Go Do That Doo Doo That You Do So Well

The recent news that Ann Coulter will be playing the U.S. Vice President in Sharknado 3: Jumping the Sharknado got me thinking about that other tigress of the right wing, Pam Geller, and how she really paved the way for Ann with her own forays into visual media.

Spasm of passion, or passing a kidney stone?

For many, Pam is the Atlas Shrugs blogger who likes to videotape herself delivering anti-Islam maledictions in a bikini, presumably to taunt orthodox Muslims with what they're missing. To others, she's probably best known as one of the stop motion Harpies who torment Phineas in Jason and the Argonauts. But Pam is vast, she contains multitudes of shit (horseshit, dogshit, bullshit, etc.) and this month she's the cover girl for Scat Fancy magazine.

The Poo Generation 

Every generation has unintentional icons – whether it’s Rosie the Riveter, the American flag, Elvis Presley, the motorcycle jacket – ideas that best express the zeitgeist of a time, a generation.

"It's weird, Bob. You know that Rosie the Riveter gal?"

"Oh, you mean the one we painted in heroic, three-point perspective, bannered with an inspirational phrase, then printed up millions of posters and plastered her image all over the country?"

"Yeah. Somehow -- don't ask me how -- she's become an icon."

"Well, I'm sure it was unintentional."

The emoticon found on phones today, of a happily smiling pile of excrement, is just that. 

 It best exemplifies the low state of the world, of the culture, and of America itself in the age of the primitive. It signifies America’s rapid decay in the wake of the left’s decades-long war on Americanism, freedom, and individual rights. The absence of morality – and by morality I mean a code of values – has led to an absence of the good. And an abundance of poo.

Granted, this probably wouldn't have made the women of the Greatest Generation want to tie on a do-rag and attack the nearest B-24 with a pneumatic rivet gun, but I bet the Germans would have been so charmed by our wide-spread scheiße imagery that they would have promptly called off the war and subscribed to our newsletter.

Ayn Rand wrote that a nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Poo.

Well, sure, if there's one word that sums up Ayn Rand's writing...

Post-9/11 America, and especially America in the Obama presidency, is a different world from America as she was before Obama, and before the left started its long march to destroy this nation.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with an emoticon.

 America today is increasingly anti-freedom, anti-truth, anti-ideas, anti-capitalsim – anti-reason.

To be fair, anti-capitalsim is probably the best edition of the Sims yet (pro-tip: always build a photography studio early on, so you'll have someone to airbrush Trotsky out of your May Day photos).

 A nation built on a morality of reason has all but abandoned its foundational principles.

If there's one thing our Enlightenment Era Founders distrusted, it was Reason, which is why today we live in a country where you can text your own mother a turd.

  Public schools and academia produce zombies – goose-steppers like the Hitler Youth – who are militant and violent in their imposition of the leftist/Islamic agenda.

I can't help but feel that the best a zombie could produce would be a goose-shuffle; maybe a goose-shamble if they were going downhill.

And when they do it, they congratulate themselves about how they have stood up against “fascism” and “intolerance,” when the intolerant fascists are they themselves.

It's The Walking Dead meets Dead Poets Society (which actually kinda sounds like a zombie film, now that I think about it...)

 Intellectually, young Americans are the most docile conformists, no matter how vocally and self-righteously they declare themselves free. They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders of the hard left without question or exploration. A continuing negation of life and self.

Pam's right. You kids should really embrace life more, maybe think about yourselves once in awhile. Regardless, she seems to be believe that today's youth are all slaves to Maoist Muslims in mortarboards because so few Millennials show up at her rallies, leaving her with the Pre-Cambrian demographic.

The culture is ugly. The music is ugly, violent, and misogynistic. Every crime drama and suspense series is rife with the most unimaginable gore. Game of Thrones, Law and Order (Sex Crimes), American Horror Story – they’re all devoid of humanity and morality. Devoid of goodness. It’s a cultural rout. It’s not that the line between good and evil has been blurred – it’s nonexistent. We are living in a cultural free-for-all, or more accurately, a free fall.

Remember, Pam got all this from an emoji.  And she's not done yet. We get a paragraph of harrumphery about Pharrell's performance at the Grammys, and how it sucked because he delivered a dirge-like tune rather than a high-steppin' cakewalk or something, then she holds us down and recites John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged until we say "Uncle."

By this point, it seems like the poop emoticon has been completely forgotten, but Pam is being subtle, even oblique in her approach to the topic, and the careful reader will note that her writing is actually a metaphor for shit.

