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Few people are as excited as I for the Season 4 premiere of The Office tonight on NBC. To celebrate, here's a compilation of clips (1:50) I strung together from the first three seasons featuring Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) busting a few moves.
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OK, so my holdout didn't last that long, but I'm back anyway. As I previously stated, I lost interest in blogging when YouTube permanently disabled my account. One of my few hobbies was editing videos on my computer and then posting them to YouTube so I could embed them here. I had some interesting projects in the pipeline, but my enthusiasm wained when I received two e-mails from YouTube one day. The first one said that Twentieth Century Fox complained that my Arrested Development: Mock Trial with J. Reinhold was infringing on copyright and that the video would be disabled and I should delete any other videos that might infringe or my account would be shut down. I didn't really get a chance to comply because the second e-mail said the same thing about another video. So even though they were both sent the same day it would appear one was the warning and the other was the death nail because after that I couldn't log in anymore. It's disappointing because some of my compilations from The Office were approaching 300,000 views. But I have bounced back. In my quest to find an alternative to YouTube I have discovered that YouTube is actually quite inferior to a lot of what's out there. The main thing it has going for it is its traffic. I eventually selected Veoh.com to host my videos. It's not unlike YouTube in its set up, but there are fewer restrictions on file size, picture resolution and video length, so if you browse this web log, you'll see the entries that formerly featured my YouTube videos now feature better quality Veoh videos.
Update: Six months after posting this web log entry, my Veoh account has followed my YouTube account into extinction following similar complaints of copyright infringement. It would seem official now: there are no good video hosting sites left on the web. |
| This is to inform loyal readers that for the time being I will no longer be contributing the world of blogging. This is largely a result of my disappointment with YouTube for permanently disabling my account. I received an e-mail from them threatening such because one of my videos was found to be in violation of copyright law according to 20th Century Fox. I considered it more of fan video and a service to Fox. Granted, none of what I put together could be considered entirely original work, but I would think the networks would want to permit videos like mine when they get comments like "I've never watched this show, after seeing this I'll have to check it out." So I apologize if most of the videos in this web log no longer work. Maybe in the future I will return here to write more, but for the time being I will not. |
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Below are the two greatest Lord of the Rings music videos ever made. The first is "Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" (1:37), circa 1968. The second, "Frodo, Don't Wear the Ring" (1:45), is from last night's episode of Flight of the Conchords.
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 With Shark Week over, I decided to move on to another themed week. Since David Beckham is trying to make soccer sexy in America, I thought I'd try Soccer Week. Before I get into that though, I like to take the time to comment on Beckham. I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand I'm not a fan of "Becks" or anything that comes with as much hype as he has and I think it could be somewhat amusing seeing him fail. I'm also not a fan of the L.A. Galaxy, although that's probably the result of built-in prejudice against sports franchises from New York and L.A. On the other hand, I am a soccer fan and even an MLS fan (although not as much now that I no longer live in Salt Lake). I would love to see soccer grow in stature in the US, but I'm realistic. As TV's Craig Ferguson said "Some people think that Americans will discover soccer through David Beckham being here, which is ridiculous. I think Americans discovered soccer years ago and went 'eh.'"
 To commemorate Soccer Week, I have been watching various soccer movies over the past few days. I started with The Miracle Match (aka The Game of Their Lives), the true story of the 1950 US Soccer Team that went to the World Cup in Brazil and upset heavily favored England 1-0. In my opinion it's right there among history's greatest sports upsets. They didn't go on to win it all like the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team, but the mere fact that these guys were all amateurs playing against English pros says a lot. After that I skipped ahead a few years to watch the documentary Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos. For those of you unfamiliar with the Cosmos, they were one of the professional soccer teams in the North American Soccer League. Back in the 1970's the US decided it was ready for soccer and formed a league. Things didn't take off until the Cosmos managed to sign Pele. It was interesting to see the parallels between Beckham's arrival in America and Pele's. (Disclaimer: I do not consider Beckham and Pele to be on the same level in terms of skill or accomplishment, only in terms of hype and celebrity.) The problem with the NASL was it expanded too quickly (28 teams compared with 13 currently in the MLS) and couldn't hang on to its TV contract with ABC. That combined with the millions of dollars teams like the Cosmos were throwing at international players doomed them to fail. Hopefully MLS has learned something. The signing of David Beckham suggests they haven't.
