2011 has been another great year for HoboTrashcan and we sincerely appreciate your support. All of you who read the site – especially those who comment on a regular basis – are what makes it so much fun for us to keep giving you new content week after week.

As we do every year, we will be taking this week off. But please come back on January 2, 2012 for more Hobo goodness.

2012 is going to be our best year yet … up until the world ends in December, of course.

- Joel Murphy
Editor-in-chief

• “We Three Kings of Orient Are” by Christmas With the Devil
• Christmas talk with Greg and Jane
• “Feliz Navidad” by Christmas With Beer

Hobo Radio 212 - A Hobo family Christmas [ 1:11:10 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The holidays are all about spending times with the ones you love. They are also about kicking back and taking a break from work. Joel Murphy and Lars are able to accomplish both of those things this week by inviting back Jane and Greg to co-host the show with them and letting their guests decide what to talk about.

The gang cover a wide range of subjects, including Derek Jeter’s bizarre dating ritual, what is and isn’t a planet and the sinister undertones of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” And, the show is also filled with the normal crude language and drunken shenanigans you would expect from Hobo Radio.

Is giving a gift basket to your conquests a classy move? Who has the biggest potty mouth on the show this week? What exactly is figgy pudding? 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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• Hobo Radio 163 – A very drunk Christmas
• Hobo Radio 70 – We wish you a Merry Christmas
• Hobo Radio 111 – It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
• Bathroom Adventures
• Overrated – More Christmas songs

Joel Murphy

I love Tom Cruise.

There, I said it.

I love him as much as any heterosexual man can love a couch jumping, slightly manic Scientologist he’s never actually met.

I know that ever since his now infamous Oprah moment, Cruise has been seen more as a punchline than an A-list movie star. Plus, Scientology seems so bizarre and kooky to outsiders that it’s easy to shake your head and dismiss anyone involved as being a few teddy bears short of a picnic. But I’m sorry, I don’t care what the doubters think. Tom Cruise is great.

Is he crazy? Quite possibly. But aren’t all great actors? Is Tom Cruise really any more crazy than Daniel Day Lewis, who reportedly refused to ever break character on his Lincoln biopic (supposedly his own name didn’t appear on the call sheet, just “Abraham Lincoln”) and who was so intense on the set of There Will Be Blood that Paul Dano refuses to be alone in a room with him? Or how about Christian Bale, the guy who dropped an unhealthy amount of weight for The Machinist, then immediately put it back on and then some for Batman Begins – going so intense with his bulking up that he was actually too big for his Batman costume? You know, the same Christian Bale who has had public blow ups with his own family and that poor lighting guy on Terminator Salvation.

Tom Cruise may be unstable, but it manifests itself in completely harmless and generally entertaining ways. Cruise getting overly animated in his affection for his new beau Katie Holmes may have seemed like the rantings of an unhinged lunatic, but it was fun to watch and it gave us this, so really I think it was totally worth it.

Like Day Lewis and Bale, Cruise generally tends to channel his craziness into his acting, which has given us quite a few memorable moments. His latest on set craziness was his decision to perform as many of his own stunts as they would let him on the set of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, including a breathtaking sequence where his character is forced to climb up the side of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

Cruise could have easily used a mix of stuntman shots and a green screen to film it, but instead he decided to strap himself in a harness 1,700 feet in the air to get the shots Brad Bird needed. The scene would have worked just fine if done the safer (and much saner) way, but actually having close ups of Cruise dangling outside the building adds a level of intensity to the entire sequence. It seems more dangerous and more impactful seeing him struggle to climb the structure. And even though logically you know he is going to be okay, some part of your brain legitimately fears for Cruise’s (and his character Ethan Hunt’s) safety. It’s the best scene in a highly entertaining action movie and its one we are all likely to remember for years to come.

And when you look at Tom Cruise’s career, he has given us so many memorable moments that it’s almost difficult to keep track of them all. His brief-clad slide across the hard wood floor in Risky Business, which has been parodied and ripped off countless times. The volleyball scene in Top Gun – the most homoerotic sports sequence ever put on film. The “You can’t handle the truth!” showdown with Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, which is one of my favorite cinematic moments of all time.

And that’s not even mentioning all of his other memorable films like Rain Man, Days of Thunder, Cocktail, The Firm, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and Minority Report. The guy has had one of the most consistently entertaining careers in all of Hollywood. He’s been starring in some of the best films the business has had to offer for almost 30 years. While guys like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have become parodies of themselves on screen, Cruise is still able to give a nuanced and captivating performance.

I don’t care if he’s crazy. I don’t care what his religious beliefs are. I am constantly impressed by Cruise’s work and I hope he continues to star as Ethan Hunt in as many Mission: Impossible films as they feel like making. I know that the introduction of Jeremy Renner in this latest film was supposed to be a passing of the torch of sorts, but I hope it’s not the case. Renner’s Brandt has nowhere near as much charisma or personality as Ethan Hunt. And Renner certainly isn’t going to be dangling himself from the side of any tall buildings any time soon.

