What’s the deal with: The Fox NFL Robot
Champion of the Sun is happy to present the first post written by our newest contributor, Robin.
That fucking bastard has been at the bottom of the screen for what seems like my entire adult life. I do not understand the appeal of this computer-generated sack of shit. What the hell is the deal with the Fox NFL Robot?
I’ve been watching football off and on for 20 years or so and it seems like this fucker has only been around the last five or six years. In that time I’ve watched games with dozens of people and I have yet to find anyone that isn’t annoyed by the useless CG robot dancing and hitting baseballs and getting attacked by whatever FOX is promoting that week.
I just don’t get it. What the fuck does this cheesy douche have to do with football, or anything else for that matter? Wikipedia informs me that his name is “Cleatus the Fox Sports Robot”. At least Fox can distance itself somewhat from that awful name – he was named by some idiot fan.
Oh jesus, you can even buy an action figure of this thing. I guess I could understand if Fox was sending them out for free as promotional material or something, but what kind of moron would actually spend money on one? If I caught my kid playing with one of these things, he’d be packed off to fat camp for daddy’s chubby little secret in no time.
Hold on while I stretch my robotic neck and point at the camera. Now Let me jump up and down now before I start hitting baseballs into the distance.
Woo hoo! Sports robot!
What is the fucking deal?!
A Couple Great Links
You’ll see more links being posted here in the future. I don’t know why I wasn’t sharing cool stuff that I had been sent or found more often.
Found by Brendon: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/us/16bully.html?_r=1&hp
Found by Nick: http://www.citypages.com/2003-01-29/news/pushing-tin&page=64/
A Quick Note
I decided to delete a post from the site about a certain writer being fired from their position recently.
My intent was to share the story with the small number of people that regularly read the site, but because the story wasn’t something covered in depth anywhere else on the net the post quickly became one of the top matches on google searches for that author’s name and other key words like “fired”. The end effect was that a lot of his fans were being directed to my gloating post.
This page normally gets about 30-50 views a day but suddenly every day 300+ plus were being directed here just to see me delight in someone they like reading being fired. I don’t regret anything that was said, but it wasn’t really intended for the mass audience it was attracting. My goal wasn’t to drive page views by being shocking or mean, I just wanted to share a story with some friends, but I picked a bad medium to do so.
Hopefully deleting the post and a couple of tags will mean that things return to normal around here.
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
I think it's time I see other shows.
Being a fan of a tv show is a lot like being in a relationship. You put in the time to give an hour each week of your time plus bits of your memory and attention span that could certainly be put to better use and in return you’re entertained and in rare instances inspired to look at the world differently than you did before.
Sometimes you’re set up on a blind date with a new show you’ve never seen before. Maybe a friend tells you that you two would get along, or perhaps a certain actor’s attachment piques your interest. Then you sit down over a frozen pizza and a PBR and find out you two have nothing in common. Sometimes it doesn’t even get to that point if your friend has led you astray before. Oh really, you think I’d like “Mike and Molly”? Weren’t you the same person who set me up on that disasterous evening with “‘Til Death”?
It’s easy to forget about and move on from those quick flings, but it’s something else entirely to break up with a show that you’ve actually invested a good deal of time and emotion into. When you stop being a fan of something you’ve told friends to check out, or that you’ve purchased on DVD, you are not only realizing that the show you once loved has become something else, but you begin to question if you were dumb for liking it in the first place.
Sometimes the answer is easy. I bought “Entourage” on DVD based on hype and a number of people I knew who liked it. I watched the first season and apparently liked it enough to buy the second season, which I also enjoyed. Somewhere during the third season I realized I had made a terrible mistake. What once seemed funny and charming now seemed smarmy and sexist. I realized that the show wasn’t starting to suck, but had in fact always sucked and somehow I had been blind to these faults. I stopped watching it and sold my DVDs. When I run into mutual acquaintances at parties I ask how Entourage is now and laugh in my head that the show is the same crap now as it was then.
