Monday, October 10, 2011

Crushable

Crushable

Sex On The Wire: Do Looks Matter?

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 12:36 PM PDT

• “Do looks matter,” the world asks? Yes, yes they do. (YourTango)

• Here are five crazy ways to meet men. Volunteer at a soup kitchen and find the homeless hunk of your dreams! (The Frisky)

• Here are some of the very worst reasons to get married. One of them is “love”! (The Gloss)

• Do you have a relationship exit strategy? (Ruuuuun!) (The College Crush)

• Here’s a list of the world’s most famous love triangles. (CollegeCandy)

• Are you guys dating? Or just hanging out? This love expert will let you know. (Betty Confidential)

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Everyone Needs To Calm Down About Christina Aguilera’s Weight Gain

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 12:12 PM PDT

When she hit the stage at this past weekend’s Michael Jackson tribute concert in Wales, Christina Aguilera looked a little bit different than we’re used to seeing her. Namely, she had a bad weave and she’d gained a bit of weight, and she did not dress to disguise that second fact. Because it’s their job to police famous women’s bodies, outlets like The Daily Mail published headlines like “Christina Aguilera Hits A Low Note.” This is especially ironic in light of the fact that X-tina did a great job with the actual singing, as evidenced by this low quality Youtube video:

Does that performance sound like a “low note” to you? It doesn’t to me. You know what’s a “low note”? Using someone’s profession (in her case, singing) as a metaphor for how fat they look in a leotard and fishnets. (Never mind that fact that pretty much everyone with a BMI above “borderline too low” looks fat in a leotard and fishnets.)

Could she have picked an outfit that made her look thinner? Sure. But I think it’s kind of cool that she didn’t. I love it how everyone’s okay with Christina engaging in cosplay and wearing a ton of makeup when she’s on a diet, but once she [goes on a new medication/gets off birth control/eats a delicious cheesecake/insert reason for weight gain here], suddenly it’s all, “ew, gross, we don’t want to see that.” Guess what? Chubby girls can be sexy, too, and Christina is here to demonstrate that fact for you. Beyond that, though, this particular pop star was never solely about sex appeal. The thing that’s always differentiated her from Britney Spears is that, in addition to being sexy or whatever, she has some insane fucking pipes, and those pipes are going to carry her career long after she’s no longer considered a babe by society’s messed up standards. Consider this my “LEAVE CHRISTINA ALONE!”

I will say, however, that she should probably get a better hair stylist for her next performance. You paid good money for that hair, girl. It does not just get to do whatever it wants.

(Via The Daily Mail)

 

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SWAT Team Raids Brad Pitt’s World War Z Set

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:58 AM PDT

Here’s a story that starts out hilarious and gets ominous (but still bizarre) by the end: A SWAT team from Hungary’s Anti-Terrorism Unit raided a warehouse belonging to World War Z, Brad Pitt‘s zombie movie currently shooting in Budapest.

At first it sounds like some wacky misunderstanding, and you can’t help but envision a bunch of hardened SWAT guys standing there with prop guns going “Huh?” But here’s the twist: The weapons they confiscated were all in working order. The paperwork they came with said that they were non-functional.

Thank God these guys got the memo that a plane had entered Budapest transporting weapons, right? Otherwise there could’ve been an accident while shooting one of the movie’s many zombie-showdown sequences. The director and deputy director of the Anti-Terrorism Unit explained that this type of gun — they’re described as “automatic, military-style assault rifles” — are highly illegal to transport even if their purpose was to be a prop.

So you’ve got the issue of someone on the studio’s side not communicating about the guns being delivered, and the fact that real guns made their way to this movie set. Creepy, right?

But edging back to the bizarre, let’s talk about Brad Pitt’s reaction to the debacle, according to Us’ source: “The film is already over budget and over schedule. Brad is furious.” That quote is probably taken out of context, but it just makes it sound like Brad wants to forget this gun debacle and get back to shooting.

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Video: SNL‘s Stefon’s Back And He Brought Derek Zoolander

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:46 AM PDT

Our very favorite SNL character, Stefon, made his triumphant return to Weekend Update on Saturday — and he brought a special guest! Bill Hader‘s Stefon and host Seth Myers were joined by Ben Stiller‘s male model character Derek Zoolander.

Hey Lorne Michaels: when’s the Stefon movie going to happen? We would see it on opening day, even if it were just 90 minutes of a talking head telling us where New York’s hottest human fire extinguishers like to hang out.

