This Week In Video

Memo to Future Blockbuster Patrons: YOU ARE DUMB.

But that's OK. Because I'm here to help you. Yes, it's time for Yet Another New Feature. It's Tuesday, and that means a whole slew of new movies come out on DVD. The Anglophiles, Oscar-whores, and cineastes are already in line at Best Buy for their copies of The Office Season 2, Master And Commander, and the Ingmar Bergman collection, so they're set, but what about the masses? How will they know which of this week's asinine releases is best for them to rent this weekend? Ideally, they will turn to me, because I alone can help them.

For example. Say you've been living under a rock for the past ten years, and happened to be watching Access Hollywood, when you heard that John Travolta, who you thought did a lovely job in that Punisher movie you went to see this weekend, is a big fan of Dianetics. Now, you've never heard of Dianetics before, but you are feeling like you could lose a few pounds. Dianetics: A Visual Guidebook is for you! Just make sure you hurry, because if you don't, a strange man with a vacant stare and a copy of Battlefield Earth under his arm will buy all three copies from your Suncoast and you'll have to wait until next week to start your low-thetan routine.

Dilemma #2. You haven't had a date in three years. Your last four online conversations have mentioned that "women don't like nice guys". You desperately need to masturbate, but a storm has knocked out your broadband and you don't have the wherewithal or fortitude to rent real porn. HAVE NO FEAR. Wild Things (Unrated Edition) and the direct to video sequel, Wild Things 2 are now available! And nobody need ever know how long you pause on the Kevin Bacon full-frontal.

Many people cannot get enough of Tom Hanks. Many people long for a simpler time, when movies were about people hitting balls with bats, not people hitting each other in the balls with bats. And even though it's got that whore Madonna and that big lesbo Rosie O'Donnell in it, they're all modest and purtied up and like boys like they're supposed to in A League Of Their Own: Special Edition. Pop it into your Clearplay DVD player, sit back with some microwave popcorn, and for somewhere between 112 and 128 minutes depending on content filter settings, you can sit back and pretend that life has not passed you by.

For years, the entertainment industry has ignored the vital needs of masochistic narcoleptics in basement apartments without cable. But no longer! Now you can experience the same mediocrity the rest of us get to see two to three times a day in local strip syndication, thanks to The King Of Queens: Season One. Now you can free yourself from the tyranny of broadcast TV and enjoy moderately successful second-rate lesser-network sitcom stylings whenever you want. Ain't technology grand?

Has it been thirteen years since you've heard someone say the "F-word"? Think it's about time you heard it again? Then let me recommend Dice Rules!, the concert film that lets you relive those whimsical, care-free early 90's when filthy nursery rhymes got you on the cover of People magazine, along with four to six question marks.

And finally, what week wouldn't be complete without a lovely family film for people who aren't racist at all, yet still clutch their purses tightly and check their wallets whenever they're on an elevator with someone browner than they are. The Haunted Mansion is from Disney, after all, and now that Eddie Murphy has stopped wearing leather and picking up transsexual hookers and doing comedy routines about how his people wouldn't stay in a haunted house for more than about 20 seconds, you can watch him be scared of ghosts in a haunted house for 5,920 seconds longer. And he's funny, and he's on the TV, and he's not threatening at all. You may want to reserve a copy in advance!

Hatelets

Today, in the grand You Are Dumb Dot Net tradition of features you'll never see again, or renaming features you've seen before (but only once), we bring you HATELETS. Little tiny packets of hate that can course through your bloodstream and form a callous scab of cynicism over your soul.

For example, our first Hatelet has Yahoo's name stamped on it. You know why? Because nobody knows what a "Life Engine" is, nobody needs a "Life Engine" even if they could figure out what it is, and going around calling yourself a "Life Engine" when you're the second-place search engine is just asinine. People do not use Yahoo to live things, they use it to find stuff. Yahoo is just bitter because Google got to be the verb. Get the fuck over it. Lots of sites wanted to be PORTALS a few years ago, it didn't work out, move on.

