Take Nolan's Dick Out of Your Mouth!

Christopher Nolan's a good guy. He's been a total gentleman: treated you well all evening, opened all the right doors for you, pulled out all the right chairs. But just because a guy buys you dinner, that doesn't mean you owe him a blowjob. Even if that dinner was The Dark Knight.

And let's not kid ourselves. The Dark Knight is the only reason Nolan's balls are resting on your chin right now. You're not teasing his glans with your tongue because of Tom Hardy's Bane.

He caught your eye with Memento. Wow! This guy, he seemed so deep, so intellectual! Then he flashed you that sultry, seductive, Batman Begins smile, and you were hooked. Your heart raced. This guy might finally wash away those awful Bruckheimer years! Nolan was so raw, so confident! Was it getting warm in here?

Well, by the end of The Dark Knight, you were starting to feel a little drunk. It's okay, it happens to the best of us. That Joker is some pretty potent stuff.

But everyone looks better through that intoxicated cloud. So you overlooked the signs, the little red flags that said maybe Nolan wasn't really all that. You excused his pretentous posturing while he rambled through Inception. Did your best to ignore his boorish, chest-thumping bluster during The Dark Knight Rises.

Now you've made it to the end of Interstellar, and, well...

Well for fuck's sake, you'll give the guy head just to shut him up and get this night over with.

But you don't have to do it! You don't owe it to him, and you're not doing either of you any favors!

Sure, the evening could have gone better, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a wash. Who knows, maybe your earlier impression wasn't far off. Nobody who makes The Dark Knight can be all bad, right? Sure, the writing got a bit clunky at times, and the morals were alternately ham-fisted or oddly ambiguous. But that fucking JOKER, right?

Maybe Nolan's worth another shot. Maybe he just got a bit flustered and overeager to follow his best moment with something equally impressive, rather than moving slowly, deliberately, and letting this courtship progress naturally.

One thing's for sure, though: he's got no incentive to do better when blowjobs come this easy.

So how about you pull that thing out of your mouth, wipe off your chin, and politely call it a night? Give the both of you a little time to cool off, get some distance, and come back fresh at a later date. This guy needs to slow it down and consider his next move with more care.

Maybe this time the he could try taking a little longer than two years to churn out another "masterpiece".

Who Shat First?

God knows why, but somebody roused Harrison Ford long enough to ask him "who shot first". As though he alone held the secret truth. That somehow all conclusive evidence has been washed from the earth and our last hope is for testimony from the man who held the prop blaster almost four decades ago. His answer, equal parts appropriate and unhelpful, was "I don't care".

Lucas has so thoroughly soiled the franchise for me that I don't care either these days. Cleansing Solo's record of one premeditated murder isn't even a drop in the oceans of blood fans have wept over the past fifteen years. But one thing I still care about is the notion that matters of indisputable fact are treated as "opinions" to be "debated". Climate change is a fact. Evolution is a fact. Dan Aykroyd should have been the first dead Ghostbuster: fact.

Allow me to push my glasses up and suck the excess spit from my retainer.

*AHEM*

Han shot first. In fact, he was the only one who fired at all.

Many years later, a pussy son of a bitch who unironically called himself "George Lucas" forced a CG artist -- at knifepoint -- to add a blast from Greedo to "justify" Han's use of lethal force. "George" then masturbated to the revised footage until he reached a massive, body-rocking climax. His muscles contracted so hard that he sprayed shit all over the floor. The shit was collected into wet, runny piles, then distributed in theaters as "prequels".

And that's the story, motherfucker.

Sex, Lies and Cloud-Based File Sharing of MP4's

Sex Tape
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel and a bunch of actors who've come to terms with where their careers are at these days.

Remember that time when you and your spouse, the two of you struggling to rekindle the fire of your early years, recorded yourselves having sex? And remember how your iPad sent that video to the Cloud, seeding that lusty video to the bundle of iPads you got from Costco to give to all your friends and family? What a hilarious time you both had as you scrambled to retrieve those tablets and remove all evidence of your suburban debauchery from the internet!

Yeah, that old chestnut.

Thankfully, writer Kate Angelo has breathed fresh new life into this age-old premise, in this year's best film inspired by an awards show swag-bag. Not since the Palm Pilot-based Brittany Murphy vehicle Little Black Book has a film so daringly embraced a short-lived fad as its core foundation. (I'm speaking of the Palm Pilot, not Brittany Murphy.)

All sarcasm aside, this movie looks to be another artless, heartless, soulless space-filler. The trailer alone is dripping with contempt for the viewing public. The only good thing I can say from what I've seen is that Jason Segel's been eating less, and Cameron Diaz has been eating more, and they're both better off for it.

But that's no reason to sit through this shit. The best moments of the film are in the trailer, and they're not much. Better to watch some legitimate porn. The writing and acting, admittedly, will be (marginally) inferior to Sex Tape, but at least porn is honest. Everyone knows the score. But this, this thing... it's a calculated, cynical dodge to pad studio pockets. A formulaic, paint-by-numbers smirk-fest built from a screenplay seminar algorithm.

