I No Longer Have Problems With Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly is back on my good side! The website has an article about comedians in serious roles. I think the article is supposed to be about their first role being serious, and I haven't seen about 90% of these movies. I need to get on it, because one of my favorite things is comedians in serious roles! Here are some of my favorites:

-Steve Martin in Shopgirl. So creepy!
-Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. I totally would have made out with him!
-Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I loved this movie in high school but I haven't seen it since.
-Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love. All of my favorite things in one movie: lonely people, phone sex, people with anger issues, and a Jon Brion soundtrack.

And I leave you with a question. Who would you rather make out with...
Young Bill Murray...

or Old Bill Murray?

This is also known as The Impossible Choice. I could never choose, and I can't imagine a scenario in which I would have to (unless I end up in my Fantasy World, also known as Time Travel Celebrity Make Out Land).

The Bagheads (that's what it was called, right?)

Since I'm one of those Women Who Love Horror Films, I finally (at Alex's urging) watched Baghead last weekend. I know he already posted this trailer at least once, but here it is again. Watch it! Really!

Except don't watch it if you're going to a cabin in the middle of the woods in Kentucky that weekend. I really can't believe Alex allowed me to watch it on Friday night, knowing full well that we were leaving Saturday on our trip. I spent the whole weekend worrying about Bagheads. And Alex (of course) tried to scare me but I was on the lookout the whole weekend so it didn't work. I had to watch for Bagheads, you know?
Another reason to watch this movie is that it stars Jon Lovitz Baby a.k.a. one of the main actors. He's the one who looks like Jon Lovitz as a baby.

I Have Some Problems With Entertainment Weekly

Alex and I have long had a love/hate relationship with Entertainment Weekly. Mostly we feel this ambivalence about head film writer Owen Gleiberman, a.k.a. The Gleibs. He is merciless. He hates everything we love (comedy, horror) and usually only gives As to children's films (except for that time he hated Beverly Hills Chihuahua because it needed "more interesting chihuahuas."). But we still care what he thinks. In that way, he's a lot like an abusive boyfriend. We just keep coming back to him.
But Entertainment Weekly really cheesed me off the last couple of weeks. First, they had an article about how there were so many female directors. Seriously. That was the whole article. Women be directin'! But then, oh then, they dared to publish an article called "Horror Films...(the title is okay so far, in case you were wondering)...and the Women who Love Them!" The article was about, you guessed it, how women like horror films, and how this is so shocking, and what we never expected this it's all so confusing I thought they liked Sex and the City whaaaat? I can't type any verbatim quotes from the article because I already barfed all over it, but I can tell you about it. Here were the people they chose to interview for this really well researched article:
1. Diablo Cody, because she wrote a Megan Fox movie that, honestly, looks a little more action-y than horror-y to me.
2. Vera Farmiga, because she's in the Orphan (ugh) and I guess that qualifies her?
3. Sam Raimi. I love Sam Raimi as much as the next girl (I mean, way more than the next girl), but why did they interview him for this? Because he cast a female lead in his last film? I don't know.

So Diablo Cody did her usual thing (talked about herself whenever she was asked a question), Vera Farmiga gave some psychobabble bullshit answer ("Women are just more visceral and they like the excitement of being scared") and Sam Raimi was like, "Sorry, I'm too busy for this, I have to go direct another good movie."
Here were Entertainment Weekly's two reasons why women go see horror films:
1. There are often female leads, and women like to see other women beat the odds and be the last one standing. And...
2. Because they like to cuddle! With their boyfriends!

No, Entertainment Weekly. Just no. Here's an idea. Stop treating women like they're some sort of alien species. Why are you so surprised that women like horror films? What SHOULD we like? Matthew McCounaghey (whatever) movies only come out so often, okay? Maybe, and I'm sure this is shocking, women like horror films for the same reasons men do. Maybe it's just because they're fun, and because people in general enjoy getting a little rush of adrenaline when they are actually in a completely safe environment. You can try to reason it away with Psych 101 level bullshit all you want, but I like watching scary movies because I LIKE THEM. And as far as the whole cuddling thing goes, H. won't watch scary movies with me so I watch them with Alex (and sometimes Chase). Not a lot of cuddling goes on.
I will continue hating Entertainment Weekly until tomorrow when we get a new issue. I love Entertainment Weekly!

You like what you like.

