I KNOW IT’S ONLY ROCK N ROLL…

Yuri told me a story when a woman at his job noticed he was reading comics and told him how childish it was to which he asked, “Did you see the Spider-Man movies?”

She said, “Yes.”

“Batman Begins, Fantastic Four, X-Men?  300, Sin City, Blade, Hellboy?”

She nodded she had.

“Did you like them?”

Yes again.

“Then how can you like all those and it’s okay, but I like the source material they came from and that’s childish?”

I had the same conversation with Kelly Gaudet, a woman I worked with, who waited excitedly to see SPIDER-MAN 2 and told me she’d never read a comic book.  It always escapes me how anyone has never read a comic.  To me it’s like saying you’ve never seen a play or never read a book.  Usually people see comics and comment they used to read Archie… for some reason everyone read Archie.  The conversation turned to Hollywood’s mining of comic properties that doesn’t funnel back into the books.  When a new Harry Potter movie comes out, the book sales spike.  How many times do you see someone say, “No, I want to read it before I see the movie,” which is the wrong way to do it but that’s another blog.

When was the last time someone said, “V FOR VENDETTA looks good… I’d like to read Alan Moore’s comic first.”

I mean, granted, Spider-Man and Batman have been around for decades.  I have been reading comics since I was ten I wouldn’t even know where to tell you to start.  But Frank Miller’s 300 was five issues collected into one book that is available in Waldenbooks and Barnes & Nobles… I’ve seen it there.  And you know it’s a comic (or graphic novel) because they blast that shit right in the trailer.  My DVD for V FOR VENDETTA and BATMAN BEGINS actually come with an issue of the comics the film’s are based on.  The supplemental discs to all those films always has a featurette on the source material.

So I asked Kelly why she never read comics and she gave the exact same response, they’re kinda childish.  She somehow had it in her head that all the comics were like Archie versions of Batman or Spider-Man and the medium hadn’t changed since she was young in the early seventies.  Of course, television has changed in that forty years.  Movies, books, magazines and plays have changed, broke new ground and paved new directions… but in her mind comics never did.  So I brought in a few of my books.  A little mix of everything but especially the work of Alex Ross.  She looked at them, surprised at how much they’d changed and when she was done kindly handed them back.

Comics live in a little ghetto of their own and like most impoverished peoples, they don’t know or are in denial of this.  In 1991, Neil Gaiman won the World Fantasy Award for A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Sandman #19).  This was the first and only comic to ever win the award.  The following year comics were given their own category.  By then it was a little too late.  Gaiman compares it to not only had they left the barn door open, the horse won the Kentucky Derby.  The same year BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  Ten years later animated films were given their own category, essentially rending them awarded, but unlikely to be Best Picture.  Enjoy your spoils… but enjoy them over there.

A few months ago I spent a weekend at Yuri’s and his wife, Deanna, was reading a graphic novel based on the television show HEROES.  I made the same comment to her that I made to my friend Heidi’s mother, another fan of the series.  It bothers me a little the success of that show.  There is an art form I love and it’s dying.  Partly to it’s own devices and partly because it’s been abandoned.  Meanwhile other mediums steal it’s core premises and are wildly successful.

I asked Deanna why she doesn’t read other comics.  She likes the SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN movies and her response was, “Well, maybe if they made them look like the actors.”

And I die a little more inside.

I told that story to Yuri a few weeks later and you could hear him on the phone verifying it and then telling me he’s glad he didn’t hear her say it because he would have wanted to punch her in the mouth.

Fanboys… what are you gonna do?  Seriously, he would never hit her… he just would have wanted to.

My brother Bobby is probably right: Deanna doesn’t read that book because she likes comics.  She doesn’t even read it because she likes the show.  She reads it because it’s a direct extension of the show.  She doesn’t like Peter Parker as a character.  She likes Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker.  She’ll be the same one who has trouble if they recast that character because he won’t be her Peter Parker.  This has been proven on her protests of SUPERMAN RETURNS because she watches SMALLVILLE and wants Tom Welling to be Superman.

I myself, have seen six Superman/Superboys in my lifetime.  I’m cool with it.  Then again, I have a chrome Superman insignia plate on my truck, not a Christopher Reeve plate.

