Aaron R. Davis

At least, that seems to be the message being sent out by Hollywood.

Last week, the first official photo from the probably unnecessary sequel to The Hangover hit the Internet. Apparently, some people were very excited by a picture of the quartet from the first movie standing inside of an airport. Hollywood really knows how to whip up the publicity hurricane.

Anyway, seeing the picture reminded me of the to-do about a month ago over Mel Gibson’s planned cameo in the film. Mad Mel, Hollywood’s angry, drunken, boorish, bigoted, domestic abusing Lout of the Moment, was supposed to play a tattoo artist in Thailand and … do something, I guess. The kibosh was put on this one when the cast and crew, supposedly led by Zach Galifianakis, objected to Mel’s appearance in the flick because of his recent public behavior.

Director Todd Phillips accepted the decision, but later told MTV he was surprised and disappointed by “the outside world’s lack of empathy.”

Apparently when we hear a man on tape tell the mother of his infant daughter that she deserved it when he hit her, that she deserves to get gang-raped, and that he’s going to murder her and put her in a rose garden, we should really just feel sorry for him.

Now, I believe in separating the artist from their work. But one of the many problems I have with this is that Phillips doesn’t seem to understand that putting famous drunk Mel Gibson in a movie called The Hangover 2 automatically brings these recent discomforts to mind. How can you look at Mel Gibson in a movie like that and not think of him calling a lady cop “Sugar Tits”?

It seems obvious to me that Mel was only cast in the movie because of his image as an unstable drunk. Todd Phillips thought it would be funny in a movie to play off of that image. The only reason to cast Mel Gibson in this thing is not to add weight to it, as Phillips claimed, but to add a dimension of meta-humor by spoofing that image. There’s no way that decision gets made for any other reason. It’s just stunt casting.

So I get why Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper McConaughey and whatever the short dude’s name is were uncomfortable with Mel making fun of his tabloid-ready indiscretions.

Now, I’m all for second chances, but what I’m not for is hypocrisy. So here’s where I question the motives behind this decision.

I don’t get why the same four guys were perfectly okay the first time around letting Mike Tyson do the same thing.

Whatever way you want to slice it, Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist. He was a mugger. He bit a guy’s ear off. And they had no problem letting this guy play a cute caricature of his image as a violent sex offender? I mean, let’s face it, that’s the only reason for Mike Tyson to be in The Hangover. It’s not because Mike Tyson is inherently hilarious (he isn’t) or a really fun personality (he doesn’t have one), but because of his past history with alcohol and violence. The movie is spoofing his image the same way the second one would’ve spoofed Mel Gibson’s, even though Mel wasn’t playing himself.

So, you know, I don’t really care if Mel Gibson is in The Hangover 2 or not, but I do care that we’re being given this moral relativism as an excuse for taking a stand on this. I really want to know why Zach Galifianakis refuses to be in a movie with Mel Gibson, but has no problem appearing in a movie with Mike Tyson. Or, for that matter, why he has no problem being in one of the year’s hit movies with former alcoholic and former drug abuser Robert Downey, Jr. Someone really needs to explain to me why the selective outrage on this one.

Maybe these people are all assholes behind closed doors, but you know what? I don’t really care. I don’t really care as it applies to their work. But the inconsistency just nags at me. I have to wonder how Desiree Washington felt about Mike Tyson joking around with the Jonas Brothers onstage at the Teen Choice Awards, given his past history with teenagers and all.

My own opinion is that Mike Tyson — who joked (I think…) in an interview about appearing in The Hangover to earn some drug money — is given a pass because all of the wife-beating and raping was so far in the past. Mel Gibson doesn’t have the pass yet because all of the death-threatening and anti-Semitism are fresh and recent. And that means that people aren’t ready for him to make light of it yet. And there’s always a chance that a new round of craziness can damage the publicity for the film.

But if this is all the case, then it’s merely a commercial decision, and it’s disingenuous to present it as the principled moral stand that everyone is pretending it is.

Zach, please explain to me at what point assaulting women changes from an outrage to a foible from someone’s past to be made light of.

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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Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … copious amounts of toppings.

America has taken the concept of “excess” and made it an art form. It’s bad art, much like Andy Warhol’s overhyped output, but it’s still something to behold, to look at with a mixture of disgust and awe. We’ve got buffet chains, eating contests and Super Walmarts. We’ve got Black Friday, the Super Bowl and Hummers. The list is extensive.