A mini-Hatelet goes out to STOP, also known as "Simply Truths Our Priority", but only a small one, because they've already made giant asses of themselves, and we should all point and laugh at them. These people oughta become the official You Are Dumb Dot Net poster children, because first, they're anti-gay, second, they're overly concerned with protecting the children, and third, they believed the Internet when it lied to them. But it's better than that. They believed THE ONION.

STOP is trying to, well, stop, the expansion of a "safe schools" program. Presumably, the program would now try to teach kids that beating the living hell out of the gay kids would be a bad thing, which, of course, is promoting the filthy gay lifestyle in our schools. So STOP spent seven weeks, "researched in-depth", and put out a pamphlet and a 300-page computer document that featured a photo from the Onion showing a "gay recruitment drive" in a classroom. If only they were from Tennessee. They're from London, Ontario, Canada, which just goes to show you that the South doesn't have a monopoly on idiots, they're just the leaders in market share.

Ten million Hatelets, one to each one of you soulless fuckers who watched The Swan. And then another ten million extra Hatelets to Lisa Wright, morning DJ at WXPT, The Mix. Every week, like a champ, Wright pimps American Idol. Whether it's out of corporate mandate or just due to being mediocre, I don't know. But lately, she's started to pimp The Swan, which led to an astonishing exchange this morning. Wright started talking about the show, playing the clip where that week's winner sees herself for the first time. Her compatriot, Kevin McLaughlin, who's a fairly conservative asshole, admitted that the show creeped him out and sent an awful message to society. Wright's response: "Yeah, an awful message to society... still, other than American Idol, Fox really doesn't have any hits, and The Swan is a BIG HIT!" Again, someone has said something so obscenely wrong that I have to invent a new term to describe it. How about... coprolalic inverecrania. Talking shit with your head rammed up your own ass.

"Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's go see 'The Passion' on Good Friday!" "I've got an even better idea! Let's go see it on Easter, too!" "Brilliant! Now if we can only figure out when to watch 'Halloween' and 'The Santa Clause 2', we'll have our whole moviegoing year planned out!" Another 17 million and another #1 spot for the Jesus, and all because you people think you're CLEVER. At least when I went to see Hellboy on Easter, it was just because the schedules worked out that way. It doesn't make me some kind of MASTER OF IRONY. I've got Hatelet stigmata on my palms, and I'm itching to slap you with them. And curse you out. In Aramaic.

Hatelets. Bite-size hate for a world that bites. Yet another quality product from You Are Dumb Enterprises.

FOX, MTV, and ABC

Memo to Fox, MTV, and ABC: YOU ARE DUMB.

OK, which of you greedy bastards decided that PLASTIC SURGERY was the next great spectator sport?

Was the profession somehow not despicable enough? Was there some meeting where everyone came to the conclusion that earning billions off of insecurity, creating bionic freaks for Hollywood, and blowing boobs up to the size of a side of beef simply didn't cut it in 2004, and the only way for the industry to reclaim its position at the right hand of Satan was to be filmed and turned into a contest for consumption by the increasingly jaded masses?

I'd love to understand, somehow, an environment where "I Want A Famous Face" and "The Swan" seem like good ideas. Where nobody even thinks to object. Where, by the way, all the "media watchdogs" who scream at the top of their lungs every time we see a titty or a fake decapitation fall silent.

At least MTV tries to draw a thin veneer of plausible deniability over the whole thing. I Want A Famous Face is a documentary, you see. MTV did not arrange for or pay for any of the plastic surgery the seven deluded souls got in order to look like celebrities. They merely watched, filmed, aired, promoted, and put up web polls about the whole process. After all, it's not like the network that airs Cribs, Made, and Pimp My Ride would want to seem like they're promoting spending oodles of money and effort to turn something ugly into something pretty but ultimately pointless.

But its The Swan that makes me wish there was a Hell, if only because the kind of shit the people behind it deserve is actually LEGAL there.