Danielle, my sister-in-law, theorized that movies are a more impressive medium and I’ll agree because every time I see something look real that has always been a static image for me, the Hulk leaping across mesas in the desert, I get a little nerd rush.  But that doesn’t hold water because books are an even less visual medium than comics and people read books.  Bobby, my brother, just chalks it up to people aren’t attracted to the medium.  Some people won’t eat sushi never having tried it.  Just because you like tuna sandwiches doesn’t mean you’re going to like sushi.

Frank Miller once said when someone asked him his opinion about Hollywood ruining Batman after 1997’s BATMAN & ROBIN he said nobody ruined anything.  He loves Batman comics and those comics are still there.  Nobody has taken them away from him and tainted his fond memories of them.  They ruined a Batman movie… they can’t ruin Batman.

Fanboys like to think that the massive spike in superhero related projects somehow means they’re coming into their own.  That Hollywood justifies them.  That money-earned legitimizes them.  That comic writers are now Hollywood directors (Frank Miller, Neil Gaimain, The Wachowski Brothers) and television show writers (SMALLVILLE, LOST, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) and Hollywood talent have come to comics with director Richard Donner (SUPERMAN, THE OMEN, LETHAL WEAPON) writing Action Comics or Joss Whedon (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, FIREFLY) writing X-Men, that they’ve arrived.  Hell, Stephen King made his Dark Tower prequel as a comic.

The truth is they’re using you.  This isn’t like when people steal Rock & Roll and somewhere down the road Little Richard get recognition.  These are properties with a prepackaged audience like old TV shows and videogames.  The hard work of creating it and finding an audience has already been done… now it’s just a matter of finding a bigger audience.  I was watching this thing on MSN’s website where they have people debate stuff and it was are comics cool again and the argument always comes down to “they’re making a shitton of movies from comics so somebody likes us,” but the truth is the girl that gives it up to fifteen guys during the seven days of Spring Break is popular too but that doesn’t mean anyone is going to call her in the morning.  They are going to use her for their own needs and she’ll be buying her own breakfast in the morning.

I went into a Barnes & Nobles and browsed through the two racks that were comics.  Down the aisle I spotted a half-dozen kids (including girls, something non-existent in comic stores) mulling about in their beltless baggy pants and shaggy hair and I noticed they were reading comics… or more precisely, Manga.

For those of you who don’t know, Manga are Japanese comics.  Then I realized my nephew Alex (10), who really liked superheroes when he was younger, doesn’t so much anymore.  He’ll watch a GHOST RIDER movie but he’s not so much into reading the comics.  But he does like the Manga.

I don’t like Manga the same way I don’t like Anime (Japanese cartoons).  I don’t get it.  Then again, it wasn’t designed for me.  It was here I noticed they were on the far end of the aisle but more precisely, the far end of the comic aisle.  The whole sixty foot aisle was comics.  Manga comics.  And there I stood with my two racks of superhero books and realized I was on the verge of extinction, but comics weren’t.  Like the virus at the end of THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, it was still there… it just became something different.  Comics are doing just fine, in fact, they’re thriving… they’re just not my comics.  In 1959 there were 26 Westerns in primetime television and I picture some dude five years later complaining how television is dead and now I’m that guy.

Maybe this is how parents in the fifties felt about their kids and Elvis Presly  and the coming of Rock n Roll and in the eighties with the advent of Hip Hop.  To me, Manga is just noise.  Maybe someday all these kids will realize they like comics and they all these movies made from comics they never read and they’ll look into them.  Maybe in the next generation or two Anime will have saved the graphic storytelling medium and it’ll be respected in America the way it is on the rest of the planet. 

Until then, I look forward to my Saturday mornings of comic book reading on the couch and IRON MAN next weekend.  You see me coming because I have the chrome Superman license plate.

And when I get bored… I have a Batman one at home just like it.

What’s My Name?

So there I am performing my morning ritual of checking my movie news sites and the title for the new FAST AND FURIOUS movie got released today.  For those of you not up on your car porn, the series (and I use that word loosely) is THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (2001), 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS (2003), THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT (2006) and the upcoming… wait for it…

FAST AND FURIOUS.

Yeah.  You read that right.  They dropped the “The” from the first title and that’s the new title.  That is the most retarded thing I’ve heard since Keanu Reeves declines SPEED 2 (1997)(smart movie, Kiki) and Fox decided to recast the cop as a different character (Jason Patric, who’s pretty much been eating out of trash cans since LOST BOYS (1987)) and bring back the hostage… because that makes sense.

