Hobo Stu

Hello everyone,

To deal with all of the panicked shoppers here on the East Coast, I think I am going to start up a store that sells nothing but bread and toilet paper in bulk.

Then, with the profits, I’m going to start up a driving school that teaches these people how to drive in the snow.

Either that, or I’ll just take the money and move to the West Coast.

Here’s what’s new on HoboTrashcan.com this week:

Murphy’s Law – You had me at Denzel
As the guy on the corner wearing the sandwich board has been trying to tell us for years, the world is eventually going to end. Joel Murphy has accepted this fact and has even gone so far as to select his preferred apocalypse; one that heavily features Denzel Washington.

Outside of the In-Crowd – It’s like they’re not listening to me
No matter how much Courtney Enlow rants and raves about the sad state of chick flicks, it seems like Hollywood is content to keep churning out awful movies. The two most recent offenders are When In Rome and Valentine’s Day.

Positive Cynicism – Michael Scott jumps the shark
Unless a character literally jumps over a shark like Fonzie did on Happy Days, it’s often difficult to pinpoint the exact moment a popular show begins to decline in quality. However, Aaron R. Davis is convinced he knows exactly when The Office headed downhill.

Hobo Radio 116 – Going Ben Linus on your hatch
This week, we are shaking things up a bit. In honor of Lost’s impending final season, Joel Murphy and Lars have invited Chris Kirkman, HoboTrashcan’s resident Lost expert, on to discuss the show. Ben Linus himself, Michael Emerson, described Kirkman’s recaps as “one of the smartest articles I’ve ever read about what goes on on our show,” so needless to say, the guy knows what he’s talking about.

From the Vault – One on One with Henry Rollins
Whether on stage screaming lyrics to a song, storytelling at a spoken-word show or helping Will Smith and Martin Lawrence take down white supremacists in Bad Boys II, it’s pretty clear that Henry Rollins is a take no prisoners, take no bullshit kind of guy.

It’s also clear that he’s one of the hardest working celebrities alive today. With a versatile career in a variety of different fields, it’s clear that Rollins can accomplish anything he puts his mind to. In 2007, he took some time out his busy schedule to talk to us about his career, travels and experiences – and he certainly didn’t pull any punches in the process.

- Hobo Stu

Hobo Stu’s Weekly Recap is also available as an email newsletter. To sign up for the newsletter to ensure you never miss an update, send an email to newsletter-subscribe@hobotrashcan.com.

• Introduction
• Lost discussion
• Contractually-obligated Batman discussion
• “Lost” by The Famous

 Hobo Radio 116 - Going Ben Linus on your Hatch [84:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Week 116 Spotlight: Going Ben Linus on your hatch

This week, we are shaking things up a bit. In honor of Lost’s impending final season, Joel Murphy and Lars have invited Chris Kirkman, HoboTrashcan’s resident Lost expert, on to discuss the show. Ben Linus himself, Michael Emerson, described Kirkman’s recaps as “one of the smartest articles I’ve ever read about what goes on on our show,” so needless to say, the guy knows what he’s talking about.

Joel and Lars, of course, do not. But much like Hurley on the show, they are here this week to represent the common man and to interject with their amusing comments. And to get plastered.

You see, like he does every week in his recaps, Kirkman is providing us all with a show-inspired drink recipe:

So pour a nice tall one and enjoy the show.

Hobo Radio is the official podcast of HoboTrashcan, brought to you by The Podcast Network.

Similar Posts:

• Hobo Radio 133 – Saying goodbye to Lost
• Hobo Radio 139 – Now with more twang
• Hobo Radio 117 – Southern accents and butt jokes
• Hobo Radio 73 – Give us our damn cookies!
• Hobo Radio 123 – Lars’ mom has got it going on

As you all already know, next Tuesday Lost will return for its sixth and final season. In order to help you get up to speed for season six, this week Chris Kirkman was a guest on our Hobo Radio podcast.

But for those of you looking to dig a bit deeper, we recommend rereading Kirkman’s columns from last season so that you are prepared for the final chapter in this complex and mysterious saga. And, if all of Lost’s twists and turns and Kirkman’s bizarre theories begin to make your head hurt, we recommend pouring one of his episode-inspired drink recipes to calm you down.