The Swan, the brainchild of FreemantleMedia, the people who brought you American Idol, a bunch of game shows, and "Date Patrol", is basically a reality show leading up to a beauty pageant. The twist? All the contestants will gradually be TRANSFORMED into pageant-worthy beauties by a team of fitness trainers, lifestyle coaches, and COSMETIC SURGEONS.

And lest you think the plastic surgery thing is merely on hand to correct hideous deformities like superfluous third and fourth ears, missing body parts, or horrible burn scars, a quick skim of the official list of "experts" from the official Swan website provides the following counts: Life Coaches: 1. Therapists: 1. Fitness Trainers: 1. Dermatologists: 1. Laser Eye Surgeons: 1. Cosmetic Surgeons: 3.

A count that is, surprise surprise, strangely at odds with the official information released about the show, which mentions inspiration, work ethic, growth, and achievement, and omits hours under the knife, the dangers of anaesthesia, medical complications, all of which, I'm sure, are covered in the waiver all the contestants read and understood fully when they signed.

But then, really, having 20 people surgically rearrange their bodies to win a meaningless show-specific pageant is only a few steps farther beyond the pale, when you consider the ground already laid by ABC's "Extreme Makeover". Extreme Makeover doesn't actually pit its surgical reconstructions against each other in an arena of death like The Swan, it just promises to "change the lives" of people by letting them fulfill their "Cinderella-like fairy tale wishes.

The thing I love best is, just like The Swan website, the Extreme Makeover website barely manages to keep its bubbling evil in check under the guise of politely-worded show information. If you look at the actual contestant bios, every single one of them follows the exact same pattern. Name. Age. Occupation. Possible brief history. List of between eight and 20 surgical procedures.

The bits of color are the best part. Take Dan, a balding, sorta nerdly-looking dude who wanted to (a) boost his self-esteem, and (b) catch the eye of a co-worker he had a crush on. In my life, I've known a lot of nerdly guys who've harbored a lot of secret crushes, and most of those creepy motherfuckers would NOT have been fixed by what Dan got: chin and jowl implants, buckle pads excision*, liposuction on the cheeks, liposuction on the chest, abdomen and hip rolls, fat injections in the face, a hair weave, Lasik eye surgery and dental work, including gum reshaping, teeth whitening and 8 upper veneers.

I can only presume that, thanks to Extreme Makeover, Dan is now a love-handle-free, no-glasses hunk who will look very nice when he's lurking in the bushes outside his co-worker's house throwing dead animals at her windows.

Just remember, the next time you feel the urge to tune into one of these shows, that you're entertained by people carving themselves like a Thanksgiving turkey. Seems pretty damn DUMB to me, but its obviously a bigger moneymaker than Firefly, so what the hell do I know?

* I do not know what this is, and am hesitant to find out. Not once have I come across the "buckle pad" mentioned in any anatomical sense, so if Dan somehow had developed them, I could understand why he'd want them excised. If I found a shoelace eyelet or two growing out of my leg, I'd consult a medical professional too.

Details

Memo to Details Magazine: YOU ARE DUMB.

Today's article requires a visual aid, in the form of a whopping big JPG of a page scanned from the most recent issue of Details, one of those mens' magazines for insecure fuckheads. So click on the link below and have it open for reference.

Gay or Asian?

Ah, where to begin. There's so very much to hate, so very much that is stupid on this page that it's difficult know how to start. So we'll have to rely on standard conventions - top to bottom, left to right.

"Anthropology". That's precisely the kind of faux-ironic dressing up of your comedy as science that gives dressing up your comedy as science a bad name. Right off the bat, they're ruining it for the rest of us who use the power for good. Assholes. This also gives us our first hint of the "OH GOD AREN'T WE CLEVER" attitude that will become more important as we move down the page.

Since we're dealing with an Asian dude, the first stereotype out of the box is... yes, Chinese food. And the second stereotype out of the box is... YES, CHINESE FOOD. This page commits many crimes and sins as it is. Was it really a good idea to compound it with repetition right out of the gate? I think not.

