Untertainment Weakly (10-21-11)

By Jake

ABC has canceled Glenn’s favorite new show of the season, “Charlie’s Angels.”  He was just telling me how much he loved it and that I should check it out.

Shia LaBeouf is not returning for more “Transformers” films, but the studio is in talks with Jason Statham to take the lead!  That is some weird news.

The season 2 premiere of “The Walking Dead” made cable ratings history, drawing 4.8 million viewers.  Keep in mind that "Saved by the Bell: The College Years" got canceled for low ratings and it had 7 million viewers a week.

NBC is doing a heavy push for “Prime Suspect” next week.  It will air on 5 times next week.  Then it will get canceled probably.

Fox is looking to turn “Zombieland” into a half hour TV series.  I hated “Zombieland,” did you?

ABC has ordered a pilot for a Mandy Moore family comedy.  Nobody does comedy as well as Mandy Moore!

French Stewart will guest star on an episode of “Community.”

Guy Ritchie is planning on remaking “Cannonball Run” and wants Brad Pitt to star.  If you know why any of this is taking place please leave a comment explaining.

“The Punisher” could become a TV series on Fox.  As long as it’s like Lexi Alexander’s “Punisher: War Zone” I’ll be on board.

Movies Out Today
The Three Musketeers - While I am inherently against remakes, I am not against adaptations.  That being said, there is no way in hell you should see this movie.  First, it’s directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (of "Alien vs. Predator" fame).  Secondly, have you seen the trailer?  It looks awful.

Paranormal Activity 3 - This film has been getting some strong reviews, which I find surprising.  I absolutely hated the original film.  It was so boring.  If I wanted to watch people sleep I would get a job at a sleep clinic or crack open a bottle of chloroform.

Johnny English Reborn - I do not hate Rowan Atkinson.  I love “The Black Adder.”  I hate “Mr. Bean.”  Johnny English seems stupid in the vein of “Mr. Bean."  This movie looks like shit.  When people say that British humor is more refined than that of Americans, they are not talking about "Johnny English Reborn."  Who knows what they are talking about.  Have you seen "Coupling"?  It's worse than "Friends."

Other Thoughts
I need to clear something up that seemed to become an issue in last week’s article.  I am not disparaging the original movies that are being remade.  I hate remakes.  I just don’t want you fine folks to think of me as only negative.  In fact, I would say that I am not negative at all, I just like creativity and originality so much that I find it necessary to rally against remakes.  Just to make sure that nobody thinks I’m negative, I am now adding a top 10 list of media I enjoyed over the week.

Top 10 Things I Like This Week
1. Community
2. Upstairs, Downstairs
3. Friday Night Lights (Watching season 3 currently)
4. Arena (1989) Review
5. Jordan, Jesse GO! (Podcast)
6. Cut Copy (Band)
7. The Thing (1982)
8. Parks and Recreation
9. Rodney Dangerfield “It’s Not Easy Being Me” (Book, Currently Reading)
10. Dead Rising (XBOX 360)

Debate: Littering

By Jake and Glenn

To many littering is a lifestyle choice, not just an defiant act of laziness.  To others it is an abhorrent sin on the same level as taking the lord’s name in vein.  What would happen if you locked two of these knuckleheads inside an 18’ X 20’ steel cage?  Jake and Glenn attempt to answer this pressing question.

Jake:  Imagine that you’re zipping down the highway in an automobile.  You have your goggles firmly in place around your eyes and your scarf is flapping in the wind.  You are eating a Monster Burger from the local Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr.  You finish it and you’re left with the paper
wrapper.  What do you do?  You do the only thing there is to do: throw the piece of paper out of the window.  Let God deal with it.  You do not want your vehicle smelling of broiled burger and cheese.  You do not want your vegan girlfriend to find out you have been eating red meat.  She will smell it when you pick her up for your date, which you are headed to right now.  They say secrets tear us apart, but I say secrets keep us together.  Secrets and lies are the glue that binds a relationship and keeps it from disintegrating.  Littering is the only thing that can save your otherwise doomed relationship.

