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 stopped writing about pop culture bits, focusing on film, because I haven’t found all that much worth writing about recently. But something popped up in the past week that just made me roll my eyes. Hugh Hefner’s former fiancée Crystal Harris had tried to sell her story before the wedding, as she planned on ditching the Playboy founder at the altar and wanted to cash in on the first big public interview. It was to also coincide with Harris appearing in Playboy itself as “Mrs. Hugh Hefner,” an apparent “look what I’m doing” moment from Hef in his usual classy way.
It was going to be the subject of a television special, the wedding, and Harris had allegedly been schtooping Dr. Phil’s son as well. He certainly knew how to choose a bride in his geriatric years, I guess, but he did something good and nipped it in the bud. Hefner found out about this and called it off, not wanting his humiliation to be both public and the subject of both a television show and an interview to follow said television show up. She went on the talk show circuit anyway, admittedly with Entertainment Tonight and the like not paying her that big paycheck, and said something that had to be the single unintentionally funniest moment in celebrity.
“I never wanted to hurt him.”
She followed it up with some crying, on cue, and the interviewer broke the reporter’s creed to not get personally involved in an interview and gave her a hug. Well, it’s not like he was a real reporter or interviewer; if you’re reporting celebrity news you’re more of a cog in the machine of fame than anything else. But this statement made me laugh so hard that I had to get off the elliptical machine because I was going to fall off it if I didn’t. She didn’t want to hurt him … so she was going to jilt him at the altar for the son of a daytime TV hack and then sell her version of the story on national television for a ton of cash.
That sounds like loving behavior to me. Totally does. But one thing explains all this. Crystal Harris looks like this:
Wow. Good job by the Hef
And this is Hugh Hefner at last year’s Halloween ball at the White House:
It might be out of focus but HD isn’t good for the man
I can imagine she looked in the mirror and thought two things. The first is “Will he die before month one of the marriage?” I imagine she had a health assessment done and realized Hefner isn’t dying for at least another decade. This meant she could only think of one thing. It had to be one big thing, big enough to make her throw away a promising career as a reality TV show joke and turn her into an amusing sideshow.
“I’m about to marry the Crypt Keeper … and he’s going to outlive my peak years of attractiveness.”
One imagines that she thought that the next years of her life won’t be just as one of Hugh Hefner’s designated sex slaves but as his wife. She’d be the next Anna-Nicole Smith, waiting for him to croak so she can get her hands on his Playboy cash. I’d imagine she looked at her life and saw that it probably concluded with a drug induced death and a couple of wannabe Dick Tracy villains fighting over her children’s inheritance.
No one wants to be remembered like that.
Smith had a handful of horrible films in the ‘80s that almost were saved because of her awesome shower scenes but the ability for a woman to do that in an action film is impossible these days. Right now if Harris did a film specifically so that she could be in a shower scene no one would really bat an eye. Twenty years ago Smith did Skyscraper and it managed to incorporate a shower scene. Heck if her career hadn’t stalled she’d have probably managed to work one into a film about gritty space marines venturing to a foreign planet to steal some device from evil doers.
Somehow, someway, she’d have to be in a shower sequence.
That’s the high point of her career as an actress and one imagines Harris doesn’t want that. When we think about it her whole life was a tragedy of comic proportions. Smith may have been compared to Marilyn Monroe but the one thing Monroe did was make a number of good films. Smith just got naked and then became an embarrassment of epic proportions. Her cinema career went from white hot to completely gone and the series of any number of comedy routine.
One imagines To the Limit won’t have a similar place in the American cinematic lexicon as Some Like It Hot.
It wouldn’t be a quick path to stardom and widowhood, getting to play the grieved woman and then she could work her way into a new path: Kendra Wilkinson. Wilkinson married a second rate receiver for the Colts, got a TV show and danced with the stars. One imagines Harris thought she’d be on this path until she realized Hefner is never going to do die.
I mean Kole Heckendorf is single and I bet she was lining him up for a future sham marriage to reintroduce her as more than just a blonde with fake jugs who rode a senior citizen for the chance to be a television star. Kendra is now apparently a wholesome part of Americana and I bet Harris thought she’d be going that route, that he’d be dead soon and she could find comfort in the arms of a practice squad receiver.