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Someone Mashed Up Steve Jobs’ Stanford Speech With Nicki Minaj And Rihanna

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:16 AM PDT

In the grand pantheon of Steve Jobs tributes, this may be the most unintentionally(?) funny one yet. Someone called DJ Sketchomatic decided it would make a strong statement to mash up Jobs’ Stanford tribute speech with some inspirational rapping and singing by Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, respectively, and the result is nothing short of majestic. What better way to remember that huge dorkus malorkus than with the coolest rapper in the world (yeah, I said it) and a singer whose outfits would probably be deemed too racy for an iPhone app? Listen to this wonderful thing below, and if it moves you, it’s downloadable over here.

“FLY” STEVE JOBS TRIBUTE (sketchomatic) by sketchomatic

(Via Popcrush)

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David Boreanaz Wants Us To Think That Cheating On His Wife With Rachel Uchitel Actually Helped Their Marriage

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:10 AM PDT

Rachel Uchitel just got married less than a week ago, so of course we’re hearing from David Boreanaz, who had an affair with Tiger Woods‘ one-time mistress. But what’s bizarre is that David claims that cheating on his wife Jaime Bergman was actually “a bonding experience, in the long run.”

The only way we would believe that is if it came from Jaime, and she isn’t talking. It’s difficult to believe that any good could be had of the affair, which came out in a really embarrassing way. In 2010, David did a tell-all interview with People where he admitted to being “irresponsible” and cheating on Jaime. He came forward, he said, because a woman he’d had an affair with (he wouldn’t name her) was trying to extort him for money.

Then RadarOnline published a series of texts between Rachel and David that clearly showed an affair has been taking place. The only problem is, Rachel wasn’t the woman David was talking about, as she explained to the New York Daily News; she didn’t extort him for money, so now their affair got outed in addition to the one he actually copped to.

Barrel of laughs for Jaime, right?

David’s interview is in the print mag TV Week, so all of the online outlets have been operating off the same three quotes—the fragment above, one about him being a lover and a fighter (um, that’s for sure), and one where he justifies stepping out on his wife of (at the time) eight years while she was pregnant:

“In a sacred ground like marriage, you find yourself out of it at certain times for reasons unknown that can be destructive,” the 42-year-old actor explains. “There could be a demon that kind of comes out and overtakes you.”

Oh he did not just use his character Angel as a metaphor for his cheating! (On Buffy, Angel turns into the evil, soulless Angelus when he experiences perfect happiness.)

It’s really unfortunate, because we want to love David after playing Angel (on his good days) and being just plain adorable as Seeley Booth on Bones. We’re sure there’s genuine love between him and Jaime, but he also comes off sounding like a creep—or at least like he controls the marriage and Jaime doesn’t have much say.

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Celebrity Lookalikes: Courtney Stodden Does Her Best Marilyn Monroe

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 11:12 AM PDT

I have no problem admitting it: I am unabashedly fascinated by 17-year-old child bride Courtney Stodden. While folks like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton are mindless celebudrones incapable of producing any thought more complex than a famous-person @-reply, Courtney is offering up some genuine entertainment. Her alliterative tweets are works of pure poetry and her delusional obsession with fame is incredibly interesting to watch. Yesterday, she hit up Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood and posed with Marilyn Monroe‘s hand print (“a perfect fit”). Here are some more examples of Courtney dressed up in weird facsimiles of the iconic Marilyn.

Marilyn was sexy without trying to be sexy; Courtney is a parody of sexiness.

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Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: Why Is Kris Humphries Marrying Into This?

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:49 AM PDT

Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian already got married in late August, so we know that they eventually made it down the aisle. But the E! special Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event gives us a unique perspective on the union: We see how much shit the Kardashian/Jenner clan put poor Kris through before the big day.

Despite their constant coverage in tabloids and reality news, you would never know how much the family dislikes Kim’s fiance Kris. They constantly make fun of his height and dopeyness — which isn’t actually the way he talks but fits with the stereotype of a big lug — behind his back. Did you guys ever watch Better with You last season? Kris is cast in the same role as one of the sitcom’s characters: The well-meaning boyfriend whose every joke and overture is misinterpreted. He explains this in one of the confessionals, and you see it in the footage: He tries to join in on the family’s usual ribbing of each other, but the moment he jumps in with a jibe, everyone turns on him as if he genuinely were trying to insult his mother-in-law Kris after her pre-wedding surgery, or what have you.