The men's magazine then takes its first shot at the scary homosexuals with "shaved balls". It's funny, but every time I've seen an article this year about the increasing trend of male pube-trimming, it's always been straight guys hopping on the bandwagon. I guess I'm not nearly as in touch with the culture as Details.

"...entering the dragon requires imperial tastes." I don't even get this. I mean, OK, vague connection between Bruce Lee movie (Martial Arts! A totally unexpected turn!) title and some form of penetration, but the whole thing doesn't actually match up to any standards of comedy (or, really English) logic.

"Choke up on your chopsticks, and make sure your labels are showing." So we have a baseball term for gripping a long, hard shaft, a THIRD reference to Chinese food, and some kind of dig at designer-fetishism. Obviously, Ms. Mcnally feels she's on a roll, and decides to hit for the bleachers with...

YES! The fortune cookie sage aphorism, complete with David Carradine overtones, ending with a dick joke! To use my own sports analogy here, this is the comedy equivalent of Greg Louganis hitting his head on the diving board on the way down. Complete with the horrified splash as the joke makes its final impact with the pool.

Now we turn to the poor model, who probably had no idea he'd be used for something like this, and whose clothes are then made fun of by Whitmey. One would assume, being in the magazine business, Whitney would be aware that models never actually pick out their own clothes, but whatever.

Let's just run down the offense tallies on both sides of the aisle to save time.

Asian: Inscrutable. Check. Obsession with American stars. Check. Accent-mocking. Check. Asian food references four and five. Karate Kid, Last Samurai, Pink Lady namedrops - check, check, and check. And don't forget the bonsai!

Gay: Reference to fringe sexual practice - check. Fashion references two through seven inclusive - check. Dick joke #2. Check. Mentioning the ass at least once... almost didn't get that in there, but YES. Checklist complete.

Sweet fuck, that's trite. I mean, essentially, there are FOUR jokes on the entire page: "Asians make Asian food.", "Asians know kung fu.", "Gay guys like clothes.", and "Gay guys like dick." That's what the whole thing boils down to. I mean, if you're going to incur the wrath of two entire communities, and they did, wouldn't you at least want it to be from something daring? Something bold? Something even remotely... funny?

Here, by the way, is apparently how they plan to "apologize".

"The "Gay or Asian?" item in our April issue was part of a continuing feature that is intended as a humorous swipe at social stereotypes. Details has a wide readership?male, female, straight, gay?from all cultures, and we value all of them. We appreciate the substantial feedback on this item that we have received, and we will certainly keep those concerns in mind as we move forward. We regret that anyone was offended by the article, as that was not our intention."

TRANSLATION: Um, we were making fun OF stereotypes, really, not making fun USING them. We love everyone who gives us money! It wasn't our fault, and why are you so damn sensitive, anyway? Oh, and we're gonna keep doing it.

Dumb or smart? You make the call. Oh, wait. That's my job. DUMB.

Billy Bush

Memo to Billy Bush: YOU ARE DUMB.

God, you fucking little parasite. I wasn't even planning on watching the Oscars, but it happened. So I'm sitting here, watching the countdown, and I'm seeing this guy. This... thing. This sycophantic self-parody of an entertainment reporter was cruising around the building, leaning over and annoying the living shit out of everyone anyone's ever heard of.

He's like some kind of cross between Christopher Walken and a lobotomized, poo-throwing monkey. Only in a tux. And not dancing through a hotel lobby. I experienced a rare sensation I have, over the years, referred to as Carnation Instant Hate. Where instinctive, automatic powdered hatred blends with the milk of my human kindness to form a rich, creamy shake of bile that lasts me ALL DAY LONG.

All I knew was that his name was Billy. And he was hosting the preshow. When BILLY Crystal is HOSTING the Oscars, finding out who this little wormfucker is via the magic of Google is not easy. But I found him. Billy Bush.

