Self-Indulgent Post of the Week: Bo Jackson vs. Barry Sanders on Monday Night Football

Tag: self-indulgence


25Dec 2014
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Self-Indulgent Post of the Week: Saturday Night Live, Season 40

As a fan of Saturday Night Live since I was a kid, I have become more and more aware of how great certain sketch comedians are . . . and how quickly others fade into oblivion. That discrepancy seems to have been made blatantly obvious over the past couple seasons, the last of which – season 39 – included a lot of cast turnover. New cast members pop up every year, but SNL seems to be in rebuilding mode recently. Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis all left before season 39, and then Seth Meyers left in the middle of the year. After the season finished, John Milhiser, Nasim Pedrad, Noel Wells, and Brooks Wheelan all left or got fired; the only one of those with any talent whoatsoever seemed to be Pedrad.

Now it’s season 40, and there are still some decent talents hanging around but nobody who seems like a future star. In the days of yore, it seemed SNL always featured a guy or girl with enough charisma to move on to his or her own talk show, comedy, movies, etc. There are some people I really like, but nobody who looks like a Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, Chris Farley, Kristen Wiig, etc.

So after watching the first half of the season, here are the current SNL actors from best to worst:

Bobby Moynihan: Moynihan doesn’t have the same kind of physical presence as Chris Farley or John Belushi, but he has taken that chubby guy role and done some great things with it. He’s good at improvising if things go sideways, and his facial contortions help him sell his characters. My favorites are Anthony Crispino – who’s pretty sure his secondhand news is accurate – and Drunk Uncle, with some Kirby the Astronaut mixed in.

Kate McKinnon: McKinnon has “crazy eyes” that make her a little off-putting and intriguing at the same time. Her impressions are unmatched on the current show, and she goes over the top just enough with her takes on Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, and Martha Stewart, among others. She’s probably the most consistent actor on the show in committing to the sketch and staying in character.

Pete Davidson: Davidson is my favorite new-ish actor on the show. He’s only 21 years old and so he shows his immaturity by occasional breaks in character, but he looks comfortable on stage and delivers his lines with an underlying energy like Jimmy Fallon or Adam Sandler. (Interesting note: Davidson’s father was a firefighter who was tragically killed during the September 11th attacks.)

Kenan Thompson: Early in his career I thought Thompson was pretty bad, because he seemed to break character left and right. Now he’s been around forever (he joined the cast in 2003 and has stuck around longer than Grandpa Tim Meadows), and he has grown on me. He still breaks character sometimes, but the creator of the knucklepuck has developed enough lovable roles to make him a comfortable sight on Saturday nights.

Taran Killam: Killam is pretty skilled impressionist, and he’s currently the “good looking” guy on the roster who can play the role of a Hollywood leading man or a goofball. He’s no match for Darrell Hammond at doing impressions, but he’s versatile enough to fit into almost any sketch.

Cecily Strong: Strong is someone I can see becoming a supporting actress in movies or TV shows. She’s good looking enough to make a passable Hollywood actress, she’s pretty versatile with her characters, and she’s relatable enough to make her a sympathetic character.

Colin Jost: Jost is the head writer and a standup comedian. After some early snafus, he has become pretty solid as an anchor on Weekend Update. Some of his deliveries are similar to those of Norm McDonald, and he has the face to make a convincing news anchor. He doesn’t seem to have the same improvisational chops as some of the former anchors (Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers), so I can’t see him moving to his own talk show. But he seems like a good writer and is coming into his own as a performer.

Vanessa Bayer: Bayer is a good bit player who can make a cute girl or play an androgynous role like, say, a Jewish boy. You need good glue girls like her.

Michael Che: Che has some funny moments as the co-host for Weekend Update. Unfortunately, he stumbles over the setups and punchlines so often that he’s very inconsistent. For every joke that succeeds, at least one fails because the timing gets thrown off.

Aidy Bryant: Bryant is in her third year on the show, and while I liked her at first, her act has gotten a little stale for me. She plays essentially the same person in all of her skits, and her best one – co-host of Girlfriends Talk Show – has run its course. She has her funny moments, but she’s too one-dimensional.

Jay Pharaoh: Pharaoh – whose Barack Obama impersonation has improved over the years – has never impressed me. You have to have someone around who can impersonate the President, so I guess he’s necessary. But the guy just isn’t that funny. Almost every impression he does is sold only by the people doing his makeup and costumes.

Sasheer Zamata: I have a feeling I will forget about her in a few years. Kind of like how you forgot about Paul Brittain.

Beck Bennett: Bennett’s best professional moments came in AT&T commercials talking to little kids. Otherwise, his best role is Casey, a local skating talk-show host. Generally, he’s too stilted and awkward and monotone to be of much use.

