In continuing his lifelong pursuit to quantify the essence of the human spirit, Michael Bay has created a film that is both BOOM! KAPOW! BLOOOOSHE!!! yet literally bursting with the mechanized emotion for BLAMM!!! ZAPOW!!! HOT CHICK RIDING A MOTORCYCLE!! For the joyful glee of wanton nihilism expressed here as BAM! KABOOM!!! GIANT ROBOTS!!! MACHINE GUNS!! yet it is through this flaw in their dynamic that we see Shia LaBouef at his most ZOOOOOOOOOM!!! CAMARO!!! BLAAAAM!!! with the possible exception of Megan Fox, who for all her MINI SKIRT!!! CLEAVAGE ARRRGHH!! EXPLOOOOOOSION!!! for this dichotomy to work, and though there are certainly manifestations of her SLOOOO-MOOOOOOOO!!! KARATE ROBOT!!! BLOOOOOOOGGH!!! likable enough, however her ROBOT TURNING INTO A TRUCK!!! GRRRRRR-CRUSH!!! CRUSH!!! Michael Bay, mirroring his own BOOOM-POW!! EXPLOOOOOSIOOOOON!!!! ROBOT ROBOT BOOOM!!!! humanity isn’t enough; it serves as a greater metaphor for BLARRRRRRZZ-SPLOSION HOT CHICK!! ROBOT!!! FERRARI EXPLOSION!!! enough to know where machine ends, and human begins?

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Full disclosure: I’m a bit of a moron. My IQ hovers around the mid 80s depending on how much model glue I’ve been huffing, and I barely made it through a half semester of junior college before I was kicked out for stealing a vat of formaldehyde from the science lab so I could mummify a dead possum I’d found. Still my lack of cognitive skills does not excuse that fact that it took me over a week to put this together, because it should’ve been forehead-slappingly obvious from the get-go who the filmmakers have based their Jonah Hex character design on…

Yup. Fox News correspondent Greta Van Susteren. Just to be clear, Greta’s the one on the right.

To be fair to myself, it’s not like Greta’s on the brain 24/7; in fact I generally try to block her out of my mind altogether. I mean its tough enough sustaining an erection at my age, and weight (though I’m down to a slim 450 lbs. thanks to something called “bulimia”), without some neo-fascist, arthropod-worshipping screechy skeleton hovering around the recesses of my psyche. But it just so happens that I was at the gym the other day, where the TVs are — inexplicably — always tuned to Fox News as opposed to say ESPN (perhaps the folks at LA Fitness see me head for the treadmill and quickly change the channel – hoping the GOP’s propaganda network will raise my blood pressure — in an attempt to induce a stroke and free up the machine for more attractive clients). It was there that I caught a bit of Greta’s ranting and raving about her “outrage” regarding the “controversial” joke by David Letterman wherein he accurately described Sarah Palin’s daughter as a slutty baby-incubator who can’t keep her legs shut through the seventh inning stretch of a major league baseball game (specifically, Dave mused that Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez had “knocked up” one of Governor Palin’s trailer-spawn on their recent trip to New York City).

And let me emphasize, Greta was outraged.

Until this point I’d been unaware that this was a controversy at all. This barb (they’re called that for a reason) came care of one of Dave’s typically innocuous opening monologues in which Letterman makes jokes at other people’s expense. That’s his job; and he’s been doing it adequately on national television for about thirty years. But while Dave may have been on the bleeding edge of comedy in the 1980s, back when he hosted Late Night for NBC (aka the Failure Network), his CBS show is only controversial when compared to reruns of Full House. And it’s not like Palin is even a “hot topic” anymore. So to quote Bugs Bunny: “What’s all the hubbub, bub?”

But let me re-emphasize, Greta was outraged.

Now normally I’d forgo the ad hominem attack, but since this was Fox News I was watching, and per their own modus operandi ad hominem attacks are intrinsic to “fair and balanced” news coverage: Why would Greta Van Susteren’s “outrage” mean anything to me, a somewhat rational human being, when her moral compass has been bent by a steadfast conviction that our bodies are inhabited by the souls of aliens who died in a nuclear blast thousands of years ago at the hands of an evil intergalactic space wizard named Xenu?

