Screenhead

You know, I always knew Miley Cyrus was a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but this latest move marks her as either abysmally stupid or the single ballsiest player in Hollywood.

Seriously.  Stones like CANNONBALLS.  And I’m thoroughly aware she’s a chick–it’s a metaphor.

Anyway, check out what she had to say about it:

“I’ve never seen [Twilight], and nor will I ever. I don’t believe in it—I don’t believe in it. I don’t like vampires, I don’t like any of the stuff, like the wolf that pops out of the screen when I’m watching my TV at night. I feel like it’s seriously, like, people really like get into it maybe because it’s like people always fall in love with the characters I don’t like it, I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t like the shirts, any of it.”

Hmm…now, why would a tween pop icon deliberately, suicidally, denounce the hottest book / movie property for the tween market?  There are several possibilities.

1. Miley is genuinely outraged as a good Christian and is denouncing those Satanic vampire movies. Yeah, I didn’t really buy that one either–because where was she before now?  But it’s a possibility, and anyone giving her the benefit of the doubt has to include that.

2. Miley is genuinely outraged that Twilight is cutting into her profits.  Much more possible.

3. Miley is feigning outrage to stir the pot and get attention because her standard practice of alerting the media to where she’ll be jogging in a bikini top and getting upset when they show up isn’t working any more. Again, even more likely.

4. Miley is too stupid to live.  She doesn’t even realize that she and Twilight share so many fans it’s ludicrous, and to try and get between them and their other love is just, as said above, abysmally stupid.

Which of these is it?  I can’t say.  But it’s pretty likely to be one of them!

Popularity: unranked [?]

I was really looking forward to this one, I’ll tell you that much going in.  I saw Borat back in 2006, and I really liked it.  I loved the way Sacha Baron Cohen playfully jabbed at our weaknesses and failings, as a way for us to maybe take a little better look at how we treat other people.  Was it frequently wrong, how we treated others?  Yes, of course it was.  Look at those poor dumb fratboys who got in the trailer with him.  They’ll NEVER live that down.  See?  We’re even still talking about it three years later!  Right here!

But Bruno…this is somewhat different.

Bruno, opening today,  is the story of Bruno, a nineteen year old fashionista played ably by Sacha Baron Cohen and the former host of Funky Tag, a show dedicated to fashion and similarly pointless topics such as a “What’s in / what’s out” segment. One such segment declared chlamydia out and autism in because “autism is funnier”.

That is a QUOTE, please save your flames.

Indeed, Bruno was on top of the world, with Germany-wide fame, at least minor celebrity and power, and even a flight attendant boyfriend, plus several bicycle-powered sex toys.  No, seriously.  But following a disaster of epic proportions involving a suit made entirely of velcro at the Prada show, Bruno was out.  And thus, taking with him only his assistant’s assistant Lutz, Bruno went to Los Angeles in search of global celebrity.  But what he would find would be much more and much different than he would ever expect.

Like I said above, Bruno was a much different animal from Borat.  Sure, both started out about the same, making me laugh with the power of sheer over-the-top antics.  Borat had The Running Of The Jews, Bruno had a three minute sequence involving things he did with his flight attendant boyfriend.  Sheer ludicrousity fuels the comedy in both Borat AND Bruno.

But Bruno…Bruno overdid the ludicrousity.  I know, how can it be possible?  The very definition of ludicrous requires it to be laughably unrealistic!  How can you overdo the unrealistic when it’s REQUIRED for ludicrous!  Oh, they did.  Believe me, they did.

Most of the movie is, as I’ve mentioned, that gentle poking of fun with the standard overblown Sacha Baron Cohen style,  with one-note jokes over and over again:  gay guy learns self-defense, gay guy baits ministers, gay guy tries to join the Army, gay guy baits more ministers, gay guy goes down South and tries to bait EVERYBODY and so on and so forth.  But not a whole lot of people are rising to that bait.

Until the night of the cage match, and this is where it really gets low.

See, Cohen, in a new persona as “Straight Dave”, sets up a cage match.  Lots of people there, plenty of them clearly crocked, several actually holding beers.  And “Straight Dave” ramps up the rhetoric, describing how great it is to be around straight people, how he’s glad no “fags” are around (again, QUOTE, no flames, thank you) and it goes on like this until Lutz shows up.

