PROVERBIAL THEY

TCA 2016: "People of Earth"

7/31/2016

TBS has an alien abduction comedy coming to you! But is it kicking weirdos who believe in this garbage while they're down? No, no it isn't. Shut up. "It goes into body issues and you could write a version of this show that's these guys are kooky weirdos!" says creator David Jenkins. "But this is like creating comedy ensembles that are little Robert Altman movies, and I think if you stay true to that and write for them as if you're their lawyer... I hope that somebody who had something like this would feel seen and not made fun of."

Look, if we can't make fun of people who think they've been abducted by aliens, we might as well declare humor dead and curl up in a collective fetal position.

Thank God for "The Office" star Oscar Nunez, who plays Father Doug, and says, "There's more [victims] than you think,and they're all voting for Trump," There, that's better.

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"RHOA" STAR APOLLO IS OFF TO JAIL - AND THAT'S JUST FINE

7/9/2014

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    Fans of "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" will remember Apollo Nida, the husband of lawyer/mortician/mommy Phaedra Parks, for any number of things. He's the ex-con who almost beat the hell out of a guy last season, or he's the boy toy who either bagged former Miss USA Kenya Moore or who was pretty sure he could have. Or maybe he's the poor boy who married a rich girl and then became a crappy husband and father, sort of like the world's worst alternative ending to "The Princess Bride." So many choices!
    Well, now he's just the dumbshit headed to jail for eight years on fraud charges. I'm not sure why he needed to cash stolen checks or launder money, seeing that he's married to a lawyer, but I suspect jail was starting to look like a safer place than that marriage, so this all may make an awful kind of sense. What better way to be an absent father than from behind bars?
    Okay, I'll admit to not only watching the show but being a Phaedra fan. Yes, she's fake as can be, but funny, and I'll forgive a lot for funny. But her marriage to Apollo was always a head scratcher. Despite an obvious physical attraction (at least on her part), he seemed to be both a macho throwback and none too bright -- a guy she might have wanted to keep on speed dial for a booty call, not actually marry and father her children. I'm not sure whether Phaedra will suffer through eight years of prison visits, but if she was looking for the exit, Apollo's incarceration should make that a little easier.
    As to what this means to the show, the short answer is -- not much. Apollo had woven himself into last season by dragging out the question as to whether he and Moore had been intimate, but by season's end the horse had been flogged to death. Other than showing up in Phaedra's workout video and some tense (and honestly unpleasant) scenes of his family life with Phaedra and the kids, he wasn't much of an addition to the show. But hey, if he manages to sell Bravo on a life behind bar reality soap, he just might prove useful after all!

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"The View" is changing - but leave guys out of it

