Every Monday morning, InsidePulse Movies Czar Scott “Kubryk” Sawitz brings an irreverent and oftentimes hilarious look at pop culture, politics, sports and whatever else comes to mind. And sometimes he writes about movies.
I’ve got a theory on the start of reality programming. Not how it started, because The Real World was the original show that brought out the genre’s start in American television. At the base of all reality programming in a competitive environment is some guy with a stupid question that ends up with a brilliant answer. Think of it like how you used to discuss on the playgrounds who’d win in a fight between like a karate guy and a wrestler. You could debate all you want, but wouldn’t it be cool to see them actually fight? That’s kind of the basis for the UFC, which was “Guys who use Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu can beat any other type of fighter, right?” and evolved into the sport of mixed martial arts.
There’s more to it, of course, but isn’t that the brass tacks of how that developed? I think so and I’m beginning to think the sum of reality programming is spitball questions by people with nothing else to talk about. And money enough to make it happen, of course, because these shows are cheap but not miniscule in budget enough for a couple of working stiffs to do part time on the weekends as a hobby. Think about all the useless questions that have been answered via reality television over the past couple years:
“What would it like to be on a deserted island and have to compete with others to keep living?” sounds kind of dumb but at its heart is what’s behind Survivor. And it’s not the only one.
“How many desperate, slutty women are willing to sleep with a washed up ‘80s musician for their 15 minutes of fame?” becomes Flavor of Love. And then later Rock of Love and For the Love of Ray J to a lesser extent.
“How washed up and coked out would you have to be to still be considered a celebrity?” evolves into The Surreal Life.
“I wonder what karaoke in from of 10,000 people and a television audience would be like”> becomes American Idol.
“How dumb is the average American?” becomes Are you smarter than a fifth grader?.
“Just exactly how many retarded people are there on the shores of New Jersey? And I mean full-on ‘tards, not people with a little bit of ‘tard in them and just kind of act a little off sometimes” becomes Jersey Shore.
I say this because my friend Nick turned me on to perhaps the trashiest reality show so far: Bridalplasty. The brass tacks for this particular show involve a number of soon to be blushing brides who compete to win plastic surgery and thus become a more beautiful bride. Or a slightly less ugly one as a white wedding dress doesn’t make everyone beautiful. And honestly, I can see why this show exists. Some rich guy in television, or who knows someone in television, probably was about to marry a 7 he thought could be a 10, or close to it, with the right plastic surgeon. So instead of doing something like breaking off the wedding for someone hotter, and dirtier, you can use the power of the beautification arts to give yourself the ideal arm candy. And wouldn’t it be fun to see women compete for this? How much further can we degrade the concept of marriage?
The answer is “Hell yeah,” apparently, and with the advent of Bridalplasty perhaps we’re not looking low enough for reality programming on cable television. So in that vein I’ve decided to come up with a handful of shows I think would only enhance the level that comes with programming about brides competing for plastic surgery for their wedding day. I really ought to be programming for E! after this, I think. The more I kept thinking about this, the more I kept thinking that it’s not the worst thing in the world. Far from it, actually, as it could be a good idea to abandon any pretensions about quality programming and just throw as much dirty programming on the air. If you’re going to air this kind of beyond trashy programming I say you just go for it. At this point in the game there’s no real good way of stopping the tide of trash spewing on the airwaves in between reruns of Law & Order: SVU so perhaps it’s time to embrace it. And it started giving me ideas. Way too many, matter of fact, so I’ve decided to narrow it down to 10.
I whittled it down using simple criteria: it has to be trashy and no network would ever really want to touch it. And considering E! is the network home of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, not exactly the highest of brows on the entertainment cavalcade, this could be the start of something awesomely bad that needs an epic follow up. So I’ve decided to put on my network executive hat so as to suggest the next generation of programming for the network …. You can call it:
10. Celebrity Colonoscopies
We like to get into the lives of celebrities, to see how they live when they’re not on camera or in the recording studio, so why not follow them to routine checkups every American has to experience at some point? Follow Oprah Winfrey endorsed cardiac surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani as they walk us through an embarrassing but potentially life-saving medical procedure with celebrities. See Bruce Willis’s sphincter and colon as they look for polyps and tumors in a race against time.
