Coca Cola's Ma-fiasco

I've got some good news for you if you've gone to the movies lately and been forced to sit through the latest lousy short film in Coca Cola's ongoing Refreshing Filmmaker Award campaign. It's been pulled! Hey, it took the force of the Italian-America Anti-Defamation folks to do it, but the trite, unfunny and monumentally in-bad-taste Mafia-themed opus is gone. Who judges this crap, anyway? You can't blame the young filmmakers for trying to suck a little dough out of Coke's corporate teat, and we get it that they have to shill for the soft drink, but couldn't Coke at least throw something up there that was 1.) not embarrassingly inappropriate, even at first glance and 2.) even marginally entertaining or original? Anyway, good riddance to their latest misfire. It was strictly "poke your own eyes out rather than watch it" time.

And speaking of misfires, there's some mighty gratuitous ferret-bashing going on in the trailer for the upcoming Ben Stiller/Jennifer Anniston comedy Along Came Polly. Hasn't society gotten past the need to see animals mistreated for a cheap laugh? Yes, I know no real ferrets were hurt, but it's the attitude that's all wrong here. The last thing young kids or incipient serial killer adolescent males need to see is a defenseless little ferret getting beaned or running into solid objects to provide a tacky laugh. The couple of times I've seen this trailer, the first time there was no laughter at all, and when it ran before the tough crowd in front of Bad Santa, there were universal dismayed moans throughout the theater when the blind ferret took it on the snout.

I'm not so sure that stuff like this is so very funny anymore to a lot of people. Thanks to influences from Animal Planet to Zoobomafoo, lots of children are growing up with a more finely attuned sense of the wrongness of casual disregard for animals' lives. Other than the psychopathic troubled teen who's probably already been practicing his evil on the neighborhood pets, nobody wants to see this stuff. And I know it's only a movie, but if movies are our best entertainment, surely they can do better than this.

 
Playboy to Launch New High Definition Service

There's really only one honest response to that news -- ewwwwww!!

You want to put all America off sex, forever? I'd say this is a pretty good start. What porn needs is more airbrushing, not better resolution....

Delicate sensibility-wise, this is a disaster. Business-wise, it's a damn good idea. If high-def flora and fauna, or secret celebrity acne scars aren't enough to push HDTV acceptance, turning to the world's oldest persuader is a great move.

If you need to know more about this visually distressing development, check out this press release.

 
Gentle Celebs, Place Your Bets

The latest improbable cable mini-phenomenon seems to be poker (at least according to the PR buzz), and tonight at 9pm is your chance to check out Bravo's entry in the genre, Celebrity Poker Showdown. First week players are Ben Affleck, Don Cheadle, David Schwimmer, Emily Proctor and Willie Garson. Is it a sports show? Is it a reality show? Is it a celebrity gawking show? Who knows? Who cares? If you're into this thing, and Bravo hopes you are, this might be fun. I guess we should just be thankful that there weren't so many hungry cable networks around when Trivial Pursuit was big. A bunch of celebrities sitting around playing that would have been really unbearable. At least one aspect of the show is unbeatable -- the brash and funny Kevin Pollak who's hosting the show. (How often do you get to write about KP twice in one day? See my other posting about Line of Fire.) It might be worth watching just for him.

If nothing else, Bravo deserves credit for daring to throw the dice with program concepts that haven't been beaten to death before, though of course if they hit, step aside for the imitators. Hey, I'm waiting for Celebrity Bingo...let's get The Golden Girls and the crew of The Love Boat together and watch the Fixodent fly!


Check out Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown website.

 
Get Into The Line of Fire Tonight

This is a season that's jam-packed with decent new dramas, some of them even stylish -- Karen Sisco -- and zippy -- Jake 2.0; it's also indicative of the playing field that the aforementioned series are, respectively, on hiatus until March, and in for a full season but getting barely any audience attention so far. Into this maelstrom, where the good can come mighty close to dying young, ABC's bringing forth a new skein with a provenance meriting consideration. Line of Fire, which premieres this evening at 10pm, is writer/director/ex-cranky film critic Rod Lurie's FBI vs. the Mob tale, set in Richmond, Virginia. Though Lurie's previous film output isn't prodigious in quantity, he knows how to put together an intelligent, principled drama like The Contender, or a last stance action/intellectual showdown piece like The Last Castle, and was able to make a basically one-set small nuclear crisis pic like Deterrence into a must-see. We can take from his resume that Lurie is into strong female characters, can handle action, knows how to eke the most from his production budget, and isn't afraid of ideas or the people who have them. That last attribute is the one to hang our hope on here.

Lurie's also got an eye for casting; in Deterrence, for example, stand-up comic/actor Kevin Pollak was a perhaps unlikely but fascinating President of the United States, and in Line of Fire he gives us bespectacled and serious David Paymer in the key role of mob boss Jonah Malloy. Paymer's Moriarity is Leslie Hope, who as Teri Bauer died in husband Jack's arms at the end of 24's first season, and we’ll assume that Lurie does as well by her as he did Joan Allen in The Contender. It will be good to see performers of this caliber sparring on the small screen; the rest of the cast, including ex-con turned actor Brian Goodman as one of the mob men, and a bevy of talented and photogenic younger folks, look like they’ll be more than up to the job of support.

Crime dramas are nothing new perhaps, but three cheers to Line of Fire right off the bat for being something that’s not about forensics, and for not hesitating to tackle The Mob as subject matter. The Sopranos isn’t, despite all the hyperbolic claims, the last word on that particular set of bad guys; let’s see what happens when the emphasis is not so much on the family dynamics as what transpires on the street. Without the easy pass of pay cable content freedom, Line of Fire will also have to do its job within the confines of broadcast guidelines, liberalized though they may be these days. I don’t doubt that Lurie will be able to pull it off. It looks like there’s gonna be another great drama hour to watch come tonight. Don’t miss it.


Speaking of content freedom, if you’re not adverse to wall-to-wall profanity and don’t think the idea of a foul-mouthed Santa impersonator is well…unthinkable, you’ll enjoy Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa, in theaters now. There’s something marvelous about an actor who can curse effectively, convincingly, naturally, and Thornton can do it. He and co-star Tony Cox are a matched set of profanity masters, spewing the blasphemous dialogue with skill and élan, and it’ll give you drop-jawed joy to see it. The movie pulled its punches in the last few minutes, but not everybody likes unremitting bleakness like I do, so you may be perfectly satisfied with it. Yes, it’s mean, sort of disgusting and completely inappropriate, and I sure don’t want these people living next door to me, but as an amoral, antisocial, and crazily amusing anti-Yule cliche (mostly) tale, it’s a winner. Just seeing Billy Bob and Tony Cox plodding through a Phoenix shopping mall parking lot, dressed in North Pole gear and disgusted with everything and everybody, is an image worth the price of admission (at least matinee). And though it may be hard to reconcile his turn here as a repressed persnickety mall manager with the the warm and fuzzy comedy saint image people have now bestowed upon the late John Ritter, he’s great.

If you can’t handle Bad Santa and want a more-traditional feel-good Yule season movie that isn’t nearly as nauseating as it might have been, thanks to Will Ferrell’s sweet, non-cynical but still bearable performance, go to Elf. No bad words, people sing Christmas songs, nothing to get nervous about, and Santa doesn’t pee in his pants, not even once.


Line of Fire premieres tonight on ABC at 10pm. Visit the Line of Fire website for more information about the show.

And if you end up liking Bad Santa's Billy Bob Thornton, you'll want to check out BillyBobapalooza, his official website.