FYI: Homosexual Savagery

Jason Jones did a great segment on a don't ask don't tell purporter. Though the topic is fairly obvious at this point. Obviously homosexuals should be able to fight in the military, thinking otherwise has zero reasons other than biggotry (yes, it is), but the guy in the interview has some really ridiculous claims about history and so the segment ends up fairly entertaining. Jones also does a good job of hitting the guy with some fairly obvious and damning questions-counterpoints.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Gay Reichs
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Canadian link.

You know what, I've heard gay people refer to themselves as savage before, but I think they meant it, well, in a gayer way. (Hey, David)

More savage than natural men.

Signs of Life

Wow, it's been a while. School is wrapping up quickly, with lots and lots of work to do, and I'm on the hunt for a job (if you know anyone looking for a wise-ass blogger send me an email), so I've been shitty with the blog.
I've collected a few things over the last bit that I thought I could post about but never got around to it. So how about I do just a quick rundown.

1. The Bechdel Test - I didn't need a test to tell me that Hollywood is male centric, but this test is a fairly damning and practical way to think about women in movies.
2. That South Park death threaten-er got arrested for being stupid in front of an FBI agent apparently. I hope some people greet him kindly when he gets to prison.
3. Um:Quick, someone get him some honey before he joins the new Avengers movie (perhaps a Mary Sue for Whedon ...)
4. Moreover:Darth Vader in a Wes Anderson flick.
   
5. And finally, though not directly related to humour, Glenn Beck hate is as good as chuckles around here so... go fuck yourself Beck.
   

Also, apparently Jon Stewart has a beard. Rub it in Stewart. Rub it in.

props Boing Boing for many of these list items.

Futurama on the Radio

Or well just Billy West, who is half of Futurama on his own really.

West appeared on Fresh Air this week and talked a little about how he created many of his Futurama voices. It's interesting to hear him talk about how he creates his voices, and how he thinks about voice acting. His explanations for Zoidburg and Zap are pretty funny, and I'm pretty impressed to learn that he does all the voices live when they record, so really sometimes he just sits with a mic in front of him and talk with himself.

Here's the link to stream or download.

Simpson Infographic

Seems like these infographics are all the rage nowadays. Here's one for the Simpsons. My take away: voice actors are pimps, especially Azaria, Shearer, and Castellaneta, and that Lisa isn't pulling her weight.

I'd love to see a Futurama one, but then it would only be Billy West.

via /Film

TT: Schmucks and Guns

So Steve Carell and Paul Rudd have teamed up for another comedy, this time Carell playing the supporting role. I don't know if this represents their respective careers, Rudd on the way up after a couple of well received flicks, and Carell on his way down after a series of poorly received films, but it looks like it puts both actors in back in their comfort zones. Rudd gets to play the nice and wise ass straight man and Carell gets to the be the clueless/harmless weirdo.

Dinner for Schmucks is apparently a remake of some Swedish film, which is based of some play. I know some of that information is wrong (particularly the Swedish part) but I can't find the correct information in the 3 minutes I was willing to look for it. The trailer makes the film look pretty funny if not emotionally/narratively predictable. Really though, Carell and Rudd are enough for me to buy in.

The second trailer does not inspire as much confidence in me as the first. It's for the generic sounding Operation: Endgame which stars a bunch of people, most notably Rob Corddry, Jeffrey Tambor, and Zach Galifianakis. It's also straight to DVD, which is usually a bad sign.

/Film talks about the possible reasons why, from mediocre movie to movie company politics. Whyever, it looks like something I'll try but won't be disappointed if it blows. I've embedded the red band trailer so it's NSFW, but here's the link to the green band trailer.

Corddry seems like the standout performance in this. To me, he's always had a mean streak in his comedy and so this sort of role, where he needs to actually seem dangerous, might be just the right opportunity for his particular brand of charisma.

On a final side note, did you notice Galifianakis is in both trailers, indeed is in 60% of comedy trailers nowadays. I think Galifianakis is a funny guy, but I think he's running the risk of over-exposing himself. Notice how people react to Michael Cera or Seth Rogen nowadays? We'll see.

