DO I STUTTER?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

IT'S NOT WHETHER YOU WIN OR LOSE, IT'S ABOUT HOW MUCH MONEY HARVEY WEINSTEIN SPENT ON YOUR MOVIE'S CAMPAIGN

Since who wins and who loses isn't decided on merit, if one can compartmentalize and enjoy the spectacle of a bunch of extremely rich people taking themselves extremely seriously, the Oscars can be a lot of fun. So, with my predictions about who's going to win out of the way, here's a bunch of good old fashioned bullshit (if you have to ask whether a particular prediction is serious, it's not):

---James Franco's timing is going to be a little off all night, but Anne Hathaway's going to be on point. By the end of the telecast, the audience will be begging him to shut the fuck up so we can focus on Anne's smile. Speculation that Franco's stoned will run rampant, but the real explanation is, he'll be distracted by the forty college degrees he's working on, the twenty-five movies he's directing, and the mistaken impression that he has a shot in hell of winning tonight.

---It'll be a good year for dresses. Some will actually look good, some will be mindbogglingly awful. But it won't be a boring year.

---Florence will be laid bare as the fraud she is without The Machine.

---Gwyneth Paltrow will make everyone go, “Damn, remember when she used to act? Fuck me I'm old.”

---The best speech all night will either be by the Foreign Film winner, or one of the shorts.

---Colin Firth will alienate the entire world moviegoing audience by pretending to stutter in his own acceptance speech; he'll later tell the media “I was having a laugh, is that so wrong?” and the media will go, “Yeah, stick to drama, motherfucker.”

---Tony Curtis will win a bunch of gamblers a shitload of money by batting cleanup in the Dead People Montage. Dennis Hopper, counterintuitively, will lead it off.

---Aaron Sorkin will be a giant cock in his acceptance speech.

---Something will go horribly wrong with the Oscars' “virtual stage” or whatever the fuck it is.

---The ceremony will run 27 minutes and 14 seconds over.

---Thankfully, no dumb political shit in the acceptance speeches this year. Smart political shit, on the other hand, will certainly ensue when the Wall Street documentary guy wins, but he'll be dignified about it. Fox will still jump on this and do a thing about how out-of-touch and left-wing Hollywood is, even though it'll ironically be the least partisan and most relevant political statement at the Oscars in decades.

---No Banksy. Sigh.

---Somebody's gawnna do a wicked retahded Bahstin accent joke at sam point duriness fackin show. It's nawt gawnna be fackin funny.

---This one I can guarantee: when the old guy who wrote King's Speech wins, I'm going to get up and go “David Seidler, I'm happy for you, and I'mma let you finish . . . but Chris Nolan wrote the most original screenplay of all time!” But since that's not actually true, and that joke is old anyway, I'll just be glad no one's around to hear me. Except you all, but hey. What's a blog for if not oversharing.

---Natalie Portman's loss is going to be treated like some gigantic upset, but remember, I fuckin told you so.

---The Cameron Diaz Memorial “Most Stoned Presenter Award,” won last year by Jake Gyllenhaal (who is presenting this year but will likely not repeat), should go to either Halle Berry or Matthew McConaughy.

---Value bet of the night: Me getting bored with the inevitable King's Speech sweep (and the related reaffirming of Harvey Weinstein as the Master of the Oscars) and switching over to the Knicks-Heat game, with 7 to 1 odds.

So yeah, I'll be watching alone, since all my friends are either having a quiet evening in with their wives/husbands or don't give a shit. But you can follow me on Twitter as I crack wise all night. Just be forewarned, if those tweets start being about Carmelo and Amar'e, it means the Oscars fuckin sucked this year.

C'MON OSCAR, LET'S GO FOR A RIDE, VOL. II: 2010-11 PREDICTIONS

Wave your gold statuettes in the motherfuckin air, and wave them motherfuckers like they were based on a selection process that was remotely a meritocracy rather than a labyrinthine web of politics and stupid old people bullshit! (Wait, that's not how the song goes?) FUCK IT, IT'S OSCAR TIME!!!

