Moving on (please!)

Things that must die in 2011: From Tim Tebow's cult to viral cat videos

News_Dancing with the Stars_Bristol Palin_Mark Ballas

Shouldn’t it be renamed "Dancing with the Vaguely Familiar People Whose Publicists Slept with the Show’s Producers"?

AP Photo/ABC, Adam Larkey

I’m not a hater. However, there are some things in pop culture, many of them floating around these social networks that have infiltrated our homes and lives like a mold growing on moist bread, that just need to die … and soon.

These are just a handful that I could happily live without:

5.) Celebrity Twitter Accounts

With the exception of Conan O’Brien, celebrities spilling out their innermost thoughts and dreams in a stream of 140 characters to anyone willing to check their smartphone or computer every five minutes, is frankly annoying.

Now, in addition to the awkward paparazzi photos we all secretly enjoy viewing on TMZ and PerezHilton.com, we can know what you ate for dinner, where you went shopping, what your mom bought you for Christmas and when you went to the bathroom.

Sorry Ashton Kutcher, I’m just not that into you. Even more annoying — celebrity Twitter feuds.

Isn’t being rich and famous enough for you already? Get. A. Life.

4.) Cat Themed Internet Memes

I could expect a small chuckle every now and then when I first saw Lolcats, but now I loathe the broken, misspelled English on the mostly benign photos of cats. The silly-cat-photo-misspelled-words-phenomenon seems to have nine lives.

If I see the phrase “I can haz cheezburger,” one more time, I might throw said “cheezburger” at my computer screen.

Although I’m an equal opportunity animal lover (meaning all types of furry friends — including felines), if I see one more cutesy cat video on the front page of Yahoo!, I might vomit up a hairball. Enough already you freakish cat people … your plan to take over the interwebz is giving me a headache, or perhaps it’s just all that cat dandruff floating around the web.

3.) Comic Sans Bashing

It’s been well established by now that the font, Comic Sans, in and of itself, also needs to die a quick death. It’s cheesy, ugly and brings nothing but pain and embarrassment to the organizations and individuals willing to use it on websites or any printed materials.

However, even worse than Comic Sans usage, are the designers and hipsters set on blanketing the Internet with crude jokes and unabashed bashing of this dying, washed-up font.

We know it’s not OK to use it in anything other than a joke. We get that if you’re a cool, hip designer, it’s fun to crack Comic Sans jokes on all your social media applications while drinking coffee in your special wireless Internet-offering coffeehouses on your super-hip Mac computer in your super awesome Chuck Taylors. But now, it’s time to move on to the next font or design issue — perhaps drop shadows or gradients?

2. Dancing with the “Stars”

Did you notice that neat little trick I played with the quotation marks in the heading of this section? It’s funny because it’s true.

Just to refresh your memory, Bristol Palin was never a star. She was a vice presidential candidate’s daughter who had the misfortune (or just the bad judgment) of sleeping with a fame whore named Levi, who happened to be pretty virulent, without any form of protection. She definitely warrants the quotation marks.

Shouldn’t it be renamed Dancing with the Vaguely Familiar People Whose Publicists Slept with the Show’s Producers?

1.) America’s Collective Tebow-ner

So perhaps the statement “I’m not a hater,” is a little white lie. Tim Tebow and his rainbow of happiness coupled with his incredible football skills are my one exception, and a window into the darkest depths of my soul.

As an Alabama fan married to a lifetime Florida Gator, I have a vile rage so filthy and dark that the soot on the floor of your hearth couldn’t compete with my disdain for the Bronco’s new Pollyanna warrior. His impassioned speeches, his Scripture spewing, and his showing against our always disappointing Texans last weekend only add to my mistrust of the (seemingly) gentle giant. By the way, have you Googled his name and found the first picture that pops up under “images”?

Still think he’s a saint?

I’ll be damned if the announcer on television didn’t say “Tebow” over 100 times during that awful game against the Texans and by God, I wish America would stop taking the Viagra that continues to fuel their Tebowners game after game.

Shouldn’t it be renamed "Dancing with the Vaguely Familiar People Whose Publicists Slept with the Show’s Producers"?

AP Photo/ABC, Adam Larkey

Shouldn’t it be renamed "Dancing with the Vaguely Familiar People Whose Publicists Slept with the Show’s Producers"?

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Movie Review

Glen Powell stumbles in remake of sci-fi classic The Running Man

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Glen Powell in The Running Man.

For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.

Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.

Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.

Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.

The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.

Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.

Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.

The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.

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The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14.

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