But of all the things Americans do to disgust me in the excess department, nothing makes me sicker than the way we ruin classic comfort foods by adding too many toppings and extras, rendering perfectly good hamburgers, pizza and whatever else into culinary catastrophes devoid of flavor and unable to provide true eating satisfaction.

I first noticed this addiction to extra-ness when I was a teenager working in a pizza restaurant. It wasn’t the fact that two of our biggest sellers were the 5- and 7-topping specials we sold. (Well, I guess it was a little bit of that.) If you followed the restaurant specs while making those pies, there was very little of each topping on either pizza. It was still gross, but it was a manageable mess.

What used to make me wince were the idiots – usually females between the ages of 15-30 – who would ask for extra cheese on whatever pizza they’d order.

Extra cheese always ruins pizza. The dough doesn’t cook right, the toppings don’t cook right, and the eating of an extra cheese pizza requires so much intensive chewing power that you need to re-energize your tired, aching jaw muscles with a mid-meal Powerbar by the second slice and all that stringy extra cheese becomes difficult to swallow. I bet there’s more choking involved with extra cheese pizza than there is at Washington Capital playoff games.

This exhausting and potentially life-threatening extra cheese experience might be worth it if it made the pizza taste better, but all it does is render the rest of the pizza flavorless. You can’t taste the toppings or crust (and the crust is what makes a pizza great or ordinary) because their flavors are defeated by the extra cheese. The best pizzas have very little of any one topping, including cheese. Yet so many morons have to order extra cheese because they seem to equate excess with a sense of accomplishment.

Hamburgers also fall victim to this hateful heaping o’ the toppings. Excessors, as I call these idiots, seem to order their hamburgers with the belief that more toppings equal more flavor, or more masculinity, or more coolness …who knows … so they add onions, tomato, lettuce, pickles, bacon and two or three condiments. And of course, they can’t eat a hamburger without cheese, which usually can’t be tasted on a hamburger anyway, especially if it’s covered with an onslaught of vegetables and sauces. It all becomes a gooey, sloppy mess with no distinctive flavors.

Hamburgers aren’t the only sandwiches that excessors ruin with too many extras. Ever had an authentic Philly cheesesteak? (No, Mr. Applebee’s Addict, you haven’t.) It’s perfection on a hoagie roll. Fried, thin-sliced ribeye, onions and cheese. That’s it. But stand in any South Philly cheesesteak line long enough, and you’ll see an excessor have them add tomatoes, lettuce, jalapenos and pickles. It’s like adding a bouncy song and dance number to Hamlet.

Most sub shops even cater to these cretins by including on their menus some form of death-wich with an exceedingly clever name like the blimp, the belly-buster or the stomach stretcher. These usually involve a supersized roll crammed with four types of meat, two cheeses and six other toppings. Ever watch people create their own subs at Subway? They have the beleaguered kid behind the counter toss in every wilted item in the stainless steel bins, just because they’re available and “free.” Can anyone truly enjoy – let alone actually taste – pickles, black olives and two kinds of hot peppers on a sandwich already over-burdened by green peppers, tomatoes, onions and lettuce?

Even the classic American hot dog gets abused. All a hot dog needs is one or two additions. Chili and cheese are okay. Mustard and onions work. But have you ever seen or eaten the famous Chicago hot dog? The only thing sadder in Chicago is the endless of optimism of the annually duped diehard Cubs fan who believes that Cub ownership actually tries to put a winner on the field and fails to recognize that the owners’ main interest is in reaping insane profits by selling the quaint Wrigley experience instead of truly competitive baseball. But that’s another column.

The Chicago hot dog takes a beautiful, flavor-filled kosher hot dog and buries all that flavorful goodness under yellow mustard, a dill pickle spear, tomatoes, onions, relish and pickled peppers. It looks like someone emptied a dustpan on the overwhelmed dog after sweeping up a Denny’s kitchen.

Fries are another nearly perfect food that need just one addition to create perfection, and we sure as Heinz know what that addition is. But excessors ruin the best potato creation ever invented by adding gravy and sour cream and cheese and bacon bits and whatever didn’t come off that dustpan when it was being dumped onto a Chicago dog.

