The Lonely Island have become grown-ass men. In a new video for YouTube's Comedy Week, the trio take on the mature subjects of wife sex and cemetery real estate ("wobble-dee-wobble-dee drop into my grave plot"). It goes hard, because it's #DIAPERCORE. Reggie Watts also debuted a video for YouTube's celebration with his variation on the Rickroll, faithfully re-creating Rick Astley's outfits and letting his upper lip dance to '80s synth like no one is watching.
Tom Cruise's Midlife Crisis: "Alone and awkward, Tom Cruise wages a futile battle against time." Tom Cruise is mortal? "He's kind of broken. He's too concerned with what people think." Tom has been hitting clubs in an attempt to get over his divorce. "Tom's trying to look cool and go out and be hip, but he just looks silly and icky. He's going through a midlife crisis." His 50th birthday may be to blame. "Midlife crises become acute if a man's life is marked by failed marriages and strained relationships." Turning 50 in itself can be "a traumatic event for many men." He hasn't seen daughter Suri in two months. "He's lost his place as a husband and father." He's also worried about his career. "Tom is very nervous about being eased out of big action star roles." That doesn't have to be an issue necessarily, as men get to play leads much longer — just look at 60-year-old Liam Neeson headlining the Taken franchise. Tom has no idea how to be single. At a London club "he looked awkward and uncomfortable. The rest of the club was dancing, but Tom was in a corner talking to a woman like it was a business meeting. As rich and famous as he is, Tom just doesn't know how to fit in." A therapist says that Cruise "has to confront that his power is shifting." NEVER!
Looks like Larry David has got some friends in this town. His upcoming HBO movie Clear History is shaping up to be a doozy. David co-wrote (alongside some other Curb Your Enthusiasm writers) and will star; Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland) will direct. And the rest of the cast includes [deep breath] Bill Hader, Jon Hamm, Danny McBride, Phillip Baker Hall, Kate Hudson, Michael Keaton, Eva Mendes, Amy Ryan, and JB Smoove [exhale].
The Women of Beverly Hills 90210 Are BFFs: "The scene was perfectly set for a showdown. Shannen Doherty had just marched into Jennie Garth's 40th birthday bash sporting killer boots and her trademark smirk — looking every inch like Brenda Walsh at her fiercest." YES. "The Beverly Hills 90210 vets, once such mortal enemies that costar Tori Spelling claimed they had a fistfight, strode toward each other and … hugged." Hugged?! Reunited and acting "just like real friends," the former "Kelly and Brenda have called a cease-fire to their 20-year war." Why now? "A Doherty pal attributes the bonding to the simple matter of growing up — and feeling nostalgic for the Peach Pit days: 'It's like high school friends that you fought with but now love. They're a big part of your past.'" OK, sure. "Shannen and Tori were in New York doing press, and they were warm. The '90s were a long time ago." They sure were. At least they all still hate that bitch Valerie (Tiffani Thiessen).
Things You Don't Know About Ice-T (Excerpts):
"I love grape Kool-Aid"
"As a kid, I dreamed of being a bank robber"
"My favorite artist is Prince"
"If I could time travel, I'd go to the Roaring '20s"
"I love all kinds of cereal"
"My most embarrassing moment was getting diarrhea while performing at a concert."
"Harvey Keitel is my favorite actor."
"I prefer to be indoors."
"The first famous person I met was my neighborhood crime boss."
Over a five-year period beginning in 1998, HBO premiered Sex and the City (1998), The Sopranos (1999), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), and The Wire (2002). That’s a DiMaggio-esque streak of hits, unparalleled in the unpredictable, ego- and money-fueled world of television. Which makes sense considering that at the time the network didn’t consider itself in the television business at all: It was in the HBO business. Unlike ossified, regular old TV, HBO was an exciting new world where breasts could be bared, F-bombs could be dropped, and Brian Benben was considered a leading man. The premium channel was blessed with an executive team committed to empowering cranky creators — can you imagine giving notes to David Chase, David Simon, or Larry David? — and an operating ethos that wasn’t tied to antiquated notions like “advertising” or “ratings.” Part of what HBO was selling was prestige: These were shows unavailable anywhere else, serialized conversation starters that dominated water coolers and Internet message boards. If you didn’t want to be left behind, you’d pay for the privilege of watching them. Sure, the shows were brilliant, but it isn’t hard to game the system when you’re playing by different rules.
