Cradle of Lies is the story of how when you meet and then marry a guy over the course of one weekend at a Best Western Lodge, he will eventually try to kill you for not bearing him a son, even though he is incapable of having children. Like all Lifetime Movies, it is a cautionary tale.
I don't watch much television. When I do I'm happy to vapidly gaze into the glowing cube and gape at whatever slop my snapped-in-half rabbit ears can receive. It's all just crap for me to zone out to when I feel like I need to paralyze my brain for an hour. It's probably because I don't have cable, but for whatever reason I've noticed that companies are buying commercials in blocks. Over the course of a half-hour show, I'll see the same ad three times on average. It usually doesn't bother me, but every once in a while I'll stumble across a promotional abomination that vomits on my soul and makes me want to track down and lynch the standards-and-practices board of whatever network I'm watching. In an attempt to analyze and exorcise these demons, I've compiled a list of commercials that refuse to die and make me want to abolish every human being who's ever been beamed through a cathode ray tube. Keep reading to see all the bullshit that makes me hate people.
The other day my friend showed up at my place with some DVDs he'd taken out from the library. Wow, I thought, no one goes to the library anymore. I was impressed. But then he showed me what he'd borrowed. "Have you seen this?" he said, holding up a pink DVD with Anna Nicole Smith on it. "You have to see Cousin Shelly," he told me, and so he popped it in and I watched my first-ever episode of The Anna Nicole Smith Show (36 out of 49 of those reviews are 5-stars) and holy fucking shit. I was never interested in ANS before. I thought it was sad that she died and the whole thing seemed trashy and tragic but man, I didn't think I'd ever fall in love with her. Since that first episode I've watched almost all of them, and I read about her obsessively. And by the way, in my expert opinion Howard K. Stern is definitely not guilty and he truly loved her. Now my friends are asking me why I like Anna so much and why I'm taking pictures of her on the television. I think it's because she's like a pet. She's sweet and nice and round and soft and fat and beautiful and she's simple and lovely. And when questioned about her love for that old billionaire husband she explained that he had made her feel secure and that no one had ever loved her so much and that that was what made her love him back. That seemed like as
good and honest a reason to love as any other, I think. After her declaration, she took the urn full of his ashes and, whimpering, she set them on top of her VCR.
We haven't mentioned what we watched last night in a long time. How else will you know you are reading an official blog unless we do that? So here is another Shitty TV Recap by Alex Pareene...
"This film is inspired by a true story." That is basically a Lifetime Movie Network Awesomeness Guarantee. Also good signs: a colon followed by a subtitle with the word "confession" or "secret." So I highly recommend Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict even though as of right now I'm only actually halfway through the title sequence.
Is it naïve to assume that $12,000 and a camera crew is all it takes to track down your creative hero for a beer and a chat? Find out the answer to that question and more in the 6 Beers of Separation series screening now at VBS. If you haven’t heard about it, four creative grasshoppers have been challenged to travel to the other side of the world to interview their artistic idols, all in six moves or less. Basically, it’s a test of the six degrees of separation theory, and balls. Both will have to come through if our contestants are to avoid humiliating themselves in front of a national audience.
Slap Chop technology has revolutionised lunches at the Vice office. To think there was ever a time when we prepared non-slap salads is beyond us. Now some guy with a lot of time on his hands called Steve Porter has revolutionised the Slap Chop infomercial, starring super salesman Vince Shlomi.
Every site in the world – literally EVERY FUCKING WEBSITE ON EARTH – has jumped on the "recapping shitty TV" craze. This is the promise of the web realized: lengthy stream-of-consciousness summaries of things that were on TV last night written by underpaid permalancers for a dwindling audience of the still-employed. Ever write 4,000 words on a teen soap opera for 20 bucks? YOU WILL. So why not jump on the bandwagon?
We can exclusively reveal that The Wire will return for a sixth series in 2010. David Simon and Ed Burns are currently in negotiation with HBO and The BBC with plans to make the next season of the cult show, but this time utilising even more British talent than the previous seasons (for those of you not “in the know,” both Stringer Bell and Jimmy McNulty are actual Brits).
Remember those Iraqi guys we helped get over here? Those ones in a band called Acrassicauda who fucking shred and had their practice space bombed for it and were in exile in Syria and Turkey and lived their lives in total shambles marinated in fear for years and…and…shit, why am I still typing this? You know by now who they are and that we made that documentary about it. Heavy Metal in Baghdad is screening on the Sundance channel tonight at 10 PM. And what a coincidence, it's screening 26 minutes after the official six-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Oh, did you forget about that? Well, at least there’s those dreams of owning the fiberglass killer whale to bring you back to fantasy land.
When I was a kid I would stay up all night to watch titty movies on cable before I even knew what to do with that kind of information. In between the softest of softcore flicks they would show these ridiculous phone hotline commercials. No, I'm not talking about stroke lines, I'm talking about the bizarre numbers that you could dial to plug you into the life of the party, a scary story, or the most hype rapper's personal life. I mean, who couldn't resist calling fucking MC Hammer at 2 AM when they were 9 years old? Here are a few I remember the best.
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