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We are so lucky to have come of entertainment age in the 90s.
(Source: rumble-with-the-bee, via howtobeafuckinglady)
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Trailer Park Thursdays
You know how it is. You’re young, you’re tan, you’re possibly Italian and you just got laid off from your job selling underwear at a Newark Macy’s. Right? Right. New Katherine Heigel vehicle “One for the Money” knows and is basically your biography, as told to Theresa Guidice from Real Housewives of New Jersey. She then scribbled the story in lipstick on the back of a Hollywood Tans receipt, on her way to lunch with these two.Theresa knows that you are Heigel character Stephanie Plum. You have an at-times-thick, at-times-non-existent Jerseytalian accent and your hair always looks sort of wet. Like you, Stephanie is down on her luck. “Going through a bit of a rough patch” as your own nice, suburban mom would cautiously say to her friend over the phone as she watches you glumly setting the table in the same sweater you wore last time you were home. Unlike you, Stephanie will rally. She has dinner with the two aging cultural stereotypes she calls parents, and her grandma, a tragic Debbie Reynolds, sounding the death rattle of her storied career. During the family meal it is decided that Stephanie must find a joband, just as in real life, she finds one the very next day as a bail bondsman and is immediately outfitted with an automatic weapon. Nice and neat.
So here’s Stephanie! Getting excited about her job, being a sassbox, waving that gun all over town and really making it happen. Yay! This is the part of the story that we like! It’s heartening to see someone previously adrift get wholly engaged in something, even if that person is a lady played by Katherine Heigel and the thing she’s excited about is, from the looks of it, standing amongst a mess of plastic tarps in partially-completed high-rise constructions, quipping her head off and shaking that partial-perm all over the place. I desperately, desperately wanted the tagline for this movie to be “permed and dangerous” but I guess Christmas isn’t for another 3 weeks so, fine.
The crux of the story, we learn, is that Stephanie’s main mark is jerky-cute Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara) who ALSO happens to be her high-school ex-boyfriend!! (right? or something?) He is, apparently, wanted dead or alive for the princely sum of…50 grand? Really? Dead OR alive? Bail dodgers who owe roughly the cost of a single year’s tuition at Sarah Lawrence College including books and meals, it’s okay to just kill them? Okay, lady in all the eyeliner. You’re the boss.
Along the way Stephanie joins forces with an elderly man with a penchant for indecent exposure, employing his bare testicles in her plot to bring her target to his knees. She also pals around with women who have not lost their sense of humor or their sanity despite their careers as sex-workers in the decaying post-industrial wasteland of Trenton, NJ.
Also, it’s sad to see Debbie Reynolds going the Betty White route.
I love Betty White a lot, and while I think she doesn’t need to take the broadest roles offered her, I applaud her for having a sense of humor about herself and reinvigorating her career. Still, Debbie Reynolds, don’t pull that. Old-lady-being-gross is Betty’s thing now, and as terrible as it is to have no roles for women over the age of 30 it’s still more terrible for each actress of high quality to line up, one by one and smilingly hop on the jokes-about-Johnny-Knoxville’s-balls Express. You don’t even pronounce thong right, Debbie. It rhymes with bong, not with lawn, don’t you see? You don’t belong in a place like this, kid. But maybe, what else can you do? It’s just a terrible situation and I’m sorry for you, Debbie. You deserve far better than this.Other people who deserve better than this are everyone, with the possible exception of Katherine Heigel who deserves exactly this. With the warmth of an Auschwitz outhouse, and the comic timing of a half-blind tortoise stumbling over a rocky impasse deep in the Appalachian hinterlands, she infuses the already delightful script with a brand of heady, too-tan charm all her own! Katherine Heigel. Heigel? Higel? Am I saying that right? Nobody knows!
In a surprise twist, Stephanie’s shocking addiction to junk food is shockingly revealed. Shockingly. I bet the producers really patted themselves on the back for sort of calling attention to the fact that, as Mindy Kaling and so many others have pointed out, movies and TV shows consistently boast lead females who, we are told, can NOT stop eating garbage despite stubbornly retaining a body that strongly suggests an adherence to a raw food diet and several daily trips to the gym.
