Chicago -
Who: Joel Osteen.
Organization: Lakewood Church, Joel Osteen Ministries.
Book: “Your Best Life Now”
Website slogan: Discover the Champion in You
Fire and Brimstone: Joel is too much of an optimist to believe anyone would ever end up in Hell.
Posted on August 15, 2007
By Julia Gray
When I heard that Kimora Lee Simmons and her husband, hip hop mogul and satchel-ass pants designer Russell Simmons were getting a divorce, I was hoping that Kimora’s 15 minutes would finally be up. Why such vitriol you ask? Well, her first offense was taking over the Hello, Kitty icon and turning it into expensive jewelry for her line of clothing and accessories, Baby Phat. Then, in an article in Vanity Fair, she compared herself to the late Coretta Scott King. Seriously.
The Style Network’s new reality series Kimora: Life In the Fab Lane is an inside peek at Kimora’s world. Last night’s episode featured Kimora planning an ad campaign for her Baby Phat line. There’s a hitch, though. The chosen theme, Russia, does not exactly reflect the pink T-shirts and hip sweat suits that are Baby Phat’s signature. I don’t remember seeing photos of Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front festooned in pink sweats or prisoners in the gulag trying to keep warm in dolman-sleeved tees. So, Senior Director of Marketing James (serfs aren’t allowed last names) has been assigned the task of making new designs to match the theme, not go over budget and most importantly, not let Kimora know there’s a problem.
Posted on August 13, 2007
By Julia Gray
“My name is Tim. T-I-M. And I’m addicted to crack cocaine.”
This is how every episode of A&E’s Intervention begins. Each week highlights a person with a life-threatening addiction and they agree to have cameras follow their adventures under the guise that they’re in a documentary about addiction. Little do they know that they will face an intervention during the last 15 minutes of each show with an “interventionist” who, along with family and friends, will hopefully convince the addict to be trucked off to rehab someplace across country – or else.
Posted on August 6, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
I’m from Minneapolis and I’ve driven on the stretch of 35W that collapsed into the Mississippi River about a million times. The highway is a major north-south route through the city, and also happens to run along the edge of both the West and East Banks of the University of Minnesota, where I was an undergraduate for, oh, a good six or seven years. I was having too much fun to leave, and besides, we were kicking a lot of ass at The Minnesota Daily.
I just saw the big ol’ house that me and four friends lived in our junior year on a national network broadcast. One of the all-time great party houses (before these guys prettied it up). I think we paid $190 a month each in rent. Our landlord was an ass; I’ll never forget the time one of my roommates, whose father was friends with my father at the same age, swung a golf club at him.
We lived just a few blocks west of the first entrance and exit ramps of 35W just after the bridge crossed the Mississippi; the campus was a few blocks to the east. We walked by that bridge every day.
Posted on August 3, 2007
By Scott Buckner
If you’re going to get a hankering for a good black-and-white horror flick, just after midnight in that time that bridges Friday and Saturday is as good a time to get it. The folks running the Independent Film Channel certainly get it, because they had the presence of mind to present This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, the subtitled 1967 sequel to At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul by Brazilian macabre master Jose Mojica Marins.
This one’s even better than At Midnight because Marins demonstrates growth as a filmmaker – which basically means it’s even more Felliniesque, there’s considerably more screaming and cheesecake, the women are hotter, and Zé now has a hunchbacked assistant named Bruno.
Posted on July 30, 2007
By Scott Buckner
If you like your women cold and hard as a well-digger’s ass in January, you’ll like FX’s new series, Damages. (Tuesday’s premiere episode, which I wasn’t home to see Tuesday, is being re-run several times tonight and probably to death this weekend, so you’ll have ample chance to see it.) If you like legal dramas where you sit there the whole time trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on but you go along for the ride anyway because it’s not often that you get to see the dark, manipulative underbelly of the legal profession, you’ll like this show, too.
I like my women a bit softer than that, and there are times when I don’t feel like working that hard in order to enjoy a TV show, but it’s still a show worth watching because it solidifies common opinion that lawyers suck.
Posted on July 26, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Do you believe in God? Well, do ya, punk? That’s kinda the premise behind Saving Grace, TNT’s new Monday night show that, I’m hoping, will quell my incessant bitching about the state of Monday night TV. It’s a good show, but whether it turns out to be a great one will depend how well Holly Hunter can beat it into submission. Or lets us in on why she keeps kissing police headquarters lab rat Laura San Giacamo on the cheek, whichever comes first.
Hunter plays Grace Hanadarko, an Oklahoma City detective who gets her morning hangover started with a healthy Jack and Coke because, well, history has shown that cops with the shakes aim their guns better with some hair of the dog. She drives her own Porsche on duty (which ought to make the citizenry wonder about the pay scale for their civil servants) and her hobbies involve an adulterous affair with her partner (police fraternity runs rampant in Oklahoma City, it seems), parking in handicapped spaces, sucker punching smart-assed cattlemen, and fishtailing through the crowded Okie streets giving her grade-school nephew and his girlfriend a high-speed joyride while blaring the siren and flashing her gun. She also likes to drive drunk and mow down pedestrians, but more on that later.
Posted on July 24, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Let’s say you’re the programming think tank at VH1 and you want to resurrect an ’80s hair band singer, The Bachelor and Flavor of Love all in one breath because, well, actually showing music videos is just so booooooring and you can beat the lifeless carcass of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to death only so many times. So what do you do?
You create Rock of Love with former Poison singer Bret Michaels, that’s what.
I saw the rerun of the premiere episode Sunday morning. I’ve been entertained by Flavor Flav on Flavor and The Surreal Life>, and Bret’s no Flav. He doesn’t have big gold teeth to flash in a pimp smile like Richard Kiel’s titanium-mouthed villain Jaws The Spy Who Loved Me. He doesn’t wear a way-cool Viking helmet. He doesn’t wear a clock around his neck the size of Big Ben on a chain big enough to anchor an aircraft carrier. He’s never schtupped Brigitte Nielsen – at least not admittedly.
Nope. Bret’s just a long-haired dude in a doo-rag “looking for that special someone” to settle down with.
Posted on July 23, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Back in the day – which in Internet time amounts to maybe two days ago – there was this neat little sports show called The Best Damn Sports Show Period. Granted, I’m not much of a sports freak – or even mildly dispassionate (or hell, even apolitical for Chrissakes) about any televised sports programming, for that matter. Unless maybe it involves race car crashes or women wearing really short uniforms.
At any rate, back in the day, the non-sports guy that I am actually liked Best Damn when Tom Arnold was left to bounce around all willy-nilly to wherever he ended up. And I was pretty enamored by the show in a month or three ago when Best Damn featured Thursday night chick boxing. This is why I was mystified at last night’s Best Damn show, which happened to be airing – without sound – on Comcast SportsNet on the TV sets of the two local gin mills I stopped into for a quick nip before going home at a sensible hour.
Simply put, it was an hour or so without mentioning a damn thing about sports. Instead, I saw Pamela Anderson and magician – oops, illusionist – Hans Klok promoting their Las Vegas show, The Beauty of Magic.
Posted on July 18, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Each week, we home viewers of Fox-TV’s Hell’s Kitchen learn two lessons about being a successful chef, even though few of us would probably want to become one because there are easier jobs in the world, like rebuilding transmissions: 1) You’ve got to have teamwork in the kitchen, and 2) when it comes to developing and actually delivering a menu, there’s no place for snobbery.
Naturally, the cheftestants on this program spend a lot of time ignoring all that each week, and last night wasn’t any different. Which again made Kitchen the only worthwhile Monday night program.
Posted on July 17, 2007