6/27/2014

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So, Sherri Shepherd and Jenny McCarthy have been kicked to the curb by "The View." While I'm sure members of the Vaccines are Evil Unless Barbara Walters Is Listening fan club and The Earth Is Totally Not Round, Dammit Meetup.com group are likely incensed, I doubt the rest of America is broken up about the change.
    Now, the question turns to who will replace these two dimmest of bulbs on the panel. It seems many a pundit thinks it would be wildly edgy for at least one of the replacement panelists to be a man. To be clear, this isn't an edgy idea. It isn't even a good one, and here's why.
    I remember many years ago when Jimmy Fallon left "Saturday Night Live." Tina Fey was flying solo at the news desk, so the question being bantered around by the men in my office (all of them TV and movie critics) was who would replace Fallon.
    Not once was a female name mentioned. Every other man on the cast, plus previous cast members and unrelated male comedians, was suggested as a possibility. Of course, we all know that Lorne Michaels was more evolved than my co-workers, and Amy Poehler took over the open seat. But this experience was eye-opening, at least for me.
    Yes, "The View" appeals to a largely female audience, but when Barbara Walters created the show, it was actually seen as revolutionary to leave men off the panel. At the time, there were usually two or more talking heads sitting at the head of any morning chat show -- and, at minimum, one was always male. This was before Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford, before "The Talk," before any acknowledgment that women didn't need a man in the mix to justify their existence on television. It didn't matter that most of the audience was female -- there always had to be room for a guy at the table.
    The idea that a show that paved the way for all-female chat shows would toss out that core premise -- that women could do it all on their own, could seriously debate politics without bursting into tears, could be funny instead of catty, could care passionately about topics beyond soap operas and lipstick (though they could care a little about those, too) -- is heartbreaking.
    Maybe it speaks to how far we've come -- to stand out in the crowd, the show must open the door to the men as more than guest co-hosts. I would argue that men don't need the boost, either in front of the camera or behind it. According to "The Hollywood Reporter," as recently as 2011 only 16 percent of all the "important" behind-the-scenes jobs were held by women.
    And, despite all the ladies in daytime, it's not as if men are absent. While there is "The Talk," there is also the predominantly male "The Chew." Matt Lauer still helms the first part of "Today," leaving the last hour of the show to Hoda, Kathie Lee and their booze. While Kelly Ripa should be the big kahuna on "LIVE with Kelly and Michael," everyone is seemingly far more excited about Michael Strahan (who recently took a gig on "GMA"). No one needs to cry a bucket of tears for the fellas.
    Barbara Walters had it right the first time -- and to cede that ground is to overlook the real reasons for crumbling ratings. The show is aging, it's a crowded marketplace, and the combination of Sherri and Jenny brought down the level of dialogue. I never thought I'd be sorry that Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar are gone, but they're far sharper than the two dim bulbs who took their chairs.
    This is not a problem that has to be (or even can be) fixed by a man. To imply testosterone is a cure-all for what ails "The View" is to diminish what the show has accomplished. Put on your thinking caps, ABC, but don't go "edgy" or whatever else anyone is calling it. The women you want are out there -- and they are, in fact, women.

COPYRIGHT 2014 - PROVERBIAL THEY. Steal and suffer the consequences.

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MALEFICENT - Life's a WItch

6/26/2014

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Yes, the movie has been out for so long that it's almost out of theaters and on Netflix at this point. But PT has not been impressed with the discourse about the movie, which is mostly because the vast majority of movie critics have penises. Yes, there are female movie critics. Some of them even gave this movie insightful, smart and pointed reviews. It was just hard to focus on those with all the bearish braying and stomping around from the men folk.

To wit, critics have been deeply, deeply offended by (spoiler alert, I guess, but if you were going to see it you would have by now) Maleficent getting her wings clipped. It was genital mutilation! Or rape! Or something! It was a violation of the happy, family-friendly HISTORY OF FAIRY TALES TENDING TO BE ABOUT RAPING AND KILLING PEOPLE.

What, you didn't notice? Yeah, if you read those Grimm's fairy tales, there was a lot of killing, and Little Red Riding Hood? The wolf was a different kind of hungry. And I think the woodsman cut the wolf in half with an ax or something.

No, the real affront here wasn't that the de-winging was a euphemism for sexual assault. What male movie critics largely danced around was that this was a studio movie that sent the message men don't matter. Sometimes they're sidekicks, or just meant to look pretty. How deeply offensive!

Of course, no one wanted to point out how unnerving it was to view the world the way almost every woman who has sat through a superhero movie has already seen it umpteen times. So, the focus was on the fact that "Frozen" covered the same turf but was a better film (no argument there), that the tone was all over the place (true) and the film's reliance on narration suggested a hacked-up script and poor direction. PT is not going to go to bat for "Maleficent" being a great film. It isn't. What it is, though, is a flawed film that's downright revolutionary -- especially coming from Disney.

"Maleficent" may ultimately be important for reasons that have very little to do with the pros and cons of the film itself. It's a live action film that sets out to pain men with the broad, unforgiving brush usually applied to women. It's a love story without a man in the mix (and worse, without the hot lesbian sex that makes men tolerate that sort of thing).

Most of the women I know who saw the film willfully tuned out the crap (bad writing, poor construction, a raven with all these scars for some reason we never, ever learned) to take away something more important -- the message that sometimes, if a female star is big enough (thanks, Angelina!), they can get a big budget studio movie that's mostly for them. Yeah, their dates can come, but they better shut up and stick their noses in the popcorn if they have any complaints. It's what women have been doing through all those "Transformers" movies, after all.