Last year's Oscars were largely a snore because there were two legitimately great movies (The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds), a handful of really good ones (like Precious and District 9, for one of the funnier juxtapositions in living memory), and a flaming $300 million turd (Avatar), and there was no suspense whatsoever about who was actually going to win, with the only surprise being that Katherine Bigelow actually won Best Director (which wasn't really even much of one). This year's a different story, as 2010 was one of the sneakiest good years for movies on record.

The year started out with a wet stinky fart with Avatar dominating the box office for like ever, since no one seemed to give a fuck that it was fucking retarded and that moreover the FX weren't even that cool (sorry, civilians, you can get the same experience by eating mushrooms and watching the Smurfs, for a lot less money) and then Clash of the Titans coming along being like “Hey, we can take the lead guy from Avatar and suck even more!” and civilized people generally reaching for the whiskey bottle and wondering whether the Vicodin would be better in pill form or chopped up and snorted.

Then all of a sudden in the middle of the year shit started to absolutely fucking rock. Inception, The Kids are All Right, Winter's Bone started a litany of interesting, ambitious pictures that held reasonably steady until the end of the year, by which time there was a legitimately impressive roster of releases, with some excellent performances by actors, some truly visionary directing, and some fuckin a solid writing.

This means that, unlike last year, there were actual worthy nominees who got snubbed; Chris Nolan took the most public hit, not being nominated for Best Director for Inception, whose editor Lee Smith got royally fucked, not even getting nominated for one of the most magnificent editing jobs perhaps in decades. Best Director and Best Editing are the only categories where they really messed up the nominations (well, and a couple others that we'll get to later). Best Director, in a just universe, looks like this:

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right
David Fincher, The Social Network
Debra Granik, Winter's Bone
Chris Nolan, Inception

That's your five. Fuck David Russell and a polite request to vacate the premises to Tom Hooper and the Coen Brothers (who justfuckinbarely miss the cut, I am not pissing on True Grit in any way). But, hey, them's the bricks.

Also unlike last year, there's some actual uncertainty in the acting categories. Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz, and Mo'Nique had that shit on lock even before the nominations were announced. This year, they don't even need to bother announcing the other four dudes in the Best Actor category, but the other three acting categories are still kind of up for grabs (it's a shame Jennifer Lawrence ain't got a shot). This necessitates the finest in analysis, from Movies By Bowes' ™ crack staff of one crackhead. Let's start with the ones I haven't any fuckin clue about:


Best Foreign Language Film

Always the most arbitrary award, because it never goes to the one movie anyone's ever heard of. It won't be Biutiful for that reason (also it apparently kind of sucks), and it won't be Dogtooth because it was the one everyone jumped to when they went “well it won't be Biutiful because people have heard of it.” I'm rooting for the Danish picture In A Better World so one woman director gets an Oscar, since Debra Granik and Lisa Cholodenko got boned by the nominating committee.


Best Live Action Short/Best Animated Short/Best Documentary Short Subject

No fuckin idea. But hey, you don't know either, that makes two of us.


Best Documentary Feature

This category's the most fun it's been years, with three king-hell badass pictures right at the top: Exit Through The Gift Shop, which isn't going to win—alas—though not winning will actually probably be better for Banksy's career than winning, just because it's hard to be anti-establishment with an Oscar (just ask Eminem) and we fuckin need Banksy to be anti-establishment. Also, if he did some shit like accept the fuckin thing as himself it'd be like, “right, you really are just some dude from Bristol in his late 30s. Fart.”

That means it's down to Inside Job and Restrepo, which means it's a coin flip: do you go with the—former, intellectually harrowing account of how far up our ass Wall Street's dick is, or do you go with the—latter—viscerally harrowing thing about combat troops in war? Guess it all depends which side of the bed the Academy wakes up on, but it'll be one of those two.

