Cynical Cinema

“And His forgiveness blew their mind”

A Colbert Christmas opens with one of the most entertaining, funny Christmas songs I’ve ever heard.  Stephen Colbert, you see, has discovered that when you sing regular Christmas songs on television, you have to pay royalties.  So he has decided to write his own, which will be performed throughout the show.  The first one is a song he sings solo, a song about…the song he’s singing.  How you can log onto iTunes and pay to download it.  It’s lots of fun, and kicks off one of the very best Christmas specials I have seen.  From there, it moves on to the standard fireplace-and-sweater Chistmas theme, the way only Stephen Colbert can twist that one up.

The little bits between songs are OK, but the cheesy “hey, you want some chestnuts” bits get old after a while.  But the songs themselves are magnificent.  Feist shows up as an angel, singing a song about how due to an unusually high level of prayer volume, there will be some delays in answering your prayer.  Your prayer is important to us, and we will answer all prayers in the order in which they were received.  “Please continue to hold, an angel will be with thee…shortly”.  I love Feist.  Now, she does allow Elvis Costello to be mauled by a bear, and that upset me because I also love Elvis Costello.  But aside from that, her appearance is absolutely a success.

Toby Keith shows up, making fun of a lot of things.  Including himself.  Stephen Colbert has modeled his Colbert Report on Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor, in that it is delusional right-wing propaganda taken to the extreme.  No one in the music business represents delusional right-wing propaganda more than Toby Keith.  Remember that song he wrote about America sticking her big flag-painted boot up the ass of the rest of the world?  (Or something like that.)  This year, as he does most years, Bill O’Reilly has been spouting off on his show about “the war on Christmas”.  How people say “happy holidays” in the stores instead of “Merry Christmas”.  And he gets enraged about it, and turns to Focus On The Family for an opinion - oh, my.  It’s some hilarious, delusional television.

Anyway, that is the song Toby Keith performs.  The tune could have come straight from the teleprompter of Bill O’Reilly - “they took our Christmas, but we’re taking it back”.  The video involves several shots of massive, destructive bombings, Toby Keith shooting his assault rifle directly into the camera, and numerous references to the Statue of Liberty, the American Flag, and so forth.  Toby Keith has long been one of my least favourite musicians, partly because I took the side of the Dixie Chicks in that battle a few years ago.  But maybe I’ve got him all wrong.  If he can make fun of himself, Bill O’Reilly, American uber-patriotism, and country music all at the same time, and so cleverly, perhaps he’s OK.  Then again, that’s assuming he gets it.  He looks pretty darn unenthused through his whole performance.  But I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.  Toby Keith gets it, and it’s great.

Jon Stewart makes a brief appearance, (of course), to sing a song about Hanukkah.  It’s OK, but disappointing.  Stewart isn’t as funny on Colbert as he is on his own program.  But that moment is saved when John Legend shows up.  For those of you unfamiliar with John Legend, he’s one of those modern R&B artists who wins a ton of Grammys for his slick and cheesily sexy love ballads.  He gets angry when Colbert serves egg nog without nutmeg, and he performs an ode to nutmeg, one that sends up his own style of music while being funny, smart, and totally filthy.  It’s terrific.

Toward the end, after the Jonas Brothers have died in a horrible drowning accident and Elvis Costello has been eaten by a bear, the cast gets together to sing Costello’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”.  It’s a great musical moment, and pretty funny too.  Then Costello is cut out of the bear’s stomach by Santa Claus (George Wendt) just in time to sing one last song with Colbert.  Again, a great musical moment.

But the best song on the DVD belongs to Willie Nelson, who shows up as a fourth wise man, bringing an offering of weed to the baby Jesus.  I lauged so hard at this part - mostly for the song but also beacuse of Nelson’s ridiculous get-up - that tears were coming down my cheeks.  This song features almost all of the best lines in the entire Colbert Christmas special - “and his forgiveness blew their mind”, “let not mankind bogart love”.  A magnificent song by a wonderful artist, and the best moment I have seen in any Christmas special.  Ever.

