All Apologies

Joe Queenan once set up a small website to apologise to all those people he'd been unnecessarily mean to. It was mostly just a chance to replay all the really mean things he'd said about some celebrities or other and keep them all in one, handy place. Unfortunately it's not there anymore and I can't find a copy anywhere, but as a non-apology masquerading as an apology it was one of the funniest. I attempted a similar trick myself when I'd spent a previous night thinking up ways a holidaying American's girlfriend could be cuckolding him and then apologised the next day for being harsh eg. "You know when I said she was probably on all-fours right now being taken from behind by some muscly black guy with a cock the size of a baby's arm holding an apple. Yeah? Well I'm sorry I said that". Sadly in his apology to Keefer Sutherland in The Guardian Queenan doesn't take this approach, although he does take a side-swipe at Bridget Fonda:

Though I stand by my criticism of his early films, which were putrid, there is no doubt that I allowed my hatred of nepotism to blind me to the potential Sutherland clearly possessed. I still doubt that Sutherland would have succeeded had he not been Donald Sutherland's son. This does not alter the fact that he has succeeded. This is a lot more than you can say of Bridget Fonda.

A couple of non-apologies do slip in, though, Anthony Quinn, film critic for The Independent, is sorry he didn't make it clearer that Life Is Beautiful stinks and Jim Shelley, TV critic for the Mirror is sorry he wasn't harsher on Lindsey Corkhill.

Reasons I Don't Understand Ann Coulter

From the News Blog comes this exchange where scary pundit Ann Coulter tries to suggest that Bill Clinton is gay because he can't keep off the pussy...

Ms. COULTER: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.
DEUTSCH: OK, I think you need to say that again. That Bill Clinton, you think on some level, has — is a latent homosexual, is that what you’re saying?
Ms. COULTER: Yeah. I mean, not sort of just completely anonymous — I don’t know if you read the Starr report, the rest of us were glued to it, I have many passages memorized. No, there was more plot and dialogue in a porno movie.

Steely Dan Are Higher Than You'll Ever Be

Apparently they're pissed off that new Owen Wilson comedy "You, Me & Dupree" is a rip-off of "Cousin Dupree" from Two Against Nature, which, it seems, they wouldn't mind so much if it didn't suck or they'd got paid or something. Anyway they wrote an open letter to Luke Wilson:

Your bro may be creating an extremely retrograde reality matrix for himself with his whole sellout moveistar game and there may be some righteous dudes to pay, amen.

When You Put It Like That...

Not Coming To A Theatre Near You's review of Lethal Weapon:

Is it possible that Mel Gibson is the world’s most conflicted, self-hating homosexual? There’s the rampant, uncontrolled homophobia, a good first sign. Then of course we have his celebrated obsession with flagellation and torture, a good Catholic boy’s desperate atonement for some unnamed, unforgivable sin. In this film alone he gets to use the word ‘fag’ more than once, refers to lesbianism as ‘disgusting’, shows his naked backside, gets brutally tortured and finally beats Gary Busey almost to death, the hapless bad guy pinned betwixt Gibson’s heaving thighs until he cries for mercy. Hell, even the title is questionable. It all points to a man wrestling not only with special forces terrorists but with his very nature, an apocalyptic battle, God and parentally instigated notions of propriety duking it out with Gibson’s deepest desires. Let it go, Mel! Don’t live a lie! We will all be forgiven in the end, even you.

Pretentious? Moi?

Ten-Bob Dylan holds the opinion that when people describe a movie as pretentious it almost always means that the reviewer didn't get it and that, as such, pretentious is useless as a critical description.

If nothing else it's an idea that stops you from using it without thinking, at least a bit, about whether the word is appropriate.

Well, I watched Stay and a bigger load of pretentious twaddle I couldn't imagine. It's Jacob's Ladder with pretentions to Mulholland Drive, but so wholly worried with how the next scene transition is going to be achieved that everything else seems secondary. It doesn't help that Ewan McGregor seems to act even less here than he did in Phantom Menace, being content to look mildly confused while wearing yellow trousers, which were, no doubt, significant of something.

