You know folks, there are some who might say that Friday Buzzkills has become redundant, when the mess on Main Street has trickled down to Wall Street and so many working class families are feeling the sting sitting around their kitchen tables and, talking to each other at soccer practice, thinking about healthcare and how governmental tax cuts have reared their head on the 85 percent of moms with special needs kids, God bless 'em, and the need to defend against those who would threaten our freedom, don'tcha know. But you betcha I'm glad to get this chance to, as a maverick has since being an outsider and saying, "No thank ya" to the same old lobbyist tricks and the record shows, to talk to you without the filter of the mainstream media and say doggone it, we're gonna do a heck of a time cleaning up the very important job creations so this country can be the greatest in the world which it currently is and we small-town people in the heartland know it can be, gosh darn. That's why we're sworn on this mission to reach across the aisle in history with the Friday Buzzkills Express, so we can see up close the values and strength of those values against the failed policies of past policies. You'll get your reward in heaven, right? God bless 'em don'tcha know! [Adorable wink.]
– You'd think in these dizzying, never-a-dull-moment times for our economy (Hey, it's like a roller coaster! And when you get off you don't have a job anymore! Wheeee! Maybe you shouldn't have been out riding roller coasters on a workday!), people would be more conservative with their money: Cutting back on extravagant foods in favor of more budget-conscious substitutions. Avoiding risky investments. Recycling. But then there are those devil-may-care pyromaniacs who get so caught up in letting the motherfucker burn that they set their own house ablaze–like Screen Gems, who this week announced a veritable bonfire of the banalities by signing a three-picture deal with Hayden Christensen, (outside of the fluke that was Shattered Glass) easily one of the least charismatic and most critically drubbed actors of his generation. Staying on message in his pleased-as-spiked-punch press release, Screen Gems president Doug Culpepper said, "Hayden is a very talented and versatile actor with a proven worldwide box-office history." And doubters, heed: Christensen does technically have a box-office history–after all, he's starred in some actual films! That played in movie theaters that sold tickets via an actual box office! But at a time when everybody's joking about the Awesomest Depression, how is it that the guy whose most recent résumé is littered with future Films That Time Forgot such as Jumper and Awake looks like a sound investment? Seriously, we're baffled. Could somebody get Jim Cramer to yell at us until this makes sense?
– To his credit, at least Christensen still has a considerable Q-rating among young girls and undiscriminating gay men who don't care what wooden dialogue he spouts so long as he does it with those smug, pouting lips. But we're also confused by the faith being put into reviving the far-beyond-tired variety show format, which is being pitched as a way to distract people from their various problems by giving them something even more cringeworthy to focus on. We've already filled you in on the forthcoming Osbournes Grimace-Time Milking-It-For-All-It's-Worth Revival Hour, but this week it was announced that Bard of The Sweatpants Set Rosie O'Donnell is ramping up her own play on the white-bread-and-shitty-circuses skein to debut this Thanksgiving, just when you'll need to purge most. Featuring celebrity guests, musical acts, comedy sketches, and plenty of our host braying very, very loudly, Rosie's Variety Show is being pitched by its star as "old-time variety, live from New York, with a nod to Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett, and memories of Sonny and Cher." Your mom is stoked. Here's hoping she gets the chance to put her amazing skills of impersonation to good use.
– Still, in times like these it's good to diversify–even here at Friday Buzzkills we've taken on a second job: For a small fee, we'll make an appearance at your corporate party, avail ourselves of the open bar, make snarky comments about the choice of music, and eventually sink into a tear-streaked state of distress in which we lash out at everyone for not liking us. That's just smart business. So we can certainly understand why perennial Buzzkills favorite Jesse "Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here" Ventura would be branching out yet again from being a jackass-of-all-trades to accept hosting duties on a new reality show exploring conspiracy theories for truTV. Ventura (himself a fervent 9/11 "Truther") will travel to far-flung locales to bark menacingly at "skeptics and adherents to a particular conspiracy theory, after which he'll render a verdict on the alleged phenomenon's veracity." Because who better to expose the truth than a professional wrestler?
– Perhaps while Ventura is cutting his truthy swath across this great land of ours, he can tackle the latest scheme a-brewin'–namely the nefarious plot by the director and producers of the new film Blindness to portray blind people as "incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved." The film is based on Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago's novel of the same name, which has been touted by smarty-pants critics and literary theorists as a resonant, thought-provoking allegory on the fragility of human social order. But forget that: According to National Federation Of The Blind president Marc Maurer, it's a smear job that paints blind people as "unable to do the simplest things like dressing, bathing, and finding the bathroom" and it will "reinforce false public notions that blind children are ineducable, that blind adults are unemployable, and that all blind people are socially undesirable." Of course, in his rush to protest (and there are at least 75 cities with planned demonstrations today, reportedly), Maurer perhaps overlooked that the film is about a town that goes blind overnight and then finds itself forced into quarantine in an abandoned hospital where there's no bathroom to find even if they wanted to. But hey, that's obviously beside the point. The fact is that once again those sensationalistic Hollywood jerks–not to mention that pulp-pusher Saramago–were obviously far too prejudiced to make a movie about what would really happen if society were suddenly stricken blind. I mean, how come everyone in the movie couldn't immediately triumph over adversity, seamlessly integrate themselves into society, and then develop a huge fucking chip on their shoulder?
– Between the brouhaha over Blindness and this summer's scandal over use of the word "retard" in Tropic Thunder, it's clear that being a humorless prig about things is the new stalking when it comes to normal people getting their names in the trade sheets. But we have to ask: Why did so many panties remain bunchless when I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry came out? Where were all the public tantrums about the way that film casts same-sex coupling as a cheap and easy way to pull a fast scam on the federal government? You'd think that more of a fuss would have been raised–after all, homosexuals can be so dramatic, don't you know–but instead the film came and went with nary a whimper, save from critics forced to cringe through its ham-fisted attempt to be progressive while doling out every homophobic stereotype it could muster. And because the film was never properly denounced, it survived long enough to garner enough credibility that it was recently referenced in a Senate hearing on same-sex benefits as some sort of evidence that men will totes start pretending to be gay if it means getting better insurance. Clearly coming off a lonely night with HBO, Office Of Personnel Management deputy director Howard C. Weizmann cited Chuck And Larry to bolster his position that allowing employees in same-sex relationships to receive family benefits would lead to "insurance fraud," saying the film's premise was "not farfetched." Naturally, Weizmann has reason to be skeptical: Witness the number of straight men who pretended to be gay so they could shack up with two female roommates after the landmark case of Furley v. Tripper.