The Cheese Fry

Ask the Fry

2012-01-22T16:58:00.001-08:00

For our six or seven regular readers out there, here's an opportunity to get involved and create some of that, you know, interactivity they always talk about. We want to hear from you. Have a question? A post idea? A complaint? Let us know.

E-mail us at: thecheesefry@gmail.com.

Sundancing

2012-01-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

This year's version of the Sundance Film Festival, considered by Hollywood to be among the three or four most influential and important international film festivals, started this weekend. We've been lucky enough to attend the festival several times over the years and found it to be as memorable and surreal as you might imagine.

Our ruminations:

1. It can be bitterly cold in Utah, especially when walking the streets pre-dawn to go score tickets. We'd never before (or since) had the snot in our nose freeze into sharp little snot-crystals.

2. We'd also never seen snow so deep. What seemed to be level ground was actually, when we stepped onto it, a snow drift. We sank into right to our knees.

3. The desperate self-promoters and Hollywood wannabes come out in full force at Sundance, which can be especially amusing in the long ticket lines. Sundance releases a small reserve of tickets each morning, which is why you have to line up very very early at the box office. The characters you meet in that line would have you believe that are the Next Big Thing and know everyone who's everyone. But, of course, if they were truly connected they wouldn't be in line with you at 5:30am.

4. You could usually tell which people in line should not be told that we worked in the industry. The next thing you know, you'd be given a business plan for a Leonardo DiCaprio project that DiCaprio had probably never heard of and only needed 85% of the financing.

5. We tried to attend the infamous Sundance parties. Even with our name on the list, one party was so packed we couldn't even get up the steps to the front door. The other was so crowded, the bar was literally wall-to-wall people, crammed in elbow to elbow, each with a drink in their head. We think we had a small panic attack.

6. It's true. Everyone wears black.

7. Celebrity sightings are indeed very common, though we don't count the Q&A after movies when the actors and directors take the stage. We prefer seeing famous people in their natural habitat just out there walking around.

8. For some reason, the most memorable celebrity sighting: 1990s Lolita ingenue sex kitten Dominique Swain posing for fan pictures on the sidewalk.

9. No, we never saw Redford, though we heard he was in a theater we were in.

10. We saw The Blair Witch Project in the front row of a packed auditorium. Remember this was before the hype and the hype backlash. In 1999, it was the hot ticket - everyone was talking about this weird, creepy little movie. It was the scariest thing we'd ever seen.

11. If you plan it right, on a good day you can see five movies.

12. Foreign-langauge movies at Sundance invariably put us to sleep. Not sure why.

13. If you're looking for cheap fast food on a budget, Park City isn't the place to go. There's maybe one Subway and one Burger King.

14. We didn't know that ski resorts would illuminate the slopes so people could ski at night. Is that common? The whole side of a mountain was lit up bright as day.

15. Good luck making a meal reservation for your little indie production company. The stress level was off the charts. We don't miss that part of the job.

A-one and a-two

2012-01-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

We hate ourselves for having this song stuck in our heads for 30 years thanks to the long-agoritual weekend viewing of this show by our grandmother. But then again, there is something soothing about it, in a 1970s Velveeta sort of way, don't you think? Life was simpler for the Cheese Fry when the biggest worry involved multiplication homework and deciding whether to pretend to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.

10 thoughts on the 69th Annual Golden Globes Awards

2012-01-15T23:37:00.001-08:00

1. Meryl Streep? Seriously?

2. That whole move where the winner has to wind through the tables and chairs to get to the stage and keeps getting interrupted by someone who wants a hug or a kiss or a handshake has nothing to do with the winner and everything to do with the interrupter trying to steal some of the spotlight and look important and connected.

3. Is it us or did Ricky Gervais dial it back a little this year? He seemed a lot tamer. Pity.

4. What happened to Madonna's British accent?

5. Hollywood keeps trying to push Jessica Beil on us.

6. Dudes we wish we looked like (in no particular order): George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Eawn McGregor, Clive Owen.

7. That's not playing fair to Melissa McCarthy, sticking her next to Paula Patton.

8. Quote of evening, delivered by Mrs. Cheese Fry: "Please do not fast-forward George Clooney."

9. Interesting how some women age so gracefully and continue to look radiant, while others fight age tooth and nail and wind up looking so plastic and brittle. You know which is which.

10. Morgan Freeman will always be Easy Reader to us.

Cheese Fry posts you won't be seeing in 2012

2012-01-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

2011 was a banner year for the Cheese Fry, with a whopping 80 posts. It was by far our most prolific year, thanks mostly to a very active September that involved numerous knee-jerks to the new fall TV shows (New Girl and Person of Interest, yes, we're still watching).

We're hoping for an equally prodigious 2012. We're not sure what pop culture ephemera will catch our eye, but we can guarantee it won't include these topics:

"The prequels are way better than the original trilogy"

"Hipsters taught us a valuable lesson about great music"

"Why we love the Kardashians"

"The joys of traffic gridlock"

"The day we won the Powerball $78 million lottery"

"Dallas Cowboys: undefeated"

"Knee-jerk review: the Twilight franchise DVD box set"

"We wish more people talked in movie theaters"

"Live blogging the People's Choice Awards"

"Justin Bieber is underrated"

"How 'Hawaii Five-O' accurately portrays genuine police work"

And the Oscar goes to

2012-01-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what an Oscar ballot looks like? Wonder no more. Thanks to GoldDerby.com

Post-yuletide malaise

2011-12-31T21:55:00.001-08:00

You'd think a grown adult would grow jaded about Christmas, develop an immunity to yuletide cheer. Not us. The run-up to December 25 remains our favorite time of the year (some might call it that most wonderful time of the year), which means December 26 leads to a calendar sugar crash of immense proportions.

No more anticipation regarding the presents - gifts are suddenly open and what was a pile of mysterious packages is now just a pile of wadded-up paper. No more stop-motion 1960s holiday TV specials. No more of that infectious holiday buzz at malls and grocery stores as everyone rushes to get everything done on time. No more "A Christmas Story" marathons. No more lines to get a picture with Santa. No more holiday-themed TV episodes or commercials where everyone's looking out a snowy window or presenting perfect snacks on candlelit suburban tables. No more countdowns of shopping days. No more turkey and dressing leftovers. No more over-the-top set decorations on the network morning shows that are all snowflakes and aluminum trees. No more reason to stay in town to see family and old friends, not when the real world and your job awaits back home. No more uttering of "Happy holidays" or "Merry Christmas" to strangers. No more wink-wink "scientific" discussions of tracking Santa's progress on Christmas Eve. No more "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses on your local radio station. No more relevance to the many artifacts that remain until January 2, things like rooftop Christmas lights, your living room tree, or that mistletoe-scented candle, things that are now instantly obsolete and serve only to cruelly remind us that it's all over.

See you next December.

Knee-jerk review: "My Week with Marilyn"

2011-12-31T18:42:00.000-08:00

1. Finally, a legitimate indie arthouse drama. Call it a palate cleanser after the in-your-face pyrotechnics and sequel theatrics of Mission Impossible 4 and Sherlock Holmes 2.

2. Michelle Williams dazzles. She doesn't look at all like Marilyn, yet at the same time looks exactly like her, if that makes sense. She seems to somehow capture Marilyn's essence (as if any of us even know what that might be). And she completely nails the voice.

3. But she nearly gets the movie stolen out from under her by Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench, both at the top of their game.

4. Marilyn may have suffered under the invasive scrutiny of her fans, but she would have been miserable without their attention. If you buy what this film is selling, she simply had to have the adoration. She was desperate for approval and love.

5. What red-blooded American male wouldn't have wilted at the phrase "Call me Marilyn"? Gulp.

6. We were very engaged by the backstage drama involving the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, especially the arguments over Method Acting and the delicate politics of handling a temperamental star. The sycophantic hand-holding, the chronic tardiness, the ineffective self-medication that does more harm than good, the crippling self-doubt of fragile egos... is this a period piece or a modern-day documentary? On-set problems with A-list movie stars all remain the same.

7. Marilyn refers to her persona at one point in the third-person "her" - suggesting she turns on that charm and performs as Marilyn when she thinks that's what required. Fascinating.

8. We were trying to imagine what sort of modern-day movie star might be Marilyn's equal. That is, if you're a first-time employee of a big Hollywood production and you wind up in a strange romance with the leading lady, spending a weekend with her, sharing both kisses and a bed, what sexy contemporary star (i.e. someone every man wants) would it have to be to rival the ridiculous situation our young hero finds himself in? Angelina Jolie probably wins the "sexy" scale, but is she an A-list movie star? Maybe. We also considered Julia Roberts in her early 1990s prime, but as huge as she was, Julia was never sexy and desirable like Marilyn, was she? The landscape has changed.

9. Emma Watson probably shot her scenes in three days.

2011 movies we wished we'd seen

2011-12-29T18:48:00.001-08:00

The 2009 arrival of Li'l Fry has put a crimp in our habit of seeing one or two new releases in theaters every weekend. That sort of social-life spontaneity is now a completely alien concept. The list of movies we have seen in theaters can be counted on two hands (The King's Speech, Hanna, Bridesmaids, X Men First Class, Super 8, Moneyball, The Muppets, Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows).

The movies we wanted to see, but didn't, are legion:

30 Minutes or Less

The Adjustment Bureau

Another Earth

Apollo 18

The Artist

Captain America

Cars 2

Cedar Rapids

The Change-Up

Colombiana

Contagion

The Descendants

Dream House

Drive

Fast Five

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Green Hornet

Green Lantern

Hall Pass

The Hangover Part II

Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows Part 2

The Help

Horrible Bosses

The Ides of March

Insidious

In Time

Like Crazy

Limitless

The Lincoln Lawyer

Margin Call

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Melancholia

Midnight in Paris

My Week with Marilyn

Our Idiot Brother

Prom

Real Steel

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Scream 4

The Skin I Live In

Sucker Punch

Super

Take Me Home Tonight

Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon

The Thing

Thor

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Unknown

Young Adult

In a perfect world, all of these would have clever, pithy knee-jerk reviews that would amuse and dazzle you.

Knee-jerk review: "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows"

2011-12-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

1. Like the first movie, the plot can be impossible to follow. Sure, you'll understand the broad strokes of the story. But connecting the dots in a he's-doing-that-because-of-this way is often impossible. The action will shift locations, a new character will pop up, something important will happen and you'll hear an ominous music cue, and you won't understand any of it. So you'll just sort of have to go with the flow.

2. Not happy at all with the first act turn that does something dastardly to a character played by a Future Ex-Mrs. Cheese Fry.

3. Some pretty good action bits, especially the train sequence. But this is a movie that likes to chop up the fight scenes into little staccato chunks (perhaps the better to hide the fact that it's stuntmen doing the hard work rather than our actors). It's exciting and energetic, but also disorienting and confusing in a Michael Bay sort of way.

4. There is a certain novelty to an action movie set in 1891. Take this same story and put it in contemporary times and it wouldn't be as interesting.

5. Also a big help: the wry British humor.

6. The first 40 minutes or so is a tedious drag. The exposition and chit-chat goes on and on. Things perk up once Holmes meets his match in Professor Moriarty. Always good to have a villian who is the equal of the hero.

7. We don't think it's going to happen, Noomi Rapace. Sorry.

8. Lame Pulp Fiction ripoff. Points deducted.

9. We do like the bits in which Holmes uses his deductive reasoning.

10. But we hate the inclusion of Holmes' daffy brother. A big distraction who doesn't fit the rest of the movie.

11. Interesting theme involving the way technology is intertwined with war. For a story set at the turn of the century, but still many years away from the meat grinder of World War I, it makes perfect sense that so much is made of the growing war-making industries, especially a running gag in which the characters find bigger and bigger guns to use against one another. The days of knife fights and fist fights are coming to an end.

12. Robert Downey Jr's zippy chemistry with Jude Law remains the reason these films work as well as they do.

13. Unlike the first movie, this movie's climax doesn't feel like a cheat. Good fun, especially the final scene.

14. Tough decision as to whether it's really worth paying a movie admission or waiting to make it a DVD rental.

Knee-jerk review: "Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol"

2011-12-26T19:57:00.001-08:00

1. Grade immediately after the lights came on in the theater: A+.

2. Grade on the drive home, thinking about the plot: B+.

3. It's that kind of movie. It moves so fast and with such relentless energy that you happily swallow all of the convoluted plot turns and glossed-over implausibilities. But there's a lot of "How come?" questions once you start analyzing it all.

4. As cool as this movie is, "Ghost Protocol" could not be more cheesy. It's like something an 8th grader thought up because it sounds cool.

5. Always good to see Tom Wilkinson.

6. We like to watch Tom Cruise run. He's got that look of sweaty panic that suggests if he doesn't get to where he's going as fast as he possibly can, sprinting rather than running, he'll be completely screwed and the world will not be saved. You buy it 100%.

7. The middle section of the movie that takes place in a monster Dubai high-rise (you've seen clips in all of the trailers and TV spots), is a crackerjack set piece. Best part of the movie and arguably among the best action-suspense scenes ever made. Some ingenious moments.

8. Too bad the climax in India never quite reaches those same heights, though the business with the steel suitcase is pretty exciting.

9. The director, Brad Bird, also directed Pixar's The Incredibles, which was packed full of intricately-choreographed action sequences where everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the heroes must endlessly improvise. Same kind of vibe at work in Ghost Protocol.

10. Paula Patton is undeniably hot, but the real surprise here is how deep a character she gets to play. She's grappling with the loss of a boyfriend, the question of whether vengeance will make her feel better, and professional self-doubt in a job where confidence is everything. She's not just the eye candy.

11. Spy movies got a bit boring once they became all about stealing passwords and passcodes.

12. The hallway hologram thing? Way cool.

13. Extra points for the Sawyer cameo.

14. It's not an action movie without someone falling to his/her death, is it?

15. Where does it rank among the Mission Impossible movies? Probably right at the top. The only thing we remember about the first one is the CIA white room bit and the offensive plot twist in which Jim Phelps turned out to be a traitor. The second one was John Woo gunfights and motorcycles and the sourpuss that is Thandie Newton. We liked the last one with snide villain Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the rabbit's foot (whatever that was), and Tom Cruise getting a love interest. But this one seems stronger. More epic, tighter and more complex plotting, more ingenious "Mission Impossible" gimmicks.

16. Way too many kick-ass moments to count. Cars flying, guns pointing, buildings exploding, martial-art moves moving, fireballs roiling. A real roller coaster.

17. Go see it, people. You'll really love it until the car ride home. And even then, you'll like it a lot.

Best #1 songs of 2011

2011-12-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

The following fourteen songs all placed in the number one spot on Billboard's singles chart during 2011. We figured it was worth a look to see which ones still stick in our heads and seem the most worthy and which ones we don't remember and seem like big mistakes.

1 "Party Rock Anthem" LMFAO - We thought this group was a Black Eyed Peas ripoff (two weird dudes, one hot girl) when we first saw them on some TV show. Then we heard the song. The zippy backbeat and tweaky synth melody got our vote for song of the year.

2 "Last Friday Night" Katy Perry - We heard about parties like this in high school but never attended one in person. Catchy and memorable. Great twist also in that the disastrous, black-out events of last Friday will soon be repeated this Friday. The stubborn, reckless stupidity of youth.

3 "We Found Love" Rihanna featuring Calvin Harris - No idea what the verses say, but that soaring chorus is nothing short of amazing. "We found love in a hopeless place." Evocative.

4 "Give Me Everything" Pitbull - Another of those techno hip-hop songs (with yet another LMFAO-style earworm synth hook) that we know we shouldn't like, but then can't help ourselves. Pitbull was everywhere this year - you couldn't turn on a music program without seeing him hamming it up.