Occasionally the separation hurts a little more. When “Heroes” first debuted I was reluctant to get on board. A number of people were comparing it favorably to “Lost”, my favorite show of all time, and it made me resentful of a seemingly inferior show getting lavished with such praise. Eventually though I sat down and watched the first few episodes and though they were certainly not on par with Lost, they were really fun. I watched the first season online, finishing the penultimate episode the evening that the first season finale was to air. I was excited to see what would happen to Peter and Sylar, excited to be watching Heroes as it aired for the first time, and excited to talk about it with friends the next day. Then I watched the episode and it was terrible. It looked cheap, the writing was bad, and the ending left pretty much all of the show’s fans wanting. I tuned into season 2 hoping for better, but the show proceeded to get worse. Eventually I stopped watching. I checked in at the beginning of season 3 and the same thing happened; after a few episodes I had to check out. Heroes and I were through, and a year later the show was put out of it’s misery as most everyone had come to the same conclusion I had. Unlike Entourage though, Heroes and I had some legitmately great moments together. Unfortunately the thrill of the chase vanished and left us with a couple of heroes with nearly unlimited powers (Peter and Hiro) and a villain with unlimited power (Sylar) and a bunch of silly garbage to justify why we should still care.
Occasionally it may become prudent to break up with a show that you’ve spent a good deal of time with because it just isn’t the same entity you fell in love with. Years ago I had to say goodbye to “24″ after it proved that the weight of its central gimmick was simply too much to bear. Many of us longtime fans of “The Simpsons” have broken up with the show to some degree, there’s hardly anyone over the age of 25 that considers it a must-watch show each week.
And most recently I found myself at the end of the road with my relationship with “Dexter.” When it started it was dark and mysterious. It felt like Dexter was a half step ahead of being caught by someone he loved and that sooner or later the other shoe would drop. The show kept getting better, the fourth season featuring a frightening turn by John Lithgow was the show’s best. But the recently concluded fifth season showed that the staff is out of ideas. The show needs to radically change (have Deb discover Dexter’s secret!) or die, but Showtime loves the money the show brings in too much to do either. Every episode of the show makes the flaws that have been there all along (the implausibility of Dexter’s constant use of police resources to find people to kill, the show’s terrible supporting cast) bubble up to the surface, and a recent string of dangling plot threads have left me frustrated and, worse, bored. Dexter, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can see each other any more. It’s not me…it’s you.
And then, as with the end of any relationship, it’s back out into the market to see what else may attractive. Or maybe I’ll just be satisfied that my old fling “Parks and Recreation” just showed up at my doorstep, boozy and ready for some laughs.
On paper Richard Cheese is a one trick pony. The idea of “guy reinvents pop songs as lounge tunes” doesn’t sound like it would be enough to sustain a career that’s now entering its second decade. I admit that the idea itself seems hokey and a little bit cooler-than-thou but thanks to Cheese’s smooth delivery and the consummate musicianship of his backing band, Lounge Against the Machine, a week or two will go by where Richard Cheese is the only music I listen to.
As the album cover from the above video demonstrates, Cheese is the master of titling his albums cleverly and changing an iconic album cover image to a more swingin’ version.
Richard Cheese has a number of covers I like much more than the original. I can’t stand “Last Resort” by Papa Roach for instance, but Cheese turns it into to cheeky and emotional lounge journey.
If you don’t like it, there’s really nothing I can say to convince you, I can totally understand someone saying this is cheesy and one note but I’ve never seen Cheese that way. Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine is absolutely one of the 500 Greatest Things Ever.
Around Nature Photos #3
Photo credit to Gary Kraszewski.
I won’t be coy: we’re getting into, with seasons 2 and 3, the place that I think is the pinnacle of Mr. Show With Bob And David’s greatness, which means the pinnacle of greatness in the medium of sketch comedy of which American television has thus far been capable.