I’m not sure what the psychology is behind this national addiction to the mountain of more-more-more. I’m guessing all this ugly over-consumption compensates for some kind of inner emptiness. (Which I guess also explains my drinking.) Maybe I’m overanalyzing, but something has to lie behind the way these sad people sacrifice flavor and true eating pleasure for pure excess. Maybe they have so little true substance going on inside that they try to fill that void by having it all and then some when they eat.

This fattest country on the planet will continue to get fatter as long as we condone and even laud all this topping excess. Waffles and pancakes will continue to be slathered with creams and goos and sugared fruits. Guy Fieri will continue to get big ratings by seeking out diners, drive-ins and dives that specialize in creating over-topped sandwiches that look like so much vomit on a bun. And someone will get rich by jamming gummi bears into a calzone.

And the excessors will continue to gorge on wretched excess, never learning what it’s like to savor flavor over volume. And I’ll continue to hate these excessors. But despite my hate, I hope I don’t ever break down and call them what I’d like to call them: Over-indulgent Children Trying to Fill the Emotional Abyss that Is Their Inner Selves with a Culinary Gangrape of Their Food. Or maybe that’s what they’d prefer to be called. After all, it’s a bit excessive.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

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• Introduction
• Thanksgiving/turkey balls
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• “Thank God Thanksgiving Only Comes Once A Year” by Steve Goodie & FuMP

Hobo Radio 159 - The classiest Thanksgiving show on the Internet [ 1:08:49 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thanksgiving is a time to put on nice clothes, break out the fine china and have an elaborate, fancy dinner with your loved ones. In short, it’s a time of year to be on your best behavior.

Unless, of course, it’s a Hobo Radio Thanksgiving. On this week’s podcast, Joel Murphy and Lars celebrate Thanksgiving the only way they know how – by comparing turkey’s wattles to testicles. It’s the kind of sophisticated and classy discussion you’ve come to expect from our dynamic duo.

Do turkey’s wattles really suffer from shrinkage? Which President is on the four dollar bill? What, exactly, is “nude karaoke”? 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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Ned Bitters

[Editor's Note - Joel Murphy is currently traveling via plane, train and automobile to get home in time for Thanksgiving, so today we are reposting this classic Ned Bitters Thanksgiving rant, which originally ran on the site December 2, 2008.]

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … Thanksgiving.

Once again, Mrs. Bitters and I didn’t go “home,” or north, for Thanksgiving this year. We hardly ever do. (Although after living here for 20 and 23 years respectively, I think here is actually home to us by now.) Our Thanksgiving dinner? Takeout from the local Hard Times Café, which was one of about eight restaurants open on Thanksgiving in this shithole area in which we live. We split chili mac, a chili dog, jalapeno poppers and chicken wings. We devoured it while standing at our kitchen counter. We were in total bliss. And we were damn thankful.

That beats the hell out of another paint-by-numbers American Thanksgiving in a crowded house filled with drunk relatives. How was your Thanksgiving? I’m betting that, if you traveled or spent it cooped up with a passel of “loved” ones, the negatives far outweighed the positives. Because Thanksgiving is overrated.

Here’s why:

Turkey: I’m guessing yours was no doubt severely overcooked, resulting in a dry, flavorless bird that needed copious amounts of gravy just to make it swallowable. This is 2008. Stop cooking the shit out of it like your grandmother used to. The bird was done an hour before you took the shriveled carcass out of the oven. And it’s not the triptofen that send the family into a two-hour collective nap. It’s borderline asphyxiation brought on by all those deadly dark-meat turkey farts.

Stuffing/Dressing: If you were served a casserole of soggy bread any other day of the year, you’d howl in protest and slap the cook. But last Thursday, you somehow crowbarred in a third helping.

Cranberry Sauce: Cranberries taste good only if liquefied and paired with vokda. I can think of 37 fruits that taste better then cranberries, but somehow, the bitter berry makes its way onto most Thanksgiving tables. Where is it the other 364 days of the year? In its rightful slot on the “Who Eats This Shit” list.

Mashed Potatoes: A clever cook can devise countless ways to make a potato so delicious your taste buds stand up and salute. But in late November, imagination is cast aside and potatoes are peeled, boiled, whipped to a runny mess and flavored with an unoriginal mix of salt, pepper and butter. And you triple-dipped anyway, didn’t you, you fat bastard?

Drunk Relatives: In movies and TV shows, the drunk in-law is always a good-natured lout who elicits a few warm-hearted laughs with his Zinfandel-induced antics. I bet that in your non-sitcom real life, your shitfaced second cousin grabbed your sister’s tit before throwing up in the hamper.