Kris’ biggest detractor is Khloe, whose main worry is that Kim doesn’t know Kris well enough to share her assets with him. Normally this would be an issue, but we’re talking about the Kardashians; any time there’s an engagement, you have to wonder how much it’s done for the attention. Kim and Kris started dating around December 2010, and got engaged in May 2011. So yeah, that’s definitely shorter than we’d recommend to consider spending your lives together, but Khloe got engaged to Lamar Odom two weeks after they started dating. God forbid Kris point this out, because Khloe gets incredibly defensive.

The rest of the family is similarly apathetic. The most bizarre part was when Kourtney‘s boyfriend/babydaddy Scott Disick stands up for Kris, saying he knows what it’s like to try to get in good with the sisters when they already have a bad view of you. (And you know you’re in trouble when it’s Scott who’s sticking up for you.) But then he turns around and makes fun of Kris behind his back for not owning a polo shirt for their golf game. “Who doesn’t have a polo shirt?” he snarks. “Only someone from Lake Minnetonka.”

It doesn’t help that Kim gets all bridezilla, especially since they decide to plan the wedding in just three months. She snaps at Kris for being late to register for presents with her mom Kris Jenner, but shuts him down when he makes “down home” suggestions for the decor and food. (For what it’s worth, the producers make him look really stupid. I’m charmed by the idea of food trucks at weddings, but when Kris says he wants it to be “like the State Fair, with fresh cookies,” he just sounds like a simpleton.)

To be honest, I didn’t know anything about Kris Humphries until he and Kim got engaged in May. And now I understand why: Compared to these screeching, oversharing women, he’s a quiet guy. When he does try to match their humor, he gets shot down. Then the family accuses him of not trying to get to know them.

And yet, crux of all this is actually centered on Kim, not Kris. Khloe warns Kris that Kim falls in love with everyone: “Her nickname isn’t Elizabeth Taylor just for the diamonds.” Kris, too, points out that unlike his soon-to-be bride, he hasn’t ever been married. It all comes to a head with this fight:

Kim: “I seriously have been planning this dream wedding since I was ten years old.”
Kris: “Yeah, and you can slap any guy into it!”

Honestly, we’re on Kris’ side here! Kim is so used to being a self-sufficient powerhouse that she doesn’t let her man make any decisions about the big day.

Worst of all, that was only part 1. And of course it ended on the cliffhanger of Kris finally telling Kim that Khloe was talking shit about him at the engagement party. The fact that he managed to stay mum about the whole thing for a few days was impressive, but as he says, he wants his and Kim’s marriage to be open. (Not the Ashton/Demi way, just really honest.)

Part 2 airs tonight at 9 p.m. EST on E!, but I can already answer my question of why Kris decided to marry into this clusterfuck of a family: Because he loves Kim, and that’s enough.

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Gallery: 10 Men Dressed As Sarah Palin For Halloween

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:45 AM PDT

Sarah Palin‘s been the Halloween costume du jour for the last couple years, and sometimes it takes a little rouge to go rogue. Which is to say: men can dress as Palin, too. And they do, completing their ensembles with fake plastic guns and fake plastic babies. Here are ten of the best examples.

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On Breaking Bad‘s Intense Critique Of Western Masculinity

Posted: 10 Oct 2011 10:34 AM PDT

Holy shit, you guys. The season finale of Breaking Bad happened last night, and it was so intense I laid awake for hours thinking, yes, about that shot, but also about Walter White‘s complete and utter corruption as a human being, and the degree to which said corruption is a result of Walt having watched too many westerns as a kid. Like its Emmy-baiting brethren Mad Men, Breaking Bad is all about What It Means To Be A Man in this day and age, an especially deep theme for something emanating from the same appliance that shows us The Jersey Shore.

The series opens with Walt feeling utterly emasculated by pretty much everything in his life. He has an excess of intelligence, but not (yet) the conniving kind that allowed his partner in research to double cross him and make a ton of money off his work. For this he’s rewarded with a low-paying job teaching bored kids about chemistry, plus an even lower-paying job at a car wash. Walter White is the 99%! Like many people in America, he grew up being told that if he just worked hard enough and did what he was supposed to (and also, if he could manage it, be born white and male), he’d be able to win enough bread for his family to live decently and have a house, a car, a color TV, etc. And for his wife to stay at home, baking cookies and taking care of the kids. Only, like many people in this country, he finds this is no longer the case. As if that weren’t enough, he’s emasculated some more by cancer, and must submit to all kinds of treatments that literally penetrate and invade his body. And then there’s his wife. So many opinions, this woman has. Why won’t she shut up and let him die already?