I had never seen Billy Bush before. He is apparently the east coast correspondent for Access Hollywood, which I would have assumed was, on the showbiz totem pole, a notch or two below Tom Cruise's fluffer. But there he was. In an interview, he describes his work thusly: "This show is all about moments. It's about being off the script, and connecting."

This translates to staring down Angelina Jolie's cleavage and asking her if she's happy to be there.

I thought part of the promise of the Internet was that, once we could all get up-to-the-minute news in plain text on whatever magical device was hooked to this web, that people like this would be turning tricks for ramen money, as a just world demands. But no. They still have microphones, they're still capable of, as a reflex motion, remembering which hand the microphone is in and extending the corresponding arm, and these are the only qualifications they need.

You could actually see the contempt dripping off the celebrities he was talking to. It was kind of a wavy video effect around the edges of the screen, like a Predator was stalking the Oscars. But Billy Bush did not have time to bleed. I strongly suggest that ABC remember this next year, and adjust their schedule accordingly if you'd like me to tune in. Let the carpet start white, and END RED.

Oh, dear. See, sometimes, I do my research while I write these, and sometimes, midstream, I come across a factoid that changes everything. He's Billy Bush. That last name is not, as it turns out, a coincidence. He's cousin to Dubya. It's like there isn't a worthwhile gene in the entire bloodline. It's like there's a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy to get incompetent members of the Bush family high-profile jobs as interviewers, governors, oil executives, and presidents. That's explainable without any kind of conspiracy. No, this is a conspiracy to give me an embolism.

There are secret connections in the world, threads that irrevocably bind together all the disparate things that piss me off. And if the creationists are to be believed, a web of idiocy this complex could not have arisen by chance. There MUST be a unifying force behind this!

Oh, wait. Creationists are morons. I guess there's just a lot of DUMB out there to be found.

By the way, Billy Crystal as Aragorn looks like a Renfest Ron Jeremy. STOP SINGING, YOU UNFUNNY FUCKWAD.

Mattel And The Media

Memo to Mattel and "the media": YOU ARE DUMB.

Regular readers of You Are Dumb (and I now know there are some. SUCKERS!) may be aware that a personal pet peeve has already made itself apparent: shit that is NOT NEWS being paraded about as if it WERE NEWS.

Well, it's happening again. And this time, it's the "breakup" of Barbie and Ken.

First, to Mattel, and I say this with all the care and compassion of someone who both enjoys your products, and is involved with someone who REALLY enjoys your products: go fuck yourselves. I mean, come on. If you wanted some cheap publicity, just ship another pregnant doll or a guy with an earring. That's always good for some press. Maybe include something that looks a LOT like a beer bottle, but is actually a juice bottle, in the next toy car in the Barbie line. That'd be awesome.

But this faux "breakup" press release? Someone light a match. "Barbie(TM) and Ken(TM) have always been an extraordinary couple with so much on- and off-screen chemistry," said the pair's business manager, Russell Arons, Vice President Marketing, Mattel. "In fact, they just finished wrapping their fourth movie together, 'Barbie(TM) as The Princess and the Pauper,' which debuts this fall. And now they feel it's time to spend some quality time -- apart."

Here is an important hint. When a Vice President of Marketing spends five to ten minutes pretending to be part of an elaborate fantasy world of his own making, in which he is the business manager for two CGI models on a hard drive in Canada that aren't even models of people, but are instead models of PLASTIC DOLLS, this is not "whimsical". This is grounds for committment in at least 43 of the 50 states.

But hey, companies release dumb press releases all the time. Surely, the fictional separation of two hunks of plastic who have never had any kind of cohesive narrative throughout their 45 years of history anyway; surely, this would not be treated as news, not with a war, an election, and scandals aplenty, right? RIGHT?

WRONG. Meet Samantha Critchell, Associated Press writer and rapidly rising star on today's You Are Dumb Enemies List. Ms. Critchell not only reported on the story, but appears to have expanded on it with her own brand of delusional speculation.

