But Bird proved he could tell a terrific story way back in 1999 with the beautifully crafted animated film “The Iron Giant.”

“Giant” didn’t use computers to generate its characters, and the only bankable star in the vocal cast, Jennifer Aniston, wasn’t even atop the A-list at the time. Bird relied on an old-fashioned story leavened with the kind of mature themes that transform kiddie fare into content suitable for all ages. And he might have coaxed Vin Diesel to give the most tender performance of his action-packed career.

Young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) is as inquisitive as any boy in ’50s era America. So when he’s not going through “duck and cover” drills at his school, he’s on the prowl for adventure. He finds plenty when he spots an immense robot snacking on spare metal at a nearby power plant.

Boy and ‘bot become fast friends, but hiding a creature that’s taller than most buildings isn’t easy. Hogarth’s Mom (Aniston) is always prying into her son’s life – with the best of intentions, of course. And a government official snooping around Hogarth’s home town wants to be the man who finds the ultimate weapon.

“The Iron Giant” certainly packs its share of anti-military sentiment, and the very notion of a gun can set the Giant off on an emotional guilt trip. Yet the government’s de facto representative (voiced with panache by Christopher McDonald) is actually the film’s biggest thug. The shrewd screenplay, which includes a few mature phrases that bumped the film’s rating up to PG, allows a key military official (John Mahoney of “Frasier” fame) to mature as the story reaches its conclusion.

The Communist paranoia of the era is also in play, as everyone assumes the clanking metallic man is a Russian weapon of some kind. What other option could there be? The “duck and cover” meme also gets woven into the narrative without a hiccup.

Bird’s film is so beautifully rendered you’d probably forgive a glaring global warming message had it slipped into the story. The animation style hearkens back to the best of Disney, with each character’s face conveying a wealth of emotions within just a few cel changes.

The vocal work is particularly appealing, especially Harry Connick, Jr. as the handsome hipster who makes art out of scrap metal. The New Orleans native never got the film career he deserved, but even while limited to just his voice he flashes charisma to spare.

The Giant itself (himself?) cannot speak at first, but he learns a few phrases thanks to Hogarth’s tutelage. Diesel provides the creature’s voice, a booming tone that sounds like it ricocheted around an iron lung’s interior before reaching our ears.

The boy’s relationship with the Giant is never forced, but when the lad confesses his love for the otherworldly being, it’s an emotional moment that transcends the medium.

“The Iron Giant” is currently available in the expected formats, from DVD to Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming services. Blu-ray owners will have to settle for those inferior, albeit speedy platforms.

But 99.5 percent of terrible movies are just … terrible. That’s especially evident with the following five features, a quintet which cost millions to produce and yielded very little in return.

Dishonorable mentions include “The Change Up,” “Green Lantern,” “Larry Crowne,” “Sucker Punch” and “A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.” But these five movies went above and beyond the call of duty in draining precious hours from our lives.

1. “Just Go With It” – Wow. Just wow. The laziest comedy in who knows how long wastes not only the talents of stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston but also bit players Nicole Kidman and Dave Matthews. Sandler can challenge us (“Punch Drunk Love”), make us smile (“The Wedding Singer”) and even give us some grand guilty pleasures (“You Don’t Mess with the Zohan”). But with this sorry remake of “Cactus Flower” shows he can arrive on a movie set, recite dialogue less thought out than a Mad Libs sheet and call it a day without doing some rigorous soul searching.
2. “Dylan Dog: Dead of Night” – Insert your own Superman crashes back to Earth gag here. Poor Brandon Routh received precious little career buzz from his underrated work in the 2006 Man of Steel reboot. Five years later, he’s reduced to starring in this wannabe horror comedy about an undead hunter trying to … well, is there any point reciting such a sorry excuse for a plot?
3. “Your Highness” – Danny McBride is not a movie star, James Franco isn’t the next Steve Martin and Natalie Portman should know better than to appear in a fifth-rate “Monty Python” sketch stretched beyond the breaking point. Best suited for teenage boys jazzed to see their first R-rated movie no matter how painful the experience may be.
4. “The Human Centipede – Full Sequence” – “Fear Factor” contestants should be forced to watch this on an IMAX screen. Every criticism unfairly lobbed at the first “Centipede” hits the mark in this gross and mindless affair. The concept – a “Centipede” fan wants to emulate his favorite movie – might have worked had writer/director Tom Six not decided to eschew the storytelling prowess he flashed in the grisly original.
5. “Apollo 18” – It’s amazing how many scares Hollywood has wrung out of the found footage genre, from “The Blair Witch Project” to three chilling “Paranormal Activity” films. That means we were bound to endure a mega-bomb like this outer space claptrap.