That being said, the best movie in this category is Exit Through The Gift Shop. Hands fucking down. Banksy is a fucking god.


Best Original Score

Hans Zimmer, motherfuckers.


Best Original Song

I don't really give a fuck. Randy Newman? Sure, why not. I'll be taking a piss when this one's presented anyway. This is why we either need to take a page out of Bollywood's book and actually fucking write good songs for this category, or just change the goddamn thing to “Best Needle Drop” and give the award to the hipster who decided to score a gun battle to “Two Weeks” by Grizzly Bear.


Best Sound Editing/Best Sound Mixing

Both of these joints had best be going to Inception. I watched Inception with headphones on a train coming back from Christmas and I was like “fuck, they should call this movie Erection.” Because of the sound, you see. Well, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's suits ahem but that's not the point. Seriously, if either of these categories go to anything else, the whole thing is a fucking fraud.


Best Makeup

The Wolfman. Sure it sucked, but Rick Baker owns.


Best Costume Design

An utterly invalid category this year due to the absence of Inception. Any movie responsible for that many people calling me gay for babbling about Joseph Gordon-Levitt's tailoring should fucking win Best Costume Design. Point fucking blank.


Best Editing

No Inception = The Social Network by default. But it's fucking bullshit that Inception is not nominated in this category. Seriously, we need to find out whose wives Chris Nolan has been fucking.


Best Visual Effects

No Tron: Legacy (which should have won, not even being nominated is retarded) = Inception wins by default. “Oh, there's your consolation prize for not being nominated for editing, Inception.” Yeah, suck my dick, Oscar.


Best Cinematography

A good field of nominees. Can't really go wrong with any of them except The King's Speech, which isn't even that bad, it's just the weakest of the five. General consensus is it's Roger Deakins' year for True Grit; I was amazed that he hasn't won yet, and that shit was gorgeous, so it's not even a consolation prize.


Best Animated Feature

Fuck knows. Don't care. I hear How To Train Your Dragon is good, but as part of the .0001 “Fuck Pixar” % of humanity, I just don't want it to be Toy Story even though it will be. I'm sorry, Pixar movies are so emotionally manipulative it's scary: what happens when Disney decides to use those skills for evil? HUH???


And now . . . the biggies:


Best Adapted Screenplay

Aaron Sorkin and a cast of thousands, and could very well end up being The Social Network's token Oscar, if the Academy indeed makes the howlingly retarded decision to fuck David Fincher. Unfortunately, this means Debra Granik goes home empty-handed, but hopefully she cleans up at the Spirit Awards.


Best Original Screenplay

Chris Nolan should win, but they're probably giving it to The King's Speech, which annoys me because not only does it wantonly fuck Chris Nolan over it's also an insult to Lisa Cholodenko, which is just like goddamn it man. Fuck the Oscars are annoying sometimes. Anyway, in a just world this is a coin flip between Inception and The Kids Are All Right, because you cannot compare those pictures. But this is not a just world.


Best Supporting Actress

Anybody's guess. Most likely are Melissa Leo for The Fighter or Hallee Steinfeld for True Grit, but more likely Melissa Leo.


Best Supporting Actor

A two-man race between Christian Bale and Geoffrey Rush. Bale's not as much of a favorite as people seem to think, but he still probably takes it so the Academy never has to vote for him again for anything (people really don't like that cat for whatever reason).


Best Actress

Another two-way race, this one between Annette Bening and Natalie Portman. I don't know why everyone's so convinced Natalie Portman has this one in the bag, because I'm goddamn near positive Annette Bening's winning it. First of all, this is another instance where you can't compare the performance. Natalie Portman in Black Swan gives one of those high-wire act, teetering on the brink of madness performances that are really flashy and everything but really, bizarrely, aren't as reliant on talent as they are a willingness to push oneself. It still, obviously, takes talent to do it that well.

