Hello, and welcome to the Phile. I am your host, Keith Urban. Now I bet this blog won't be dissed. Anyway, this blog had over a thousand hits, so in a way it's kinda like the blog version of Paris Hilton. So, the other night was the Golden Globes. It marked the start of the Hollywood award season. As you know the season runs from January 1st to December 31st. Britney Spears won an award for best net photo. Senator Hillary Clinton is back from her fact finding trip to Iraq. She found a lot of good facts – like the fact that in Iraq they hang people for adultery. David Beckham is coming to the United States. People say he could make a huge impact on the way Americans ignore soccer. Someone else is now running for president in 2008. Tom Tancredo. Today Tancredo started an exploratory committee for a presidential bid. So far the only member of the committee is Tom Tancredo. American Idol began its sixth season. Unfortunately Paula Abdul only remembers three of them. A new international survey has found that American believe in evolution less than any other industrialized nation. When asked why Americans pointed to Kevin Federline. Monday was Martin Luther King Day. He was such a great speaker. He could really get people inspired. Now today we have George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They make you reach for the dictionary. President Bush says that his new plan will ensure that every Iraqi gets a piece of the oil business. Unlike here where the oil business gets a piece of every American. Are you folks football fans? Big weekend for football – the NFL playoffs continue, and this weekend, the Giants will be playing golf. And finally, Rosie and Donald are still feuding. It’s gotten pretty bad because Miss America has gone back to drinking again.
CANNED LAUGHTER
A guy walks into a post office one day to see a middle-aged, balding man standing at the counter methodically placing "Love" stamps on bright pink envelopes with hearts all over them. He then takes out a perfume bottle and starts spraying scent all over them. His curiosity getting the better of him, he goes up to the balding man and asks him what he is doing. The man says, "I'm sending out 1,000 Valentine's Day cards signed, 'Guess Who?'" "But why?" asks the man. "I'm a divorce lawyer," the man replies.
Q: Why don't cowboys make good lovers? A: Because they think a good ride is eight seconds.
WORST TOYS OF ALL TIME
Executives at Galoob Toys predicted big sales for Christmas 1994. With their new Sky Dancer, they would be the first toy company to combine the sparkly femininity of Barbie with the firepower of a bottle rocket. In December of that same year, a New York Times article predicted that if Galoob met its goals, Sky Dancer would "be all the rage, the sort of product that engenders black markets, toy-related bribes, and giddy newspaper stories invoking the word 'phenomenon.'" The writer, giddy himself over the "sprite's powerful launch," added, "For every parent who doubts Sky Dancer's safety ... there are 10 who feel the foam wings and take their softness as an assurance of safety." But six years later, the Sky Dancer was grounded. When spun aloft, the wings—which felt so soft and cushy in the aisles of Toys "R" Us—turned into steely-hard child manglers. In 2000, the CPSC announced that over 150 children fell prey to Sky Dancer's helicopter-blade arms and erratic "Oh-Jesus-it's-chasing-me!" flying patterns. Injuries included scratched corneas and temporary blindness, mild concussions, broken ribs and teeth, and facial lacerations that required stitches. Nearly nine million Sky Dancers were eventually recalled, leaving aspiring ballerinas to earn their battle scars the old fashioned way, with an eating disorder.
TODAY IN HISTORY
1945: The Auschwitz Death March began. 1978: "Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read." -- Frank Zappa, Chicago Tribune. 1983: During a broadcast of "The Magic Christian," Bruce Blackman shoots and kills his family. He claims that he acted on orders received while watching the movie. 1990: Rusty Hamer, the actor who played Danny Thomas's son on Make Room For Daddy, shoots himself in the head with a .357 Magnum in DeRidder, Louisiana. Rusty was 42 years old. 1990: Washington DC mayor Marion Barry is arrested on cocaine possession charges at the Vista International Hotel, as he tokes on a glass crack pipe while being videotaped with his mistress Rasheeda. 1991: The United States admits that the CIA paid Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega over $300,000 during his career as undercover narc. 1998: An advertisement in Norway's primary daily newspaper Verdens Gang today depicted a used tampon made to resemble the Japanese flag, with the caption "We wish the female participants luck in Nagano" (the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics). The Japanese Embassy in Oslo has filed a protest.