You can probably figure out what happened from there, but I’ll say this much, the phrase “descent into barbarism” is at least somewhat appropriate.  Bruno stacks the deck by trying literally everything it can think of to bait a response.  Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t.  Thus, we’re left with a series of gay jokes that fall terribly flat and a skewed reflection of the very worst of America.  It’s the Borat that didn’t work.

I had wondered how Cohen could ever manage to pull off another Borat–wouldn’t everyone see him coming?  And the answer, for the most part, is yes.  No matter what outlandishness he tries–and man, does he ever try–he just can’t replicate what he did the first time.

Bruno is a profound waste of time and money.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yesterday we lost a very talented and human artist because of prescription drugs. Michael Jackson was taking a cocktail of up to SEVEN prescription drugs in the months before his death, Life & Style has confirmed.

The star had been taking prescription painkillers including anti-anxiety drugs Xanax, Zoloft and painkiller Demerol in recent months, sources close to Jackson say. The insider close to the star said he took a suspected overdose of drugs on Thursday morning, which caused respiratory and cardiac arrest.

Jackson family lawyer Brian Oxman confirmed Jackson may have had trouble with prescription drugs as he prepared for his London show. “This was something which I feared and something which I warned about,” Oxman said on CNN. “I can tell you for sure that this is something I warned about. Where there is smoke there is fire.”

Mr Oxman compared Michael to Anna Nicole Smith, alleging that Michael had ‘enablers’ just like her.

I also recommend you visit a very truthful explanation from Lisa Marie Presley’s MySpace post on Michael.

Popularity: unranked [?]

What is it with Nic Cage and precognition?

Seriously, the last movie I caught him in was that movie Next, where he could predict the future up to a couple minutes in advance, now he’s got the capacity to predict farther out.  More on that in a minute, I just wanted to get that point in there that Nic Cage and suspense movies about precognition seem to go together like beans and rice, or failing that, chocolate and peanut butter.

Anyway, this time Nic’s back in the precog department with Knowing, only this time, he’s got a roadmap of the future written by a clearly insane ten year old girl.  At least I think she’s ten—it’s not like I got a copy of her birth certificate.  Said road map is put into a time capsule as part of a school building’s grand opening and sunk into the ground for the next fifty years.  Fifty years later, Nic’s kid gets a hold of the road map, which is basically just a series of numbers.  How handy that Nic’s playing an astrophysics professor at MIT!

When Nic finally puts his huge analytical MIT brain to work, he discovers that the series of numbers on the page essentially tell the future, in unsettling detail.  As he works to uncover the secrets behind the numbers, he’ll learn a whole lot of OTHER unsettling details until the final unsettling ending.  This ending, sadly, I absolutely cannot tell you about because it will be a MONSTER spoiler.

Basically, the first two hours or so of Knowing are a series of really, really awesome moments, one right after the next, and you’ll spend a good chunk of the movie with your jaw dropped.  Let me put it this way—there’s this one truly spectacular scene with an airliner that just GOT me.  I was downright amazed—the last time I’d seen anything this eye-popping with an airplane was one of the last scenes in Pulse.

Even the plot holes are so cool that you’ll slide right over them—for instance, watch for Nic’s cell phone to spend a lot of time unable to get a signal, until his son calls him from a landline phone, and then suddenly, not a pop or a hiss.  I didn’t even catch that one until about five minutes AFTER the movie ended.  It was just that cool.

However, the ending, which contains massive twists, isn’t exactly the greatest thing since sliced bread.  While I understand, from a narrative perspective, that they really didn’t have a fat lot of choice BUT to do what they did, it still left a whole lot of unanswered questions that didn’t sit well with me.  And it was sad to have to go out on that note—for crying out loud, this was an AWESOME movie.  For the first two hours my mind was BLOWN.  But then, they hit the ending, and suddenly it all just falls apart by a sequence that seems almost tacked on.

In the immortal words of Mr. Horse, no sir, I didn’t like it.

But still, considering the sheer ratio of good to suck in this movie, and further considering that the suck was of the most minor sort to begin with, it’s still hard to do anything but recommend this movie.  You really ought to get a thrill out of Knowing, especially if you’re a science wonk.

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is a little raunchy. What do you think?

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Morgan Freeman is in the hospital due to a car accident in Mississippi.  The hospital reports that his condition is serious although emergency technicians said the 71 year old Oscar winning actor was lucid during the rescue. The rescue included jaws to extract him from the vehicle.

My prayers and wishes are for you to recover quickly and completely Morgan. God bless.

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