5 "Firework" Katy Perry - A cheesy, transparent, overly earnest attempt to create an empowerment anthem. We know. But we still like it. For those very reasons.

6 "E.T." Katy Perry featuring Katy Perry - Gee, we really must like Katy Perry. So be it. This one isn't her usual peppy, polished pop music jewel. It's weird and dark and oddly robotic. "Infect me with your love and fill me with your poison." What do you suppose that means?

7 "Rolling in the Deep" Adele - Objectively, this should probably be the song of the year. Nothing else was as ubiquitous or beloved. But despite the hook and Adele's big-belted vocals, it's not exactly the kind of thing you can sing along to. And it was way overplayed. We heard it everywhere to the point of diminishing returns.

8 "Born This Way" Lady Gaga - There are better Gaga songs, but it's solid and hooky. Plus, we found this one unfairly attacked for sounding too Madonna. Strange, since Madonna hasn't sounded like Madonna since 1998.

9 "Grenade" Bruno Mars - The Bruno Mars phenomenon is a curious one. He's talented and silky smooth, sure, but we can't quite connect. Lil' Fry did love the "Lazy Song" video, however, with the dancers in monkey masks. So bonus points for that.

10 "Someone Like You" Adele - Powerful and poignant. But we ask you: would you really pay to see her sing this live on stage in concert? It's soooo slow... and soooo dreary.

11 "Moves Like Jagger" Maroon 5 featuring Christina Aguilera - We're big fans of Maroon 5. How can you not love the whistling? But we have to take away points for invoking the image of a rock star 30 years past his prime.

12 "Hold It Against Me" Britney Spears - Wouldn't know it if we heard it. And proud to say so.

13 "Black and Yellow" Wiz Khalifa - All we know is that it was maybe inspired by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

14 "S&M" Rihanna featuring Britney Spears - Huh?

Happy holidays circa 1960s

2011-12-24T21:15:00.000-08:00

Nothing says Christmas like the rerunning of animated holiday specials first aired back in the 1960s and 70s. We've knee-jerked three of the most popular in past years:

"A Charlie Brown Christmas"

"Santa Claus is Comin' to Town"

"The Year Without Santa Claus"

And to all a good night!

Observations from an NFL stadium

2011-12-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

The Cheese Fry was in attendance at the Christmas Eve game at Cowboys Stadium in which the Cowboys again prove that they're just good enough to disappoint their fans time and again.

* If you think getting to the game two hours before kickoff is "early," about 10,000 other fans think so, too.

* People sometimes joke that their Sunday religion is the NFL. If so, then the steel and glass monstrosity that is Cowboys Stadium is surely their church. It is enormous.

* 16 ounces of beer is $8.50. We will admit, however, that it was ice cold.

* It's hard to not watch the infamous 60-yards-long HD screen as if you're still in your living room. You have force yourself to watch the action down on the actual field.

* You don't have to have a screw loose to go to a game in face paint, but it probably helps, don't you think? Especially for those who go shirtless and apply face paint to their pasty white pudgy torsos.

* The video packages displayed on the in-stadium screens are incredibly sophisticated and polished. And remarkably effective in stirring emotion. They play you like a cheap violin. You will laugh... here. You will get fired up... here.

* We're glad we brought binoculars. All the better to see Tony Romo huddle up with Steven McGee on the sideline to try and figure just what in the hell is wrong with the Dallas offense.

* We have new respect for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The most we usually ever see of them involves mugging for the Fox Sports cameras as the games go to commercial, but at the stadium, they're working hard between quarters and during TV timeouts. The halftime routine was easily ten minutes of choreography.

* Nachos are $9. And it's the exact same kind of nachos you'd pay $4 for at your local cineplex.

* Not many things more miserable than watching your team flail and stumble while the opposing team racks up yards and touchdowns. Well, there is one thing more miserable: having the opposing team's fans cheer and holler. Who knew there were any actual Eagles fans outside of Pennsylvania?

* In person, NFL game day is like a one-day, PG-13-rated house party. Wall to wall people, loud music, crazy clothes, lots of food and alcohol. Plus Santa Claus.

* If there's a way to honor the military, the NFL will do so. Not passing judgment on the questionable pandering that hasn't ebbed since 2001, just making an observation.

* Some of the players in pre-game stretching exercises look like they could perform with Cirque de Soleil the way they contort and bend.

* Plastic bucket of slightly stale popcorn is $10. But you get to keep the souvenir bucket.

* There's always one or two jackasses who won't take off their hat for the national anthem. What is their malfunction?

* It's such a big operation that the stadium has something of an in-house TV show going on, with a host setting up videoclips, interviewing guests, and announcing promotions. All of it coming to you live from the concourse.

* Looking at all of the corporate signage, the mind reels in thinking how much Jerry Jones is paid for the privilege. Dr Pepper, AT&T, Miller Lite, Ford. The list goes on and on.

* Are we old or is the stadium audio turned up about two notches too loud?

* We hate not sitting on the aisle. There's no graceful way to shuffle down the row without getting intimate with the people you're passing.

* Bottle of water is $5. Bargain of the day.

* You surely can't find a more enjoyable way to drop $200 or so, spend an entire day standing in line in the cold, then sitting in a hard plastic seat, all to watch your team get dropped like a JV squad.

Knee-jerk review: "The Muppets"

2011-12-21T20:20:00.001-08:00

1. We were the only person in the theater not seeing it with a small child.

2. We were also the only person in the theater seeing it alone.

3. We probably looked creepy.

4. Sweet and charming. And for Generation Xers who remember watching "The Muppet Show" in syndication back in the late 1970s, also a bittersweet nostalgia trip.

5. Which connects nicely to one of the movie's unexpectedly dark themes: a worry that one's glory days can never be recaptured or bettered.

6. We'd follow Jason Segel anywhere. Dude's way underrated. A minor genius.

7. Watching a re-enactment of "The Muppet Show" opening number? Goosebumps.

8. In a way, all you really need to know about this movie is that the arch villain played by Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper raps. If that idea amuses you in any way, this movie is for you.

9. We always liked Kermit, sure (though we still can't accept his new, non-Jim Henson voice) but mostly just tolerated Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear. Real fans know it's Animal and Beaker that deserve our full attention.

10. It's a Disney movie, so it stands to reason that the film's "Muppet Theater" is really the Disney-owned El Capitan theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

11. We sometimes wish we could travel by map.

12. Strong original songs here, some tender and poignant, others goofy and ridiculous. None will be noticed by the Oscars.

13. As much as we enjoyed it, we probably liked the Pixar "Toy Story" short that preceded it even better, especially the way it cleverly skewers something that so richly deserves skewering: the cheesy, cheap, one-gimmick plastic toys that come with fast food meals.

He won the lottery and died the next day

2011-11-29T21:57:00.001-08:00

Does Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" provide actual examples of irony or just bad luck? We've heard this argument before many times, but it's still interesting to think about and the L.A. Weekly offers a fairly in-depth look at the lyrics.

Is this the worst song of the 1990s as Ben Westhoff suggests? That's a whole other question. We vote for "Macarena" and "All Star."

Kung-fu Kirk

2011-11-18T14:13:00.001-08:00

The nerds at io9 compiled a hilarious list of Captain Kirk's best fight moves. Seems like hand-to-hand combat will become a lost art in the 23rd century. We've always been a fan of the strange karate "hi-ya!" chop to the opponent's neck.

Don't let the Dodger Stadium door hit you

2011-11-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

Dodger fans rejoiced when news emerged last week that shamelessly stubborn slimeball Frank McCourt finally saw the writing on the wall (e.g. that Bud Selig would never, ever let him keep the team and, in fact, wished he could find a DeLorean to go back in time and prevent himself from ever allowing McCourt to come within 1000 feet of the team, much less buy it with what was essentially a maxed-out Visa credit card). McCourt, you see, agreed to sell the team.

Good things (if you don't count Game 6, also known as the Ninth Inning We Don't Talk About) happened to the Texas Rangers with new ownership. Maybe the Dodgers are in for some sunnier times as well.

Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness catalogs the many crimes and misdeeds of Frank and his blowsy wannabe-Real Housewife of Beverly Hills wife Jamie. They came to Los Angeles wanting to be loved and respected power players, they leave hated and reviled and listed among the city's most infamous figures.

Nicely played, losers.

Not-so-knee-jerk review: "Moneyball"

2011-11-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

1. We saw it a few weeks ago. So it's not exactly fresh in our minds.

2. A fairly riveting look at the inner workings of a baseball team front office: scouting players, riding the ups and lows of a season grind, wheeling and dealing for trades on the phone, cutting players.

3. Make no mistake. Brad Pitt is a Movie Star. And he has his charisma cranked way up here. The perfect part for him.

4. Too bad the story didn't build to a stronger ending. No World Series run. Just a win streak. Sometimes the truth isn't as compelling as fiction.

5. It's a Columbia movie so all of the electronic gadgets have a very prominent Sony logo.

6. Loved the power-struggle between GM and manager. You won't start the players I want, then I'll trade your players away so you have to start my players. Ruthless.

7. Major League was a lot of fun and Field of Dreams certainly captures the romance and nostalgia of baseball, but Bull Durham remains the undisputed best baseball movie. We also have a soft spot for the underrated For Love of the Game and The Rookie.

8. No, we didn't read the book either.

9. We know someone who knows the player Brad Pitt cuts. A little detail the movie didn't mention: that player was cut just a few days shy of a contractual benchmark that would have granted him a full pension from Major League Baseball. He's now a high school teacher.

10. Always fun to watch stubborn old-timers get told off, isn't it? They just Don't Get It.

11. A guy with an ugly girlfriend has no confidence. Funny. And kind of true, if you think about it.

12. Worth seeing.

Knee-jerk review: FX's "American Horror Story"

2011-11-05T22:21:00.001-07:00

1. Well that was certainly disturbing.

2. Yeah yeah, it's been on the air a while now. We just watched the pilot. Thank you, DirecTV DVR.

3. If we didn't know the two showrunners also created the narrative-train-wreck that is "Glee," we would never have believed it.

4. Only in movies and TV shows do people have no problem buying a creepy house in which someone was killed. How often do you think that happens in the real world?

5. Connie Britton. So amazing. But we feel like she's cheating on Kyle Chandler when we see her with a new TV husband.

6. The credit sequence gave us goosebumps. And not in a good way. Few things more unsettling than old turn-of-the-century black-and-white photos where the people just sort of stare dead-eyed into the camera. We almost stopped watching.

7. Dylan McDermott's character is a complete jerk, but he's Dylan McDermott so you still kind of like him.

8. "You're going to die in there."

9. Pilots are supposed to clearly sketch out the main characters and provide a clear indication of future subplots and storylines. No lack of possibilities here. A brilliant, efficient introduction into a fairly complicated situation.

10. Genius: wife sees housekeeper as dowdy and wrinkled, husband sees housekeeper as young and sexy. Shades of The Shining.

11. The producers sure do like to take advantage of FX's willingness to let a certain s-word fly free. A little much, if you ask us.

12. Jessica Lange seems to be enjoying herself.

13. Great stuff. We may even like it better than our favorite other new show, "Person of Interest."

Zombie all-stars

2011-10-31T20:28:00.000-07:00

The Cheese Fry is a self-proclaimed zombie connoisseur. To us, there's something uniquely horrifying in a relentless, mindless attack by hordes of the undead. They can't be reasoned with or bargained with, not just because higher brain functions have shut down making it impossible to communicate, but because what drives zombies is the very primal need to feed... right... now. A zombie will keep going and going until it finds something to eat or until you kill it. Worse, for the heroes of zombie stories, it usually seems to come down to an issue of math: there's more of them than there are of you. Kill one and six more stagger in to take their place.

Here's our favorites.

28 Weeks Later (2007) - The first movie, 28 Days Later, starts strong (and we love the idea of fleet-footing running zombies, a scary update on the staggering and shuffling Romero-style zombies) but we never liked the last third of the movie when the action shifts to the military compound. The scope and scale of the sequel, however, as well as its depiction of how the government and military might respond to a genuine zombie crisis, make for a far more compelling story. And yes, we know the monsters are technically not dead, just infected with the rage virus. Let's not quibble.

Dawn of the Dead remake (2004) - We suspect this is the movie that kick-started the recent zombie renaissance. The opening sequence is an instant classic, a sucker punch of bloody horror and shocking chaos invading a placid suburban neighborhood. Dynamite horror action that explores that classic zombie movie trope: strangers stuck together in an isolated location (here, an empty shopping mall) trying hard to survive and plot a successful getaway. Bonus points for a surprisingly downbeat twist ending.

"Dead Island" teaser (2011) - We're not big videogamers, so we can't speak to the quality of the title it's selling. But there's no question the three-minute teaser (see below) is a haunting, stylistically ingenious account of one family's bloody demise. If you hunt around on YouTube, you'll find some versions that fans have recut to make the action unspool linearly. For us, though, it's the unsettling non-linear mosaic that's more effective. It's better than a lot of full-length features.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) - "They're coming to get you, Barbara!" The one that started it all. The cheap, grainy, zero-budget rawness only adds to the unsettling claustrophobic horror as strangers gather in a farmhouse (there's that set-up again) to hide from a sudden zombie scourge. Lean, mean, and unashamedly nasty. It's best to watch it on a late-night cable station while you're huddled up in bed under the covers.

Resident Evil (2002) - Probably the guilty pleasure of the list. It's undeniably shlocky, what with the heavy metal guitars and derivative slow-motion fight scenes. But shlock can be fun. There is something appealing about the propulsive action-thriller plot, the convoluted Umbrella Corporation conspiracy-theory backstory, the creepy Red Queen computer voice, and a nice amnesia-sufferers-remembering-the-truths act-two twist. And who wouldn't respond favorably to Milla Jovovick spending the entire movie in a little red dress?

AMC's "The Walking Dead" (2010-) - How could a cable channel turn everything we love about zombie apocalypse stories into a serialized show? It just didn't seem possible. But "The Walking Dead" is managing it quite well and drawing a pretty big audience. (On our to-do list: read the graphic novels on which the show is based.) You get all of the usual elements here: perfect strangers banding together to fight for survival, a collapsed social infrastructure, moral questions about hard choices the living sometimes must make to save themselves, and lots of running from shuffle-step zombies. The show is never afraid to go to some very dark places, whether it's putting children in jeopardy or suggesting some of the living may be just as inhuman as the undead.

World War Z by Max Brooks (2006) - "Genius" is how we describe it. A kind of literary mockumentary, fiction pretending to be oral-history non-fiction. It's told from the point of view of some distant future after a global zombie war was won. Rather than a single conventional narrative, "World War Z" is divided up into a number of personal accounts of the zombie war, whether it's a personal story of some ordinary citizen or a look at the choices of higher-ranking officials who propose some fairly radical counter-attacks. Coming soon to a theater near you, of course.

Zombieland (2009) - Give us a thumbs down for still having not yet seen Shaun of the Dead. We think if we had, it would have made this list. Instead, we're nominating Zombieland in the category of black-comedy zombie movie. Unlike a lot of people, we're not too keen on the Bill Murray cameo. But the stylish visual flourishes, the deadpan humor, the sprinkle of romantic comedy elements, and a hilariously intense performance by Woody Harrelson (who so desperately wants a Twinkie) make this a stand-out.

Robert Stack's voice still haunts us

2011-10-30T22:17:00.000-07:00

We suspect that if you ask any Generation Xer about the things that most scared and scarred their childhood, NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries" would crack the top ten. We certainly had trouble watching the show when our parents were gone. And Mrs. Cheese Fy just had a unmistakably panicky emotional reaction when she noticed us composing this post and looking for the clip below on YouTube: "Where are you doing? No way."