UNFORTUNATE STAR WARS COSTUMES
World War II is now long ago enough that the idea of French Stormtroopers is apparently OK with these people.
MOVIE BUZZ
Kurt Corbain Biopic: Courtney Love has acquired the film rights of the biography Heavier Than Heaven, about husband Kurt's life, probably since she's so out of it she can barely remember anything about him herself. I still miss Kurt.
Spider-Man 3: Hey, did you miss that image of the Venom action figure that was going around the web last week that Sony made everyone take down? Psst, you can still see it here.
The Alexander Litvinenko Story: Johnny Depp and Michael Mann are both trying to work a film about the Russian spy who died from radiation poisoning. I always thought getting injected with radiation gave you superpowers, but maybe I just read too many comic books as a kid.
Hannibal Rising: A full-length trailer is finally showing online, and it seems they've turned the world's most sophisticated serial killer into a clone of Jigsaw. That's OK — the tagline alone, "He's hungry for revenge," makes me want to see this.
Jurassic Park IV: Extinction: A site has posted "scouting photos" from the upcoming sequel. Except for a chewed up JP car, they're fairly random shots of another uninhabited island-looking place. So, other than that one T. rex in San Diego, can't they get those dinos off the friggin' island already?
Disturbia: Sure, this looks just like a rip-off of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window for the tweener set. But between this, Surf's Up and Transformers, 2007 is going to be the year of the LaBeouf. Of course, we all said that last year.
Suck City: You know how for every big film there's also a porno movie that tries to come up with a clever, dirty parody title? But when a serious drama has this title, they're gonna have a little trouble.
Babylon A.D.: You mean they let him back into Europe after XXX?
And now for the review of Harry and the Henderson's...I mean Arthur and the Invisibles. Starring Freddie Highmore, Mia Farrow, David Bowie, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, Robert De Niro, Anthony Anderson, Chazz Palminteri, Jason Bateman, Harvey Keitel, Emilio Estevez. Live action and animation congeal into a stinky glop when a kid has to go into a fantasy world of tiny creatures to retrieve some jewels that will help his in-debt granny save her home from mean developers. The fantasy world is underground outside the house, so his "hero's journey" is more like a stroll. Meanwhile it's from Fifth Element loon Luc Besson, and the whole time I just sat there thinking about how many cool French movies didn't make it to America so that this one could. Accuse me of xenophobia if you will, but don't we have enough of our own crappy animated features to contend with in this country? Do we really have to import more awful ones from France and lend celebrity voices to them to keep our soon-to-be brain-damaged children from understanding what a good movie can look and feel like? I say we do. Besides the totally played out, aforementioned "hero" storyline and the useless casting of people like De Niro and the confusing plot stuff that never gets explained, we're treated to even more of that winking, wishes-it-were-hip sarcasm and irony that children barely understand and that parents love when the brats begin to mimic it. And that it's set in 1960 makes it even more excitingly inappropriate for the characters to talk that way. The best thing about the movie was David Bowie. He may be incapable of uncool behavior and you think scientists would have studied that quality in him by now. Also Madonna can add this to the short list of films she didn't single-handedly destroy with her participation. It destroys itself just fine. She's actually a neutral component. I hear that Disney is going to re-kick-start their traditional animation department again. Maybe now we can have a break from all these mono-dimensional 3D lumps of coal.
FINAL WORDS
Well, there you have it people. I don't know what's happening with the competition I mentioned in last week's entry, or if anyone gives two shit's about, but just spread the word, not the turd. If you liked the blog, talk about it, if you don't...keep your trap door shut. Anyway, here's a random pic.
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