There are a few bonus features on the DVD, like the three “alternate endings”, which are clearly filmed after the fact and were never intended to be real “alternate endings”.  There is an “advent calendar” feature, where I guess the idea is that every day from December 1st until Christmas you can click on one of the calendar squares, and Stephen Colbert will appear to dish out words of wisdom, or to do something funny.  The best bonus feature, however, is another song.  “Cold Cold Christmas” is a country Christmas song performed by Colbert with a guitar, and it might be even funnier than the Willie Nelson tune.  What makes it so brilliant is that it really could be a country Christmas tune.  It seems totally real, except for the bitterness that comes out more and more as the song goes on.  Another amazing moment on a terrific DVD.

I had the most masochistic morning of my life today.  I watched, back to back, The Hottie and the Nottie, the Paris Hilton crapfest, followed by Blonde Ambition, the Jessica Simpson crapfest.  You see, I was working out and didn’t really want to put on a movie for which I would actually have to take notes.  Or one that I would actually care about.  And I decided to review the two together, because in many ways, they are the same movie.

 The plot of The Hottie and the Nottie is that Paris Hilton is hot.  She is apparently the hottest chick in the city…Los Angeles?  I think?  And every guy who sees her either falls over, or spills his drink on himself, or crashes his car.  HILARIOUS!  She appears in the film for the first time jogging down a beach.  Paris Hilton, perhaps the worst actress alive, can’t even JOG convincingly.  And some creepy guy stalks her, because he was in love with her when he was six.  Or something.  And she has this ugly friend, and she won’t date until her ugly friend does, so this guy has to figure out how to get her friend a date…and people fall down and spill their drinks and…blahblahblah.  Of course, the ugly friend is clearly just made up to look ugly, and we know that by the end of the film she’ll be reasonably attractive, if not actually hot.  But then, I never got to the end of the movie.  The cable came out of the back of the TV when the ugly girl was starting to get more attractive and Paris Hilton was starting to irritate me so much that I didn’t get off the rowing machine to plug the cables back in.  I just enjoyed the silence.  By the time I was done, so too was the movie.  And the end of this piece of trash will always remain a mystery to me.  And happily so.

I actually managed to stick it out all the way through Blonde Ambition.  Mostly because it’s background noise, and background noise is OK for when you’re excercising.  At least it is not specifically irritating the way The Hottie and the Nottie is.  Which is why it gets one star.  Bringing the total number of stars for these two piles of crap to…one.  Jessica Simpson, just like Paris Hilton, has only one thing to do in this film - be hot.  As she walks around, guys stare.  And they fall down, they spill drinks on themselves, they crash cars…the film itself is basically a remake of 1988’s Working Girl, which gave the world Melanie Griffith, making her a star.  Since then, Melanie Griffith has become a bizarre casualty of plastic surgery, with the world’s biggest, weirdest lips.  The only person close is…Jessica Simpson.  In this movie.  At least in this film there are other actors with her.  Real ones.  Rachel Leigh Cook, Luke Wilson, and Willie Nelson, who somehow shows up in every Jessica Simpson movie.  But that does not save this junk.  People fall down holes, Jessica Simpson burps and farts and wears trucker hats - get it?  She’s CRASS!  She can’t ride a bike well.  Hahahahahahahahahaha.  And she’s trying to make it in the cutthroat world of New York.  That should be good for some jokes.  But it isn’t.

 And here’s the thing - neither one of them is hot enough.  Jessica Simpson comes close, but she has these gigantic mandrill-ass lips that really distract from any prettiness her face may contain.  And Paris Hilton most definitely is not hot enough to be in a movie where being hot is the only character trait her character has.  Neither one can act, neither one has talent, neither one should ever be in movies, and both these movies suck.  And - both bombed miserably at the box office.  In fact, both of them were, as much as possible, kept out of the theatres by the studios, because they knew they would be ridiculed.  Even so, both these movies opened in theatres, and both made less than $30,000.  The Hottie and the Nottie averaged $249.00 per theatre.  Total.  111 theatres, $27,000.  Blonde Ambition averaged $165.00 per theatre on opening weekend.  It ended up playing in 8 theatres, and made $6,000.  And deservedly so, as both are among the worst movies ever made.