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Observe and Report. It's... A Movie.

4/8/2009

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Proverbial They will never, ever drink enough to enjoy this film. Actually, PT doesn't think there's enough liquor on the Western seaboard to make that happen.

Going into this screening, the I thought, hey, big dumb mall cop movie (didn't we see this roughly two weeks ago when it was called Paul Blart?), whatever. But hey, better than doing taxes, right?

Oh no, not better than doing taxes. Elective dental surgery would have been preferable to this piece of crap, which Rotten Tomato critics have lauded as wonderfully cutting edge and delightfully twisted. Which just makes me think, Jesus, I don't want to sit next to you sticky-palmed fuck-ups in any movie theater ever again. And not just because of the sticky palms.

But then again, I am not evolved enough to realize the brilliance of this dialogue exchange.

MALL WORKER
Fuck you!

MALL COP RONNIE
Fuck you!

MALL WORKER
Fuck you!

MALL COP RONNIE
Fuck you!

Okay, you get the idea, but that went on for what felt like forever but was probably a few minutes. Brilliant! Insightful! Best dialogue I've heard in ages! What the fuck is wrong with people? I thought the drooling dunderheadedness of Idiocracy was supposed to take place in a distant future. But hey, with this economy maybe we're spiraling down the drain at a higher speed, who knows.

If you haven't heard, the writer/director's vision was essentially Taxi Driver but funny. Ha ha ha! Travis Bickle, what a CARD! That blank-eyed look Robert De Niro has as he blows away the pimps, MAN, that just cracks my ass up! Ha ha ha! Jodi Foster, what a sassy little child prostitute!

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm a PC prude or anything. George Carlin making rape jokes, bring it on. But this movie just isn't funny. Or particularly coherent. I guess I should just be happy it was in focus. It's the little things.

But I digress. The story, which rambles like a one-legged drunk trying to find his car at 2 a.m., revolves around Ronnie, played with bearman bravado by Seth Rogan. This rent-a-cop has delusions of grandeur, like most numbskulls with a little power to exert. Except he's one step away from a Columbine blow-out and actually owns the artillery to do the job. Ha ha ha! That's FUNNY.

Ronnie goes from goofy to borderline psychotic and back again from scene to scene, and I honestly didn't know if the movie would end in an orgy of violence, with Ronnie slitting throats and drinking blood, or a goofy aw-shucks, local kid makes good schmaltzfest. There's just no way of knowing. It's really THAT uneven.

Ronnie is on a quest to catch a flasher at the mall (expect a lot of fat, middle-aged guy penis flopping around -- gotta earn that R!), then he's on a quest to become a cop. Guess how that works out. There are various twists and turns, none of which make a hell of a lot of sense. The director creates a world that seems to mirror reality, except when he wants to ditch it in favor of a superhero-esque battle to the death. Watch an unarmed Ronnie take down a bunch of gun-toting gangbangers! Watch Ronnie take on a phalanx of cops who would be well within their rights to shoot his ass, but don't! And poor Ronnie gets a black eye, boo. Ronnie is supposedly delusional, but I think the writer-director was half off his meds, too.

But hey, for anyone craving cutting edge comedy, this movie is chock full of it. You'll love the scene where Ronnie's finally realizing his dream of having sex with the make-up counter chick, who's mostly unconscious and threw up on the pillow a little bit, but GO RONNIE! Wow, that's a scream.

But Observe and Report is not a total wash. Anna Faris manages to eke out some humor, as does Celia Weston as Ronnie's alcoholic mom (I did actually smile when she tells Ronnie she's finally ready to make a change... by switching to beer). And there is that in focus thing.

PROVERBIAL THEY SAYS: If you're a fledgling mass murderer with bipolar disorder looking for a good time, check it out! The rest of you can stay home and watch something that doesn't suck.

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REVIEW: FOUR CHRISTMASES

11/25/2008

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Before we get to the nitty gritty of this soulless, lackluster and remarkably unfunny movie (wait, that may actually BE the nitty gritty of "Four Christmases," but please, do read on), let's stop and take a moment to mourn the passing of Vince Vaughn's neck.

Please, bow your heads.

Thank you.

Amen.

