A ho-hum Saturday Night Live with the gorgeous Emma Stone

I didn't realize that Emma Stone was so tall, and had such great legs, until last night's Saturday Night Live. Also, there was a pretty funny sexual education skit in the final 30 minutes - It was much, much better than the lame ones with Kenan Thompson.

And hey, now that I think about it, there were several good moments in Weekend Update. It's silly, but I like the Stefon character. Furkels was great, and made me spit-take a bit. And Kenan was really good as that wacky "The rent is too damn high!" character. And the weird French dancing skit was something they would have done on an old school Saturday Night Live, and very effective.

As usual, anything Kristen Wiig was in made me recoil. And the opening monologue? I bet while Jay Pharoah was watching in the background, he was thinking, "Why does this Fred mother effer get to Obama?" That was long, drawn-out and not funny. Same thing goes with everything Wiig was featured prominently in. Another funny skit, the "my brother is awesome!" show, made that clear to me. Just start putting the new girls in every skit, Lorne Michaels.


Note: Sorry for the brevity of this entry, but I'm doing this, that and the other thing tonight - Packing for a two-day trip to New York, preparing for the initial high school newspaper edition of the year, planning for my site launch on November 1... Being an adult is tough work.

A quick post of odds and ends.

Saturdays are always my least-read day, which in turn makes it hard for me to get the proper motivation toward them. A couple weeks ago, I had the idea of using it as a showcase for my horrible cartoon strip, The Greatest Comic Ever Ever, and I managed to get the first one posted. However, I probably don't have regular access to a scanner for another couple of weeks, so I've decided to delay pursuing that completely.

So, since I don't have the comic to use for Saturdays, I decided instead to do some random odds and ends, entertainment-wise. You know, for things I couldn't really do a full post on, but that still interest me. For example...


- Did you know Paris Hilton can be funny? Me either! And surprisingly, it took Jimmy Fallon to get it out of her. The above is still one of my favorite Saturday Night Live clips. She wasn't hosting this episode, just doing a guest spot, which is probably why it was decent. (The episode she did host wasn't that well-received by the cast, apparently.)

Always funny and awesome though is Kenan Thompson in "What Up With That." I notice something new each time, like how Kenan doesn't slap Lindsay Buckingham's hand.


- I caught some of the Betty White-featuring Hot in Cleveland the other night, and I thought it was pretty enjoyable. If you like The Golden Girls, but wish they weren't all effing ancient, then this is funny in a similar way. The only annoying aspect is the persistent laugh track. It's a good, old school style scripted comedy, with a completely ridiculous premise of three showbiz workers deciding to leave it all behind for the relaxed life of Cleveland, but it is overall a bit of a throwback to a somewhat bygone era.

However, it does make me question whether it is wrong for me to be quite enamored with Jane Leeves. She's almost 50, but between the accent and the general good looks, she's still quite foxy.

The picture of Jane comes from this TV Land photo gallery, which is also the network the show is on.

TV Review: SNL back up to adequate

While the early 2000s and late 1990s still seem like centuries ago, and even the mini-Renaissance of the past couple years has faded with the stink bomb of the early episodes, Saturday Night Live does seem to be climbing out of its funk. This week's show had some strong sketches, even though the host, Ryan Phillippe, was nothing special.

The show started out strong with the cold open, which was an always enjoyable Larry King spot. Yeah, he's still no Norm MacDonald, but King is always so ripe for parody, as were his guests, Bjork and Richard Branson (pictured above). SNL has been a lot better this season when it has strayed away from politics and stuck to mocking pop culture and celebrities. The monologue was also decent, since it starred one of my favorite characters at the end, DeAndre Cole. "Wooooo, wheeee! What's up with that?"

From there, the show replayed a commercial spoof, although it was one of the better ones, mocking the home security commercials that feature random white dudes breaking into houses. I loved the next skit though, featuring the doofy mock ESPN sportscasters shilling for female condoms during a female weightlifting competition. (I am just barely old enough to remember the days when ESPN really did show lots of crap like that. Now, the female weightlifting, bowling and strong man events are mostly confined to ESPN2 on the weekends.)

The rest of the episode was merely average to me, although an average episode of SNL is above their standard for this season. Also, this makes me potentially gay, but I actually like Ke$ha. Her music is catchy, and I'm not ashamed to say that I find her easy on the eyes as well. I have no idea what she was thinking with the American flag cape, but hey, it works for me.

Grade: B

The Philosophy of the Flying V

Uh oh, look at all these wacky kids! You know craziness will ensue!

