Joel Murphy

Last Thursday, Jason Bateman stood in line outside an Apple Store with 2,000 other people in order to get his hands on the new iPhone 4. However, Apple Store employees, most likely recognizing him from his iconic role as the overprivileged tight end Jarvis Edison in Necessary Roughness, plucked Bateman out of line and invited him inside the store to get his phone ahead of everyone else.

A paparazzi photographer was there at the time, so photos of Bateman being pulled out of line quickly surfaced. (Bateman later claimed that the Apple Store employees invited him inside the store to get him away from the paparazzi photographer.) Not surprisingly, gossip blogs ran the photo and talked about the “incident” on Thursday. What is surprising though is that, for some reason, people are still talking about this (incredibly insignificant) event a week later.

This is mostly thanks to Us Weekly, which is clearly struggling to find compelling content in these slow summer months. The magazine tracked down several people who were in the line that day and allowed them to vent their frustrations. Here’s a sample of their top notch reporting, which no doubt will be in line for the Pulitzer next year:

“Everyone literally started booing and hissing!” a source tells UsMagazine.com.

Adds another witness, “The crowd freaked and booed, and [Bateman] put his head down.”

Why are these sources anonymous? Are these people really afraid to go on the record? Do they think the star of Teen Wolf Too is going to track them down and kick their asses? It’s Jason Bateman, not Sean Penn. Cowboy up and give the report your fucking names, you pansies.

Luckily, there was a brave soul willing to go on record. Angela Mayhew, who had been in line since 3:30 a.m. according to Us Weekly, told the magazine: “It was so much drama! It was the most surreal experience. People were so pissed because that line was ridiculous.”

On his Twitter account, Bateman at first denied that anyone was booing when he was let into the store (adding “I was content in line. I wish I’d stayed”), but later, after being confronted with Us Weekly’s crack reporting, Bateman posted: “Correction – If there were boos, I didn’t hear them. If some were mad, I didn’t see them. I wish I had. If you’re out there, I’m sorry.”

It’s nice of Bateman to apologize, but honestly I don’t think he did anything wrong. It’s easy for Us Weekly to paint Bateman as a spoiled Hollywood elitist using his celebrity status to jump to the head of the line, but that’s not really fair.

For one thing, in Us Weekly’s own article, Mayhew says that Bateman got in line at 4:45 a.m. and it wasn’t until around 10 that employees pulled him out of it. So Bateman was there for five hours and 15 minutes patiently waiting before anyone came and got him. In the paparazzi photos, Bateman is sitting on the sidewalk looking slightly confused as the Apple employee pulls him out of the line. He wasn’t shouting or making a scene. He didn’t demand to be let in first. At no point did he yell: “Do you know who I am? I played Carl Himple on Simon, damn it, and I demand you take me to the front of this line!”

Still, it’s not surprising that people in line were upset. When you’ve been there since 3:30 in the morning, you are going to be pissed off that someone gets to jump in front of you. That’s completely understandable. Even the biggest Valerie’s Family fan in the world is going to get upset when ol’ David Hogan himself cuts in line.

But I blame the Apple Store. You are located in L.A., Apple Store. Undoubtedly, you are used to dealing with celebrities. If you are going to have a policy where you give celebrities special treatment, at least have an employee subtly tell Bateman to head around back and sneak him in through the employee entrance or something. What is this, amateur hour?

I don’t blame Bateman for doing it though. Is he honestly supposed to turn down the employee’s offer to get his phone before everyone else? Do we really expect him to be so noble that he would continue to wait in line after being offered a way out? Who would actually do that? I guarantee that, in his shoes, you would have all followed that Apple Store employee too. If you don’t think you would have, you are kidding yourself.

Bateman’s biggest problem here is that he seems like a nice guy. The fact that he was even in the line in the first place is astounding to me. The only reason you didn’t hear about a ton of other celebrities getting plucked out of the same line ahead of everyone else was because they all sent their managers or personal assistants out to buy the phone for them. Or they called Steve Jobs and asked him to bring one over. Bateman is only catching grief because he tried to be a regular guy instead of a pampered celebrity. He’s catching flack because he forgot that he was better than everyone else until an Apple Store employee came along and reminded him.