So HBO’s mid-decade hiccup — that creative trench that brought us Unscripted (an improvised show about George Clooney’s girlfriend’s acting class) and Tell Me You Love Me (an overly ambitious gamble on America’s appetite for televised hate-fucking) — wasn’t just a result of visionary executive Chris Albrecht being forced to resign in disgrace. It was representative of a larger shift in the small-screen landscape as even the most obscure cable channels began to realize that investing in narrative series could instantly put them on the map, or at least liberate them from the lower 400s on Time Warner’s ever-expanding grid. The more attention-getting and risk-taking their offerings, the better. HBO was still HBO. But TV? That was quickly becoming HBO, too.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Predicament: The season finale of Curb’s New York adventure has everything you’d want: pre-gay seven-year-olds, Mayor Bloomberg, Nazi iconography, narrative symmetry, and the highest concentration of Parkinson’s disease jokes per minute in sitcom history, presumably.
Too bad that the amazingly sassy, kid who played Ana Gasteyer’s Project Runway-loving, swastika-appreciating son Greg had the misfortune of appearing in the same episode where Michael J. Fox got to play himself as (maybe?) a diabolical bastard who uses his debilitating illness to completely fuck with Larry David, otherwise that’s all people would be talking about. Instead, Fox, perhaps ticked at being shushed by Larry at a piano bar, has a field day playing with his own saintly image, and ultimately uses his vast influence to get Larry kicked out of New York for miming a violin during Fox’s benefit speech. Although Larry doesn’t actually leave until he’s once again asked to appear at a charity event for ill children — then he and Leon are off to harass pig-parkers in Paris.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Walter White, Breaking Bad
Predicament: The main objective of “Hermanos” is to establish Gustavo Fring’s origin story and the source of his conflict with the cartel and the now-silent Tio Hector, just as Hank seems to be backing the stoic chicken man into a corner. But that increased scrutiny — combined with Walt’s unwitting participation in Hank’s case and Jesse’s apparent shift in loyalty towards the man he’s supposed to be poisoning with ricin — causes Walt to feel strangely simpatico with the man he’s been trying to murder all season. (You know, in self-defense.) He knows this looks bad and wants Gus to understand he wants no part of the tracking-device scheme Hank is counting on to counter Gus’ ice-cold, largely redemptive questioning.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Walter White, Breaking Bad
Predicament: Perhaps galvanized by making clear to Skyler where he resides on the guy-who-knocks-or-doesn’t-knock continuum last week, he both disregards her instructions about returning Walt Jr.’s new Challenger to the dealership by instead blowing it up (rather than walking away from the explosion, he sits and watches it while calling for a cab) and revels in her discomfort over the sheer amounts of cash she’s being tasked with laundering, as well as her realization that a car wash is insufficient as a cover. He also provides a vial of ricin for Jesse to slip his new pal Gus.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Walter White, Breaking Bad (Last Week: 1)
Predicament: Here comes the hangover: The morning after drinking too much red wine and telling too many DEA agents that the dead meth chemist they’re investigating is a mere pretender and the real Heisenberg is still out there, wink wink, Walt wakes up with a giant headache. Make that two — Skyler is understandably concerned that someone may knock on their door one night and shoot Walt in the face. His response is chilling. Not only is he too indispensable to his employers’ concerns to be in danger, he’s actually the one who will knock on someone’s door. Skyler gets the message loud and clear: Her passive high-school chemistry teacher husband is no passive middle-manager; he’s a stone-cold killer, and if she has any illusions that they’re going to get out of this thing clean, she is mistaken. She takes Holly and drives to Four Corners, and even after two coin flips tell her to keep driving to Colorado, she can’t do it.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Louis C.K., Louie