It's not just the eerie, relentless, synthesizer-heavy theme song that's been seared into our memory. And it's not just the terrifying stories of people who just, like, disappeared into thin air or met a gruesome death (we still remember the story of a guy who vanished and whose car later turned up abandoned with the doors open and the keys in the ignition at an interstate rest stop - the authorities could only speculate who left it there and why and where the owner went) - people just like you and your parents. No one is safe. It was also host Robert Stack's gravel-voiced, poker-faced narration that remained flat and dispassionate no matter how horrible the stories became. This was TV's Eilot Ness, after all, telling us that the cops couldn't do it alone and needed your help. How scary is that?

Happy Halloween. And sweet dreams.

More songs we never get tired of

2011-10-04T21:12:00.000-07:00

Last year, we listed 20 songs on which we'd never change the station. Here's a new batch:

1 Stone Temple Pilots, "Creep"

2 Jimmy Buffett, "Margaritaville"

3 Len, "Steal My Sunshine"

4 Hole, "Malibu"

5 Jane Child, "Don't Want to Fall in Love"

6 Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys, "Empire State of Mind"

7 Third Eye Blind, "Jumper"

8 Foo Fighters, "Everlong"

9 Chicago, "25 or 6 to 4"

10 Crowded House, "Don't Dream It's Over"

11 Estelle featuring Kayne West, "American Boy"

12 Paramore, "That's What You Get"

13 Eddie Rabbit, "Driving My Life Away"

14 The Breeders, "Cannonball"

15 Tears for Fears, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"

16 Pink, "Perfect"

17 Don Henley, "The End of Innocence"

18 Jade, "Don't Walk Away"

19 Foghat, "Slow Ride"

20 B.o.B. featuring Hayley Williams, "Airplanes"

Knee-jerk review: ABC's "Pan Am"

2011-09-28T20:47:00.000-07:00

1. Looks like it has at least twice the budget of NBC's "The Playboy Club." Fantastic, retro 60s production design. Plush and sleek.

2. To us, Christina Ricci has always been rather odd looking.

3. It's a bit more soapy than we expected, but why wouldn't it be? Anything that skews female will (rightly or wrongly) work the romantic angles. We should have expected that.

4. The sister rivalry subplot feels kind of fresh, though since this is a TV show even the "plain" sister is hot by normal people's standards.

5. Will the "Lost"-style character flashbacks carry over into the series or was it just a pilot gimmick? They worked okay.

6. Curious to see more of that crazy Bay of Pigs evacuation.

7. Where have they been hiding Karine Vanasse?

8. If we hadn't read an article proving it's true, we never would have bought the idea of stewardesses working as government spies.

9. Unlike the stock-character product-placement phoniness of "The Playboy Club," this show feels more organic and layered. It helps that the "we're a new breed of woman" revisionist feminism is mostly downplayed. They're stewardesses, people, not suffragists.

10. Girdles? Seriously?

11. Bridget is annoying. And she's barely in the show.

12. Who owns the Pan Am name and logo now? If this show hits, someone could probably make a lot of money selling baby blue leather flight bags.

13. The biggest concern is the pacing. This is one... slow... show. Glacial at times. Pick up the pace, folks.

Knee-jerk review: Fox's "Terra Nova"

2011-09-27T13:28:00.000-07:00

1. Cracker-jack premise: ecologically-destroyed future Earth sends colonists back through time to the dinosaur era to start over. Love it.

2. It's a Hollywood rule that Stephen Lang cannot play a good guy, so we were immediately suspicious of his true intentions when he showed up. And sure enough, by the end of the episode he looks like he's not to be trusted.

3. Call us chicken, but it's never a good idea to go "OTG." Outside the gates. Not in the Cretaceous Period, anyway.

4. Spielberg's fingerprints are all over this, what with the heavy-handed, overly sentimental Family (with a capital F) themes.

5. Love this world.

6. But as of now, we're not particularly endeared to the married couple leads. In the future, it's illegal to have a third child. This seems perfectly reasonable. The planet looks like Coruscant - one big giant polluted city - and everyone wears breathing masks. So our couple decides to have a third kid anyway and dad goes to prison. And we're supposed to feel sorry for them why exactly? Worse, when asked why they had the third kid, he just shrugs "Seemed like a good idea at the time." What an ass.

7. No way do we buy the whole escape-from-prison, break-into-the-colonist-center sequence. A clumsy contrivance to add some tension and conflict in the first half hour (and to introduce that favorite trope of Spielberg's, the Absent Father, via the prison sentence). Which is stupid, because there's plenty of organic, natural tension at Terra Nova.

8. That wide shot of Terra Nova is a terrible painting. Look, kids, where we'll soon live: Matte Painting World!

9. We do like those rifles with the built-in flashlights.

10. Do shows now have to have an overarching, "Lost"-style backstory mystery? Is it written into the contracts?

Knee-jerk review: NBC's "Prime Suspect"

2011-09-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

1. The consensus seems to be that Maria Bello is too good for this show.

2. There's a definite haze of been-there, done-that here. How many more gritty NYPD-set police procedurals can one viewing nation tolerate?

3. It may be steeped in realism, but it's just hard for us to buy the level of antagonism, sexism, and open disgust Bello's character has to face in her own squad room. It's feels contrived. So these guys have never had to work with a woman before? Never had to face a coworker who may have pulled a string to get a promotion? We call bull.

4. Plus, the show does such a good job painting those other cops as arrogant, lazy, intolerant idiots it's very hard to muster much interest in what happens to them.

5. They're sharing a drink in the middle of the day, people. In the squad room. Hollywood thinks that makes them, you know, complex. We think it's makes them unsympathetic jackasses.

6. It's also a little precious the way everyone's got those authentic New York accents.

7. In other words, it's trying too hard and we just don't care.

8. That doesn't mean it's not polished and well-made. We're just not interested. No thank you.

Knee-jerk review: CBS' "Person of Interest"

2011-09-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

1. Now that's a pilot. Hoo-wee.

2. There is an undeniable thrill that comes from watching a supremely skilled and cold-bloodedly confident Special Forces bad-ass conduct business. With Jim Caviezel, Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer has a successor in the don't-cross-me staredown.

3. Smart, lean, exciting.

4. Our only complaint is some of the on-the-nose, spoon-feeding dialogue that's there just to be completely sure viewers at home are following along and don't missing anything.

5. Big third act twist! Bonus points. We hate ourselves for not seeing it coming.

6. But is Caviezel's character too invulnerable and too resourceful to create genuine tension? Will audiences ever wonder about whether or not he'll prevail? We predict he'll get kidnapped and beaten up once per episode to help with that.

7. Michael Emerson is always smooth, isn't he?

8. Genius premise, but haven't we all just about had enough of J.J. Abrams and his hit factory?

9. The 9/11 subplot feels somewhat organic here. So many movies and TV shows shoehorn it in to make things feel topical or add some level of sympathy for the characters.

10. Of all the new shows we've seen thus far, this is the one we're most excited about.

Knee-jerk review: Fox's "Glee"

2011-09-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

1. Our patience is wearing thin, McKinley High's New Directions.

2. This show is surely one of the most illogical and ridiculous things on the air. We spend half the time analyzing the stupid plot contrivances and implausible character choices. It's like the producers aren't even trying to be realistic. Like, at all. Exhibit A: it's fundamentally impossible that the Glee Club are social pariahs so long as the varsity quarterback and two hot cheerleaders are members. That's just not how the high school hierarchy of popularity works.

3. But there's something addictively exuberant about some of the dance numbers, such as this episode's "We Got the Beat" lunchroom number or the "It's Not Unusual" number in the quad. When they work, they work.

4. But then there's all of those other stupid scenes without singing and dancing that just don't work.

5. As un-P.C. as this may sound, we're getting tired of Kurt. And his wardrobe.

6. But the person we're most tired of is Sue Sylvester. Her conflict with Mr. Schu hits the same beats in every single episode. Plus, in the real world, both of them would have been fired long ago. She's psychotic, he's pathetic.

7. Yes, Lea Michelle remains a member of the Future Ex-Mrs. Cheese Fry Club.

8. Coach Beiste is probably our favorite character.

9. We also find strange amusement in the rapid-fire "previously on" recap that comes at the top of every episode that ends abruptly with a-- "Glee!"

Knee-jerk review: Fox's "Fringe"

2011-09-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

1. Oh how we love this show.

2. It's clearly a descendant of "The X-Files." But one could argue that this show is better in that the overarching mythology still makes sense and the producers aren't afraid to answer questions and keep the plot moving forward. That's in contrast to the frustrating way "The X-Files" was determined to keep everything as murky as possible for as long as possible. (We hated "X-Files" mythology episodes.) For every question that was answered, three new ones were posed and eventually audiences stopped caring and changed the channel. This is the same sort of thing that crippled "Lost."

3. Very clever of the writers, the way so many lines of dialogue had that "Peter is gone and I don't even know it" double-meaning.

4. Agent Lee's horn-rim glasses. Very 1960s chic.

5. It's clear evidence of genre bias the way Emmy ignores this show. John Noble has been doing sterling work since the very beginning and now with Anna Torv playing two very different versions of the same person (the first scene of this episode should go directly to Emmy voters), the oversight is becoming ridiculous. You can't tell us Torv's work last season wasn't better than the hammy theatrics of Kathy Bates on "Harry's Law" (Emmy loves movie stars) or the tired, empathetic retread of Mariska Hargitay on "SVU" (Emmy loves nominating the same people over and over).

6. The first page raises your security clearance, the second page says we'll prosecute you if you talk about what you're about to see.

7. We like Astrid's new haircut.

8. Note to self: erasing someone from time requires a cathode-ray tube.

Studio audience breakdown on "The Price Is Right"

2011-09-23T23:54:00.001-07:00

86% tourists from out of town

79% will watch the whole show on the TV monitors rather than looking at the stage

77% self-proclaimed die-hard TPIR fans

73% will need the audience's advice to make every decision on stage

68% spunky and spry retirees

60% from the Midwest

55% overweight

42% will scream louder than they did at the Duran Duran concert they saw when they were 13

37% groups in matching T-shirts with cute phrases ironed on the front

34% college students

22% will hug Drew Carey a little too hard

21% have zero chance of ever making the right bid to get out of Contestants' Row

20% active military in dress uniform

19% friends/spouses of self-proclaimed die-hard TPIR fans dragged along

14% locals taking the day off

13% couples in matching T-shirts with cute phrases ironed on the front

11% RV drivers

7% newlyweds

6% too frail/small to spin the Big Wheel

Fantasy "Survivor"

2011-09-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

The pop-culture savants at Grantland have done it again. They've concocted a fantasy-football style game based on CBS's hit "Survivor," exposing all of the show's cliches and themes.

Take a look:

* No points for unintentional nudity

* All hook-up points scored at triple value (they deserve them for hooking up with someone who hasn’t showered for a month)

* Making a catty exit speech: 25 points

* Wining a “tie vote” challenge: 10 points

* Stealing or hiding food: 15 points

* Killing a mammal and eating it (i.e., no fish or insects): 15 points (only killer gets points)

* Receiving medical attention: 20 points

* Adding additional flair on tribal vote card (smiley faces, hearts, symbols, etc.): -10 points

* Announcing that you are "in control of this game": 5 points

* Accusing someone of eating more food than they were rationed: 5 points

* Being sent home with an unused immunity idol: -20 points

* Jeff Probst stops addressing you by your real name and starts using a nickname: 25 points (one time only)

* The Loved One who comes to the island is not a parent, spouse, kin, or sibling: 20 points

* No Loved One comes to the island: 100 points

* Claiming your real job gives you an advantage in the game: 25 points

* Crying in Tribal Council: 5 bonus points

* Jury member makes a survivor cry in the Final Tribal Council: 20 points

* Getting injured in an immunity challenge in an unathletic manner: 15 points

* Having so much trouble swimming that it briefly seems like you might drown: 10 points

* Being unable to light a fire: -5 points

* Being unable to make fire in a tie breaker: -5 more points

* Comparing another contestant to vermin in Tribal Council: 10 points

* Faking possession of an immunity idol: 10 points (one time only)

* Unsuccessfully hiding the immunity idol: 5 points

* Claiming that you will "teach these young people a thing or two": 10 points

* Saying something that makes Jeff Probst raise his eyebrows: 10 points

Knee-jerk review: NBC's "Law & Order SVU"

2011-09-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

1. Now we remember why we quit watching this show.

2. Though Linus Roache should have his own spin off: "Mike Cutter, D.A." We love his character. So good to see him again. We miss the original "Law & Order."

3. Mariska Hargitay looks very old and tired here. Maybe she should have left the show with Chris Meloni.

4. And what's with her crying scene? Eliot's retiring, he's not moving to Norway.

5. We still can't believe Ice T has created a television acting career for himself.

6. Same with Richard Belzer. We remember watching him as some scary R-rated comic on a 1980s HBO comedy special.

7. "SVU" is just plain crazy. The season premiere isn't as loopy as some recent episodes, which often pile on plot twist after plot twist at the expense of logic and plausibility, suggest that every suspect is a criminal mastermind and/or foamy-mouthed sociopath, and never met a salacious detail that wasn't worth exploiting. Tonight we get discussions of gang rape, forced oral sex (and the disposition of the resulting fluid), and mass murder, along with some sanctimonious preaching about African civil wars, Euro-trash politicians, U.S immigration policy, and classism.

8. The show wants to educate you, sure, but it mostly wants to shock you with sex and violence.

9. Once upon a time, "Law & Order" would use a real world headline only as a jumping-off point. But here, the season premiere pretty much spends the first 30 minutes following the same exact narrative as the infamous Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case. What is this, "Dateline" with Ann Curry? Where's the fictionalization and dramatic license? Yawn.

Knee-jerk review: NBC's "Whitney"

2011-09-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

1. Perhaps you've heard of it? NBC has spent what is surely a fortune in promotion. We've seen Whitney Cummings in TV spots, on the sides of buses, on thirty-foot-tall billboards, and stuck to plywood walls of construction sites. We get it. There's a new show on called "Whitney."

2. NBC is not only showing it love with advertising, this show also has a plum post-"Office" timeslot. NBC's doing everything it can outside of tying you down and making you watch.

3. "Half of all marriages end in sweatpants." That's kind of funny. "I don't mean to be rude means you're about to say something crazy rude." That's kind of lame.

4. Which summarizes this show in a nutshell. Kind of funny, kind of lame.

5. It's very traditional. Live studio audience, wacky characters, bright no-contrast lighting, set-up/punchline jokes. Interesting that the Cheese Fry's inventory of new sitcoms has continued to lead to this question of reality versus artifice. Should sitcoms strive to capture the natural humor in our lives (like "Modern Family") or create an alternate universe that's completely bonkers (like "Cougartown")? Is one better than the other?

6. Case in point: in the real world, no one knocks themselves unconscious trying to pull off a pair of pants.

7. But there is something genuine and honest about a comfortable, veteran couple worried about maintaining that romantic spark.

8. Good, but not great. And we had such high hopes.

9. Luckily for Whitney, her other show is much better; she's a co-creator of "Two Broke Girls."

Knee-jerk review: NBC's "The Playboy Club"

2011-09-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

1. Hmmm. Not nearly as bad as we thought it would be. Also not at all as good as it could be.

2. Clearly a "Mad Men" ripoff, but without the somber, downbeat realism and basic-cable edgy fearlessness. It wants to be sexy, but it's stuck on NBC, people. If only it were on FX or Showtime.

3. Surely one of the show's reasons for being is to polish the Playboy brand, what with the Hugh Hefner voiceovers and whispered suggestions about how progressive and feminist the whole hot-girls-in-bunny-outfits actually is. We wonder if this show wasn't Hef's idea.