* Note: My schedule did not allow me to view other potential clunkers like “Jack and Jill,” “Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star” and “Dream House.”

JENNIFER ANISTON NAMED SEXIEST WOMAN OF ALL TIME

Nothing against Aniston, who gets better looking every year, but… ever?

Here are the Top 100. No Angie Dickinson. Indefensible.

In no particular order, my top picks:

Ann-Margret, Tina Turner, Barbara Stanwyck, Pam Grier, Ava Gardner, Cyd Charisse, Maria Conchita Alonso, Angie Dickinson, Janet Leigh, Julie Newmar, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, Paulette Goddard, Sheree North, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Rachel Ticotin.

CLOONEY ON BOARD FOR MORE HOLLYWOOD MASTURBATION

The Wrap:

Clooney and Heslov are teaming with Sony to turn David Bianculli’s 2009 book “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’” into a film.

Bianculli confirmed the project on his site, TV Worth Watching. He called Clooney his dream choice for the movie adaptation of his book about the Smothers and their 1967-69 variety hour series.

No doubt the story of the Smother Brothers being subversive and censored and anti-American and against the Vietnam War will all be a large part of the film’s narrative.

Hollywood just loves to play the victim even as it applauds itself for being so courageous. This is especially true for Clooney. Did you see “Good Night and Good Luck”? Yeah, neither did anyone else.

CRAIG PROMISES ‘SKYFALL’ WILL BE BETTER THAN ‘QUANTUM’

Not a high bar:

“[Quantum] was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was; it just ended up being one, starting where the last one finished. For me personally, on a level of feeling satisfied, I would want to do better next time. That’s really important to me.”

But why will SKYFALL be better?

“I really think this one is better even than Casino Royale”, Craig enthuses. “[Director] Sam Mendes has lived with Bond all his life, and he grew up with Bond in the same way I did. We have exactly the same reference points, we both like the same Bond movies, and we both like the same bits in the same Bond movies we like. We sat down and we just rabbited for hours about Live And Let Die or From Russia With Love, and talked about little scenes that we knew from them. That’s how we started talking about it. That’s what we tried to instill in the script. He’s been working his arse off to tie all these things together so they make sense… in a Bond way!”

“Skyfall” will be a crucial entry in the series. In the past, Bond films have survived stinkers because no matter how disappointing (“A View to a Kill,” “Die Another Day”) they were still Bond films. The formula was beloved and so people always kept coming back.

The Craig films dropped the Bond formula and the risk there is that they are now pretty interchangeable with other high-profile action films. This, I think, removes the loyalty factor. The closest thing I’ve seen to a Bond film since the Pierce Brosnan days is Angelina Jolie’s “Salt.”

ALEXANDRE AJA TO DIRECT JOE HILL’S HORNS

Aja is a director to start paying attention to. His remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” is brilliant and his “Piranha 3D” was one of the best of last year.

‘CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 3′ CROSSES $1 BILLION SALES MARK

This must be cutting into Hollywood’s box office:

Activision Blizzard said Monday that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has crossed the $1 billion mark in sales after 16 days, eclipsing a record set in 2009 by the film release Avatar, which reached the $1 billion milestone in 17 days.

The latest edition of the Call of Duty franchise launched on Nov. 8 with a one-day sales record of $400 million in North America and the U.K. The gaming giant’s Activision Publishing arm cited sales data from Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information.

With more than 30 million gamers, the Call of Duty community now exceeds the combined populations of the cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Madrid, the firm said.

If movies are going to compete with video games this popular, movies are going to have to stop blaming video games and get better.

DON RICKLES MOURNS THE LOSS OF HIS SON

Awful news:

Larry Rickles died of pneumonia complications and respiratory failure on 3 December.

He passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 41, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Larry Rickles was born in 1970 and went on to become a writer for the popular U.S. sitcom Murphy Brown. He also received an Emmy Award in 2008 for his TV documentary on his comedian father, Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project.

“Mr. Warmth” is superb and available on Netflix Streaming.

How do you die of pneumonia at the age of 41 in this day and age?

A SETBACK FOR CORD CUTTING? TV SERVICE SUBSCRIBERS GAIN IN Q3

Does a 34,000 boost even keep up with the growing population?

ICE CUBE TO STAR IN FX VIGILANTE SERIES ‘EYE FOR AN EYE’

Screen Rant:

The television show would center around Ice Cube’s character, a paramedic, who – after witnessing his fill of violent crime scenes and the broken lives of victims and community bystanders – becomes a vigilante that seeks to punish the perpetrators and avenge the victims.