Instead she discovered that unless she got into necrophilia her prime years of being young and beautiful, which is her only asset at this point, are going to be wasted as arm candy to a pornographer. But then again, thoughts like these kept me out of the good colleges.
Random Thoughts of the Week
Of all the things to happen this week in film, this was easily the biggest to happen. For those unwilling or unable to click on it, the Academy decided to change up their methodology of voting. Instead of taking 10 films from the voting blocks, they’ll take up to 10 with a minimum of five based on voting percentages. So there could be potentially only five and up to 10 in any given year, making it that much more interesting as to who gets nominated per year. But it’s only doing one thing.
It showed us that expanding the Oscar field beyond five was a mistake and ought to go back to that.
One of the reasons why the field was expanded was because The Dark Knight was voted the best film of the year by nearly everyone involved and didn’t garner a Best Picture nomination. As much as want to say that it’d be good to expand the field and that everyone has a top 10 at the end of the year, not a top five, but the intended result was to try and include more popular films that were also quite good as opposed to selecting the best prestige picture of the year. It hasn’t worked for one reason: none of the initial problems for its expansion were rectified to begin with.
The thing here is to notice one thing. I said best prestige picture and not best picture because that’s the truth. The best films of the year don’t get nominated unless they’re released in the last four months of the year except for rare circumstances. Expanding the field to 10, we had mainly small pictures which caught fire get nominated and be in serious contention with a handful of larger ones in there as filler. That’s what Inception and Toy Story were a year ago and District 9 and Up were two years before. They were there to throw a bone to the fanboys who had complained vigorously en masse about good summer films being excluded but it is not like they had a serious chance at winning.
I think the Academy needs to do more than just try and use the voting categories to revitalize interest in the Oscars. The presentation, et al, is still the same but all that seems to be happening is that what is considered the best of the year is being artificially diluted for the sake of viewership. I get that this is the biggest night of the year for film, with many trailers debuting that night just because the night should be fairly large, but it doesn’t add anything to the prestige of winning best picture if voters are using their final three votes of 10 as more of a popularity contest as opposed to the best five of the year.
While it’s hard to say that Inception was nominated not for its quality but because it also was one of the biggest drawing films of the year it’s the absolute truth of the matter. The thought is that people would tune in because the film was nominated because if it is nominated you never know if it could win. It’s the proverbial puncher’s chance at winning a fight: it could happen but odds are it probably won’t.
If the Academy wants to be serious about revamping the Oscars, small changes like this aren’t going to work. The illusion that any film can win, that anything but a certain select group of films released at a certain time of year will get serious nominations every year based on its quality alone, is just that. The Academy would be better off going back to five, call the experiment complete, and work on other ways to boost viewership than downgrading its awards by scheming for popular appeal.
A Movie A Week – The Challenge
This Week’s DVD – Hamburger Hill
If you could shove every war cliché into one mediocre film, Hamburger Hill is it. One of a ton of ‘80s films that came out en masse about Vietnam, this follows the real life Battle of Hamburger Hill. Hill 937 was hotly contested between the VC and U.S forces, with heavy casualties on both sides, and the film is based off that.
It’s a real life battle with fictional people in it as Sergeants Worcester (Steven Weber) and Frantz (Dylan McDermott) lead a group of soldiers into the battle and have to survive the incursion. With soldiers who’ve been in ‘Nam for years, and others experiencing their first tour, we experience the battle through the eyes of the dwindling platoon.
And while the battle sequences are quite worth it, this is a film that doesn’t get us vested into the characters. It’s a walking cliché of character types that becomes almost comical after a while. But it has a great young cast, including a young Don Cheadle, so it’s worth the watch for that and some solid action.
Recommendation in the middle … neither positive nor negative 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
Cars 2 – Lightning McQueen and gang return as it goes international! Michael Caine lends a voice.
See it – It’s Pixar. They don’t screw up.
Bad Teacher – Cameron Diaz wants to leave teaching as a profession and pursue professional gold-digging. Shenanigans ensue.
Skip it – After the last year where we saw films exposing the flaws in our educational system with some good documentaries on the subject, we get this. And who says Hollywood is out of touch?
Scott “Kubryk” Sawitz brings his trademarked irreverence and offensive hilarity to Twitter in 140 characters or less. Follow him @MMCritic_Kubryk.