I almost want to let it slide because I don’t give James Cameron shit for ALIENS (1986) and all he did was make the previous film’s title plural but there is a subtle wit there.  The first film had one alien and the second film had many aliens.  For that matter ALIEN³ (1991) had the pointless exponent which means I should get at least three aliens and instead I only got one (and a shoddy looking one at that).  It reminded of a Motley Crue Behind The Music where they were in Germany and ten thousand people were mispronouncing the band name and someone told them those little dots over the letters actually mean something.  Morons.

I like wit.  I loved that Warner Bros actually toyed with the idea of calling the SCOOBY-DOO sequel SCOOBY-DEUX but since Americans didn’t get it, the joke is lost.  The WAYNE’S WORLD sequel was originally WW2: THE BIG ONE.  I’m always in favor of telling a joke 95% of the audience doesn’t get as long as they don’t know there’s been a joke because that 5% makes me happy.

Sure, I could give a pass to 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS because you see, it’s the second sequel and they worked that in there, you know, number two.  And the third one, they’re in Toyko… and they’re drifting.  Admittedly, I have seen the first one and detested it.  I watched the second one because John Singleton, who I believe is the most underrated director in Hollywood, needed to prove he could direct a movie that made money and it’s better than the first the way a kick to head is better than a kick to the groin.  I kinda like Vin Diesel for his ridiculous name and as the eighties action hero throwback he is and Paul Walker is the new Jason Patric.  Honestly, I liked the movie more when it was called POINT BREAK (1991).

And that brings us back to Keanu.

But you have to call these damn things something.  And here I would like to blame James Cameron (or at least his marketing people) for something.  Summer 1991 and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY is released and marketed as T2.  Everywhere.  Soon everybody starts marketing their movies with initials like they were elements.  We don’t need words anymore… all the kids talk in TextSpeak.  D2, AFO, MI2, MI3, CA2, X2, TMNT, LXG, AVP, AVP-R, MIB, MIIB.

In most cases, these are sequels.  The X-MEN sequel was X2 but the third one was X-MEN: THE LAST STAND.  And ALIENS VS PREDATOR became AVP but the sequel was ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM (note the singular Alien) and I am pretty sure 90% of people who paid to see that movie don’t know what ‘requiem‘ means.  Then the MEN IN BLACK sequel isn’t MIB2 or the completely incoherent MIBII.  They stuck the Roman numeral in with the other ‘I’ making it MEN II BLACK.

My head hurts.

I can give a pass to JASON X being clever and copyright conscious since Paramount sold the Jason Vorhees character to New Line Cinema but retained the FRIDAY THE 13^th title for their own use forcing them to call their ninth film JASON GOES TO HELL and their tenth film JASON X.  Get it, X is the Roman numeral for ten… even though it sounds like he should be some kind of mongoloid slasher activist.

HALLOWEEN: H20 (1998) which is actually the seventh film in the series which was released on the twentieth anniversary of the original, not the twentieth sequel (like my roommate at the time thought).  Of course none of the ads called it HALLOWEEN H-TWENTY.  They all referred to it as HALLOWEEN: H-TWO-OH because a horror movie with the abbreviation for water makes perfect sense.

Then there is ID4 which somehow means INDEPENDENCE DAY FOUR?  Fourth Of July.  Independence Day.  I get it… it’s just stupid.  So would the sequel be ID4-2?

I picture movies in years past using this technique.  WIZARD OF OZ would be WOZ, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (TM7), THE DIRTY DOZEN (D12), TM6: SONG OF THE THIN MAN, THE GREAT ESCAPE (TGX) and THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (TMWKTM).

But then, maybe I shouldn’t expect originality out of a sequel.

