A.V. Club: Best of the Decade

  • Adorable Internet Thing Of The Day: Jason Segel + The Swell Season + penis jokes

    posted by: Tasha Robinson November 19, 2009 - 06:11p.m.

    As a publicist at Shore Fire Media helpfully (and self-servingly, but what can you do) just informed us, The Swell Season (Once stars Markéta Irglová and Glen Hansard) performed a concert in L.A. last night, and a buddy showed up to première a new song: actor Jason Segel, playing piano and singing a somewhat stream-of-consciousness song not unlike the songs he wrote and performed on How I Met Your Mother and in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Naturally, someone in the audience videotaped it all and got it up on YouTube.

    In the clip, Segel claims Irglová told him that the best way to write a good song is to put as much personal information in it as he can. So he repeats his full phone number with area code many times (we called and got his answering machine, which does seem to be taking messages if you want to say hi), talks about his penis size as revealed in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and invites audience members to sleep with him, regardless of gender, though he asks that bi-curious boys bring along their lesbian friends. Like all things Segel, it's kinda clumsy and pretty damn endearing. Enjoy. And ...

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  • Snap!

    posted by: Genevieve Koski November 13, 2009 - 11:11a.m.

    It's Friday morning, which means it's time for a Ridiculous Internet Thing to get you through 'til the weekend. Courtesy of the always-awesome Rich over at FourFour: A lesson in SNAP.

    To quote Josh when I showed him this: "Wow. There are whole worlds out there." Indeed there are. Snap on, divas.

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  • Here we stand, all together now, at the end of the media age

    posted by: Andy Battaglia November 13, 2009 - 09:11a.m.

    The only thing more 2009 than a Media Alert from a big PR firm about a "flash mob" to happen at Universal City Walk in support of a new Janet Jackson CD is a follow-up Correction Media Alert stating that the time for the "flash mob" will be 6 p.m., not 4 p.m. as previously stated.

    There you have it.

    "MEDIA OPPS," the release goes on to state, "WILL INCLUDE B-ROLL OF DANCERS SURPRISING THE PUBLIC WITH SPONTANEOUS FLASH MOB PERFORMANCE SET TO A MEDLEY OF JACKSON HITS: 'IF,' 'RHYTHM NATION,' 'MISS YOU MUCH,' 'NASTY.'”

    Take some time to unpack all of that above. Take some time indeed.

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  • I went to see 50 Cent introduce his directorial debut and all I got was this lousy blog post

    posted by: Nathan Rabin November 10, 2009 - 02:11p.m.

    As readers are perhaps aware, I am perversely fascinated by 50 Cent. He’s one of those larger-than-life pop icons who makes the world just a little more interesting. So when Josh Modell forwarded me an email about 50 coming to Chicago to screen his sub-direct-to-DVD directorial debut, Before I Self Destruct at a gloriously cheesy downtown multiplex called River East I was, to put it mildly, intrigued. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.

    So last night I went to River East with my friend Michelle to see the man himself and the “film” that will be bundled alongside every copy of 50’s new album. I don’t know what I expected but I figured it would be a memorable night. It was, but not for the reasons I had anticipated. Entering the theater, I was surprised at how sparse the crowd was.

    Six years ago, 50 was unquestionably the biggest rapper in the world and arguably the biggest pop star as well. He was a pop culture phenomenon. His debut album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ was just a half million albums away from going diamond. That’s ten million fucking albums sold in the U.S ...

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  • Some fun Halloween crap to do without leaving your computer

    posted by: Josh Modell October 29, 2009 - 03:10p.m.

    Oh, Halloween. You're a holiday I don't celebrate. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy some Internet content related to your celebration. For instance...

    Rotten Tomatoes has a feature on the 25 best vampire movies according to the Tomatometer. I haven't seen too many of them, and 30 Days Of Night was so boring I turned it off, but perhaps you'll find something to love. It did remind me that I've had a copy of Night Watch at my house for like 2 years, so maybe it's time to bust that out...

    Tomorrow night (Oct. 30), at 8 p.m. Eastern, this website will be playing Orson Welles' original War Of The Worlds broadcast--you know, the one that scared the shit out of the world. It's sponsored, naturally, by the upcoming Welles biopic Me And Orson Welles, which stars Zac Efron and Claire Danes and comes out November 25.

    The Huffington Post has a piece on costume knockoffs that's got some entertaining photos.

    Adorable pop-culture enthusiast Whitney over at Pop Candy has a bunch of photos of carved pumpkins inspired by celebrities. And she's worth reading every day, if ...

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  • Want 10 pounds of Halloween candy?

    posted by: Kyle Ryan October 14, 2009 - 11:10a.m.

    Our friends at the National Confectioners Association—the wonderful souls behind the annual All Candy Expo—and their Candy Dish blog are giving away a whopping 10 pounds of Halloween candy in time for the industry's favorite holiday. Sure, it means you'll need to work out roughly six hours a day seven days a week until Memorial Day to burn it all off, but...10 POUNDS OF CANDY! Your inner grade-schooler would kill for that kind of score. 

    Yes, of course, there's a catch: To win the candy, you have to tell a panel of judges selected by the Candy Dish blog (which includes me) your cool Halloween costume idea. Susan Whiteside of the NCA spells out the rules here:

    To enter the contest, leave a comment on this post telling us about your cool and timely Halloween costume for this year. The costume idea should relate to current events, world news or pop culture. For example, I was planning to dress up as health care reform, but I don’t think it will be ready by Halloween. (Get it?  It’s a crack at how long it’s taking Congress to devise some acceptable health care ...

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  • 30 Rock's dangerous decline and the shadow of Will & Grace

    posted by: Todd VanDerWerff October 14, 2009 - 01:10a.m.

    30 Rock occupies an unusual place in the television landscape. It’s far from a hit—its ratings would have meant cancellation on just about any other network—but because of its leading lady, snarky sense of humor, and satirical digs at the network that airs both it and the show within its show, it’s become one of those things you Have To See if you’re at all interested in television or comedy. And back in 2007—roughly the show’s back half of its first season and first half of its second season—there was nothing quite like the sheer, go-for-broke craziness that the show put out. It was legitimately one of the best shows on television, and one of the funniest in the medium’s history.

    But since the show returned from a hiatus imposed by the 2007-08 writers' strike, it’s lost some of that confident swagger, becoming more hit-and-miss, with its worst episodes a shell of the show that once was. The last few episodes of its second season and all of its third season had moments that were staggeringly uneven, veering from good joke to bad joke, sometimes within individual scenes. The ratio ...

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  • Song And Vision No. 5: "California Dreamin'" and Chungking Express

    posted by: Steven Hyden October 5, 2009 - 12:10p.m.

    Why do movies and pop songs work so well together, and how does the union of sound and vision affect how you see the image in the moment and hear the song for years afterward? These are some of the pretentiously worded questions A.V. Club writer Steven Hyden will be trying to answer in the semi-regular column "Song And Vision," where he'll be writing about famous (and maybe not-so famous) movie scenes set to pop songs and all the weird and wonderful things that happen when directors and singers collide. Find the first four "Song And Vision" columns here. 

    When Mackenzie Phillips chatted with Oprah Winfrey about the time she carried on a 10-year sexual relationship with her father, she said she was trying to put a public face on consensual incest. I think she succeeded, because when I bumped into consensual incest the other day it looked exactly like the older sister from One Day At A Time. But what else did Phillips accomplish? Well, she pretty much ensured that every time I hear “California Dreamin’”—a song I could otherwise play 38 times in a row and never tire of—my brain will flash at least ...

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  • How many of the 100 worst films have you seen?

    posted by: Josh Modell September 28, 2009 - 04:09p.m.

    Late last week, our friends over at Rotten Tomatoes put together a list of the worst-reviewed movies of the past 10 years. Twitterers across the globe raced to count how many they'd seen, and now it's your turn to share your horrible magic number with us. Check out the list here, and then don't be shy: Let us know how many hours you've wasted with these horrible movies. Or defend those that you think shouldn't have been rated so low.

    I've seen 11, maybe 12. (I'm pretty sure I saw Three Strikes, but I can't remember for sure.)  A couple of them were for "I Watched This On Purpose" (the truly awful 88 Minutes and Strange Wilderness). There are certainly a few that I'd classify as so bad they're good, including Glitter and Gigli. But I couldn't find any to defend, though I remember giggling occasionally at The New Guy.

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  • There IS crying in boxing

    posted by: Josh Modell September 27, 2009 - 08:09p.m.

    I enjoy boxing, but I don't follow it at all. (Who's got time when there are so many movies to see and TV shows to watch?) But when there's a fight on HBO I'll often find myself stopping to watch the whole thing, which never happens to be when I chance upon a basketball, baseball, or football game.

    Anyway, I just watched the replay of last night's WBC heavyweight title match between two guys I'd never heard of before: Chris "Nightmare" Arreola and Vitali "Dr. Iron Fist" Klitschko. Klitschko was defending, and by pretty much every measure, it was a relatively boring heavyweight bout: The big Russian dominated nearly every minute, relying on his reach and his speed to keep Arreola at a distance, and just clobbering him every once in a while. Arreola's trainer stopped the fight after 10 rounds.

    Pretty standard stuff, really, with no Rocky moments (though Sly Stallone and his pal Arnold Schwarzenegger were seated together at ringside). But Arreola's amazing post-show in-ring interview really struck me: Dude was basically bawling--out of frustration, not pain--and swearing up a storm: "Vitali's a strong motherfucker. Shit!" It's touching ...

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  • Hey Screenwriters, Enough With The Backstory-Rationing Already!

    posted by: Noel Murray September 23, 2009 - 01:09p.m.

    There’s something about watching five or six movies a day for a solid week that makes a body contemplate how movies are constructed—and what makes them “good.” Back in 2006, at the end of the Toronto International Film Festival, I wrote a blog post about what I like to see when I plop myself down at the cinema. That list hasn’t changed much over the past three years, though there’s something I’d now add to a list of what I don’t want to see, and it’s this: Please, no more movies that are so preoccupied with how to convey the characters’ backstories that they forget to tell the story-story.

    I started to sense the pervasiveness of this scourge at my first Sundance film festival, in 2008. There I saw one indie dramedy after another about characters who’d been deeply bruised by… what? The movies refused to say right away. The characters’ friends would all make oblique references to the death of a family member, or some past sexual and/or physical abuse, or a drug problem, or an arrest, but no one would just outright say what the problem was—presumably ...

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  • Dollhouse: "Epitaph One"

    posted by: Scott Tobias September 20, 2009 - 10:09p.m.

    Dollhouse

    [Note: The following is a review of the unaired 13th episode of Dollhouse: Season One. Normally, this would warrant a place among my TV Club write-ups of the show, but since this is a special case, it’s appearing here in the blogs. Fair warning: As with a standard TV Club entry, massive spoilers follow. Please view the episode before reading further.]

    In my favorite scene in True Romance—hell, everyone’s favorite scene in True Romance—a powerful Italian mobster, played by Christopher Walken, confronts a veteran cop, played by Dennis Hopper, over the whereabouts of Hopper’s son. Hopper contends that he doesn’t know where the boy and his new wife went, other than somewhere on their honeymoon; Walken doesn’t believe him, and threatens to do “some damage” if he doesn’t tell the truth. At this point, Hopper understands that he’s going to die and that realization changes the tone of the scene: Resigned to his fate, he asks for what will be his last cigarette, takes a drag, and proceeds to launch on a floridly offensive monologue about Walken’s Sicilian heritage. The moral of the story? If you’re going to ...

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  • Fall TV Predictions We Got Wrong

    posted by: Noel Murray September 9, 2009 - 11:09a.m.

    Every year when we write our fall TV previews, we do so with minimal foreknowledge of the shows in question. We’ve maybe seen a screener or two, and maybe read some advance reviews from other critics, but mostly we’re relying on instinct and a lifetime of watching TV. But we don’t always get it right. The following is a sampling of some not-so-exact predictions and prejudgment from the past four years of A.V. Club fall TV previews.

    2005

    On Criminal Minds: “Although Mandy Patinkin’s one of Broadway’s brightest stars, and a reasonably value character actor in movies, the divine Mr. M. hasn’t exactly set the small screen ablaze.”

    Actually… The show’s been a solid hit for CBS, and is heading into its fifth season this fall. (Though to be fair to us, Patinkin only lasted two years, and CM has become a bigger hit since he left.)

    On Head Cases: “Although the eccentric-lawyer genre has been expertly mined by shows like Boston Legal, Head Cases promises a fresh take on the law as practiced by weirdoes. Chris O’Donnell and Adam Goldberg look to be playing real characters (with families, motivations, notable ...

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  • The Price Is What?

    posted by: Noel Murray August 27, 2009 - 02:08p.m.

    If I may offer a counter-example to my own “the monoculture is doing just fine” post of yesterday, there’s one example of a grand national unifier that strikes me as less unifying every time I watch. That would be The Price Is Right. I’ve been watching The Price Is Right off and on since I was a kid, and I’ve watched it more lately because my son is a game show fanatic. He’s watched every episode on my four-DVD Price Is Right set multiple times, and over the summer he watched the Drew Carey-hosted version just about every day. When I was a young man, I was pretty good at gauging what everything should cost on The Price Is Right, and even now when I watch the ‘70s episodes, I can roughly estimate the cost of a car or a gazebo or a box of Noodle Dinner. But when it comes to the current show? Man, I have no idea what pricetag to stick on anything.

    I’d feel bad about this, except that I’m not alone. When I watch the new episodes of The Price Is Right, I’m constantly amazed by how wildly ...

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  • One Nation, Still More Or Less Under A Groove

    posted by: Noel Murray August 26, 2009 - 12:08p.m.

    The death of Michael Jackson this summer prompted a slew of familiar-sounding opinion pieces proclaiming—yet again—the death of “monoculture.” As the legend has it, once upon a time, in the days before cable and the internet, we all (or at least more of us than currently) shared common experiences thanks to the wide popularity of certain mega-event movies, TV shows and albums. Nearly everyone was aware of Thriller. A large chunk of the country watched M*A*S*H*, or went to see Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Now we’re all “bowling alone” (to use another outdated buzz term), as we share our tastes and even our political opinions with an ever-smaller group of people. There’s less and less to unite us.

    That’s a romantic vision of the past—and a melancholy vision of the present—and it’s not entirely untrue. Record sales are down. Television audiences have fragmented. These are hard facts to deny. And yet if I hesitate to join in tsk-tsking the end of a golden age, it’s for a couple of reasons. For one, I’m not so sure that ending “monoculture” is such a tragedy. As comforting as ...

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