Author: David Medsker (Page 18 of 65)

Producers of “Fast and Furious” do open audition for models. This should be interesting.

February 12, 2009 /

From the Careful What You Wish For Department, the producers of “Fast and Furious” are launching a modeling contest. Send them your sexiest photo, and the winner will receive their choice of a professional modeling session or $5,000. Sounds awesome, right? A bunch of hardbodies will surely put their talents on display in the hopes of getting their big break, right?

Well, yes, but remember the age in which we live; the one where everyone thinks they’re entitled to be famous, and no one has friends who love them enough to stop them from doing something potentially humiliating that will live on the Internet forever and ever. We browsed through a gaggle of the contestants in the “Fast and Furious” contest, and sure enough, there are both smoking hot candidates and girls who have a wildly exaggerated sense of self. This does not mean that we’re saying the women in this latter category are ugly. (Well, some of them are.) In fact, most of the girls who have submitted photos are very attractive, but that alone does not make them model material. Odds are, the woman who wins this contest is already a professional model. That’s how competitive this business is.

Still interested in submitting a picture? Excellent, but before you do, you would be wise to learn from the examples of the other women who have already entered, and will certainly lose. In an attempt at performing some kind of public service, we would like to offer a few tips to consider before shooting the picture that will change your life.*

– Wearing less isn’t necessarily sexier than wearing more. It’s all in how you frame the package.
– Pulling down your bikini top and covering your nipples with masking tape isn’t sexy. It’s creepy.
– Cover up the tattoos, or risk alienating three out of every four people on the planet.
– Choose your background and pose carefully. Megan Fox may have looked hot bent over the car engine in “Transformers,” but she’s Megan Fox, and you’re not.
– You can have the hottest body in the world, but it won’t matter if you aren’t pretty.
– Being hot is not the same as being pretty.
– If we can’t see your face, we’re going to assume you’re hiding something.
– Don’t pose on a stripper pole, or in a position that suggests Ron Jeremy is about to enter the room from stage left. This is a modeling contest, not a porno audition.
– Fishnets are for catching fish.
– Animal prints look better on animals.
– Don’t even think about chains.
– Hats? Really? Look at that girl up there. She is smoking hot. But what part of the picture are your eyes drawn to? Yep, the hat.
– Take off the sunglasses. If your eyes are red from being hung over or stoned, today is not the day to take the picture.
– No one likes stringy hair.
– For God’s sake, smile.

Still think you’ve got what it takes? Then go here and show off your stuff. Good luck, and may you post a picture that will make your children proud. Because they’ll see it one day, you know that, right?

*- It probably won’t change your life. At least not in a good way.

Action Movies, Actors, Actresses

Lost 5.5 – This Island Is Death

February 12, 2009 /

In the mid-’90s, my then-girlfriend watched “Melrose Place” religiously. I wasn’t opposed to the show itself – any show with Heather Locklear is worth at least a look with the sound off, right? – but every time Marcia Cross came onscreen, I would repeat my mantra: “Would someone please KILL HER?” They would even tease us with promos saying, “One of these characters will die,” then show shots of all the leads and one blatant Red Shirt character. It made me crazy that these people would knock on Death’s door and ask him to punch them in the face, but they survived everything, like a bunch of bed-hopping cockroaches. For years, I would think that TV shows didn’t have the balls to kill their characters. It would be too risky, too polarizing.

Man, karma’s a bitch. This week alone, Daphne bites it on “Heroes,” and now Charlotte succumbs to Time Jumping Syndrome. TV finally gave me everything I ever wanted. It wasn’t what I wanted. Come on, they couldn’t have killed the cheerleader and Juliet instead?

Ben Linus might be the most conniving bag of douche on God’s green earth, but you have to admire how unflappable he is. He never loses his cool or panics even when someone has a gun to his head, and that happens a lot. This time it was Sun that was looking for a little payback, though one thing about her arc bugs me: she gets the gun through covert means, and is flipping through a file with shots of Jack and Ben before meeting them at the pier. At first, it looked as though she was on assignment, and Ben was the target. Is she a contract killer, or did she merely pull a few of Daddy’s strings to acquire some heat and settle a score?

“You go ahead, Sawyer. I’m going to watch the love of my life regress to her childhood self and die, but not before scaring the living shit out of me.”

The bits between Rousseau and Jin were interesting, though much like everything else about “Lost,” they ask more questions than they answer. Her entire group goes to save their leader after the smoke monster drags him below (though not before he loses an arm, yikes). Then Jin jumps forward a little bit, and the rest of her group is now “infected,” though with what we’re not sure. She even thinks Jin is infected too, and since the father of Rousseau’s baby just tried to shoot her, I can’t say I blame her for being a little paranoid. Still, I hope they shed more light on what happened to them in the “temple.” I’d also love to know how Ben came to be Alexandra’s “father.”

