The Grouchy Editor

Tiger Woods is a genius.  Tiger Woods is stupid.  Cable talk-show hosts keep asking guests to comment on Tiger Woods, and most of them say we should just leave him alone.  Well … this is what happens when you make millions off such a wholesome image.

Joy Behar made a good point the other night:  When are the media going to ask Tiger’s wife, Elin, how well she knew this philandering guy before she married him?  Could it be that she knew a lot?  (Same question for Sandra Bullock.)

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A low-level diplomat from Qatar tries to sneak a smoke in an airplane bathroom … and the FBI is summoned.  Isn’t this the kind of “crime” committed every day in junior high schools?

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About a month ago, I was watching Jimmy Kimmel’s show when he did a segment about a little girl who was infatuated with a teen pop star.  Kimmel arranged to have the pop star surprise the precocious tot with a visit on the show.  It was cute.  End of story, I thought.

Some time later, I noticed the pop star’s name, Justin Bieber, in the newspaper.  Then he showed up in Newsweek.  And in Time.  And in Entertainment Weekly.  And on Chelsea Handler’s TV show.  Now I see that the kid is slated to appear on Saturday Night Live.  Who the hell IS this kid?  God, I must be old.

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The Jerks of Summer

In high school, certain truths were self-evident:  Most of the “theater people” were gay, most of the jocks were jerks, and Karen VanderHaagen would not go out with me.

Life is not fair.  We continue to reward jocks with taxpayer-funded playgrounds, like new Target Field in Minneapolis, and with most of the pretty girls, like Karen VanderHaagen.

So I have mixed emotions about this multi-million dollar stadium in my back yard.  Spring is here, Minnesota’s lineup looks pretty good … but dammit, please stop telling me that “the Twins” built a beautiful new stadium.  The taxpayers built it.

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I guess I’m just another spoiled American, because I want an iPad.  Everyone has an opinion about these computer tablets.  Stephen King says reading books on them gives him an eerie sense of “not-thereness.”  Anna Quindlen assures traditional publishers that the iPad does not signal the end of the world as they know it.

I just know that I want one.  Buy me one.  I’ll bet pro jocks can afford lots of them.

© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

The balcony has closed on At the Movies, and Web sites like Rotten Tomatoes are shouldering some of the blame.  Apparently, a lot of folks prefer to get their cinematic guidance from people like Catherine, a 20-something from England who is one of my “friends” on Tomatoes and who lists movies like Ghost among her all-time favorites.  Sigh.

At least you can’t blame my reviews for the demise of At the Movies.  I’m guessing that my site gets fewer visits than Tiger Woods gets from his mother-in-law.

For me, At the Movies lost its must-see-TV status back in 1999, when Gene Siskel died.  It’s not that subsequent critics weren’t knowledgeable, it’s just that when Siskel and Roger Ebert ceased sparring, the magic was gone.  Perhaps Catherine can get her own show ….

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Tucker Carlson was on Red Eye carping about how all too often when we need to raise taxes, we raise it on whomever or whatever happens to be unpopular.  Carlson proposed, I assume facetiously, that we tax children, nuns, and mothers.

I might not go that far.  But as a smoker, I feel Carlson’s point and I can see how tanners might get burned up over a proposed tax on them.  On the other hand, look at the woman in the picture above.  Doesn’t she look smug?  I don’t like her.  Let’s tax her.

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Gutfeld’s Girls

No one who knows me would label me a “red guy” politically, but I’ll have to admit there is something lecherously appealing about Greg Gutfeld’s wee-hours free-for-all on Fox News, otherwise known as Red Eye.

Gutfeld does spew conservative venom in his “Greg-alogues,” but there’s a reason for that sparkle in his peepers:  the bevy of supermodel types that get booked to appear on the show.  You won’t find Liz Cheney on Red Eye, but you will find babes like (clockwise from top left) Megyn Kelly, Diana Falzone, Martha MacCallum, Reshma Shetty, S.E. Cupp, and Remi Spencer.

Gutfeld and his View-like panel, including the hilariously deadpan Andy Levy, are in such good humor that it’s hard not to smile.  Or, as Slate put it, “It’s all horribly watchable.”  Does that make me a racist homophobe?

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Saying goodbye to Nip/Tuck was a bit like dumping old breast implants.  At first they were good, but then they began to sag, and in the end you had to dump them.  This FX show — one of the hottest on TV just five years ago — went out with a whimper on Wednesday.  The finale was rather touching but, sad to say, I stopped watching Nip/Tuck a few years ago.  What was once a cutting-edge drama with bizarre twists eventually became bizarre, period.  But I used to like you, so thanks for the mammaries.

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Olympic Divas     For the casual Olympics fan, it’s a letdown that the Lindsey Vonn-Julia Mancuso feud has sputtered out.  The last time we had this much fun was back in 1994 when the Queen of Catfights broke out between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.   That episode worked out well for both ladies:  Kerrigan got to host Saturday Night Live, and Harding got to make a sex tape.

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Something’s Fishy   Imagine that — turns out they call them “killer whales” for a reason.

Why is it that every time we read about a dog, often a pit bull, bumping off some human, we always learn that the dog was later euthanized, but this whale, supposedly responsible for several deaths now, goes on with the show?  Gee, could big money be involved?

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The 39 Steps     You’d think that the British, of all people, would know better than to mess with the films of native son Alfred Hitchcock.  Didn’t they see Christopher Reeve’s sleep-inducing Rear Window, or Gus Van Sant’s pointless remake of Psycho?

But this “Masterpiece Classic” fares much better than those other duds.  It’s not Hitchcock, but it is fairly entertaining.

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Ozzie and Harriet    OK, we’re all a little tired of this melodrama, but there are no “victims” in this soap opera.  Certainly not golf fans, who were foolish enough to put Tiger on his pedestal.  Not Woods’s wife, who had to know what she was getting into when she married the lunkhead.  Not the mistresses, who will rake in big bucks from porn films, talk shows, and Gloria Allred lawsuits.  As for Tiger himself, he will finish his “rehab” and go back to his enchanted golf career.

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Roger Ebert    The esteemed film critic says he doesn’t want pity, but I feel I might owe him an apology.  In the past, I have occasionally befouled the comments section of his Web site.  Ebert would usually reply to my (sometimes drunken) rants, and he always did so in a civil tone.  He’s a class act who really is a victim, unlike that boneheaded golfer pictured at top.

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Shutter Island    There is just one thing missing from Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island:  fun.  The movie is gloomy, which is not the same as scary.  On just a fraction of Scorsese’s budget, the makers of Paranormal Activity at least managed to produce a few chills.

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Kevin Smith     No sympathy for this guy, who got booted off a Southwest Airlines flight because his booty was too big for one seat.  I am a smoker, and I don’t recall the Kevin Smiths of the world standing up for us when we got the boot.

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© 2010-2025 grouchyeditor.com (text only)