Predicament: Double the Louie episodes (seriously, what’s your hurry, FX?) means double the opportunity for angst. In the first, Louie appears on Red Eye (!) to vigorously defend the art of self-doin’ it against a prim, virtuous Ellen of Citizens Against Masturbation on behalf of everyone who’s ever lived, save for her. She appeals to his loneliness and desperation and dares him to come to one of her meetings, but not before he fantasizes about shoving an entire bag of dicks into an attractive elevator passenger suffering from a crippling case of no-dicks-up-in-here. Louie shows up at the end of a CAM meeting, then goes out for a drink with Ellen, then ends up back at her hotel suite with her cozied up next to him in a silk robe. He tries to kiss her, with predictably doomed results, and she proceeds to talk him through how amazing sex could be if they fell in love slowly and then got married. He, of course, uses this as inspiration in the hotel bathroom, which proves to be much sexier material than NPR reports about African genocide.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Predicament: Big drama for the Greenes as their beloved German shepherd, Oscar, has to be put down just before they move to New York for three months. Larry and Jeff are suffering from low blood sugar, so they wind up eating Oscar’s last supper of Pinkberry — a perfect crime they would have gotten away with if it weren’t for that meddling Vance, currently observing a vow of silence as recommended by his spiritual adviser, shattering said vow by ratting them out after Larry left a nasty note on his windshield lambasting his double-parking habits.
Meanwhile, Larry declines TV director Tessler’s invitation to come volunteer at a one-day camp for disabled kids by claiming he’s going to New York to work on a show with Seinfeld. As the camp’s date changes, so, amazingly, do Larry’s travel plans, but not his insistence on avoiding it — or Tessler’s persistence in asking, going so far as to call Larry’s bluff by offering him a three-month sublet in Manhattan. So, for anyone wondering what the narrative conceit that would send Season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm to New York would be, there you go: It’s to follow-through on an elaborate lie devised to avoid helping the helpless.
He flirted with villainhood as a robber in A River Runs Through ItThe River Wild and a dancing miscreant in Footloose, but now Kevin Bacon seems to have fully embraced unlikability: He'll follow his roles as a Nazi in X-Men: First Class and the guy who wrecks Steve Carell's marriage in Crazy, Stupid, Love. with one as the bad guy in Robert Schwentke's (Flightplan, Red) comic-adapted supernatural actioner R.I.P.D., about a murdered cop (Ryan Reynolds) who joins other undead officers in the Rest In Peace Department, then tries to catch the guy who killed him (Bacon, presumably). Grade: B+ [Variety]
Terry Gilliam is developing another movie, this one an adaptation of Paul Auster's highly Gilliam-y novel Mr. Vertigo, about a levitating sideshow performer and the mentor who teaches him to fly. Even Gilliam sounds doubtful that this project will ever advance beyond the screenplay he's writing, but just to be safe, everybody should probably buy more insurance. Grade: B+ [Playlist]
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling powerless and put-upon this week? Let us count the ways.
3. Louis CK (Last week: 1)
Predicament: When Louie has Jane and Lily, he tends to want to teach them some valuable lesson, and this time it’s in the form of a road trip. They’re driving to Pennsylvania to see his great aunt Ellen, who lives alone at age 97. He wants the girls to hear firsthand what life was like in a different age, before television, before cars, while there’s still the opportunity, which, of course triggers some brief mortality anxiety. Lily keeps chanting that she’s “Bored, bored, bored, bored,” and Louie’s incredulous — their brains have barely begun to develop, it’s a miracle they’re even alive, they haven’t earned the right to be bored. He does his part to keep things interesting by blasting and singing along to pretty much the entirety of “Who Are You?” — hey, if you’re gonna bust the budget clearing a music license, you might as well get your money’s worth. (Think the final omelet-making scene in Big Night: Once you realize you’re seeing the whole thing, the pace is weirdly engrossing and, in this case, hilarious, if only to see Louie experiencing the closest thing we’ll see to unbridled joy.)