So judge me all you want, but I love Tom Cruise. I think he’s one of the greatest actors of our time. And I don’t care who knows it. Hell, I’ll jump on Oprah’s couch and shout it to the world if I need to.

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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• Hobo Radio 209 – Boys don’t cry
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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Release Date: December 20, 2011 Director: David Fincher Writers: Steven Zaillian (screenplay), Stieg Larsson (novel) Stars: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara and Christopher Plummer MPAA Rating: R HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

Even before last year’s Academy Award nominations for The Social Network, David Fincher established himself as one of the most versatile and entertaining directors in Hollywood. Whether doing a live action fairy tale like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or a dark satire like Fight Club, the projects Fincher chooses are varied, but they are normally worth your time. So while remaking the 2009 Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (based on the popular Swedish novel of the same name) is a complete divergence from last year’s The Social Network, Fincher once again gives his audience a well-crafted and engaging film.

The film centers around a 40 year old murder mystery. Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to investigate the disappearance of his great niece Harriet. To aid in his search, Blomkvist turns to an unorthodox researcher named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who is recommended by Henrik after she did the background check on Blomkvist for him.

Blomkvist is willing to take on the case and to spend a year on a remote island investigating it because he’s looking to lay low and to rehab his image after losing a high profile libel case filed by Hans-Erik Wennerström (Ulf Friberg), a CEO who Blomkvist wrote a scathing article about. Henrik also promises Blomkvist that he has information that can help him take down Wennerström, who once worked for Vanger’s company. Lisbeth only takes on cases that interest her, but she’s willing to come on board once it becomes clear that there’s a lot more to this one than just the disappearance of Harriet.

While the audience mostly follows Blomkvist, it quickly becomes clear that Lisbeth is the true hero of the story. And she’s quite an unconventional one. Lisbeth is a rape victim who is a ward of the state, having been deemed mentally incompetent due to her instability. But she is also an expert hacker able to get information no one else can (after reading her file on him, Blomkvist tells her that she knows him better than his own friends do) and she’s an incredibly strong and fiercely independent woman determined to never let herself become a victim again.

Fincher did a great job casting Rooney Mara to play the part. Not only is she strikingly beautiful, but Mara gives a performance filled with quiet intensity. Lisbeth is a woman of few words – slow to trust people or to reveal too much of herself – but the way Mara play the character, you get a sense that all these complex emotions are bubbling just below the surface. Also, by casting an unknown actress, the audience has no preconceived notions about the character. Unraveling Lisbeth becomes just as fascinating as unraveling the Vanger family mystery.

Daniel Craig is quite good as Blomkvist. And the rest of the cast is solid as well. Christopher Plummer injects a lot of personality into Henrik, who must convey a lot of information to the audience in a limited amount of screen time. Stellan Skarsgård, who is good in everything he’s in, gives a memorable performance as Martin Vanger, Harriet’s brother. Yorick van Wageningen gives a very good, though incredibly disturbing, performance as Bjurman, the social worker assigned to Lisbeth.

Fincher once again turned to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the team who did the music for The Social Network, for the soundtrack to the film. They do a great job adding dramatic tension with their frantic electronic score. The music gives an urgency to the film that helps drive the story forward.

From top to bottom, The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is a well-crafted movie with a great story. My only real issue is whether or not it actually needed to be made in the first place. Stieg Larsson’s novel was already turned into a highly-regarded Swedish film in 2009. In retelling the story, Fincher chose to stay faithful to the novel, keeping the story set in Sweden. The characters (except for Blomkvist, who is presumably a British transplant in this version) all have Swedish accents, but speak in English.

It would have made more sense for Fincher to Americanize the film further, setting it on a remote island in Nantucket or somewhere like that. It could have easily been about a Swedish family that immigrated to the United States years ago. There’s nothing in the story that requires it to take place in Sweden. Setting it in America would have helped to set this version apart from the original, helping to justify its existence. But instead, it’s essentially the same story, but told without subtitles. (Then again, if Hollywood felt the need to remake Death at a Funeral, a British film where the characters all speak English, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that they remade this film as well.)

Whether this version of the film needs to exist or not, it is nonetheless a beautifully made and well told version of the story. Thanks to solid performances all around, a great soundtrack and the confident direction of Fincher, it’s an incredibly satisfying film.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

The Late December Holiday Mash-Up is nearly upon us, and the orgy of corporate-mandated Good Cheer that comes with it, and I want to wish you all a safe and happy season of whatever the season means to you personally and will offend you the least.

I wish you good tidings and a pause to ill news. I wish you a lack of long lines and a decent parking space. I wish you less awkwardness than ever when dealing with your families, especially if you’re interesting enough to have found your own identity in spite of how you were raised.

May all of your technology work the way it’s supposed to for a change. If you have to contact a call center, I wish you help instead of belligerence, and an actual human voice instead of a goddamn recording.