A culture that would love such a thing is incapable of true humanity and love. Hollywood is incapable of writing or producing a Casablanca. There are no adults anymore – just petulant children who know nothing but to scream that they know everything and to heap contempt on anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their liberal fascism. Logic and facts are scorned and derided; myths (global warning, “Islamophobia”) and feelings are held up as fact and science.

Just to sum up: "liberal fascism" is a fact, "global warning [sic]" is a myth.

I was watching a movie not long ago, a dated fifties musical short on Turner Classic Movies. It was bursting with life. The kids in the room wanted me to put on something gory, negative, dark, and I said, no, no, watch this, this is great stuff – this is America. 

America: We're Dated, But At Least We're Short.

 And one of the teens replied, no it’s not, that’s from when America was happy. And that struck me. It hit me like a ton of bricks. The left has worked so hard to make us miserable, and has succeeded.

Yeah, Pam? I'm sure part of this anecdote is true -- I have no trouble at all in believing that you monopolized the TV and succeeded in boring a roomful of children -- but as long as we're on the topic of shit, I'm going to call the Bull variety, and say you put those words into that kid's mouth. And he immediately spat them out and pursed his lips and refused to let you feed him anymore, even when you did that "Here comes the choo-choo!" thing with the spoon.

If you had to boil the culture down to its essential oils, it would be last Sunday’s Oscars – oh, how that once mighty American art genre has fallen.

I tried boiling Pam's column down to its essential oils, and found it's primarily composed of two: sebaceous and crude.

American traitor Edward Snowden got an Oscar; American hero Chris Kyle got the middle finger.

I didn't realize that when a bio-pic wins an Oscar, it's the subject of the biography who actually collects it -- even when he's dead. I guess that explains the hubbub at the 1936 Academy Awards, when Paul Muni won for The Story of Louis Pasteur and his acceptance speech was interrupted by a moldy skeleton in pince-nez and and a morning coat that charged on stage and tried to wrestle away his statuette.

Anyway, Pam bitches about Hollywood for another three paragraphs before finally remembering what it was that originally pissed her off way back at the beginning of the column.

The Oscar show was typical Hollywood, epitomized by Neil Patirck Harris going on stage in his underwear. What’s next? Poo on the floor? 

No, I think under the circumstances the worst we might get is a skidmark.

On the bright side, Pam declared Lady Gaga's medley from The Sound of Music a highlight, but couldn't enjoy it because "leftists seek to impose that evil upon us all."

Ayn Rand said, “There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.” Both of which have all but been extinguished in the era of amoralism – reflected in cultural rot and the exaltation of the crank. 

If The Exaltation of the Crank isn't the title of Pam's autobiography, it really should be. Who's with me?

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The New Addition Edition

It's been awhile since we've had any beast blogging around here, and I've frankly been jonesin' for it. Fortunately, our friend Emily -- who, like Sheri, is a veteran of the animal rescue trenches -- emailed me this afternoon to introduce the latest addition to her menagerie. 

I'll let Emily explain the circuitous, Incredible Journey-like route by which this gorgeous hunk of luminous-eyed midnight found its way onto her couch:

Meet Langley

She is 1 ½ and originally from Missouri (you can’t blame her for wanting out). She was bussed to Kansas with the other victims of the hoarding situation from which she was rescued, but the Kansas shelter was overloaded so Cat Adoption Team took some. Apparently, the Portland-area Feral Cat spay and neuter program (mostly through Feral Cat Coalition) has been so successful, we can start importing from other states. 

She was driven out to Oregon about a month ago. She is so sweet, so mellow and so tiny! She is literally half the size of one of my boys (I mean literally: they are 14 lbs each – she is a petite 7 lbs). Here is a picture of Burnaby and Richmond looking warily at her while activating, even though I know you totally remember them:

[Scott: I totally do.]

The boys don’t trust her yet, but at least they’re not hiding under the bed anymore. Langley loves sitting on laps and has the quietest purr I’ve ever barely heard. She’s already quite comfortable wherever she is – just a quiet, confident, cool cat.

(That’s not a white spot [or a White Spot – Canada joke!] – they shaved her to make sure she was spayed.) 

In case you’re wondering about her name, we have kept the theme going we started with Richmond and Burnaby; Langley is also a suburb of the Vancouver, BC area:

There are good cat names for days there, like Elgin, Townsend, Marpole and (if they’re conservative) Pratt. 

They may be suburbs of Vancouver, but they’re capitals of my heart! 

Sorry. 

I hope you’re feeling better and that Moondoggie and Mary are OK as well. 2014 was sucky for both our households, so I’m hoping Langley will bring the good luck that should be traditionally associated with black cats. Because they’re awesome. 

That is all. 

