Megan Fox Reminds Harry Smith of a “Woodland Nymph Fairy”
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Well, she put words in his mouth, but that didn’t help him talk during this interview.
Video of the Day: Dirty Projectors, “Stillness is the Move”
I’m this close to calling the race for album of the year. Buy Bitte Orca immediately. Review to follow.
Video of the Day: The Lonely Island feat. Jonas Brothers, “Property Of The Queen”
“Africa — I’ve been to Africa.
Africa — I broke a broke a sweat.”
The Thriller’s Gone
The icons of my childhood are going fast, it seems. Ed McMahon on Tuesday. Farrah Fawcett this morning. And this evening, the King of Pop.
I can’t say I was a die-hard Michael Jackson fan, but his music was the music of my youth, from the perfectly crafted pop confections of “ABC” and “I Want You Back” with the Jackson Five, to such towering works as 1982’s “Thriller” and ’87’s “Bad.” There was no disputing his enormous talent and riveting showmanship — music that proved to be terrific enough to withstand the ugliness that dogged him with charges of child molestation.
What surprises me now is how sad I find myself as I watch the canonization of Michael Jackson unfold on cable news. His impact on music was, and remains, monumental. Jackson was an artist of the highest caliber, and he ranks alongside Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the influence he wielded on popular culture.
As a human being, however, the assessment isn’t so clear-cut. Being charitable, it is fair to say he was awfully eccentric. But it doesn’t take a licensed psychologist to suggest that Jackson’s own troubled childhood — from an abusive father to obscenely early superstardom — likely spurred some of his problems later in life.
He lost his own youth, and in so doing, enriched the youth of untold millions of others.
And it goes without saying that Jackson, who would have been 51 in August, was far too young to die.
RIP, Michael Jackson.
– Chase
Video of the Day: Street Sweeper Social Club, “
Street Sweeper Social Club is the latest project from former Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello and Boots Riley from the legendary, revolutionary undergroup hip-hop group, The Coup.
Oscar To Have 10 Best Picture Nominees in 2010
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that the 2010 Oscar ceremonies will include 10 films in contention for Best Picture.
“After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,” said Sid Ganis, president of the academy. “The final outcome, of course, will be the same — one Best Picture winner — but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009.”
This at least looks like a reaction to this year’s much-maligned roster, which excluded the most well-received and well-attended film of 2008, “The Dark Knight,” as well as the second most well-received film of that year, “Wall-E.” And, it is Staticblog’s scrupulously founded opinion that those films were excluded because of furious campaigning by The Weinstein Company on behalf of “The Reader.”
But 10? I could be wrong, but now the opposite could happen, and the Best Picture category could become far too inclusive. I mean, there’s no danger of “Year One” or “Obsessed” making it to the dais, but the bottom five could get a little thin. On the “Up” side, at least a deserving animated film might have a shot next year.
Video of the Day: Major Lazer, “Hold the Line”
Not only is Major Lazer the subject of a cheapo cartoon, but we get an action figure tie-in commercial to boot!
Beastie Boys’ “Hot Sauce Committee, Part 1″ To Be Released Sept. 15
Capitol will release the eighth disc by Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond and Adam Horowitz on Sept. 15 in multiple configurations, including a 5.1 surround mix, and will include the following tracks:
1. Tadlock’s Glasses
2. B-Boys In The Cut
3. Make Some Noise
4. Nonstop Disco Powerpack
5. OK
6. Too Many Rappers (featuring NAS)
7. Say It
8. The Bill Harper Collection
9. Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win (featuring Santigold)
10. Long Burn The Fire
11. Bundt Cake
12. Funky Donkey
13. Lee Majors Come Again
14. Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament
15. Pop Your Balloon
16. Crazy A– Sh–
17. Here’s A Little Something For Ya
Mark your calendars, reorganize your life. And look at it this way: if this is “Part 1,” then they must have a “Part 2″ in mind, which we can undoubtedly look forward to hearing in 2015 or so.
Jon and Kate Plus 8 Plus Hate
Usually with deep embarrassment and lately with great regret, I have watched “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ for the past couple of years, mainly because my wife loved the show and because the behavior of the sextuplets was just slightly ahead of the actions of my own preschooler — predictive on a massive and scary scale. Before the show devolved into a self-referential meditation on the caustic effects of 21st century tabloid/reality television fame, “J&K+8″ was the cutest little horror show on television — parents of young children could look at Jon and Kate Gosselin and their massive brood and think, “There but for the grace of limited fertility go I.”
But last night’s episode confirmed what our supermarket checkout experiences had been trumpeting for weeks: the Gosselins are a 20-legged disaster. While the couple announced on the show (in isolated interviews) that they were separating, a placard appeared shortly afterward indicating that the Gosselins had filed papers on Monday to dissolve the marriage. Quick and ugly.
Even from the limited understanding we are allowed if we choose not to read the rags, this was still not a surprise, given that Kate was increasingly surly and self-absorbed last season and Jon has been uninvolved and enunciating like he just got stuck with a tranquilizer dart. Plus, the kids started looking a lot like window dressing on the show, which is a fairly pathetic but obvious outcome in the reality television age.
We’ve seen all this before in the paleolithic era of reality television. The historical precursor to all this was “An American Family,” a 12-episode series that ran on PBS in 1973, in which the Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif. fell apart. The documentarians weren’t counting on the Louds being a mess when they arrived, but that’s what they got when Pat asked Bill to move out and filed for divorce.
The Gosselins are a different kind of loud, and even without the cameras or the couple’s personality mismatch, the odds were against them — parents of multiples are reportedly three times as likely to divorce. Throw camera crews into the mix, and Monday’s outcome was predictable as sunrise.
What bothers me about this meltdown is the terrible Faustian deal the Gosselins entered into with this show. The couple reportedly made nearly $50,000 per episode, which should provide some security for the kids provided that the cash doesn’t get wasted on legal fees and/or excessive living. But then there’s the toxic aftermath: the sextuplets and the twins will grow up with an obnoxious truth — the dissolution of their family can be Netflixed by everyone they know, and far too many people that they don’t know.
Isn’t reality television wonderful? Two decades ago, when TLC was still “The Learning Channel,” the network used to broadcast surgeries. It’s a toss-up as to whether “J&K+8″ or those chest-cavity shots were more invasive.
Video of the Day: Green Day, “21 Guns”
The second video from “21st Century Breakdown” was helmed by Marc Webb, director of the upcoming “(500) Days of Summer.”