The twist in the series revolves around the fact that Cube’s character, far from being your regular selfless hero, begins to enjoy his violent actions and becomes addicted to metering out the harsh justice, which in turn begins to destroy his private life.  He then struggles to reconcile the two disparate sides of his persona.

Hopefully this won’t be politically correct like most of the vigilante product coming out of Hollywood lately. More “Harry Brown” and “Death Wish,” less “The Brave One” and “Death Sentence” would be great.  

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

“Home Alone” on Blu-ray: The print isn’t as much of an improvement as I had hoped, but after 21 years and just as many screenings, this classic hasn’t aged a day.

Did you know that when the budget ballooned from $15 million to $18 million, Paramount dropped the project (20th Century Fox picked it up)? My guess is that that decision cost the studio somewhere around a half-billion dollars, and that doesn’t even include the money made on “Home Alone 2: Lost In New York.”

Ouch.

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SCOTTDS’ EPIC LINKTACULAR

NEW TEASER POSTER FOR ‘THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN‘

CAST TALKS ‘THE WALKING DEAD”S FEBRUARY RETURN

J.J. ABRAMS AND ‘ONE TREE HILL’ CREATOR MARK SCHWAHN DEVELOPING HOTEL DRAMA FOR THE CW

STEVEN SPIELBERG: WORKAHOLIC

NETFLIX SHARES SOARING ON REPORT OF SALE TALKS WITH VERIZON

LIFETIME GREENLIGHTS A REMAKE OF ‘THE BLUE LAGOON‘

10 MOST INAPPROPRIATE HOLIDAY SONGS EVER MADE

DIRECTOR PETER BERG ON ‘BATTLESHIP’ AND ‘CYNICISM AMONG THE CINEMA INTELLIGENTSIA’…

…NEW ‘BATTLESHIP’ TRAILER

2011′S BIGGEST MOVIE CONTROVERSIES

HOW TO CATCH SANTA CLAUS (ACCORDING TO THE MOVIES)

WATCH JOHN CARPENTER’S MUSIC VIDEO FOR ‘BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA‘

BLACK LIST: 100 HOTTEST UNPRODUCED SCRIPTS IN HOLLYWOOD

10 TV CHARACTERS THAT DEFY STEREOTYPES

35 THINGS WE LEARNED FROM ‘THE IRON GIANT’ COMMENTARY

‘WAR HORSE’ ROUNDTABLE WITH STEVEN SPIELBERG

10 MOVIES THAT GET DEPRESSION RIGHT

10 MOVIE VILLAINS WHOSE ACTIONS WERE JUSTIFIED

GUY RITCHIE TAKES OVER ‘MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.’ FROM STEVEN SODERBERGH

10 HILARIOUS SCATHING REVIEWS

HOW MICHAEL BAY CAN CHANGE ‘TRANSFORMERS 4‘

THE CAST OF ‘TAPS’: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

A LOOK BACK AT RORY CALHOUN AND ‘THE BIG CAPER‘

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CLASSIC PICK FOR TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13

TCM:

1:30 AM  Susan Slept Here (1954) –  A Hollywood screenwriter takes in a runaway girl who’s more woman than he can handle. Dir: Frank Tashlin Cast:  Dick Powell, Debbie Reynolds, Anne Francis. C-98 mins, TV-PG, CC.

My pretty wife’s favorite Christmas film, and it’s not hard to see why. Pure escapism with plenty of digs at Hollywood. Debbie Reynolds is adorable, Dick Powell is acerbic as always, and Alvy Moore keeps the laughs coming with non-stop asides and wisecracks.

There are plenty of Christmas gems still out there waiting to be rediscovered. This is one of them.

In the new comedy Horrible Bosses, Jennifer Aniston plays an overbearing dentist named Julia who tortures her assistant Dale (Charlie Day) by sexually harassing him. She’s one of three managers (along with Colin Farrell and Kevin Spacey) meant to be so detestable that their underlings plot to murder them. She constantly corners Dale, asking him to perform lewd sexual acts. In one scene, Aniston’s character calls him into her office, wearing nothing but a white lab coat. When he expresses discomfort, she taunts him like a high-school bully. “You’re starting to sound like a little faggot there, Dale,” she says.

[...]

So remember folks, the First Amendment provides for freedom of speech, just so long as you don’t offend any gay people.  Just ask Tracy Morgan…

The Green Police gave her grief about this.

