Courtney Enlow

Each year, there exist certain phenomena we can count upon. 1) Lindsay Lohan will do something insane and get into the most minimum amount of trouble possible, 2) Reality television will take itself to new and more stupid places and 3) Mother. Fucking. Shark Week.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are currently living in the magical world of number three. A beautiful and wondrous seven-day period filled with nothing but sharks, sharks, chewed up surfers and more sharks.

Sharks may be balls-numbingly terrifying, but are the gentle, dead-eyed giants of the sea, according to the people who study them and have not yet been turned into coleslaw at their fins. And because of that, there is much to take away from these snuggly fish friends (note: do not snuggle with a shark; they will cut you with their dagger skin and eat your spooning body like it’s a Dorito).

Sharks may be known for their murderous death touch and lust for blood, but dammit if they aren’t romantics at heart, and they know not to kiss and tell. In fact, sharks have rarely been observed mating. They keep it private. So, listen up, high school girls; if you insist on getting slutty, do it on the quiet. Shark-style.

Humans and their simple feeble minds watch MTV mindlessly, fascinated by the shiny orange people, but sharks know that Jersey Shore has sucked for far longer than Snooki’s been alive. That’s why in the summer of 1916, they made like Jersey was Old Country Buffet and ate all they could. Five people were attacked, with only one surviving. People who didn’t fully fear and respect the power of the shark theorized that the killings were actually done by sea turtles, or perhaps German-trained Nazi sharks. People in 1916 were awesome.

Sharks and wannabe-actresses living on celery and hopeless wishes agree on one thing: nothing tastes as good as thin feels. Sharks laugh in the face of the metric ton of ranch dressing I personally consumed today, and have the ability to survive three months between meals. Sharks live in the sea without makeup or cute outfits and don’t give a fuck how they look and they possess the ability to go three months without eating. I have nine months to fit into a wedding dress and I ate an entire cake in the past three days. I hate you, sharks.

You know those sad teens who are convinced by sixteen years old that they will die alone? Sharks scoff at their angst. Sharks don’t bother mating until they’re 20 or so. In shark years, that’s the equivalent of you or I avoiding ass like the plague until well into our sixties. Sharks just really want to focus on their career before they settle down.

Sharks don’t give a damn about their bad reputation. They are perfectly comfortable with us being terrified of them. Unlike their needy sea brethren, the orca, who have also been known to attack and kill, and yet we buy stuffed versions for our children and wish to free them while Michael Jackson sings beautiful songs about it. And dolphins? Dolphins are goddamn rapists and murderers, known to kill for fun. Think about that, girls who have them tattooed on their ankles.

Most importantly, the biggest lesson to be gleamed from the shark? Stay the fucking fuck out of the ocean. Look, they don’t want us there. When we go there, they eat us. They don’t come on land and follow us around with cameras. The ocean is basically one big watery death trap.

No one’s ever fallen victim to a shark attack while watching Shark Week, you guys. Stay on the couch. It’s never safe out there.

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.

Courtney Enlow

From 1987 to 1995, one family appointed themselves as the moral guideline for the entire nation. That family? The Tanners, of San Francisco.

The TV show Full House was an incredibly important part of the televised upbringing of my entire generation. The program was known for a polite, clean and very white 192 episodes of pure sweetness.

Or was it?

I would argue that the perfection of the Tanner family was nothing more than illusion. An illusion made up of seemingly sweet children with a seemingly sweet relationship with their seemingly sweet father and co-father figures.

The frequent watcher will tell you this was not the case.

Exhibit A: Donna Jo “DJ” Tanner

DJ was the eldest Tanner daughter. A clingy, self-involved shrew, she at various points refused to let her father date, she throws tantrums every time anyone in her life acts like a parent, she tackled Kirk Cameron because he wouldn’t play with her and she had really awful half flip-up, half flip-down bangs for far longer than acceptable.

She has a horrible time with boys. She dates perfectly nice, super-rich Nelson and two-times him with a doober named Viper and then dumps them both. She dates Steve, and that goes well, but then she climbs a mountain and dumps him. That’s pretty much how it happens. Also, Danny catches them having what he thinks is sex (which was ridiculous as they were on separate sides of the couch and very obviously asleep) and instead of doing the sensible thing and a) calmly telling her father that they were not doing such a thing, and/or b) just having sex with him (the guy was Aladdin, COME ON) she has another tantrum and forces her dad to apologize to her for her staying over at a guy’s house. My dad would have slapped me.

