Harry Connick, Jr., the Jonas Brothers, and American Idol champ David Cook.

More of tonight's TV, after the jump...

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The Cartoon Network Rickrolls The Macy's Parade

by Glenn McDonald

This is inspired.

At the extremely orchestrated, extremely annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, those rascals at the Cartoon Network managed to Rickroll a crowd of millions, both in person and via the live broadcast on NBC.

If you're not familiar with the concept of Rickrolling, there's a good primer here. Basically, it's a fun but aging Internet meme -- an endlessly perpetuating prank that tricks people into watching a full-screen, full-volume version of Rick Astley's 1987 video, "Never Going to Give You Up."

More on Rickrolling, The Man, and how a meme dies, after the jump...

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Midweek Blah-Buster: Ben Folds

Ben Folds - "Such Great Heights" Hey, Play This. . . !

A room full of excitable nerds with acoustic guitars is never, never, never a bad idea. This video of Ben Folds covering the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" has been kicking around for a couple of years now, beloved by random YouTube stumblers and email link-followers. There's a lot of love in that room.

Happy middle of the week.

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Gap Holiday: The Thrill Is Gone

It used to be that one of the best sources of palatable holiday ads was The Gap. This one was actually the first time many people ever saw Rufus Wainwright, singing "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" for the holiday campaign in 1998. Around the same vintage, there were ads with Luscious Jackson singing "Let It Snow" and with Low singing "The Little Drummer Boy." It wasn't all hipster bands, either -- Johnny Mathis showed up to sing "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year."

Gap history and holiday blues, after the jump, and be warned -- mute your computer first if you are working around sleeping babies, because The Gap will autoplay its merriment in your ear if you don't...

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Snobs, Movies, & Adorable Thrift, In The Monday Roundup

Culture panic: Worried about applauding at the wrong time? You're hardly alone. iStockphoto.

 

by Linda Holmes

• The London Times is feeling mighty optimistic these days, judging from its creation of a list of the 100 Best Movies of 2008. Now, it doesn't always feel like there are two movies a week that anyone would want to include on such a list, but they've gone and compiled their list nonetheless. (Note that it's based on 2008 releases in the U.K.; some of these were released in the U.S. in 2007.) If nothing else, it does make a nice refresher on recent movies you may have missed, and there are handy links to every review.

TiVo, penny-pinching, and fear of culture snobbery, after the jump...

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The Hotness Menace

Roger Ebert's blistering takedown of what he calls the "CelebCult" delivers a well-earned beating to magazines and web sites supported by what would, without the intervention of cameras and thus "journalism," be easily classifiable as stalking. It's bad for us all, dealing daily in the details of whether Suri Cruise will or will not wear pants. Let us agree on that premise.

But because Ebert has bitten off so much -- the publishing crisis, the AP's 500-word limit on everything from reviews to interviews, celebrity obsessions, the disappearance of critical critics -- the piece is a little bit...all over the place. One of the things he doesn't directly address came roaring to the front of my mind as I perused the Rolling Stone "Hot List" for 2008: I have come to view hotness as the enemy of everything about pop culture that I enjoy. I hate hotness.

Why hotness is a menace, and what it's crowding out, after the jump...

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Monkey See Introduces: The Movie Blurb Game

by Glenn McDonald

Back in the halcyon days of the early 1990s, before broadband Internet and IMDb.com, my friends and I -- a small group of disturbed, minutiae-obsessed film geeks -- often killed time with something called The Movie Blurb Game. The idea was to think of a phrase that combined the titles of two or more films, then improvise a blurb for the movie that might appear in the newspaper. The other guy then had to piece together the title of the movie from the blurb.

I sense an example is in order:

In this cross-genre fairy tale musical from maverick director Terry Gilliam, Matt Damon and Heath Ledger star as 18th-century Chicago musicians on a mission from God to write timeless children's stories featuring the music of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles.

Answer: The Blues Brothers Grimm

The only rules were that you could not use the actual words of the movie name in the blurb, you had to use theatrically released films, and you had to stick to that dopey style of breezy entertainment journalism. In this game, it's all about style. For instance, bonus points are awarded for:

- incorporating admirable brevity ("M. Night Shyamalan adapts Jane Austen" = The Sixth Sense and Sensibility)

- incorporating inspired lack of brevity ("Robert Altman directs this Jimmy Cliff reggae classic starring Cher and Sandy Dennis as devotees of a tragically deceased screen star of yesteryear" = The Harder They Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean)

- incorporating Cher

Remember that films can be mashed up phonetically (Nosferatu Kill a
Mockingbird) and definite articles can be dropped (The Maltese Falcon and the Snowman).

Go to it, have fun, and post your answers below. (First-time players, be forewarned that answers may, indeed, be posted below -- don't scroll down unless you want to cheat.)

+++

1. Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker star in Charlie Chaplin's classic silent comedy.

2. The Gotham franchise takes a dubious turn when Batman (Ben Stiller) moonlights as a security guard.

3. Michelle Rodriguez spars with Ed Norton.

4. In Robert Zemeckis' original time-travel classic, Angela Bassett enjoys a steamy, passionate affair with Michael J. Fox.

5. This strangest of chick flicks finds Christina Ricci, Rosie O'Donnell, Thora Birch and Melanie Griffith journeying upriver to assassinate a rogue colonel.

6.) Kurt Russell and Steve McQueen escape a German POW camp in Manhattan.

7.) Mike Judge's animated cult comedy stars Ron Livingston and Jennifer Aniston as primates shot into orbit.

8.) In this poorly received sequel, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns from the future to fight zombies, Robin Williams and painfully earnest prep school boys. (3 films)

9. In the quintessential heavy metal Elvis picture, the King teams with Jim Varney and Mark Wahlberg to join the Rebel Alliance. (4 films)

10.) Based on the Alice Walker novel, Steven Spielberg directs Prince in this touching tale of an autistic man and his brother, featuring Jim Carrey as comedian Andy Kaufmann, with Nicholas Cage and Cher as star-crossed lovers. (5 films)

Watch this space for future installments. (Next up: The Movie Blurb Game, Holiday Films Edition.)

Answers are after the jump, so don't spoil it for yourself!

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