QuickPost: Ten Celebrities I Have No Problem Calling an Asshole

I’m going to start doing quickposts in order to get over my tentative posting patterns and write more! While I don’t think they’ll always be lists, I was having a conversation earlier this evening about how ridiculous it is that many people label celebrities “an asshole” or “really genuine”. Unless you’ve actually been in the same room with them (and usually not even then), there’s no way you can say that you can affirmatively say that they’re personality is one extreme or the other. Obviously this has a lot to do with what tabloid storyline ghetto a celebrity has been relegated to – it’s been like five years, I could give a shit about what’s going on in Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie’s uterus.

That being said, there are some repeat offenders – either in interviews, leaked footage, or accounts from co-workers – that make me feel a little less guilty about making a generalization. I still like these performers/creators (with the exception of Frank Miller, Kevin Smith and Gene Simmons because their work is crap from the get-go). I learned my lesson from the 2000 election: never go with the guy you think you can have a beer with over the one that’s obviously an asshole but more qualified.

James Woods: Very conservative and very outspoken about it. His reasoning and argumentation style made him a tea partier before there was even such a thing.

Frank Miller: Ditto. Worse, he presents the misogyny and racism in his work as fact as opposed to, well, anything defensible or interesting.

Peter Sellers: Destroyed film projects, careers, a couple of marriages and his children’s childhoods with his ego.

Dennis Hopper: Very smug and took credit for a lot of things he didn’t do, but specifically the idea that he wrote and directed Easy Rider. (Terry Southern wrote the screenplay, editors at AIP pieced it together.) He also did very, very unkind impersonations of David Lynch and pretty clearly made an opportunistic move from left to right politically.

Steven Seagal: Mostly because he uses excessive force as a police officer.

Russell Crowe: Has been very demanding and difficult to work with. Besides, I’ve never seen him in a really amazing or nuanced role. Great, you can shout, now get in the corner with latter-day Al Pacino.

Christian Bale:

Vincent Gallo: Probably one of the more ridiculous people on this list. He has sold his sperm exclusively to Aryan women (and offered to “personally deliver it” to ones that were attractive), repeatedly made homophobic and vaguely fascistic remarks, all the while knowing he can get away with it because he’s so good looking.

Kevin Smith: A writer-director who does not write or direct very memorably. Some of his scenes are quotable, but I don’t think that the ability to rework some line from Star Wars so an army of dudes in shortpants will repeat it until the end of time is really a talent. Also, he’s made unnecessarily vicious remarks about Ben Affleck and Tim Burton, blaming them for projects that didn’t work out. Yes, I’m sorry your terrible screenplay for Superman didn’t work out. It’s probably because the sound of your dick rubbing against your hand was too loud.

Gene Simmons: Proud misogynist and marketer who happened to do rock music on the side. Unapologetically in love with himself.

Honorary mentions: Klaus Kinski, Robert Crumb, Norman Mailer

Showgifs

Since being laid off in November, I’ve wholly embraced the culture of unemployment: riding the bus, ambling around Chinatown at 2:00 in the afternoon, and relying on the kindness of economically stable friends for nights out. But since I don’t have TV reception, I can’t really bask in television’s warming glow like a real bum. Instead, I turn to the internet, but more specifically, the magic of the animated gif.

This is in part nostalgia. The internet/digital culture I grew up with as a teenager was a garden of gifs;  video was limited to (mostly educational) CD Roms. Usually they were horribly pixelated apologies, a variant on “this page under construction”. Even though it was terrible netiquette back then (yes, that’s right, not “best practices”), personal homepages could seem very static or just took a long-ass time for a layperson to code, and gifs underscored that fact.

Where would Geocities have been without that shit? They were like Christmas decorations: sort of serious, but also tacky and easily overdone; generic and repetitive yet a mode of self-expression. However, as the internet became more about preformatted, minimal design instead of decorative DIY (which could be summed up as the switch from Myspace to Facebook), the glitzier variety of gif went away or at least outside the mainstream of internet creators/manufacturers. This also coincided with the rise of high-speed internet. Larger-sized media were now accessible without massive/indefinite wait-times, effectively killing the CD Rom and bringing high-resolution photograph, music, video and flash to the forefront of what made a page/filesharing site worth visiting. Porn gifs (which I would argue were equally ubiquitous/shared as those “under construction” ones) were no longer necessary; you could just download the porn itself.