Twenty-Five Things About Jim & Movies You May Not Have Known…

• 1. The first movie I recall seeing was JAWS (1975) at the Bethlehem Drive-In in Pennsylvania. Honestly, it was a triple feature and the first movie was THE CAT FROM OUT SPACE (1978), followed by JAWS and then The Beatles in YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968). My father didn’t understand why they would show the cartoon at midnight but my father didn’t understand The Beatles or potheads.
• 2. In 1985 I wrote three pitches for Steven Spielberg’s television series AMAZING STORIES. They sent me a rejection letter and I was so excited I rode my bike to bus stop to show my brother. I was twelve.
• 3. My parents seldom took us to movies as children. I can count the times on one hand. The first movie I was allowed to see by myself was POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE (1985).
• 4. I have no problem watching movies alone in a theatre. I don’t consider movies a social situation. I prefer not to go on weekend evenings because I think people are looking at me.
• 5. I seldom eat at movies. In 1997, a friend saw me by popcorn, candy and a drink once and in ten years of knowing me had never seen that done. I replied, “It’s Star Wars.”
• 6. I almost failed a Cinema History class in college because I hated the teacher, and honestly, was bored and cocky. To pass with a ‘D’ I had to write a ten page dissection of the shower scene from PSYCHO (1960). You do not want to argue with me about the shower Scene in PSYCHO.
• 7. While promoting the film revival of LOST IN SPACE (1998) at the Orlando Megacon, I asked the then eighty-four year-old Jonathan Harris (Dr Zachary Smith of the 1960s television series) to sign my Lost In Space poster “Gary Oldman sucks.” He was very kind and refused because “the good people at New Line Cinema would be quite upset with him.” He really did talk like that.
• 8. I have a copy of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) signed by director George A Romero. It’s signed “Fuck running zombies.”
• 9. I used to have over three hundred laserdiscs. I still have two. One is a signed copy of BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991) by director John Singleton (who I snuck backstage at a lecture to meet). The other is a signed copy of THE KILLER (1988) by director John Woo a friend who used to work at ICM Talent Agency in Los Angeles got for me.
• 10. I auditioned for the movie JEEPERS CREEPERS.
• 11. I worked at Universal Studios in 1991. I would wake up at 7:00a, write screenplay until 10:30a and go to work. I would work my shift, go to the locker rooms, change clothes, and then sneak back onto the sets and watch them film very bad television shows like SWAMP THING and SUPERBOY for several more hours. The next day I would do it again.
• 12. I have had two letters printed in Entertainment Weekly. Ironically, they both are about Batman. After the second letter I got an email from Paul Dini, producer of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (1991). He appreciated my compliments so much he offered to send me some free stuff. I asked for some signed stuff from him and the staff and he did.
• 13. At fifteen I didn’t drive but had a military ID from my father with the misprint of his birth month, my mother’s birth date and my year. I made up a story how the year was wrong also and used it to get my first job at a movie theatre because it was the only way I could figure out how to see Rated R movies. I worked there for eight months and then got fired. It’s the only job I have ever been fired from.
• 14. At the age of ten I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. I have written eight screenplays and am rewriting number nine (MORTAL SAINTS) because I accidentally formatted a hard drive with seventy pages of it four years ago. The agency that reads my stuff also represents The Wachowski Brothers (THE MATRIX TRILOGY, SPEED RACER) and Steve Niles (30 DAYS OF NIGHT). Ironically, once I am done writing, I usually send them to six people, throw them in a drawer and go on with my life. I just need to get it out of me. I really need to be more motivated.
• 15. In 1998 I had writer’s block and wrote a screenplay for Warner Bros then-stalled Superman project as a sample. To get an objective opinion, we leaked it into the internet with a fake story that it had been rejected by the studio. A website in Australia found my contact information through the Writer’s Guild of America and asked for an interview and I agreed. I threw out the name of a comic store in town I frequent. Some guy from Gainesville used to drive in every few weeks hoping to get some screenwriting advice from me (I was actually in the store once when he came in).
• 16. I have bought the STAR WARS TRILOGY six different times.
• 17. I have only walked out of three movies in a theatre. A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988) which I watched on prom night when a girl who agreed to go with me got a better offer (SEE YOU IN HELL, RACHAEL!). I actually own this movie now because when I saw it with a clear head, I liked it a lot. THE CRUSH (1993) with Alicia Silverstone (there is only so much pouting one man can take) and HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING (1991). I have never watched a HIGHLANDER movie or TV show since.
• 18. Every year I buy one issue of Vanity Fair. It’s the Hollywood Issue that comes out in March. It used to have very clever awe-inspiring pictorials. Recently it has become a showcase of “Who’s Hot” but I still buy it anyway.
• 19. I have theatre rituals. I always park on the sides of the theatre, seldom in the front (more open spaces, shorter walk). If I eat candy, the only candy I eat are Whoppers, Raisinettes and M&Ms. I always enter a theatre through the left door (people tend to move to their right so that side of the theatre always has less open seating. I always try to sit two thirds from the screen in the center. I used to like the back row because I didn’t have to worry about idiots behind me but found I couldn’t properly hear the surround channels.
• 20. I remove the copy protection from DVDs, rip the audio commentaries to my hard drive, transfer them to my Zune and listen to them in my car like a book on tape. It’s much easier than it sounds.
• 21. My bathroom has a framed poster of PSYCHO and is decorated completely in white to look like a motel bathroom. Consequently, I don’t have a shower curtain, just a transparent liner. I have to know who’s in there with me.
• 22. I was in the hospital when I was fifteen and asked my father to bring me some books. He brought me Roger Ebert’s 1986 Movie Yearbook which is a collection of the majority of his reviews from the mid-sixties to that point. I read this book… not referenced it. I read it… cover to cover. To this day there are movies I know the plot, cast, screenwriters and directors of that I have never seen.
• 23. I saw my first animated Disney film when I was seventeen.
• 24. I was once at the Orlando Megacon and a booth was giving away promotional items for people answering trivia questions. After the first dozen I started asking little kids what they wanted and was winning gifts for them. To shut me down, the guy asks am I familiar with Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. My friend immediately warns him he doesn’t want to do that. He does it anyway. He searches his thoughts and confidently comes back with, “John Belushi.” “Animal House,” I respond and walked away with my prize.
• 25. I can remember every movie I saw, what theatre I saw it in and who I was with. I actually use movies to reference events in my life (so I know I lived in Orlando in 1991 because that’s when I saw THELMA & LOUISE).

