Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
What follows is the bizarre experience of watching Michael Jackson take the group hostage so that he can terrify them into loving him.
"Are you scared yet?" he asks, pulling a funny face.
"Are you scared yet?" he asks again, pulling his face right off.
Women start to cry and make for the door. Michael replies that it's too late for them to go anywhere, as they are now his "guests." He unleashes a troupe of exhumed Viennese courtesans (These ghosts can dance!) on the nervous crowd.
There's nothing like freaking people out to get them to like you. Of course, as the token straight, white, evil guy, the mayor is the only villager not eventually won over. ("Are you the ghost of jealousy?" Michael trills to himself, getting, perhaps, to the heart of the matter.) The little boys respond with awed expressions of ineffable, Spielbergian joy of the kind that only highly stylized entertainment product can bring. We can tell by the silent "whoas" on their lips and the way their hair is blown back from the sheer power of the magic of Michael that Michael is all about love and peace and monkeys until concerned citizens try to cross him.
Then watch out, straight white man. He will pour himself inside your mouth and make you grab your crotch and thrust your pelvis in front of all the den mothers. He will lead to your eventual suicide by defenestration. Don't mess with him.
Tuesday, Oct. 30
It just wouldn't be Halloween without good, old-fashioned plastic surgery horror stories.
"Emeril," the sitcom, won't be with us much longer (NBC is putting the show about another show on hiatus for November sweeps), but what better way to send it off than to devote an episode to Robert Urich talking the surly chef into an appointment with an extra-slender canulla? Yes, liposuction. Twenty pounds worth.
"Everyone in Hollywood does it!" Urich says by way of encouragement. (Up next, on "Three Sisters": Will Dyan Cannon's lips finally burst?)
What's so funny about liposuction, you ask? Major trauma! It really hurts when the pain pills wear off! And the doctor draws all over you with a black magic marker! You could even bleed to death! So remember: Don't hoover your love handles on Halloween. Your drunken colleagues might just come over and tell you ghost stories, and you just might split your sides.
Oh, my innards!
Tonight I watched my very first episode of "Becoming." The premise of the show is that a young girl or boy -- if he or she wants it bad enough -- can "become" their favorite recording artist by having MTV show up on their doorstep, give them a makeover and tape them aping and lip-synching their way through said recording artist's most recent video.
The MTV crew knocks on the door of a girl named Katie Chatsworth, a junior from Canoga Park, Calif., who will be magically transformed from a curly-haired girl in a tank top to a straight-haired teen in a tank top with a push-up bra.
"Congratulations! You're becoming Mandy Moore."
It's that easy, kids! Go ahead and skip high school!
Katie says goodbye to her pony, gets in a limo and is whisked away to Beverly Hills.
After having her hair ("I'm nice and blond now") and makeup ("I can't believe he touched her face and now he's touching mine!") done, Katie is taken to meet the choreographer who will teach her to move just like Mandy Moore in what appears to be a single afternoon. ("Congratulations on becoming Mandy Moore!" the choreographer says.)
Then it's time for a pedicure.
"Getting my hair done and my nails done gives me more of an idea of how Mandy Moore lives," says Katie, who might have gained greater insight and perhaps a more important life lesson had she been treated to a few days with a shrewish stage-mother, an oily manager, a few execs with the music industry version of the casting couch -- and a crazed stalker, a scary fan like herself.
Frighteningly,
Carina
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