Lost – Season Five

• 1.23.09 – “Because You Left” and “The Lie”
• 1.30.09 – “Jughead”
• 2.06.09 – “The Little Prince”
• 2.13.09 – “This Place is Death”
• 2.20.09 – “316″
• 3.27.09 – “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”
• 3.06.09 – “LaFleur”
• 3.13.09 – A little intermezzo
• 3.20.09 – “Namaste”
• 3.27.09 – “He’s Our You”
• 4.03.09 – “Whatever Happened, Happened”
• 4.10.09 – “Dead is Dead”
• 4.17.09 – “Some Like It Hoth”
• 5.01.09 – “The Variable”
• 5.08.09 – “Follow the Leader”
• 5.15.09 – “The Incident”

Courtney Enlow

It was not that long ago that I was forced to pop a vein over The Ugly Truth. And it wasn’t long before that when I did the same about He’s Just Not That Into You and Bride Wars. And yet, Hollywood soldiers on.

The latest pair of purported chick flicks, When In Rome and Valentine’s Day, also make me want to kill someone in the face. Every TV spot I see, every pre-film trailer I suffer through, every laugh of a different female in the audience who will shell out countless duckets to see these heinous offerings, well, it just hurts. And that’s what you’re here for. As sounding boards for my pain. Deal with this.

Let’s start with When In Rome, because the other one pisses me off way more and I don’t want to peter out halfway through like The Lovely Bones (damn you, Jackson). When In Rome is the story of, as Wikipedia almost parodically puts it, Beth Harper, “a successful but hopelessly single Gotham curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.”

No, she isn’t.

But, sure, yeah, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Kristen Bell stepped on the throats of every single Art History major in the country for a gig as a curator at the Guggenheim. We’ll go ahead and ignore that. What I’m focused on is the “hopelessly single” part. Aren’t they all?

Look, I know that the busy hardworking career woman who doesn’t have time to find a man cliche bares some truth. But not “hopelessly.” “Hopelessly single” should be reserved for 35-year-old sad cat lady Twilight fans who wear Garfield shirts. And even they aren’t totally hopeless. I mean, I watch Hoarders, and a lot of those nutters are married. But in a romantic comedy, can’t we EVER have a female character who just happens to be single? Not because she chose work, which implies that we’re too weak to balance both; not because she’s a total spaz freaktrain, which makes you totally not root for her anyway; not even because she chooses to be, because rom-com science dictates that that perfect man will come along and make her see the light anyway. Just single. Just happens to not be seeing anyone at the moment, just like all of us have been. And not desperately so.

We all like attachment and affection. Hell, we all even love love. But it’s not realistic (or at least, not a respectful realistic) to have a twenty-something woman with a crazy successful career, as they all do in these movies, pining away as though her life is shit because she’s not married yet.

ANYWAY that was one big long tangent. Hopeless McVeronicamars goes to Rome for her sister’s wedding, because of course she does. She decides that since people throw coins in the fountain and find the loves of their lives, she will steal coins and find hers. Which has already lost me, because why don’t you just toss your coin? It seems like the rules are pretty clear and implicit. But anystupidmovie, her weird plan works and all these men follow her to New York to win her love, including Josh Duhamel, who is basically the C-list Timothy Olyphant, which as lower-tiered celebrity clones go is a pretty low bar already. Dax Shepherd is involved, too, who I don’t hate because I quote “I like money” from Idiocracy pretty much daily and I’m really excited for Parenthood. Also, Will Arnett is in there, and aside from GOB Bluth and his recurring role on 30 Rock, that man has made wicked bad career decisions.

What I assume will happen in the end: K. Bellz assumes J. Duhamz only loves her because of his coin, and then he tells her that he never dropped the coin in the fountain, or that his coin bounced out or something lame. Hate. Stupid. Lame. The TV spot people obviously agree, because if you’ll notice, none of the new ads include the fountain plot point, which is, essentially, the plot, period.