Enter Jennifer Aniston, the former Friends star who has successfully transitioned from TV to motion picture fame and cares deeply about conservation. In her contribution to a 2007 book about “saving the planet one simple step at a time,” Aniston reveals she takes three-minute showers and brushes her teeth in the shower. “Every two minutes in the shower uses as much water as a person in Africa uses for everything in their life for a whole day!” she explains.

Well, it’s good to know that Aniston has been consuming less water than the rest of us climate change deniers… in a $42 million Beverly Hills mansion. No cognitive dissonance there! Except, apparently, Aniston has recently decided that the lavish crib is “too much” for her, and she will be downgrading to a “wooden box” a la Mad Men’s Vincent Katheiser trailer a la director Tom Shadyac $4.95 million Manhattan luxury apartment. Now, I’m no expert on New York’s housing market, but that doesn’t quite sound like the kind of humble life that, say, we middle-cass flyover troglodytes already live, right?

The story’s been getting legs in the press (coincidentally, around the same time as her own legs showed up in a trailer for her next film) because she bought the place using a trust fund that was set up in her dog’s name. Eh, let people have their inside jokes, I say; this is a more illuminating detail: “As well as the penthouse, she snapped up two other small units in the building.” So, not only is she buying more expensive housing than a person in Africa can afford over an entire lifetime with the apartment itself, but she needs even more space–all for her and little Norman, the corgi-terrier mix.

It’s been almost half a decade since An Inconvenient Truth came out. I’m no scientist, but the fact that I can count the number of true climate change alarmists who have actually scaled down their standard of living (even though they still work in one of the most unnecessary wasteful industries in the country) on one hand is all I need to know about that documentary’s warnings. Note to Jenn: since neither you nor your peers are exemplifying a real solution for global climate catastrophe, does it really make sense to move to a city that will become the Ground Zero of rising ocean levels?

After Aniston’s ill-advised political posturing, Bill O’Reilly picked up on the quote and riffed off it on his FoxNews show.  Key quote:

Aniston can hire a battery of people to help her, but she cannot hire a dad, OK? And Dads bring a psychology to children that is, in this society, I believe, underemphasized. I think men get hosed all day long in the parental arena.

This is, of course, right on the money.  Since the right to abort a fetus was dubbed “a woman’s right to choose,” feminists, the welfare state, and deadbeat dads across America have done their level best to marginalize the role a father plays in a child’s life.  And finally, in 2010, Jennifer Aniston proclaims that men are officially unnecessary for child rearing.

So, Aniston billed the Switch as a tale of 21st Century girl power and was rewarded with nightmare-ish press from America’s number one cable news show.  Lo and behold, the movie takes an abysmal seventh place at its opening weekend box office behind “Julia Roberts Eats Gelato on a Park Bench” as well as movies called “Lottery Ticket” and “Vampire Sucks” which I first heard of just now.

**MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD**

Before we go any further, I’d like to suggest you stop reading this post right now because I am about to give away the plot of one of the best films of the year.  No kidding.  But if you need your culture war fix, read on.

Kassie, played by Aniston, is a successful, man-less career woman whose child-bearing years are numbered.  So, she decides to do what any 21st century progressive feminist would do and get artificially inseminated, bringing another child into the world who won’t get the benefit of the unique qualities only a father can provide.  She plans to do so at a soirée celebrating this act of supreme narcissism.  So far it sounds like required viewing for new NOW membership.  But not so fast…

At the party, we first meet the sperm-donating hunk Roland (played by the talented Patrick Wilson), donning a ridiculous Viking helmet.  Meanwhile, the doctor who will perform the insemination is preparing for the procedure by partying as hard as anyone.  Then comes the Switch’s riotous kid-humps-a-pie-iconic scene where Aniston’s jealous best friend Wally (a top-notch Jason Bateman) switches The Viking’s semen with his own.  The switch is made unbeknownst to Kassie (and even Wally, who was inebriated at the time), and the end result is Sebastian (played unforgettably by Thomas Robinson).  Later on we’ll learn that instead of taking after the upbeat Adonis Roland, Sebastian is the spitting image of hyper-analytical, hyper-cynical, hand-wringer Wally.  By the end of the party it’s clear the single-mom getting artificially inseminated idea is being mocked.  Here’s more proof:

Yup, Ms. Aniston, it’s satire, and the joke’s on feministas like you.