Emily

Sniff! Is That the Movie, or the Catbox? Oh, It's Both...?

Catwoman (2004)
Directed by Pitof (which is, appropriately, the sound one makes when hawking up a loogie)
Written by Bob Kane (characters), Theresa Rebeck and John D. Brancanto & Michael Ferris (story), John D. Brancanto & Michael Ferris and John Rogers (screenplay)

Halle Berry is a chatty corpse floating face down in the water and telling us all about how she's dead, which would be great if this was Sunset Boulevard and she was William Holden, but it's not and she isn't. Instead, we get an earful about her job designing ads for beauty cream, which sounds boring until we see that her boss is that snotty French guy from the Matrix sequels, so it's probably EVIL beauty cream. This is confirmed when we learn that his wife, Sharon Stone, has reluctantly decided to step aside as the face of the cosmetics company because she's too old, which is the exact same plot as Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman. So based on past performance, the skin cream will turn her into a bug, and Halle's Catwoman will spend the rest of the film toying with Sharon on kitchen floor before eating her.

The Merovingian calls Halle into his office and complains that her artwork is crappy. Then her neighbors throw a party that keep her up until four in the morning, so she really has no choice but to become a super-villain, since basically the same thing happened to Hitler. (The poor reviews for his paintings, I mean, but I bet he only invaded Poland because they had their polka music turned up too loud.) The final indignity comes when a stray cat lures Halle outside in a transparent attempt to kill her, and Halle cooperates by crawling through her fourth floor window and getting stuck on her air conditioner.

So rest easy, Gotham. The Catwoman has treed herself.

Passing cop Benjamin Bratt mistakenly assumes she's suicidal rather than stupid, and pulls her off the a/c just as it gives way. But he lets her head off to work, presumably because he's also stupid and there's such a thing as professional courtesy, you know. But Benjamin quickly deduces that if he wants any more screen time he's going to have to attach himself to Halle so closely she’ll need a nit comb to dislodge him. So he shows up in her cubicle at Evil Creams, Inc., flips through her portfolio while muttering insincere compliments, then asks her out on a date in a vaguely creepy way, raising the question in the viewer's mind: why did I buy a ticket to this movie when I can see the same thing for free in the break room on Monday?

Halle's strategically less attractive friend tells her to shave her legs and "wear that leather outfit I got you for your birthday.” Halle says, “I’ll never wear that leather outfit,” but her friend has already quit for the day because she's freelance, not salaried, and only gets paid on a per-foreshadowing basis.

Halle goes to Evil Cream's secret R&D facility at midnight in the mistaken belief someone wants her crappy artwork, and blunders into a PowerPoint presentation on how their beauty ointment is noxious, addictive, and turns long-term customers into Rondo Hatton. Sharon doesn't care about side effects and plans to sell the product anyway, because like all women who own cosmetics brands, she's a genocidal maniac (I haven't had a chance to look it up, but I'm pretty sure Mary Kay was tried at the Hague for war crimes).  Unsurprisingly, Sharon's skin cream company employs an army of heavily armed mercenaries (I myself was once chased through an abandoned warehouse by bloodthirsty goons in the pay of Maybelline), and they go all The Most Dangerous Game on Halle's ass. She escapes into a sewer pipe, but one of the mercs had a big breakfast and flushes twice, and Halle goes shooting out the end of the pipe, which apparently flows into the Grand Canyon, because she falls about a thousand feet into a river, which is where we came in at the beginning with the talkative floater.

A CGI cat yowls. Now, I know I ought to be paying attention to the plot, that's what you people are paying me for, but I can't help wondering why they went to all the trouble to computer generate this animal. I mean, it's not Rise of the Planet of the Apes. If you want to see a kitty go "meow," you don't have to put Andy Serkis in a mo-cap suit and fire up the Avatar technology, you can just go to YouTube. There's almost nothing but cat videos there, and most of them are doing much more interesting things than they are in this movie: riding around the kitchen on Roombas, wrestling Vietnamese Pot-Bellied Pigs, and photobombing erotic Snapchats.

Despite drowning in a river, Halle's body washes up on the top of a mountain somewhere, so apparently her corpse not only performs a tender and confessional one woman show, but likes to unwind by rock-climbing.

Morris the CGI Cat stands on her chest and exhales tuna breath into Halle's face, and it's apparently so pungent she's literally awoken from the dead. And endowed with feline super powers, such as the ability to grasp ineffectually at a crab, leap onto a second story fire escape, and clean her anus by scooting on the carpet.