Annette Bening, on the other hand, gives a much subtler performance in The Kids Are All Right. Her character is a bit of a control freak, and extremely uptight, and in a lesser movie with a lesser actress could have just been the most annoying fucking person on the planet. In Annette's hands, the character becomes enormously compelling, human, and the kind of person the audience can actually relate to. That, clearly, is not a substitute for artistic achievement, but Annette's attention to detail takes surgical skill (and I'm not just phrasing it that way because she plays a surgeon, but holy shit, how bout that, huh?)

You can't compare the two performances, but I personally am taking Annette, and I'm taking her to win because of the Hilary Swank losses in '99 and '04. Politics are a way bigger part of this than anyone wants to admit, but in this case, it'd be a deserved win.


Best Actor

Colin Firth. The biggest lock the entire night. It ain't a race, it's a coronation. But oh . . . what about his speech? Bahahahahahaha TIP YOUR WAITRESS MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAAA


Best Director

Okay. Even if they hadn't fucked up the nominations in this category and Nolan was still in, it'd be a coin flip between David Fincher and Debra Granik, if we were doing this on straight quality, with no politics or box office or anything thrown in. So, post-fuckup, it should be David Fincher finally getting some recognition for being fucking David Fincher (and The Social Network was a worthy picture to win for). But lo and behold, there's this absurd tantrum the old people are throwing where they're pretending that The King's Speech is this legendary, earth-shattering thing. It's a good movie, but come the fuck on, man. And Tom Hooper's just sort of there. Best Director means Best Fucking Director. That means David Fincher, of these five.

The probability at this point is probably 60/40 for Tom Hooper to win, but don't be surprised if Fincher wins. The fact that he's the underdog is absolutely fucking ridiculous, though.


Best Picture

It's The King's Speech. It's been The King's Speech since the old people threw their coup d'etat and decided The Social Network never existed. It's not an apocalyptic disaster if The King's Speech wins (it is good), but it's a sign that critics are being more completely marginalized. Critics, the people who actually study movies, were all in agreement: The Social Network was by far the best movie of the year. Then all of a sudden the guilds with all the old people give out their awards and suddenly The King's Speech is the only movie that came out in 2010? Child please. The old people are just pissed because a movie about all that computer shit that they're still convinced is a fad—AFTER ALMOST 20 YEARS OF THE FUCKING INTERNET—had all these damn critics all in a tizzy. Again, The King's Speech is a good movie. And yes, The Social Network is, at best, a parable, and at worst near-total fiction. But for fuck's sake, it's a brilliantly made movie. It's the best Hollywood movie in years. The choice between a good movie, that's nice and makes you feel good, and a great movie, that's a work of genius and makes you think is not a fucking choice. Great is better than good. But people prefer to feel than to think, so it's The King's Speech.

This isn't even taking into account the other movies that were better than The King's Speech this year: Black Swan, Winter's Bone, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, True Grit (Dabangg, Endhiran, Tees Maar Khan . . .) But, in spite of all my ranting, the fact that there are this many pictures that were better than the (admittedly good) heir apparent to the Best Picture statue is a sign that 2010 was a pretty fuckin good year for movies.


The other, more general, good news is, to use one classic example, Citizen Kane is Citizen Kane and me and maybe other four people under the age of 60 have seen How Green Was My Valley. I'd say Fight Club has more enduring relevance than American Beauty, but that'd just make me mad about David Fincher inevitably getting banjaxed this year. But the point I started to make, with Kane, is that the good news is, it's just the Oscars. History has a better voting record than the Academy.

HEY, YOU GUYS SEEN AN ELEPHANT? ABOUT YAY BIG? REALLY CUTE. NO? THEN YOU MUST DIE

Last night I completed my little Tony Jaa project, and I realized one mildly disappointing thing: I should have done them in chronological order. The problem with The Protector not being available on Netflix Instant meant I had to wait forfuckingever for the goddamn postal service to bring it to me, thus leaving it as the capstone of my Jaa-capades.