Glenn:  It is very hard to find someone to love you as you are - your faults are numerous and you know that no matter how hard you try you will never grow as a person.  The instinct to lie to protect a relationship is as natural as homosexuality in numerous animals.  Just as natural, though, is protecting our planet.  When I wake up in the morning I do not defecate on the floor next to my bed nor do I empty my chamber pot on our family’s kitchen table.  These actions are encompassed in the quote “do not shit where you eat/sleep” but they also describe my opposition to littering.  Trash belongs in a dump or the trunk of your car - not on a highway or in an infant’s outdoor crib.  Treat the Earth as you would your own house and you will be blessed with the riches of heaven.
 
Jake:  “Do not shit where you eat?”  What if you eat shit?  A lot of us Americans eat shit all day long, from our bosses, wives, Sunday school teachers, parents and little league referees who cannot make a fair call to save their lives.  If were eating all of this shit--just having it shoveled into our gullets--then eventually we too are going to have to shit.  Why not occasionally throw some trash out your car window?  It is not going to hurt anybody.  Nature is boring.  You know what is visually exciting?  The Pepsi logo.  Let’s throw some 20 liter bottles of Pepsi into a bog and show nature what top-of-the-line graphic design is all about.  What’s prettier: a maple tree or a billboard for Virginia Slims?  Obviously the billboard.  Nobody besides a tripped out hippie would answer otherwise.  Let us throw our trash wherever we please.  If nature doesn’t like it, well, I guess it can just eat some shit.
 
Glenn:  A billboard is beautiful - whether it is for Olive Garden or Houlihan's, a restaurant owned by surviving members of the Third Reich.  But throwing trash out your window is the moral equivalent of slowing down in your car and using a baseball bat to hurt a young child walking on the side of the road.  She was there because her larger metropolitan area does not include sidewalks.  The municipality that forces children to walk on the side of a major road is partially at fault, but you’re the one with the baseball bat.  Similarly, trash is partially at fault for litter by its mere existence but you’re the one throwing it out your car instead of putting it under the car seat where you hide the rest of your secrets.  The United States in its current form will not last fifty more years and this Earth will not last more than one million years.  Why speed up this process?  Instead, consider speeding up your car and driving right into a concrete wall.  The wreckage will be a form of litter, but not the trash we are discussing here.

 
Jake:  If nobody littered how would criminals pay back their debt to society?  They would just go on to commit an escalating amount of heinous crimes until they hit on the worst of all: regicide.  I would hardly support something that would lead to the death of royalty, and that is why I do support littering.  How easy is it to just toss the wrapper of a Klondike bar on the sidewalk as you walk hand in hand with your metrosexual friends?  Nothing has ever been easier.  Should we not get a break from the weight that is crushing us?  I say yes, and unlike Glenn, I do not want all of my friends crushed, but I do want beautiful women/men to have crushes on them.  Without trash we would not have Doritos.  I have never seen an empty bag of Doritos in a rubbish bin.  They should be blowing down a busy street like an urban tumbleweed.  In the film “American Beauty” one of the protagonists claims that a plastic bag being blown around in the wind is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.  If trash is so beautiful--and popular movies agree--then why not toss our refuse wherever we please?  We can add a little beauty to America.


Glenn:  Why bother?  Again, this country will not last for another 50 years.  I imagine a resurgent Confederate States of America rising again (now with Missouri) and shudder at the littered dystopia awaiting those of us fortunate enough to live in the South.  Every street will be full of discarded Waffle House menus and swastika armbands from a Houlihan's liquidation sale.  It sounds like a nightmare, but I can handle it because I know the rest of the planet will be around for one million more years.  We need to keep it clean for our estranged children and our estranged children’s estranged children.  It would be easy to throw your trash out the window just like it would be easy to pick up a phone and call your son to apologize for your the way you treated him when he was a teenager.  Instead I throw my garbage, including letters I’ve written but never sent to my 28 year old son, in a city-approved dump where it can all be burned or shot into space in ships captained by the smartest chimpanzees and gorillas among us.  To paraphrase Radiohead: stop littering / start shouting!

Saved by the Bell: The Lisa Card

By Jake

Episode 6315: “The Lisa Card”

First of all, let us briefly discuss the title of this episode.  Is it a reference to playing the race card?  Lisa is the only African-American person that regularly appears on this program.  “The Lisa Card” could be a pun of “Visa card,” but who puts the article “the” in front of it?  Do you go to a store and the clerk says, “I’m sorry, sir/miss, but we do not accept the Visa card here”?  Maybe they did refer to it as such back in the early 90s when this episode was dreamed up by the scribe Tom Tenowich.