Halle wakes up to a pretty crappy day. She's missed her date with Benjamin Bratt, she's late for work, and she's a half-cat zombie. But she's also a good citizen, so she takes the cat that tried to kill her and then resurrected her back to her owner, a crazy cat lady who gasses on about the goddess Bast, and then tosses Halle a catnip ball just to watch her go Full Metal Felix.

At work the next day, Halle begins to display disturbing, but typical feline behaviors, such as hissing at dogs, doodling cartoons, and appraising jewelry. She gets herself fired by the Frenchman, then goes to a Rec Center where Benjamin is helping at-risk youth stay out of gangs by giving them a really boring speech. The kids, desperate for entertainment, suggest the two adults play one-on-one and toss the basketball to Halle. You expect that she'll bat it around until it rolls under the couch and then immediately forgets it exists, but it turns out she's not only a zombie were-cat, but also a were-Harlem Globetrotter, as the previously gawky, klutzy nerd suddenly busts out so many spectacular ball-handling tricks you expect the soundtrack to start whistling "Sweet Georgia Brown." Then she turns into a were-Miley Cyrus and twerks on Benjamin until he falls to the ground, where she mounts him in front of the children. After subjecting a playground full of underprivileged children to involuntary sex education, she goes into a biker hangout and terrorizes the Hell's Angels by squatting on the bar and cracking the club soda hose like a whip.

Back home, Halle grabs some grooming shears and cuts her own hair off at lightning speed, because if there's one thing cats are known for, it's their super-fast scissors work.

She goes to a high end jewelry store to window shop, and notices there just happens to be two thieves with shotguns wandering around inside, shattering display cases at random because this is a world where skin cream is as additive as heroin and cats can resurrect dead bodies, but nobody ever thought to invent the burglar alarm. So Halle goes inside, dons a cat-eye mask that just happens to be there, and introduces herself to the two thieves, who instantly empty their shotguns at her in a vain attempt to end the movie right now. They miss, because she's been endowed with the cat-like ability crawl up walls and across ceilings like a spider. Also, like most common house pets, she knows Matrix-style kung fu.

Halle goes back to the Crazy Cat Lady, who admits that her cat is constantly getting people killed, and then resurrecting them -- it's a little game it likes to play -- and Halle is just the latest in a long line of undead human-feline hybrids it's created over the years. Clearly somebody needs to get this cat a laser pointer, or one of those feather-on-a-fishing pole things.

Halle decides to track down the people who murdered her (rather than the cat who orchestrated it), since the movie's still got an hour to go. She doesn't remember how she died or who killed her, so the first thing she does is go immediately and unerringly to the guy who shot her in the head. The movie is vague about how she accomplishes this, but I presume it's some new app designed to help zombies connect with the people who snuffed them ("Hey Siri, where's the guy who blew my brains out?") Siri responds that he appears to be chilling in the discotheque from Saturday Night Fever, so Halle travels by turning into a computer generated video game character who leaps over rooftops and squats on water tanks. Then she interrogates her killer by grabbing his tongue and saying, "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?", which really makes me want to kill her, but I don't bother because I know Kitty Christ would just give her the Lazarus treatment again.

But Halle's not the only one with kind of stupid super powers, as we see when Sharon and Merovingian get in a tiff; he slaps her face and breaks his hand, because the toxic cold cream has not only shrunk her pores, it's turned her skin bulletproof. This is actually great news, because now all they need is a mascara that gives you heat vision, a lip gloss that grants freeze breath, and a blusher that lets you fly, and anybody can be Superman, if Superman looked like a slut.

Benjamin and Halle go out to dinner, and then back to her place. Things heat up, but he begins to suspect she might secretly be Catwoman when Halle scratches his back during sex and then complains about the lack of barbs on his penis.

After he leaves, Sharon calls and asks Halle to come over because she's killed her husband and would  really like to frame her for his murder.

"Awww, what's the matter? Suddenly wondering if you've made a bad career choice? Yeah, boo-hoo. Talk to me after you've simulated intercourse with a Baldwin."

Benjamin arrests Halle for homicide, grand larceny (the jewel heist) and trash-talking his penis.  But the cat who killed her and unkilled her shows up again and teaches Halle the mystical secret to breaking out of jail: be skinny enough to squeeze through the bars.  (This is why nobody even bothers arresting Ann Coulter for murder anymore.)

Benjamin confronts Sharon at her office, but he's not the star so she just shoots him; then she and Halle have the the mother (and grandmother) of all cat fights.  It goes on for awhile, because Sharon's mutagenic cold cream has given her "skin like living marble," so she can really take a beating, and cleans up in a jif. Eventually, however, Halle's diamond-encrusted claws scratch up Sharon's surface (just another reminder that if you have cats, you can forget about having nice things -- like a face), before shoving her out a high rise window.