 Next I moved into the realm of soccer fiction by watching Goal!: The Dream Begins and its sequel Goal II: Living the Dream. If FIFA were to make a movie, it would be exactly like these two. They chronicle the life a young Santiago Munez as he goes from being an illegal Mexican immigrant living in L.A. to a European soccer star playing in the UEFA Champions League. The story lines are full of cliches, but the action is probably as good as any soccer movie out there. There are even plenty of cameos from stars like Beckham, Zidane and Raul. I then scaled things back a bit from soccer's second biggest stage (the third installment about Santiago playing in soccer's biggest stage, the World Cup, is due out next year), but kept with the current theme and watched Bend It Like Beckham featuring a pre-Pirates Keira Knightley, a pre-ER Parminder Nagra, a pre-Tudors Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and, despite the title, no David Beckham. It's a fun little movie with a ton of story lines all over the place.
Other soccer movies I recommend include Victory (or Escape to Victory) starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Pele, The Cup about a group of Buddhist monks who watch the World Cup (it was the first movie to ever come out of Bhutan), The Other Final, a documentary about a 2002 match between Bhutan and Montserrat, the two lowest ranked teams in the world, and of course Air Bud: World Pup. Other soccer movies I've seen in the past include Shaolin Soccer (from Kung Fu Hustle's Stephen Chow) and countless kid soccer movies like The Big Green and Will Farrell's Kicking & Screaming. Next year I will hype Soccer Week better and make it more of an event. |
"Live every week like it's Shark Week." The words of Tracy Jordan, the Eddie Murphy/Dave Chappelle/Chris Rock composite from 30 Rock (played by Tracy Morgan), to NBC page Kenneth have never rung truer. The Discovery Channel is wrapping up yet another Shark Week (17th annual or 29th annual depending on who's counting) and we here at Entertainment News have been debating the best way to celebrate. We considered spotlighting the Steven Spielberg classic Jaws, but instead decided to focus on jumping the shark. For those of you out there who just gasped in horror at the mention of such a dirty-sounding expression, let me reassure you that "jump the shark" is harmless. It comes from an episode of Happy Days in which Henry Winkler's Fonzie goes water skiing, leather jacket and all, and attempts to jump over a shark (You can see the clip here). From that moment on many felt the show didn't have it's same panache and so today when something, particularly a TV show, has passed its prime it is said to have jumped the shark. In fact, there is even a website dedicated to shows and their shark-jumping moments. The crafty writers of Arrested Development made fun of the Happy Days scene when Winkler, playing family lawyer Barry Peppercorn, is down at the docks with a dead shark and then declares he's off to Burger King and proceeds to jump over the shark.
Some are suggesting that Shark Week itself has jumped the shark. They argue that the Discovery Channel has failed to produce anything new and exciting in recent years (read the article here). I don't think I watched enough of Shark Week this year to form an opinion. I'm just fascinated by it's pop cultural lure. Aside from 30 Rock (NBC) it's also been mentioned by TV's Craig Ferguson (CBS), the guys on Pardon the Interruption (ESPN) and countless other places, I'm sure. So until next year's Shark Week, stay off the water skis. |
 This week will see the last print issue of The Weekly World News. We here at Entertainment News are saddened by this announcement. What else are Americans supposed to do while waiting in line at the grocery store check out stand? Certainly not read the US Weekly or The National Inquirer. It's a sad day in America when celebrity gossip survives and news about aliens and bat people is cast aside. As recently as 1993 "The Paper" had the eighth highest circulation in the world (source: May Mackenzie in So I Married an Axe Murderer). Now we are required to turn to the online version for the latest in alien news or cross-species breading breakthroughs (porcuporks, armadillo-ducks, rhinocerchickens). Let us all observe a moment of silence for "The Paper." That means that those of you reading out loud need to pause before finishing this sentence.