This is not conjecture; this is not satire; this is what she believes. THIS IS HER RELIGION, a religion contrived more or less on a whim by a paranoid-schizophrenic science fiction writer. Per the tenets of her belief system she’s also outraged by psychiatry, frowny faces and people who think Tom Cruise is gay. Hell — blueberry pancakes, Labrador retrievers and kettle whistles probably set her off too. But apparently Greta wasn’t alone in her outrage. There was a veritable army of humorless, literal-minded, right-wing-fringe lunatics out there who were similarly upset by Letterman’s joke, not the least of which being Sarah Palin herself.

Per the statement released on the Luv-Guv’s Facebook page (:-) LOL TMI ;-):

‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands – that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’

Ohhhh… kay… um, what?

First of all, who is the “rest of America” Palin is speaking for? Certainly not me, or anyone I know, or anyone with an IQ of 80 or above. Secondly: Fourteen? Really? Letterman didn’t specify WHICH Palin girl A-Rod had been slipping his A-Rod to, but common sense would tell you this joke was aimed at Palin’s famously fertile 18-year-old daughter Bristol. You know, the one who got mothered up out of wedlock, then kicked the bastard’s Skidoo-riding redneck daddy to the curb so she could embark on a whirlwind speaking tour — whoring lil’ oopsy and herself out to any TV talk show that would take them so she could share with the world the wellspring of knowledge she’d garnered from shooting a broken-rubber-baby out of her fetus-cannon? Yeah, that one. That’s the point of the joke. But apparently Bristol hadn’t accompanied the LuvGuv on her trip to Fancy Town, so Sarah jumped to the illogical conclusion that Dave’s joke was aimed at her 14-year-old but by no mean any less slutty daughter Willow. And that’s just WRONG, man. She’s like… FOURTEEN. 14-year-old girls don’t have consensual sex! Ever! (Though one whiff of my be-mulleted, high school freshman iteration’s index finger would’ve told you otherwise).

Palin’s equally vacuous husband Todd also released a statement, probably via Friendster because he’s a backwards rural hill-man:

‘Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.’

Okay, now who the hell said anything about RAPE?? Let me make something perfectly clear: I am a connoisseur of rape jokes. I love them, they love me and sometimes, they are my bread and butter. So as much as I’d love for Letterman’s harmless one-liner to have been a rape joke, it just wasn’t. I know rape jokes, and that was no rape joke.

So where are the Palins getting this stuff? Read through their statements again. Or search YouTube for any one of the many, many, MANY interviews they’ve done since this “controversy” broke last week: It’s like sexual-perversion, rape and pedophilia are the sugar plums dancing in their heads. Am I the only one who finds this FUCKING CREEPY? Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a feral JeanBenet Ramsey chained to a water boiler in the Palins’ basement. These people are FREAKS.

But the true motivation behind Sarah’s very public cries of outrage is pretty clear: Sarah Palin wants our attention. Nay, she NEEDS OUR attention. She is no different than those superficial non-humans on The Hills, or John and Kate and their eight little inbred demon-spawn. Once you give these idiots a taste of the spotlight they will stop at nothing to gorge themselves on more, like ravenous piggies gobbling up every crumb of their fleeting fame. Don’t think for second that this has anything to do with Sarah’s political aspirations. She’s a politician as much as she is a beauty contestant, or a TV weather girl. Politics for Sarah is just a means to an end, another route to achieve the fame and attention she so desperately craves, despite the fact that she has nothing to offer society in exchange for such notoriety – other than being an easy punch line.

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Did Warner Bros. hire Carl Rove to sway the outcome of this weekend’s box office in their favor? Because last night the trades were reporting that UP grabbed the weekend’s number one spot with $ 44 million. However a different tune was sung today, with the Todd Phillips’ emotionally-stunted-male comedy The Hangover wearing the Weekend Box Office’s ruby-encrusted tiara, having bested the aforementioned Pixar flick by a cool mil.