And while we’re talking about graphic violence, did anyone else wince at the sight of Locke’s leg after he fell down the well? Compound fractures are right up there with severed Achilles tendons on the list of things that make me go “Aieeeeeeeee!” I thought it was amusing that Jack’s father is now Jacob’s official spokesperson. I’m sure there’s some cosmic significance to that – though my first thought when I saw him was “Help Locke, dude, you’re a doctor!” – but we’re probably a year away from any explanation.

And let us not forget the episode’s Big Reveal, when Charlotte told Daniel that she used to live on the island as a little girl, and that a scary old man once told her that she would die here…and that the old man was Daniel, dunt dunt duuuuuuunh. Daniel didn’t know this, which means it hasn’t happened to him yet. Does it happen soon, or years from now? How much time do Sawyer, Juliet and Miles have before they die, too? And how heartbreaking was it to watch Charlotte’s mind come undone? Also, is it just me, or does Jeremy Davies have the most expressive eyebrows of any actor working today?

Jason will be back to blog next week, so thanks for allowing me to sub in for him this week, and I hope I didn’t completely screw the pooch.

Lost, TV, TV Dramas

24 7.8: Would you kill for love?

February 9, 2009 /

If last week closed to the sound of the studio blinking – we can’t show a chemical factory meltdown, there would be panic! – tonight’s episode featured the jarring sound of metal on metal as the show hit its first real snag. Dudley Do-Right uttered one of the most painful Straw Man lines in the show’s history (“The rules are what make us better,” ugh), and Jack winds up killing yet another person that could have blown the case wide open. For as much as we love Jack’s tendency to torture first and follow protocol later, would it kill them to have him bring the authorities a living bad guy once in a while?

Actually, that whole conversation by the pool was laughable. DDR is all upset about Jacqueline’s willingness to do things Jack’s way, but not once did either Jack or Jackie say to DDR, “We’re not going to hurt the wife or the child! We just have to make Vossler think we’re going to hurt them.” Jesus, that’s Negotiation 101, isn’t it? I thought that Jackie was being hard on the woman at first, but then I realized that if she’s too nice and explains everything, it won’t put the proper fear of God in Vossler. When his wife/widow says to her afterward, “You’re a monster,” I was hoping Jackie would return with something along the lines of, “Your husband is a traitor to his country, takes his orders from a brutal African dictator, and just participated in the kidnapping of the First Man, so you can suck it. Oh, and he’s dead now. Smooches.”

“Can you do me a favor and give me that smoldering stare just long enough for everyone in the office to know that we’re sleeping together? There, that’s perfect, thanks.”

I was amused at the sister of Col. Ike Turner’s girlfriend – her real name is Marika, but you just know that we have to call her Tina – blackmailing Ike. I’m surprised he didn’t laugh out loud when she did it, since he knows she’s in a wheelchair and was probably thinking about feeding her to dogs the entire time.

Once again, President Taylor shows tremendous stones for realizing that what Ike Turner is asking of her is no different than what she asked of the people who lost loved ones on the colliding planes. I was also glad that they had one of Ike’s henchmen remind him that if they kill the First Man, they will have played all their bargaining chips. Ike’s willingness to do it anyway leads me to believe that the show is about to abandon this entire plot – and two things in the scenes for next week’s episode confirm that – and I gotta say, I’m not sure how I feel about that. This isn’t going to turn into Jack Bauer Week on Court TV, is it? God, how boring would that be? But you just know that the rabid Attorney General is looming off camera with the pitchfork and the torch. If they don’t pick that thread back up, it will be a tremendous oversight. When they do pick it up, it’ll be sanctimonious and dull.

So the First Man takes a gunshot to the midsection and is going to live, while Vossler takes a knife to the stomach and dies instantly. Hmmm. Yes, the First Man’s shot is off to the left, but that means it punctured a kidney and would speed up the organ failure, yes? I don’t know much about that sort of thing, to be honest – just that a lack of a kidney is what saved John Locke on “Lost” a while back.

And sure enough, just as I predicted (not that it was a stretch, I know), Janis is wise to Billy Walsh’s philandering ways. Of course, there is no reason for us to witness that exchange unless it leads to something down the road, so what could that something be? Is Erika the mole, and using Billy’s clearance to set him up? That’s the most obvious answer, so let’s come up with a better one: Janis is the mole, and will use Billy’s affair as a means to pin the whole thing on Billy by saying, “He’s cheating on his wife, he can’t be trusted.” Nah, that’s just as lame as Erika using Billy for clearance. They should just have Billy be the mole, hiding in plain sight. No one expects him to actually be the bad guy, right? So make him the bad guy.