I hope we all learn to drive for a change in 2012. No more of the dozens of daily car accidents we take for granted because we assume people are too stupid to pay attention when cars are trying to merge during rush hour. Seriously, people, pay attention to where you’re going. Oh, and people in Mini Coopers, I know you have a tiny little car, but that doesn’t give you license to weave in and out of traffic constantly like you’re zipping around in a goddamn Vespa. Seriously, what is wrong with you people? You still have to obey the rules of the road. And why the hell are you driving a Mini Cooper, anyway? Look at your life, look at your choices.

Um … I mean … may we all learn to forgive others, and ourselves.

I wish more Muppets for the world in 2012.

I wish us actual good movies again.

May Steven Spielberg finally make a movie that isn’t about penis or how creepily magical little boys are, may Pixar make a movie that isn’t a giant allegory for sexual dysfunction and may Hollywood finally relent and finance some Terry Gilliam movies, since almost every popular movie ever has just been ripping the man off. Alright, maybe I’m too hard on everyone; it’s mostly joking, guys. Except for the boy thing, Spielberg, what the hell? AI was like a damn NAMBLA ad.

May Michael Bay never make another movie again and instead travel the world making explosions that help mankind somehow.

I wish some kind of happiness for the people who lost Community only to get a freaking Chelsea Handler sitcom instead. I wish some serious perspective for NBC. I hope Kate Beckett and Richard Castle finally get together, already; seriously, you’re running out of excuses to keep them apart that aren’t just straight trolling the audience. May all of our sweeps weeks contain something worth watching that isn’t all gimmicky.

May Kat Dennings get everything she wants forever until the end of time, because she is perfect and I love her.

May we each win $20,000 in contests we didn’t even know we entered and that don’t turn out to be scams. May all scammers and people who create viruses drop dead from massive coronary episodes that create immense pain. And may they be revived, only to feel every artery harden, then feel their brains shut down and then finally die once again as the people they victimized kick them repeatedly. And this isn’t a one-day thing, oh no, this goes on for like a week, with one artery hardening at a time, and one synapse in the brain shorting out. Yeah, yeah, and then they have to relive all of their most painful moments, like when their dogs died or that creepy guy with the shed next door touched them inappropriately, and then they overload on the pain, but they can’t even become unconscious or numb to it, they just have to sit there and take it all in, just feel all of that pain and sorrow, they can’t filter that shit out.

Oh. Um …where was I? I mean, of course, may we all find inner peace and enlightenment.

May we all understand the value of other people, or, failing that, may we all somehow find ways to work from home and get paid for, I don’t know, entering data or something. Man, that’d be sweet.

May we all get the exercise we need and eat more fruit.

I wish jobs for the people who need them. May corruption be weeded out of our institutions and may cops stop pepper-spraying people in the face for exercising their rights of free assembly. May anyone who says that pepper spray, hotter than the hottest pepper known to man, is merely a food product, get pepper-sprayed in the face so they can see what they’ve been missing. I wish for a Congress that isn’t filled with traitors, who want to do the best for the people of this country and the Constitution of the United States instead of putting a promise made to Grover fucking Norquist above their oaths of office.

I hope the Republican debates get more interesting. Like, instead of the same idiots saying the same stupid garbage over and over again, they have to make it through the final round of American Gladiators or something. Or the games in Tron. Something to make it exciting instead of an exchange of non-ideas. It’s like watching a Model UN made up of D students. Seriously, you know you’d rather watch Rick Perry have to try to be a cowboy instead of just dressing like one and blathering on about prayer in schools. I bet he gets stomped to death by a bronco, which would just make the world a better place, anyway. And who doesn’t want to see Newt Gingrich crying his eyes out while trying to wrestle a bear?

Oh, and let’s tax the rich in 2012. Fuck the one percent for always asking the rest of us to contribute more and more while they contribute nothing to the economy AT ALL. You can’t take it with you, chumps. (Oh, and before you get all pissy in the comments about “job creators” and other buzz-lies, take a deep breath, realize you aren’t rich and you never will be, that you will never be in the one percent ever at all, and that they in fact laugh at you for defending them while they steal your pensions and your 401(k), and go play with your kids or volunteer at a shelter or just read a book or something. If you’re in the one percent, you’re certainly not reading this.)

Oh, and no more corporate personhood. Give me a fucking break with that.

I wish you no racism in 2012. No sexism. Actual compassion for all people. An end to the irrational fear that because someone is a different religion, they want to kill you.

I wish Pat Roberston a quick and very, very quiet retirement.

No more hate. No more war. No more disparity. No more demonizing other people and bombing them because we don’t want to fix problems at home. Economic recovery. Hell, economic prosperity.

Peace and all that. Live long and prosper. May the force be with you.

See you in 2012. I hope it all works out, but maybe bring a helmet just in case. Ooh, and some sandwiches.

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