Exhibit B: Stephanie Judith Tanner

Stephanie is the classic middle child. Desperate for attention, shrill and exhibiting all signs that she will one day become a meth-head, Stephanie is the worst of the Tanner children. Mean to her classmates such as Walter the Duckface, a nosy eavesdropper, and insistent upon having not one, but multiple catchphrases, Stephanie is basically a tiny blonde nightmare who happens to be quite proficient at the Running Man.

Stephanie drove a car into the fucking kitchen. She does not get in trouble. She also runs away, gets herself on a plane to Auckland, turns her house into absolute chaos because she can’t find her teddy bear when she is well into her teens and befriends Marla Sokoloff, which you really shouldn’t do.

Also, she drove the car into the fucking kitchen.

Exhibit C: Michelle Elizabeth Tanner

Michelle was a really ugly baby. That is not her fault. She didn’t do it. But she looked exactly like her stuffed monkey and that cannot be ignored. Not content to let her sister get all the string-pull doll glory, Michelle also insisted upon having a catchphrase. This catchphrase was “You got it, dude.” This is barely a catchphrase. It’s no “Did I do that?”

In fairness to Michelle, she was the only Tanner who acknowledged that black people are real and deserving of friendship. One of her black friends was a Mowry, as in Tia and Tamara, and the other one was revealed to be the niece of Little Richard, because it was very important to Full House to point out that all black people are related.

Michelle fell off a horse, lost her memory, split into two and talked to herself, then ended the series that way. This was stupid.

Exhibit D: Danny Tanner

Danny was severely obsessive compulsive and in serious need of psychiatric care. He also hugged people a lot, often inappropriately. I think we have another Belding situation on our hands.

Exhibit E: Jesse Katsopolis

If that’s even his real name. Jesse Katsopolis entered the television world with the far less ethnic name Jesse Cochran. Inexplicably, his name became Katsopolis in the second season. Theory: his attempt at a false name was an effort to hide that he was totally not the mom’s brother. Jesse was the Greekest man alive. His sister produced three incredibly Aryan daughters. Basically he read the obit and moved in.

At the beginning of the series, he didn’t just have a mullet; he had a Kate Jackson layered shag.

He plays a lot with the Beach Boys, but subscribes to the belief that Mike Love, not Brian Wilson, is the true genius of the band. This is ridiculous.

In the research of this piece, I discovered that his wife could fuck you up.

Exhibit F: Joey Gladstone

First and foremost, his name was not “Uncle” Joey. He was never called “Uncle” Joey. If I hear anyone call him “Uncle” Joey, I will call you out for being stupid.

Maligned nomenclature is the lease of Joey’s worries. Joey never dates much the entire series, choosing instead to spend his longest televised relationship with a beaver puppet. Okay, it was actually a woodchuck, but the Mel Gibson similarities just seemed so timely. He is a failed comedian, then a failed advertising man. He was basically a giant lump of fail, and much like Screech before him, was alternately perfectly intelligent and mostly retarded.

For spending seven years making our families seem inferior, the House of Tanner was built on shaky ground. The three girls were bratty disasters, the three men were overreacting messes who I wouldn’t trust to lead a parade.

The only person who escapes unscathed and was largely normal and okay? Kimmy Gibler. They should have been nicer to her.

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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Courtney Enlow

For we Doctor Who-vians, losing David Tennant was akin to saying goodbye to a best friend. The years we spent together were some of the finest years of our lives, filled with Cybermen, Daleks, blue suits, questionable love connections and lots and lots of running.

But as this first Tennant-less season comes to an end, it is with a huge sigh of relief that I say it was all for the best.

I really must qualify my love for DT before I get into this, lest you think I took his absence lightly. This is not the case. Tennant’s Doctor, the Tenth Doctor, was My Doctor. Though I grew up watching Baker and Davison on PBS, it was the Tennant era that made me fall deeply in love and become the kind of fan I am now. Throughout his tenure (or, Ten-ure, rather. OW, don’t hit!) I laughed, cried and shouted, “Fuck, quit it with the Daleks already.” But I loved unconditionally.

Then he left. And it hurt. It hurt a lot. During the second half of “The End of Time” I cried harder than I have when I’ve lost relatives. I was a sniffling sobbing shitbag mess disaster. And I was sorry to see him ago. I loved him. And I approached this new Eleventh Doctor with trepidation and caution.