Sometimes I forget that other people on the Internet, you know, write stuff. But by chance, I stumbled upon this blog the other day, which is really quite grand, and specifically, this post, about the top 10 selfish sports teams of the 1990s. The relevant overlap to this post I'm crafting right now would be the following paragraph about D2: The Mighty Ducks:

Question: How does a team that barely makes it to the post season in their crappy neighborhood hockey league get selected to represent our nation in the Junior Olympic Goodwill games? Coach Gordon Bombay that's how. I understand hiring Bombay as your coach. The man is an innovator, I mean the flying V? Come on, that's just good hockey. But why choose the whole Mighty Ducks team for Team USA? You're going to tell me that Goldberg was the best goalie our country had to offer?

I concur with bricksexplode (or Josh, his actual name). (And also, creepily enough, he and I have practically the same take and story about Wake Up Ron Burgandy.) Even as a 10-year-old kid, the second Mighty Ducks movie was so implausible to me that it ruined all of the good feelings created in the first one. The series morphed from a plausible story of a team of misfits to a ridiculous farce of a movie with no basis in reality. The final installment is actually somewhat realistic, but I am apparently the only person in the world who enjoys watching it.

The first movie, while no cinematic masterpiece, was a great movie of its type. Just about any kid can relate to being a sort of outcast portrayed in the movie, especially a geeky young kid like myself. Even though I never had (and still haven't) ice skated, there are obvious parallels between other sports and other movies - Little League (The Bad News Bears), Pop Warner football (Little Giants, even though it came out later), basketball (... um, I'm sure there is one I'm forgetting).

It also had a memorable cast of characters with easily-identifiable counterparts in my everyday life. While they weren't exact matches with my friends, there were shared traits: the brash-talking Jessie, the smart-alecky Averman, the fat kid no one actually wanted to hang out with (Goldberg), and the big tough guy Fulton.

D1 is the classic underdog tale, on ice, and you feel great when they win the championship. The story is as predictible as a Subway sandwich - what else would you expect from Disney, or from a $5 footlong? - but ultimately somewhat believable and satisfying.

The second is just pure "let's make a buck!" fuckery that made me eventually dislike all these movies from Disney. As bricksexplode brings up, the most ludicrous idea is that a team that barely made the playoffs in a Minnesota youth hockey league would represent the United States. I grew up in the woods of Rhode Island, and even our Little League all-star team that would try to qualify for the Little League World Series would be a combination of the best players from all the league's teams. (Speaking to my athletic prowess as a kid, I never came close to making one.)

Deciding to just reunite the whole team is so transparent and shitty, and the opening scenes are some of the worst of the movie. Looking back at it as a 25-year-old, there are a couple plausible ways you could do it. First, instead of setting the movie in Los Angeles, why not have these games come to Minnesota? Then it is more plausible that you'd have to use the Ducks. Or, failing that, at least have some flashback scenes with the Ducks winning a couple regional tournaments and earning their way to L.A. Or, because the kids all live in the same area, and are roughly the same age, why not just have the sequel take place (brace yourself) a year later? Because I had played Little League, D2 immediately seemed fake to me, because even as a kid I realized that shit with L.A. would never happen.

Okay though, looking past that - What the fuck did Iceland ever do to you, Disney? Like, seriously, it is bad enough that they have a horrible, false country name (according to weather.com, Iceland is roughly the same weather-wise as New England right now). Hey Mouse, why do you have to shit all over them by making them the obviously-Soviet Union inspired enemy? Either make up a fake country or leave the Icelanders alone.

Anyway, the Ducks recruit some players from other parts of the country for no good reason. I mean, non-movie, they're to include some non-white people in the cast, but in-movie, Gordon Bombay hates them and barely plays any of them. I don't think most return for the third movie, which is great, except for the Goon, who is clearly not even close to being the right age for D2 and D3. The Ducks also recruit a young, trash-talking Kenan Thompson in his film debut, and he is kind of OK despite using a preposterous shot. Also, really, he's playing street hockey out in L.A.? Not basketball? Not skateboarding? Not surfing? L.A. does have that intense hockey tradition, after all.

The whole movie is effing absurd, and if you like D2 the most out of the three, I don't know what's wrong with you. Pull yourself together! Oddly enough, I think it was too much overt zaniness even for Disney, because they went the opposite direction for D3. I actually like that movie because it is super serious and (shockingly) focuses on hockey from time to time. It is plausible (at least in terms of the movie world) that a private school would recruit the Ducks, because the dominant Rhode Island private schools mostly cherry pick their athletes from Rhode Island public schools. D3 also has some redeeming value with the introduction of their new coach. He lacks the charm of Gordon Bombay, but he is an interesting character at least.