Only problem with that is that The Protector isn't very good. It's kind of like an attempt to recapture the bugfuck energy of Ong-Bak, utilizing a similar fish-out-of-water premise where the good kid from the sticks (Tony) goes to the big city and has to fight a bunch of gangsters again, only this time IN A SURPRISE TWIST he goes to Sydney, Australia instead of Bangkok. Fresh!

The fact that The Protector doesn't make more out of the fact that one of the world's top 5 craziest motherfuckers (Tony Jaa) is running around kicking ass in Australia, home of at least three of the other four—it just has to be, it's Australia—is a bit of a let-down. The fight scenes are extremely hot stuff, as they damn near have to be, with Tony Jaa involved, though the intervening story is giggle-inducing horseshit. Or, more accurately, elephant shit.

Yes, this is the movie whose alternate American title is Where's My Goddamn Elephant?: One Man's Pugilistic Quest To Find a Lost Pachyderm. Tony plays a guy in a long line of monks or something who train in Muay Thai to protect battle elephants, and there are a whole lot of stupid-looking CG flashback/dream sequences to back in the days when tiny little Thai motherfuckers would protect the elephants by owning anyone who tries to get up under the elephants where they're vulnerable. Even though the elephants are no longer used for battle anymore, Tony's still all trained and everything. Then one day, a bunch of bad guys who seemingly are involved in every single illegal activity there is—murder, drugs, prostitution, kidnapping animals on the endangered species list—straight up gank Tony's sacred elephant, and the little baby one. Tony beats the shit out of everyone and is told that the bad guys have amscrayed to Australia with the elephants.

Tony shows up in Australia and starts barging up to everyone in sight, beating the shit out of them, and asking them where his elephants are. In so doing, he runs into a Vietnamese gang lieutenant who fucks Tony up with wushu (which I guess he's never seen before or something), that lieutenant's boss, a Chinese trans woman who—in the American cut—never has anyone remark, rudely or otherwise about the fact that she was blatantly not born female (in the original cut, they do acknowledge this). Xing Jin, the actress who plays the role, is trans in real life, and one of the only trans people the Chinese government is willing to acknowledge, because she's apparently an awesome ballet dancer, so, far out. Not a whole lot of those moves are on display in The Protector, though, and one gets the distinct feeling that a whole lot of her scenes were cut due to Harvey Weinstein being a pussy about action fans not being able to get down with LGBT stuff.

I'd rant a little more about Harvey except why fucking bother at this point, and also the movie really isn't all that good. It does, however, have one all-time fucking legendary sequence, and fortunately it's on Youtube, so you don't have to watch the whole movie to see it:



That's right. The first four fucking minutes of that clip was one fucking shot. I sure hope those stunt dudes who went flying four stories into wooden roofs are okay . . .

Then toward the end there's another sequence which is kind of awesome, except more in an unintentional comedy way than the staircase one which is completely and inarguably awesome independent of how dumb the rest of the movie is. And, because this fight is just straight-up ridiculous, it actually fits a little better with the rest of the movie:



This is basically the climactic fight (SPOILER ALERT: the bad guys killed the big elephant, that's what Tony's so pissed about; the baby elephant's ok, though). Tony goes on to have a fight with a gigantic white guy, and then there are multiple gigantic white guys, then he yanks the trans villainess out of a helicopter in a cruddy-looking CGI shot and then the fuckin movie mercifully ends.

But, back to the staircase fight, with the uninterrupted four-minute Steadicam shot of Tony owning the shit of everybody (and getting visibly tired by the end of it, which, hey, he's allowed to). This is the most important part of this picture for two reasons: one, it's awesome, and two, it comes at the halfway point of the movie, which is in itself a major flaw and a sign that the creative talent behind The Protector didn't really know what the fuck they were doing on this one. When one random fight in the middle of the movie is so exponentially cooler than anything else in the movie, it's a sign that either the movie doesn't know what it's doing, or doesn't give a fuck.