4. The Cheese Fry doesn't often throw this word around, but actress Amber Heard is beautiful. Incredibly so.

5. The 1960s mod production design may be the best part of the show. Who wouldn't want to live in that guy's two-story apartment with the circular staircase and the sliding bathroom door?

6. But come on, a Chicago mobster murder in the first 15 minutes? Really? Shouldn't you save that for sweeps at least?

7. And he's killed by... wait for it... a high heel. Get the symbolism? Nudge nudge.

8. The most interesting thing may be the logistics of the Chicago Playboy Club. You have to present a key to get through the door. And once you're there, they slide a nameplate onto the wall so everyone knows which members are present. (Wikipedia tells us that membership at the Chicago club was initially $25 a year.)

9. To us, Eddie Cibrian looks like a kid playing grown-up.

10. The best-developed character is Laura Benanti's character, the older "bunny" (should that be capitalized?) who's trying to reinvent herself.

11. It's an amusing diversion, but ultimately too fluffy.

Knee-jerk review: Fox's "New Girl"

2011-09-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

1. We stipulate that your enjoyment of this show will have a lot to do with whether or not you find Zooey Deschanel's nerd quirkiness endearing or annoying. We like it, but it's easy to see how someone might hate it.

2. We've made a big deal recently about TV shows that feel real versus TV shows that are clearly existing in a writers-room alternate universe. "New Girl" is definitely not a portrayal of the real world. No, this is Sitcom World, where everyone's witty and good-looking and getting dumped is the worst thing that could happen to you.

3. Four 20-somethings share a huge, spacious loft apartment? One's a bartender, one's a trainer, one's a marketing guy of some kind, and we're not sure what Zooey does. No way they can all afford that place.

4. We wish we had a theme song.

5. The show deftly captures what it's like to have roommates who aren't your best friends. You like your roommate, you hang out with your roommate, but there's still that tension.

6. We could use a Douchebag Jar at our office. Brilliant.

7. Zooey's cheating boyfriend is played by an actor who starred as possibly one of the most sociopathic characters in the history of television advertising. Whenever we saw this commercial, we wanted to punch this guy right in the balls as hard as possible.

Knee-jerk review: CBS' "Two Broke Girls"

2011-09-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

1. Very charming.

2. And also doing as much as it can to at least try to look like reality, rather than a laugh-tracked alternate reality where entry-level jobs pay for huge city apartments, no one locks their front door, and everyone's acquaintance is a cutesy-quirky "character" with a snarky catchphrase.

3. We also like that the show didn't take the easy route and make spoiled rich girl Beth Behrs an airhead. Here, she clearly has a considerable education and a clear sense of decency. Which dovetails nicely with Kat Dennings' street smarts and unapologetic misanthropy.

4. Some very funny lines. Laugh out loud lines.

5. We like also the final card showing us the tally for the girls' savings. Clever running gag idea.

6. We know it's only a sitcom, but there's something vaguely feminist about the show that feels fresh and lively. Two smart, strong women (who so far don't seem to need men) pooling their resources to work for a better life.

7. Yes, Kat Dennings is hot. Especially with those boots.

8. We're not sure the show needs Garrett Morris as the cashier. We predict he'll be gone soon.

Knee-jerk review: CBS' "Two and a Half Men"

2011-09-20T20:41:00.000-07:00

1. No matter how awful Charlie Sheen may have acted towards CBS, Warner Bros. and Chuck Lorre, it seems to us really hateful to kill off his character with such glee. "He exploded like a balloon filled with meat." Wow. Like, icky. The whole funeral open was exceedingly unfunny.

2. We never were fans of this show. It was always funny in that forced set-up/punchline sort of sitcom way. But it is also completely focused on crude, graphic sex jokes to exclusion of all else. (This despite the fact that it features an underage character.)

3. Ashton Kutcher did fine in what's a somewhat thankless role, but the dynamic between his character and Jon Cryer's character seems completely different than the Jon Cryer-Charlie Sheen relationship. We applaud the producers for daring to go in a completely different direction. But will it work? More importantly, will we ever watch again to find out?

4. We noticed the title sequence billing of Cryer and Kutcher. One of those Towering Inferno credit agreements, it seems, where one gets the left-hand slot, but the other gets the upper-slot.

5. Angus T. Jones was barely in the episode for reasons unknown. He was there for a couple of delightful fart jokes, however. His agent must be so proud.

6. Even if you don't watch it all the time, surely you can still sing it with us: "Mennnn."

7. They couldn't help themselves, could they? Urn of ashes must always lead to hilariously unintentional cloud of spilled ash. Must be a sitcom rule somewhere.

Knee-jerk review: NBC's "Free Agents"

2011-09-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

1. Now this is funny. And kind of odd, which we appreciate.

2. Historically we have not liked Hank Azaria. We're not sure why. But he's good here. A screwed up divorcee who knows he's screwed up but just can't help himself.

3. The flying Dutchman is easier with three people.

4. Unlike "Up All Night," the workplace here at least has some basis in reality. You or someone you know might actually have a job sort of like this. Bonus points for that.

5. Add Kathyrn Hahn to our list of future ex-Mrs. Cheese Frys. She's what we call quirky hot.

6. With the co-worker characters, the show is walking that fine line between colorful-but-real and wacky-but-phony. So far it's the former. So far.

7. Potato.

Three interactions with noisy moviegoers

2011-09-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

G.I. Jane (1997) - Offender: stupid high-schoolers. Crime: talking and laughing during the movie. Our response: an ear-splitting "Shhh!" followed by our very best stink-eye stare-down when they looked over to see who dared tell them to keep it down.

The Core (2003) - Offender: douchebag high-schooler with his dimwit friends. Crime: carrying on a cell phone conversation in the middle of the movie. Our response: a loud "Shut up!" which prompted a fellow moviegoer to add in a "Can you get off the phone?!" They did and then we spent the rest of the movie wondering where in the parking lot the retribution beatdown would happen.

Mission Impossible 3 (2006) - Offender: middle-aged fool. Crime: performing open-mouthed crunching on a brought-from-home bag of smelly popcorn as the movie started. Our response: gently touching his arm and hissing "Do you mind please keeping it down?"

The lesson to us: only go to movies in...

1. An empty theater (first show on a weekday, preferably) so you can sit as far away as possible from your fellow loathsome humans. They cannot be trusted.

2. A 100% sold out theater (opening weekend evenings) so that the dull murmur of the hundreds of people will drown out the more asinine moviegoers. There's also a peer-pressure in effect: when someone's a jerk, it won't fall only on your shoulders to enforce civility.

Knee-jerk review: NBC's "Up All Night"

2011-09-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

1. Hmmm. Disappointing overall. The funniest bits were in the endless NBC promos, especially the direct-address bits where Christina Applegate and Will Arnett purr into the camera all sexy, only to reveal that their big "fantasies" involve getting some help with the baby.

2. The show itself is amusing, but not funny really. You'll smile, but you might not laugh.

3. We'll give it a few more chances. We do understand that it can take a new show some time to find itself, but then again, life is too short to watch episode after episode while six-figure writers try and work it out. Call us when it's ready, you know?

4. Also not keen on Maya Rudolph's character. Or even that whole workplace setting. Characters on TV shows are never ordinary people with boring jobs. Christina Applegate isn't a marketing manager or a teacher. No, she's the producer of a talk show. We can all relate, can't we? It's such a tough job.

5. The domestic stuff with the baby feels genuine and works with subtlty. That stands in sharp contrast to the broad, forced, this-is-a-wacky-sitcom humor at the TV show office.

6. Will Arnett is just this side of genius.

7. Christina Applegate, to us, is a little overrated in the comedy department. Funny and appealing, yes, but not out-and-out hilarious.

15 ways a 2-year-old avoids going to sleep

2011-09-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

Based on a true story.

1. She wants a drink of water.

2. She wants to go to the bathroom.

3. She wants to give you her stuffed lion.

4. She wants her stuffed lion back.

5. She wants her other baby doll.

6. She wants a napkin to clean up the water she spilled on her sheet.

7. She wants you to sing the theme from "Sesame Street."

8. She wants to shake your hand.

9. She wants to go the bathroom again.

10. She wants her mother.

11. She wants a tissue to blow her nose.

12. She wants to jump up and down.

13. She wants you to sing "Rock a Bye Baby."

14. She wants you to pick up the bottle of water she just dropped on the floor.

15. She wants her other, other baby doll.

You call this music?

2011-09-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

Our recent viewing of the MTV Video Music Awards (on a network that no longer runs videos) left us feeling two steps away from the AARP. We'd heard of a few of the musical acts featured on the show, but the majority of singers and bands were completely alien to us. There ought to be a YouTube video montage of our puzzled face and grunts of "Who the hell is that?"

We decided to take a look at the Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart and see which, if any, of the top 20 songs this week we knew.

1. "Moves Like Jagger" - Maroon 5/f Christina Aguilera

We love Maroon 5. "Wake Up Call" is on our list of songs of which we never tire.

2. "Party Rock Anthem" - LMFAO

Our devotion to Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" might be a big help with staying somewhat current with pop music (Lady Gaga made her big splash on SYTYCD with her first hit "Just Dance"). We know this song from that show. And we bought it on iTunes. So far, so good.

3. "Pumped Up Kicks" - Foster the People

Who?

4. "Lighters" - Bad Meets Evil/f Bruno Mars

We know Bruno Mars, of course. He's charming if weightless. And we think we've heard of Bad Meets Evil. But we couldn't pick this song out of an audio lineup.

5. "Last Friday Night" - Katy Perry

It's probably not cool to admit an affection for Katy, but every song of hers seems like a finely-tuned pop-music Swiss watch, perfectly crafted and sleekly executed. How can you not like "Teenage Dream"?

6. "Super Bass" - Nicki Minaj

Apparently, Nicki is a big deal. We're also aware that she dresses outrageously, which is very important these days. But we don't know her music.

7. "How to Love" - Lil Wayne

All we really know about Lil Wayne is that he is one scary-looking tattooed dude.

8. "Good Life" - OneRepublic

We know the band, but not this song.

9. "Give Me Everything" - Pitbull/f NeYo, Afrojack, and Nayer

We think this one was performed on the VMAs. Not sure. Four in a row now we don't know. Pitbull is always a slick dresser. We couldn't pull off that look, that's for damn sure.

10. "Stereo Hearts" - Gym Class Heroes f/Adam Levine

We've heard of it, but don't know it.

11. "Cheers (Drink to That)" - Rihanna

"What's My Name" and "Love the Way You Lie" are gems. We don't know this one, but it's new - maybe in time we'll recognize it. In general, we don't get all the hubbub over Rihanna. Seems like any 20-something singer could have the same career if given the same songs.

12. "I Wanna Go" - Britney Spears

Don't know this one. We seem to be aging out of the Britney skeevy club-pop genre.

13. "Tonight Tonight" - Hot Chelle Rae

We have this on iTunes. A jangly anthem that's a staple of movie trailers and TV spots right now.

14. "Rolling in the Deep" - Adele

Who hasn't heard this song over and over and over since the spring? We get it, she's talented. She's also overrated in the same way that Amy Winehouse was overrated. It always seems to us to be more about admiring their work to appear cool and discerning, rather than actually buying their music.

15. "If I Die Young" - The Band Perry

We know this song. A country crossover. Dark.

16. "You and I" - Lady Gaga

This is her new one. We don't know it. There's something of a Gaga backlash brewing it seems. But we remain convinced that she's a genius, even if she's a little odd. Comparisons have been made to Madonna, but Gaga has a better voice and a stronger theatrical streak (she commits to her craziness in ways that Madonna never did; Madonna always seemed to be winking so we knew she was in on the joke). And Gaga is succeeding in a world far different than the one that Madonna dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, music label monopolies drove the artists and spent millions in marketing dollars and MTV videos. There wasn't much competition. That was before the internet and digital downloaded gutted the music business and fractured the audience. To succeed now demands a new set of skills in self-promotion.

17. "She Will" - Lil Wayne/f Drake

It'd be an interesting study to look at this proliferation of the "featuring" element in hip-hop/R&B songs. It seems to have started sometime around 2000 as a novelty (usually mixing gritty rappers with female singers), but now it's become commonplace.

18. "You Make Me Feel" - Cobra Starship/f Sabi

We like this one. We bought it on iTunes. But the better Cobra Starship song is the infectious "Good Girls Gone Bad."

19. "Someone Like You" - Adele

Sorry, but... yawn. She sang this on the VMAs. Stately and important, yes, but also slow and dull.

20. "I'm On One" - DJ Khaled/f Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne

Nope. We can tell you that Drake is the guy in that 7-Up commercial where the singer broke apart like a robot, but the soft drink put him back together.

So... out of 20 "hit" songs, we've heard of 7 or 8. Not a great batting average, but most of these songs seem pitched to a younger demographic.

In other words, sometimes we prefer the cozy embrace of SiriusXM's 80s channel.

Uninformed fall TV preview

2011-09-06T21:33:00.001-07:00

What little we know about the upcoming slate of fall television shows we've learned from TV spots, billboards, and glossy supermarket-checkout magazines. But that's more than enough for us to form certain opinions, such as our utter lack of interest in NBC's "Free Agents" (coworkers sleep together, hilarity ensures) or the CW's "Ringer" (twins fight, thrills ensue) based solely on our fervent disinterest in Hank Azaria and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

The eight new shows we'll be sampling:

"Charlie's Angels" (ABC) - We'll take a look. But we all know there's simply no way ABC didn't screw this up like NBC screwed up the "Bionic Woman" remake a few years back. We're also not fans of making John Bosley a 20-something hunk. But if they keep the theme song (and the explosion logo), we'll cut them a small bit of slack.

"New Girl" (Fox) - By now we've probably seen every joke from the pilot thanks to the endless spots on Fox, but this is still the show we're most rooting for. That said, we stipulate that the sort of adorably awkward and quirky pixie girl Zooey Deschanel specializes in doesn't exist in the real world. But we don't watch Fox to get a look at the "real world." We watch Fox to see parallel universes that involve people trapped in amber and disappearing Joshua Jacksons.

"Pan Am" (ABC) - Could this "Mad Men" in the air? It should be, it could be. But it's probably not.

"Person of Interest" (CBS) - Seems appropriately gritty and dark, but it may be trying too hard to be a post-9/11 statement show. We'd also like to note that this is the same network responsible for the insufferably cheesy "Hawaii Five-O." (Then again, it's also the home of the best show on broadcast TV: "The Good Wife.") Bonus points for post-"Lost" Michael Emerson.

"The Playboy Club" (NBC) - We were excited by this other 1960s period drama what with the sexy backdrop and hot women. But then we learned it revolves around a mob murder. That can't be good.

"Two Broke Girls" (CBS) - We have a crush on Kat Dennings. The end.

"Up All Night" (NBC) - Despite a very strong cast (Will Arnett rules), we're skeptical if the show can mine a season's worth of material out of, you know, just being tired and rundown because of a baby.

"Whitney" (NBC) - Whitney Cummings is genuinely funny and NBC seems to have decided that this is the show that deserves the bulk of it advertising budget. They're pushing it very, very hard. They either know they have a hit or they're shoving a lame show down our throats a la NBC's "Joey."

Why bad movies get made

2011-09-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

This is perhaps the most common complaint made by avid moviegoers and followers of the Hollywood film industry. Why do crappy movies get made?

The answer is, of course, complicated. Filmmaking is a decentralized business where no two movies are put together the same way (compared to the standardization of building construction or Coca-Cola bottling), where hundreds of people who may have never met before spend three months together creating the end result (compared to the close-knit fraternities of banking and legal systems), and where tens of millions of dollars go into producing something you will likely use for only two hours (compared to cars that last many years or a tube of toothpaste that you'll squeeze for weeks). It's a crazy business unlike any other.