Vince Vaughn's recent expansion into fat guy-with-hot chick territory is a sad and unexpected loss, as I always thought, man, if that guy can look hot in a turtleneck WHILE licking the walls as Norman Bates, well, that's a whole lotta something. But I suspect, after committing to the festering pile that is "Four Christmases," he needed some way to assuage his pain, and apparently that was a bottomless pit of Big Macs and fried dough.

This is not to say that Vaughn and the always lovably perky Reese Witherspoon didn't try their level bests to rise above the material. The beginning of the movie, which kicks things off with a meet-cute-moment-that-isn't, actually suggests a level of naughty fun to which the film never again even aspires. In fact, the caliber of the cast makes the mediocrity of the finished product even harder to fathom. Mary Steenburgen? Robert Duvall? Sissy Spacek? Jon Voight? Was it really between this and a digestive health yogurt commercial or what?

All this noble talent is put to work on the storyline you've probably already sussed out from watching the trailer. Cute couple with no interest in kids or marriage is forced to visit their divorced parents and then, lo and behold, are convinced of the sanctity of marriage and bliss of procreating by vomiting babies and Spam casserole. Nope, not making up the Spam casserole.

It's predictable, sure. But what Hollywood movie isn't? Where "Four Christmases" fails is in the details. "The King of Kong" director Seth Gordon makes the mistake of, yet again, putting too much faith in a flawed hero, namely Vaughn. Yes, the guy is a natural born cut-up. He can riff with the best of them. But stick him in a shlocky romantic comedy and the guy seizes up like a salted snail. Scenes between Witherspoon and Vaughn that are clearly improvised (or God, we certainly hope so, because otherwise the team of writers on this thing should have their WGA cards revoked) meander so agonizingly you can tell it's all either star can do not to reach out and grab the camera lens, shrieking, "YELL CUT ALREADY, YOU BASTARD!"

The movie reaches for the kind of outlandish, wild-eyed humor of a Judd Apatow movie, but weighs down the two main characters with a level of nicey-nice self-awareness that, instead of rendering either one sympathetic, only succeeds in making them dull. The outrageous family members are either hateful (Tim McGraw and Jon Favreau's violent wrestlers, Kristin Chenoweth's competitive sister) or blandly misunderstood (warm and fuzzy parents Voight, Steenburgen and Spacek). If a bomb had blown up in the middle of the film, killing every other character and mangling the rest, the Proverbial They would have given the director kudos for going a different direction and skipped out of the theater, pausing only to comment on how wildly distracting Vaughn's gut is when shot from a low angle and shrouded in a Hawaiian shirt.

There are, surely, far worse Christmas movies out there, and some people may enjoy the bitter irony of watching Vince Vaughn make fun of Reese Witherspoon for once being a tubby kid (pot, meet kettle and seriously, smack one of the screenwriters for leaving that in when you showed up on set 50 pounds over your fighting weight). But if that's simply not enough fun for you, just skip this one.

PROVERBIAL THEY SAYS: Skip it. Seriously. Just run. Give your ticket to a homeless guy or something.

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WHO ARE THE PROVERBIAL THEY?

11/20/2008

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The answer to that question is complicated and far too involved to answer here. Let's suffice it to say that They know their shit. They so know it. And you don't have to agree with Them, but They hopes you will learn to respect their wisdom in all things pop culture-related, which, honestly, are completely subjective anyway and who the fuck knows what's good and what's not, because really, time will tell. And all They knows is that They really liked "The Breakfast Club" when They were teenagers, and now recognizes it for the steaming pile of shit it really is, so hey, you change, you grow, but They likes to think They are always right regardless. And They can be irritable and cross and spew quite a bit of venom, but honestly hope that you will realize that, underneath it all, They have a marshmallow heart that is only partially rotten.

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TCA 2016: "People of Earth"

"RHOA" STAR APOLLO IS OFF TO JAIL - AND THAT'S JUST FINE

"The View" is changing - but leave guys out of it

MALEFICENT - Life's a WItch

Observe and Report. It's... A Movie.

REVIEW: FOUR CHRISTMASES

WHO ARE THE PROVERBIAL THEY?

The Proverbial They

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