- I can’t shake the feeling that my IQ goes down five points every time I hear Michael Irvin talk on ESPN. Double that rate of decrease if Irvin is having an argument with Mike Ditka. These two team up to form one giant black hole of football commentary. Irvin couldn’t be more biased in favor of his beloved Dallas Cowboys and more of a sycophant for his buddy, Terrell Owens. Hey Mike, I don’t need another T.O. apologist who will try to excuse anything he does, hit the mute button if that’s your take. And Ditka…..this guy is so blasé and fails to say anything of significance or to take an actual position on any issue, what a waste of airtime.
- ESPN doesn’t stop with those two yutzes, though. No, the centerpiece of their NFL coverage is Chris Berman, who stopped being funny after the third or fourth successive “pick” of a Bills-49ers Super Bowl in the 90s. Berman’s tired gimmicks and cumbersome, unfunny nicknames for players are cause for wanting to jam an ice pick into both ears rather than listen to him. Dude has been trotting out the same tired, played out routine for a couple decades and apparently he and his bosses at the Worldwide Leader are the only ones that actually think that it’s still amusing.
- I’m sorry, but why is everyone so pissed that The Killers’ new album is such a departure from their first one? Sam’s Town sounds little to nothing like Hot Fuss, which was an overproduced, overly slick trendy rock piece of crap for the most part. I, for one, am glad these guys ditched the flashy outfits, synthesized sound and are at least attempting to sound like, as some have alleged, Bruce Springstein in his Born to Run days. Trendy rockers, as I have dubbed bands like The Killers (after their first album), XXXXXXXX, XXXXXXX, are the dregs of the music industry, almost as bad as the Britney’s and Christina’s of the world. They pretend to rock, but only in the hopes of appealing to the masses, with a hint of rock kitch but not actually rocking enough to lose their popular appeal.
- Movies disappoint, for the most part, when they are billed as highly as The Departed, the new Martin Scorscese film. So you know going in that the movie likely isn’t going to live up to the hype, and when it doesn’t, you’re disappointed, but not as much as you might have otherwise been. This movie, though, is the rare one that, for its firs two hours, makes you believe that it really is as good as advertised, then in the final half hour or so, pulls the rug out from under you with a trite, unimaginative and unoriginal ending. I won't give away the ending, but let’s just say it follows the way too obvious path and plays into the most obvious traps. Scorscese and Co. had the chance to cap off a great picture with an original, innovative ending, but they blew it. That shouldn’t invalidate great performances by Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Martin Sheen. Still, The Departed, in the end, is really no departure at all from a million other crime thrillers.
- It may not be the British Invasion of a few decades ago, but a slew of great Euro bands are cropping up on the music scene, although they’re not mainstream enough for most to have heard of them. Snow Patrol (Northern Ireland), Arctic Monkeys (England), Ella Rouge (Sweden) and Minimum Serious (France) and are just a few good imports, some more recent, some more established. Good to know that Europe can produce more than club music/techno crap, even if not nearly enough people are taking notice.
- Is Hollywood that unimaginative, that two period films about magicians come out within weeks of each other? The Illusionist and The Prestige both have been well received, so this isn’t a slight on either of them. This is just to say that maybe, just maybe, someone could direct their creative energy toward finding concepts that aren't so similar to movies out at the exact same time.
- There are a few noteworthy TV shows that have made a splash this fall, two in particular that have caught my attention. Heroes, NBC’s new Monday night offering, had been absolutely fantastic, riveting TV since it hit the air in mid-September. The show features a string of strangers from across the world who discover that they each have a supernatural ability (i.e. flying, teleportation, painting scenes from the future, indestructibility, etc.). What has been extremely interesting has been the way the show slowly weaves together the paths of these characters, who are apparently tied together in ways we have yet to discover. Six Degrees is another new show of merit, a bit more in the traditional mold, but like Heroes, it examines the paths of strangers whose lives are inextricably intertwined. Six Degrees has the advantage of being based in Manhattan, which just happens to be one of my favorite places in the world, and it’s a place with so much going on and so many possibilities that the show should never get boring.
- Is there anything more aggravating for TV fans than having to wait an extra month and a half for their favorite shows to debut because of the World Series? Maybe it’s having an awesome show such as Prison Break interrupted for two weeks for the same reason. I love baseball and follow it intensely throughout the season, but is it too much to ask to have it on ESPN instead of clogging up the airways in lieu of the shows I love to watch? That’s exponentially more true this year, when the Series is a giant clunker, featuring two teams most people could not possibly care less about.
- A big fat “Ha ha!” to the execs at the CW network, most notably head imbecile Dawn Ostroff, who axed Everwood after last season to fill Monday nights with the insufferable and played out 7th Heaven and new drama Runaway, featuring Mr. Marky Mark Jr., Donny Wahlberg. As if being a member of New Kids on the Block wasn’t bad enough, he had to foist this giant, steaming turd of a show on the world. Shockingly, Runaway has gotten such awful ratings that it looks like a slam dunk to be cancelled. Oh, and the network shifted these two shows from Monday to Sunday nights because they were receiving a thorough ass kicking on Mondays. But hey, who could have seen this coming? Wait, I did? Several times, over a period of months? Wow, not only me, but loads of other fans and TV critics too? Wow, that is simply shocking, just blows my mind.
- Hate to keep pounding ESPN, but when someone hands you the hammer and points out the bright shiny nail right in front of you, what choice do you have? Who the f**k wants to see golf on a weekday afternoon in lieu of shows like Jim Rome is Burning and Pardon the Interruption? Those are two of the better shows on the network, yet the ESPN execs foist some inane, innocuous and nondescript golf tournament that no significant names are playing in on the sports watching public. Furthermore, what’s the point in following a golf tournament on the first two days? You’re watching a large number of guys who won't make the cut anyhow, so why waste TV time on them? And you actually want the right to televise these events? Grr-eat idea, ESPN, superb.
- If there was some sort of service that would allow you to block out all the crank enhancement ads from your TV, how much would you pay for it? You know the ones, make your crank bigger, stay active longer, etc. They show all of these old dudes and their wives saying how these pills have helped them to….well, never mind. Know what, old guys and drug companies? We don’t need to hear about this sort of thing. We get enough spam in our email inboxes for these drugs, seeing them seventy-four times during every sporting event on TV is really, really overkill. I would venture to say that guys who need those drugs know about them and can figure out to ask their doctor for information, so quit pounding away at us.
- Even more ubiquitous than the crank enhancement ads on TV, the “Is it Monday yet?” ad onslaught by ESPN has made me want to hurl my TV remote at the wall. The ads themselves are annoying enough, presumptuous in assuming that football fans are not interested in a slate of great games, 13 or 14 of them on Sunday, but rather by a single game on Monday night that all too often features a terrible matchup of teams that the network thought were going to be good this year but inevitably suck. No one is that ecstatic about the Packers or Ravens on a Monday night, ESPN. And we get the point, you now have Monday Night Football. Quit beating us over the head with the same lame ads all week, every week, hundreds of times.
- It’s not a new development, but the question needs to be asked: why in the world would you want to get your news from the nightly TV news shows as opposed to “fake” news shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report? Yes, I know, these shows don’t cover all the news in the world, but they cover enough to give a general idea of what’s going on. And you can fill in the rest with your chosen medium (Internet, newspaper) and avoid the drudge of watching the nightly news, filled with depressing stories about the same topics over and over again. Not to mention, by watching the “fake” news with Stewart and Colbert, you can get plenty of laughs with your news and not wind up quite as depressed about this chaotic world in which we live.
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