Then I watched his first episode. And holy shit.

Matt Smith is simply excellent. Funny, dark, smart, quick and while Tennant was all these things, Smith’s made the character all his own. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) Matt Smith is a tremendous performer and 2) Steven Moffat is brilliant.

You see, David Tennant, for all the awesome he was and is, had one big thunderhead above him, and that was a Welshman by the name of Russell T. Davies. Apparently when you’re about to insult RTD, you’re supposed to drop a big load of props all over the floor so that apparently your insult slips and slides about like Buster Keaton in a banana peel factory. So I will give him his due, because he really did bring the show back, making it a cultural icon for a whole new generation and finally gaining it some popularity in the States. But once you get past those important accolades, one thing is abundantly clear: RTD was a pretty shitty writer.

The best of the Tenth Doctor era were all written by others. The worst episodes and worst characters were all written by the show’s lord and savior, RTD. Episodes like “Voyage of the Damned” and “Love and Monsters” (arguably the worst episode of any television show ever), aliens like the Slitheen and the idiotic fart jokes that came with them, characters like that American fuckwad in “Dalek” and episodes like “Voyage of the Damned” and “Love and Monsters” (I just cannot state enough how abysmal those were), painfully reach-y sexual innuendos, awful awful one-dimensionally evil villains, these were all pure RTD creations. And they sucked. So hard.

And don’t get me started on Rose Tyler.

Rose Tyler started out perfectly fine. A perfect vessel story, a perfectly nice girl with good moments. Some of the best moments of her run involved her wonderful friendship with the Doctor. In fact, my favorite episodes of the entire new series, the two-parter “The Impossible Planet”/”The Satan Pit,” hints at her desire for more and his feelings of love for his companion. But it was left open enough that silly old me thought his “love” for her was of a friendly nature, one of admiration for her sense of adventure and fascination at the universe. Because we really weren’t given any sense that the Doctor, a somewhat aloof, if not asexual, being for his whole televised life, had romantic feelings for her.

Apparently, I was wrong.

In what is basically a good finale with two horrendous moments, the Doctor winds up being cloned. Clone Doctor is part human, meaning he has one heart and the ability to age (by the by, was it ever stated that his two hearts were what kept him ageless in the first place? Why would one heart stop that? He’s still part Time Lord). He chooses to spend this life making out with Rose Tyler, whose boyfriend, the perfectly nice and serviceable Mickey Smith, trapped himself in another dimension to be with.

This was complete bullshit, and turned our Doctor’s emo-ness up to 11.

Season Two Doctor would have grabbed Season Four/the final DT season specials Doctor by the Chuck Taylor strings and slapped him silly for being such a pussy. He cried … so much. And that’s what made me ready to say goodbye in “The End of Time,” even though I was crying right along with him. I should cry. I’m a measly human. The Doctor doesn’t cry. He’s supposed to be better than that.

This Doctor is.

Eleven hasn’t cried once. Thank Jesus. The Doctor is once again strong and awesome, and we have Steven Moffat to thank for that.

Steven Moffat is responsible for the best episodes of the pre-Smith run. “The Girl in the Fireplace” was spectacular and “Blink” is very much one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever seen. Moffat is also responsible for Coupling, which I loved (even Season Four so screw you and the Lesbian Spank Inferno you rode in on). And because of him, this past season was the single most consistent Who series of all.

Every single episode was at least good (“Victory of the Daleks” really threw off the curve; sans that every episode would be at least great). The characters fully-fleshed and well-written, especially the villains, a wonderfully lovable side-companion (Rory is greater than everyone else on the planet; remember this), the companion finally not balls-crazy in love with the Doctor/sad old maid (sorry, Donna, know that I love you) and no fucking crying Doctor. A fantastic season with a fantastic arc and fantastic characters, all of which remind me why I love Doctor Who as much as I do.

The season finale, “The Big Bang,” airs this Saturday on BBC America. Not that I already watched it through illegal means or anything, but it’s amazing. Watch and love.

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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Courtney Enlow

When it comes to the films I’ve reviewed in this series, I can see why others might not be as into them as I. This is not one of those films.

I love The Craft. I think it’s a great film. Fun, well-written, well acted, badass soundtrack, the coolest ’90s clothes ever, which I would totally wear today and, most importantly, it appealed to my 12-year-old desire to be a witch.