Benjamin walks off his bullet wound and shows up just in time to hear Halle deliver the coda:  "I may not be a hero...But I'm certainly not killer." 

Hm. That seems...debatable. Let's just say, for now, that you're Killer Adjacent.

I Can Show You The World...

Tell me, princess, now when did
you last let your heart decide?(h/t BuzzFeed)

Personal Care Products You Never Knew You Needed!

You know who I trust to clue me in on the latest advances in beauty culture? Women's magazines? Hardly. No, I get my grooming tips from Adult Sex Stores, and because I like you, I'm going to share this season's hottest trend in feminine toiletries (I'm pretty sure it's based on the Wen Hair Care line of products):

I wonder if it's sold in a "Volumizing" formula?  Or perhaps an herbal scented version, "Gee, Your Muff Smells Terrific!"  (I take it for granted it comes in a cream rinse.)  Anyway, say goodbye to those hours spent detangling it, ironing it flat, or even using a no-lye relaxer to "conk" your muff.

You're welcome.

My Baloney Has a Second Name, It's O.S.C.A.R.

Hey guys, look who it is!  It's Brother From Another and Another 'Nother Mother, Professor Robert Oscar Lopez. You may remember ROL from his sad, Dickensian life as a boy who caught Teh Ghey from living in a trailer with two unvaccinated lesbians, or perhaps you recall his LOL-worthy theory that Homosexuals are modern slave masters who oppress Blacks by using them as breeding stock to replenish their plantations, and by "plantations" I mean "mobile homes."

In any case...he's back!

Children of Same-Sex Couples: A Turning Point

I am a professor.

Really?  Can you make a radio out of coconuts and bamboo?  I didn't think so...

 Among the many farces of academia, hiring season is exceptional.

Okay, sure, somehow you were hired to teach at the college level, but don't you agree that's really more tragedy than farce?

 Everyone in the department pretends that we are completely collegial and endearing, while job candidates arrive and audition for us. We go out to lunch with the aspirants and small talk ensues.

And that's when the Olive Garden turns into the Garden of Gethsemane! Except instead of Judas kissing Jesus, your department head hogs the breadsticks!

This time around, many of my colleagues courted the candidates by musing about their childhoods over dinner. Colleague X talked about how he was the first one to attend college because his father only finished up to tenth grade. Colleague Y recounted arguments about classic books with her parents who were both English teachers. Colleague Z reminisced about the days when her father, a preacher, prepared for his weekly sermons. 

And then there’s me sitting there. I’d love to say: “I was raised by a lesbian who took me to a motor home on the weekends so she and her lover could hike and build wooden decks together. 

So it was like growing up with slightly more butch versions of Bob Vila and Norm Abrams?

When I worked in my mother’s clinic doing typing and filing, I transcribed the files of her mentally ill patients, some of whom were gay or transgender, so I knew everything about sex a kid could possibly imagine by the time I was fourteen.

Yeah, I don't want to get into a pissing match about who had the more picaresque upbringing, Prof, since compared to a lot of people I got off light; but given that my mother was mentally ill and began threatening to murder me in my sleep when I was five years old (Insomnia 4 Life, yo), I'd totally be willing to trade my night terrors for your light typing and filing.

By the time I was sixteen, I was getting in lots of trouble.

Well I would hope so, given all that free sex ed you were getting. Hell, if I'd had your advantages as a teenager I'd have been working my way through the Kama Sutra and the Collected Works of Henry Miller like somebody following one of those IKEA chifforobe-assembling diagrams.

By the way, because this was my life and I refuse to lie about the problems it caused me, I have been dubbed an anti-gay bigot by all the major gay advocacy organizations and the other people at this table have banned me from the department listserv and newsletter.

Yeah, cry me a river and pass the Five Cheese Dipping Sauce.

“But please, go ahead, tell me how you grew up.”

Nervously, with a chair wedged against my bedroom door at night. But I thank my lucky stars that at least I was never subjected to non-consensual clerical work!

For all the talk about fighting privilege, “speaking out” and “breaking silences” are actually not what the left wants children of gay couples to do.

They want them to do The Macarena. No one's quite sure why.

Everything about my life is dangerous to discuss

Cross the wrong people, and the forces of Big Lesbian might just push you off the top of a high dental dam.

because if I tell the truth about where I came from, I can be accused of homophobia (which has happened) and fired (which has come near to happening).

Not near enough, apparently.

I wish they -- the pro-gay liberals -- would make up their minds. 

You're right. Let's quite hemming and hawing and just order the Pasta e Fagioli, we gotta be back at work by one-thirty.