That quote is from one of Leonard Pierce’s recaps of “Mr. Show with Bob and David” for the AV Club. First off let’s all thank Pierce for not being coy. It might result in us mistaking him for a critic and not someone who has dreamed of giving David Cross and Bob Odenkirk a tongue bath since Freshman year of college.
As a tribute to his brutal frankness naked fanboyism, I would like to also dispense with the coyness up front. I’m not writing some kind of hipster backlash post about how “Mr. Show” sucks. “Mr. Show” doesn’t suck at all, in fact it’s pretty excellent. Mr. Show gave us this:
This:
And of course this:
But people aren’t happy saying Mr. Show was simply awesome. They want to go the Leonard Pierce route and talk about it as if it is far and away the greatest sketch comedy show of all time. Revisionist fans and pop culture critics talk about Mr. Show as if it was exempt from the greatest flaw that effects all sketch comedy: unevenness.
Mr. Show was just as uneven as the other two great sketch comedy shows of it’s era, Mtv’s “The State” and the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s “The Kids in the Hall.” It was as uneven as other second tier sketch shows from the same era like “Upright Citizens Brigade” and “The Ben Stiller Show.”
Exhibit A: Ronnie Dobbs
Ronnie Dobbs is a David Cross creation and he exemplifies many of the traits that make Cross unbearable in the eyes of many. Cross is a smart, well educated liberal who has a stinging sense of comedy that often dips into condescension for those on the other side. Personally, I find him hilarious, but I do see what the critics are complaining about. Ronnie Dobbs however, I do not find funny. I don’t get how anyone could. The character is made up of low hanging fruit and well worn territory. He’s a dumb redneck, ha ha freakin ha. Odenkirk and Cross apparently thought Ronnie was so funny he got his own movie, “Run Ronnie Run” which went straight to video and is loathed by fans and Bob and David alike (Odenkirk blames the editing but Cross has said “it is the movie we wrote”).
Exhibit B:
This is the pinnacle of greatness for American sketch comedy?
Exhibit C:
Granted this sketch gets good once David Cross’s pretentious character is introduced, but before that there’s a solid minute of awfulness.
From this point on can we all just agree that Mr. Show was great sketch comedy show with a lot of good sketches and stop the ridiculous hipster hyperbole?
Baseless Accusations: Mystic Pizza
Reviews based on actual consumption of media is for people with a lot of free time and no imaginiation. Champion of the Sun occasionally likes to write reviews based on little more than gut instinct. These are our Baseless Accusations.
Baseless Accusations is the recently debuted feature wherein we here at Champion of the Sun review something we haven’t actually seen/heard/tasted based on whatever we feel like basing our review on. In this case I will be reviewing the mid 90′s(?) non-classic film “Mystic Pizza” based on the title and whatever information I can glean from this French DVD case I found. For those of you wondering no, I do not parlez vous the francais.
“Mystic Pizza” may be remembered for it’s high flying dough tossing scenes but it has stood the test of time mostly by being remembered as one the many movies that made America fall in love with Julia Roberts before everyone realized she can’t act and is extremely weird looking. However “Pizza” finds her at the height of her America’s Sweetheart powers as Claire Danneville, a hooker with a heart of gold (at this point in her career Julia’s contracts had a clause requiring all parts she played to be hookers with hearts of gold) who through a series of wacky judicial decisions comes to own Mystic Pizza, a small pizzeria in the center of a quirky New Hampshire township that she has never visited.
The extended use of pizza creation montages seems like a crutch director Don Petrie leans on far too often, but there is meaning to be found in the spin of dough and the spreading of cheese. Unfortunately the movie never makes its metaphor clear, making the 45 minutes we see of slow motion pizza making seem at best a bit superflous.
More relatable is Roberts’s romance with a young, slumming it Vincent D’Onfrio, the local handyman. The chemistry between these two is palpable as they must decide to consummate their relationship before she is called back to Las Vegas for prostitution unionization meetings.
Ultimately the movie leads to a surprising climax (in space!) that resonates despite the deeply racist undertones of a subplot involving Eppy (Michael Dorn), a local slave who wants to be free so he can demonstrate his innate pizza making ability.
