Artistically Challenged

If TV producers and movie makers could somehow send me promos of shows/movies beforehand, I could save them a ton of cash. ABC is now promoting a new show called Romantically Challenged which looks to be an overproduced, banal-humor-laden, safe, generic pile of crap. It will no doubt recycle lockstep stereotypes, trite, canned one-liners, and ridden into the ground like a Tiger mistress storylines. (But, she's not married, she's divorced!) It's all the same. If ABC had just talked to me, I could have told them, "Stop...stop...stop talking...no it's awful."

There is nothing especially bad about RomChan, (I've never seen an episode, I just know it will be bad. Prejudging? yes Correct? yes) it's just the same lowest common denominator horrible safe humor that network television seems to be all about. It's the same in movies. C gets pissed when I watch the lastest rom-com mad-lib preview and just cannot help myself by finishing the plot. (They fall in love despite the circumstances...every time...without fail.) She almost kicked me out of the theater during He's Just Not That Into You which had promise in the beginning and then turned on everything it believed in half way through. (Don't get married Ben Affleck, you won, she agreed, aaahhhh) I couldn't help but start a social commentary with a quarter of the movie still to go. Everyone of those art bastardizations deadens my nerves a little bit more. (She's uptight, he doesn't play by the rules!) Sometimes a writer will really gamble like author/rebel John Hamburg who pitched Along Came Polly as he's uptight and she doesn't play by the rules. Ugh. It's the same everytime people! Stand up for quality! George Clooney gets his heart ripped out in Up In The Air; oscar-nomination.

Why does it continue to happen? Well, of course money. These are pre-packaged, streamlined, efficient cash cows. Insert name actor and actress here. A self-serving entertainment exec will of course substitute original thought for free cash flow. They don't have any incentive not to. It's the same with actors. Just look at Jennifer Ainiston. She keeps making this same slop every year. At least have the decency to use the film as an elaborate ploy to bang your co-star like Gerard Butler did to you. The producers of these shows are guilty of having sedentary brains as well. Charlie Sheen can not wear a bowling shirt and cargo shorts every day of his life! That's lazy character molding. Do they think if he wears jeans people won't perceive the male fantasy ethos they have bestowed on him? No, don't make them think, aaahhhh.

I'm not an literary elitest snob Slate editor, I own the A-Team on DVD. I just want the entertainment industry to stop rehashing the same tired shit they've been recycling over and over. It's insulting. It's mentally insulting to me. Get some new cookie-cutters Hollywood. But, what do I know The Big Bang Theory is still on television?

At least Lost is on tonight.

-K

Gossip Girl

C sent me this link about the Parents Television Council. It of course pissed me off, so I wrote up a response for the CW:

Dear Family Parent Television Council or whatever,

You and your kind are the same people who got television stations to adopt a TV rating system and television manufacturers to adopt the V-chip. The FCC has turned into a completely unchecked authority on broadcast content even though every channel has a standards board. We are choosing to show an admittedly racy episode involving teenage sexuality because that is what our viewers want. You have every right to shield your children from our TV show and to even start a boycott to encourage others to do the like. But, at what point do you stop infringing upon people’s personal freedoms? When to do you stop imposing your morals on the whole of society and allow for individuals and parents to be personally accountable? We live in a free society, so you are free to howl about the immorality of overt displays of young people's sexuality, but we are also free to show it, so f--- you.

XOXO

Seems pretty reasonable right? I mean the show already has Chuck Bass as a character, so it's obviously not based in reality. Lighten up PTC. But, I guess that isn't what they do.

Also, C and her friends like to side with these "save the children" people when it comes to mandating through law that fast food places put up caloric information, but when these same types try to take their Gossip Girl away, look out. Freedom for me, but not for McDee I guess. That's why you just have to let people decide for themselves.

-K

I'm fired up today, don't expect it to last.

National Treasure 2

Warning: Contains sentence fragments and you might not get it unless you watch National Treasure: Book of Secrets.



What can draw me out of a 2 and a half week hiatus?, Nic Cage of course. I watched National Treasure: Book of Secrets or National Treasure 2 as Starz On Demand named it. Why did I do this? As Sir Edmund Hillary put it when asked why he climbed Mount Everest, "because it's there." I want to try and give a chronological synopsis of the sheer ridiculousness that is NTBS, but there is just so much flying at you it might get garbled.

First off, I'm not a hater, I am fully willing to sit back and be entertained by an action movie and just buy in. I OWN Steven Segal movies. I will go along with some crazy conspiracy theory plot line. I've read all of Dan Brown's and Michael Crichton's stuff. I will buy in, I promise you. BUT, complete random lunacy is where I stop. NTBS does not fail in this regard.

Spoiler Alert: They find the treasure and everyone falls in love along the way. It's actually not a spoiler alert, I got that much from the Disney production label. Of course, the first time we see Nic Cage, playing Professor Ben Gates, he says he was thrown out of his house by his girlfriend. Let's see if those two crazy kids go on a little adventure and fall (back) in love along the way.