Kyle Mooney: As Bennett’s co-star on the skating talk show, Mooney isn’t atrocious. He makes an acceptable stoner. That’s about all I can say for him. His impressions are disasters.

Leslie Jones: Leslie Jones is terrible and one-dimensional. I’m not quite sure why she was added to the cast, but I would be happy if she did not return for season 41.

16Mar 2014
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Self-Indulgent Post of the Week: The Bachelor season finale

Juan Pablo Galavis (image via Bachelor Burn Book)

Here is where I submit my man card and admit that I’ve been a pretty consistent watcher of ABC’s The Bachelor  over the past few years. I consider it a somewhat fair trade-off for making my special lady watch hours and hours of Michigan football games and listening to me rant and rave about Rich Rodriguez’s failure to recruit more offensive linemen. And on top of the whole “fairness” aspect, it’s not so bad to watch 25 or so attractive females prance around in bikinis and tight dresses to try to win the heart of the hunk du jour.

That “hunk” for the 2014 rendition of The Bachelor  turned out to be Juan Pablo, a single father of Venezuelan heritage from Miami. Juan Pablo won many Americans’ hearts with his panache and sense of humor during the 2013 season of The Bachelorette, when Desiree let him advance several rounds before axing him. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he’s Latino and could appeal to the ever-increasing Spanish-speaking market in the United States.

For perhaps the first time ever (though I haven’t been watching the show since its inception), the show went down in flames as Juan Pablo started to piss off a bunch of bachelorettes/contestants down the stretch. The first real signs of trouble appeared when Sharleen, a 29-year-old opera singer from Heidelberg, Germany, left the show early because she couldn’t find a cerebral connection with the Spanish-speaking jock. I have known my fair share of opera singers, and they are all well educated and cultured. I have also known my fair share of athletes, and, well, let’s just say they don’t tend to be the most thoughtful bunch. However, the disappointment and surprise Sharleen showed because she couldn’t connect intellectually with Juan Pablo was both sad and comical.

Then there was Andi, the 26-year-old assistant district attorney from Atlanta. She thought she had found a “great love” in Juan Pablo . . . until she spent the night in the fantasy suite with him and realized that he was self-centered and didn’t ask many questions about her. After several weeks of dating a dwindling number of women, alas, he couldn’t tell her what religion she practiced. The horror! The next morning she summoned him for a meeting and removed herself from the show prior to the rose ceremony, incessantly berating him for saying “It’s okay” when she said she was leaving. She also claimed he said she made it that far “by default,” but he insisted he didn’t know what that word meant and had said she “barely” made it.

In the season’s final barrage, there was 32-year-old Clare, a hairdresser from Sacramento. In my opinion, Clare was the most physically attractive girl on the show, but there wasn’t a whole lot going on upstairs. On their final date, when no cameras and no audio could catch it, Juan Pablo allegedly said something like “I don’t know you all that well, but I really liked f***ing you in the fantasy suite.” She was upset but after a heart-to-heart with him later that night, she felt reassured that he was interested in her. During the final rose ceremony a day later, she came marching across the sand in a beautiful gown only to be told that Juan Pablo didn’t see a future with her, implying he had chosen the other remaining bachelorette/contestant. Rather than taking it in stride, she shoved him away when he tried to hug her goodbye and yelled at him for not being a real man, saying she would never want him to be the father of her children. If he had got down on his knee and proposed, she would have said yes. Because the 50/50 proposition went against her, she insulted him and stalked off.

Last Monday was the season finale, and Juan Pablo was accosted from all angles during the After the Final Rose episode. Host Chris Harrison seemed miffed that the guy he hand-picked to be The Bachelor had not told the winner, Nikki (a 26-year-old pediatric nurse from Missouri), that he loved her. Clare hoped that her verbal assault would somehow empower other women to stand up for themselves, advice that will surely be heeded by the plethora of females who find themselves losing on the final round of Bachelor-like dating shows. Andi proceeded to make fun of Juan Pablo’s accent and say she “wanted to strangle him” when he kept saying “It’s okay.” (I wonder how a long a male assistant district attorney would keep his job after saying in front of millions of people that he wanted to strangle a female game show contestant for saying “It’s okay” in a foreign accent.) Kelly, a 27-year-old “dog lover” from Georgia, took the most irrelevant potshot at Juan Pablo; in a separate interview, he had made the mistake of saying that he wouldn’t approve of a same-sex version of The Bachelor, and poor Kelly somehow found it surprising that there are human beings in this country who aren’t 100% in favor of same-sex everything when she herself had been raised by a same-sex couple. Harrison, meanwhile, spent the last few minutes of the show alternately making fun of Juan Pablo and getting quite chummy with the new Bachelorette, none other than the wannabe strangler/accentist Andi.