I'd be inclined to posit that the answer lies somewhere in between in the case of The Protector. It's flawed and dumb and the acting parts are just fucking staggeringly stupid in places (and killing the big elephant was stupid and unnecessarily melodramatic), but it gets style points for eccentricity (the fact that they're just like, sure, our villain is a trans woman, and sure, she's fucking the corrupt Australian cop dude who kills people for her, not to mention all the goofiness with the elephants) and any movie with Tony Jaa beating the shit out of people is watchable for those scenes alone, though in the case of The Protector, you want to keep your fast-forward button handy.

I now feel like I'm up to speed with Tony Jaa. Like I was saying in my previous post about him, I think he's a total singularity in the history of action movies, and is amazing to watch. But holy fuckin shit he's weird. Don't get me wrong, I like weird. But there's civilian weird and then there's Tony Jaa weird, way the fuck over there in a whole separate category. And if you go over there, don't mess with his elephant, because it'll be all day getting Tony Jaa's foot out from being embedded in your ass.

WEEKEND RECAP, AND THE WEEK AHEAD

I'm currently busy finishing up a first draft of a play that is already absolutely fucking insane and will only get more so before the action-packed climax, so posting might be a little light over the next few days. I'm going to try to get in previews of the Spirit Awards and the Oscars this coming weekend, so be on the lookout for those.

I reviewed a couple movies for Tor last weekend: Unknown, the latest entry in my favorite new genre (Liam Neeson owning the fuck out of people in a randomly selected European city). I didn't really like it all that much (the intervals between ownages were a little long and a little dumb), but it had its moments, and was a flat-out fucking masterpiece compared to the thing I saw the next day, that may be the single stupidest fucking piece of shit I've ever seen, I Am Number Four. When I got out of that movie, I went on a Twitter rant:

Reviewing I AM NUMBER FOUR without the f-word and death threats is going to be a challenge.

I saw a guy on the subway who was going to recharge his cell phone with the third rail; he said I AM NUMBER FOUR was his favorite movie.

I AM NUMBER FOUR is so stupid, Glenn Beck denounced it as a fourth columnist trying to discredit stupid people (think about this one a sec)

I AM NUMBER FOUR is so fucking stupid, stupid people just hired Ron Kuby for a defamation lawsuit.

I AM NUMBER FOUR is stupider than doing heroin off a stranger's key because he told you it was coke.

Any movie that can't be saved by an Australian biker chick with guns is deeply fucked.

Sarah Palin in a fucking coma would be smarter than I AM NUMBER FOUR. Bad reviews aren't enough, we need prison sentences.

A number of my friends seemed to find this highly amusing, but really, it was using humor to hide the pain. When someone who counts Tango & Cash, Marked For Death, Bloodsport, and The Last Boy Scout among his favorite (do not confuse with "best") movies of all time tells you something is offensively stupid, you best be fucking sitting down. Because the concept of something being that stupid ought to fill your soul with dread. Matter of fact, since I can curse here, this is my actual review of I Am Number Four:



Happy President's Day, my friends.

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS COKEHEADS

One occasional annoyance of living in the Western world (it's not just America, though we fucking rule at this just like EVERYTHING ELSE) is that the commercialization of the media leads to stupid shit getting a ton of coverage because real news is boring. So, at a time when the people of seemingly every country in the Middle East and North Africa are in the streets engaged in (mostly) non-violent protests demanding democracy, our news media here in the United States of Apathy is largely occupied by the activities of Charlie Sheen's penis, liver, and nasal membranes.

And fuck it, I'm not above writing about this shit. All I know about the pro-democracy protests in the Middle East/North Africa is “Good luck, y'all, hope it works out for you,” and I don't really have anything more substantial to write about it than that, other than to say that having a sitcom starring the deposed Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Ahmadinejad all forced to live in the same apartment splitting rent after all their shit gets seized would be funny. They could even call it Two and a Half Men because Mubarak and Ahmadinejad would misogynistically make fun of Gaddafi for having female bodyguards. And with that, we segue back to Charlie.