It starts with Ben Gates' sidekick saying, "Do you know how much $5 million costs in taxes, $6 million." Yeah, and that was before the Healthcare bill (oooohhhh). Ben got kicked out by the same chick from the first movie and her German accent is noticeably lessened, but still there. Now, why the F you would get an actress with a German accent to play the head curator of the National Museum of American History, I have no idea. Shouldn't that be, you know, an American. Now, she works at the Library of Congress as the head of Document Preservation. Where else would a German be at home other than being surrounded by great American works of literature?

Snide Remarks does a good job of skewering this plot, so I'll try not to overlap, but let me reiterate the plot line. Ben and Dad, played by Jon Voight, get sucked in to this adventure because some dude besmirched his great grandfather's name and now he has to clear it and the only way to do it is by finding a city of gold. See how linear that is. They figure out a coded message, go to Paris to see the other Statue of Liberty and find an inscription and then it's off to Buckingham Palace.

The sidekick hacks into Buckingham Palace using circuitry he snuck in an Ipod and a Blackberry. I have no real complaint here, at least it's better than the old school Batcave computers that gave you a printout after some knobs were turned and lights blinked arbitrarily. The only thing is the graphical interface that every movie and TV show has. This is enough for a whole separate post really, but doesn't anyone use Windows?

Nic Cage and the German girl proceed to break into probably two of the more secure places in the world, Buckingham Palace and the White House. All they have to do is ride in a dumb waiter and ask the guy who's trying to bang German girl to get them into the Oval Office like it's getting backstage at a U2 concert.

Nic Cage then ups the anty to get some one on one face time with the President. He turns into a super historian/Navy SEAL as he infiltrates the President's birthday party. Ben dons some scuba gear and then slips past the Secret Service with a "hey, howya doing" and walks right up to the Prez and engages him in conversation. He shows the Prez a sketch of Mt. Vernon with a secret passage drawn by George Washington and entices him to go check it out. How? Because the Prez was a "Historical Architecture" major at Yale (duh). He gets the Prez to tell him about the Book of Secrets and then heads to the Library of Congress to get it. Ben arrives all the while evading bumbling Secret Service and federal agents and driving over the slowest rising car barriers I have ever seen. Hasn't the writer seen the History Channel were the show a semi trying to slam into an embassy or something; those things shoot up.

It is at this point or some point prior, or after, that Professor Gates tells the story of some ship that shipwrecked in Florida and how there were only 4 survivors. One of them was a slave who saved the local chief's life and, as a reward, they took him to see their city of gold. He came back years later and couldn't find it. Remember this part because there is a good reason he couldn't find it.

The gang figures out that they have to go to Mount Rushmore and come to the realization that the monument was a cover up. They wanted to destroy the clues that led to the city of gold. As lifeandtimesofthestrange author Bobby Roberts put it, "Why would they cover it up?" To keep it for themselves? Then, why didn't they take the gold? To keep it hidden? Then why build a F'N monument on top of it? There is no reason. The gang stops at an arbitrary spot on Mount Rushmore and starts looking for this eagle symbol they need to find, which they of course do. In one minute. On top of a mountain. Randomly. The writers didn't even throw in the "it should be right here" line that would've helped and NOT been lazy filmmaking.

They find the secret passage which leads to the climax of the story, finding the city of gold and then escaping. This also coincides, probably not ironically, with the climax of plot holes in the story. The Drain. What makes this point so excruciating is that they explain it in the movie. The gang needs to find a way out, but there is water cascading all around the city of gold. Then, Ben explains that there has to be a drain because the room would have filled up. There has to be a drain! They get the water to stop momentarily and Dad drops a dollar in the water proclaiming, "there's a current...it's right under us." The gang heads down to the the drain area where they discover that there is a door they need someone to open so they can all get through it, but close it behind them because the shaft floods with water when it's left open. THEN HOW THE F IS THAT THE DRAIN?!? It's obviously not the place where the water is draining to. Find the real drain and take that. When the door is closed no water gets in, it cannot be the drain. So, who do they choose to leave behind Ed Harris.

(Oh, right. Okay so Ed Harris plays the villain Wilkeson who wants to find the city of gold to make a name for the Wilkesons or something like that. Why?, we have no idea. I have a theory that Wilkeson is somehow related to John Wilkes Booth, but they don't explain that either. Anyway, he chases Ben Gates and company all over the globe with guns and switches from holding a knife to German girl's throat to giving himself up to hold the door open and save the gang. This happens in a span of 1 minute.)

The gang escapes and the Gates name is cleared.

Wait, what?

How does finding the city of gold clear his name and not him trying to burn coded pages to keep the South from finding the gold? Oh, and I know why the slave couldn't find the city again. BECAUSE IT WAS IN SOUTH DAKOTA. The slave was shipwrecked in Florida and the local Indians had a lost city of gold in South Dakota?!? That doesn't make any F'N sense. A 16th century regional tribe of Seminoles had a lost city of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Jacksonville, FL to Mount Rushmore, SD is 1874 miles.

Ah well, at least I'll have some more material when they make National Treasure 3 about whatever was on page 47 in that damn book.

-K