My Elevator

Hey. I had to write a"scenerio" last week for one of my classes. Essentially the assignment was meant to help us explore imaginary users for devices we plan to re-engineer in terms of sound interaction. I wrote my "scenerio" with a certain lack of seriousness because a) I'm a bit (?) of a wanker and b) because I may be incapable of taking anything seriously.

Anyways, I think you might find at least one of my jokes funny if you actually enjoy reading my blog.

After the jump.

Mark checks his mail. Pizza flyer. He never gets flyers from the place where he actually orders his pizza. Probably because they aren’t an international pizza conglomerate, like mom used to run.

He presses the flyer through the trash lid and glimpses dozens more inside.

At the elevators, he presses the up button. He looks at the floor indicator above each elevator and sees the left displays a “1” and the right a “7”. Moving in front of the left elevator, expecting it to open in reaction to his button press, he looks the fool. The left elevator doors remains closed as the number above the right floor indicator begins to decrease.

It does that sometimes.

The right floor indicator reaches “1” and the door opens. The left door never even pretends to open. Which is rude.

Mark enters the right elevator. Of the pair, it has the second set of doors that open to the loading/sticky garbage area. Sometime people throw out couches in this area, which is rude. This elevator, unlike the left, also beeps.

The doors close after Mark presses the button marked “11”. The elevator hums as it begins its ascent. Not to use sound clichés (are all onomatopoeia clichés?), but that’s what the elevator does; it hums as it moves.

But the humming is nothing. Mark accepts the humming. Indeed to not expect humming might be a little presumptuous. Anyways, as the elevator reaches the second floor the speaker beeps. And not a subtle beep, or a pleasant beep, the little speaker produces a harsh and sharp beep, just to let you know, you know, that you’ve passed the second floor. And the elevator offers this notification every floor.

I don’t know why the elevator thinks Mark, or anyone else for that matter, needs to know that s/he has passed the second floor, or each floor. Really, anyone only needs to know when they’ve reached their particular floor. Beeping every floor is like a tour guide that only honks the horn as s/he drives passed every site of importance.

The irritating quality of this ticker is only one of the myriad beautiful sounds this elevator can provide. Also for your listening pleasure:

• A rapid (approx once every 2/3 of a second) beepdicator to inform you that the elevator door cannot close. This usually occurs because you are holding the door back to prevent it from crushing a newborn child, or because you are holding the “open door” button while you wait for your significant other to grab her zune in the apartment and god forbid she go anywhere without the ability to listen to the new Drake album.
• A (again) harsh ringing tone that sounds when you hit the help button. Which you do, often, because it’s located right above the “close door” button, and is actually where the “close door” button is located in the other elevator.

As mark rides the noise machine up through the series of floors, he listens as the elevator gleefully sounds its beep at each floor. Again, Mark concentrates on the rhythm, struggling to determine whether the rhythm is indeed arhythmical as he believes. It could simply be the maddening force of the oppressive beeps that has distorted his sense of reality/sense of rhythm so that he merely perceives the series of beeps as irregular, but he swears (pinky) that the beeps are not perfectly rhythmic. He’s certain something’s off. Well, at least certain that the beep on floor seven is a micromoment shorter than the rest.

The elevator reaches the eleventh floor, the top floor of the building, the floor which maximizes both the time Mark needs to spend in an elevator to reach his apartment, and, crucially, the number of (possibly) arhythmical beeps he must suffer.

He exits the elevator and hopes to get lefty next time.

Now that's Comedy makes a Porno(?)

Alright, so I guess a notch down the narcissistic ladder from googling oneself would be typing in your name.com. Well because I'm not a narcissist (hahahaha) instead I typed in www.nowthatscomedy.com into my address bar.

And there's fairly logical reasons to do so. Really, registering websites isn't too expensive and I could force myself to take this seriously if I had to plop down $17 to "purchase" the real domain to my blog title.

But someone already owns www.nowthatscomedy.com. Go ahead, you can try it if you want. It's not nsfw, but it comes awfully close. Indeed, www.nowthatscomedy.com redirects, promptly, to www.hotmoviechicks.com. Which is rude.