Like most people, my reaction to Charlie Sheen's exploits is a Venn diagram of exasperation and disgust, though mine has a third circle: a hazily laissez-faire “hey, fuck it, if he can do 8-balls the size of his fist and bang porn stars and drink like a fish with a drinking problem, let him do it.” Cuz, really?As someone who's a little unconventional about who he goes to bed with and also been unwise with the controlled substances his own self, I can't really talk. Beyond that, I don't have anything emotional invested in this cat. I could concoct some kind of “he was one of the most compelling leading men to arrive in the mid-to-late 80s but never fulfilled his promise as a movie star in part due to his spiralling substance abuse issues” argument, except that's kinda bullshit. Sure he's on a sitcom now, but TV is far from its former status as purgatory, and he is getting motherfucking paid to be on that thing. Cat makes $40-50 mil a year or some shit on that damn show. It may not be any kind of apex of artistic achievement, but money's money and this is America. Not to mention, the show is incredibly patient with him; if they haven't fired him yet, they're not going to. He could fuck the boss' wife in the ass while spooning coke into his daughters' noses and still not get fired at this point.

That's probably the weirdest thing about the media narrative on Charlie Sheen. People can do all the hand-wringing they want about how he's self-destructing, consciously/unconsciously committing suicide, all that jazz, but the fact of the matter is, he's got probably more job security than anyone in the business (CBS is only now hesitating about bringing him back). Certainly more than the other tabloid piñata we'll be discussing today, Lindsay Lohan.


Lindsay Lohan, from all available and objective accounts, drinks and snorts less than Charlie, and does not have a terribly seamy sex life. Sure she likes chicks, but she doesn't piss on them or lock them in closets or anything, she just has lesbian sex with them, and lesbian sex is one of the cornerstones of a civilized society. This is how you can tell all the homophobe religious people are full of shit; anyone who claims to not like lesbians is either a fucking liar (unless you're a straight girl in a bar dealing with a belligerently determined drunk one who isn't listening, and even then if you blame the faults of each on all you're making a moral mistake) or seriously misguided.

Even if one presupposes that the tales of Lindsay Lohan's debauchery are factual and that the nature of said debauchery is as severe as all the tabloid tut-tutters maintain, she's hardly unique. There is a well-established tradition of child stars, denied a proper childhood due to having spent the entirety of it onstage or on a movie set, freaking out and getting fucked up on drugs in their teen years and young adulthood. Lindsay ain't the first and she sure ain't the worst. The tone of the vast majority of the tabloid reports on her exploits is 90% faux outrage and 10% content (Ed. Note: stats courtesy of NASA in collaboration with the Trilateral Commission) and when you sift through and find out what they're actually accusing her of doing is having a couple drinks and then passing out because she's tired. Even the necklace thing isn't all that cut and dry: celebrities get given free shit all the time and sometimes signals get crossed. Is it dumb to walk off with a necklace and assume it's free? Sure. But it ain't all on her.

So. Whence this contrast, and to what end? Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are but two examples, the most current, of heavily-chronicled celebrities who like getting fuggedup. There are two important dichotomies at play here:

a) Charlie Sheen is male and Lindsay Lohan is female
b) Charlie Sheen makes evil white guys in suits money and Lindsay Lohan no longer does.

The first is important because forgetting that the vast majority of people calling the shots in the entertainments industry are guys is a mistake. It's probably the main determining factor in the bile that arises from the second point. If you're a fucked-up guy former child star, you get to be Corey Haim (well, til you OD, but you get the point). People sigh and make mean jokes about you, but there's a fondness in the way you're remembered (especially after you OD), even if it's couched in smarmy irony. Lindsay Lohan isn't getting any of this slack. This assessment has a bit of subjectivity to it, of course, and I have way the fuck better things to do than reading everything motherfuckers write about her, but it seems like there's a lot more anger to the way people write about her, and a whole lotta schadenfreude when one of her pictures flops.