Football: Americans used to have to endure two blowouts. Now we are subjected to three. I don’t care if we bail out the Detroit automakers. Can someone just bail us out of having to endure the Detroit Lions every Thanksgiving?

Parades: I tried to watch these parades every year when I was a kid. I lasted about two minutes each time. I tried watching them as an adult. I lasted maybe 90 seconds. I just can’t resist hitting the remote when I see the chunky flag girls in that band from Little Rock. Maybe if they picked high school bands based on teenage hotness instead of, you know, actual talent, more people (meaning me) might actually watch.

Parade Hosts: Even if the parades were boner-inducing, who wants to listen to the pathetic enthusiasm of the C-list pseudo-celebrity hosts who are just so damn grateful to be offered the work. I didn’t watch a second of this year’s parades, but I bet one of them was hosted by the likes of Alan Thicke or Leah Remini. One year that Corky guy was a co-host. That’s right, Corky, the Downs Syndrome kid who became an actor and landed a role in a hit series by going all John Gielgud on our asses by playing – get this – a kid with Downs Syndrome. If that’s the fast-track to Hollywood success, than Ned Bitters should move to L.A. tomorrow. By Friday I’ll have landed that “miserable middle–aged bastard” role they’re casting.

Thanksgiving Crafts: Hey son, that turkey finger puppet you made? Corky could whip up on one of his slow days. Show me somethin’, kid. Impress me.

Sickeningly Sweet Family Movies on Network TV: Even when I was a kid and had no iPod, no computer, no video games, three measly channels and an undiscovered cock for my three daily jerkings, having to sit in the living room with my family and watch the likes of Judy Garland, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke made me damn near suicidal. Are today’s kids still forced to watch a sexless whore of a nanny sing her way into the heart and pants of an already engaged quasi-Nazi with six talentless little brats? Must our kids still contend with the chill-inducing creepiness of a shrill-voiced Dorothy traipsing about with a trio of pseudo-monsters? Does any kid still buy a nanny who flies who uses her umbrella to fly? Today’s overstimulated kids have at their disposal Gears of War 2, 2000 songs, 200 channels, On Demand, Tivo, DVR, a closet filled with DVDs and 30-second clips of Sarah Palin lookalikes sucking on black cocks online. I think all that trumps some washed up SNL alum talking to animals.

Call me Ebenezer. Call me a misanthrope. Call me bitter. But don’t call me incapable of feeling thanks, as the holiday requires. I’m extremely grateful for many things. Faux Sarah Palin porn, Thanksgiving chili dogs and the fact that three weeks from today, Christmas will be over, too.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Aaron R. Davis

My wife and I are big horror movie fans. We also agree that, as a general rule, the recent wave of horror movie remakes sucks. And even the ones that don’t suck still kind of suck. I think it’s because horror movies in the seventies and early eighties had something to say about the way we related to a world we once considered safe. Today, these movies — when they’re not just being excessively cruel — are just lame action thrillers with half-hearted monsters. There’s no thought behind what these things represent. There’s no characterization, no build, no crescendo … it’s all just creepy monotones and flashes of blood and total boredom.

So, gluttons for punishment that we are, we decided this weekend to finally sit down and check out the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

As I write this, we were sitting in front of our television and watching this movie less than 24 hours ago. And I can barely remember it.

I remember some blood and a couple of scenes and that weird piss-yellow color that hangs over every horror movie these days. I remember the new Freddy Krueger make-up, which makes a horror icon now look like Pruneface from Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy movie. I remember Clancy Brown, because I love Clancy motherfucking Brown. But mostly what I remember is being dead bored by this … I don’t even want to call it a movie, because that gives it more respect than it deserves.

Here are 10 things I did while this movie was playing and completely failing to hold my attention.

1. Washed my lens cloths. I wear glasses, and the cloths I use to clean my lenses have been getting a little dirty. So I went into the bathroom, washed them in the sink, and hung them to dry, all the while completely unconcerned that I would miss anything that was going on. This is how bored I was: I had the time to notice my dirty lenses, and walk into another room entirely to clean the cloths. And you know what? I could still follow the movie, because there is zero story in this thing. Everything is just that predictable and pointless.