Something Rotten In Denmark

Shakespeare is great.  Natalie and I disagree on this.  She sums up all Shakespeare as “if your name is in the title, you’re gonna die.”

Kenneth Branagh’s WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET (1996) was one of the last Holy Grails of DVD for me and after ten years of buying DVDs, it finally was released last fall.  At four hours it’s the most complete version of the play ever done.  If you’re remotely interested you should clear out an afternoon (or two nights, miniseries-style as I do) and watch it.

So there I am on a Saturday afternoon trolling through the Special Features looking for trailers and find one for the Laurence Olivier version of OTHELLO (1965).

So I’m like “cool, “1965… who’s playing Othello?”  Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, Paul Robeson?

No.  Laurence Olivier is playing Othello.

You read that right.  Olivier.  Is playing Othello.  The Moor of Venice.  The African-Italian.  The black guy.

You might want to go back and click the hyperlink now.

I watched the trailer, jaw in my lap, in shock.  British Olivier walking around with short “black” hair and covered with makeup that makes him look more like one of the One Hundred and One Dalmatians trying to escape Cruella De Vil more than it makes him look like a black guy.  His nose, his lips, his voice still sounds like Olivier, albeit, Olivier covered in probably the same makeup they used to do the same thing to C Thomas Howell in SOUL MAN (1986).  I don’t know what kicks my ass more; that somebody thought this was a good idea for OTHELLO seven years before I was born or still thought it was a good idea fourteen years after I was born.

I have a hard time watching the movie SCARFACE (1982) mostly because I think it sucks.  Yeah, I’m the black guy that hates SCARFACE, I’m the one.  It irks me there isn’t a Latino in it (actually that’s untrue because I found out later Steven Bauer is actually Cuban).  But watching people with the names Pacino, Mastrantonio, Loggia and F Murray Abraham play Cubans is just laughable.  Granted, this isn’t 1961’s WEST SIDE STORY that without Rita Moreno is Latino-free.  This is 1982.  Director Brian DePalma would correct this later in CARLITO’S WAY (1993), a movie I think chains SCARFACE to a shower and goes at it with mini-chainsaw.  The only non-Latino in that film?: Al Pacino… again.  But we were more politically correct in 1993.

Trivia: The first Latina female lead of a Hollywood Studio film?  Salma Hayek, DESPERADO (1995).  Thought there would have been one twenty years earlier?  Me too.