Being a celebrity these days is tough. With so many paparazzi photographers and gossip blogs looking to tear you down, it’s just not as fun as it used to be. As a society, we have this insatiable need to destroy these celebrities anytime they do something we deem unacceptable. But you know what makes being a celebrity awesome? (Besides the piles and piles of cash.) The perks.

Jason Bateman should get the iPhone before everyone else. He deserves it. The man who starred in Extract shouldn’t have to stand in line with the unwashed masses. The Angela Mayhews of the world should move out of his way so that he can get his iPhone first. He needs that phone to call up all of his bigtime Hollywood friends to invite them over to his house for an awesome party that we could only dream of attending.

I say enjoy your phone, Jason Bateman. And don’t ever stand in line for anything ever again. You are better than everyone else … and I’m okay with that.

Joel Murphy is the creator of HoboTrashcan, which is probably why he has his own column. He loves pugs, hates Jimmy Fallon and has an irrational fear of robots. You can contact him at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

We’re well into summer now, and that’s always meant one thing to me: even less interesting television programming than usual.

Now, granted, there’s no accounting for taste. We all like crap of some sort or another, and we all get precious about it on some level or another. Crap is fun to watch. It’s like White Castle: it goes down easily, it fills you up for a little while, it doesn’t tax your attention span and it’s even more awesome when you’re high. Crap is awesome.

(And so is White Castle.)

Coupled with that is the fact that, like people who eat White Castle, I get bored easily and need something to do. I’ve always been like that. When you were younger, did you ever get bored and end up, by default, just watch hours and hours and hours of daytime TV? You know how it is: you wake up in the morning, you think you’re going to get a ton of stuff done over the day and suddenly you get distracted and realize you’ve just watched three episodes of Jerry Springer in a row. Suddenly, a week later, you have no idea why but you’re really interested to find out where Erica Kane’s newest story arc is going. It just sort of … happens.

This is why, last summer, I suddenly found myself deeply involved in daytime reruns of Desperate Housewives, a show I never thought I’d watch in my life, but which I now watch for three hours a day in the summer.

Yeah, distractions will come.

There is some quality in the summer schedule, by which I pretty much exclusively mean Futurama’s triumphant return to Comedy Central. Unfortunately, I despise Comedy Central, so I can’t watch the show live. All of those loud, obnoxious commercials for cash-for-gold scams, Olive Garden and Comedy Central’s idiotic original programming screaming out at me in a cacophony that’s almost impossible to ignore … There are certain things I don’t need in my life, and those things include fake Italian restaurants, someone trying to underpay me for my gold and Jon Stewart mugging at the camera. The person who invented TiVo has my gratitude.

The other stuff I’m watching is crap, and I’m willing to admit that.

True Blood… the other day, someone asked me what my favorite episode of True Blood was, and I had no idea how to answer her. I finally had to say “I have no idea. True Blood isn’t a show I watch because it’s good, it’s really just a show I watch because it’s summer and there’s nothing on. It’s stupid and ridiculous, and sleazy and hilarious and it’s full of nudity and sex.”

“So, you watch it even though you think it’s dumb?” she asked.

To which I could only answer: “I watch it because the dumbness is hilariously entertaining.”

If that makes me shallow, hey, I don’t care.

It’s not like I don’t like good television, it’s just that there’s so little good television on in the summer. So instead I’ll watch Hell’s Kitchen and Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami and whatever the hell that thing is with Jillian Michaels because, you know, what else is on? Plus, you know, hot chicks.

Yes, I am this lazy.

About the only type of television I won’t watch—and which is becoming prevalent these days — are those weird macho shows my Dad likes. You know what I mean: Pawn Stars, Deadliest Catch, Ace of Cakes, etc. Shows where they either highlight how much machismo it takes to do a particular job, or where they take a job which is, I guess, stereotypically feminine and get a bunch of pissed-off alpha males to do it and whine about how manly it is.

This is a phenomenon I really don’t get. Is it just because I don’t think cooking is stereotypically feminine or masculine or made for any sort of person that I think Anthony Bourdain’s confrontational bullshit is silly, or is it just that he’s an ass hat?

Is it just that I’m comfortable with who I am and seeing other people risk their lives while I sit my fat ass down on the couch doesn’t give me a vicarious erection?

I don’t know, but I do think those shows are kind of ridiculous. They’re so formulaic. You can build one of these out of nothing.