Speaking of C-list things and hate, let’s talk Valentine’s Day, which has triumphantly cast the most JV C-list group of actors ever assembled. Jessicas, both Biel and Alba? Taylors, both Swift and Lautner? Mcs, both Dreamy and Steamy (Patrick Dempsey and Eric Dane)? Joe goddamn Jonas? What the crap kind of pilot season call list is this?

Even the actual actors, with the exception of Anne Hathaway, are nothing too special, and I really think this is her penance for Bride Wars. I like Topher Grace to the point where I had him listed with Anne then backspaced, so we’ll ignore him, but look – When Bradley Cooper is possibly the only cast member (again, aside from Annie H.) who has successfully opened a movie in the last five years, and it’s not like he’s really proven himself beyond that one film, you have a problem. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Julia Roberts. What happened to your career? You were on a long-term hot streak, and then you just went away. I blame that “A Low Vera” shirt.

Sorry, Jamie Foxx, but I cannot in good conscience award A-list to the gentleman who was in Booty Call and very recently wrote an entire song about “the Hennay” and why I should blame my poor decisions on it.

My biggest hate goes to the Jessicas. I loathe. They’re both total idiots who say stupid things about how hard it is to be pretty and how they’ll never win Oscars because they’re so gorgeous. Because, you see, everyone else in Hollywood is big fat piles of ugly fat shit, obviously. It’s a conspiracy against the heavy-browed chick with the overbite from 7th Heaven! Rude!

My second biggest hate goes to the notion of Valentine’s Day hate. But BUHLIEVE me, I’ll be covering that in just a couple weeks. Third biggest? This lame new trend of casting everyone in the world in one movie and hoping something sticks to the wall of good taste. Just because it worked in Love Actually does not mean anyone else should do it. I’ve made my loathe of He’s Just Not That Into You widely known, and this looks even worse! With or without an insane, mildly-retarded Ginnifer Goodwin! That’s saying something.

Look, ladies, as long as we (and I mean you, I’m just trying to be nice) keep seeing these movies, they will keep making them. They think they can’t trust us with good movies because we (again, you) keep shelling out the Hamiltons to go see them.

Stop. Just stop.

Courtney Enlow is a writer living in Chicago and working as a corporate shill to pay the bills. You can contact her at courtney@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Outside of the In-Crowd – Valentine’s Day: It’s not out to get you
• Murphy’s Law – Things that piss me off (Special VD Edition)
• Positive Cynicism – Writing a romantic comedy is easy
• Outside of the In-Crowd – Why Date Night needs to be amazing
• Hobo Radio – An All American Valentine’s Day

Aaron R. Davis

Let’s just get this out of the way first thing: The Office has jumped the shark.

Ever since the hour-long wedding episode, which saw Jim and Pam finally wed and ended with the characters acting out a YouTube video, there have been a lot of people talking about shark-jumping. For the record, I was not one of the people who hated that episode and called out the show for leaping over a Selachimoprh. Maybe the wedding episode was a tad indulgent, but it seemed totally in character for Michael. We’ve seen him hijack a wedding before in his endless bid to be beloved and popular, and we’ve seen in the past how, like a child, he tries to replicate what he sees online because he thinks people will be delighted. I had zero problems with the wedding episode.

But what really cinched it for me was this past week’s episode, which was a fucking clip show.

Clip shows used to be a cheap way to pad out the episode count with filler when a show spent too much of its budget on other episodes. I’ve always found them joyless and easy to skip. Frankly, they’re the worst episodes of any TV series (unless we’re talking about The Simpsons; the worst episodes of The Simpsons are now musical episodes and any show where they tell three incredibly unfunny stories about something).

But in the age of DVD (not to mention ubiquitous Office reruns on TBS and a thousand local affiliates), are clip shows even necessary? And what really irks me is that it was the first new episode of the show in over a month (advertised with only the new scenes in the framing device to make it look like it was a real episode), it’s a rerun this week, and the Olympics are about to preempt everything. Why put in a “new” episode at all?

What really made me think The Office has jumped the shark was the weirdly smug tone of the whole episode; the way it reveled in the assumed adoration of the audience. There was no effort to it at all. At this point, the producers seem to think that the audience will love whatever they do, no matter how bad it is. They’ve gotten so overconfident in peoples’ love of the show that they think they can get away with anything.

