Ashton to Ashes

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | INDIA FILES

by James Killough

It hasn’t been a good year or so for my ideal younger man, Ashton Kutcher.  This breaks my heart because I do wish him all the best, in a concerned, fatherly way.  First came his split with Demi, then his stint on Two and a Half Men, a show he is being credited with killing, although I see that more as a kindly act of euthanasia; I agree with Charlie Sheen: TAAHM kinda sucks.  Now he has managed to outrage some members of the Indian community by appearing in “brown face” in an ad for PopChips, and he has been roasted alive on Twitter, a social media platform he in no small part helped to build.

This poses something of a conundrum for performers in general and the people who create material for them: at what point does satire become offensive and racist?  Are actors, comedians specifically, only allowed to appear as their race or, in the case of repeat-offender Sacha Baron Cohen, as something other than their real sexuality?

Always a Bridesmaid

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

I was just going through the arduous task of deleting today’s Facebook friend requests when I decided to flip on the TV to make the process less tedious and what should appear on the screen but a little gem called Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids.  The episode was about half over, but I already had a really clear idea of what was going on courtesy of the very descriptive title.  Anything that says “bridesmaids” is bound to be an overflowing bounty of estrogen and ego.

Luke Guldan is not a bridesmaid and can have any haircut he wants.

In one salon, a lovely African-American bride-to-be was having trouble achieving clarity on what she wanted her bridesmaids to wear and the bridesmaids in question weren’t really helping because they basically complained about everything.  I have to say that, when it came to a shiny burgundy number with a cape thing attached to a huge cluster of fabric flowers on the back that the bride just adored, I was on their side.

Marcus Bachmann Is A Homo

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

I didn’t want to spoil my Bridesmaids experience by going to see Bad Teacher, but there is little to see in the dry summer months before the fall deluge of quality films, so you can’t be as choosy as usual.  As you may know by now, both movies are post-feminist broad comedies (again, forgive the pun) about chicks behaving like gross-infused dudes, and being utterly believable.  Both films are pleasing cultural milestones to be a part of; this is genuine equality given freely and willingly, not demanded just because it is deserved and therefore stilted, forced, maybe sententious.

A rather implausible position to sleep in, but the PR gal at Louboutin was thrilled.

Bad Teacher is the lesser film, no question.  It is School of Rock next to There’s Something About Mary, which first showed us Cameron Diaz’s extraordinary comedy chops, and which still remains quite possibly the funniest movie I’ve ever seen.

I’m Too Sexy For My Car

BAKER STREET

 by Eric J Baker

Welcome to Pure Film Creative or, as I like to think of it, Tiger Beat for intellectuals (and perverts; you know which one you are).

Regular readers of these pages will often find us opining on who is sexy (Ashton Kutcher, Duran Duran, Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and who is not (Killough’s former landlady Susan Blais, Russell Crowe, pre-Raphaelite painters). It’s easy to do when you’re talking about movie stars and fashionable pop bands, since good looks are a prerequisite for such roles in society. With political figures, the distinction is murkier. Much like the sewage most of them crawled from.

What's not sexy about an Aussie thug in a tub with a stogie, a brew and phone he's about to brain the hotel maid with?

I don’t find ugly liars attractive, but I seem to be in the minority. Last week, before the shocking truth exploded, I wrote on PFC that Anthony Weiner couldn’t have e-mailed his cock-bulge photo to a 22-year-old woman because he’s not that dumb. What I thought, but didn’t write was, “Who the fuck wants to see Anthony Weiner’s dick, anyway?”

I Dream Of Blogging

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

I don’t know if other blogueurs do this, but I dream sometimes about my daily post, and I’m so utterly convinced it’s what I should write about that I sit up in bed and try to make myself remember.  More than a couple of posts so far have been written in the middle of the night with a pen and a notebook by my side.

I should have dreamed about Ashton Kutcher instead. I should only dream of Ashton Kutcher.

I know that last night I dreamed about director Marcus Nispel, I guy I wrote for and developed films with for a couple of years at the turn of this century.  I dreamed I should blog about Marcus and commercials, and the whole thing was brilliant when I was dreaming about it, except not having kept paper and pen by my bed I don’t remember how to reconstruct that brilliance. 

Ring Around A Volcano

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEWS

by James Killough

I know, I was supposed to post on Tuesday, but I’m not sure that properly speaking I had a Tuesday.  Well, I had sort of one, but it was in Delhi, which wasn’t really a Tuesday in the West, and we’re on a PST time schedule at PFC.  I worked flat-out all day, wrapped my last shoot a half hour before I travelled for twenty-eight hours home, eighteen of which were on a non-stop flight from Dubai to LA.  We had to skirt the volcano in Iceland and fly south.  The journey would have been more of a bitch than it was had it not been for the fact I was able to lie down and get a good night’s sleep, and gurgle when I was awake like a stupefied baby at the gazillion channels of entertainment on Emirates.

I would even be willing to endure a knee-lift like Demi if I thought I stood a chance with Kutcher.

I was going to blog from forty thousand feet, but I felt more inspired to watch inflight Hollywood crap.  Most of the plane was watching inflight Bollywood crap, which just goes to show that even when given the choice, Indians would rather keep it real with the caca; we will never prevail over them with our cinematic pablum.

Most inflight entertainment is crap that has just been released on DVD, which sort of justifies this mash-up of reviews.  In the case of Virgin Atlantic, which is more prone to have a selection of quality films side by side with the crap, they will often screen a British film that has yet to be released in the States, or an American one that hasn’t been released in the UK.  That’s what you get when a former entertainment company owns an airline: better contracts with the film companies.