One last thought: Ike Turner has proceeded to screw up a whole bunch of stuff in the last two hours. The location of their ops center was blown, he didn’t pull the trigger on the chemical plant failure, and the CIP device has been destroyed. His attempt to use the First Man as leverage has failed, and now his backup hideout has been ransacked and the First Man recovered. This man works for, as we mentioned, a brutal dictator. Isn’t he as good as dead right now? Anyone remember the shot in “The Last King of Scotland” of what Amin did to his wife when she tried to hide the evidence of her infidelity? Isn’t that what’s waiting for Ike? If his head isn’t on a stake by season’s end, we’ve been gypped.

The ‘Damn It’ counter went into overdrive this week. I counted four, which puts us at 14 for the season, far behind where I thought we’d be after eight hours. Pick up the pace, you slackers.

24, TV, TV Action

24 7.7: If they dare touch a hair on your head, I’ll fight to the last breath

February 3, 2009 /

We are an hour away from the unofficial end of Act I, and while I’m shocked that they have suddenly discarded the most formidable weapon that any President in the show’s history has had to face – fare thee well, CIP device – I applaud and understand the decision to move the show to the next arena. The FBI weren’t going to remain in the dark forever, so it was only a matter of time before they were able to figure out the next target. Likewise, the Scoobies weren’t going to be able to do this on their own forever, so as risky as the move is to reveal their identities to the President, to have them continue to operate so efficiently, without tipping off the authorities to either their identities or location, would have been silly. So good for them for acknowledging that and moving on.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind about any of this if they take the show somewhere I don’t like. It’s my right as its blogger. So mleah.

So Colonel Ike Turner, aware that the FBI had figured out his next target but unaware that they didn’t know where he was or how to stop him (why not make a call to your well-placed source and find out the dilleo?), pulled the plug on his chemical plant attack with only minutes to go. Hmmm. Why not just let it play out, even if you think your location has been compromised? May as well hit them hard one last time, right? My inner paranoid – which is a flattering way of just saying ‘I’ – wonders if the Fox censors stepped in and said, “Uh, no, you’re not wiping out a small town in Ohio. They vote Republican, Murdoch won’t have it.” Just a thought.

“Hot damn, Tony, I finally get to shoot me some bad guys.” “I’m happy for you, Bill.”

Luckily for Turner, he now has the First Man as a hostage, so if he was able to freak out Madame President with the threat of massive casualties, he can now freak her out with the threat of one extremely important casualty. At the same time, Turner has lost an incredible amount of leverage in the process. I picture their next exchange to go something like this:

Dubaku: You will meet my demands.
Taylor: No, I won’t.
Dubaku: (*BANG*) Your husband is dead.
Taylor: Way to go, genius. I’m now going to bomb your army back to the Stone Age, steal your diamonds, and rename the country Taylorville.
Dubaku: *Shit.*

Yes, he can take away the love of her life, but as cynical as this may sound, that’s all he can do. Dubaku is no longer in a position to threaten the nation’s security, so how badly can he really hurt her? His only recourse after playing the First Husband card is to coerce his US government recruits to step up their complicity. But they’ll get caught, because they were all stupid enough to get into bed with General Candyman in the first place. Hopefully, they have something planned that we can’t predict at the moment. Hopefully.

God, how much does Jack love Jacqeline right now? She holds her own in a huge gunfight and takes out a bunch of Dubaku’s men. Next week’s scenes show a shot of Jack speaking with the President in the Oval Office, and I’m waiting to hear Jack say, “You can trust us, Madame President, but first thing’s first.” (drops to one knee, looks at Freckles) “You are going to marry me. The only question is how much you want it to hurt.” That’s truth. That’s love.

24, TV, TV Action

Make ’em Laugh: The Funny Business of America

January 30, 2009 /

Simply put, the three-DVD set of PBS’ six-part special on comedy in America is a must-have for any fan of comedy. Hosted by Billy Crystal and narrated by Amy Sedaris, “Make ’em Laugh” traces the origins of the wiseguy, the oddball, the breadwinner, the satirist, the pratfaller, and the groundbreaker in incredible detail, combining footage of the masters at work (both movies and TV) with interviews of dozens of comedians, writers and producers. (Holy cow, was Jack Benny’s writing staff an All-Star lineup of funny.) It’s all very informative, but if the set has one flaw, it’s in each show’s tendency to stop the timeline around 1989, which results in the omission of several prominent modern-day comedians (Bill Hicks, Patton Oswalt and Sarah Silverman, to name a few). That will happen, of course, when trying to condense 80 years of comedy into six hours. Each disc also contains extended interviews with dozens of comedians, and a couple bits of guys telling their favorite jokes. Great stuff, across the board.

Click to buy Make ’em Laugh: The Funny Business of America

Humor, Stand-Up Comics, TV, TV DVD Quicktakes, TV DVDs

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Premium Hollywood

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