I’m Not a Cat Lady

Cliché Watch: You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

In the trailer for The Bounty Hunter, Jennifer Aniston delivers two lines in under three seconds that resonate with as much subtlety as a klaxon. As she's being bundled into a car trunk by Gerard Butler—a scene that the studio allowed to be photographed when it was being shot way back in August and then leaked for some cheap-and-cheerful tabloid publicity along the lines of  "Jennifer Aniston Gets Dumped In Car Boot By Costar Gerard Butler!"—she yells, "You have got to be kidding me! You are not serious!" (Check it out at 00:38–00:41.)

It is the most disingenuous movie reaction to being thrown into the boot of a car that I believe has ever been committed to film. And the most desperate attempt to seem "current" and "cool."  For some reason, sometime in the early 00s, young folks started rejecting the contraction and began channeling John McEnroe circa 1981: Everything became "do not!" this and "you have got to" that. Once upon a time, people were content to say  "You're kidding" when they couldn't quite believe what they were hearing. Then that morphed into "You're kidding me!", as if all that kidding had suddenly become, like, personal—You're not just KIDDING, but you're kidding ME! 

Now, however, you're not just kidding me, but you have GOT to be KIDDING me. You're not simply not serious anymore; you are NOT serious (alternatives include You canNOT be SERIOUS and its nervous cousin, Seriously?). The emphasis and the attitude often involve an arched eyebrow, a straight face and, according to my informal observations, were pioneered by Chandler Bing. With his trademark deadpan delivery, Matthew Perry imbued his lines with a slightly off-kilter sarcastic twist—"And I'm supposed to care... because?"—that swept through the mainstream like H1N1 and that we now hear echoed ad infinitum on The Office and Saturday Night Live and ads for Verizon. The language has repeatedly come out of the mouths of babes on The Hills and Gossip Girls alike, and contestants on Project Runway, and the likes of Seth Rogen and Michael Cera, and every stock stroppy teenager and disaffected hipster featured in any current sitcom or TV commercial you care to name. And as the years go by, the trend keeps growing stronger.

Maybe it's an affectation of the now-universal Valley Speak, or post-ironic posturing, but whatever it is and wherever it came from, it has simply got to stop. Lines like "You have got to be kidding me! You are not serious!" are a poor excuse for dialogue by now—especially for a 41-year-old like Jennifer Aniston. They are officially old-hat. And they need to be retired, along with "You got that right!"; "Let's do this!"; and the old chestnut, "That's what I'm talking about!" (aka "That's what I'm talking about!") It was cute when Will Smith popularized it in Men in Black. That was way back in 1997. It's time to move on. Seriously.

The Women of Vogue: Tales From the Crypt Part II

Holy Lord, ladies, if this is what several decades in fashion does to you, get out NOW!!!

(via Gawker)

Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew: Tales From the Crypt

Not necessarily on purpose, I caught up with the Season 3 premiere of VH1's Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew today and I am still reeling from the retina-scorching plastic-surgery-gone-way-past-wrong mess that is Heidi Fleiss, and the so-haggard-it-hurts-to-look-to-look-at-her Mackenzie Phillips.

Just look at these mugs. And trust me, folks, this is nothing compared to seeing them on a big screen in glorious, unforgiving HD.

 

Heidi reminds us more than once that she's 43, because Lord knows we'd never guess from the butchered state of that puss. Poor Mackenzie has never been a looker, but somebody please get that girl a tub of Max Factor Pancake and a sponge. There's no need for a costly, clever anti-drug campaign ever again: Just slap these ladies' faces on a lifesize poster and the job's done.

Yes, this season's bunch is definitely the ropiest yet. There's a true trilogy of terror in scary monster Dennis Rodman, who seems to think he's there because of a court order; super-creep Tom Sizemore, who—hey! casting coup!—was convicted of assaulting ex-lover Fleiss in 2003, and a freshly Saran-wrapped Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, who shows up with a weeping abscess caused by shooting up but still seems rather robust for a drug addict, if you ask me.

 

Rounding off this particularly motley crew we've got the requisite bosomy Playboy model, a meatball from The Real World, some country singer or other and a contestant from America's Next Top Model who's quite pretty but, c'mon, had about as much chance making it as a model as Heidi Fleiss has of passing for 43. 

This show is frequently revolting and vaguely obscene. There's no celebrity trainwreck Dr. Drew isn't willing to exploit, even after his "good friend" DJ AM turned back to drugs and killed himself after hosting his own rehab series last year. And yet… Yeah. I'm gonna have to watch.

 

... and a Happy New Year! I'll be back in January 2010—see you then!

Today's Moment in Déjà Vu

Is it just me, or is there something kinda familiar about Where the Wild Things Are?

Sonia Sotomayor is a Lahd-TIIIIIIIIna!