None of this bullshit would be happening if she wasn't making atomic turds like I Know Who Killed Me (which is student film quality garbage) and Georgia Rule (which is just jaw-droppingly awful). Both of those are several years ago at this point, reinforcing the already painful truth that the difficulty curve for a career comeback is vastly steeper for women in the business than it is men. A couple flops, and a couple instances of unladylike public behavior, and the industry goes “My word!” and turns into a fuckin spinster aunt from a fuckin 1920s melodrama, whereas Robert Downey, Jr. (to be fair, a much different type of actor than Double-L, who at her peak was a highly competent comic leading player rather than a chameleonic Method lunatic like RDJ) is that nice young man who just needed to be given a hand.

Gender isn't the only element at play here, though. Remember, Charlie Sheen is on a massively successful TV show (forget that it looks fucking retarded, it prints money) and RDJ had that slam-your-dick-on-the-table blockbuster with the first Iron Man picture. So while Lindsay Lohan being a girl is arguably responsible for the severity of the critique she receives for her behavior, motherfuckers wouldn't give a flying fuck if she was making hits. If the right producer offered her the right project where she could transition into more adult roles, in one of those performances that gets written up as a “revelation” in the press, that turned into one of those $50-75 mil grossing Indiewood pictures and got nominated for awards and shit, next thing you know Chris Nolan rolls the dice and casts her as Harley Quinn or some fuckin thing and boom, she's in “I guess we gotta put up with the lateness and booze breath” Sheen territory.

That last brings up one of the potential elements one might bring up to counter my argument. “Charlie may get fucked up and have nine-ways with porn stars, but he always shows up to work. Lindsay is so often late and absent that guy had to send an open letter to the media complaining about her behavior.” First, let's not hold the guy who sent the letter up as some kind of crusader for decency. If you have a problem with someone, tell them about it, not the fuckin media. And second, dealing with crazy girls requires a bit of compassion; it's tempting, as a guy, to just say fuck it and wash your hands of the whole situation, but not all crazy girl craziness is malignant or personally directed at you. A lot of times it isn't even craziness, it's just behavior grounded in unfamiliar premises. Granted, Lindsay actually is kind of nuts (poor Samantha Ronson), and producing a project where your lead actor is always late is frustrating. But goddamn, dude, trying to shame her into better behavior through the media was like “Holy shit my house is on fire, let me put it out with this giant can of gasoline.” Because maybe it works temporarily, but the next time she's in a bad mood and has a couple drinks, she's like “THE FUCKING MEDIA IS RUINING MY LIFE” and next thing you know they're dragging her into a limo with no panties on and there goes that meeting the next day; “Fuck it, we're casting Emma Stone, this is too much headache.” There's a point where responsibility for one's own actions becomes moot: the feeling that the entire fucking world is conspiring against you leads to despair, nihilism, and an abandonment of any desire to play by that goddamn world's fucking rules.

And so this is why Charlie can give interviews saying sobriety is boring and nothing'll probably happen, where if Lindsay tried to pull some shit like that she'd get fired from projects she wasn't even attached to. I won't recap the reasons why, but I will add an emotional tag: it kind of pisses me off. To the point where I'd write and direct a comeback vehicle for her if I could get funding for it, just to be like “Fuck you, it can be done.” I mean, I'm not saying I'd do it without a really good contract and a couple ex-Mossad agents to follow her and keep her sober, but I'd give it a go.

As for Charlie, it's a moot point considering that show is all the work he needs to do, and if he's banked even a tiny percentage of his insane salary from that show he's set for life, however much of it is left. But I don't know, the only advantages I can see working with him are easy access to coke and porn stars. I have no use for coke, and I hang out with burlesque performers and models on the regular. Sorry, Charlie. I think you can deal with the disappointment.

A HELL OF A DRUG

Sarah Palin Media Addict from Gina Gershon

Oh, Gina Gershon. My God woman if you were any more perfect I don't know if I'd ever be able to form sentences.