Heh. A bunch of movie critics in the UK are whining that Disney used blurbs from real people in ads for the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Welcome to the future critics: We’re all critics now. It’s particularly funny to me that critics consider blurbspace theirs. How dare a movie studio quote the people who actually buy the tickets and watch the movies? How dare they give respect to the audience?
I will confess that when I was a critic, I got pissed when I was blurbed without mention of my name. But there was only one reason for that: ego.
(While I’m at it, another blurb story: I was TV critic at People and complained in my column about a “pinhead” at NBC who had taken my review quite out of context to turn a negative review into a positive blurb. It was something to the moral effect of this: I said the show as an incredible piece of crap and the blurb said, “Incredible!” Anyway, when my putative partner in the launch of Entertainment Weekly went to Hollywood to push the magazine before its launch, he met with an executive at NBC who announced that he was my “pinhead.” He was not amused. I was.)
My Guardian column this week is an interview with the Googliest author I know, Paulo Coelho about the power of free and friendships online. The lede:
Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate. . . .
My friend Neil McIntosh says he was inspired by my wonder at the British institution of the Pukka Pie (why’d anyone one to puke a pie, I asked) to explain the ritual on his blog as he did for me on my visit to London last week:
When served in a crinkly plastic bag, the top may appear cool, while the foil tray in which they rest is quite warm. Nothing, however, indicates the extraordinary heat in the centre of the pie. N00b pie eaters will dive straight in, and risk serious burns to tongue, lips and even face as the pie contents spill out. Seasoned supporters view this as something of a test; the “serious” fan would not make such a schoolboy error.
The pragmatic pie eater, therefore, may choose to wait 15-20 minutes before consuming the product, knowing that it is piping hot throughout despite its cool exterior. This waiting time is known, at least round seat M108 of the Don Rogers Stand, Swindon, as the “half life” of the Pukka pie. The pie should then be debagged and, by means of gripping the edges of the foil tray while using the index finger to push the bottom of said tray, the pie raised out its container. This allows a safer approach to the snack, all the while ensuring no gravy spills down your front.
I think he’s taking me for a N00b. Surely one can’t eat a piping-hot gravy-and-grease-filled pie as if it were something truly sensible like a hot dog. I’m betting he’s trying to trap me. I have demanded a demonstration.
I am reminded of one of my favorite Calvin Trillin pieces in The New Yorker in which he attended an oyster festival at a bayou firehouse. The firefighters tried to rile N00b oyster-haters by convincing them that REAL men preferred to consume the bivalves by sucking them up their noses. This, Trillin said, made just as much sense to an oyster-fearer as eating them in the mouth.
Neil also points us to Pukka Pie posters, which can be purchased for two quid each (that’s about $300 for us). What’s particularly striking is how they try to make the Pukka Pie into a sexual symbol. But then again, they do produce foodstuffs named after an article of stripper’s clothing.
I’ve been inhaling the third season of Weeds on my iPod (it’s a crime to watch Mary-Louise Parker that size). On the way back from London last night, I watched four episodes in a row – which is a great way to see it. OK, every once in awhile the plot does take a Dallas-shower-scene route (Andy getting out of the Army). But gawd, I do love the thing. And I can’t get enough of Parker, queen of MILFs. It’s about enough to get me to finally subscribe to Showtime.
(Disclosures: I had an ad from Showtime on the blog when the fourth season started and they sent me third season on DVD — but I was so eager, I’d already bought it on iTunes.)
After tonight’s world premiere of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, a woman in the audience asked why they involved George Bush. Someone else in the audience answered for the stars and creators on stage:
“Because it’s funny.”
Thank goodness we haven’t lost our sense of humor about even him.
I liked the movie. It always helps to watch in a premiere audience, where they’ll applaud even the gaffer’s credit. But the thing’s funny and the political overtones aren’t heavy-handed.
Oh, I’m feeling so old right now watching a TimeLife commercial for a (shockingly overpriced) collection of FlowerPower songs from the ’60s with your infomercial host: Peter Fonda. Ouch. It’s not just that he has fallen to this fate but that my demographic has. Born to be wild, my ass.