“How does a person eat like you eat and look like you look?” Joe Morelli bellows, dumping her Chee-toh stash all over the floor. Finally, vindication, except no. Heigel-as-Stephanie’s answer? “Why ya gotta mess with my Tastycakes, huh?’Why indeed. Nice deflection, Stephanie, and nice deflection Hollywood. We will all now take the hint, and cease and desist our “messing with” the industrial “Tastycakes,” as it were. Consider disbelief forever suspended, and the pesky tools of logic packed away, finally and forever in grandpa’s heavy trunk from the war, and hidden in the old attic behind the Mall Madness game and the The Ab Roller.
What will happen to Stephanie? will taking her top off, tawkin’ like dis, and firing a gun at a paper target help her get her man, and GET her MAN?
I think, probably yes it will, but also, who cares?
WHEN WILL I SEE THIS??? When it’s on cable and I’m home on my mom’s couch drinking wine at 2 am.
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I think it’s really sort of fucked up that the press and Vogue magazine and whoever else are giving “My Week With Marilyn” all this attention. It’s like they’re forgetting that the world already HAS an incredible film celebrating the beauty, charm, mystery and magic of Marilyn Monroe.Hollywood’s always fixing what ain’t broke.
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Dear Black American culture,
We just want to let you know that we will not rest until we have co-opted every single one of your gestures, expressions, dance moves, musical styles, sartorial inventions and turns of phrase.
Very sincerely,
White People
p.s. Thanks for Jay-Z, he’s really working out great!
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If you know me IRL, it’s no secret that I don’t like cats. I’m allergic to them, but real talk, I think they’re gross and a little scary.
I know that I’m in the minority, especially in Brooklyn and especially, especially on the internet. I do understand and respect that people love their cats the way I love dogs. I do not wish any harm to come to any cat anywhere, and I do not in any way endeavour to change peoples minds about their beloved pets, but having recently been linked to this video
by @Annsganistan, I felt it was time to share my feelinz.
This lady has a far more severe phobia than I do. Dislike and disgust are more my bag than irrational terror. That said, that cat they show first at :09 and then throughout the video? Fucking scary. Yeah. And when she freaks out about the cat paw at 1:58, I said out loud “Girl, I KNOW.” I hate that paw-under-the-door thing so much!
Aside from my allergies, I’m pretty much fine with them being around I just don’t LIKE them. Full disclosure: when I was about seven years old, I went with my mom to the home of a friend of hers, a woman whose family owned two cats. While my mom and this lady were hanging out, I was looking at the books on their bookshelves. The two cats were around me, sniffing a new person as they would, when suddenly, incited by absolutely NOTHING, they EACH opened their mouths and clamped on to one of my forearms dragging their teeth along my tender, delicate child-flesh leaving twin red parallel lines. Both of them. At the same time.
They drew no blood, just simultaneously scraaaaaaaped the hell out of my skin and then wandered off, probably to pee in a box that would just sit there all day.
Did this one experience ruin me for cats forever? Probably, but, hey. There are a whole host of other reasons to seriously dislike cats and find them distasteful and even offensive. Here:
The noises they make. For real real, I think their mewling and hissing is as unappealing a sound that a pet could make, and their cries when they are in heat are literally the most repellent sounds I have ever had the misfortune to hear in the small yard behind my apartment building.
They smell bad. FACT. If you have a cat, I can tell the minute I walk into your house. the odor leaves no mystery to, to say nothing of the shedding.
The shedding. “Nice dress.” “Oh thanks, too bad it’s covered with cat hair, haha!” Yeah hahahahaha that’s disgusting. So if someone goes home with you, they are basically signing themselves up for a night rolling around in that.
The licking. People are always like “cats are clean because they bathe themselves”. I fail to see what’s clean about licking one’s own filth and then swallowing it along with a mass of hair, creating a disgusting ball that will inevitably be hacked up onto the carpet just as soon as you have company. Also their tongue feels like wet sandpaper. CUTE!
Litterbox. They go to the bathroom inside, in a box. Seriously? Sure, dogs might have the occasional accident every now and then, but generally speaking outside is where it all goes down. Having a cat essentially means having an animal outhouse inside your apartment.
They really don’t give a shit. Like at all. You could die and they would just snack on your corpse. Maybe I’m a glutton for attention, but if I want something surly and disinterested who stalks about the house in a state of perpetual ennui and is only nice to me when it wants something, I’ll have children. Heyo!
Their food. Look, smell, packaging: all bad. Also, what’s with those commercials trying to get us to believe that chopped up God know’s what belongs in a cut crystal dish for our precious diva of a housepet? Fuck you, those commercials. Is that cat King Mongkut of Siam or Gwyneth Paltrow? No? Then it doesn’t really need it’s feast to be fancy.