There are a few strange things about this:

• Why does hotmoviechicks.com need to own the domain nowthatscomedy.com? Are there a lot of people trying to get to hotmoviechicks.com and making a few typos? Like hotmale.com? Are they trying to provide a service to their users? Or! are they trying to capture poor url adventurers with a wide net of multiple urls that all direct to their XXX service?
• The website defies expectations a little in that there are no poorly photoshopped-topless Jessica Alba assaults you upon immediate load. Nor is there any nudity really. However, what is on display seems a thin pretense of non-porn, but seems to indicate, purposefully, that here be porn. It's sort of like some of the advertising on torrent sites. The not-necessarily-porn banners that everyone knows, if they aren't fooling themselves, are porn adverts.

The real problem with this new site is not that loyal followers of this blog (heh heh) will accidentally stumble upon titillating images of hollywood's moneyshots, but that it now pops up every time I begin to type in hotmail.com. It makes me feel/look the skeeve. And I don't appreciate that porno site. Not one bit.

See me later ;)

P.S. Both nowthatscomedy.ca and [...].org seem to be safe. For now.

P.P.S. I looked up cameronwalker.com because of what I wrote earlier. I was protected by my computer from an unsafe website. Either my computer is being overzealous in its attempts to protect me, or that cameronwalker.com, like its namesake, is one bad muthafucka.

The Force is Strong in these Directions

I'm a sucker for these stupid Star Wars GPS commercials. I laughed embarrassingly long at the first Darth Vader video (roundabound!) and this morning I saw a new Yoda video. I convinced myself before watching it that the first video was just a fluke and that I'd roll my eyes at this new video's lame pandering and become irritated as these videos continued to hit the YouTubes.

But I didn't. I laughed heartily at the pandering. Whatever, I can laugh if I want to.

A) He says roundabound!
B) I always loved the Yoda's first appearance in Empire, when he was a crazy hermit, and so this little video warmed the cockles of my laugh heart.

Dagobah!

The Bicycle Thief: William Shatner

I give a lot of love (love is the same as hate right?) to Star Wars here at Now that's Comedy, but Star Trek can be just as funny. I mean, had I been blogging at the time, I would have loved to post about Patrick Stewart's appearance on Extras, and William Shatner is always a source of amusement (how can you hate a man that embraces his own self as a self parody?).

But I digress, the point is this funny video with Nimoy and Shatner at some (possibly) 70's con wherein Nimoy attempts to prove, through anecdotal evidence, that Shatner is not a nice man.

I like when Shatner tries to bite Nimoy's ear. Or kiss it. Whatever he was planning on doing, I'm sure it was better for us all that he stopped.

Bam, first Star Trek tag.

Hot Tub Time Machine v. Casual Sexism

So, Hot Tub Time Machine. I first heard about this movie on /Film, when all that was knew about the film was the name of the film (and subsequently a little about what the film was about) and who was in it. The title alone had my interest, the shear absurdity of the main conceit tickled me, and the pedigree in terms of casting helped a lot. High Fidelity is a favourite for me, so I knew John Cusack could do comedy, Rob Corddry was always decent, if not charismatic, on the Daily Show, Craig Robinson gets some of the best jokes in The Daily Show, and Clarke Duke was great in the relatively unknown (web?) series Clark and Michael. Long sentence though it may be, I was pretty stoked for the movie.

Is stoked, a word, out of vogue? Is it just a stoner thing now? Sometimes I worry my vocabulary is full on lexical hipster-anachronisms. Full review/rant after the jump.

And I liked the trailer a lot. Well, sort of. I mean, it wasn't hysterical, but there was certainly some quality jokes, and the whole hot tub time machine gimmick looked to be just as ridiculous as the name would suggest. The eighties thing too seemed like a fun way to mine some comedy. I especially liked the red band trailer, like when Robinson declares that it must "be some kinda ... hot tub time machine! *musical cue*", and that he's not crying, it's "just water splashin his face from all the fuckin."

When the movie hit theatres I never really got around to see it because a) I just never got around to it, b) I was reluctant to spend the cash on it, especially since c) it didn't do very well with critics. I basically chalked it up to something to see on DVD.