Example: you want to do one of these slick reality shows for The Learning Channel, no matter how nonsensical that seems, since this channel used to actually carry programs about learning. You want to do a show about the work that goes into the fine craftsmanship of making dollhouse furniture. So, since no one in America is apparently going to watch a program like that without a by-now-very-clichéd hook, you need to find someone very manly, with big arms and tattoos, who got kicked out of the army for heroin or something and then dramatically kicked the habit, and who also happens to make dollhouse furniture.

And, of course, because alpha males apparently can’t make things a girl might play with, he’ll have to angrily, gruffly go on about how it’s carpentry and architectural design, but only on a much smaller scale, which is of course the challenge of the whole thing, and anyway, he likes the idea that something he does makes children happy DAMN IT TO HELL, I’M A TOUGH GUY AND I MAKE FURNITURE FOR DOLLS, SO WHAT?! He’ll have to get in your face with that ‘tude, and he’ll need younger guys with ‘tude of their own to get into confrontations over whether the bedspread should be made out of gingham or lace, because if shows that used to be about knowledge and the world have shown us anything, it’s that no one wants to watch a show where guys just build cars, they want guys to build cars while SCREAMING AT EACH OTHER!

And we can call it Doll Men! Or Toy Warriors! Or, I don’t know, something manlier. We’ll work out the fine details later. TLC, I expect you to call me on this.

Just don’t call me when Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami is on.

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.

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Courtney Enlow

Because experience has taught me that nothing follows up The Crush like Fear.

Fear and The Crush are my two all-time, top two, guilty pleasure delights. The difference? Only one really makes me feel all that guilty. And it ain’t this one.

I genuinely love this movie. Not in a “God, The Room is awesome” kind of love. Like, “This is how girls who wear t-shirts to the pool and 45-year-old ladies with 10 cats and hoarding disorder feel about Twilight.” Love. Pure and simple, unconditional. Love.

James Foley, the director of Glengarry Glen Ross, no doubt inspired after working with Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin and Alan Arkin, said, “I want to work with that guy who posed in his tighty-whiteys and rapped of vibrations, good like Sunkist.” And the magic was born.

Feel it, feel it.

Fear is the tale of Reese Witherspoon, a spoiled brat who wears very short skirts. Despite constantly showing her thighs and midsection, we are lead to believe that she is the good girl to her best friend Margot’s (Alyssa Milano) giant whoreface. You can tell she’s a whoreface because she asks for chocolate cake like she wants it. Aw yeah.

They are also friends with Gary. Gary is the biggest wimp ever. Fuck Gary.

Her dad is William Peterson. At one point in the film, he whips off his sunglasses when shit goes down. David Caruso later stole this and had a career with it on Peterson’s spinoff.

Because Reese is a spoiled child of divorce, she is angsty and longs for excitement. So she, Margot and Gary sneak out of school one day and get coffee. EXCITEMENT! While java-ing, she spies the incredible pile of muscle and beauty and Boston that is Mark Wahlberg. She tingles twixt her nethers. Alyssa Milano spies his friend who looks like a fat Slash. She burns and itches twixt her nethers, but that’s probably been going on for a while, what with the aforementioned whorefacing.

When her dad bails on a James Taylor concert, Reese storms out of her house ready to be a rebel (missing out on “Fire and Rain” will do that to a 16-year-old) and she and Margot head off to experience Seattle’s mid-’90s rave scene. There’s lights, flannel, dude-on-dude action, untz-untz music and she is stoked to finally feel alive. And as if things couldn’t get better, though it is a rave of at least 300 people, she runs into Marky Mark. Well, he mysteriously appears from behind a pole, but it’s fine. She wows him with her stunning conversational skills (“So … why aren’t you dancing?”) and then a fight breaks out or grunge dies or something angsty, I’m not sure, but they all have to bounce because the police helicopters are coming.

He whisks her away from danger in his Corvair and when she tells him she should get home, he turns her watch back.

It’s a cute moment, but when he does it again later in her dad’s office, you kind of start to realize that maybe he really thinks that’s how time works.

After that, they have a montage of tenderness. Playing pool, making out, rollercoaster fingerblasting, the usual. We get hints that Marky Mark may not be all he’s cracked up to be – bossing her around, getting a little friendly with her stepmom, implied shady dealings with his friends – but dammit if he doesn’t get that job done in record speed. He’s at it, what, 10 seconds? Then the virginal teenager’s all “wiiiiiild hoooorses” on the Screamin’ Eagle and we know he is IN and, hell, we’d let him in, too.