As a young girl, I was fascinated by the concept of having the power to create my own world around me.

Also I really like candles. My understanding is that there are a lot of candles.

The Craft made being a teen witch super appealing. But does the movie hold up to my pre-teen memories? I decided to watch and see.

The Craft is the story of Sarah, a be-wigged Robin Tunney, still bald from shaving her head in Empire Records. It’s a good wig, too. I genuinely can’t tell.

I should probably get this aside out of the way early – Robin Tunney is an incredibly underrated actress. I’m not sure why she never really broke out. She’s very pretty, incredibly talented and she’s a Chicago girl. If you haven’t seen Niagara, Niagara, track it down and watch it. She’s truly outstanding in it.

Anyway, speaking of actresses who never really broke out, the film also stars Rachel True and Fairuza Balk, and, in the “she broke out, but then the aughts happened and her career disappeared” category, so does Neve Campbell.

Sarah moves to LA with her family and immediately catches the eye of Skeet Ulrich. The day after getting none from her, he starts spreading vile rumors, which I’ve never understood of high school boys. Dudes, just be nice to the chick till she puts out. If you spread lies, she’ll never spread thighs.

I’m going to be a great mom someday.

Moving along …

The outcasts in school, Neve, Fairuza and Rachel, take pity on her and let her join their witch club. We learn that Nancy (Balk) is an outcast because she’s all gothy and white trashy and also had rumors spread about her by Skeet Ulrich. Bonnie (Campbell) is an outcast because she has scars on her back. Rochelle (True) is an outcast because … I think it’s because she’s black. They don’t really get into it.

After they cause a crazy homeless guy to get hit by a car through mind powers, the girls introduce Sarah to the idea of Manon, their pagan-y witch god, and we learn why each of them had to turn to magic. Rochelle had to turn to magic because Christine Taylor is an enormous racist c-word (censored for my dad who does not care for said word, but Jesus, there is no other word to describe that character). Bonnie had to because of the aforementioned scars that no amount of gene therapy can cure. Nancy had to because her skanky, drunken trailer mom married an abusive fat guy. Don’t they all.

To do away with all their troubles, they bus it out to the fields and drink each others’ blood. Butterflies appear and their wishes start coming true.

Skeet Ulrich starts lovelornedly gazing at Sarah. Bonnie’s scars disappear. Christine Taylor’s hair starts falling out in huge clumps. They dominate at Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board. Finally, Nancy’s step-dad has a big fat guy heart attack, leaving her family with a hefty life insurance payout (which was totally not enough to pay for an awesome LA penthouse, but whatever).

After that, the girls, mainly Nancy and not really including Sarah, get drunk with witchy power. Nancy decides to “invoke the spirit” which apparently involves making small animals explode and sharks wash ashore. Sarah gets freaked the eff out and is ready to quit the witch game, and then their spells start to turn ugly. Rochelle starts to feel guilty about giving the racist bitch alopecia, and Skeet tries to rape Sarah. Nancy hears this and is either pissed for her friend or jealous he doesn’t want her (I think it’s supposed to be both) and uses a glamor spell to pretend to be Sarah and seduce him, then scream him to his death out the window.

This is pretty much the back-breaking camel straw for Sarah and she bounces cult. The girls don’t take this well.

Their revenge exaction is most excellent. They invade her dreams, make her think her dad’s dead, fill her house with snakes and creepy crawlies and try to get her to kill herself. But, see, Sarah is a witch by blood. Her dead mama was a witch, and she’s a good person, so she wins, and Nancy ends up in a mental institution. Eat it, bitches.

This movie holds up. All the acting is good, but Fairuza Balk is goddamn terrifying. And this may be random, but the sets are seriously spectacular. Who ever did the decorating and design is awesome and I would like them to come do my house, please. I would absolutely live in that witch shop. Did I mention I love candles?

One glaring matter, not just in this movie, but most ’80s/’90s teen movies is this: God, actresses used to be bigger. They were still slender, but they were fleshier and had boobs made of actual human fat. Christine Taylor in this movie has almost my exact same body. This is Christine Taylor now. Actresses were allowed to weigh more than 100 pounds, and they were still beautiful. Certainly more so than now. Their heads didn’t look too big for their body and they didn’t have those weird pulled flesh wrinkles from starvation. It makes me sad.

For non-anorexic hot bods and a super fun story of witchcraft and teengirldom, I give The Craft 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.

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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