Eventually the various threads converge for the most part (in space!) and I was left with a mostly satisfied feeling. I may have been confused sometimes about the route we took, but I was ultimately happy with the destination (space!).
Final Verdict: 8 out of 12 Clovers.
The Night I Met Tommy Wiseau
Tommy Wiseau doesn’t smell weird.
Hours before meeting Wiseau at a midnight screening of his cult sensation “The Room” I was catching a friend’s band at a local bar and my buddy Nick told me to try and get a whiff of Wiseau because, Nick surmised, “He looks like he smells like some people’s basements, you know, where there’s wood paneling everything is moist and smells weird. Not terrible mind you, just sort of off.” I hadn’t previously considered what Tommy would smell like, but thinking about it I figured it might be what Nick was describing, only masked by the overwhelming smell of incense and exotic oils.
It turns out though that Tommy smells perfectly normal, or at least you can’t smell him over the popcorn in the movie theater lobby. And this makes sense. Tommy has enough money to avoid smelling bad, and he’s concerned enough with appearing American at all times to avoid smelling like some stereotypical Eastern European.
This wasn’t the only surprise to meeting Wiseau, but we’ll cover the rest of the night in a minute. It’s possible that some of you aren’t familiar with the man or his movie.
“The Room” is a film directed, produced, written, and starring Tommy Wiseau. With a budget around $6 million (all raised with no studio support and largely self financed by Wiseau himself) it had a theatrical release at a single theater in Los Angeles and closed after a few weeks. However the movie was so terrible, so laugh-out-loud bad, that a small group of fans emerged and encouraged Tommy to screen the movie once a month. Those screenings, in addition to a large billboard featuring Wiseau’s weathered and surgically altered face that stood in LA for years, slowly accumulated more and more fans. Though the two films aren’t necessarily comparable, “The Room” essentially became a “Rocky Horror Picture Show” type of phenomenon, with fans attending screenings regularly.
Soon the movie was picking up some famous fans and getting written about in Entertainment Weekly and various blogs and entertainment sites. A DVD was released in 2005 and at that point The Room really began to take off. There are now regular showings in cities across America and Tommy himself tours the country attending them. Like ‘Rocky Horror’ there is now an informal set of audience participation guidelines. Yelling out your own jokes is highly encouraged, as is dressing in costume.
The story of the film centers around a love triangle between Wiseau’s Johnny, a San Francisco bank executive, his fiancé Lisa (Juliette Danielle), a young woman struggling in the competitive “computer business”, and Mark (Greg Sestero), Johnny’s best friend.
To understand how bad the movie is and the unique way in which it is bad, one must make an attempt to know Tommy Wiseau, who for unexplained reasons, likes to make himself a completely unknowable figure. Judging by his thick accent he is Eastern European but when asked where he is from he will say only that he is American and grew up in New Orleans (though he has said he moved back and forth between Europe and America often). Even Danielle herself says she never learned where he was actually from. When asked how he raised $6 million to realize his dream he is evasive and vague, the most direct answer he has ever given on the subject was to tell Entertainment Weekly that he imported leather jackets.
But enough about the movie, there’s been a lot of good writing already done about the movie itself and the many ways in which it is bad (I’ve linked some at the end of the post for you). I want to talk about my evening with Tommy.
We showed up at the theater about an hour early. There a few people outside but most everyone was crammed into the small lobby between the entrance from the outside and the doors that let you into the theater itself. Initially I thought this was because of the ice storm going on outside but soon camera flashes and excited giggling made it clear that Tommy was in the same cramped space packed with dozens of fans.
I made my way around to get a better view and there he was. His face hung weird and plastic-looking and he was wearing shades (indoors at 11pm). Standing next to him was the tall and incredibly handsome Sestero, who it was surprising to see as he hadn’t been advertised for the event. I was able to shove my way near Wiseau who was signing things and posing for pictures and being very bossy.