Aniston moves away and years later she returns for the second act.  It’s in this act that we learn the film isn’t about feminism at all, and it isn’t even about Kassie.  The Switch ultimately is about the relationship that develops between Wally and his biological son Sebastian who he’s just now meeting for the first time at age seven.  Their union is blissful; the kindred spirits fill obvious voids in each others’ lives, and contrary to everything you’re taught in college about fathers, Sebastian needs Wally.  For example, Sebastian begins to gravitate towards his new adult male role model, not his mother, when he’s getting bullied at school.

In the final act, Wally drunkenly stumbles to his friend Leonard’s house at 4am, miserable after finally spilling the beans about the switch to Kassie and fearing he’s lost her and Sebastian forever.  Leonard, played by a very funny Jeff Goldblum, implores him to “go home.”  To that Wally says, “they are my home.”

As you could guess by now, the traditional family is united in the end and it’s smiles all around.

I saw the Switch against my will.  Between Aniston’s insistence this was a film that was culturally relevant in it’s rejection of the traditional family and an ad campaign that centered on billboards of Jason Bateman staring into a cup of male ejaculate, I came into it expecting something akin to an Enhanced Interrogation Technique.  As it turns out, the Switch has a clever plot executed with brisk pacing, complete with memorable performances, and an optimism in the traditional family structure that rises above the chaos of 21st century progressive foolishness.

Aniston’s assessment that the film was a revelation about how men are unnecessary was 180-degrees off the mark.  It’s as if she didn’t see the movie herself.  And that’s sad, not because she cost the film money, but because she deterred a lot of people from a real 21st century novelty: a deep and deeply funny movie-going experience.

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Far more rare is the case that a film can look atrocious and downright distasteful in its ad campaign and then turn out to be an outright winner. Yet thankfully that’s the case with the new dramedy “The Switch,” in which Jennifer Aniston plays Kassie, a woman who opts for artificial insemination when she can’t find Mr. Right while facing 40. Her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) offers to be the sperm supplier, but she has him stuck in the “friend zone” and worries he’ll pass on his neuroses to boot.

The TV commercials for “The Switch” cut to the chase with a stomach-churning scene in which Wally (Jason Bateman) drunkenly sniffs, stares at, plays with and then spills the container of sperm that Kassie is hoping to use for the procedure. Realizing that she has an apartment filled with people attending her “pregnancy party,” and that he can’t face up to admitting he’s ruined her big night, he unzips his pants and takes care of replenishing the supply himself.

So far, so icky. And yet, a better movie is already lurking around the edges as there’s witty banter between the two stars, who are in top form throughout the film, and a thoughtful opening narration over images of New Yorkers rushing right past each others’ lives. That clever writing is courtesy of Allan Loeb, who is widely considered the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood these days due to the fact he has a whopping 12 screenplays in production.

The movie pulls a switch of its own after taking a seven-year leap in time. Kassie decided to move back home to Minnesota while pregnant because she felt it would be too hard to raise a child in New York City. But now her son is six, she’s gotten a great job offer back in the Big Apple, and she’s suddenly ready to re-enter Wally’s life.

Wally’s still single and a neurotic mess, but he sees that her son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson, a real find) looks and acts just like himself even as Kassie’s in oblivious denial. And as she relies on Wally to babysit for Sebastian while she delves into a new relationship with the guy she thought was the donor (Patrick Wilson), Wally comes to realize it’s time to grow up and fight for the important things in life.

“The Switch” is directed by the team of Josh Gordon and Will Speck, who previously did the Will Ferrell figure-skating farce “Blades of Glory.” They pull a 180 in this film once the slapsticky first 20 minutes go by, turning out a film that knows when to be funny but more importantly, knows when to be serious without turning sappy. It’s almost as good as the highly regarded 2002 film “About a Boy,” in which Hugh Grant played a middle-aged man-child forced to mature when a lonely teenage boy and his mother enter his life.

Gordon and Speck also make vibrant use of a sharp supporting cast including Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis, as well as the film’s many New York City locations, fully ingraining the city into the film’s atmosphere without relying on overused tourist traps like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. And the sharp score by Alex Wurman is complemented by an array of thoughtful indie-rock songs.

For those wondering how the film handles the moral issues of artificial insemination and single motherhood, “The Switch” starts out with Kassie happy and determined to get pregnant, saying that a man isn’t necessary to raise a child. But as the film goes on, it uses a couple of quietly powerful and moving sequences to show the enormous emotional impact the lack of a father and the opportunity to bond with a father figure can have on a child. This is one film that handles thorny lifestyle issues in a directly positive way.