The Players
Lisa Turtle
Zack Morris
AC Slater
Samuel "Screech" Powers
Kelly Kapowski
Lisa Turtle
Jessica Spano
Miss Wentworth
Principal Richard Belding
Max

Screech and Slater are hanging out at The Max, as they are apt to do.  It is report card day.  Zack runs through the grades of Bayside’s favorite ladies: Jesse got all A’s, Kelly has B’s and Lisa made honor roll.  Her father gave her his credit card to go to the mall.  Zack, if you hadn’t guessed, got bad grades because he’s an underachiever.

Jesse complains about being called a “chick” by her meat-headed boy toy, Slater. She is not an animal, she is a human being.

Max does a terrible magic trick to reveal Lisa’s new ensemble.  It is quite expensive, from a early 90s point of view.  Kelly tells Lisa to add up all of her reciepts.  She spent $386!  She could have gone to see “The Three Musketeers” in the theater and got a large popcorn for that price. 

The gang tells Lisa to return her clothes, but the store will not let her return the sales items.  Lisa is going to run away, but Zack tells her to just deny it and enjoy the ride.  Sound advice. Jesse and Kelly tell her to just be honest and own up to it.  Lisa goes into a fantasy about telling her father the bad news.  He calls her the worst daughter of all and then she turns into a punk for some reason.  And Screech is the grim reaper--not in the dream sequence, just a general note.

Lisa and Zack have a scheme: they’re going to hold a raffle.  They’re in Miss Wentworth’s biology class.  Slater asks why birds aren’t attracted to horses and she says they are and she writhes around semi-erotically on her desk.  Some kid kisses Lisa for some cash.  Lisa is a whore.  The actress who plays the teacher must have been starving because she ate the ever-loving shit out of the scenery.

Mr. Belding reminds the students of the charity clothing drive.  Keep this in mind, because it plays out soon.  This show has little to no fat. Then Belding does a bad impression of Elvis Presley.  Then it’s an earthquake drill and Screech attempts to get a kiss.  Lisa is mad at Zack for turning her out.

Zack sells Lisa’s clothes out of all of the lockers.  How did he get into every locker to put the clothes there?  He has an automatic door opener, obviously.  Screech buys some lingerie.  Some twins buy some cowboy boots for $10.  Rocco buys a Tina Turner wig, no questions asked.  He’s a transgendered individual.

Slater asks Mr. Belding if he likes the dress he’s holding in order to distract him.  Belding says it’s nice and Slater tells him that he wants to wear it to school.  Belding takes Slater to his office.  Slater says he doesn’t know who he is anymore.  Belding can relate to Slater trying to attract women.  Belding went to the prom with his sister and his first real date was in the ARMY with an enemy combatant.
 Zack brings out Kelly is in a bikini, but she’s like 15 so it’s kind of creepy to me.  To the boys of Bayside it is perfectly reasonable pre-internet porn masturbation fodder. Belding says that the Viet Cong girl he was dating dumped him after the war.  Then he met his lovely wife while he was drowning.  Slater can no longer distract Mr. Belding.  He catches Zack and Screech selling off Lisa’s clothing.  He thinks they’re for the charity drive.
 They made $53 selling Lisa’s clothes.  Now Lisa is a terrible server at The Max.  She is yells at all of the customers.  Slater is going to show her how to do it, by which I mean he is throwing away the customers’ food the second they receive it.  Lisa made $37 in tips in three hours.  Jesse can’t believe it.  I’ve made triple that before in three hours waiting tables.  Jesse is an idiot.
 Zack comes clean about Lisa’s clothes.  Lisa laughs hysterically.  She has hit her rock bottom, at least until the episode where she becomes a whore--which is THIS episode!  Lisa decides to tell her father the truth finally.

Dr. Turtle quickly forgives Lisa and wants to take her to the Sizzler.  She can’t believe it!  She wants her dad to punish her, but he doesn’t want to.  So he finally decides she needs to keep her job until she pays him back.  Zack and the gang come in and give her $83 to help her pay back the debt, but she refuses it.  Then Zack does a commercial parody for the titular “The Lisa Card.”
 A terrible episode.

The End.