Go ahead a call me petty, but this has been catching my ear a lot lately. As I've been listening to news updates on NPR over the last couple of days, Sonia Sotomayor's nomination as associate justice of the Supreme Court has been continually mentioned. She is, as we all know by now, the first Latina to ever win the post. And listening to the announcements, I am once again struck by the way newsreaders pronounce the word Latina. Doesn't matter if they're of actual Latin-American heritage themselves or direct descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims—they all seem to go out of their way to infuse the word with every ounce of Latin flair they can muster, pronouncing it: Lahd-dtiiiiiiinah!

It's one thing to honor a person's preferred pronunciation of their family name—in this case, Soto-mai-yohr—but is it necessary to put on such a performance when merely stating an ethnonym? Take Lakshmi Singh. Have you ever heard her introducing her weekly show? "From National Public Radio, it's Lahd-dtiiiiiiino USA!" Up to "it's," she sounds like any standard American-accented NPR-style newsreader. And then, just like that, she's Charo. She should go the whole hog and say "Lahd-dtiiiiiiino Oo-ess-ah!"

Okay, so her mother is Puerto Rican. (And with a name like Lakshmi Singh, who knew?) But I've heard newsreaders and announcers who don't have a drop of Hispanic blood in their veins make a meal out of Latino and Latina. Or the names of Latinos and Latinas. Like Gasia Mickaelian, on KTVU Channel 2. In the promo for her News at 5, the voiceover guy practically bursts an artery when he says her name: "Gaaaaaa-theeya Meee-kaiii-YAAAAYAAY-yian!" Why is that?

I don't hear people do this for names of people in other ethnic groups. Nobody suddenly lapses into Chinese tonal inflections when reporting about Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Perhaps it's in deference to the fact that the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing sector in the country right now. Who knows: One of these days Spanish will be the majority language, so it's probably a good idea to start brushing up. Si?

Sex and the City Pipe-Lady Style

All prescription drug commercials are pretty vile, but I saw one recently that really made me stop in my tracks and go, Huh? It's that ad for the bladder-control drug Vesicare, starring three women made out of shiny brass pipes telling us all about their leaky-bladder issues.

I can only guess that some advertising whiz came up with the leaky-bladder-as-faulty-plumbing concept. Which is fine. But who made the leap to animated characters composed entirely of pipes? And why do these pipe-ladies have no spigots? How come they have a normal-looking furry little dog when the pipe men have a dog made out of brass cans? Also, I'm really not getting the whole Sex and the City vibe here. Are stick-figured women who parade around in high heels while laden with shopping bags really the appropriate demo for this particular drug?

The other leaky-bladder commercial, for Enablex, which features a bunch of chubby, Disneyesque water balloons doing the conga at their Class of '68 high school reunion, suggests that advertisers think cartoon renderings are the only way illustrate this pesky and potentially embarrassing affliction. Which is pretty condescending. But at least this Enblex has got the demo right.

Three Things I Need To Say About Russell Brand Right Now

While scouting the Daily Mail today—which I do now and then when craving some good, juicy celeb gossip with extra lashings of lowbrow—I was struck by this photo of Russell Brand enjoying himself a nice New York summer.

Two things:
1. He has a woman's figure.
2. Freakishly tall!
3. Doesn't he look a lot like Tiny Tim?

I know he can be charming and funny, bit still—I can't believe this guy's a sex god in the UK.

Daily Mail: Russell Brand Steps Out in Matching Outfit With His Latest Lady Friend

The Teenagers Have Spoken: Twitter Is for Tw@ts

I'm a great big slobbering fan of Choire Sicha and his brainchild, The Awl. Between his Twitter feed, his awesome Awl posts and his daily Awl emails, I can't get any work done: He keeps pointing to all these articles I have to drop everything to read and sites I need to explore and bookmark.

Like this post today about a 15-year-old Matthew Robson, a Morgan Stanely intern in the UK (yep, they start 'em  young over there, Oliver Twist–style), who wrote a memo that basically blew all the myths about teen media consumption clear out of the Atlantic.

Among his observations:

• Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average.

• Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless.

• Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.

Predictably, mediaworld has gone nuts over this. Even better, Matthew's report prompted two he-said, she-said responses that pooh-poohed one or two things, which are equally illuminating—and pretty damn hilarious.

Like this:

...any teenager could tell you that paying for things is unpopular and Facebook has infinite importance over Twitter. After all, the only people that use Twitter are celebrities with nothing else to do and bored old people who think they're connecting with the younger generation. Does anyone care that Miley Cyrus is "eatin' an apple".

And this:

Our generation has become near-on obsessed with soaps ranging from the sickeningly American lives of those in The Hills to the gritty social problems discussed in Skins, girls and boys alike.

British teens are obsessed with our sickeningly American lives! Bless their worn sooty socks.

This, however, is the most insightful perspective on news-consumption habits of any generation I've seen yet:

Robson seems to feel that all teenagers read freesheets. However, he seems to have forgotten that these are only available to those living in towns and cities, leaving the majority of teenagers forced to get their news fix either from the school library, a self bought paper (which, I must agree, are usually tabloids) or may catch the front page story when their parents are reading it. Reading a quality newspaper seems to be a case of nurture and varies with each family's political persuasion and perception of the mass media, rather than be a case of not having the time to do so.