9. Tyler Perry’s The Godfather: An Epic Mini-Series
Don Corleone (Louis Gossett Jr.) is the head of a criminal empire but getting up in age. His sons Sonny (Idris Alba) and Fredo (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) would seem to be the heir apparent but his youngest Michael (Rick Fox) appears to be the most apt for the crime game. But Michael is having problem that not even his girlfriend Kay (Janet Jackson) can help him with. Enter his Aunt Medea (Tyler Perry) and good Christian morals to save the day.
8. My Precious Dating Life
Gabourey Sidibe has everything in life; a burgeoning career, an Oscar nomination and fame. But she doesn’t have a man to call her own. Follow us as the star of Precious whittles down a list of 16 suitors to one lucky man. Through a series of challenges, dates and input from her friends and Precious co-star Mo’Nique, Sidibe will venture forth to find one man to settle down with.
7. The Real Housewives of Brown County
Life may be a bit more glamorous in Atlanta and Orange County, but Northeast Wisconsin has enough drama to match. Follow the lives of six women from Green Bay, De Pere and Ashwaubenon as they juggle careers and families.
6. Get off My Lawn … with Clint Eastwood
Want to know why Walt wanted everyone off his lawn in Gran Torino? It’s because he takes time and energy to work on maintaining his lawn. Based off one of Clint Eastwood’s more enduring traits, that of a dedicated landscaper, the two-time Oscar winner walks you through both basic and advanced lawn care techniques that will help you maintain the same type of award-winning lawn that Eastwood himself has. Joined by industry professionals providing guidance and expertise along the way, as well as the occasional visit from wacky neighbor Morgan Freeman, Eastwood shows a different side of himself than the tough guy we’ve grown to love.
5. Makin’ It
One of Canada’s lesser known experts comes into view: white rappers. Sixteen white rappers from Canada are given an opportunity to live in a house and compete for a record contract from Death Row Records. Hosted by former House of Pain member Everlast, Canadian rap music icons Chuggo and Loe Pesci will join 14 other rappers from across the 10 provinces and three territories in search of fame, fortune and credibility. Competing in challenges for immunity from that week’s elimination every episode, two contestants will battle rap for the opportunity to keep their dream of being a successful white rapper alive until only two remain. For them, a 25 round battle rap for the ages will be all that’s standing in their way from signing a six figure recording contract.
4. Mike Sorrentino’s New Jersey
If Sarah Palin can show off Alaska, why can’t “The Situation” show off his roots in Jersey? We follow the former Dancing with the Stars contestant as he shows off the wonder and majesty of Jersey for all Americans, occasionally being joined by such Jersey icons as Snooki, Pauly D, J-Woww and former Skid Row front man Sebastian Bach.
3. Dying with the Stars
Ever wondered what it’s like to get a celebrity’s corpse ready for its viewing? Wonder no longer as mortician to the stars Herbie Malkowicz leads you the gruesome details that even celebrities go through after they’ve passed on. Watch in horror as Leslie Nielsen’s corpse gets drained of fluids and embalmed. But can Herbie finish in time to get the body shipped out to his native Canada in time for the funeral? Tune in!
2. Inheritance Beatdown
Lawyers and the courts waste too much time and money dividing up the estates of the wealthy that don’t provide a will, or provide one that’s being contested, and generally fairly annoying. How do we make this more fun? CAGE-FIGHTING!
Ryan Seacrest hosts the fun as MMA Refereeing legend “Big” John McCarthy coordinates in the ring. Two parties in dispute step into the IB Arena. One will leave wealthy. The other walks away with nothing. Both are going to have to throw hands to get what they want. There isn’t anything more American than that.