After that, things get dark. He picks her up at school and sees Gary – pussed out little Gary – and beats the shit out of him, elbowing her in the face in the process. She cries tears that would make any one of us think, “Wow, she has an Oscar?” and decides it’s over.

Until her dad forbids her from seeing him again when he finds the condom. Then it’s all back together cuddle time and amusement park diddle jobs.

Then, shit gets the realest.

He starts threatening William Peterson. He destroys his awesome vintage car, he punches himself in the chest a bunch, then he fucking rapes a cracked-out Alyssa Milano.

Reese Witherspoon, being the sensible girl she is, witnesses this and blames her best friend. Naturally.

After that, Marky Mark threatens Margot, stalks Reese and straight up murders Gary (dude, Gary had it coming). Then …

Then he beheads the family dog, pushes its head through the doggie door and forever traumatizes Reese’s little brother.

No, seriously, it’s rough.

He and his pals proceed to terrorize the family, kill a security guard, tie up stepmom Amy Brenneman, totally ruining her bouncy curls and generally fuck shit up old school. There’s a lot of tension and he almost shoots William Peterson and then Reese stabs him in the back with a peace pipe and out the window he goes, boom CRACK against the pavement.

Goddamn I love that movie.

With the exception of an over-the-top slutty character in Margot, three incredibly random and out-of-place zoom-in close-ups and Gary as a whole, there is not a single thing wrong with this movie. Mark Wahlberg is awesomely creepy, the tension is fierce and the soundtrack is amazing. Mostly because they play “Something’s Always Wrong” by Toad the Wet Sprocket no less than twice, and that’s one of my favorite songs of all time. Fear rivals The Craft (ohhh look for it next time) as my favorite ’90s-flick-soundtrack of all time.

If you’ve never seen it, rent it. If you have seen it, watch it again. Love like I love. Fear is worth it. Five out of five Twinkies.

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.

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Hobo Stu

Hello everyone,

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

Murphy’s Law – One Shot: The Gates
Vampires and werewolves are all the rage right now, so it’s no big surprise that ABC is bringing us The Gates, a show about supernatural creatures living in suburbia. The question is – is it any good? Joel Murphy gave the new summer show “one shot” to impress him and he shares how it fared this week.

Outside of the In-Crowd – January Jones and Jeremy London: Class, elegance and awesomeness
Courtney Enlow shares two unrelated stories involving celebrities making bad decisions. The first story is of Mad Men‘s January Jones, who wrecked her car and then turned to celebrity chef Bobby Flay for advice. The second story is about Jeremy London of Mallrats fame, who claims to have had an ordeal eerily similar to an episode of Six Feet Under.

Positive Cynicism – Open letters
Aaron R. Davis brings us a series of open letters to a wide variety of people this week. TMZ, Dax Shepard, Apple supporters and even Elmo (yes Elmo) receive scorn from Davis this week. Needless to say, you really do not want to ever get on Davis’ bad side. Of course, if you do, his response to you will be incredibly entertaining.

Hobo Radio 137 – Our Jerry Maguire best
The dynamic duo is at their podcasting best this week. Seamlessly transitioning from one topic to another, Joel and Lars discuss Timothy Olyphant’s career, SyFy Original movies (including a new one pitting Deborah Gibson against Tiffany) and the reason reality shows in D.C. fail.

- 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
• Grats
• Knight and Day advertising
• Timothy Olyphant
• SyFy Original Movies
• D.C.
• Contractually-obligated Batman discussion
• “Agile, Mobile and Hostile” by The Goldstars

Hobo Radio 137 - Our Jerry Maguire best [ 1:06:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The ads for the new film Knight and Day claim that Tom Cruise is at his “Jerry Maguire best” in the film. Joel Murphy and Lars don’t really think that is something to be proud of.

Luckily, the dynamic duo is at their podcasting best this week. Seamlessly transitioning from one topic to another, Joel and Lars discuss Timothy Olyphant’s career, SyFy Original movies (including a new one pitting Deborah Gibson against Tiffany) and the reason reality shows in D.C. fail.

Would Olyphant make a good Snake Plissken? Why do people in the South use polka dotted fabric to patch their pants? What the hell is a gatoroid? The answers to these questions and more are in this week’s podcast.

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

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