Walt’s first slide into “breaking bad,” as the series calls it, is at least partially motivated by the type of benevolent sexism that makes up a huge part of western masculinity. (I mean “western” in the terms of the developed world, but the concept of the American West certainly plays into it, too.) A man must provide for his helpless family by whatever means necessary, besides taking charity from others, of course, because that would make him weak. Also, he wants to provide for himself, which means treating his cancer and staying alive. This is partially underpinned by Skyler‘s stubborn refusal to just let him die, but as the series progresses, Walt turns out to have quite a strong self-preservation instinct of his own. His loyalty to his image of what it means to be a man could be mistaken for nobility, at this point. “He’d rather sell meth than accept charity from anyone! What a man,” etc.

But it’s clear from the first moment he puts on that black hat and calls himself “Heisenberg” that he’s not just doing it for his wife and kids. He’s doing it because being a drug dealer is exciting, and tests his mettle in ways suburban life never did. He gets to play out his fantasy of being a bad ass gangster, being “the danger,” and he turns out to be improbably good at it. Pretending to be John fucking Wayne or Avon Barksdale or whomever is Walt’s twisted version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He’s doing it, frankly, because it gets his dick hard.

Because this is a smart show, it undercuts that fantasy every chance it gets. The shots of the New Mexican landscape echo old westerns, while Walt’s suburban markers (those brown bag lunches!) juxtapose the fact that he works at a meth lab. (See also: poisoning a child with a goddamn house plant.) The biggest example of this, of course, is the terrible way Walt’s actions affect both himself and everyone else. For a tough gang banger, it quickly grows apparent that Jesse is much more human on the inside than Walt. The first time Jesse kills someone, it almost destroys him; the first time Walt kills someone, it only makes him more murderous, more Heisenberg. Walt’s masculinity is toxic and self-perpetuating.

Another fascinating way the show complicates masculinity is with its homoerotic undercurrents. We talked in our editorial meeting last week about why Walt never cheats on Skyler with other women, and I think it’s because he’s busy being in love with both meth-cooking, and his partner in meth-cooking. From the very first time they take their clothes off to cook, Walt and Jesse’s relationship plays out somewhat like a love story. It’s passionate, tempestuous, and jealous! They even get to have some full body contact in the scene where Walt’s brand of discipline gets to be too much even for a sub like Jesse, and they fight. Don’t tell me wrestling is not incredibly homoerotic. (See also: Fight Club.)

There’s also the matter of Gus Fring, who seems coded as queer in many ways. He’s a fastidious dresser, he’s soft-spoken, and he had a rather dreamy “friend” he loved so much that he’s willing to spend years building a fast food franchise/super meth lab/community presence just to get a chance at avenging him. He’s even willing to risk death just to be the one who sticks the needle in Tio Hector. Would you do that for a “friend”? (It wouldn’t be the first time a critically acclaimed show had complicated things by making the drug king pin queer.)

It’s a testament to how committed we are to these ideals of masculinity that so many people spent so long rooting for Walt, murderous asshole, while at the same time hating Skyler for…what, exactly? Showing tough love by trying to snap him out of his prideful “let the cancer kill me” daze? Wanting to know what the fuck is up with her husband? Demanding to be treated as co-pilot of the family? Being kind of annoying? Ironically enough, as Walt continues to unravel he unwittingly takes on many stereotypically feminine qualities (irrationallity, impulsiveness, verbal diarrhea), while Skyler is forced to keep a cool head and do damage control (for him, and for fellow failed man Ted Beneke) so that she and her kids have a chance at survival. Who’s the shrewish wife now?

Which is all to say, this show is hugely subversive. Of course, there are always going to be people who take the utterly wrong message from it; they’re probably the same people who made the Brooks Brothers Mad Men line of suits possible. But I think Breaking Bad‘s popularity has at least something to do with how well it engages with issues that are on a lot of people’s minds these days, especially the people in that crucial 18-49-year-old male demographic. With Walt as corrupted as he is right now, where will the final sixteen episodes take us? To penance as ugly as Walt’s battle scarred face, no doubt.

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