By Bethany Lankin

What we saw on the red carpet.
Cameron Diaz
Cameron seems to be overdoing the spray tan these days. Her skin’s a shade of orange somewhere between “Irish setter” and “basketball.” Why is she standing like that? Did she just get over a bout of rickets? Cameron, did you know that cheese, fortified milk, herring, and mackerel are all good sources of vitamin D? The worst part is that Cameron’s dress seems to be made from a linen tablecloth and napkins. You’re going to be pretty embarrassed later in the evening at the Governor’s Ball when a waiter tries to rewrap a champagne bottle in your neckline.
Reese Witherspoon
I actually liked this dress, mostly because it looks like it’s made out of crepe paper and it’s the color of a nasty bruise. However, the fact that it looks like the heavily shingled “before” picture of a stripped hair cuticle from the Pantene Pro-V commercials reminds me to schedule a conditioning oil treatment at my local spa.
Jennifer Lopez
. . . and so I was like, “You want to just use a few, right?” and she was all like “No, I want to use all of them.” And I was all like “You don’t mean all of them.” And she was all like “Yes, I want you to use every single one of Liberace’s bicycle chains for this dress.”

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Posted on February 27, 2007

By Scott Buckner

It’s Monday night, undisputedly the worst night of the week for TV watching. So I figure: Screw it – if you can’t beat ’em join ’em. Next thing I know, I’m sitting high atop the nation’s TV programming landfill with ABC’s Wife Swap. It took awhile for the dog with the brandy keg around its neck to lead me back down, but I can tell you this: I have been to the mountain, and if bad TV was bread raining down from the heavens, I’d have enough yeast to give every woman in the Northern Hemisphere a really uncomfortable infection of some sort for months. Or the ability cure every case of the clap that arises during the next 150 years, whichever.
In case you’ve been living on the moon for the past year or two, Wife Swap follows two families with values as mixable as oil and water in a two-week exchange of husbands, children, and lives to discover just what it’s like to live in the other woman’s world. Fourteen days, which is four more than the washed-up celebrities on VH-1’s The Surreal Life have to endure without strangling each other in their sleep. And the wife swapper folks are real people with real lives, so a lot less slack gets cut.
Anyway, here’s the stats on Monday night’s mismatched families with behavioral habits you should be glad you don’t have:
Family 1: The Hamiltons. They live in Ohio. There’s mom Angie, husband Tim, and 14-year-old daughter Chastity. Angie believes all girls (and wives) should be treated like princesses. Literally. She even holds – and participates in – “princess parties” for Chastity and her friends, and believes that princesses (including princess wives) don’t do chores. Or anything much else constructive, either. Shopping, designer labels, manicures, and pedicures totally rule, dude.

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Posted on February 27, 2007

By Scott Buckner

ABC continued its tradition of delivering the most astoundingly lame programming into America’s living rooms with a vengeance last night as it presented the 79th Academy Awards. If you come across a bunch of surly co-workers today, cut them a good bit of slack. Not only did the Oscars kill any hope of any of them getting laid at a reasonable hour, but it killed any plans they might have had for watching Tora! Tora! Tora! was on American Movie Classics.
On the bright side, Nielsen ratings history was made when a mass exodus of viewers was noticed emigrating to WTTW. Unfortunately for the folks at Channel 11, it wasn’t a pledge night. They won’t make that mistake next year.
*
The 2007 Oscars. Yeah. The night of 1,000 stars – and 999 showed up in the most hideous dresses anyone could possibly invent. This was a night that totally begged for the astutely rude commentary we’ve come to expect and enjoy in the past from Kathy Griffin on E!’s Live From The Red Carpet pre-show. Instead we got a taste of how much tedium lay ahead with E!’s decision to have Ryan Seacrest do the honors.
The top offender was Penelope Cruz, wearing something that 500 pink poodles were sacrificed to make. Runner-up was little Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), doing her best to look like a Baskin-Robbins peppermint ice cream cake-topper decoration.

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Posted on February 26, 2007

By Kathryn Ware

A review of this year’s Academy Award acceptance speeches, in order of acceptance.
Best Live Action Short Film
Winner Ari Sandel (West Bank Story) explains to America the plight of “little guy” filmmakers such as himself, struggling to realize their vision on a shoestring and a prayer. The camera cuts to Gwyneth Paltrow in the audience, whose dangly earrings alone could finance the production of 200 short films.
Best Sound Editing
In the course of announcing the win (Letters from Iwo Jima), Alan Robert Murray is dissed twice, first when Steve Carell reads only his partner Bub Asman’s name, and again when the off-camera announcer spouting trivia to kill time as the winners walk to the stage transposes his name, calling him Robert Alan Murray. Murray retaliates by giving the dullest acceptance speech of the evening, read in a monotone voice and leaving his colleague with no time to speak.
Best Sound Mixing
The theme of the evening’s speeches is set – pull out your prepared list of Thank You’s while uttering “I know you’re not supposed to read anything, but . . . ”

