Oct 6 2009 Oprah Producing Hilarious Racial Film
Oprah thinks the struggle for a white person to form a relationship with a black person is hysterical! (She can't fathom it, because all races and species love Oprah equally.) The talk show host's Harpo Films has acquired the movie rights to Will You Be My Black Friend, a year-old GQ article about a white guy trying to make a black friend, and is somehow making it a "star vehicle" for Chris Rock even though it's about a white person. The Daily Variety says:
The article, a humorous account by senior correspondent Devin Friedman about his clumsy attempt to make friends with people of color, will be developed as a star vehicle for Chris Rock.Following a cocktail party epiphany that his entire social circle is the same color as he, the white writer made an unabashed attempt to make black friends, down to soliciting prospective pals in a Craigslist ad. The journo discovers that race aside, it is very difficult to make meaningful friends later in life.
Come on. We already have last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Black People Love Us, that episode of Seinfeld where George takes a black exterminator out to dinner, and Hitch. Can't we move on to white people befriending other races? Inuits? How about Inuits? No one is touching Inuits. Let's see a white person try to befriend an Inuit. As a whitey, I wouldn't even know where to start. Alaska?
Nov 6 2007 'The Great Debaters' Trailer is Non-Debatably Melodramatic
Having exhausted the options for high school sports, and probably shortly after Dead Poet's Society finally hit the top of his Netflix queue, Denzel Washington has devised a new, less exciting way to tell the story of an underdog African-American team in a racist time period: instead of football or whatever, how about a debate team?
The flaw in this, of course, is that a movie about a debate team is inherently pretty nerdy and uninteresting. Ask someone if they want to watch a feel-good movie about a debate team and, unless they were captain of their debate team, watch their eyes glaze over. (It might be difficult to tell, because their head will be shaking a violent negative.)
I appreciate that Denzel Washington is trying to document all of African-American history through excessive melodrama, but debate teams? After The Great Debaters, can we expected The Great Chess Players? The Great Hall Monitors? The Great Kids Who Had to Wheel Around the Overhead Projectors?
Or maybe the whole thing is just an excuse to finally cast a movie with Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and what I assume is a young, lab-created hybrid of the two, appropriately named Denzel Whitaker. Seriously.
The Great Debaters Trailer [Yahoo!]
Nov 5 2007 Hey, What About Oprah's Idiotic New YouTube Channel?!
With the sudden celebrity of the LonelyGirl15s, the eye-linered men crying to leave dying pop stars alone, and the various videotaped sexual conquests of the animal kingdom, it's easy to start thinking of YouTube as way that the world's nobodies can become somebodies, if only for one torturous weekend of email forwards.
But such a narrow outlook leaves out the other ways YouTube is useful, like giving the most famous, omnipresent people alive--those with their own cable channel, an unreasonably popular talk show, a show about that talk show, and a magazine--a way to push their influence beyond that of mortals.
Oprah, for instance, has just started her own YouTube channel to graciously bestow her greatness to the plebeian masses of the internet. And get this: Oprah is so cool and down-to-earth, she doesn't even have a name for it! She's just going to call it, "Hey, what about Oprah's channel?" That's so O.
And so are the low-quality cell phone videos of her wandering her empire, and her recommendations to be as ambitious as a skateboarding dog, that she plans on posting to "Hey, what about Oprah's channel?"
Our world is one step closer to Optopia--a life more Oprah than not.
Oprah's Message to YouTube [Hey, what about Oprah's channel?]
Aug 30 2007 Letterman to Guest on Oprah/Uma
David Letterman is scheduled to appear on Oprah next month following the most powerful human's appearance on his show last year. Prior to that, the two had a long-standing feud, largely centered on Dave juxtaposing Oprah's name with Uma Thurman's. It remains to be seen if Letterman will receive Oprah's coveted recommendation or simply given away to the audience with an iPod nano.
Letterman to make first visit to Winfrey [Hollywood Reporter]
Jun 4 2007 Oprah to Ruin Sicko
"I wanna eat a corndog this big."
Okay, I'll admit: I'm a Michael Moore apologist. Without getting too political, I think the rush to discredit his points tends to hide the fact that he makes some pretty consistently entertaining movies.
That said, Oprah is all set to provide the kiss of death. According to /Film, she's having Moore on her show tomorrow and is all set to champion Sicko as the must-see movie of the summer to her audience of barking, half-retarded seals.
Mr. Moore, may I remind you of one thing: this is the woman who brought us Dr. Phil, do you really want her endorsement? She really is the worst kind of pompous blowhard - the kind whose fame comes with an inflated sense of entitlement and the gall to tell anyone who will listen that you can achieve anything you put your mind to, just like her! Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be more like me, loser!
Three frownie faces for that: ;-( ;-( ;-(, and one for ruining East of Eden, which was a great book before you lumped it in with A Million Little Pieces. ;-(