All this is to say that it is at once riveting and tiresome to watch people who are so delusional. From educated women who so terribly misjudge ignorant and self-centered men; to ignorant women who let fairy tales (you know, all those fairy tales from childhood that include television cameras and 24 other women)  cloud their judgment; to television hosts who get offended when their chosen guests don’t play their roles exactly as expected. Who’s to blame for all this drivel on our televisions?

Me, and viewers like me. And for that I want to strangle us.

2Mar 2014
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Self-Indulgent Post of the Week: House of Cards

Kevin Spacey is deliciously unlikable in House of Cards (image via Netflix)

Like many others, I recently finished watching season two of House of Cards, the Netflix show that seems to be the current “Best Show Ever” now that Breaking Bad  has run its course. If you don’t want the show to be spoiled, then proceed no further.

Hit the jump for my thoughts (and please discuss in the comments).

I think part of the House of Cards  appeal to me is, in fact, that I don’t like any single character on the show. I dislike almost every one of the characters, and as I watch most of them spiral downard, I harbor joy at watching their demise. In my other favorite TV dramas, I can find at least a couple main characters for whom to cheer (Dexter, Rita, and Harrison from Dexter; Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, any of the Starks from Game of Thrones; Kate, Jack, and Hurly from Lost). I realized my dislike for the HOC characters at the beginning of season two when Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) pushed Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara) in front of the subway train. Barnes almost never smiled, and her only goal in life appeared to be to move up the journalistic ranks, no matter who she had to screw to get there. The only thing I would miss about her was the eye candy she provided.

After that incident, I started looking at the other characters. Peter Russo? The guy was pompous, out of control, and too easily manipulated by substances and other people. Raymond Tusk? His most redeeming quality is that he reminds me of Major Dad, but in all other cases, he’s a money- and power-hungry prick who represents the ridiculous influences of corporate America on politics. Garrett Walker? It’s difficult to strongly dislike the president on the show, who is generally shown to be a thoughtful, conscientious, humane, and intelligent person; but the fact that Tusk and Underwood bully and manipulate him into making poor decisions made me lose a little bit of respect. He almost won me back over when he shut out Tusk and told Underwood that he would no longer take his calls, but that was short-lived.

That brings me back to the Underwoods, Frank and his wife Claire. Perhaps it’s because we see behind the scenes, but his voice and actions are so dripping with obvious distaste for those around him that it’s difficult to see how he got this far in life without being beaten to a bloody pulp. I silently cheered when Donald Blythe (Reed Birney) chewed Frank out for feigning compassion for Blythe’s marital situation only for political capital. Claire (Robin Wright) is another character as fake as they come, and the way she handled the Gillian Cole (Sandrine Holt) situation was cruel and cold-hearted. Furthermore, I lost a great deal of respect for them when they cheated on each other, although obviously they have somewhat open relationships. The media uproar over Adam Galloway’s (Ben Daniels) release of the pictures of the vice president’s wife was well deserved, and I felt a great deal of indifference when he got upset that Claire lied to him, as if he thought she was incapable of lying. The Underwoods continue to ascend, and I hope for an even more spectacular failure.

The two characters I find/found to be most sympathetic were Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) and Freddy (Reg E. Cathey), because both were troubled souls who were yearning for redemption. Stamper, a recovering alcoholic, was Frank’s lap dog and did everything he could to try to get back into his boss’s good graces. And while he covered up some bad things along the way, he clearly struggled with the differences between right and wrong. Unfortunately, that ended with him getting brained with a rock by Rachel Posner at the end of season two. Freddy escaped season two with his life, and I doubt we see him much at all when the series continues to a third season; but he had to leave his business behind once Tusk revealed that he was a former gangster convicted of manslaughter. Both of those guys were headed in the right direction, but they were the victims of larger forces.

I only have a few qualms with the series, and they’re relatively insignificant. The sexual tryst between Frank, Claire, and their Secret Service agent Edward Meechum (Nathan Darrow) was a red herring that had nothing to do with anything. Unless that comes back to bite the Underwoods in some way in season three, it was useless and offended my sensibilities. Also, I was about to punch something if I had to watch Frank “pitch” another ball to Meechum; it’s a good thing the power went out in Baltimore, because then the nation didn’t have to be subjected to watching Kevin Spacey throw a baseball like a complete sissy. Perhaps most significantly, the pace of the show seems to go at breakneck speed. It seems like such a short time ago that Frank was the Whip from South Carolina, then he became vice president by suckering the previous VP out of office, and now he’s become POTUS all before President Walker could finish his first term in office.

It was recently announced that the show has been renewed for a third season, which will be released in February 2015. In the meantime, I will be searching high and low for another enthralling show with characters I hate this much.