Amongst the concepts in her AP piece on the press release, but not in the press release:

• A shameless, insipid J-Lo/Ben reference (75 points).
• The completely incomprehensible idea that the recently released Cali Girl Barbie's deeper tan, hoop earrings, and board shorts somehow reflect her "single status" (60 points).
• That the Blaine doll has the hots for the Barbie doll (45 points).
• That Ken is jealous of Barbie's many careers, including Pink Astronaut, Pink Rock Star, Pink Veterinarian, Pink Teacher, and Pink Professor of Quantum Pink Mechanics at Pink Polytechnic University, home of the Super Pink Conducting Super Pink Collider. I may have made that last bit up. (25 points).

That's a total of 205 Dumbass Points, which would be a record even if this weren't the first time I'd ever mentioned or tallied them.

Ms. Critchell gets singled out for the dumbhate because, upon being handed the press release by her editor, she did not, apparently, sigh with regret, whip out 500 words of perfunctory prose, then go home and get drunk. No, she decided to have "fun" with it. To "liven up the piece". To take Mattel's nigh-psychotic little fantasy world and just run with it. She's not the only one to have done so, admittedly. FOX News and Ananova covered it, too. But you expect that kind of thing from them. FOX even managed to work in a bit about parents explaining this horrible news to their traumatized children. GO FOX.

You wanna know how much of a non-event this is? By comparsion, this makes the Death of Superman bullshit back in '93 seem like it actually fucking happened. Alien archaeologists are going to see this in the archives, and through comparative methodology, spend five fruitless years looking for the broken-off bone spurs of Doomsday in the rubble of Metropolis. Then, one day, they'll stumble across two or three closets still full of copies of the bagged comic with the black armband in it, go home, and get drunk. Because unlike certain marketing VP's and AP reporters, they will be horribly embarassed that THEY WERE DUMB.

Memo to all you Super Bowl advertising whores: YOU ARE DUMB.

Yes, Sunday's the big game. The final showdown. When that one team and that other team will meet on the field of battle to determine which one of them is the best. This year. It's a very exciting time for millions of people who are not me.

And because millions of notmes will have their eyeballs glued to their televisions for three hours or so, the Super Bowl has been a favorite for advertisers, who spend a couple million on airtime to try and convince all of you that they are fine purveyors of products and/or services worthy of your hard-earned dough.

And that's fine.

But in the last few years, something odd has happened. A strange, inappropriate sense of importance has surrounded these ads. The ads have become, somehow, an event in and of themselves. The ads are reported on, viewed, and reviewed by people with no interest in the game themselves. These people are what we at You Are Dumb describe as "utter morons".

They're COMMERCIALS, people. I don't care how much they spend to make them, who shows you their bellybutton, or how much computer power they use to make that bellybutton tell jokes in John Laroquette's voice, they're still advertisements. The same things that interrupt your favorite show, get painted all over the side of your buses, and pop up in front of your Internet porn. Advertisements that the companies are constantly finding new, annoying ways to keep you from ignoring.

But come Super Bowl time, you're all too willing to do their work for them, aren't you.

Already this week, there are dozens upon dozens of newspaper articles previewing the ads. PREVIEWING THE ADS. That an advertisement will be appearing on television is NOT NEWS. Unless it's either the first ad to feature explicit bestiality, or an ad that kills everyone who watches it in seven days, I don't want to hear about it.

Now, if an ad DOESN'T appear, that's news. Like CBS, which won't run an ad critical of the president, because it doesn't run political or message ads during the Super Bowl unless, apparently, they call everyone who smokes pot an America-hating terrorist stooge. But that's probably a different memo.

In fact, I think it's time to introduce the Dumbness Defenestration Punishment Chart, which shows you what floor's window you should throw yourself from if you find yourself contemplating certain DUMB behaviors:

Thanks to this handy graphic, you will know what to do in the event that YOU ARE DUMB.