Either be radical and anti-establishmentarian, and accept uncomfortable voices into the conversation -- or else shut up and let me talk about Homer’s Iliad. Which I’ve read in Greek.

 I don't know which Greek you were in, but he was pretty patient to let you stay in there for the length of  an entire book. (Was it Spiros? He's pretty chill...)

Children of gays, or COGs, are ready for a turning point. 

Specifically, The Turning Point, the 1977 film about bickering middle aged ballet divas, although admittedly that's probably more popular with the COGs' parents.

The gay community raised us, sometimes with love, and often with a bit of inconsiderate self-interest.

So, like every parent, everywhere?

Too many of us were asked to keep secret how hard the whole experience was. Many times siblings turned against each other based on which brother or sister “broke ranks” and decided to speak the truth while others played along to keep Mom and Mom or Dad and Dad happy.

In other words, you're saying that sometimes the children of gay parents experience sibling rivalry, and compete for parental approval?  That is shocking, in that I never knew the Smothers Brothers were raised by lesbians.

 Actually, I guess should read, "Moms always liked you best!"

After decades of decrying the pain of “the closet,” the gay community remains largely unwilling to uncover the true feelings of the children raised in their midst.

I assume they simply wanted to spare us, since we've all heard children kick and scream and whine and fuss and write columns for American Thinker.

Don’t think we are only disappointed with liberals. We find ourselves wondering what happened to conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage. The anti-gay-marriage activists gave us much less attention than they gave to the cake-bakers, florists, and innkeepers who were Christian and who didn’t want to service gay weddings.

I don't know if you can catch syphilis from an attention whore, but I think I'll go put on a condom just to be safe...

Aside from canned platitudes extorted from kids still under gay adults’ custody, the terms of the same-sex parenting debate were always dehumanizing statistics. “Who had better outcomes?” “Who has a lower percentage of autism?” “Who has greater attachment security anxiety?”

"Who has the highest incidence of Adult Onset Self-Pity Parties?" "Who has the crappiest argument?" "Who's the biggest drama queen?"

Until now. The dissident COGs who refuse to follow either side’s party line are growing in number. We will not be left out of this marriage showdown about to go before the Supreme Court.

"We've already filed an amicus tantrum."

 This time around Anthony Kennedy will not be able to assume he knows what we are thinking, and the Human Rights Campaign will not be able to tell us what we are supposed to want. We won’t let people use us anymore. Keep your eyes out for our briefs against gay marriage. Even if we can’t change history, at least we want to be part of it. Our time has come. We deserve it.

And I think I speak for all of us when I say: here's hoping you get exactly what you deserve.

The Third Annual Skelly Awards!

By Bill S.

Awards season is winding down, with the Oscars airing this Sunday night. But before that happens, it's time once again for me to look at this year's nominees in the four acting categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress) to decide who, among them, has the most embarrassing role in their past, and award them the with the "Skelly"(as in "Skeleton In the Closet"). Last year's winner was Meryl Streep, who can take comfort in knowing she'll never make another movie worse than She-Devil. She can also take comfort in knowing she'll never be in the running for a "Skelly" again, because according to the eligibility rules I invented for the award I invented, once somebody makes the list, they never do again. This shouldn't be taken to mean that She-Devil is better than the movies we'll be looking at. It still sucks goat balls. I just don't like repeating myself. But before we find out who this year's winner is, let's look at the runner-ups. Or is it runners-up? Raise your hand if you give a shit about this.

I don't see any hands raised, so let's begin.

8th Place: ETHAN HAWKE.
Hawke made his movie debut at 15 alongside another notable teen newbie, River Phoenix, in Explorers. His best pre-stardom role was in Dead Poets Society (appearing alongside some more up-and-comers, like Robert Sean Leonard). In the 90's he became a Generation X icon, thanks to pictures like Reality Bites and Before Sunrise. But a few years earlier, before his goatee was even a single chin whisker, he had to slog through a dumb, gimmicky teen movie (I think these are a rite of passage for very young actors), called Mystery Date.

"Is it a dream? Oooh! Or a dud? Awww..."

(It's...well, I think you can guess.)

7th Place: JULIANNE MOORE
The favorite to win this years Best Actress Oscar, Moore's been so good, in so many movies, for so long, it's hard to believe she hasn't won already. Confession: as much as a Movie Trivia Geek as I am, I don't have everybody's resume memorized, and sometimes I have to look them up. And nothing has thrown me for a bigger loop, caused a bigger "What. The. Fuck?" reaction than finding out one of our finest actresses appeared in...Body of Evidence.