But here's a quick rundown of some factors that might lead to that bad movie showing up at your local cineplex.

1. Profitability trumps quality. You may think that movie is lame and ridiculous, but if the studios are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars, they don't much care what you think. To then, it's a huge success and they're already planning two sequels. Hollywood is a business driven by profits, not artistic excellence. This is even more true of the six major studios who have to answer to shareholders.

2. The movie wasn't made for you. In other words, "crappy" is in the eye of the beholder. Except for those handful of sophisticated movies made with an eye towards Oscars, Hollywood studios mostly market to younger audiences. Teenagers represent the biggest audience. Not only do teens go a lot, but if they find a movie they like, teens might go more than once. This repeat-business is what drives super-hits like Avatar, Titanic, and Star Wars into the box office stratosphere. (This is also why most movies stick with the PG-13 rating. More and more, R-ratings are seen as a risky move that cuts out that lucrative teen audience. The Hangover is the rare R-rated superhit.) What this all means is that if you're a 40-year-old with discerning tastes, you probably won't like a lot of what's released by Hollywood because they're not making movies for you. They'd like if it you came, sure. They hope you will. But they design many of their movies with the assumption that you probably won't go. (The grail for Hollywood is the so-called "four quadrant" movie - a title that appeals to all four demographics: young male, young female, older male, older female. Movies that can draw all four and hit that bullseye are always monster hits.) Bottom line: your 12-year-old nephew loves that movie you think is terrible. Which of you is right?

3. Someone powerful wanted it made. If you're watching a bad movie that involves some A-list actor or director, it's a good possibility that what you're seeing is something called a "passion project." Translated, that means it's a project that would never get made in a million years were it not for the involvement of the big name. It's that pretentious period piece the Oscar-winning actor always wanted to make or the dark World War I drama the superstar director wrote eight years ago and has been obsessed with ever since. These get made, if only because the producers and studios want to get in the A-list talent's good graces. We think the best example of this is Click, a deeply weird and dark movie that would have never gotten made were it not for Adam Sandler starring in the lead. We also suspect this is how Larry Crowne happened. (Then again, there is a bright side to this phenomenon: it's also how Inception got made.)

4. The thing just went off the rails. There may be some in Hollywood who gleefully crank out bad movies, but for the most part, no one consciously sets out to make a crappy film. Everyone goes into it with the very best of intentions. Everyone dreams of Oscars and winning the weekend box-office derby. If you were going to spend 12-18 months of your life on something, would you really waste your time on some awful, cheesy project if you could help it? But with countless creative and business decisions involved, the whole thing can very easily go sideways. Not every choice is the right one. You just hope to be right more often than you're wrong. (It's always an interesting exercise to read the original script of a bad movie - the script is usually much stronger than the final product, which shows how far off-base movies can go as they grind through the whole process.)

5. There's a pre-existing audience for the material. Not only do movies now cost millions to make, but they cost millions to market. With so much entertainment competition out there, it's harder and harder for movie studios to cut through the noise and make an impression on audiences bombarded by internet ads, TV spots, billboards, video games, and 200 TV channels. One marketing executive put it thus: unlike most companies that might launch a new product once a year, Hollywood releases a new product every Friday. So marketers have to go from zero awareness to creating enough incentive to get people off the couch and standing at the box office to spend their $30. Nike doesn't have to do that. Starbucks doesn't have to do that. Which means that if a movie can be based on a TV show or a toy or a previous movie... that's a pretty attractive project. Instead of starting from scratch, now the studio is starting with something that audiences already know. And with tens of millions of dollars on the line, it's easy to see why Hollywood might pick a film version of "Bosom Buddies" over a strange new comedy no one's heard of. In short, Hollywood wants to mitigate its risk. The best way to do that is to create a movie that has some element audiences already know. (The other way to mitigate risk is to cut the budget, so that the movie doesn't have to do as well or attract as big of an audience to earn back its money and turn a profit. A lot of good movies are seen as failures only because their budgets were too big for the limited appeal they had with audiences.) While this strategy gave us Alvin and Chipmunks, it also gave us The Help.

6. Hollywood is driven by fear. Always remember that the producers and executives who make the decisions want to keep their jobs. And the best way to that is to play things safe. If they make a Tom Hanks movie that sucks, it's an easy position to defend: "Hey, it's Tom Hanks! He's a star!" No one will be fired for greenlighing a Tom Hanks movie. It's perceived as a slam dunk. Likewise, no one will be fired for greenlighting a movie based on a Hasbro game. What does get people fired? Greenlighting something risky or different or edgy (the kinds of things that usually result in great movies) that doesn't do well. If a studio spends millions on something out of the ordinary and it tanks spectacularly, someone will have to be held accountable. This rarely happens because no one wants to stick their neck out. And why should they? How often do you risk your job?

7. Audiences tend to like crap. Whether you agree with this or not, the simple fact is that audiences vote for movie quality every time they buy a ticket. If audiences stopped going to see mindless-mayhem action movies or insipid, sexist cookie-cutter romantic comedies, Hollywood would stop making them.

Seven stages of fantasy football

2011-09-04T21:34:00.001-07:00

1. Shock and disbelief – Did you really just waste a pick on Alex Smith? What the hell is the matter with you? You shouldn’t have been drinking during the draft.

2. Denial – Don’t worry, you can still win the championship with two backup running backs and a 40-year-old receiver. It’s not that bad. It only looks bad on paper.

3. Anger – The one week you finally start the surging Detroit defense and they give up 85 points? Someone must pay and pay dearly. Maybe throwing the remote control out the kitchen window will help... no, turns out that doesn’t help. And now you can’t change the channel and you’re stuck watching Raiders-Chiefs on channel 752.

4. Bargaining – Okay, if Matt Hasselbeck throws for 300 yards and Marion Barber scores five TDs, you’re still in this. Miracles can happen, right? Right? You can always find that super-sleeper on waiver wires, the one scrub player that’s already been picked up and dropped by five other teams. But it’ll be different with you. You can make it work.

5. Guilt – You’ve wasted seven weekends of your life rooting for those go-nowhere New York Giants and all you have is a 2-6 record to show for it. "What does the outside look like on Sundays, daddy?" "Leave me alone, kid, Eli’s finally in the red zone."

6. Depression – Who are you kidding? All you know about football you learned from “Friday Night Lights” and Madden videogames. You couldn’t tell a Cover-2 from a Skinny Post if you had a gun to your pathetic head. You’re useless. No wonder you drafted Alex Smith and started a 40-year-old receiver.

7. Acceptance – There’s always next year.

Full disclosure: this was created for a private fantasy football league (go Anthrax Avalanche!), but we thought our few loyal readers might also enjoy it.

Blow off the cobwebs

2011-09-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

No new Cheese Fry posts since July 31? Can that be right? Did we miss all of August? To our two or three loyal fans, we will try to do better. We know you rely on our uninformed opinions about things that don't matter.

But if you aren't already aware of this, please be sure to take a look at the Cheese Fry's Twitter feed. We're often tweeting more than we're blogging, so if you need a Cheese fix, look no further than the little black Twitter box on the right hand side of this page. Just scroll down a bit. You can't miss it.

Grinch Green should be a Crayola color

2011-07-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

A clever interactive color wheel from the good people at Slate.com using animated characters as the colors. We at the Cheese Fry are dedicated to providing you with useless pop culture bits and bobs.

Fox Sports was smarter than all of us

2011-07-17T20:11:00.001-07:00

Our new favorite website, Bill Simmons' Grantland, offers a long overdue celebration of the "Fox box," the always-on sports score. How did we ever live without it?

Thanks, Fox. In return, please don't hack our cell phones.

Dallas 105, Miami 95

2011-06-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

* Our condolences to the NBA and to ABC for this ending in six games instead of seven. Have to make that extra dozen millions somewhere else.

* Guess that Miami Heat dynasty will have to wait a year. Sorry, Big Three.

* As much as we love to hate LeBron James - and we certainly do - there's a small little piece of us that does feel bad for him. If he thought the second-guessing and criticism was bad these last few days, he ain't seen nothing yet. Let the Miami finger-pointing begin.

* We do like Heat coach Erik Spoelstra. We just wonder where he'll be coaching next year. Someone may need to be the scapegoat. And in the NBA, that's never the players.

* Is it us or did the use of the phrase "give credit to" suddenly spike in usage by the TNT and ABC-ESPN commentators?

* We will happily take some credit for this championship. We wore the same smelly Dallas Cowboys T-shirt for all three of the Maverick's clinching victories. Should we wash it or store it for the fall NFL season? A tough decision.

* The way Dwyane Wade spells his first name really bugs us. There, we said it.

* One sportswriter noted: the Mavericks were playing like a team that wanted to win the title, while the Heat were playing like a team that thought they deserved it. We concur.

* Memo from the Washington Redskins to the Miami Heat: you can't just get a title by opening up the checkbook. You still have to play all of the games.

* It's not that LeBron James chose to sign with the Heat. He's a free agent and has every right to take full advantage. Whatever. But the smug, arrogant manner in which he did so was absolutely insufferable and proves how tone-deaf he truly is when it comes to basketball fans. Not only was the forum he used (a live ESPN primetime special) unbelievably self-serving and asinine, even the words he used were just oh-so-cocky ("I'm going to take my talents..."). He sometimes seems like a guy more interested in developing his brand than in hardening his basketball resolve.

* We'll be brutally honest here: we still only partially understand what a pick-and-roll is.

* The poetry is undeniable in comparing the 2006 Maverick collapse with the 2011 Heat collapse. Revenge is a dish best served cold. And closing out a series in Game 6 is indeed cold.

* This would seem to end Dallas' Curse of the Crease.

* Has LeBron always insisted on chewing on his mouthpiece like that? Yuck.

* Rick Carlisle does look like Jim Carrey. Sorry.

* For Dirk Nowitski, this is surely a much sweeter victory than it would have been had he moved elsewhere to win his first title. A sports columnist somewhere noted that LeBron would probably have to win three rings in Miami to get the same feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment as he would have gotten by scraping and fighting to win just one in Cleveland. In an era of wheel-and-deal trades and mercenary free agency, there remains something noble about sticking with the same team and working hard, overcoming adversity, swallowing losses, and learning from your mistakes. Even if no one does it anymore.

* We attended Mavericks games back in the 80s at musty Reunion Arena and cheered for such names as Rolando Blackman, Mark Aguirre, and white guy Brad Davis. Just saying.

* Class act, Mark Cuban, allowing first Maverick owner Don Carter to be involved in the trophy ceremony.

* Be curious to learn more about the truth behind those NBA Cares spots, as in, which players truly give their time and energy to charities when the film cameras aren't rolling?

* Odds remain good that tomorrow morning's ESPN Radio Colin Cowherd show will still focus mostly on "What's wrong with LeBron?" rather than "How 'bout them Mavericks?" We smell a lot of excuse-making from media pundits to try and explain how Goliath just got the snot kicked out of him by David.

* There's something robotic about competitive athletes. In watching Nowitski monotone his way through another interview tonight, we started to realize that all cold-blooded players demonstrate this same lack of emotion. It's like putting Spock into your lineup. They can be charismatic, sure. But Kobe, Jordan, Tim Duncan - there's just something humorless about them. They exist to win. The end.

* If you don't live in Miami and were still rooting for the Heat, we want to know why.

* We do wish ABC would retire that strange NBA Finals montage that opened each game, what with it's chintzy miniature work and goofy video effects that overlap all of that old footage together to make it seem like an NBA Hall of Justice. Much more powerful and evocative are the cool still photos of the star players from each team posing with the trophy and looking alternately introspective and hungry.

* Enjoyable side-effect of NBA playoffs: seeing what kind of insane-but-oddly-fashionable suits the players will be wearing at the press conferences.

* Show of hands: who still thinks Dirk is soft? The defense rests.

* Another villain to loathe on the Heat? One Udonis Haslem. We hate his dumb cornrows as well.

* Thank you, Tyson Chandler. Your impact cannot be overstated.

* If they could go back in time, would the Heat still put on that ridiculous pep rally extravaganza of smoke and lasers and fire before the season started? Way to raise the expectations, fellas.

* This victory proves to sports prognosticators can get it very, very wrong. Almost no one picked the Mavericks to beat the Heat. If you say you did, you're a dirty liar. We didn't even give them much of a chance against the Lakers three weeks ago. (Chronic mistrust is a symptom of being a Mavericks fan who gets burned season after season.) But we're glad they proved them wrong.

Knee-jerk review: "Super 8"

2011-06-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

1. We went in with very high expectations. And mostly, we weren't disappointed.

2. The ending gets a little sentimental and implausible, which is to be expected from producer Steven Spielberg. Even so, it left us with a sour taste in our mouth. Some of those last beats just weren't needed. We got the point without needing the cinematic highlighter pen.

3. Elle Fanning. Wow. Steals the movie.

4. It's been compared to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., similarly unsettling sci-fi movies involving the otherworldly intruding on suburbia. Those films mostly played things very straight and skillfully evoked a grand sense of wonder and awe. But the closer cousin - especially in the above-mentioned, mildly disappointing finale - may be The Goonies, a fun movie that was proudly over-the-top in how it allowed a group of 13-year-olds to rather implausibly become action heroes.

5. In many ways, the outcast-friends-hanging-out scenes in 1979 suburbia (which crackle with Spielbergian attention to coming-of-age detail) are more engaging than the familiar sci-fi/fantasy subplots (enough with Area 51, please) that fill out most of the movie. Dealing with absent parents, struggling with crushes, finding your own voice. Those things are far more universal than dodging evil Air Force officers.

6. Stay for the credits.

7. A lot of people mock director JJ Abrams' visual style (seemingly started with the Star Trek reboot) that includes lots of blue-white lens flares in his shots. We don't understand what the big deal is. We like the flares. Something "real" about them, a messiness that suggests this is all really happening. If it were all make-believe, the cinematographer would have made sure to mask the flares, right?

8. We recently watched Abrams' Star Trek a second time and found it somewhat lacking. We wonder if our initial enthusiasm was mostly driven by relief that he and his team didn't screw it up. Strong cast saved a rather ordinary story and a completely impotent villain.

9. Yeah, if we saw what Martin saw, we'd probably throw up too.

10. That is one heck of a train derailment. The sound design alone is amazing.

11. We remain big fans of Kyle Chandler, even if his performance here is merely a darker, edgier version of his "Friday Night Lights" character Coach Taylor. That is, we never saw Coach Taylor throw a punch or handle a rifle.

13. The cube thing? Now that's cool. It's got to be so hard to surprise audiences who have seen everything and anything at this point. Never would have guessed what the cubes did.

14. We want Ron Eldard's car.

15. Good stuff.

Knee-jerk review: "X-Men: First Class"

2011-06-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

1. It's way better than the ads suggest. We went in thinking it'd be about a 6. It's actually a 9.

2. It may not be as solid as the top-notch X-Men 2, but it's certainly way better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which we'd stupidly deluded ourselves into liking two years ago. First Class definitely has a place in the pantheon of A-plus superhero movies

3. As one critic put it, it's a James Bond spy caper with superpowers. As in, the bad guy has a yacht with a secret submarine in the hull. It's that kind of movie.

4. January Jones, Rose Byrne, and Jennifer Lawrence in miniskirts and knee boots? Yes, please.

5. As always with the X-Men movies, there's some fairly sophisticated subtext about racism and self-acceptance, xenophobia and empathy. The mutants serve as perfect stand-ins for any oppressed group. Which makes us wonder: what would the world do if a group of people turned up with superhuman abilities? Odds are they wouldn't get a ticker-tape parade. Probably end up in Guatanamo Bay.

6. Brilliant idea, setting the movie in the 1960s against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Energizes what had sort of become a rather stale franchise. Honestly, other than Hollywood accountants, who was really clamoring for another X-Men movie?