1. Bruce Campbell: Man of Mystery
We follow Bruce Campbell, co-star of USA’s hit show Burn Notice and cult film star, as he does things of awesomeness throughout the land. Otherwise known as following him around and seeing what he does during the day.
Me, I’d love to watch that level of programming. But then again thoughts like these kept me out of the good colleges.
Random Thoughts of the Week
One of the more interesting bits of movie news this week was the announcement of this year’s Oscar hosts: Anne Hathaway and James Franco. Hathaway earned an Oscar nomination for Rachel Getting Married not too long ago, looking at an outside shot at another nomination for Love and Other Drugs this year, and Franco is seemingly a shoe-in for a nomination and one of the favorites (alongside Colin Firth in The King’s Speech) to win for his role in 127 Hours. And for all the bluster on whether or not this is a good move by the Academy to stray from their traditional format of hiring a more veteran host like Billy Crystal and Steve Martin, someone recognizably enough to add to a television audience while being entertaining, I think there’s one huge thing that people are missing on this:
The Academy Awards are still insanely long and boring with no real entertainment value no matter who the heck is hosting it.
It’s a good start that we’re getting Hathaway and Franco, who have a lot to prove (and thus probably will go for broke in the opening monologue), but there are way too many problems with the Oscars as it stands that a pair of plucky and aesthetically pleasing hosts would solve. If anything the Oscars need a lot more fine-tuning and as always I’m the guy to give them the means to make it a more interesting broadcast. And by more interesting I mean we’ll get more viewers, which seems to be the whole goal of this. It’s not to make it a better broadcast, or make it more relevant by involving the entire slate of films and genres from the entire year. This is about ratings and bringing an audience in. As such, I’ve come up with a list of things I think could help improve the Oscars beyond adding freshness to the hosting ranks. Yep, it’s time for:
— Eliminate the amount of categories being presented on live television
One of the things about the Oscars that give it such a mammoth run time is that they present nearly every Oscar on stage. Every year the Academy says it’s trying to do things to decrease running time but the one thing they could do, eliminate a large chunk of what gets presented on live television, they never do. The Oscars ought to televise only the following awards on television:
1. Best Picture
2. Best Director
3. All Four Acting Awards
4. Best Song
5. Best Documentary
6. Best Foreign Film
Look, it’s not to demean the hard work and effort of everyone involved in making films but let’s face it: most people don’t give two craps about cinematography, costumes, effects, writing, et al, unless they’re talking about why they loved a film. No one tunes into the Oscars looking to see who wins Best Costumes unless you’re in the industry or related to one of the nominees. Screenwriters do not equal ratings, unfortunately, and yet they get a relatively large amount of time on the industry’s biggest night.
The Academy Awards being televised comes down to one thing: the movie industry promoting their best. It’s a big walking, talking advertisement for the greatness of cinema of any given year as well as a memory bank for those who have died in the last 12 months. Unless you’re a film buff the only things most people care about are going to be the big awards. By giving everyone equal time you make it into an endurance test. Me I do care about who wins for writing, etc, but unfortunately people like me are the exception and not the rule. This is about ratings, damn it, and when you eliminate the airing of the smaller, less cared about awards and you have one of two things: more time for the stuff people care about or a less lengthy broadcast.
One of the things people often complain about is that many of the awards for acting is that people rarely see many of them and we’re only given glimpses. Imagine if instead of a quick collection of clips you got five minutes of good scenes from an actor to justify their position. Most of a film’s better scenes are hard to clip down to singular moments clipped to hell. Why do it and leave people who haven’t seen them in a bit of a lurch? Sean Penn had some brilliant work in Milk last year that didn’t come through during the Best Actor presentation. Wouldn’t it be kind of cool to see it so we could go “hey, that’s why he won” as opposed to go “really?” It’s better for people to go and hunt down the DVD or see it in theatres, of course, but there isn’t a huge Oscar bump in box office grosses that comes from winning a little golden man.