Wait, what? That Basic Instinct ripoff? This first of Madonna's many failed attempts to prove she was a Serious Actress? No way!

But, Yes way...

Somebody should have done that to the idiot who greenlit this mess.

[Note from Scott: For more on Body of Evidence, check out pg. 95 of Better Living Through Bad Movies]

6th Place: J.K. SIMMONS
The favorite to win Best Supporting Actor, and hey, isn't he always the best supporting actor? I mean, he made J. Jonah Jameson the most entertaining character in the Spider-Man movies, uttered the funniest line in Juno (which some of you are now quoting) and generally is one of those guys who, when his name pops up in the credits makes you perk up and say, "Hey, if he's in it, it's probably good." The problem with such character actors is the good will they've built up can sometimes draw you into a movie your best instinct would usually drive you away from...like, for example, Autumn In New York. Once again a supporting role, Simmons plays a doctor in this tale of a terminally ill young woman who finds romance with an older man in a picturesque city. It's kinda like the equally bad 1969 flick A Place For Lovers, except that picture featured a character who sells inflatable airbags, and Autumn In New York features characters who could be outwitted by them.

[BLTM, pg. 47]

5th Place: LAURA DERN
Dern made her film debut at the age of 6 in White Lightening. In the mid-80's she became a Queen of Cult Movies (or a princess, given that her parents are Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd), thanks to pictures like Smooth Talk, Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Rambling Rose and Citizen Ruth. But in between her days as a child actress and transition to leading lady, she landed a role in a horror film with two other then-unknowns, Charlie Sheen and George Clooney. It was a called Grizzly II: The Concert, and was a sequel to the 1976 horror film Grizzly, which was a ripoff of Jaws, with a bear instead of a shark.

And that sequel has never been seen by anybody, because after it was completed it was never released. "But Bill", you ask, "If you haven't seen it, how can you be sure it really is Dern's worst movie (or Sheen's, or Clooney's)?" To which I'd reply: It's a sequel to a ripoff, and even though it starred GEORGE FREAKIN' CLOONEY, the studio still didn't think it could cash in with a video release. I'm guessing that on the scale of Movies I'll Never get To See, it falls short of that missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons. It might be better than The Day the Clown Cried. But not by much.

4th Place: ROBERT DUVALL
Duvall made his film debut in To Kill A Mockingbird. Now that's a good start. He was also in all three Godfather movies, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, M*A*S*H*, Tender Mercies, The Great Santini, True Grit...I think I might just get a filmgasm listing his best movies. But as with any career that spans 6 decades, not all of them were winners. Two less-than-stellar movies were featured in Better Living Through Bad Movies: Days Of Thunder (pg. 98), which featured 22 year old Nicole Kidman as a neurosurgeon, presumably because Katie Holmes wasn't available, and Gone In 60 Seconds (page 95), which describes the exact duration of my interest in it. Neither of those films, however, is the one that puts him on this list. No, it goes all the way back to the '60's and The Detective. While Duvall doesn't have a lot of screen time in this movie, any participation in it is embarrassing, because this pretentious sleazepit deserves a spot alongside Freebie & the Bean, Cruising, and Partners in the Homophobia Hall of Shame. The trailer features one of its gay characters, a murder suspect named "Felix"...

...and he's not even the most offensive character. If The Detective had been made in the '80's, there might have been people picketing the theater, as there had been with Cruising. But since it was pre-Stonewall (when the prevailing attitude of the public was "Any guy who doesn't wanna bang Lee Remick deserves to be killed") nobody questioned its portrayal. It even got some praise from critics who found its tacking of shocking subject matter daring. I guess, if you find it daring to confirm people's worst assumptions. Or if you forget that it came out in the same year as Rachel, Rachel, which depicted a same-sex kiss that didn't lead to someone being horrifically murdered.

3rd Place: REESE WITHERSPOON AND PATRICIA ARQUETTE (tied)
Reese Witherspoon made her film debut at 15 in the touching coming-of-age film Man In the Moon, still, along with Election, one of her best roles.

Patricia Arquette can sometimes seem overlooked among the famous acting siblings -- she isn't transgender, she isn't a flake, and she doesn't have a Toto song named after her. She is, however, the first to get an Oscar nomination. So, there's that.

These two gifted women once worked on the same movie. Ordinarily that might be cause to smile (or, if it had been a remake of Personal Best, cause to whoop joyfully). The cast also included Harvey Keitel, Rodney Dangerfield, and Rhys Ifans. Unfortunately none of them has the lead role. That acting chore (well for him it's a chore) fell on Adam Sandler...

