Entries Tagged 'Satire' ↓

Do you have to be old enough to remember Ricardo Montablan’s faux couture, 1976 Cordoba car commercial, right, to find this Chrysler/Star Trek: Wrath of Khan mashup, above, hilarious?

I’m guessing pretentiousness has no expiration date, and the answer is “No.”

…against this sexy little slow jam, featuring my main man, Mr. Hole-In-One, Tiger Woods.

It’s called the “Tiger Woods Voicemail Slow Jam Remix,” and gurrrrl, I hope you Vaselined your legs today, so yo’ panties can have a smooooth ride down.

Awwww, yeah, girl: You better believe you’re gonna break out the rear window of my 2009 Cadillac Escalade.

Only this time…..it’s gonna be from the inside….

UK designer / retailer Last Exit To Nowhere makes T-shirts for, perhaps, the most dedicated of movie fans: Those so geeked out on a particular film that they crave the logos of its barely mentioned, even merely-alluded-to, fictional corporations.

I don’t mean, like, say, The Daily Planet, Superman / Clark Kent’s well-known, Metropolis-based, but nonexistent newspaper. We’re talking more like Weyland-Yutani, Inc., above, the interplanetary megacorporation; owner-operator of the massive Nostromo and Sulaco spaceships from Alien and Aliens, respectively. Or the Slaughtered Lamb, that unfriendly-to-strangers, soupless pub in An American Werewolf in London. Have you ever thought of spending a winter weekend at the Overlook Hotel, right? Believe me: Not if you saw The Shining, first.

With stylized imagery representing fake companies in flicks from The Silence of the Lambs to Back to the Future; Jaws, right, to National Lampoon’s Vacation, there’s probably something for every cinema nerd out there. Hoodies abound, as do caps and fitted tops for ladies. There’s even a kids’ section, so you can start decking out your future aesthete early. Last Exit To Nowhere movie tees, $30; hoodies, $50. Sizes S to XXL. Hats, $20, one size fits all. Shipping to U.S., $6.65 for the first item, $1.70 for each additional item. So, unlike a Cahulawassee River expedition, you won’t get screwed…on the price.

Try not to drool over this super-cool poster, above, from The Men Who Stare At Goats, out this Friday, November 6. As Overture Films notes on their YouTube channel, the movie

was inspired by Jon Ronson’s non-fiction bestseller of the same name, an eye-opening and often hilarious exploration of the government’s attempts to harness paranormal abilities to combat its enemies.

The flick stars George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey, all somberly coin-profiled on the poster. But besides the dry humor of the Illuminati-ish background graphics—and the trailer, below—what I dig most are the image’s soothing ochre tones, the full credit for “Goat,” and that hair on his chinny-chin-chin. The Men Who Stare At Goats original one-sheet, 27 in. by 41 in., rolled, single-sided, $18, Movieposter.com.

It’s great to see Boost Mobile running the best written, best acted, best produced, best commercial of 2009 again, above, after a whole summer off.

An obvious advertising masterpiece from the time you first see it, “Pigs, Unwronged” is delectably dense with details: The lead’s momentary disbelief that he’s being ogled for eating hog; his candid excuse (“I like a nice ham”) and self-serving rationalization for cannibalism (“We’re just enjoying the flavors of a fallen friend.” “True,” burps his dinnermate); the fluid, expressive body language of the animatronic (watch the ears); the perfectly cast, bored urbanity of the voice actor; that dismissive hoof flick which closes the piece.

It all adds up to 30 seconds of twistedness from an alternate universe where pigs talk, go to fine restaurants, and you’re wrong for recklessly eyeballing porkers chomping pork. Boost Mobile not only gets the viewer’s attention, but makes the ad an event, rewarding you for sticking with it. In other words, they win. Though I’m not their market, those swine slay me.

Random thought I had today: With the King of Pop’s death in June, the price of superstar conceptual artist Jeff Koons‘ famed 1988 sculpture, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, above, must be rocketing in value. (Made in an edition of three, plus an artist’s proof, one of the life-sized, 42 in. x 70 1/2 in. x 32 1/2 in. porcelain tchotchkes sold at auction for $5.6 million in 2001.)

Indeed, legendary art dealer Larry Gagosian, who reps Koons, right, told The New York Times back in July that if one of the creations

was to come up for sale now, it could make more than $20 million. “And that’s conservative,” he added.

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You all get Fs: Mixed Company sets Asians back thousands of years

Adam Clayton Powell was fond of noting that Harvard University had “ruined more Negroes than bad whiskey.” Well, perhaps his Korean counterpart is somewhere saying the same thing about Asians at Yale.

That was my first random thought when I saw this bit, today, on YouTube: Purported members of the Mixed Company of Yale University chorale, above, shuffling to their reworked version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”: “Single Asians.”

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It’s no secret that Katie Couric, above, had some serious problems with the ratings when she took over the CBS Evening News in 2006. For a couple of years, there, her future didn’t look good, and management reportedly started speaking in low tones about pulling the plug on her broadcast.

But that was until she triumphantly body-slammed Republican VP hopeful Sarah Palin in September 2008, with a series of interviews that almost certainly helped nominee John McCain lose the November election, that boosted Couric’s viewers by millions, and that proved she was not to be messed with.

So: Where do you go from there? You go where Hillary Clinton, FOX’s Sean Hannity, CNN’s Kiran Chetry, and The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus have all gone: With Auto-Tune, the so-called “T-Pain/Cher-style” vocal processing technology that’s sweeping the nation.

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Beloved as the Emmy Award-winning Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has been for decades—my sis couldn’t get enough of the show when we were kids—and rightly honored as creator Fred Rogers, above, was in his lifetime—he died in 2003—ya gotta admit that there’s something just a little…odd about his persona.

I mean, think about it: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is a show where, ostensibly, kids, unaccompanied by adults, go to the house of a single, middle-aged man, who is there, alone, on his lunch hour.

A guy whose middle name is McFeely.

That Rogers’ intentions were, of course, so honorable only makes writer/scholar/media critic/co-sponsor of my recent Iowa lecture Kembrew McLeod‘s disassembly of the TV host’s airy monologues just that more wicked. By isolating Rogers’ trademark, singsong platitudes (“I’m glad you’re my friend…I like you very much”), and adhering them to droning drum tracks, a kind of loopy hypnosis takes over…certainly Rogers’ nefarious intent. It’s long (9:15), but worth staying with to the final utterance.

That’s designer Ryan Waller‘s smart-behind entry, right, to the New York Times’ “Help Put A New Face on Freedom,” One World Trade Center logo design contest. Asked what it meant, the artist cryptically replied, “The design says everything (and it should say multiple things at the same time).”

So, I’ll take a stab at it: Stores in the 7-11 convenience chain are often run by Middle Eastern people, of the variety many Americans broadly hold responsible for the September 2001 catastrophe, hence the allusive smear. As well, the opening within the “9” portrays the abstracted shape of a banking jetliner, rushing toward the viewer head-on, a la United Airlines Flight 175’s widely videotaped crash into the Center’s South Tower. All of which faintly suggest that Waller, and possibly someone at The New York Times, is an absurdist, a racist, or both.