In Praise Of The Hoff

Shrug over at MSN's Music Filter lays out MSN's policy on The Hoff:

So, with this axiom uppermost in our minds, we will not be mentioning anything regarding David Hasselhoff, unless the item can be objectively described as:

• An artistically historic item which will be seen by future generations as a milestone in the development of future aesthetics; or


• A grave, catastrophic federal emergency.

Before find an example that qualifies as both...

It's A Thin Line Between Stupid And Clever

Via Fark comes Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made It Big Time.

3. Doggles
Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

Eric Clapton Never Did Shoot A Sheriff...

That tends to be my generic answer to any argument about how violent some music (sub) culture that the speaker doesn't really understand is. Though pedants will then point out that it's a cover of a Bob Marley song, which combines astonishing pedantry with a high level of point missing. Most notably due to Bob saying this about the song:

"I want to say 'I shot the police' but the government would have made a fuss so I said 'I shot the sheriff' instead... but it's the same idea: justice."

That is, Bob Marley realised he could be in a lot of trouble for the song. I doubt it ever troubled Eric in quite the same way.

Anyway, notable humanitarian Bono is caught up with a lot of similar silliness about a computer game, Mercenaries 2. The original Mercenaries was an addictive GTA-alike, but with better weapon control, that involved blowing up large parts of a fantasy version of Korea. It's a lot of fun when it's not being totally frustrating — the boss levels ramped up the difficulty while not allowing you to save. Bono bought into the company that made this game and now they are making a sequel that will involve blowing up large parts of a fantasy version of Venezuela.

Naturally any number of leftys have called foul:

The Case for Impeachment co-author Dave Lindorff [...] say[s], "This kind of right-wing war game plays to the propaganda message that the Bush White House has been pushing for years: that Chavez is a dictator oppressing his people... Bono should use his financial interest in the company to kill it, or better, he should pull out entirely as an investor, and condemn such imperialist garbage."

Penny Arcade get to the root of just why this is so daft, only using a different kerfuffle over Las Vegas' protrayal in game.

Reasons I Don't Understand America Part 8

Via Roy at alicublog, comes a post from someone called Josh Trevino. He's decided to pontificate on 7/7 and how the British somehow seemed to regard it as just something that happened rather than any excuse to level Leeds, or something:

One year later, there is still the same madness and denial in the mother country. Iqbal Sacranie is still a knight of the realm. The Labour party still wants to ban the public mockery of Islam. The intelligentsia still indulge in pro-Islamist lip service whenever the subject of Israel arises. One can’t murder enough of them to change their minds, it seems. It’s almost as if they didn’t notice.

Roy re-casts this succinctly as:

The terror attacks of July 7, 2005 did not break the will of the British People. Well, better luck next time!

Even beter, though, is in the comments, Josh feels the need to futher explain:

Europe is not a lost cause, and even if it were, we should not stop fighting for it. I really do think that piety, in the classical sense, demands this much.

You're fighting for us, Josh? Well I hadn't noticed, but if you're ever in Austria there's a cold Guinness waiting for you in thanks!

Vince Noir

I'm still not sure what the etiquette is on this, and I certainly don't want to be overly gushy or anything, but one of my daily must-reads Vince Keenan linked to me recently. This made me very happy and boosted my Technorati rank to around 700,000, which, given that they track 48 million sites, I figured was impressive.

My site meter, though, didn't get the mighty boosh I expected from this, so I'm guessing not everybody is reading Vince on a the same daily basis as me. My handful of readers, you should. He has a way with a review that reminds me a bit of David Thomson, in that, after setting out the basics of a film, or book, he tells you simply, and to the point, how he felt about it. No disappointed fan-boy nit-picking, no over-written analysis of every scene in minute detail and no breathless gibbering over whatever it is they get so excited about over at AICN, just how he felt. He has a taste for the hard-boiled, but if this doesn't make you want to watch The Devil Wears Prada, nothing will:

Meryl Streep has somehow unearthed whole new reserves of joy in performing. Watching her now is like watching the late-career Brando, both of them utterly at ease and yet fiercely committed, relishing their craft enough to toss it off. Only with Meryl there’s no sense of squandered opportunity. Just the opposite.

Go. Enjoy.