Papa Winfrey always says, "You like what you like." Papa Winfrey says a lot of things, not all of them appropriate for the blog. But he's right, you know? You can't control what you like. I mean, I can't control that I've always liked Wham!, or that when I was a kid I totally had a huge crush on George Michael. And I can't control that when I got older, I bought both his solo album Faith and the Wham! album Make it Big from my Driver's Ed teacher (I also bought Prince's Purple Rain. It was 3 for 1 dollar, and I still feel like I made the right decisions). This song is a personal favorite of ours. Yeah, that's right, Alex likes it too:

Of course, Alex found out about this song not through an irrational love of Wham!, but the way normal people do: through comedy videos. We love Jon Glaser.

Jesting Infinitely (Or at Least Until September)

Because I like taking on gigantic projects and then giving up on them before I've even properly begun, I decided to do Infinite Summer. Even though I almost never buy books, I hied myself to a Barnes and Noble and bought the only copy of Infinite Jest, the same one that sat there for years, neglected, just getting sadder and more tattered looking as people picked it up and then, realizing its heft, put it back. To be fair, I only bought it because someone stole our library's copy (can we talk about this for a minute? Who the hell is stealing all the movies and books Alex and I want? How hard is it to return this stuff?). I fully expected to give up after reading the first sentence, but instead I've held on, mostly on pace, for about a month. Okay, so I'm always 40 pages behind, and this weekend I had a marathon session to catch myself up. But basically I'm on track. It's weird.
So, if you don't know, Infinite Jest is a weird book. A lot of people (what am I talking about? I mean Chase) have asked me what it's about. It's hard to explain. Mostly it's about a tennis academy, but also it's about an addiction treatment facility. Apparently DFW used to play tennis, which I guess explains the exhaustively thorough descriptions of gameplay. It's a difficult book to read, for sure. For me, anyway. I've always had a lot of trouble with reading things that I'm not immediately attracted to (which was why I wasn't a very good English major) and the truth is that a lot of this book isn't easy to fall in love with. But parts of it are, and in the Dave Eggers-penned intro we all learn that this book will change our lives. We'll see. My life is pretty malleable to begin with, so it shouldn't take much. Expect updates as I continue.
Of note: A character brings about his own demise by placing his head in a microwave oven.

The Heartbreak Kid

This weekend, Alex and I unintentionally had an Anti-Marriage Movie Marathon by watching The Heartbreak Kid and Hannah and Her Sisters. Wait, The Heartbreak Kid with Ben Stiller, you're asking yourself? NO. The original 1972 film starring the (always) superb Winfrey Family fave Charles Grodin.

We learned a lot of things from this movie. Like, don't marry someone until you've:
1. Had sex with them.
2. Gone to the beach with them.
3. Watched them eat egg salad.
4. Heard them sing.
Just make sure you know what you're getting into, I guess. Do yourself a favor and don't watch this movie if you're about to get married. Oof, seriously. This movie will make you feel so much discomfort, misery, and despair that you won't even know what to do with yourself. But I mean that in a good way. Add in some wonderful tunes, a young Cybil Shepard, and Charles Grodin's ability to pull off clashing patterns and you've got a winner.
So why the hell would anyone feel the need to remake this movie? We don't know. This movie needed no remaking, since it's already perfect the way it is. But maybe you watched it and thought, "Instead of going to Miami for their honeymoon and being surrounded by old people, why don't we take them somewhere a little more fancy and less sad? Like Mexico? And can we make everyone, like, five times hotter? And how about instead of making the audience feel depressed and confused, we try to make them laugh by making disgusting jokes?" NO, FARRELLY BROTHERS. YOU JUST RUINED THE MOVIE. Roeper and Some Guy agree:

If you, like us, enjoy Charles Grodin, movies from the 70s, and laughing and feeling sad at the same time, you should probably watch The Heartbreak Kid. And if you don't, then you probably shouldn't be reading this blog.

Harry Potter

I'm not a HUGE Harry Potter fan, but there is something magical about those films. You might say they cast a SPELL over me. I haven't read all of the books. Like the racist robots in Transformers 2, I don't do much readin' (of books about wizards), but I will gladly line up for the movies. The latest film has been out for a while, and you're probably thinking, "Alex, why haven't you seen it yet? Is something wrong?" Just shut up. I don't want to talk about it. The point of this post is that I am excited to see Harry Potter and the Unimportant Title. I found this glowing review on slashfilm.

"Hermione's tits is what did it for me ... the chick sitting next to me got so excited she started groping herself! that was some mean sh1t!"

And that's why I'm excited to see Harry Potter.