Put it all together, and “The Switch” is the best kind of cinematic surprise: a film that is far better than expected and even better than it had to be.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire – class and glamour during Hollywood’s heyday

The term “movie star” used to mean a lot to the American public – glitz, glamour, excitement. It embodied an “other worldliness,” if you will, that took hard-working people away from the daily grind and gave them something thrilling and new to take their minds off of their troubles. An afternoon or evening at the movies really meant something then, and the stars who populated the silver screen lived up to the hype – publicly, anyway. This was due to the studio system. During the 1930s and ‘40s:

…the major studios groomed their stable for stardom by picking suitable vehicles that developed their personae—sophisticated comedy for Grant, intense melodrama for Davis, and so on. They also controlled the stars’ publicity, doling out digestible, often-erroneous tidbits on their personal lives for the fan magazines and gossip columns.

Once the studio system was broken, however, we began to see Tinseltown’s residents through a very different lens. Stars began to develop their own careers, making their own decisions and living with the consequences, both good and bad. And the press, which was once held at bay by the studio bigs, had much more access to celebrities. Television talk shows like The Tonight Show and Merv Griffin brought us even closer to our idols. They became…well, more like us, except with oodles more money, fancy cars, designer duds and entrée into exclusive clubs and resorts.

Which, of course, they are. Movie stars, celebrities, whatever you wish to call them, are “just like us,” with the same fears, worries, and issues about their love lives. The problem is, we don’t want them to be just like us. They are blessed with fabulous careers that bring them ever so much more than the average person can expect out of life. Think about it: how many of us can hop on a private jet to some exotic locale and have millions of people around the world waiting eagerly to read all about it in the celebrity rags? We want them to rise above the every day humdrum. We want glamour. We want excitement. We expect them to live up to the hype.

 
Brad Pitt looking more like a boxcar vagrant than one of Hollywood’s hottest men.

But these days, what do we get? Scandal upon scandal. Constant whining. Leading ladies pushing grocery carts outside of the supermarket. Leading men sporting very unattractive facial hair and looking like badly aging skater dudes. So-called celebrities who became celebrated not based upon any kind of talent, but because they figured out how to work the system. 

One word: blech.

I expect that many of BH’s commenters might take exception to the “we want glamour from our celebrities” theory, and it’s true that not everyone is enamored with the whole glitz and glamour aspect of the entertainment world. Fair enough. So let’s move on to something we can probably all agree upon: We want to be entertained. Whether it’s acting, singing or dancing, entertainers are paid to, well, entertain the masses. And those who have made it to the top of the heap are paid very, very well.

Remember, actors and musicians were, until perhaps a century ago, near the bottom rung of the social ladder. Men in high society had affairs with beautiful actresses and opera singers, but didn’t bring them home to meet mother and they certainly didn’t do anything so rash as to propose marriage to them.

 
Jennifer Aniston greets her rabid fans in Berlin.

But today, Hollywoodists are treated as close to royalty as one can get in American society. And what do we get in return for our admiration and hard-earned dollars that we spend at the movie theater or concert arena? Instead of focusing on what they’re paid to do, entertainers often want to use their very large public platform to “do some good in the world.” Sounds good, but too many of them seem to go about it in a way that’s insulting to the unwashed hordes without whom they’d still be just another waiter or dry cleaner attendant. Frankly, we get treated like a bunch of dumb hicks who wouldn’t know how to figure our way out of the proverbial paper bag. Environmentalism is one area in which celebs have invested themselves heavily. I’ve quoted him before, but it’s worth quoting Christopher Grey again on the topic:

Celebrities want attention, but they also want credibility because they typically don’t have any. Environmentalism is an easy cause for them to promote to get attention and at the same time appear somehow thoughtful and even educated because it is allegedly based on science. Of course none of this has anything do with reality, but this is the entertainment business. Reality is not important at all. Image is everything. Talking about recycling, stopping offshore drilling, solar power, and electric cars is a lot easier than really trying to do something for people in the world like feeding the hungry, helping abused children, or building houses for the homeless.

It also deflects attention from the obvious fact that celebrities are often some of the most wasteful, energy inefficient, materialistic, shallow, and superficial people in our society. A classic recent example was James Cameron, who talked about how his film, Avatar, was a shining example of environmentalism. Obama echoed this praise. This was the most expensive movie ever made about a war on an alien planet. What exactly about this movie helped to conserve resources or save our planet? The answer is absolutely nothing.