— Invite a whole mess load of rappers
One of the great things about the Vibe Awards, et al, is that there are always violent feuds between rappers going on at all times. And most rappers are packing heat wherever they go; I bet 50 Cent has a .357 Magnum on him when he’s at the dentist with his kids. So when you get a bunch of armed, borderline illiterate and often toothless rappers who dislike each other in the same room you have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s like giving a six year old a machine gun; you don’t know what’s going down but you’re pretty sure it’s going to be on the news.
And this is where the fun begins.
Imagine if someone in the Three Six Mafia has a beef with a DMX and opts to take a shot at him. Instead he misses and wounds George Clooney in the shoulder. In response, Brad Pitt unleashes all 50 of his adopted kids to take him down and pummel him ruthlessly. In the ensuing melee Meryl Streep winds up getting sucker punched by a member of Puff Daddy’s entourage, thus her Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia co-star Stanley Tucci sticks up for her and gives Sean Combs a most righteous ass-whooping. Snoop Dogg sticks up for his boss and enters the melee, only to find himself throwing hands with Tucci’s co-star from The Lovely Bones (and potential Best Actor nominee) Mark Wahlberg. He’s got Dr. Dre with him but Wahlberg’s backed up by Christian Bale, his co-star (and probable nominee) from The Fighter. Plus Russell Crowe is inspired by all this violence and is just randomly kicking people’s asses for fun.
It’s Batman and Max Payne taking on the Kings of West Coast Gangsta Rap with the Gladiator guy throwing chairs. All the while Anne and James have live microphones, with at least one of them pissing their pants in fright. Don’t tell that wouldn’t be epic. And don’t tell me you wouldn’t be glued to your television to see what happens next, either.
— Every Best Song nominee gets the Unplugged treatment
One of the shows that MTV did that was spectacularly awesome was Unplugged. One could argue that Nirvana’s fate was sealed when they went unplugged and it was so incredibly awesome that Courtney Love had to kill her husband afterwards. Like how Johnny Depp killed the cook in Once Upon a Time in Mexico because that pork dish was too good. The universe had to balance itself out. So wouldn’t this be a great idea for Oscar nominated songs?
It is one thing to get a big orchestra together and a band on stage to perform an Oscar-nominated song, or have a top music act perform a nominated song, but the one thing that would be cool is to see what a song would sound like broken down without all the accoutrement of electronics. Just a singer, a couple guitars and some drums could be either insanely awesome or insanely bad; either way you’re not going to want to miss it.
You may think “but what if it’s a hip-hop song” like the Three-Six Mafia’s win (evening them with Martin Scorsese in Oscar wins), to which I retort: LL Cool J did “Mama Say Knock You Out” unplugged.
People seem to forget that one, especially in light of how awesome Nirvana was and how the show got the original members of KISS back together to do a couple songs for the first time in years (culminating in the original lineup, in makeup, back on tour). It was awesome, too, and if James Todd Smith can do it anyone can.
— The guys from Jackass get to prank at least one winner
Cause sometimes Hally Berry or Brad Pitt deserves to get Rocky’d.
— No shortened acceptance speeches
One of the things that really pisses me off is that as soon as someone wins they want to shove them off the stage as soon as they can, giving them like 10 seconds to thank people. Sometimes letting a celebrity ramble and thank people is kind of cool; and sometimes they need to just let it out. This is the highest honor the industry gives and yet they don’t get any opportunity to celebrity it in front of their peers. I mean if it goes too long, like five minutes, you can bring out the clown from the Apollo theatre to pull them off comically. But otherwise just let them ramble on; eventually they’ll run out or realize they need to shut up and move on.
A Movie A Week – The Challenge
This Week’s DVD – The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
You ever watch a film and one quick slipup of a character name gives you a really funny line? The 36th Chamber of Saholin gave me a quick funny as I was talking on the phone with my buddy Nick. I saw the character’s name in a brief bit of dialogue and thought it was “Santa,” not “San Te,” and my first thought was “Holy crap, Chinese Santa Clause is way more messed up than I ever thought if he has to learn kung-fu.”