Illness. Let me first say, at the risk of sounding insensitive, that I, too have lost a pet (Oliver, you are missed) and know it to be devastating. That being said, I have noticed that rather then simply getting sick and dying, cats all seem to get really gross-sick, a sort of sickness requiring ointments and needles and catheters and all manner of other easily soiled instruments. Unpleasant.
Pouncing. While I respect, admire and even envy the feline’s ability to soundlessly jump upon it’s prey, leap across the room or ascend nearly effortlessly to the top of a tall bookshelf, I find it unnerving, even horrifying to see it at one moment across the room and then find it only seconds later perched on the back of the sofa right behind my head.
Retractable claws. I still cant quite believe these. They seem like something out of a fucking Rob Zombie horror movie, but, no, it’s just one more terrifying feature of this four-legged demon pet.
While I defy you, defy you, to contradict me on any of these counts, I concede that cat lovers are possessed of something stronger than cynicism: real love. They are simply people whose affection and devotion is such that these issues I have here named are a barely noticeable blip on the radar screen of loving their animals. As in the profoundly offensive lesbian-conversion film Chasing Amy, what’s-her-name-with-the-voice teachers old lantern-jawed Affleck that love means putting an individual ahead of their actions; not counting the things ABOUT someone’s past behavior against who they ARE. Cat-owners and beer-bloated idiots from Red Bank teach us that whether the object of one’s affection is getting double teamed by high-school jocks, or shitting in a box like it owns the place, when it comes to true love, there are no deal breakers.
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NotesIt brings me no pleasure to find fault with the man who didn’t create Thuglife, but rather diagnosed it.
Still, some transgressions cannot simply be glossed over for the sake of appearances.
Fact: This is a great Tupac song.I say great because it combines my favorite things about West Coast rap: stretched-out, weed-smokin’ beats and lyrics that render even the gravest situation absurd.In the intro, Tupac calls up a young lady who has captured his attentions, and offers to come “swoop” her up. She cites the fact that her man “ain’t gon let” her and, after a few fraught moments of back-and-forth, politely declines. Tupac concedes, and it SEEMS like the phone call is about to end but then, in the next breath Tupac is heard to ask “What’s wrong with your eye? Why you got on glasses?”Forget the errors of grammatical construction. They’re there. Of couse they’re there. Let us instead focus our attentions on the content of the sentence.Are Tupac’s powers of perception so well-honed that he can sense that the object of his desire is wearing sunglasses even though he’s talking to her on the phone?Please believe me, I love Tupac. I have tried and failed to give this lyrical sequence the benefit of the doubt by playing my own devil’s advocate:“Maybe they’re actually not on the phone, maybe he ran into her at the gas station or the falafel place, or the science museum.”But then why does he say “What’s up, it’s Tupac”, hm? That’s not something you say when you’re face to face with a person. Also, he says, “Lemme come swoop you up”. This is a youth-phrase meaning “Allow me to come pick you up” leaving us no recourse.It all points to a serious lack of attention to detail on the part of Tupac and the folks in the studio when the song was recorded. While I can’t exactly work up any real shock that a bunch of music producers in the 90s weren’t especially detail oriented, it still boggles the mind to learn that not a soul at Interscope records noticed this discrepancy, in time to prevent the making of another video (weird remix, not as good), which opens with Tupac making said phone call.
Come on, everybody. Everybody, come on.
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NotesThis is exactly, absolutely right.
Double the Dutch, Whoopi. Double it.
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I am absolutely positive that Jonathan Brandis’s character in “Ladybugs” wrote about impersonating a woman and how it impacted his understanding of gendered power structures and the dominant male gaze for his college application essay.
RIP, JB
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I remember when this movie came out, Don Juan de Marco, with Johnny Depp. I was thirteen. This song and video were on rotation on MTV constantly and I decided I better start thinking stuff like this was sexy if I ever wanted a boyfriend. I paid attention to the video’s visual cues, and wore a black tank top under a red tank top to a middle school dance, along with whorish red lipstick. It was as close an approximation of the ensemble in this video that could be created by someone with a very limited wardrobe and an even more limited supply of breast tissue.The black tank top was considerably thicker and bunched up weirdly under the red one which was also too long, creating an undesirable spare tire effect that made me so self-conscious that I didn’t dance the whole night and called my mom to come get me early.