Then I saw it on DVD. My verdict is that it's a serviceable comedy that flirts with mediocrity. There are funny moments (like the aforementioned bath-sex scene, the way the protagonists discover they are indeed in the '80s, the discussion of time paradoxes, and the one armed man shtick), enjoyable moments (Robinson's musical performance), and some decent comedic performances from the actors (Robinson and Duke particularly shine in contrast to the inoffensive Cusack and Corddry). I was also amused how if you take away the Hot Tub Time Travelin', Cusack's bit in the movie is essentially an obligatory Cusack role (see Serendipity, I guess). What did piss me off about Hot Tub, was the unnecessary and ignorant sexism that exists in the film.

I'm not even talking about the almost eventual sexism that occurs in most comedies that star a bunch of men, or even a bromance. I've come to accept this issue in some sense as a result of many male comedy writer's inability to write real female characters, or the tendency for these films to cater to their audience's (other males) or even their character's gaze on the female as a sexual object. By accept, in no way do I condone. It's shitty, but it's sadly the usual.

Yeah, so near the beginning of Hot Tub, where our troop first arrives at their weekend resort, Robinson asks the manager about reservations and tries to hide that he has a shared last name with his wife, in that he is Nick Webber-Agnew. Corddry upon hearing his shared name mocks him, and continues to do so throughout the film since hyphenizing his name has emasculated XX. This alone is fairly insulting, since although it is the most obnoxious character is that voices this mockery, Robinson himself never owns the hyphenization, indeed seems to admit that it wasn't his choice, or wouldn't have done so given the opportunity (i.e. balls), to take her name into his.

For more on this I'm going into spoiler territory. Here after, there be monsters.

So, later in the film we realize that Robinson's wife has actually cheated on him and that he knows she has but she doesn't know he knows (it's okay if you need to read that a few times, I'm not the most clear writer at times). And this tears him up inside, because he loves her and doesn't want to leave her but she's emasculated him. No wait! she's cuckolded him. Heh, don't get to use that word too often.

Further, thematically the whole movie basically provides the three adult characters (XX wasn't alive in the 80's) an opportunity to fix the mistakes they made this particular weekend in the '80's that apparently sent all their lives into the shittier (although it seems like their lives went into the shitter because they were essentially shitheads or losers, not because they all made some simple blunder this particular weekend, but whatever) and so Robinson gets an opportunity to kick off, rather than end, his musical career during his performance that weekend. Then, when we see him return to the present day, or rather the fixed present, i.e. the better life, he has a record label as a successful producer, a record label that proudly displays his surname, and only his surname. And when he speaks to his wife, who no longer has cheated on him, we discover that he has not hyphenized his name. He is just Nick Webber, a real man. In this ideal world, Robinson hasn't had none of that pussy taking your wife's surname faggotry.

Seriously? So, Robinson's character arc shows him regaining his masculinity from his wife, as symbolized in the hyphenization of his last name. Our lesson apparently: taking your wife's name is to be a cuckold. Awesome.

I'm sorry, but it's actually fairly forward-thinking to take part of your partner's name into yours. I mean, I think we've gotten passed the point where marriage means a woman belongs to a man, the whole legalized prostitution thing. Fuck, some people even make new names together, like they are two equal parts to a marriage. Call them crazy, I know.

SPOILERS END!!!

While, I don't think the writers (or I wouldn't accuse them of such just out of giving the benefit of the doubt) meant to admonish the hypenizing of a males name, the way they have used it as a symbol of Robinson's emasculation is touch of bigotry I don't think serves the flick well.

In Summation: Hot Tub Time Machine is decent enough. It is like The Hangover in that it is underwhelming despite some good comedic performances, and scrapes by in the three out of five gulf of a little better than bad. However, it is pretty damn sexist. But a lot of its audience won't really see it as such, which really irks me. People will laugh at the jokes and buy the hyphenizing as a symbol of emasculation, without recognizing how insulting this is to women, to equality. So in this way, Hot Tub propagates a backwards idea of gender politics, which isn't cool, and makes it far worse than a 3/5 really, since in the act of reviewing I shouldn't have to set aside issues of sexism to assign an objective grade.

Bah.

I've written Stargate Fan Fiction.