Right now the producers are operating on a level of smarm that makes them believe they can just have Rainn Wilson sit in a chair and stare at the audience, wordlessly, for 30 straight minutes, and the audience will lap it up because they love The Office so much that nothing is a wrong decision.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the clip episode isn’t the episode where The Office vaulted over a shark called plausibility. Remember, jumping the shark is about long-term effects that you can only judge long after they’ve set in. So let’s go back and decide when, exactly, the show Fonzie’d over credibility.

My money is on “Stress Relief,” the hour-long episode that aired on February 1, 2009, immediately after the Super Bowl. That was the moment I first felt there was something … off. That was a bad episode designed as a sales pitch to whatever Super Bowl audience still wasn’t watching The Office, but it heightened everyone’s character quirks so badly that it felt overwrought, something the show had previously tried hard to avoid. That wacky, slapsticky opening with the office fire and Angela hurtling her cat into the ceiling was pure cartoon. Dwight’s behavior, especially slicing the face off of a CPR dummy to see if he can wear it over his own face like a serial killer, crossed the line into outright sociopathic. And, of course, celebrity guest stars are always a ratings stunt. It was a cynical exercise that felt completely out of place.

But since then, things have gotten more fantastic, and the plausibility of the show has become incredibly strained. The show was at its funniest when it was character-based and rooted in awkward behavior. No one seems to remember anymore, but there was a time when the show was downright uncomfortable to watch because the humor was so spot on. We’ve all known bosses like Michael Scott, and the original genius of the series was that the writers took what was familiar and ramped up the intensity just enough into absurdity. Mostly – but not always – it stayed within the realm of believability, and that’s when the show was at its best. But that kind of tension is now resolved by something magical or something pat or something wacky, and it’s come at the expense of character and credibility.

As this sixth season has gone on, with Michael and Jim as co-managers (which is about as believable as Jim being allowed to be a manager in an office where his wife works), the credibility is long gone. I especially don’t like the change that’s occurred in Jim. He was a great character because he was so effortlessly sensitive to everyone’s feelings, but now he’s turned into a total buffoon. We’ve seen this before, too – like the episode where he was in charge of the office for a day and tried to merge all of the birthday celebrations into one. He may be a nice guy, but he’s not necessarily suited for managing people, because people can be petty. And I understand the dynamic will shift, as it does in real life, when a person is promoted to a position of superiority. But the writers are handling it so badly it actually leaves me shaking my head sometimes. Dwight’s slide into cartoonish evil is bad enough, but his setting up the Employee of the Month plot in order to embarrass Jim would’ve required Jim’s brains to fall out in order to work. He’s turned into a total fool.

All of this is believability being thrown out of the window. And I’m not talking about realism. No sitcom is realistic. I’m talking about that moment when a show abandons its own interior plausibility, which every show spends time building up, only to ignore later when it goes on for more than three or four seasons and ends up on autopilot and starts doing more and more repetitive and/or outlandish things.

Frankly, by now a wizard could appear in the office and send Dwight on a quest, or Oscar could be harassed by a floating alien that only he can see and hear, and it wouldn’t seem out of place on The Office. I think believability is something the show abandoned a long time ago for the sake of ratings. It doesn’t necessarily make The Office bad, but it does make it a different show.

And with believability gone, I think we’re long into the post-shark jump period. Sure, there have been some great episodes since “Stress Relief.” I think all of the Michael Scott Paper Company episodes were brilliant. But no show goes immediately into the dregs because they jumped the shark. Declines have their momentary rises, but they always go back to falling. The Michael Scott Paper Company episodes were good, but still can’t quite touch the show at its peak. As The Office slides down the other side of the quality hill, those episodes were bright spots in a wane.

This is what happens when a show jumps the shark: overconfidence sets in, and overconfidence breeds laziness. And nothing is lazier than a damn clip episode.

The Office has jumped the shark.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

Similar Posts:

• Outside of the In-Crowd – Jump up my shark, jackass
• Hobo Radio 82 – This just in: We are whores
• One on One with Brian Baumgartner
• One on One with Angela Kinsey
• Hobo Radio 144 – This cookie tastes funny