The emphasis on that first sentence is mine. Actors and actresses are not “rocket scientists.” Some of them do attain higher education, for what it’s worth – Brooke Shields and Jodie Foster come immediately to mind – but a good number of them are either high school or college dropouts. This obviously rankles, and they want to be more than just pretty faces. And so we’re told how great it is to live in cow dung huts and do our business in the jungle in a country where half the children are underweight and maternal mortality rates are high; treated to movies about how greedy and destructive human beings are by movie moguls who work in an industry that is one of the world’s biggest polluters; and in a mythical face-off with a giant robot, the “white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America” would be the first to go.

Nice.

 Cameron Diaz is inspired by cow-dung huts in Nepal – but not inspired
enough to move there and live in one.

Of course, don’t forget that if you don’t agree with Hollywoodists politically, you might as well shoot yourself now. If you don’t like the current administration, you’re a racist. If you live in Arizona and support the law that makes it harder for illegal aliens to pour across the border, they’ll punish you by boycotting your state – of course, they don’t live there. Perhaps some of them are has-beens doing it to get their names back out into the press. Whatever. Interestingly enough, there isn’t a boycott of Rhode Island, a state that has been doing what Arizona is trying to do since 2008.

In a nutshell: Americans don’t like being lectured by those who live in glass houses. We don’t like being lectured by people who, because they happen to make a lot of money without breaking into a sweat, behave as though they are more intelligent and more cultured than the rest of us. We don’t like being belittled by those who claim to represent us while they’re overseas. The death of the Hollywood star can, I believe, be partly put down to our being tired of their elitist attitude toward the public whose support makes their fabulously privileged lives possible.

There’s an old saying: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. And a newer one: Shut up and sing. And if you can’t manage that, don’t complain when your adoring public isn’t so adoring anymore.

-”I take a three-minute shower,” [Jennifer Aniston] told Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen, authors of The Green Book. She even brushes her teeth while she’s in there.

-“Entourage” star Adrian Grenier has lived in an apartment insulated with old pants.

-Vegetarian and planetary crusader Tobey Maguire reportedly has banned all leather products from his house. He also “makes everyone take off their leather belts and shoes and leave them by the door!”

-Leonardo DiCaprio “stays green at home, too—with his $3,200 eco-friendly toilet!”

-Bob Dylan sells “renewable grocery bags” at his concerts.

-Disney Channel star Selena Gomez recently announced that her yet-to-debut clothing line will be as green as can be.

Full article here.

On another note, what is a “renewable grocery bag”?  Dictionary.com says renewable (in the environmentalism sense) means “inexhaustible or replaceable by new growth.”  Assuming we are talking about those canvas bags you see people taking to and from Whole Foods, we’re not sure the word “renewable” applies.  It seems like the word “renewable” is the latest eco-babble buzz word.

Still, props to E! for acknowledging at least some of these things are “stupid.”

It was on a Friday night and I was in the Wal-Mart DVD aisle desperately searching for anything that might help to take the edge off a particularly brutal week of corporate bill collecting when the tagline “Work Sucks” caught my eye. Normally the thought of paying retail would’ve worked against such an impulse buy, but the comfort gained from those two words were alone worth $19.99, and home with me “Office Space” went.

Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday and you’re not feeling real well, does anyone ever say to you, “Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays”?

No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you’d get your ass kicked sayin’ something like that, man.

For those of you who have never been planted in a cubicle, who have never spent 40 hours a week swallowed by a McOffice Park, suffered through endless office birthday parties, been passively-aggressively terrorized by a Bill Lumbergh, or slogged daily through endless piles of mindless, pointless corporate bull shit created for the sole purpose of being mindless, endless corporate bull shit… For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to hate yourself for worrying about losing a job you loathe… You can’t begin to understand why, after “The Searchers” and “Deuce Bigalow,” the vicarious revenge Mike Judge created just for us ranks as the third greatest movie ever made.

“Oh, and remember: next Friday… is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.”

Peter Gibbons, an office drone/software developer played to dull-eyed desperate perfection by Ron Livingston, hates most everything about his existence; the generic apartment, his grating daily commute and most especially the time he spends at Initech where life is one endless cycle of worrying about being asked to work the weekend and this:

Hi  Peter. What’s happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.

Yeah. The coversheet. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it.

Yeah. Did you get that memo?

Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. And the problem is just that I forgot the one time. And I’ve already taken care of it so it’s not even really a problem anymore.

Ah! Yeah. It’s just we’re putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that’d be great. All right!