7. The gimmicky cameo that 20th Century Fox surely thought would amuse the popcorn masses is actually, to us, rather cheesy and wholly unnecessary. As for the other cameo, we barely recognized her.

8. As hot as she may be, Hollywood, please... no more January Jones. We cry uncle. She's always stiff and uncomfortable. Blech.

9. But James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, on the other hand, dynamic and engaging. Why isn't Fassbender a movie star yet?

10. Moreso than in any of the previous X-Men movies, it's very easy here to see Magneto's point of view and understand his suspicion and mistrust of humanity.

11. By the way, Thirteen Days - about Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis - is one of our favorite movies.

12. There are gruesome ways to kill the villain... and then there's the gruesome way this movie kills its villain. Wow.

13. Some icky 9/11 allusions in a scene where people fall to their deaths with loud crashes ala the Twin Towers. And this got a PG-13 rating, people.

14. Go see it.

A binder full of movie tickets

2011-05-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

Regular readers know the Cheese Fry's obsessive-compulsive fixation on movies started at an early age. But it much worse than that: since 1984, we've saved the ticket stub to every movie we've ever paid money to see. Ever. As of now, that's 848 titles. What was surely an amusing quirk for a middle-schooler has now become a somewhat embarrassing secret habit for an adult pushing middle age. But it's a streak we can't possibly stop now. Can we?

Watch how the admission prices increase. It's true, kids, movies actually used to cost less than $5 per person. Also true: before the arrival of Lil' Fry, we often saw a movie or two every weekend.

1: Witness, Uniter Artists' Walnut Hill 6, $3.00 - date illegible

50: Big, Furneaux Creek GMC, $3.50 - June 18, 1988

100: Spirit of 76, Glen Lakes AMC, $3.50 - March 10, 1991

150: Jennifer 8, AMC Highland Park, $6.50 - November 13, 1992

200: The Ref, Hollywood USA Furneaux Creek, $3.25 - March 26, 1994

250: The Net, United Artists, $3.75 - August 5, 1994

300: A Very Brady Sequel, Mann's Hastings Ranch, $4.50 - August 30, 1996

350: Face/Off, Mann's Hastings Ranch, $4.50 - June 28, 1997

400: The Big Lebowski, Pacific's Crest Theater, $6.00 - April 11, 1998

450: Rushmore, Laemmle's Playhouse 7, $7.50 - February 6, 1999

500: Mansfield Park, Cinemark Legacy, $4.75 - December 27, 1999

550: O Brother, Where Art Thou, Laemmle's Sunset 5, $7.00 - January 28, 2001

600: Panic Room, Pacific Theater's The Grove, $9.50 - April 9, 2002

650: Chicago, Pacific Theater's The Grove, $7.50 - February 16, 2003

700: The Stepford Wives, Mann's Chinese Theater, $11.00 - June 12, 2004

750: Superman Returns, Mann's Chinese 6, $11.25 - June 29, 2006

800: Juno, Cinemark Legacy, $8.50 - December 26, 2007

848: Bridesmaids, L.A. Live, $10.00 - May 17, 2011

Knee-jerk review: "Bridesmaids"

2011-05-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

1. It's about what you would expect from a Judd Apatow-produced movie. Funny but sweet. Hilarious but sometimes disgusting. Fairly realistic main characters surrounded by strangely eccentric minor characters. Check, check, check. Our favorite, of course, remains Superbad.

2. Kristen Wiig, that sound you hear is your Hollywood stock rising. For once, she plays a relatively normal person. And she does it well. We like her very much.

3. Someone once told us that a comedy needs three big funny scenes to make it stick in viewer's minds. Here they are (your results my vary): dress fitting scene, airplane scene, bridal shower scene.

4. Melissa McCarthy steals the show without question, looking and acting nothing like the cutesy stock character she seems to play on the CBS sitcom "Mike and Molly" (we haven't seen an episode, but have bore witness to countless promos).

5. We, too, loved Wilson Phillips circa 1990.

6. The one false note, to us, is the wacky British roommates. Too much.

7. Would cops really let civilians (i.e. possible new girlfriends) ride along with them in a patrol car when they're on duty? Or let them sit on the hood of their car in a parking lot? Or let them work a radar gun?

8. Stray dogs in a restaurant parking lot is never a good sign.

9. Funny that Maya Rudolph's fiancee gets zero lines.

10. Dropping off a junker car at a swanky valet stand? We've been there, people. Not fun.

11. Good stuff. And will hopefully help get more smart, female-centric movies made.

12. As an aside, we saw trailers for Friends with Benefits and What's My Number, both of which seem atrocious, the sort of paint-by-number, connect-the-dots romantic comedies that feel completely artificial and contrived (and usually star Kate Hudson and/or Katherine Heigl). No thank you. Bridesmaids is no documentary, but at least it feels like it's a part of the real world.

"Survivor" Hall of Fame

2011-05-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Boston Rob, who won "Survivor: Redemption Island" last night, is surely the most deserving winner in "Survivor's" 22-cycle history.

"Survivor" juries can sometimes let their own bitterness and disappointment cloud their judgment, as when the "Samoa" jury infamously refused to give the $1 million prize to Russell, even though he'd dominated the game at Boston-Rob-like levels. Indeed, it never ceases to amaze the Cheese Fry when juries display such ridiculous sanctimony, preaching to the finalists about integrity and honor in a game where backstabbing is practically one of the rules. In this case, however, there was no doubt that Boston Rob pulled the strings from start to finish, making him a first-ballot inductee to the "Survivor" Hall of Fame. His was a master class in personal manipulation, poker-faced lying, physical and mental toughness, and social politicking.

The complete list of 2011 inductees:

* Boston Rob ("Marquesas, "All-Stars," "Heroes vs Villains," "Redemption Island") - Only four-time player. Dominates the social game and the challenges.

* Russell ("Samoa," "Heroes vs Villains," "Redemption Island") - Two-time finalist, two-time loser. But unfairly robbed of the prize in "Samoa" due to a sour-grapes jury that could appreciate his brilliance. His one liability is an apparent inability to play the social game and avoid antagonizing others.

* Parvati ("Cook Islands, "Fans vs Favorites," "Fans vs Favorites") - Perhaps the best social player in the show's history. Those who considered nothing more than a flirt often learned otherwise the hard way.

* Richard ("Borneo") - The godfather of it all. Inventor of the "alliance" strategy that has defined how the game is played. Too bad he's in prison right now and can't attend the induction ceremony.

* Stephenie ("Palau," "Guatemala," "Fans vs Favorites") - Toughest female competitor ever.

Didn't make the final cut:

* Amanda ("China," "Fans vs Favorites," "Heroes vs Villains") - Made it to the finals twice, lost twice. First contestant to log 100 days in the game.

* Amber ("Australian Outback", "All-Stars") - Standard-bearer for how the "coat-tails" strategy works. Boston Rob did all of the work, she came along for the ride and wound up winning.

* Coach ("Tocantins," "Heroes vs Villains") - One of the strangest contestants on the show, equal parts crazy-talk philosophizing, competitive determination, earnest sincerity, and outrageous let's-play-to-the-camera performance.

* Erik ("Fans vs Favorites") - Perhaps the most bone-headed strategic play in the show's history. Badgered into giving his immunity idol up to another contestant, then voted out. Classic.

* Phillip ("Redemption Island") - See Coach above.

You are now leaving Dillon, Texas

2011-05-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

For those with a DirecTV subscription, we hope you were smart enough to watch the last season of "Friday Night Lights" this past winter. If not, then you're hopefully catching up as the show reruns its final episodes on NBC. If Emmy were just, this show would get a slew of nominations for its final go-round. It really is that good. (And the closing moments of the series are supremely satisfying in a way we were not expecting - fans of the show are indeed rewarded.)

Those who've seen it, love it. But it was always tough to get audiences to sample the show. Too adult for teens, too teen for adults; too much football for non-football fans, not enough football for sports nuts. It was never an easy sell in a world where pre-sold titles drive ratings. Slap a "NCIS" on the title or revive some old fossilized brand like "Hawaii Five-O" and, bingo, you have yourself a top 20 show. Quality too often seems beside the point. If the networks don't have to take a chance to get a hit, why should they? (Rumor has it NBC brass insisted on a rather contrived and melodramatic "Desperate Housewives"-"One Tree Hill"-style murder-subplot in Season 2 in a desperate effort to up the ratings, one of the show's rare missteps.)

We've praised this show before, but it's worth repeating: there have perhaps been better dramas on television, but those typically involve high-stake, high-conflict jobs like cops, detectives, criminals, and doctors. It's very rare to find a show that wrings genuine emotion and tension out of "mundane" everyday situations: paying the rent, maintaining a marriage, coping with divorce, grappling with family problems, separating work pressures from home pressures. There's no wry one-liners or polished movie-star charm here, no handguns or out-of-breath footchases. This is a show that always strived for suburban realism, which may be another reason audiences had trouble with the show. It's easy to escape into an overblown world of rampaging serial killers and lovelorn wealthy doctors, less so when the middle-class TV characters deal with the same impossible problems from which you're trying to escape. This is a show, after all, where major characters by turns went to prison, took steroids, lost everything in a bad real estate deal, had an estranged father killed in action in Iraq, and suffered quadriplegic injuries. And that doesn't even include the fact that our hero was transferred to a horrible high school with no tradition of winning football - the horror.

NBC and DirecTV deserve our thanks for cutting a deal to share the costs and keep the show on the air. Critically-beloved, but low-rated shows like this simply don't run five seasons any more. Indeed, we may not again see this sort of quiet drama on network television, although "Friday Night Lights" showrunner Jason Katims' new NBC show "Parenthood" does seem to be cut from the same cloth.

Also worth celebrating...

* The show's distinctive visual style. "Friday Night Lights" employed a loose, raw feel in which actors were encouraged to improvise and cameramen filmed the action handheld as if shooting a documentary. This is a show that never felt staged. It felt captured.

* Real locations. "Friday Night Lights" was produced two time zones east of Hollywood and it showed in every frame. The Texas locations (mostly in and around Austin) added another element of grit and realism, whether a rundown hamburger shack, a crowded high school football stadium, a modest suburban house, or a proud (but struggling) car dealership.

* The moody country-rock soundtrack. The dreamy, wistful instrumentals were provided by Explosions in the Sky, but the show also added liberal doses of bands you don't always find on top-40 radio. End result: "Friday Night Lights" didn't really sound like any other show.

* A healthy marriage. Eric and Tami Taylor were surely two of the healthiest spouses ever depicted on television. They got into fights and disagreements, the worst of which of course comes in the final episodes of the series, but there was never any doubt of their commitment and admiration for one another. Marriages on TV are too often a narrative tool, a way to create a ratings event (let's have the main characters get married!), add vague backstory sorrow (let's have the main character be brooding because his wife left him!), or provide conflict (he can't be a doctor because his wife won't let him!). Real marriages just aren't that exciting - they involve constant compromise and negotiation, just like the sort we saw the Taylors engaged in.

* Football. For those who do like football, this was a show steeped deep in the obsessive culture of Texas high school football, exploring what it means to play on the field, coach from the sidelines, watch from the cold rickety stands, or long for your own teenage glory days years after you should have moved on. Yes, the show's climactic games almost always came to some ridiculous, gadget-play, last-second series of downs engineered by Coach Taylor... but it didn't always work. In keeping with the show's interest in realism, Taylor's teams often won, but sometimes they lost.

And so we bid goodbye to the sights and sounds of Dillon, Texas. Gone but not forgotten (thanks to DVD box sets).

For the record, our favorite character was always Buddy Garrity, but we sure did like looking at Tyra Collette.

Alan Sepinwall at Hitflix does a great job recapping the best moments of the series.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

A few words on "Law & Order: Los Angeles"

2011-04-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

We didn't watch the original "Law & Order" until about the time that Benjamin Bratt started. Remember him? Where'd he go? All of those old Chris Noth and Michael Moriarty episodes? Don't exist, as far as we're concerned. We are not "L&O" traditionalists. The last cast iteration featured our favorite character in all of the "L&O" pantheon: Linus Roache's Mike Cutter, who was more of a renegade, take-no-prisoners rule-breaker than Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy ever was.

So we came to "Law & Order: Los Angeles" with genuine excitement. It seemed like the perfect idea. Transplant a successful format to a new location, watch the ratings climb. Worked out well for the "CSI" shows... depending on how you define "well." Alas, the first batch of "LOLA" (it's a little too precious a nickname, don't you think?) episodes struggled and Dick Wolf took the show to the TV mechanic's shop, opened up the hood, and rebuilt the engine.

The new version of "LOLA" is certainly different, but is it better?

What works:

* We'd forgotten how good Alfred ("Throw me the whip" - Raiders of the Lost Ark) Molina can be. The doughy face makes him seem sleepy and lazy. And while we hate the contrivance that moved his character from the DA's office back to the police force, so far he's energized the "Law" elements of the show in a way that the monotone, blank-faced Skeet Ulrich never could. Molina didn't have much to do in the first round of episodes, but now it looks like he's going to be front and center. The better to chew the scenery and glare at people with sleepy, lazy, doughy eyes.

* Terrence Howard. Gold.

* Kind of cool how the show names its episodes based on the Los Angeles neighborhood in which the crime was committed. We're the sort of TV geek that pays attention to episode titles. And we appreciate purpose and consistency, like the clever titles of "Friends" and "The Big Bang Theory" episodes.

* While the revamp has reportedly tried to tamp down some of the Southern California sunniness to recapture the bleak, somber grays of the original series, there is still something fresh about the new setting. It's fun to see the detectives spend so much time in cars, driving from place to place, and it's also nice to see police work happening in places with trees and sunshine, not dank streets filled with tall buildings.

* For those of us familiar with Los Angeles, there's no better game that identifying the location of an L.A.-shot show. "Hey, that's the place over there by La Brea and Sunset!" "That's the thing by the thing in Santa Monica!"

What doesn't work:

* What's with the cheesy slow-motion new title sequence? It plays like a bad deodorant commercial. When you're chasing crooks and facing an angry press and trying to look like a bad-ass as you climb out of your car, don't stay dry. Stay extra dry. We preferred the rapid-fire, stock-photo montage of the original New York-based "Law and Orders."

* The narrative formula is getting a little creaky. We've covered this before. Crime, followed by interviews, followed by the red-herring wrong-suspect, followed by arrest of the right suspect, followed by trial curveball, followed by big courtroom showdown that may or may not lead to the punishment of the guilty. The more the show can deviate from that template, the better off it will likely be. As another critic noted, at this point there are literally thousands of hours of "Law & Order" out there in the world. How much more do we need?

* Enough with the lingering shots of corpses. It's bad enough that we hear the details, but do we need to see the horrors as well? We get it. Killing: bad, our cops and lawyers: good. The older we get, the more aggravated we are with the way cop shows like this fetishize murder scenes and zoom in on the bruises and blood. The kinkier and more outrageous the death, the better - though in "Law & Order's" defense, a great many of the murders are committed in the name of money, not depraved bloodlust. We harbor particular disgust with grubby, pseudo-scientific shows like "Criminal Minds" that wade into the bloody muck with glee, suggesting that the country is filled with serial killers and suggesting that there is no crime that science cannot solve, which is - of course - not always true. Seriously, who watches that stuff? And how can we find out where they live so we can stay away?

"Idol" odds

2011-04-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

Lauren, 3:2

James, 2:1

Scotty, 3:1

Jacob, 5:2

Casey, 7:1

Stefano, 10:1

Haley, 15:1

Knee-jerk review: "Hanna"

2011-04-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

1. Eric Bana is always cool. And the dude can rock a German accent.

2. But this movie belongs to Saoirse Ronan. With this, Atonement, and The Lovely Bones, she prove she's the real deal. Impressive. (Bonus points for the exotic first name.)