One can see what he would be like as a director (he fired cast and crew members regularly). He tells everyone how to stand in pictures, what pose to do, where to put their stuff, who should take the picture, etc. He likes to twirl ladies like they’re ballroom dancing before and/or during taking a picture with them. Tommy was whisked into the lobby before I had a chance to meet him.
Once in the lobby an orderly line was finally formed and I waited with giddy anticipation. I thought about what I could ask him or what I’d say about how I loved his movie. I love the way in which it is completely unique. I love the way it contains many of the qualities a film is supposed to have but in the disjointed fashion that makes it appear as if it was created by someone who’d read about movies but never seen one.
Tommy is the white arm pointing at someone.
Finally it was my turn. I walked up to Tommy and…nothing. I could barely squeak a word out. I asked to sign my Tommy Wiseau bobblehead and shook his hand before doing the same to Sestero. We posed for the picture and Tommy grabbed the bobblehead out of my hand and started muttering about having it out of the shot. He then picked it back up and handed it to me and told me to hold it facing out. Then he said it was my choice, but with a finality that indicated it wasn’t. I realized at that moment I was being directed by Tommy Wiseau. I gave a hearty thumbs up and the picture was snapped. I felt dizzy and giddy for minutes afterward. It was the first time in my life I had been legitimately star struck.
Greg Sestero, Me, and Tommy Wiseau.
I took my seat and my friends and I hung out until Tommy and Sestero’s Q and A session started (considerably late as they were no longer going to stick around until the end of the film because of the ice storm). The Q and A was glorious. People had paid $15 to come see a movie they had already seen and they were dying to ask Tommy questions. How did he react? Like a complete dick. He was curt and dismissive of their questions. He derided a fan for poor English skills (irony!) after he thought the fan called the movie “A Room” instead of “The Room” (I think the fan said “the”). A girl asked where his accent is from and his response was to say he’s in America and if she didn’t like his accent that’s just too bad (though he also allowed the possibility that she had a crush on him for his accent).
Sestero was kinder, but his answers were canned and pandering. Someone asked him what it was like to work with Robin Williams in “Patch Adams” and his answer was “It was great, but no one beats Tommy Wiseau!” which got the desired hoots and hollers of the crowd. I asked Greg if he felt pressure as an actor given Tommy’s propensity to fire people and keep numerous understudies ready to replace anyone he wasn’t liking.
Sestero: No. I mean, I got the part the night before filming and… I don’t know, I wasn’t worried.
Illuminating!
Tommy made vague complaints about all the questions having been asked before, as if he didn’t realize touring the country and taking questions before his movie would mean he’d be asked the same questions about his movie all the time.
One girl came up to give him flowers. Tommy declared her friends were going to take a picture, something neither she nor her friends had apparently planned on. When they didn’t get to the front quick enough Tommy began barking into the microphone that her friends were taking too long and he was getting annoyed. Then it was over. He had taken around 10 questions and actually answered none of them. He walked down the aisle giving high fives, then appeared with remarkable quickness in the balcony giving more handshakes and high fives.
Just like that it was over. Tommy was gone and the movie played. Everyone had a great time. Tommy is a strange guy who made a horrible film. He’s contemptuous of anyone asking him a question but then tours the country doing Q and A’s. He barks orders at his fans and is dismissive of them all at once. And yet we love him anyway. And I did manage to learn one new thing about him that night, he doesn’t smell weird at all.
Further Reading on “The Room”:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20246031,00.html
http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-room,25723/
http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-viewers-guide-to-the-room,25721/
http://www.avclub.com/articles/tommy-wiseau,29598/
http://www.praxismagazine.com/interview/jdan.htm
http://www.ifc.com/news/2009/03/a-primer-on-the-room.php
This is by far the best article on The Room I’ve read anywhere. It’s brilliant. Unfortunately you can only read it if you’re a subscriber to Harper’s magazine.
Around Town Photos #3
From the 2010 Minneapolis Zombie Pub Crawl