But, as the internet has repeatedly shown, just because something “isn’t necessary” doesn’t mean it won’t continue existing. This latter genre which preserved a cinematic moment – be it silly, sexy, or strange – are undoubtedly the most popular now. High speed allowed them to become “legible” (porn gifs were very, very tiny in order to preserve looping gyrations; otherwise they were incredibly pixelated). Gif Party, three frames, Aloha Friday, and Graphics Interchange Format (to name a few) are incredibly popular tumblrs that deal almost exclusively in movie/TV gifs. Since the age and background of most Tumblr users is pretty homogeneous (people in their teens/twenties who grew up with the same nerdy shit I did), there’s this strangely uniform sensibility about what is/is not worthy of being looped. The live stream of gifs posted to De.li.cious are a little bit more scattershot for that reason, but their popularity (and what they’re about) speaks to a “collective memory” at the very least. The tumblr gif gang, if I may annoyingly label it that, caters to an audience that is knowledgeable about a variety of types of media, familiar with Monsieur Hulot, Star Trek, Classical Hollywood, Bollywood, and crappy direct-to-video releases. In short, they reflect a wider range of media literacy.

So, with the announcement of Showgirls 2 – whose prequel was probably the first really, really dirty movie a lot of people of my generation accidentally/purposely saw – it should come as no surprise that a series of animated gifs of the original were released to celebrate it. Though the first Showgirls has been re-appropriated either as unabashed, laughable crap or a new type of eroticism(!?), the sequel looks true to the original in that most people will consider it utterly unwatchable.

I still haven’t watched the first one. Maybe I never will. (I love Kyle McLaughlin too much to watch him outside of a Lynch movie.) And since I’ve seen the best part of the movie distilled into  gif-form, I’m not sure how anything 2 hours long could measure up:

The Young Victoria

Spurred on by the success of those Jane Austen movies and Marie Antoinette, teenybopper milquetoast is taken to the acceptable, expected level in The Young Victoria. Although I usually don’t go in for this type of overblown Masterpiece Theater stuff, I still gave it the opportunity to fail in making me feel anything. I’m not going to beat up too much on this movie; it doesn’t really deserve it – both in the sense it’s not unique in its blandness, and that it’s simply not worth the effort.

Like Marie Antoinette or Elizabeth, The Young Victoria wants to take a queen that American audiences can recognize (by name, at least) and make her seem controversial or somehow exploding with mental strife. But mostly wear big, pretty dresses. In this sense The Young Victoria already shot itself in the foot because the “controversy” is pretty lackluster. Okay, so her mom’s lover had her very tightly controlled before she became queen, but that’s mostly expressed in the fact lil’ Vicky has to hold someone’s hand while walking up or down stairs. There’s also some hubbub because she’s young, and because of her (mother’s?) ladies in waiting. Of course, the latter wasn’t really clear because there are only like six scenes in the whole movie without Emily Blunt in them.

But then again, because Victoria suffers from Queen Amadala syndrome, there isn’t much to her aside from the big, pretty dresses. Her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert is, of course, entirely phoned in: she wants him to write her letters, they kiss in the rain, he pushes the hair off her shoulder. It’s all very romantic in a safe, predictable way without any real eroticism. Sex is hinted at but never shown (they get ready for bed, then it fades to black), clearing up any doubt who this movie is for. (There are also several text inserts that dole out Wikipedia definitions and historical facts to help clear up just what a regent is.) Pure PG-13, it’s all for moms and teenage girls looking for a decent Saturday matinee. A post-film burger at Culvers may or may not follow, but who cares because that movie had such pretty dresses! Could you imagine wearing one every day?

Or at least, it’s what a movie ostensibly for those audiences are supposed to contain. It’s certainly not Ghost World – any sort of connection to actual teenage emotion derived from a stifling environment is nonexistent. The film’s extremely linear structure, adagio tempo editing, and competently-framed/well-lit shots don’t complicate things either. It’s a very clean, white world where substance or minorities have no place. So yeah, it is pretty fucking offensive that we’re expected to feel sad or happy for her, let alone act like this is a story that needs to be told. At least “My Super Sweet Sixteen”, though treading similar territory, actively encourages you to hate the rich people you’re spying on. I guess The Young Victoria may have it’s place among some present-day princesses whose parents shower them with money and impose an updated suburban version of the Kensington System, but most likely it’ll be quickly forgotten. Except for the pretty dresses, of course.

And now, here’s some motherfucking punk rock: