FRIDAY, JUNE 17, 2011
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian is planning to marry New Jersey Nets forward Kris Humphries. To celebrate their impending nuptials, the couple created a wedding registry packed with over $65,000 worth of tchotchkes from Geary’s Beverly Hills.
In honor of this momentous occasion, I purchased Kim and Kris a twenty inch by twenty inch “Butter Sferra Festival” napkin for $12.50. The accompanying note reads:
“Dear Kim,
As a member of the media in Hollywood, I wanted to thank you and your family for making all of our jobs easier. Mazel Tov!
-Hunter”
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Which NYPost front page is your favorite Weiner pun?
I think I have to go with “Obama Beats Weiner”
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Rescue us
Pointless, ridiculous ‘Green Lantern’ illuminates nothing
BY ZACH BARON
It is by now a creaky and tedious truism that our summer blockbusters express some ineffable truth about our national character. So let’s start by giving a loud and sustained round of applause to Martin Campbell’s “Green Lantern,” a movie so totally incomprehensible, pointlessly byzantine, and poorly told that it cannot possibly be a reflection of anything but good old-fashioned Hollywood ineptitude and cynicism. There is no lesson to be learned here, no dark night of the covertly fascist American soul — just a pulsing green torso attached to the head of Ryan Reynolds. And pretty colors. And planes. Up in the sky.
We begin deep in the cosmos amid green swirls — “the emerald energy of willpower” — which is the stuff of life, except for when it’s yellow, in which case it is “the power of fear.” For centuries, a group of Guardians — a band of tiny aliens who wear red robes and sit around facing each other in solemn counsel — have enlisted a Green Lantern Corps of slightly more diverse aliens to wield the emerald stuff (via rings and lanterns, for some reason) against the yellow stuff. Lately, this job has become difficult: A cloud of smoke named Parallax has freebased so much stray fear that he’s now become too powerful for the Lanterns to defeat.
Enter Reynolds’ Hal Jordan, a fighter pilot who channels both the please-love-me-dad cockiness of “Top Gun”-era Tom Cruise and the casual misogyny of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. (“There’s water in the tap!” Jordan helpfully tells a nameless blonde as he heads out the door). Chosen as an unlikely successor for a dying Lantern who had the bad fortune of crash-landing his craft in our hero’s vicinity, Jordan is promptly whisked up in space to the Lantern’s home base, the planet Oa. There, Jordan is trained in his new powers, briefed on his new job and, finally, mocked for being a human, the youngest and most weak of all Lantern species, including the ones that look like bugs and fish.
Chastened, Hal quits, taking his ring and lantern paraphernalia back to Earth, where Blake Lively’s Carol, a fellow fighter pilot and the scion of a government-favored ballistics company, awaits. Heady with his new abilities, he flies over to Carol’s blood mansion, where he gently settles on her balcony and uses his ring, which allows the wearer to turn “thought into reality,” to make her a pretty green necklace. (Later, given the chance to create literally anything, Hal — who seems to have been studying a textbook on the history of military technology — will use his powers to craft a big fist, a catapult, a sword, a drill bit, a Gatling gun, and a clutch of fighter jets.) In a moment cribbed straight from a summer after senior year, Carol says the she like the new jewelry, but can’t stand the fact that Hal doesn’t have a steady job. He is sent away. The fading green light of his leaving, unfulfilled, looks like nothing so much as a car in the suburbs, pulling out of a driveway and rolling wistfully back over to mom’s place.
Meanwhile, across town, Hector (a magnificent Peter Sarsgaard) has been called in to perform an autopsy on Hal’s dead predecessor. He makes the mistake of reaching deep into the alien’s mortal wounds, where yellow fear lurks. As fear will, the yellow muck inflates Hector’s head to hydrocephalic proportions and renders him evil. Sarsgaard, whose job it is to grow ever more misshapen and to squeal with increasing fervor as Parallax’s yellow goo takes over his body, is the only one here to recognize that he’s acting in a bad B-movie. When Hector eventually makes a few sweaty attempts on Carol’s virtue, the results are authentically creepy and genuinely comic.
Other than that, all that passes for humor in “Green Lantern” are the degraded references of the film’s four screenwriters, who have Hal recite wedding vows, repeat Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase (“To infinity, and beyond!”), and use stray bits of dialogue from “He-Man” to coax his lantern back into working order. This last bit of schtick could be a metaphor for the inauthenticity and impotence of modern man in society, or a wink at bygone summer blockbusters, or both — mostly it’s evidence of a big movie with a remarkably small imagination.
Needless to say, with his lady at risk, and his lantern at last powered up, Hal has a change of heart about work. He dons the skintight suit of international peacekeeping and vengeance in order to do battle with Hector, Parallax, and all the mean Green Lanterns who questioned his suitability for the gig in the first place. Humankind, doubted as weak, triumphs despite its intimate acquaintance with the yellow power of fear. (“You’re afraid to admit that you’re afraid!” Hal tells his Lantern boss.) In the end, “Green Lantern“ deploys the hidden message we fervently hoped it didn’t have: it is OK, after all, to be a man, or even a woman, as long as you breathe oxygen on this planet.
”Green Lantern" is affirmative propaganda aimed at the entire species, conjuring up a thousand other alien heroes so that People’s Sexiest Man Alive might alight in their midst and, equipped with a camping lantern and the love of Blake Lively, show all 3600 imaginary sectors of the universe how much better we are.
Should the day ever come when we must prove our dubious worth to the assembled green masses, let’s make sure they never see a print of this film.
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Wheel-y cute: Six-month-old Chihuahua puppies Ellie, left, and Gulliver get to know each other at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in Methuen, Mass. The already adopted pups, born without front legs, were fitted with wheels and are training to walk and run with them.
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What if... Len Bias hadn't died of a cocaine overdose?
On June 17, 1986, University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias was selected second overall in the NBA draft by the Boston Celtics, who had just won what would be their last NBA title in 22 years. Two nights later he was dead.
Had the 6-foot-8 forward avoided the series of events that led to his death, he could have kept the Celtics dynasty going. Instead of an aging Kevin McHale, it would have been Bias guarding Magic Johnson when he made the game-winning hook shot to give the Lakers a 3-1 series lead in Game 4 of the 1987 NBA finals. Bias could have spelled McHale and Larry Bird in their waning years, possibly giving the team enough energy and scoring to outlast the Pistons in the 1988 Eastern Conference finals, delaying the start of the Bad Boys' three straight finals appearances and setting up a rematch with the Los Angeles Lakers.
What if... David Stern enacted the NBA's college requirement rule three years earlier?
In 2006, the NBA commissioner instituted a rule that all drafted players must have been out of high school for a year to enter the league. Had this been in effect in 2004, LeBron James would've been forced to enroll in college for at least a year.
In this scenario James signs with Memphis and coach John Calipari in 2003, where he averages 34 points per game as a freshman and leads the Tigers to the NCAA title game, where they lose to Connecticut. James scores a season-low eight points in the game, as teammate Rodney Carney takes the bulk of the team's shots in the final 10 minutes. James is drafted first overall by the Orlando Magic in the 2004 NBA draft, where he begins a division rivalry with Miami Heat guard Dwayne Wade that lasts until 2011, when James takes his talents to the shores of Lake Erie. The Ohio native's signing with the Cleveland Cavaliers delights local fans and owner Dan Gilbert, who calls James his "favorite player in the NBA" in a series of celebratory tweets.
What if... Terrelle Pryor decided to play college basketball?
The top high school football prospect in the country was also the 10th-rated small forward in the class of 2008. Pryor was recruited heavily in both sports but ultimately chose to play football at Ohio State. But as a sophomore in high school, the Jeanette, Pa. native made a verbal commitment to stay close to home and play hoops for coach Jamie Dixon at Pitt. What if he had stuck to that decision?
Recognizing his need for a quarterback, Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel lobbies hard for a Houston-area prospect named Andrew Luck, who signs to play in Columbus. Luck takes over for starter Todd Boeckman as a sophomore and leads the Buckeyes to wins in the Rose and Sugar bowls, hanging the merchandise from those games in his family's Texas home. Tressel's squad enters the 2011 season ranked first in the country, as eventual Heisman winner Luck leads the team to its first national title since 2002. Pryor's hoops career at Pitt gets off to a good start, with the Panthers winning the Big East tournament in Pryor's first three seasons. he's ruled ineligible for his senior year after a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter discovers that Pryor and teammates exchanged team memorabilia for free sandwiches topped with french fries and cole slaw at local institution Primanti Bros.
What if... Drew Bledsoe hadn't been injured in 2001?
In the second game of the 2001 season, Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe suffered a chest injury that vaulted sixth-round pick Tom Brady into the starting role. And the rest was history. However, if one of the Patriots' offensive players had been able to block Jets' linebacker Mo Lewis before he drilled Bledsoe along the sideline, the franchise would've suffered a different fate.
In that scenario, Bledsoe, who had just signed a 10-year deal the previous March, leads the 2001 Patriots to the wild-card game against Oakland, where he throws a "pick six" in overtime to Raiders cornerback Charles Woodson. A healthy Bledsoe remains the starter for the next five years, although the Patriots never advance beyond the wild-card round of the playoffs. Second-stringer Tom Brady signs with Indianapolis in 2004, where he serves as Peyton Manning's backup until he retires to become a golf instructor in his native San Mateo, Calif., in 2013, the same year supermodel Gisele Bundchen marries New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.
What if... Tiger Woods had been a faithful husband?
Tiger Woods hasn't won a tournament since returning to the game in April 2010 after taking time off to deal with the fallout from his well-chronicled marital infidelities.
Let's say Tiger managed to keep his putter in the bag during his five-year marriage to Elin Nordegren and the Thanksgiving night blowout never happened. Woods, who had managed a successful return to form in 2009 after missing eight months due to ACL surgery, would've had gotten back to his training in the offseason rather than spending time getting treatment in Mississippi. The extra warmup and lack of distractions would've made enough of a difference for him to shoot six strokes better in the 2010 Masters to win his fifth green jacket and 15th major. the momentum would've carried into the U.S. Open several months later and a 16th major win, forcing longtime swing coach Hank Haney to stick around, and major No. 17 would follow soon. The continuity in Woods' training would've prevented the injuries that have sidelined him this season, leading to the spectacle of him trying to tie Jack Nicklaus' record for most majors this weekend at the U.S. Open in Bethesda.
What if... Franco Harris' "Immaculate Reception" had been ruled incomplete?
Chosen the greatest play in NFL history by NFL Films, the miracle catch by Franco Harris in the 1972 AFC divisional playoffs against the Oakland Raiders led to the first playoff win the history of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who would use the momentum to win four Super Bowls in the next decade. The Raiders claimed Harris caught the ball after it hit another Steeler (French Fuqua), which would have been illegal at the time. What if the play would've been waved off?
The Raiders win the game and end up beating Miami in the AFC Championship Game, ending what would be the only perfect season in NFL history. The Steelers, who still haven't won a postseason game, decide to rebuild by trading rookie of the year Harris for a collection of picks in the 1973 draft, where they fill a number of need positions including wide receiver, center and linebacker. Future Hall of Famers Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, John Stallworth and Mike Webster are all selected by other teams the following year. The Steelers, who fire head coach Chuck Noll after the 1975 season, finally win the first playoff game in franchise history when western Pennsylvania native Mike Ditka returns home to coach the team in 1982.
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Maho Beach on St. Maarten is located awfully close to the airport.
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Detroit High School An Oasis of Hope
A unique Detroit high school for teen mothers was saved from the budget ax yesterday. It will become a charter school. Meet one of the school's greatest success stories. —Video by Elizabeth Saab, Elyse Kaftan and Devon Puglia
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Terminal Hijinks
Stranded overnight in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, travelers Joe Ayala and Larry Chen use the terminal as their personal playground.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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