2. Had a discussion with my wife regarding the lack of movie nudity these days. We both miss the eighties, when there were tits everywhere. Not that nudity was essential to the movie, or anything, but we had watched Saturday Night Live the night before and thought it was hilarious and stupid that they were making a big deal about Anne Hathaway being naked in her new movie, Love and Other Completely Predictable Storylines. I mean, it’s more of a story when Anne Hathaway isn’t naked in a movie, since that’s a much rarer occurrence.

3. Updated my farm on FarmVille. My white pumpkins were ready to be harvested. And hey, I mastered the crop, which is way more exciting than anything that happens in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Granted, the crop mastery was telegraphed because I paid attention to my harvest numbers, but everything in Nightmare is telegraphed, too, and you don’t even get any XP for it.

4. Talked about other horror remakes and their various merits. Maligned though it is, we actually both like Rob Zombie’s Halloween (though we despised Halloween II). Take that as you will; if you hated Halloween, you can imagine how much we hated A Nightmare on Elm Street. For us, the low point in horror remakes is the insipid, inept, bottomlessly cruel Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Jessica Biel. That movie just wants to hurt the audience. A Nightmare on Elm Street, once the big, obvious, remarkably uncreative “twist” is revealed, also wants to hurt the audience with its dumbass psychosexual components, but doesn’t even know how to handle it in a way that’s offensive or mean, much less organic or interesting. It doesn’t help that the “kids” in the movie — whom we never even get to know before being thrust into a situation where we’re supposed to actually give a shit if they survive or not — all look like they’ve recently graduated college. Freddy wants to behead a bunch of college kids? Be my guest, dude, they could use a good culling.

5. Cleaned the living room. There was garbage that needed to be rounded up. This is an excellent sign that I was uninterested in keeping my eyes on the screen.

6. Wondered aloud why music video directors get to graduate to features. For every David Fincher — and we can argue, I think, over whether his presence in the echelon of filmmakers is really that essential — there are eight wannabes who end up under Michael Bay’s wing interested only in showing off what they can do with a camera and not actually telling a damn story. (Bay is, of course, a former music video director.) Look, I don’t care how much you can whip your camera around and show me hands coming out of bathtubs — if I don’t care about the characters, I don’t care about the peril they’re in, and I’m just bored with your computer antics.

7. Checked my phone messages. I missed a call from my friend John in Liverpool. Damn it!

8. Made up my mind about what to have for dinner. My wife ended up making pizza. The secret to the crust? Butter and cornmeal. It tastes like my beloved Giordano’s, but at about a third of the cost.

9. Forgot what movie I was even watching. That actually happened a couple of times, then Jackie Earle Haley — apparently now typecast as a child molester — would pop out as Freddy and remind me that this was supposedly A Nightmare on Elm Street. The kids in this movie are so nondescript that I couldn’t really give them my complete attention.

10. Fixed the plot of the movie. It’s never a good sign — though it is fun — when you’re watching a movie with someone and you start rewriting the plot out loud. Here’s a spoiler for you, I guess: the movie hinges on Freddy Krueger’s history as the gardener/janitor at a preschool. There are accusations of molestation, so the parents of the children chase Freddy down and trap him in a building, which they then burn down. Now the children are in high school, and Freddy is coming for them in their dreams. One of the kids thinks Freddy must have been innocent, and that he’s killing them now to get revenge for lying about him. The big “twist” is that the kids were telling the truth, so now Freddy’s going to get revenge for their tattling, except for Nancy, whom he wants to play with again in an aggressively, almost ludicrously sexual manner.

The problem with this is: it’s stupid. A far more interesting twist would’ve been that someone else was molesting the kids — one of the parents, maybe — and that they blamed Freddy and murdered him to cover it up, so now Freddy is killing the kids to get back at the parents. Instead, the filmmakers go the far more obvious route of making Freddy just another pervert, without acknowledging the psychological fact that a pedophile has no interest in sexually-mature teenagers. Yes, I know how I sound, but Jesus, your horror movie has to make some damn sense, and when it hinges on this guy’s psychotic proclivities, you can’t just make shit up because you think it sounds creepy. Sorry for taking Psych 101, guys.

Still, after all of that stupidity, I only have myself to blame for these things. Because my curiosity gets the better of me. And they’re not going to stop making these dumb movies as long as people like me keep being so curious. The only really nice part of a movie like A Nightmare on Elm Street is that, honestly, by the end of the week I’ll have forgotten I even saw it, and it’ll fade into the background like any other nightmare.

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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