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Posted on February 26, 2007

By Marilyn Ferdinand

“Every science has its fans.” So said Walter Matthau’s blueblood character to botanist Elaine May in the 1971 comedy A New Leaf, and you know what – he was absolutely right. This evening, the world may be leering at the décolletage of this year’s crop of starlets jiggling down the red carpet or forced into watching multiple reaction shots of the aging lions of the screen getting their fawning due from the Academy. Me? I’ll be riveted to the two-minute montage that each year comprises the coverage of the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards.
I’ve always been fascinated with the technical aspects of moviemaking. I’ve long had The American Widescreen Museum bookmarked on my list of Internet favorites and believe wholeheartedly in that site’s tagline: “Where artistry and technology combined to form Showmanship.” I felt a shiver when I gazed at one of the actual two-strip Technicolor cameras used to shoot Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s great comic swashbuckler The Black Pirate (1926). (Bet you thought all silent movies were black & white, huh?)
These days, technology has come to dominate the production of the blockbuster films of summer that frequently make or break a studio’s financial year. So prevalent have special effects become that the 2002 satire S1m0ne, in which a digitally-created actress becomes an overnight sensation, actually became a cause for alarm among flesh-and-blood stars. While I don’t think our screen gods and goddesses will ever be replaced by computers, the casts of thousands that movies used to boast about are already a thing of the past, thanks to digital cloning.

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Posted on February 25, 2007

Who: Zola Levitt.
Where: Dallas.
Organization: Zola Levitt Ministries.
Brief History: Zola Levitt, a Messianic-Jewish convert, had a Ph.D. in music from Indiana University and had written more than 200 spiritual songs and two nationally televised musicals: Beloved Thief and Mine Eyes Have Seen.

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Posted on February 25, 2007

By Scott Buckner

It took me a week or two, but I finally caught up last night to Rules of Engagement on CBS because I was too busy doing something else to notice that the rerun of the always-funny Two And A Half Men ended. If I were the military or the cops, I’d sue CBS for sullying a perfectly good saying that tells all good jackbooters when, where, and how force should be used.
For anyone too uninterested in this show to read the entire account, here’s the condensed version of everything you need to know: David Spade, bad. Patrick Warburton (instantly recognizable to anyone with kids as the voice of Kronk, and as David Puddy from Seinfeld to everyone else), good. Writing, bad. Megyn Price (the hot mom from Grounded For Life), good.

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Posted on February 20, 2007

It’s a diet that masquerades as a non-diet.
What it Is: A diet and exercise plan. It includes anatomically engineered “blueprinting” cards, which you use to stack together a portrait of your body and arrive at a customized plan. For your workouts, Thurmond provides the body sculpting band – an elastic rope with handles at each end. For the dieting part, there’s a recipe and dining-out guide, and tapes on “living lean.”
Quote: “Eat more, exercise less, and make your entire body over exactly as you want it . . . if you do it, it’s impossible to fail!”

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Posted on February 20, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I’m not a major fan of auto racing but as televised sporting events go, when you need to kill a little time in the neighborhood gin mill, NASCAR isn’t too horribly bad. But when a dude goes sliding across the finish line on his roof and on fire like Clint Bowyer did during Fox TV’s coverage of Sunday’s Daytona 500, you can’t help but be either a fan or at least a momentary convert toward what’s otherwise a very boring televised sport. Hell, when dudes in the NBA start laying it up with their heads on fire, I’ll have a more charitable opinion about basketball, too.
Because NASCAR (which stands for “Nahs car, Bubba”) is an inescapable fact every Sunday afternoon between February and November in pretty much every tavern that’s worth a shit along the south suburbs/Indiana border, you pretty much have to figure out a system of dealing with it if you want some human contact to go along with your alcohol. Hence, I’ve discovered that the secret to non-fan NASCAR enjoyment is to show up sometime within the last 50 or so laps. That’s when all the good stuff really happens, because NASCAR’s roots lie in a past filled with moonshine runners and that alone means the closing laps involve some serious pedal to the metal balls to the walls racing you just don’t get anywhere else.

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Posted on February 19, 2007

They took a perfectly good potential comic-book title for this?
What It Is: A cordless electric knife that uses sound waves to separate food.
Description: It vibrates. The motor is inside a handle that looks rather unwieldy, but. It also comes with a handy, fork-like tool that holds the food in place and cubes it, but also looks like it belongs in a hairdresser’s drawer.
Quotes: “All the goodness stays inside!” “Say goodbye to the squishing and squashing!”
Price: $133.32

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Posted on February 18, 2007