Several of my Utah-based friends are involved in something called Sack Lunch TV, whose output so far is three amusing sketches that have been filmed and uploaded to the Interwebs, where you can view them.
The sketches are called “Humble Pie,” “The Man Date,” and “Cheesebigot.” I think all three of them are funny, albeit in varying degrees.
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Part of the fun of making blanket statements is trying to see if you can come up with exceptions to them. For example, in my review of “Who’s Your Caddy?,” I claimed that no movie with a pun title has ever been any good. This prompted someone to comment that “Shaun of the Dead” has a pun title and is, in fact, an excellent movie.
Indeed! That is an exception to the rule. The ONLY exception!
Let me clarify what kind of pun I’m talking about, though. I mean the kind represented by “Who’s Your Caddy?,” which is a play on the expression “Who’s your daddy?” Consider also: “Delta Farce,” “Maid in Manhattan,” “Down and Derby,” “Happily N’Ever After,” and “Deliver Us from Eva,” all of which hope to earn smiles by being slight variations on familiar phrases.
I don’t mean titles where the words have multiple applicable meanings. Someone pointed out the TV show “Arrested Development.”
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I have a couple of things to mention that are unrelated but that both fall under the category of Making the Site Better.
First, I’ve gotten better at recording the podcasts for “In the Dark” and “Snide Remarks.” Maybe you listened when I first launched them back in December, thought, “Good heavens, was he recording this on an airplane runway?,” and never listened again. I would not blame you.
But as I’ve gotten more practice with them, I’ve found new ways to improve the sound quality. Specifically, I stopped using the lousy microphone I had lying around and started using my iMac’s built-in mic instead. It’s actually better than the one I paid money for, especially when I choose the “use ambient noise reduction” setting. There is a noticeable improvement in quality between the podcasts now and the podcasts a couple months ago. So you might give ‘em another try.
Second, you might have noticed that we’ve added some Google ads on most of the site’s pages (although not here on the blog, yet). This isn’t Making the Site Better so much as it’s Making the Site More Profitable.
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As July slips out of our fingers and a huge, sweaty batch of August prepares to plop down on our heads, let us take solace where we can. In a new “Snide Remarks,” for example, entitled “Inexcusabull Behavior”! It is about the Running of the Bulls, and Michael Vick, and assorted other stupid things.
As always, you can listen to my dramatic reading of the column on the page itself with the SnideCast©, or through what’s technically called a “podcast” here. The “Snide Remarks” podcast feed is here.
Also! It was a big weekend at the movies for me. Friday was an extremely French day, as I saw “Paris, je t’aime” and “La Vie en Rose” back to back at Portland’s indispensable arthouse multiplex, Regal Fox Tower. (Reviews to come; they’re both good.)
Then, on Saturday, I endured the following triple feature: “Bratz,” “I Know Who Killed Me,” and “Who’s Your Caddy?” I’m not allowed to review “Bratz” until it comes out next Friday, so let’s just leave it at that. The reviews for the other two are available, though, and they ain’t pretty.
More blogginess later today, so don’t stray far from your computer. Seriously, no more than five or six feet.
Grab a bottle of Duff and yell “Woo-hoo!” “The Simpsons Movie” is a worthy big-screen adaptation of our favorite yellow-skinned family’s adventures. Like the TV show, it’s about one-fourth brilliant and three-fourths just OK — but even the “just OK” parts are full of fast-paced sight gags and extremely clever parodies of modern American life.
Also worth seeing this weekend is “Sunshine,” a thrilling sci-fi tale from director Danny Boyle. I distinctly remember seeing the trailer for this with my friend Brett this past January. It starts with a voice telling us that the sun is dying, and so Earth has sent a spaceship loaded with a nuclear bomb to restart it. Brett and I snorted derisively, and those snorts were saying: What a dumb idea for a movie. Then the trailer showed these words: “From the director of ‘28 Days Later’ and ‘Trainspotting.’” That’s when Brett and I repented of our snorting and started paying attention. The movie is proof that even an idea that sounds ridiculous on its face can be made into something compelling and entertaining if you do it right.