This movie doesn't deserve to make money, but chances are it will. Just don't let it take yours. Don't encourage these people. After two decades of Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, have we not learned by now that nothing good can come of a sex tape?

"Crisis" Averted

"Crisis"
Sundays 10pm, NBC, starting (and hopefully ending) March 16, 2014
Gillian Anderson, Dermot Mulroney, Rachael Taylor, Lance Gross

So. Crisis. It's crap.

This particular show has been done over and over and over now. The giant conspiracy, where everyone's a suspect, the stakes are the the world itself, and somebody has an impossibly elaborate scheme to do something stupid that doesn't need to be done at all.

This time it's a professional kidnapping of the teenage kids of a dozen different high-power families. Tycoons, diplomats, the US president... you know, the kind that are always going on field trips together. On a fucking bus. But it's not gonna be for ransom, that's for sure. No, this is all in service of a much larger design, some plot to take over something, control something, destroy something, whatever who cares. Tune in each week for another reveal that goes nowhere!

Hack writing. Canned direction. No characters, just actors hitting their marks and reciting their lines. Which is sad, because there's a handful of actors in Crisis who are better than the material they've been given.

I've seen this show before. The Event. Flash Forward. The Nine. Revolution. Vanished. So many times, over and over. And I've never stuck with any of them. This is paint-by-numbers TV, and I just don't have the time.

Well, maybe I'll watch one more episode. Just to be sure.

Dammit.

The Wire: VERY Late to the Party

Well what the hell, why not.
Sure, the show ended six years ago, sure it started twelve years ago, but I'm finally gonna watch The Wire this week. Everyone in America's already seen it, which I know because all 300 million of them have recommended it to me at one time or another. Yet somehow I have remained spoiler-free (since '93!), so this should go smoothly.
Wish me luck, see you on the other side!

Would Everyone PLEASE Stop Dying!

This is getting ridiculous.
Fuck the rule of threes. People are dropping like fucking flies now. Every week there's a new batch of dead entertainers who really contributed something.I'm not sure why Harold Ramis is the one that put me over the edge, but he did. Maybe because he was so instrumental to many of the films that I loved growing up.

THE DEAD (Just in fucking February, which ain't over yet btw):
Maximilian Schell
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Shirley Temple Black
Sid Caesar
Ralph Waite
John Henson
Malcolm Tierney
Harold Ramis

No small number of them died younger than they should have, from overdose or rare illness. And for the record, just to  put into sharp relief the injustice of it all...

THE LIVING (and still working)
Lindsay Lohan
Kirk Cameron
Stephen Baldwin
Charlie Sheen
Chelsea Handler
Corey Feldman
Dane Cook
Rob Schneider

Seriously, fuck this shit. I quit.

I've Sinew Naked Too Much Already!

Ahhh, puns.
Seriously though, is there really that big a market for Willem Dafoe nude scenes? They're everywhere! Google "Willem Dafoe naked", if you dare.
Now I'm not saying the man has anything to be ashamed of. He doesn't. He keeps himself fit and healthy. I have shame, because I've really let myself go over the last fifteen years. But fitness levels notwithstanding, this is one weird-ass body to keep putting onto film.
Picture Dafoe's face: not exactly hideous, but definitely odd; every feature fighting for dominance, bony protrusions in all the wrong places, skin pulled tightly over tendons like wet rubber bands. Now imagine that face has legs and a penis. Because that shit goes all the way down. The guy looks like a novice art student's hastily-drawn figure study crawled off the page and started fucking anything that moved.
I think my first Willem sex scene was a couple decades ago, with Madonna and some dripping candle wax. Not a pleasant memory. But I don't really follow his films, so I didn't realize how common this was. I wouldn't see that pale, vacu-sealed skin again until the first Spider-Man movie. (Thanks a lot, Raimi.)
More recently he was a demon, or the devil, or something (I've said before that I don't do research). The poster showed off his grisly torso from behind with some wood sprite or something wrapping her legs around him, because who wouldn't pay to see more of that in the theater? I'll take two tickets, one for me and one for the nurse who puts moisturizing drops in my pried-open eyeballs!
Now there's Nymphomaniac. It's an ensemble piece, so everyone gets a chance to strip and show their O face. And that's just for the posters. Of course, the producers say, let's get Willem Dafoe! That guy fucking LOVES doing nude scenes! Really, he's done so damn many this must be some kinda thing for him. And once again a crew of honest, hard-working, possibly unsuspecting union professionals shows up on the set to powder, light, and film his puckered, clenching buttocks.
I know I should be focused on Shia "Mutt" LeBeouf being in this film because of all the shit about plagiarism, but...
Sorry, wait. I have to take a moment here. Yes, I said I don't do research, but I did go as far as to look up the proper spelling of LeBeouf just now on imdb, and it turns out there's a Nymphomaniac VOLUME TWO???
Fuck it. Forget Willem Dafoe's freaky alien autopsy physique. I'm done with this one. And no more researching; it only leads to more disappointing knowledge.