Regardless, it was a good weekend for The Hollywood, what with two films north of the $40 million mark… hookers and blow for everyone! Everyone that is except Will Ferrell, whose Land of the Lost pulled in “only” $19 million – meager winnings for the once reigning king of emotionally-stunted manboy comedies. Still, there is a lesson to be learned here, and NO that lesson is not that Will Ferrell’s done like trucker hats and should be shuffled off to Jim Carrey’s Island of Comedy Wash Ups. But for you studio execs currently going over your development slates and realizing that it consists almost entirely or remakes, reboots, and adaptations it’s a lesson learned hard like “don’t drop the soap” on your first day of prison. Said lesson being, as I’ve only told y’all a gabazillion times, that just because you happen to have cherished memories of some TV show or cartoon or board game from your bed-wetting days DOESN’T mean turning said childhood memories into a $200 million feature film will result in anything but a career-ruining disaster. Nostalgia’s wonderful for staving off more painful ghosts from our past. Dad might’ve been a degenerate gambler, mom a philandering pill-head and Uncle Jerry might’ve touched us one too many times in the no-no place, but that’s okay because The Thundercats were go! and that made it all better, right? And that might’ve got you through Jr. High without going Columbine just fine, but now that you’re all growed up, stuffing those memories into a Thundercats lunch box is only gonna cost you your career, dipshit. So wise up.

Was The Hangover ever a comic book? A board game? An action figure equipped with kung-fu grip? Don’t think so. I also don’t recall there ever being an UP videogame or breakfast cereal. Yet these films managed to WIN BIG where your “branded” property failed. Why? Because the people – REAL people, not your fart-sniffing faux-liberal Hollywood friends — want FRESH and NEW. They don’t want the same old turds ground up and peppered with MSG then rammed down their throats, like you ASSUME they do because when you see ‘em driving in their Ford pick-ups on your way to Wine Country your self-important smugness informs you that these idiots will swallow anything you feed them. I mean look at them! Did those clothes come from Wal-Mart? And is that a “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon I see? What rubes! I bet they even voted for John McCain!

Yeah, well those McCain-voting pick-up truck drivers are the ones lining your coffers, The Hollywood. And just because they don’t own hybrids or buy their organic kale at Whole Foods doesn’t mean they’ll eat any shit sandwich you’re selling just because it comes in a familiar wrapper. So next time some icky writer, producer or director comes to you with an original idea stop trying to figure out how to tie it to an existing intellectual property – especially if that property is fucking Bazooka Joe (the bubblegum wrapper comic strip that has the distinction of making Fred Basset funny by comparison). Take a chance. Try being innovative. The “creative” before the word “executive” on your business card wasn’t ALWAYS intended to be ironic, ya know.

Of course if you do take my advice I’ll have nothing left to write about. Which means I’ll have to re-direct all this pent up hostility somehow, like by maybe taking my old sniper rifle down to Third Street Promenade and taking random pop-shots at street mimes. But are mimes really worth their weight in shitty movies? I don’t think so.

Speaking of Bazooka Joe, here’s some leaked footage from the upcoming feature adaptation. Perhaps I was too quick to judge? Because this actually looks pretty bad-ass.

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Below are some set pics from the upcoming cinematic adaptation of funny book Jonah Hex, starring Josh Brolin as the “tit”ular character.

Hex isn’t exactly a “top tier” comic property. He doesn’t wear a cape, he’s not a particularly nice guy, and I don’t see there being a huge market for horribly disfigured action figures. But he is a bad-ass and like me he once fought a puma. So I will reserve judgment until the movie comes out, though if history’s taught us anything it’s that a) the Holocaust didn’t happen* and b) the coolest comic book characters generally make the shittiest movies. Case in point: The three failed attempts at making a viable Punisher movie (okay, the Dolph Lundgren version was certainly a CREATIVE success, but alas not a financial one). Exhibit B: Wolverine. What a load of feces that was. And Keanu Reeves as John Constantine? Poop soup (although Peter Stormare’s turn as Satan almost made it worthwhile).

It does seem like they tried to downplay the scarring on the right side of Hex’s face, probably so as not to scare off the ladies. Really doesn’t look that disfigured at all; more like he was having a chemical peel done and walked out halfway through. As someone who’s had his share of bad spa experiences I’ll tell you, it’s the kind of thing that can turn a good-hearted person into a stone-cold killer. I mean LOOK at these cuticles! If your fingers were similarly befouled you’d stab a Vietnamese lady in the eye with a nail file too, Your Honor (more excerpts from my recent testimony can be found on the Judicial Branch of California’s website).

Oh, and for all you Google-dependent chronic masturbators, here are some shots of Megan Fox, who’ll be acting against type by playing the part of A WHORE. A stretch, I know, but something tells me she’ll be able to pull it off.

*The Holocaust did happen.

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