“No Reservations” opens today, but there’s no reason for you to watch it. In fact, I only saw it four days ago, and already I’ve forgotten everything about it.
In honor of Pioneer Day, which was yesterday and which is an official state holiday in Utah, we present “Are We There Yet?” as this week’s “Snide Remarks” Classic column. It is #306, originally published July 24, 2002.
Pioneer Day commemorates the day in 1847 when the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, which led to the settling of Utah (if you don’t count the Indians as having already settled it, of course) (which no one does). This column purports to be a diary entry written by a Mormon pioneer woman on that fateful day 160 years ago. Enjoy this bit of fake history, won’t you?
I’ve been hanging on to these e-mails for almost a year, wondering if there would ever be a good time (and a good reason) to post them. And now there is!
This takes us all the way back to my first contact with Tim Nasson last August. Enjoy!
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On Aug. 7, 2006, I posted a blog entry detailing the appalling journalistic tactics of one Tim Nasson, of Wild About Movies. Essentially, he was writing articles full of celebrities’ “quotes,” except they weren’t actual direct quotes. They were paraphrases (often with erroneous details) around which he had slapped quotation marks. And you can’t DO that in professional journalism, not even entertainment journalism.
I had brought the situation to his attention privately, but he dismissed my claims and ignored me thereafter. So I posted the blog entry exposing him to the world (well, to the parts of the world that visit my website). This resulted in a lengthy, hilarious exchange of e-mails between us….
My last post was about Tim Nasson of Wild About Movies and his “Movie Junkets Exposed” feature. Somehow I missed that at the end of that piece, he has a few paragraphs about me! I could have sworn the feature originally ended after the part about Sony, and that the stuff about me was a later addition. Maybe it was. Doesn’t matter.
Anyway, here’s what he says!
A ‘one time junketeer,’ whom will not be named, that attended a junket during the summer of 2006 in Seattle, WA, threatened to ‘expose’ Wild About Movies as a site publishing ‘fake interviews.’ While we will not be giving this sniveling creature’s name any publicity, suffice it to say, every movie studio banned him not only from junkets, but also, press screenings because he wrote about the one junket he attended in such a way that he seemed to be a complete psychopath.
Last August, I told you about Tim Nasson, a movie junketeer and entertainment writer who had been engaging in some fishy journalistic practices by making up celebrity quotes. He would take what the people actually said, paraphrase it into his own words — and then still put quotation marks around it, as if it were their actual words. That’s a no-no, and I called him on it. Hooray for me.
Nasson, whose site is called Wild About Movies, has now moved on to a different violation. He’s quoting people accurately now — a little too accurately, considering he’s using interviews that he didn’t actually attend.
He says the studios will sometimes send tapes to junket whores like himself who couldn’t attend (or who weren’t invited). That claim is still awaiting independent verification, but even if it’s true, it doesn’t explain why Nasson starts the articles by claiming he met with the interviewee in person. If you weren’t there, why lie to the reader and say you were? In fact, why run the interview at all when the exact same interview can be found on the sites of all the people who WERE there?
NOTE: This is a SPOILER THREAD for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The post itself has no spoilers, but people posting comments on it are welcome to discuss the book as freely as they want to, which includes mentioning plot details.
Well! So much for the Harry Potter books!
I ordered mine from Amazon, and they’d sent an e-mail saying it would be delivered by UPS on Saturday. This meant I spent the first part of the day lurking around my apartment with one eye on the window, keeping watch for the UPS guy. I put off taking a shower for fear of missing him while I was in there. Amazon had said the package wouldn’t require a signature, but there was no guarantee the UPS guy would consider my doorstep safe enough to leave it if no one answered the door. THERE WAS NO GUARANTEE!!