3. "I just missed your heart."

4. Imagine Salt or The Bourne Identity if the lead, killing-machine character were a 14-year-old girl.

5. How'd they manage to make Cate Blanchett look so unattractive?

6. A great soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers, especially the techno score that accompanies an incredible escape attempt.

7. This seems awfully harsh for PG-13. Lots of people get killed. Does it really make a difference if the violence is bloodless or off-screen? Guess the MPAA thinks so. And does the less-restrictive rating really open this movie up to wider audiences? We didn't see any kids in the audience. Why not just go for it and make it an R?

8. As great as the script is, we're particularly impressed by director Joe Wright. It can't be easy to strike just the right tone between tense action-thriller, poignant coming-of-age, and oddball black humor. It's a very strange, very quirky movie. And purposefully so, it seems. His last film, Atonement, is fairly genius as well.

9. Great use of some unusual exteriors, particularly a rundown, weed-choked amusement park in the finale.

10. That said, there is a bit of a pacing problem in the first 45 minutes or so.

11. Funny what happens to the boy who tries to kiss little assassin Hanna. She has some intimacy issues.

12. We liked it.

Top four somewhat criminal acts

2011-04-14T20:47:00.000-07:00

1. That time we drank too many beers and had too far to drive to get home, resulting in a unavoidable need to find a deserted alley in which to urinate for what seemed like three full minutes. You're never as aware of your surroundings as you are when you're looking in every direction all at once to be sure no one's around. That said, we couldn't have stopped even if a cop rolled up.

2. That time in college we stepped away from a first-run episode of "Seinfeld" to buy beers for a couple of freshmen. The store was right up the street, so it didn't take that long. But we did feel a pang of moral regret. Trust us, those knuckleheads had no business drinking.

3. That time in high school we helped steal a Dallas Morning News newspaper vending machine to try and get the change out of it. Turns out those things are pretty secure. Sorry, Belo Corporation.

4. That other time in high school we helped steal a bunch of fire extinguishers from a parking garage, then set them off in a creek behind a church. The resulting plume of CO smoke led someone to call the fire department. As we were leaving, we passed the fire truck, lights and sirens blazing. It's very hilarious when you're 17.

Evaluating the Charlie's Angels

2011-04-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

The Cheese Fry was well aware of the ABC hit drama - and we use that term loosely - "Charlie's Angels" back in the late 1970s. Though were a little too young to fully appreciate its unique, shall we say, charms, we remain big fans of that groovy title music, the vaguely sexist "But I took them away from all of that" voiceover, and the exploding-fireball silhouettes:

If we were putting together a detective agency comprised of nothing but Hollywood starlets and our disembodied voice coming through a 1975 speakerphone, who'd make the cut?

1. Kris Munroe (Cheryl Ladd) - If Farrah Fawcett was the senior who sneered when she caught you looking at her, Cheryl Ladd was the cute girl next door who'd go roller-skating with you on weekends. Big Angel crush.

2. Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith) - She stuck with the show for its entire five-season run, so she gets points for that. And she seemed to be the smart one because, you know, she had brown hair. Hollywood's rule, people, not ours.

3. Julie Rogers (Tanya Roberts) - We don't remember her on the show very well, but she's really really pretty. Gold star.

Left looking at the want ads:

1. Sabrina Duncan (Kate Jackson) - Now Sabrina's the really smart one: brown hair that's also short. But there's just something know-it-all about her, don't you think? Pass.

2. Jill Munroe (Farrah Fawcett) - Honestly, we never understood the whole Farrah thing. All of that hair. Plus she always seemed a little dim. Overrated.

3. Tiffany Welles (Shelley Hack) - Who?

For the record, yes, the first Charlie's Angels movies was fantastic, whereas the sequel Full Throttle was unwatchable.

"And now they work for us. Our name is the Cheese Fry."

The best of 2009 (15 words or less)

2011-04-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

That's no typo, people. The mid-2009 arrival of the Li'l Fry put something of a damper on our ability to see movies each weekend at a theater near us, which thus put a damper on our yearly best-of list. We know there are at least seven people out there who'd come to look forward our year-end rundown of the best and worst in movies. To those seven, we do apologize. Better late than never, right?

Now, sixteen months after most Best of 2009 lists were published, we can release ours. Thank you, Netflix and DirecTV's free trial of HBO and Showtime.

Sadly, for the aforementioned reason, this may well be the last Cheese Fry best-of list for quite some time, ending a tradition started on our black-and-white Macintosh Classic in 1994 (our top five movies back then: Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, Speed, Forrest Gump, and Little Women - not too shabby, though we'd argue in 2011 that Forrest Gump has aged not well at all).

To make things interesting, our recaps will be no more than 15 words.

1. The Hurt Locker - Oscar got it right. Sweaty, tense, urgent, and vividly real. A minor masterpiece.

2. Up - Certainly the darkest Pixar movie, but also the most poignant. And with unexpected whimsy.

3. Inglourious Basterds - Tarantino's best since Pulp Fiction (1994 callback!). Complex, layered, bloody wish-fulfillment. Christoph Waltz zings.

4. District 9 - Proving how sci-fi can provide sophisticated social satire while pretending to be a conspiracy thriller.

5. (500) Days of Summer - Clever jigsaw plotting explores ups and downs of romance. Best ending of the year.

6. Up in the Air - Strong characters, sharp dialogue, movie-star acting, important themes, all polished to a shine.

7. The Fantastic Mr. Fox - Hard to describe the quirky charm and oddball sensibility of Wes Anderson's animated caper.

8. Zombieland - We love zombies almost as much as we love the deadpan talents of Woody Harrellson.

9. Taken - Slambang action. Doesn't always make sense, but it always commands your respect and attention.

10. Precious - Sometimes movies show you things you'd rather not see. Happy ending measured in baby steps.

Honorable mentions: Avatar (we begrudgingly admire the visuals), Away We Go (the token Sundance-style indie), 2012 (ridiculously over the top, but it, like, completely commits to its ridiculousness), Angels and Demons (way better than we thought it'd be given the dreck that was The DaVinci Code), The Hangover (so hilarious and well-done that it almost made our top-ten list), He's Just Not That Into You (Gennifer Goodwin's sunny presence carries the movie), Knowing (we know, we know - this should have been terrible, but it wasn't), The Proposal (classic Hollywood romantic comedy done very well), Star Trek (not as good as everyone made it out to be, but appropriately epic and important).

The two worst movies of 2009:

Terminator Salvation - There's a fine line between a dark, gritty future that's fun and cool (like Blade Runner) and a dark, gritty future that just makes you depressed and numb (like this monstrosity). We wish they'd stop making Terminator movies but with Schwarzenegger out of politics, it's surely only a matter of time before they recruit him again. And we wish Hollywood would stop force-feeding actor Sam Worthington on us. We'd offer a witty comment about the ending, but we fell asleep before we got to it.

Sherlock Holmes - The rapport between Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law is exceptional. And we're happy to look at Rachel McAdams any day. But this movie is so cumbersomely plotted and crammed full of subplots and sideways red herrings that at the end, we were exhausted and just wanted it to be over. We're also not cool with the movie's decision to withhold Holmes' deductive powers until the very end. What fun is that? It makes us feel as stupid as everyone else who meets Holmes.

15 songs we never want to hear again

2011-03-29T21:48:00.001-07:00

We really, really hate these songs.

1. Thomas Dolby, "She Blinded Me with Science"

2. Blondie, "Heart of Glass"

3. Snow, "Informer"

4. David Bowie, "Let's Dance"

5. Ini Kamoze, "Here Comes the Hotstepper"

6. Toni Basil, "Mickey"

7. UB40, "Red Red Wine"

8. U2, "Pride"

9. Digital Underground, "The Humpty Dance"

10. John Cougar, "Hurts So Good"

11. Whitney Houston, "I Will Always Love You"

12. Kool and the Gang, "Celebration"

13. All-4-One, "I Swear"

14. Pearl Jam, "Jeremy"

15. Counting Crows, "Mr. Jones"

Smoking hot brackets

2011-03-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

To try and balance out the bleary-eyed, pimply-faced geekiness of the Sci-Fi Bracket post below, we took the time to fill out Esquire magazine's Sexiest Woman Alive Madness. Real men may not be able to understand the difference between The Empire Strikes Back bounty hunters Bossk and IG-88, but they know a hot girl when they see one.

* Fashion bracket

Our age is showing. As attractive as these supermodels may be, A) we haven't heard of half of them and B) when we try to get an idea of what they look like (thank you, Google image search), we find that they mostly all look alike. This wouldn't have been the case 12 years ago when all top supermodels would have filled the pages of our monthly Maxim magazine.

#1-seed Brooklyn Decker (her, we know) defeats #2-seed Miranda Kerr to advance to the Final Four.

* Music and Sports bracket

We would argue there's many more candidates from the world of music, but Esquire may be trying to balance music with sports. Not as many, ahem, candidates from the world of sports, it seems; the ones they find are mostly women we never heard of.

#14-seed Gwyneth Paltrow (music? really?) defeats #4-seed Erin Andrews (though we still prefer the smart-girl looks of Rachel Nichols or Bonnie Bernstein) to advance to the Final Four.

We stipulate that Gwyneth in the movies can be an icy, cold experience. But the Gwyneth who's suddenly found new juice on Fox's "Glee" and become a minor singing star has real oomph.

* Movies bracket

This one's in our wheelhouse, people. We know almost all of these actresses, but lament the absence of Cheese Fry guilty-pleasure Jennifer Aniston.

#2-seed Olivia Wilde defeats #1-seed Mila Kunis (who almost lost to #4-seed Ashley Greene, FYI; you got lucky, Kunis)

* Television bracket

We must protest the inclusion of #2-seed Kim Kardashian. We, in fact, protest everything about Kim Kardashian. And yes, she did advance a round in our bracket.

#8-seed "those girls from Glee" (and Esquire isn't even including actresses Naya Rivera and Heather Morris) defeats #3-seed Christina Hendricks (last year's big winner)

* Final Four results

Olivia Wilde defeats Brooklyn Decker (see Tron Legacy and you'll know why)

"Those girls from Glee" defeat Gwyneth Paltrow

* The championship game

Olivia Wilde defeats "Those girls from Glee" and spares us the indiginity of having to defend our inexplicable interest in a Fox show about a high school choir.

May the brackets be with you

2011-03-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

We are many things here at the spacious, shag-carpeted Cheese Fry offices, but college basketball fans is not one of them. Thankfully, geek website io9 kindly created a March Madness bracket consisting solely of sci-fi movies.

How'd the movies fare? Glad you asked.

From the northwest bracket (the io9 brackets aren't labeled, but it sounds cooler to name them, don't you think?), #1-seed Star Wars advanced without breaking a sweat, while #3-seed Terminator 2 had no trouble beating #2-seed Day the Earth Stood Still and #7-seed District 9.

There were likewise no shocks in the southwest bracket as #1-seed 2001: A Space Odyssey and #2-seed The Empire Strikes Back advanced. It was a real nail-biter however, as #13-seed Independence Day almost edged 2001. It's become hip to trash Independence Day, but it's hard to find another world-wide disaster movie that puts as much effort (or tries to, at least) into special-effects as it does its characters. And while we do stipulate that the beginning and end of 2001 are pretty out-there, the middle section with HAL is gold.

Big upsets in the northeast bracket as underdogs stampeded over the favorites. #12-seed Total Recall ("Consider it a divorce") blows past #4-seed Back to the Future and #1-seed E.T., while #10-seed Sunshine (yes, we know the ending is absolutely terrible) beats #2-seed Wall-E.

And in the southeast bracket, things proceed as the selection committee surely intended, as #1-seed Blade Runner and #2-seed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan advance to the Elite Eight.

And here's what happened next in the Elite Eight round... (By the way, how nerdy is this entire exercise? Good grief.)

#3 Terminator 2 defeats #1 Star Wars (we all have fond feelings about Star Wars, but it's about 20 minutes too long - search your feelings, you know it to be true)

#2 Empire Strikes Back defeats #1 2001: A Space Odyssey (2001's ending finally catches up to it)

#12 Total Recall defeats #10 Sunshine (Sunshine's ending finally catches up to it)

#1 Blade Runner defeats #2 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (we love Khan, but Blade Runner's look shaped the entire genre - there's sci-fi before Blade Runner and sci-fi after Blade Runner)

And in the Final Four round...

#2 Empire Strikes Back defeats #3 Terminator 2 (bubble gum beats dark-and-grim)

#1 Blade Runner defeats #12 Total Recall (visual style beat narrative pretzels)

And in the championship...

#2 Empire Strikes Back defeats #1 Blade Runner

This feels right, don't you think? And not just because we have a toy Tauntaun sitting on our bookshelf.

Goodnight, Frank Herbert

2011-03-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

Until the Li'l Fry came along, we were completely unaware of the classic (and rather creepy) children's book Goodnight Moon. Which is why two years ago, we would have been unable to appreciate the strangeness of Goodnight Dune, a spoof that involves elements of Frank Herbert's sci-fi/fantasy books - and the very strange, very flawed David Lynch film.

Live blogging the 83rd Academy Awards

2011-02-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

* We give it a C+. See you next year.

* And now, a very special episode of "Fame" as everyone in the audience applauds politely and checks their watches.

* Thanks, Anne and James. You'll never host this show again!

* It's the Best Picture award. Why not let the three producers each have their turn at the mike without trying to play them off with the music? It's not their fault you stuck in that stupid mother/grandmother gag at the top of the show.

* Congratulations, The King's Speech. A very safe, very British, very conventional choice. The Social Network was more important, The Kids Are All Right more emotional.

* An actual timpani roll? Nice.

* How many costume changes has Anne Hathaway undergone tonight? That last one was a doozy.

* Oscar voters also love British actors. So a British actor playing a character with a disability? Slam dunk.

* Colin Firth wins Best Actor. No surprise there. Oscar voters always love characters who are somehow disabled. And a bad stutter certainly counts.

* Whether it's genuine or not, Sandra Bullock always seems so charming and cute, doesn't she?

* Natalie's right. Darren Aronofsky is a visionary.

* As inevitable as it was, we still can't believe Natalie Portman is now an Oscar winner. She was good in Black Swan, yes, but bland and ordinary in so many other movies.

* We appreciate showing longer clips of the nominees, so that we can, you know, see them acting.

* We did sort of like the bit from the last couple of Oscar shows where each acting nominee got a little speech from a past costar or friend. We miss that. Jeff Bridges is sort of halfway doing that now with the Best Actress nominees.

* They make actually end it on time, people.

* Usually they give the Thalberg Award during the show.

* Tom Hooper's mom should get a job as a project scout for the studios.

* Unbelievable. Tom Hooper wins Best Director for The King's Speech. Over Black Swan or The Social Network? This means The King's Speech wins Best Picture, people.

* Still hard to believe that Hilary Swank, of all people, has two Oscars.

* We must be too young to fully appreciate Lena Horne.

* The dead-people montage. And this year, for some reason, we can't hear the audience clapping. The applause usually turns into a kind of weird popularity contest. We don't miss it. Did they decide not to mike the audience or were they told to lay off on the clapping?

* We didn't know that Gwyneth Paltrow was "country music's newest star." Did anyone tell country music that?

* This show is making us dislike James Franco and Anne Hathaway.

* Mrs. Cheese Fry: "Does it end in 20 minutes?" Uh, no.

* Why does David Fincher keep looking so glum and unhappy when the cameras cut to him?

* The rotating hallway scene in Inception is probably 2010's most amazing piece of film. Best Visual Effects pretty much had to go to them.