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I suppose I might be at that stage many journalists find themselves at one time or another. (Yes, I do consider myself a journalist. While I don't consider what I write important at all, I do actually have a degree in journalism.) You might call it writer's block. Maybe the excitement or thrill I originally got from "blogging" has worn off. Maybe it's the fact that my web log has been getting only about 10-15 visitors a day, which is down from the 45-50 it had been getting and a far cry from the 7,280 it got on June 8. Whatever it is, I've been having trouble coming up with fresh and creative blog entries. I'm never really short on ideas, it's the seeing the ideas through that has slowed me down. So I've decided today I will lay out several of the smaller ideas I've been kicking around into one random mess of a blog entry.
I've only watched a few episodes, but HBO's Flight of Conchords is the funniest new show to come along in a while. It's too early to tell if it will reach the level of esteem where I currently hold Arrested Development and The Office, but that first episode had me laughing all the way through it. Below is a clip (3:21) where a music video/music montage breaks out during the first episode. For "The Vader Project," an art show in New York City, 66 artists were given replicas of Darth Vader helmets as a blank canvas and asked to go to work. Some of the better results can be seen below. More photos can be seen here. 
Sunday was the 67th birthday of the great Alex Trebek. We here at Entertainment News wish him the best. With all the big-budget game shows that seem to come and go with all their pomp and pretense (Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Deal or No Deal and their subsequent clones), Jeopardy! is the constant, steady standard you can set your watch to.  A&E will soon debut a new reality TV show called The Two Coreys starring Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. From what I can gather it's basically a camera following these two losers around for weekly half-hour segments. It's a good thing they both spell their names with an "ey" or the marketing department would need to come up a different catchy title. I can't think if there has ever been a show that has featured two "actors" more desperate for a paycheck than this one. On a related note, you will soon be able to get your own Corey Feldman action figure. A toy company specializing in nostalgic toys based on cult movies will be launching a line of action figures from the 1985 movie The Goonies. Besides Feldman's "Mouth," the line will also include Chunk, Sloth, Data (the kid from Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom) and Sean Astin's Mikey.
I'm a sucker for funny cameos from famous actors. One of my favorites is Charlton Heston in Wayne's World 2, seen below (1:24). I recently watched the movies The Prestige and The Illusionist within a week of each other so I could compare. I'd have to give the edge to The Prestige if for no other reason than David Bowie. Below is picture of him the 1986 movie Labyrinth and one from The Prestige in which he played the inventor Tesla. Who knew he had such range? And speaking of funny celebrity cameos, David Bowie showing up to officiate the the walk-off scene in Zoolander is also among the best.
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Of the late night talk show hosts, Craig Ferguson has quickly risen to the top and is now my favorite.
Back when it was announced that the mean Scottish boss from The Drew Carey Show would take over the show after Letterman, I remember thinking "That guy!? Who's going to watch that?" Fortunately for him, the people at CBS recognize the added exposure their shows get from YouTube and have uploaded several clips themselves. Below is a great clip (3:54) from a show back in May where Craig is talking about the "Up-fronts" (where networks unveil their fall lineups). I don't much care for Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno has gotten stale. David Letterman is funny, but his show is too frustrating for me to watch because he is too easily distracted and takes forever to make his point. Conan is good. He's probably my second favorite. Below is a clip (1:10) from when he hosted the Emmy's last year and drops in on the folks from The Office. You can see the entire 7-minute Emmy opening sequence here. In it Conan also visits Lost, 24, House, South Park and To Catch a Predator.  |
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A game I used to play with friends is one where you take two movie titles and combine them together to make one cleverly humorous movie title. For example Dirty Dancing plus Dances with Wolves becomes Dirty Dances with Wolves. There's also A Walk to Remember the Titans, Dirty Harry & Hendersons and several others. Back in 2003, after compiling a sizeable list, I submitted it to Jeff Vice, the Deseret Morning News movie critic and weekend entertainment columnist, who featured a few in an article which can be seen here. That was four years ago. The Internet has grown some since then and, as I've mentioned before on this web log, that has brought us access to vast amounts of creativity. I've already featured recut movie trailers (including those for Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandements), so today I'll spotlight the Photoshop skills of the many web monkeys out there. Much like how I created my Incredible Shrulk, other people have gone beyond thinking up title combinations and have created movie posters featuring their creations. Some of my favorites can be seen below.
(Click on an image to see it full size)
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