I was listening to Richard Attenborough commentary on GANDHI (Best Picture, 1982, I am the only person who describes GANDHI as a movie that “kicks ass”) and he commented that Anthony Hopkins has lost considerable weight hoping he’d get the part and Attenborough couldn’t hire him because he was very uncomfortable with a white man in blackface, especially a British white man, playing that part.  A few years ago the same thing happened with MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (2005) casting Chinese actresses to play Japanese and something about China being bitter to Japan from World War II.  I came to this conclusion.  I’m cool with someone playing another ethnicity in their race, just not another race.  I am offended by Olivier in OTHELLO and Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S(playing a buck-toothed Japanese buffoon, something director Blake Edwards and Rooney still see no need to apologize for (although the Producer has)).  Andy Garcia playing an Italian in GODFATHER PART III (1990)… fine.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz (she doesn’t look it but she’s Mexican, people) playing in GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)… sure.  Tony Shaloub, Ben Kingsley and The Rock playing pretty much anybody that isn’t white… no problem.

I have seen Homosexuals get ticked when they cast non-gay actors to play Homosexual-American roles.  It isn’t like Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas are really going to have sex (but I would pay ten bucks to see it especially if one of them didn’t know it was going to happen).  Then you drift really close into should Catholics play Jews and if not then what’s the point of hiring actors?  Spike Lee got the directing gig on MALCOLM X (1992) when he protested to the point Norman Jewison was kicked from the project (honestly, I don’t think it would have made much difference).  I remember the backlash when THE REAGANS (2003)miniseries aired that James Brolin, husband of Barbra Streisand, confirmed card-carrying liberal, was playing Reagan.  Oliver Stone is prepping his film W about George W Bush and there are people already fastening their nooses.

Ironically, James Brolin’s son, Josh, is playing George W.

Can people only participate in projects that reflect themselves?  Or maybe we can live in Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare world.  A place where he made Shakespeare’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (1993)and cast Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves as brothers and never once attempted to explain it.

 Perhaps we doth protest too much.

Eyeshadow Of The Empire

What the hell is wrong with people?  I am watching the news this morning and my good friend Meredith Viera tells me cosmetics companies are marketing makeup to preschoolers.  I don’t blame Revlon because somebody has to pay John Cougar’s hottie wife.  My question is who buys this crap?

Makeup is designed to make you more attractive.  Is this something preschoolers should be concerned with?  What do they need concealer for?  Hell, I am not even sure what concealer is but I am assuming it conceals something.  I think kids should be presentable.  Clean faces, clean clothes, not look like they just finished playing in a dumpster behind the KFC.  I once saw a ten year old girl in shorts and heels at the Kwik-E-Mart.  Not clunky Kiss Army heels, but “that’ll be fifty and your friend can watch for another twenty” heels.

I heard breast implants are the most requested gift for sixteen year old girls.  If my daughter asks me for breast implants when she’s sixteen my head is just going to implode and I have failed as a father because for some reason my daughter thinks she should be racked out at sixteen. Great, then I can drive her to Hooters where she can work until she gets a job as a real stripper.  My daughter asks for implants, I’m locking her in her room with a stack of Judy Blume books until she works it out.  Hopefully, Natalie will be better at this than I am.

And speaking of my sweet Baboo… she’s a feminist.  I am not a 100% what that means but she’s happy I am a male and own a copy of THELMA & LOUISE (Ridley Scott’s best film, ALIEN be damned) and I am pretty sure every time a mother buys implants or makeup for their daughter or Paris Hilton steps out of bed it’s working against her.

Maybe implants will help Ripley’s (that’s our imaginary daughter’s name) self-esteem but I’d like to think her esteem wasn’t tied to her bra size or what people said about her.  And they are just going to attract boys.  And there is always competition.  She could get her boob job and Winona across the street is in the front yard in a bikini with her A-cup breasts, sitting on a keg of beer, eating a six-foot sandwich and playing Xbox 360 on a 65″ TV and I am pretty sure she’ll steal Ripley’s boyfriend and send the Spider-Sense of boys from here to Michigan tingling uncontrollably.

And we can argue that society forces these images and standards or beauty and I won’t disagree but women don’t dress for men… women dress for women.  Things men find sexy, women find vile.  I’ve seen polls on this.  Men like panty lines.  We like knowing what kind of underwear you’re wearing even though we’re never going to see you in it.  I like the double-bubble effect when the boobs look like they’re trying to escape a bra that is two sizes too small.  It reminds me of baking bread.  Men like chunky girls.  Every guy I know would rather have Bridget Jones’ chunky ass every day and twice on a Sunday than have to cuddle up with the fourteen year old boy that is Roxie Hart.  Men like porno girls and strippers who dress like… well, porno girls and strippers and when women see other women dressed like that, they hate them.  They don’t hate them because they are holding women back but they hate them because they are willing to do something to get attention that other women aren’t willing to do.