Joan Rivers is back covering the red carpet, but this time for her own site: Emmys with Joan. It starts Sunday at 5p. Who needs a network when you have a blog? She and Melissa will be home live-blogging, live-vlogging, and all that, giving us the alternate soundtrack the awards show scene needs. No holds barred, my friend Fred Graver promises. She’s already blogging and its’ funny:
Hello, my darlings! Joan Rivers here, blogging for the first time in my short adult life.
I know what you’re thinking. “Why is Joan Rivers blogging?†Good question. My doctor told me blogging was what happened after eating too many bananas. But blogging is so much more — it’s sitting alone in a dark room, eating raw cookie dough out of the package while my dogs lick my bare feet, and wondering where my life has gone. Melissa, my daughter, love her to death, but the bitch never calls unless I threaten to update my will.
I may – may – be on Today this morning. They came to my house last night to record the interview but I suspect the segment may get bumped by the bridge disaster (my last network appearances were bumped by the execution of Saddam Hussein and the death of Anna Nicole Smith…. I am the news fairy; if you want a big story to break, just interview and preempt me). The topic on Today: Nan Talese saying that Oprah Winfrey shangaiied James Frey into his public flogging and blasting her “sanctimoniousness.” They needed someone who dared to criticize Oprah and found me. I remind them that it was Oprah who sleazed up daytime TV — in a straight line leading to Jerry Springer — before she recanted and declared herself the queen of all good.
I haven’t worn a tie in months, maybe even a year. It may have something to do with my partial unemployment and attempts to act heretical when I have to go to church, but even while still an executive, I all but stopped wearing them. A suit with a shirt became my uniform: my Conde Nast protective coloration, a friend said. I’m ready to throw them out and I’m wondering whether it’s possible that at long last, the tie is out.
It has always been an utterly useless part of the male wardrobe. But now, it seems to me, the only people who wear the things daily are male politicians, the male reporters who interview them – and dodgy estate agents. . . .
The main reason we remain trussed up is simply the dead hand of convention. House of Commons rules say that men must not appear open-necked. But then the rules also say there are no liars in the House.
Increasingly, ties are simply bits of cloth which we hang around our necks when getting married, attending a funeral, or when called for a job interview.
However, the attack on ties has left its defenders distinctly hot under the collar.
Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ magazine, said: “The fact that fewer men wear ties makes the wearing of them even more important.
“When men do wear ties, it makes them more powerful.” . . .
Nicholas Worth, the manager of the Jermyn Street tailors Hawes and Curtis, said: “Ties are selling very well. In fact, we are selling more than we used to.
“People don’t like open necks or dress down days. I think men of a certain age, like Jeremy Paxman or Jeremy Clarkson, think not wearing ties or wearing jeans is cool. It’s not, it’s just sad.”
Off with the yoke. Damn the tie.
But then again, when my mother saw my appearance on Reliable Sources (above) her only comments was that I was the one guy who was not wearing a tie.
Kudos to Alan Sepinwall at the Star-Ledger, the official newspapers of The Sopranos, for getting the only interview with David Chase.
“I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene.
“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’
“People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them, and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”
In that final scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow’s parallel parking and a walk by a man in a Members Only jacket to the men’s room. Just as the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid-song), with no resolution.
“Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there,” says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony’s relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.
Sepinwall also debunks the email and comment-thread that burst into forums and blogs like Phil Leotardo’s brains under the SUV tire. There was a lot of excitement about the idea that all the people in the final scene in the restaurant were assassins or ghosts — take your choice — from earlier shows but Sepinwall says it’s just not true. The speculation almost got me to believe that Tony was dead: he saw himself in the restaurant as he came in and this was his life passing before his eyes as he died. But that did seem too neat and the appeal of the Sopranos is that it’s not neat. Cue Sartre.
I liked the ending. The banality of evil. The devil’s in the diner. Jersey as purgatory. There is no justice. Cue Sartre.
At the NJ.com forums, the ending confused some folks: They thought their TV’s had died. Damned TiVo, cut off again. Art appreciation in the land of the Sopranos. Existentialism doesn’t play outside Princeton.
Neil also points us to Pukka Pie posters, which can be 