To his credit, Peter is at least wise enough to have figured out ambition is a poison you take yourself and has no desire to advance his way out of Initech. But there is rent to pay, which means he’s stuck at Initech or someplace just as bad … unless of course he wins the lottery, in which case he would do exactly what I dreamt of with each and every scratch off: “… relax … sit on my ass all day …do nothing.” The only problem is that unless that unlikely ship docks, Peter can only see life unspooling in a manner in which a good day is one where his boss Bill Lumbergh (a way beyond brilliant Gary Cole) doesn’t “request” his presence on Saturday.

Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too…

The only bright spot in Peter’s day is sneaking off with his fellow cube-bots Samir and Michael Bolton (no, not the singer) and strolling over to Chotchkie’s (one of those obnoxiously-themed restaurant chains that glom on to McOffice Parks like sucker fish on a shark) where from afar he admires Joanna (an all kinds of fetching Jennifer Aniston), a waitress as dissatisfied with her fifteen pieces of flaired existence as Peter. (You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair… that they made the Jews wear.)

Peter: Lumbergh’s gonna have me work on Saturday. I can tell already. I’m gonna end up doing it, because, uh… because I’m a big pussy, which is why I work at Initech to begin with.

Michael Bolton: Uh, yeah, well, I work at Initech and I don’t consider myself a pussy, okay?

Samir: Yes, I am also not a pussy.

Anne, Peter’s controlling girlfriend (who’s probably cheating on him), is tired of his increasingly gloomy outlook and drags him into hypnotherapy to get help. As a relaxation exercise, the therapist hypnotizes Peter and essentially orders him not to give a damn. But before he can bring Peter out of the spell, the therapist has a heart attack and a new Peter is born.

I uh, I don’t like my job, and, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.

You’re just not gonna go?

Yeah.

Won’t you get fired?

I don’t know, but I really don’t like it, and, uh, I’m not gonna go.

Rather than detail and ruin the surprise of what follows, suffice to say it fulfills the non-violent but still very satisfying daydreams every cubicle rat has ever had. In other words: Damn it feels good to be a gangsta’.

The consequence of Peter’s behavior ends up being what you might call counter-intuitive. Instead of his attitude getting him fired, Peter is seen as showing leadership, given a raise and promoted. Unfortunately, Samir and Michael Bolton (no, not the singer) are “downsized” by the “two Bobs,” a couple of hired guns brought in by Initech to “evaluate” everyone’s job.

–

After taking revenge on a hated office machine (see above) that only ever produced error messages (Mother… shitter… Son of an… ass. I just…), the trio steals Richard Pryor’s genius idea from “Superman III” and plots an even bigger revenge against Initech — the kind of revenge that might land them in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. All the while, Peter’s new give-a-damn attitude continues to make his dreams come true when he suddenly finds himself free to pursue Joanna after Anne dumps him.

I wanna take you out to dinner, and then I wanna go back to my apartment and watch ‘Kung Fu.’ Do you ever watch ‘Kung Fu’?

I love ‘Kung Fu.’

Channel 39.

Totally.

You should come over and watch ‘Kung Fu’ tonight.

Ok.

Besides the terrific performances already mentioned, Stephen Root disappears behind a genius mix of pathetic and creepy as the Swingline stapler-obsessed Milton Waddams. Richard Riehle (who would reach the heights of cinema esteem that very same year as Deuce Biglow’s dad) captures so well those middle-aged guys who do nothing all day beyond perfecting the art of looking busy and vital. As Lawrence, Peter’s construction-worker neighbor wise beyond his I.Q., Diedrich Bader gets most of the bigger laughs.

Another special mention must go out to Gary Cole’s — yeah-that-would-be great — work as Lumbergh. Somehow, in a single iconic performance, Cole brought together the characteristics of every manipulative, obtuse, coffee cup-carrying middle-manager who wouldn’t know an original thought if it kissed him on the mouth. The impact of this performance is so great you don’t realize how few scenes he really has.

For as long as there are soul-numbing commutes, sad little men in business-casual dying slowly under flickering fluorescents, and chirpy secretaries who define their existence planning that day’s office party, “Office Space” will live on because Judge brought this world to life with both penetrating insight and a sincere, good-natured sense of humor that never condescends but only sympathizes. Most important, in his delivery, Judge understood that you don’t have to exaggerate that which is already exaggerated.

In my day I’ve worked for more than my share of Lumberghs, with too many office supply-obsessed Miltons, and sang Happy Birthday to more people I loathe than I care to remember. Come Friday night, “Office Space” was my palate cleanser, my spirit guide, and my way to wash off the stain of the work week and begin another two day countdown to the next case of the Mondays.

Yes, by that objective standard, there are plenty of “superior” films.

But how many of those help to get us through? Or introduced us to the O Face?