And I have never once seen a man comment on how much he likes a woman’s shoes yet women keep buying them.  Just admit, you buy them for you, not for us.  I am tired of taking the heat on that one.

Yes, we live in a culture that televises awards for pretty people under the pretense they are scholarship pageants.  Sell that bullshit to the tourists, I’m not buying.  The day I see someone in that contest that is 160lbs is the same day Flavor Flav gets his NAACP Image Award.  Magazines have their 50 Most Beautiful issue and Sports Illustrated keeps trying to convince me that just wearing a swimsuit is a sport… oh yeah, that was when they wore swimsuits, now they just paint them on.  I guess because I am a moron I can’t tell that America Ferreira is a hottie (there I go with my Latinas again) and no amount of ponchos and glasses will ever make her UGLY BETTY.

There is a Chris Rock joke that being a father of girls is hard because you know you daughter is one hug too many or one hug to little from dancing on a table for truckers in sweatpants.

Go home.  Call your sister, your wife, your girlfriend, that woman you work with who is 115 pounds eating her Lean Cuisine and tell them they’re okay and just fine the way they are.

We all can’t be Salma Hayek.

Revision: Apparently I was telling this story to my friend Jessica and she said the teaser I saw for the story was very misleading.  Essentially it still is shitty little girl makeup, just slightly better, and the boutique is hosting what I have been told is the equivalent of Princess Parties (whatever the hell that is).  Rant uncalled for.  Crisis averted.

Diary Of An Ad Black Man…

A few weeks ago my friend Jon and I were having lunch at IHOP (or iHop if you’re trendy cool) and they were serving a Green Eggs and Ham breakfast as a promotion for the film version of Dr Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who? (which is worth seeing if you haven’t even though I despised the other two recent adaptations).

So Jon is reading the menu and both of us, thinking you would be getting eggs with green dye, realize the green is spinach.

Spinach. Nothing kids like more with their Dr Seuss than spinach. Who were the marketing guys on this?

For that matter, there is this trend to advertise the voice actors of an animated film. I picture twenty-two year old drunken frat boys watching a Horton commercial between Girls Gone Wild DVDs and thinking “that looks stupid” and then realizing Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen from Superbad are in it and quickly rushing to the theatre only to be disappointed by the lack of vaginal fluid jokes. Like somehow parents are telling their kids they won’t take them to a movie and then, oh wait, Denis Leary is the voice of a Sabertooth tiger?… get my keys. Parent’s see kid’s movies because their kids want to see them and no amount of stunt voicing will make a difference. They could have the remaining members of the Ronald Reagan cabinet perform Where The Wild Things Are and kids will still want to see it.

This brings me to Nim’s Island, a harmless kid’s movie being advertised right now with Jodie Foster and Gerald Butler that boasts “Starring Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin.” Have you seen Little Miss Sunshine? I know it sounds like a kid’s movie but it isn’t. My favorite line is the grandfather Alan Arkin at the gas station with the instruction: “Bring me some titty magazines… and none of that airbushed bullshit.”

I like to think Eddie Murphy lost his deserved Oscar because he didn’t get to say that line in Dreamgirls.

You might as well put “Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin, The Accused’s Jodie Foster and 300’s Gerald Butler.” I always like when people are involved with projects 180 degrees different than their previous work. What I would have given to see Babe: Pig In The City advertised as “From The Director Of Mad Max” or Dawn Of The Dead (2004) as “From The Writer Of Scooby-Doo.”

This brings me to my marketing WTF of the week. I am in Target looking for Aquaman action figures for my friend’s son (yes, he’s the one kid who knows Spider-Man, Superman and Batman and his favorite dude is Aquaman, go figure) and I come across this:

Platoon (1985) action figures. WTF? I can picture the licensing department of this toy company with some Power Point presentation on the impact of the Academy Award winning Viet-Nam film Platoon and how the market is ripe for an action figure line twenty-three years after the film was released.

“You see, Charlie Sheen from this film is now on big TV star playing a gigolo on the sitcom Two and a Half men and Willem Dafoe was the Green Goblin in Spiderman and Johnny Depp was in Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Let me put this into perspective (since I am going to date myself having seen this film in a theatre), it’s very possible that the parent’s who have kids you may buy these figures for weren’t even alive when the movie was released.

I guess they couldn’t get those Color Purple action figures out for Martin Luther King day.