I picked this up like two years ago after a column by Sutton on the best master-student films in action. I had a gift certificate from winning a sales contest and, like every gift certificate I won while back in the insurance game, I blew it on DVDs. There was a Best Buy like right on the way home from work so every 2-3 months I got to blow some cash on films outside the mainstream. For me that will usually apply to anything Dragon Dynasty puts their name on that isn’t a Hong Kong crime film. Nuts for nothing I think there are some great martial arts films but at heart I’m a fan of the crime film. Hong Kong often has some interesting takes on the genre, giving the basis for The Departed as a grand crime epic with a little actioneer like Infernal Affairs, but it’s in their martial arts releases where we find some of Dragon Dynasty’s more high profile works. Such is the case of Shaolin, hailed as perhaps the finest kung fu film of all time.
San Te (Gordon Liu) is a student who gets caught up in a rebellion against invaders. Aiding his teacher in rebellion by smuggling via his father’s shop, he and his cohorts are caught. With everyone he knows being killed by their oppressors, he goes to the one place he thinks he’ll be safe: a Shaolin temple. Convincing the monks to let him learn Kung Fu, San Te eventually becomes a master of the 35 chambers of Shaolin Kung Fu and goes back home to set things right. In other words, there are some people who have an appointment with Buddha and he’s the man making their travel arrangements. But the film isn’t about his revenge, or his desire to teach Kung Fu to the masses.
This is basically the Kung Fu equivalent of Rocky but without a villain; San Te has to go through 35 sets of challenges to become a kung fu master and get colored robes to wear, as opposed to the gray crap he trains in. Along the way he invents the three section staff, too, just to kick one guy’s ass that’s been beating him regularly in sparring. Most of the film is concentrated on San Te going from normal guy to badass Buddhist monk, with just enough setup to get him to the temple and just enough conclusion to give him a happy ending, And that was my main problem with 36th Chamber.
There are lots of training and personal growth bits throughout the film but in the end it leads to a quick finale and San Te establishing the 36th chamber (teaching peasants Kung Fu). This is a personal journey of growth, et al, fueled by the need to learn Kung Fu to whoop somebody’s ass. It would be like having an entire film based off of Rocky Balboa and mentioning his opponent once, then having a quick first round knockout at the end before Rocky goes off to run his own gym. It kind of bugged me; I realize this is more about the journey but if it has no cathartic finale it’s just a martial arts wankfest to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the heck out of it, but to call it the greatest Kung Fu or Martial Arts film of all time is a bit much. I’d go with Enter the Dragon but that’s just me.
Mild recommendation.
What Looks Good This Weekend, and I Don’t Mean the $2 Pints of Bass Ale and community college co-eds with low standards at the Alumni Club
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – More adventures with those wacky British kids who go Narnia.
See It – The series has been remarkably watchable so far and I don’t think this’ll be any different
The Tourist – Angelina Jolie dupes Johnny Depp into posing as her husband, a wanted criminal. Problems arise when it’s love at first sight … and a whole bunch of killers on either side of the law wanting them both dead.
See It – Jolie rarely misfires when it comes to action thrillers and this is based off a first rate French action thriller. All signs point to entertaining.
The Fighter – “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) gets one last chance at being a high profile boxer. His brother Dick (Christian Bale) comes along for the ride.
See It – Mark Wahlberg has been training for this film for two years as a passion project. Between films he built a boxing ring and trained non-stop for this film. Think about it: for two years of his life all he did was work his ass off to be Micky Ward. That kind of dedication makes this a must watch to begin with for me. That and the buzz mill is on Wahlberg and Bale being near mortal locks for Academy Award nominations because of how good they are in this film.
Do you have questions about movies, life, love, or Branigan’s Law? Shoot me an e-mail at Kubryk@Insidepulse.com and you could be featured in the next “Monday Morning Critic.” Include your name and hometown to improve your odds.
Scott “Kubryk” Sawitz brings his trademarked irreverence and offensive hilarity to Twitter in 140 characters or less. Follow him @MMCritic_Kubryk.
