Celebs to reconsider in '11

Mind changer: Ke$ha flexes woman power in her sex photos & James Van Der Beek cries cool

James van der Memes: eyebrows

The new year is a time for fresh starts and reevaluations. I present two lame-seeming stars you might want to reconsider in 2011.

James Van Der Beek

First and foremost, I present James Van Der Beek. Twentysomethings best know him from Dawson’s Creek where he played the title character, a wussy but heartbreakingly handsome prep hung up on Joey (Katie Holmes). Recently his face has become synonymous with maudlin breakdowns. An animated gif circulating on the Internet shows the actor bursting into tears in an especially emotional scene of Dawson's Creek.

Although I admit he’s attractive, he’s an all-American cheese ball and about as dangerous as Hello Kitty. Or that’s what I thought until the Vandermemes.

He’s embraced the bawling ridicule (though what else was he going to do, cry about it?) and posted videos of his reenactments of popular emotions, from an “awkwarrrd” side-glance to a dismissive “Lilo eye roll."

He explains, "The more I saw [the gif] in website comment sections mocking the sadness of others, the more I realized what the Internet was really demanding: more intense emotional close-ups of my face." He even revisits his crying clip in his "10 year anniversary crying edition." Watch his video for the full Van-Der-feelings experience:

Vandermemes from James Van Der Beek

As if one-upping those who popularized the crying gif wasn't enough, he even makes fun of his role as the goody two-shoes, pushover Dawson. In his "Hire an Asshole" video, he addresses the men of the world:

"Hello men. My name is James Van Der Beek, and I’m sorry. For years I played sensitive do-gooder Dawson Leery on Dawson’s Creek. Now you may not have watched the show but your girlfriend did. For years she’s been secretly comparing you to a very unrealistic standard. You see, Dawson was sweet, kind, loving, eloquent, generous, romantic. He never made a move and always apologized whether it was his fault or not. Well, I’m making it right. Maybe you forgot your anniversary or you didn’t call her enough from your friend’s bachelor party. I’ll make you look like a hero by lowering the bar."

Van Der Beek then cops feels and heckles waitresses, to the disgust of onlooking girlfriends. A satisfied customer attests, “My wife was crazy about Dawson ... until he punched her mother in the face.” Check it out:

Asshole For Hire from James Van Der Beek

Van Der Beek shouldn't receive full credit for the clever spoofs (they're all part of FunnyorDie.com, the celebrity humor website of Will Ferrell), but he deserves a pat on the back.

He has flawless comedic timing, and his willingness not only to revisit his past, but to ridicule it in ways his critics never touched upon has me smitten.

Ke$ha

I used to abhor Ke$ha, dismissing her as another industry-produced pop princess using sex to sell shitty songs. She looked like a drunk Blake Lively dressed up as Lady Gaga for Halloween. While I'm still not too keen on her self-described “white trash dumpster-diving chic” fashion, I have newfound respect for the singer ever since her sex photos.

Yes, it's a rarity that sex photos garner any sort respect, but these aren't the subservient images you'd expect. She's not bent over a couch or on her knees in dutiful service. No, a guy is servicing Ke$ha, the picture snapped from her point of view with her foot curled around his head in dominance. Publicity stunt or not, that's sort of awesome.

As an article on EqualWrites.org explains, Ke$ha doesn’t merely flout the hyper-sexualization of women; she satirizes and undercuts it. We know girls who get drunk and have sex, and we know girls who don't (think Taylor Swift or Jessica Simpson in the time of promise rings). Ke$ha, though, is a chick who gets drunk without having sex. In the video for “Tik Tok” she uproots the conventional party narrative, waking up not half-naked in the arms of some rando but fully clothed in a suburban family’s bathtub.

I won’t advocate passing out in a bathtubs (though if you do, remember turn the water off — your landlord will get way pissed when it leaks through the ceiling trust me), but I will encourage young partiers to think twice before stripping down for a drunk idiot who won't call.

Even the dollar sign in her name, which used to annoy me (OK, it still annoys me) is emblematic of a roll reversal. We generally see dollar signs on rappers' chains, not in the names of skinny white girls.

While I won’t argue anything ludicrous like that Ke$ha is the next Madonna. Rather I urge you to consider the fact that maybe she’s not that horrible.

As I listen solely to post-apocalyptic neo folk, I’ll never be a real fan of her sound. Her thin, often computer-manipulated voice makes it hard to tell where the vocals end and Vocoder processing kicks in.

She’s not fully writing and producing her own music, and we’ll never know how much of her act is personal dogma or simply the result of a record label’s image consultant partnering with a clever lyricist. Either way, I'm amused.

James Van Der Beek lets the cry loose.

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Movie Review

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is technically stunning but lacks emotion

Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Matt Damon in The Odyssey.

For a story that is 3,000 years old and has been referenced innumerable times since the advent of the moving picture, it’s striking that The Odyssey has not been adapted into a film more often. Christopher Nolan’s new film is, depending on your definition, just the fourth time in film history that someone has attempted to tell the original story (oddly, the third film — The Return — came out just two years ago).

Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, who has been gone from his home of Ithaca for over 20 years. Waiting at home for him is his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), as well as a hall full of suitors — most notably Antinous (Robert Pattinson) — who are hoping that Penelope will finally believe that Odysseus is dead and choose to marry one of them.

In typical Nolan fashion, the film goes back-and-forth in time often to show what has happened to Odysseus in the past two decades. His sea voyages with his crew have him attacking Troy using the legendary Trojan Horse; taking on the cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin); trying to escape the clutches of the witch Circe (Samantha Morton); living with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron); communing with the vision of Athena (Zendaya); and more.

Nolan, who wrote and directed the epic film, has a clear reverence for the material and, perhaps more than any current filmmaker, has the chops to make the sprawling story feel coherent. With a plethora of characters who have names that take some time to understand for those not familiar with the ancient tale, it’s extremely tough to wrangle everything and everyone together, and Nolan and his team make that trick seem relatively easy.

However, there’s a difference between making the story comprehensible and making it compelling, and Nolan is not as successful on this front. As portrayed in this film, it’s difficult to care whether Odysseus ever finds his way home. His connection with Penelope and Telemachus is tenuous, at best, and his status as a hero is called into question on multiple occasions. Complicated protagonists are nothing new, but in a story where the hero’s journey is the whole point, Nolan fails to make the quest all encompassing.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some standout moments along the way. The sequence in Polyphemus’ cave is tremendous, as are a few other scenes in which Nolan’s reported reliance on practical effects make you wonder how the crew accomplished what they did. Damon has said this is the hardest movie he’s ever made, and that effort shows up in every scene, especially those on the water.

At 56 years old, Damon is getting close to elder statesman status in Hollywood, and he ably embodies the role of the respected and feared leader. Hathaway, Holland, and Pattinson get the next most screentime, and each makes their character interesting if not mesmerizing. The murderer’s row of the supporting cast — Theron, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Elliot Page, Morton, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, and more — give each scene a nice sheen whether or not their individual arc makes sense.

While the technical achievements of Nolan and his team in The Odyssey are admirable and occasionally awe-inspiring, the story he lays out is not quite as overwhelming. The structure he chose to use doesn’t allow the story to overcome the episodic nature of Odysseus’ brutal journey, keeping big emotions mostly at bay.

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The Odyssey opens in theaters on July 17.

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