None of these pronouncements is exactly earth-shattering, of course. But with isn't it refreshing to hear them from actual members of this obsessively analyzed demographic for a change?

The Guardian: How Teenagers Consume Media: The report that shook the City

The Guardian: Teenage Media Habits: Was the whiz-kid correct?

The Awl: Morgan Stanley Intern Is Voice of His Generation

Brüno Hits America, Goes Soft

 

What a difference an umlaut makes.

While Brüno was the No. 1 movie this weekend, according to the New York Times, its actual earnings weren't all that. Ticket sales have added up to an estimated $30.4 million versus Borat's $26.5 million opening in 2006. But Brüno opened in a few thousand more theaters, and its comparative per screen average of $11,040 is well short of Borat's $31,607.

(Time magazine thinks it's Twitter's fault. Now there's an angle!)

Sacha Baron Cohen was the flavor of the year when Borat came out. This was comedy tailormade for all the hip, knowing young subversives and ironistes raised on a diet of The Daily Show, Jackass and the US version of The Office. I was struck by how anxiously critics and cultural commentators jumped on the Borat bandwagon—even the fogeys on NPR were gushing, as if hoping to score points with a younger demo and say, "We're cool! We get it!"

I thought Americans were missing the anti-Americanism of SBC's humor and getting off on their own superiority—sort of, "Hey, it's those Americans he's taking the piss out of; I'm not one of those Americans so it's fine  .... and it's hilarious!" If you didn't love it, then you didn't get it—which meant, well, if you were a critic or cultural commentator, you'd passed your sell-by date and would probably lose your job.

I've never been a huge fan of Sacha Baron Cohen. I always sensed a certain hubris about this guy, from Ali G on down. Borat made me laugh, a lot—SBC has a sublime gift for mimicry and physical comedy—but I also thought his targets were too easy. So America is full of Ugly Americans, tell us something we don't know! And I don't care if Cohen is Jewish—the scenes in the B&B run by the kindly older couple, with Borat carrying on about "shape-shifting Jews" and throwing money at cockroaches, pushed it way too far. (Even though the couple whom SBC tricked into filming those scenes, the Behars, are heroically magnanimous about what happened and are big SBC fans now.) But between the jumbo-sized censor bar dancing below Borat's groin during the infamous wrestling scene, Borat posing in that banana hammock in Cannes, and Brüno's junk-hugging outfits, I also think SBC is just a little bit too infatuated with his own footlong. So you're a big guy there, Sacha. Lucky Isla. Congratch!

So I've been fascinated by how many critics have done a dizzying about-face on SBC and his humor now. On Rotten Tomatoes, Borat scored 97 percent from the "top critics" on the Tomatometer. Brüno scored a relatively meagre 69 percent. Take a look at the contrasts.

In Manohla Dargis's Borat review in the NYT, she likens "Mr. Baron Cohen" to "the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel" and glowingly declares that "the brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy" and that "just when you’re ready to cry, you howl."

Her fellow critic AO Scott, however, calls Brüno "a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes" and harumphs, "It’s not all that hard to find people in America who will expose their fear, ignorance and hatred on camera, as anyone with access to YouTube during the last presidential election knows. Derision, though, is not the same as insight, and 'Will you look at those dumb rednecks' is not much of a punch line."

Let's see what the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has to say. In his Borat review he reverently ponders the cultural and  intellectual method behind SBC's madness: "...it is as if he were outraged by the business of our being human—as if, in laying bare our follies, he were just quickening the process by which we already make fools of ourselves." And yet, for Brüno, he has grown weary. "Its main target area, as before, is the United States, or, as Baron Cohen sees it, a vast barrel writhing with shootable fish. Forget satire; this guy doesn’t want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick."

While New York magazine did a whole zeitgeisty feature on Borat and the new "squirm comedy" called So Funny It Hurts, their Brüno piece is called Mincing Minstrelsy and poses the question, Are we laughing with Brüno or at him? (They're asking now?)

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon was somewhat tentative about Borat, but she had high praise for SBC, conceding that it was "an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is." However, she ditches the gloves for Brüno: "Cohen's methods and aims are more scattershot, and his shtick is more stock: Setting out to "prove" how dumb Midwesterners are doesn't qualify as great satire. It's really just superiority."

You don't say.

There's one more thing I need to say about Sacha Baron Cohen. His shtick isn't even original. Way back in the 70s, the Australian comedian Garry McDonald created a character called Norman Gunston, a nervous, sweaty, bumbling Hollywood correspondent with permanent shaving nicks on his face who routinely ambushed celebrities with painfully inane questions. For better or worse, he was a national hero. I think SBC owes royalties to this guy.

NYT: No Swagger Like 'Borat,' but 'Bruno" Opens on Top