In Little Nicky, Sandler plays the dim-witted son of Satan (so many punch lines, so little time), who's sent to Earth in order to bring back his brothers before they turn New York City into a bigger hell hole than it already is (so many punch lines, so little time). It's hard to decide which actress has the more demeaning role: Arquette plays a girl whom Nicky develops a romantic interest in, and Witherspoon plays Nicky's mother, who turns out to be an Angel. This movie is so stupid, it actually buries the lead about Nicky being a half demon/half angel, introducing this late in the film as a contrived plot twist, and so lazy that once that twist is revealed, absolutely nothing clever is done with it. Full disclosure: I avoided seeing this movie for many years, since it looked like a suckfest, and only watched it for the purpose of this column. I hope you appreciate that sacrifice. It's an all-time low for everyone involved, with the glaring exception of Adam Sandler, and the possible exception of the maintenance crew who arrived after production wrapped, performing the valued public service of removing any evidence of the movie before anyone had the misfortune to step in it.

2nd Place: MICHAEL KEATON.
My favorite Batman (Adam West runs a close second). I've liked this guy since I was a kid, and saw him for the first time on the sitcom "All's Fair", playing Lanny Wolf (what a name), a comedian hired by Jimmy Carter to add humor to Presidential speeches. (I was disappointed to learn "Joke writer to the President" wasn't a real job.) It seems hard to believe that in his 40-year career, this is the first time he's ever been nominated for an Oscar. At the very least, he should have gotten a Best Supporting Actor nod for stealing ever scene in Night Shift. (Who'd have guessed a guy who excels at playing slick, quick-thinking hustlers and hipsters, would be this year's sentimental favorite.) If he doesn't win, he at least deserves to win 'Father of the Year" for that Golden Globes acceptance speech (I don't know about the rest of you, but I teared up.) That's not an award he'd win for the movie that landed him on this list: Jack Frost.

This wasn't just bad, it was unwatchable. It centers around a man who dies in an auto accident and is reincarnated as a creepy CGI snowman who will haunt your nightmares forever. Scott already did a fine job describing this movie's awfulness, so all I can add is that it falls into a very weirdly specific comedy subgenre: the dead parent who comes back to haunt his children. Of which another example is Ghost Dad. Oh well, at least Jack Frost doesn't star a serial rapist. But on the whole, "Hamlet" was still funnier.

So you may be asking: if Jack Frost was only bad enough to land Michael Keaton in second place, what could be worse? For then answer, you need look no further than Keaton's co-star in Birdman, the winner of the 2015 SKELLY AWARD goes to...

EDWARD NORTON.
He got his first Oscar nomination for his very first movie, Primal Fear, but lost to Cuba Gooding, Jr. (if he doesn't win this year, he can take comfort in knowing he lost to a worthy opponent.) In addition to Birdman, he's also in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Norton's career is marked by (mostly) interesting, ambitious film choices-dark films like Fight Club or oddball comedies like Moonrise Kingdom. So I guess it's no surprise that his worst film wouldn't just be some garden-variety, run-of-the-mill flop. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert (who gave it HALF a star) wrote: "Only enormously talented people could have made [it]. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and big dreams."And just what movie could have produced such a reaction. Three little words: 

"Death To Smoochy"

Like Little Nicky, I've purposely avoided seeing this movie for years. I knew it had a reputation as one of the biggest bombs of the past two decades. I was also aware that it actually had a cult status, fans who claimed it was an underrated masterpiece. So this year, for the purpose of this column, I had to watch it, to see for certain whether it truly was as bad as I was expecting. Spoiler alert: it's worse.

All the talent involved in making this, in the service of a movie that really only has one joke: Sheldon, AKA "Smoochy", is sincere and sweet and incorruptible, and everybody else is a complete scumbag. This gets old after the first 15 minutes (the running gag about the brain-damaged boxer gets old after 15 seconds.) Once you realize this, every attempt to shock becomes predictable, especially since its attempts to shock aren't all that bold to begin with. "Ha ha, Rainbow Randolph curses like a sailor when the cameras stop rolling. I was totally not expecting this." Of course there's gonna be a clown with a drug addiction. Of course the charity organization's going to be a scam. Of course Catherine Keener's programming director's gonna have a fetish for kiddie show hosts -- what else are you going to do with a smart, sexy female character, make her human?

To quote another critic, Dorothy Parker, this wasn't plain terrible. This was fancy-terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.

Well, something that looked like raisins anyway.

But let's end this column on a lighter note. Here's Best Actor Nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, who, if he doesn't win for his work in The Imitation Game, should at least win "Best Actor With a Name that's Fun To Mispronounce On Purpose". In this clip he offers up imitations of other famous actors. He's amusing and charming.

Bill S.