TMZ and all that

Encountered 4:30am approx, Wednesday

Oh, so this is what it looks like when bitchy celebrity gossip sites go televisual. Finally the mystery is solved!

The show's format consists of people who I presume to be the TMZ staff sitting around their office in a (faux?) brainstorming session, their middle-aged boss who is leading the discussion leaning on the cubicle dividers because, you know, he’s hip and down with his employees (most of whom could be his children) in between offering colour commentary with all the wit of a thirteen year old.

Who’s there? Let’s see...

Douchey unshaven fratboy type with backwards baseball cap, untrimmed, unwashed hair and a pink Sex Pistols tshirt? Check.

Alt-indie but not too alt-indie dude who’s way too old to be wearing a tartan rattan trilby? Check.

Smart-mouthed larger black woman? Check.

Sexy youngish chick with chemically straightened hair, a high-waisted skintight skirt and oh-so-intellectual thick-rimmed glasses? Check.

A bunch of mid to late twenty-something dudes who look like they stepped out of the most boring bit of the 90s? Check.

This guy out of *NSYNC's uglier identical twin? Check.

Yep, I think that’s about all our "trendy yet diverse workplace" bases covered.

One of the staff members will suggest a celebrity/incident to be discussed (cue rapid zoom in on the speaker from the shaky handheld camera because this shit’s so dynamic, yo) and there will be a quick, flashy cut to the related piece of paparazzi footage.

Or sometimes after the ad break, following a clip of the TMZ logo buzzing frenetically over a, like, totally fun and messy and abstract expressionist background that looks like it was made by a 15 year old who just got photoshop for his birthday, there’ll be an hilariously titled segment with an opening graphic that consists of some stock CGI (circa 1998 style) and text, e.g.

“The Kardashians’ NOTHING SPECIAL Fathers’ Day!” - A green gradient background and TWO different fonts? TMZ, you so crazy!

or

“TESTOSTERONE HOUR” – Mugs of beer? Shit, son, that was so subtly witty I might just recommend you for a Pulitzer Prize.

Seriously, though, all the crappy graphics, shaky hand-held camerawork, stock characters, smartarse voiceovers, and rapid, flashy transitions in the world couldn’t disguise the utterly prosaic nature of the bits of footage and sound bites the TMZ staff base their discussion on. Lady Gaga didn’t wear pants at a baseball game, Batista doesn’t like blonds, Woody Allen is walking down a street with his wife/sortofbutreallynotreally daughter. Or, my personal favourite, celebrity spotters are flocking to Sandra Bullock’s New Orleans house and HER DOGS ARE BARKING AT THEM (there was nothing to accompany this but a shot of someone near the house followed by several minutes of footage of the dogs... then the same footage with post-production digital zoom applied to emphasise the point, just in case the audience didn’t get it the first time. )

It’s just the most innocuous pile of nothing ever.

Then again, what else should anyone expect? That’s all celebrity gossip culture is founded on in the end. I just wish I could get paid the same for bitching about people I don’t know (please contact me via email to enquire about making a donation).

There are pool parties, then there are Trivium pool parties

Encountered at 2:55am approx. Sunday

I find it very upsetting when a music video attempts to utilise one of the sluts of the music video concept world (in this case the rebellion of youth vs. The establishment/preps /the education system/ parents) and, despite years of precedent, fails miserably. When your record company is saying that you “redefine the pool party” in your video description, I anticipate seeing more than one person in the pool. The lone underwear-clad girl’s splash, slo-mo’d to hell like it was some great gesture of revolution, was nothing more than a small, disappointing orgasm, occurring far too early in the video to actually mean anything, with no attempt to compensate for or better it in the parts that follow. Why, if the rest of the fans were going crazy, were they so neatly confined to the opposite side of the pool, metres away from their rock-god liberators? Are Trivium fans allergic to chlorine?

Speaking of totally hardcore liberation through music, here are some examples of rebellious youth vs. The establishment binary-type videos (defined by contrasting depictions of each party), organised into vague categories. For health and safety reasons the entirety of this list should not be watched in one sitting.

School is like Stalin’s Russia but worse

"Feeling This" - Blink 182

"Another Brick in the Wall" - Pink Floyd (I feel kind of bad putting this here considering the calibre of the rest of the stuff on this list)

"Hook Me Up" - The Veronicas

Hot, ostracised girls await knights in shining ROKK

"Numb" - Linkin Park

"Hard Rock Hallelujah" - Lordi

Fuck you preps, I’m crashing your party

"Tainted Love" - Marilyn Manson

No-one gets it, you know?

"Jesus of Suburbia" - Green Day

"All the Things She Said" - TaTu

"I Hate People Like That" - Jerk

Stupid conformist bitch, stay away from my man!

"Misery Business" - Paramore
"Girlfriend" - Avril Lavigne

Massacre aboard the SS Ghost Ship and gratuitous spoilers

Encountered at 2:30 am approx, Saturday

A Terrorised Yet Badass Lone Female Heroine aboard a wrecked ship finds that the members of her salvaging crew are being killed off in grotesque ways. The ghost of a creepy young girl then reveals to her the history of the ship...

I personally liked the well-performed elation of the crew upon reaching the gold the best.

(And, of course, things that come later like the Terrorised Yet Badass Lone Female Heroine’s detonation of the ship via harpoon gun sharpshooting, her subsequent miraculous survival, the way the liberated ghosts swirled up into the heavens all sparkly like a Sailor Moon attack, her being saved from floating debris by a convenient ocean liner and the fantastic “NOOOOOOOOO” plus freezeframe from the heroine at the end as she’s being loaded into an ambulance and realises that one of the crew on the liner is the same demon charged with harvesting shiploads of souls who initiated the above massacre.)

Oh those Nazis, they can't do a thing right.

Encountered at 2:55am approx, Sunday

Ever since Downfall I’ve had a bit of an issue with the believability of Nazis in films. They’re such a pervasive cultural phenomenon that their characterisation often lapses into the realm of parody, with writers clumsily pinning on trope after trope like so many iron crosses.

Imagine my delight this morning when I turned on the TV to discover a menacing Kommandant standing over two captured Americans. He was in a long black leather jacket and pedantically neat and greyfaced; the dark, immovable, inhuman pillar* to the Allied prisoners’ ruffled-and-bruised-yet-wide-eyed-and-righteously-defiant golden boys. When he spoke to his troops it wasn’t in German but English tinged with an accent that put me in mind of Colonel Klink.

His face was expressive as a ventriloquist’s (as all evil Germans’ should be), his hat was historically inaccurate and I was just about to change the channel when... “be sure to scream so vwe know vwen zey have found you”.

“Who are ‘zey’?” I wondered.

My masochism compelling me, I watched on.

And a good thing I did too, because the screen was quickly filled with screeching humanoid creatures with batlike wings. Only for a moment, though, because no sooner had the prisoners been left to their baffling fate than the scene had cut to one of a grizzled army major telling a young soldier of how he had lost his wife and son, and that the young soldier’s exfoliated, bleach-tooth’d face reminded him of his dead son’s to the extent that they could have been brothers. The implications were so subtle I wanted to cry.

Anyway, the screeching bat creatures. Desperately flicking through the TV guide for answers, I found this:

Sometimes I think there’s too much money going into the American film industry.

*curse you phallic imagery!

The time has come, the walrus said...

... to make another blog. I feel this might turn into one of those "slippery slope" situations. Oh well.

Welcome to my second blog. It shall be a repository of musings upon the strange stuff that fills the airwaves after 11:30pm, probably with lots of swearing.

Enjoy your stay.