* Very cool idea, making it look like Bob Hope is there at a podium in the Kodak Theater. But then they blew it by having "Bob Hope" announce Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr. (As an aside, Sherlock Holmes was a convoluted mess of a movie, redeemed only partially by their chemistry together.)

* Standing ovation for Billy Crystal. We're betting right now that he gets the hosting job next year. We're also betting that he's had some work done - that is one smooth forehead, people.

* ABC is giving us the hard-sell on the new Dana Delany show "Body of Proof." She'll always be hot Army nurse Colleen McMurphy to us.

* Best Documentary Feature winner provides us with the obligatory podium political statement.

* The Auto-Tune fake song bit was funny, but not as funny as it probably looked on paper.

* We're now in the mushy middle of the Oscar-cast, doling out the Best Documentary Short award. An amazing time for the winner, time to refresh your beverage for the rest of us.

* Why is NBC's Chuck singing on my Oscar broadcast?

* Best Song nominee performances, the one thing that really should go, don't you think? Nowadays, movie songs are usually stuck in the end credits and Oscar night is the first time anyone hears them.

* Barack Obama cameo.

* We think Marisa Tomei is underrated, but she was always dogged by a rumor that Jack Palance read the wrong name and she didn't win Best Supporting Actress in 1992.

* And it did. So it doesn't have to always be about Hans Zimmer?

* Best Original Score really should go to The Social Network. Perfectly suited to that technological story.

* The Star Wars theme still gives us goose-bumps. It's like we're five-years-old all over again.

* Super 8: Coach Taylor meets Close Encounters. We're so there.

* Best Supporting Actor goes to Christian Bale, as expected. He is always very good, without question. But it's hard to forget the audio recording of his Terminator Salvation meltdown, isn't it?

* Russell Brand and Helen Mirren starring in the upcoming Arthur remake. We wonder who pulled which string to get them this prime spot.

* Franco in drag. They seem to be trying too hard, don't you think? Hathaway's whole cutesy song insulting Hugh Jackman was rather pointless.

* Best Original Screenplay goes to The King's Speech, a script David Seidler wrote many, many years ago. We would have voted for The Kids Are All Right, but no one asked us.

* The Social Network and Aaron Sorkin win Best Adapted Screenplay. Well deserved. A smart, literate, crackling script.

* We're big fans, Josh Brolin. Big fans.

* Predictable: "Toy Story 3" wins Best Animated Feature. It was pretty good, no question.

* The nominated animated shorts always look so brilliant and genius.

* "I'm Banksy." Funny line, J.T.

* Melissa Leo is annoying Mrs. Cheese Fry. Then she dropped the F-bomb. She's great, but she pushes the blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges thing a little too much.

* Guess Melissa Leo's "tacky" for-your-consideration ads didn't undermine her appeal after all. She's still Detective Kay Howard to us.

* First genuinely funny moment: Kirk Douglas delaying the delivery of the Oscar to Melissa Leo.

* First standing ovation: Kirk Douglas.

* Again, Roger Deakins loses the Best Cinematography Oscar. He's the Susan Lucci of DPs.

* Tim Burton's best movies remain two of his earliest - Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.

* Winner of Best Art Direction goes to Alice in Wonderland (which was a very strange movie, even for Tim Burton). Interesting. Could mean no big sweep for The King's Speech.

* The Oscars run three hours plus and we're wasting time on Hathaway/Franco mom/grandmom bits? Seriously?

* Yeah, so the Hathaway/Franco hosting decision? Big mistake so far. Awkward.

* Opening bit putting Hathaway and Franco into the Best Picture nominees... pretty lame. Alec Baldwin scored the best lines. And a completely random and unmotivated Back to the Future spoof.

* Minutes away now.

* Source Code seems kind of cool, but we remain unconvinced about Jake Gyllenhaal.

* ABC had to go and remind us about Roberto Benigni's embarrassingly over-the-top, aren't-I-a-funny-Frenchman-who-no-speak-much-English acceptance shenanigans for Life Is Beautiful. Some things are better left unremembered.

* James Franco will always be Daniel Desario to us.

* Oscar-related celebrity interaction #1: delivering script to Silver Pictures, we caught a look at Robert Downey Jr., slouching on the sofa in the office of his soon-to-be wife Susan Levin.

* Reese Witherspoon looks like Carrie Underwood, or is it the other way around?

* 45 minutes to show time and our first indication if the unconventional recruitment of James Franco and Anne Hathaway to be hosts was brilliant or misguided.

* Our predictions: Best Picture - The King's Speech, Best Actor - Colin Firth, Best Actress - Natalie Portman, Best Supporting Actor - Christian Bale, Best Supporting Actress - Hailie Steinfeld, Best Director - David Fincher.

* Why doesn't Warren Beatty make movies anymore?

* For a truly snarky, bitter take on the Oscars, keep an eye on Nikki Finke's real-time blogging at Deadline.com.

* Another future ex-Mrs. Cheese Fry: Scarlett Johansson.

* We also wonder about the origins of this deplorable practice in which commentators critique red carpet dresses. And "critique" is being generous. What really happens is that a panel of snarky, self-styled fashionistas rip apart the actresses like they're filling the pages of some middle-school slam book. It usually feels more about scoring the best line than really examining the fashion. It's even stranger when the attacks come on the same network as those that carry the events. So Ryan Seacrest on E! asks about the dresses and marvels at how great everyone looks, while two days later another show on E! happily attacks everyone with a snotty "what were they thinking" condescension.

* Dear ABC, I'm here to look at movie stars, not inner city kids who sing. Is that so terrible?

* Why wouldn't E! broadcast their red carpet show in high-definition?

* We liked Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but no way is Russell Brand Oscar-show-worthy,

* Maria Menounos is, quite literally, too cute for words, people.

* It always seems that the bigger stars show up right before the show starts, while the lesser stars, like Winter's Bone's Jennifer Lawrence show up 2 hours ahead of time. Is that just an unwritten Oscar etiquette rule or do the Oscar handlers issue arrival times to everyone?

* 90 minutes to showtime.

* We usually don't have sympathy for Ryan Seacrest, but Michelle Williams did him no favors in their red carpet interview. It was like pulling teeth to get her to say more than two words at a time. If you don't want to talk to him, keep walking.

* Where and when did this irritating practice begin in which celebrities get asked about their clothing on the red carpet? This is a relatively new phenomenon. We wonder if it was Joan Rivers when she started this whole red carpet marathons on E!. Seriously, aside from the designers and fashion geeks, does anyone care? We wouldn't know a Donna Karan from a Versace if you held a gun to our head.

* The Cheese Fry spent five years living several blocks from the Kodak Theater in a little one-bedroom Hollywood apartment. An interesting experience to watch the show on TV and hear the helicopters buzzing around outside the windows. Oscar night would start a week beforehand when the award cops would shut down Hollywood Blvd. to get to work building the grandstands, laying the red carpet, and rolling in those giant Oscar statues.

Knee-jerk review: "The King's Speech"

2011-02-26T20:37:00.000-08:00

1. We won't be too disappointed when this wins Best Picture tomorrow night. But we still prefer The Kids Are All Right and The Social Network. Those films fresh and urgent. This one more familiar.

2. It's exceedingly well-done and at times subtly brilliant, but much of the film's power (and helps it transcend that BBC/Film Four familiarity) comes from Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.

3. We never really liked Rush, mostly because of his greasy, squinty, over-the-top, look-at-me performance in Shine. Hard to shake that first impression. But here he is magnetic, albeit in a much showier role.

4. It took us a while to recognize Guy Pearce.

5. We went into this movie considering it medicinal. We didn't really want to see it, but figured it would be "good" for us. Critics loved it, lots of Oscar nominations. It's our duty to see it. But it's a movie about a king with a stutter. Not exactly high-concept.

6. It's definitely a film that seems designed to win awards, what with its period setting (look at the old cars!) and British class conflict (the rich treat the poor so terribly!). One of these gets onto Best Film lists every year, it seems.

7. Without question, there's something about period English stories that appeals to a certain American audience. Is it a morbid curiosity about the culture from which this country came? Is it envy for all of those great clothes and plush country mansions?

8. Unpopular truth: it's always fun to see a pompous clergyman get taken down a peg.

9. Helena Bonham Carter watch: this is the frumpy, stolid HBC, not the sexy freewheeling HBC on display in Fight Club or as a bad guy in the Harry Potter movies.

10. Hard to imagine a time when radio was a novel invention that went by the title "wireless" and changed the way politics was conducted.

11. Love the wide-angle lenses and the overall muted blues of the cinematography. Why? Not sure.

12. Overall, it is pretty amazing that the filmmakers wring so much sympathy for a millionaire king who wants for nothing and whose biggest problem involves public speaking.

Oscar Contest

2011-02-21T21:40:00.001-08:00

The Cheese Fry announces its first-ever Oscar Contest.

E-mail to thecheesefry@gmail.com your picks for the Big Five: Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, and Director before the show starts on Sunday, February 27. To help with tiebreakers, please also submit your guess for the show's total running time. In the event of a tie, the person closest to the actual time without going over wins (call it "The Price is Right" rule).

The winner will receive an original Cheese Fry art piece related to the Oscars.

Best movie of 2010...

2011-02-21T21:32:00.000-08:00

A case could be made that the best film of 2010 wasn't a feature film, but this incredible goose-bumpy trailer for The Social Network. Moody, important, compelling, urgent, dramatic, hip... the perfect combination of visuals and music (Vega Choir's cover of Radiohead's "Creep"). And in some ways, better than the actual movie it's selling.

"The Social Network" and the Issue of Protagonist Likability

2011-02-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

Do you have to like a movie's main character? How essential to a film's success is what Hollywood sometimes calls "likability"?

As much as we admire The Social Network as an important and engaging film, we had big problems with the main character, Mark Zuckerberg. As we read it, Zuckerberg's an antisocial creep unable (or unwilling) to empathize with anyone else. He's so self-absorbed and driven that he rarely cracks a smile in the whole movie. He's a genius, true, but a genius very much aware of his genius-ness and thus uninterested in hiding his impatience, scorn, and contempt for those not his perceived equal.

Does this sound like the sort of person you'd want to spend two hours with? Maybe, maybe not.

If it were just these irritating character quirks, we might have let him slide. But Zuckerberg (the character in the movie, we mean - whether any of this actually involved the real person is apparently subject to debate) allows his only genuine friend to be screwed over in so ruthless and cruel a fashion, that we found ourselves actively disliking him and hoping for a dramatic comeuppance. We wound up rooting for the friend, not Zuckerberg.

The question is: is that okay? Is it a problem that we had such a negative reaction to the Zuckerberg character? Did the filmmakers push the warts-and-all approach too far?

Hollywood executives make a big deal out of creating "likable" protagonists. It's essential, the thinking goes, that audiences like the main character and and root for him to get what he wants. One famous screenwriting guru even coined a phrase for this tendency: "save the cat." As in, somehow in the first few minutes of the movie, the main character must say something or do something (like save a cat from a tree) to give the audience permission to like him. This is particularly true for darker, edgier characters. In The Town, for example, scary bank robber Ben Affleck shows his softer side in the first sequence by treating one of his hostages with kindness and sympathy. That's his "save the cat" moment.

Some consider this a needless simplification. People are evil and abrasive and petty, so why shouldn't our movie protagonists be the same? Why must Hollywood dumb everything down? Why can't a main character like Zuckerberg be a shameless jackass?

For one, most Hollywood movies are multi-million dollar enterprises most often designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This means don't alienate the customer with main characters who are completely unpleasant.

Two, it's not as simple as that.

To us, it's absolutely okay for a movie to tell the story of a shameless jackass, so long as he also...

1. Displays some charisma - After much reflection, we believe that this is our main problem with The Social Network. Zuckerberg is a complete wet blanket. There's not even a little zip or zing to his personality. He speaks in a monotone chatter, can sometimes barely focus on the person talking to him, and seems completely humorless. Think Scarface's Tony Montana or The Godfather's Michael Corleone or Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter or Inglorious Basterds' Hans Landa. All very bad men doing very bad things, but still charming and charismatic enough to engage you. They pop. Zuckerberg fizzles.

2. Generates empathy - There's often a lot of confusion between sympathy and empathy. We think it's okay to tell the story of a bank robber like Ben Affleck in The Town. You don't have to like what he's doing (sympathy) - shooting at cops and robbing banks and lying to his girlfriend. But you do have to understand why he's doing what he's doing (empathy). You have to get a glimpse into his thinking and understand that, "Yeah, I might do the same thing if I were in his shoes."

At first, we had no inkling why Zuckerberg was behaving so cruelly to his friend or why he had to undertake a scorched-earth strategy in pursuing Facebook (as much as we enjoyed seeing the Wiklevi get screwed, there's no denying that Zuckerberg strung them along long enough to get his rival site up and running). But after some spirited conversations/arguments with fellow film geeks, we've changed our thinking. In fact, it's all right there in the opening scene (perhaps a "save the cat" moment after all) as Zuckerberg worries about getting into one of Harvard's finals clubs. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin clearly sets up Zuckerberg as the outsider desperate to belong. But... one look at this guy and it's clear he will never fit in for the reasons we described earlier. He's brilliant, yes, but socially incompetent. And in a place like Harvard, social awkwardness seems to be a big handicap. Zuckerberg's many jackass moves are motivated solely by the need to succeed and prove that he does belong. We don't like what he does, but we begrudgingly can understand why he does it.

3. Comes to an internal understanding - If "likability" is a Hollywood dirty word, the word "arc" is even dirtier. Put simply, audiences respond best to a main character who undergoes some kind of transformation. He learns a lesson and corrects a past misdeed or flaw. Or, in the case of someone like poor Tony Montana, he is destroyed by his inability to learn a lesson or correct a past misdeed or flaw (in that case, through a spectacular cocaine-binge shootout). This is called the "arc." How do you know if a character doesn't change? If you leave the theater wondering what was the point. We had this reaction to the True Grit remake. An engaging, compelling Western full of charismatic outlaws (#1 above) and empathy for some dastardly deeds (#2 above). But in the end, we're not sure if anyone learned anything. So what was the point? The non-arc ending of True Grit undermined what was otherwise a pretty solid movie.

In The Social Network, Zuckerberg seemed fairly static to us. He doesn't change. His friend Eduardo certainly changes, learning a hard lesson about the way power and money can corrupt friendships. But this is Zuckerberg's story. He's the first character and the last character we see. So... does he change? It's hard to tell, thanks mostly to Jesse Eisenberg's inscrutable performance (which is either brilliant or lazy, we can't tell). We thought perhaps there was a glimmer of something in Zuckerberg eyes when Eduardo says to him at one deposition, "I was your only friend." Could that be his realization of how far he's fallen? Or are we just imagining things?

The moment seems to involve the infamous last shot of the movie as Zuckerberg tries to "friend" the girl who dumped him in the first scene. He pathetically hits "refresh" over and over again, desperate for a reply. At first, we thought this proved that he hasn't changed. After all he went through and all of the success, he's still hung up on that one dumb girl? He hasn't changed at all. He hasn't learned anything. Or has he? It was suggested to us that the act of "friending" by someone as introverted and closed-off as Zuckerberg might be the most profound statement of change he could make. Maybe seeking out his ex-girlfriend on Facebook suggests he is trying to make amends for the past and become more sociable. So which is it? Both? Neither? In a strange way, the ambiguity of the ending may be the best part of the movie. As with any good art, the meaning often involves how the viewer reads it, not what the creator intended.

So what does this all mean? Even though arguments with fellow moviegoers helped convince us that Zuckerberg is not as bad as we thought, we still don't like him. But we do like his movie.

Ke$ha meets $tar Trek

2011-02-17T23:24:00.000-08:00

An older mash-up, but one we find... fascinating (arch your Vulcan eyebrow as you say it).