Homeless Men of America's 'Great Depression Redux Charm Initiative' Still Going Smoothly

Dispatch from The Michigan Front:

PONTIAC, Mich. — A homeless man in southeast Michigan says a woman accidentally gave him a gold ring laced with diamonds when she handed him a handful of change.
Michael Secaur tells The Oakland Press that he was panhandling at an intersection in Pontiac on Monday when a woman pulled up in a vehicle and handed him some money. He says the ring was among some coins, and that he thinks she "did an oops."
Secaur says he would recognize the woman if he saw her again.
He says he quickly dismissed a plan to pawn the ring. The owner of a shelter where Secaur often stays has locked it in a safety deposit box.
Secaur says he has lived on the streets of Pontiac for nearly two years.

(courtesy HuffPo)

Could you imagine a rich person doing that? Hard enough to squeeze some spare change out of them. You gotta get creative, get your finger poopy, and make quaint signs that say things like "Homeless Veteran Father of Three Mongoloid Preemies Who Can't Catch a Break. God Bless." just to get your hands on some Diet-Coke-greased pennies from the polished-walnut-lined cupholder between the cabretta leather-skinned bucket seats of some old bag's Bentley that could fetch enough bank at auction to feed an entire town for a year.

The kind of old bag that doesn't realize for weeks she lost an extraordinarily expensive ring during one of her 5000 daily moments of carelessness--if she ever noticed at all.

And this guy's who's been living in the street for a year is begging to give it back to her. Shades of that Homeless Radio Announceritis outbreak not that long ago.

Thank you, Homeless Men of America, for keeping it classy.

Seriously, though--how bad do they need to make us feel about ourselves before this increasingly derivative hubbub is over and the homeless men are once again a phantom population everybody pretends is already dead, thinks of as naught but a swarm of charming and smelly holographic reminder of the desperate lives people lead when they don't work hard enough or get born to rich parents.

I'm getting too worked up about this. I might just have to forget about it, erase it from my brain by going to Disneyland til it blows over--tickets are only $100 per day for Southern California residents and they apparently have "carts that sell big turkey legs (fried, I think) for $7 each."

See ya there!

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Elton John Spends a Scary Amount of Coolness Currency Date-Raping "Gnomeo and Juliet" into Existence

Despite whoring himself out to Rush Limbaugh for $1 million and not releasing a good album for a hundred years or so, Elton still has enough coolness currency left over from his seven consecutive number-one albums in the United States and putting the Pope in his fucking place to deserve his place in the sun.

Barely.

Where did he spend all this coolness in such a hurry? On this giant smelly turd:

For those of you not in the know, this regrettable project has regrettably been in development for an eternity. Many, many years ago somebody got stoned at one of Elton John's castles (probably) and he became fixated on the idea of doing a version of Romeo & Juliet with animated gnomes--for which he, of course, would do the music and win another Oscar/Grammy/knighthood.

Flush with coolness, Elton had no problem forcing the project onto Disney Feature Animation while it was roofied on the couch in his pool house, but when Disney bought Pixar (in order to release good movies again--SNAP) John Lasseter greatly increased his own coolness reserves by calling a turd a turd and kicking Gnomeo out the back door without so much as a how's-your-father.

Say "Ahhhh" Harvey. And yes, Bob--you can watch.

So Elton did what anybody in his enviable position would do--he climbed up on Harvey Weinstein's solid-diamond desk and shoved good-ole Gnomeo down Miramax's throat with ease. After all, Elton still had plenty of coolness left to spend [More than one could ever spend in a lifetime. We think. -Ed.] and he was not going to let this brilliant idea die on the vine, goddamnit!

But then Miramax never woke up from the Gnomeo-induced coma, went bankrupt, and the project was dead and buried...until a recent full moon, when that zombie climbed out of the grave, walked over to Burbank incredibly slowly, and put the blocks to Disney's Touchstone Pictures while it was on acid and totally distracted by some water dripping out of a faucet.

Starring the voices of every whore who can do a British accent (sorry, Gwyneth!)

And so now here we are--unrecyclable Gnomeo & Juliet ads coat the town and a bunch of stupid gnomes will grace silver screens all over the country on February 11th. [Bad movie junkies should wait until said gnomes are available for much, much less at Big Lots starting February 12th. -Ed.]

How bad is this movie? Well, let's just say it has NINE credited writers (plus the Bard himself) and that is never a good thing. There were probably, what, fifteen writers who didn't want their names anywhere near this slithering turd that vomited thousand-pound notes all over Hollywood for 15 years?

But that doesn't matter because Elton is happy. He still has just enough coolness currency to skip to the front of the line at Starbucks, he sold the same movie at least three times, he got to be Executive Producer and do the music, his boo (David Furnish) got to be a producer, and some poor team of handsome young PAs got to be fondled while managing Elton's treasured bobblehead collection.

The bottom line here is that if Elton John doesn't become President of Haiti and clothe the entire nation in sequined jumpsuits and velour top hats for a fast-motion, single-take-helicopter-shot music video within the next couple years he might not only have to forfeit his spot in Princess Diana's tomb, but I might also have to leave him off my Christmas card list and get in on some of this Bieber Fever action that's been going around...

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Boot-strapper Breck Eisner Finds a Way

In today's economic climate, independent artists have generally gone the way of the dodo and, due to the modest and measured release slate, even companymen have dwindled in number.

Despite all this, the virile Breck Eisner has found a way to flourish. He's got a movie out right now and potential tentpole Flash Gordon in the works at Sony, on the slate for 2012.

On his experience as the director of the universally-loathed (except by this someday serial killer) Sahara:

I wanted to ask you about Sahara. Looking back now, the dust having settled, what have you learned about the perils of launching a franchise, and working from pre-existing material?
For me the biggest lesson in the perils of making any movie, whether it’s a franchise or costs a dollar or a $100 million — you got to have a solid script going into production. It’s crucial. That’s your blueprint. You can make a bad script an OK movie if you work really hard, but it’s really easy to make a great script an OK movie. Which is not the goal any of us want. But what happened in Sahara is that we had an author who by contract had absolute script approval, and who wouldn’t approve any script. And they had a date they had to shoot by before they lost the rights. And those two do not mix well. And so on production we were having to make it up as we went. We didn’t have a clear path. We were only allowed to make script changes once we started photography, and at that point it’s just too late. So the perils of that is that you have to be sure you have a good script no matter what it is you’re making. That was the biggest lesson I learned from Sahara. And it’s a lesson they seem to forget over and over again in these big movies. They figure out a release date, they figure out the rights, and sometimes a script doesn’t come together but the commitments have already been made. And that’s a dangerous situation.

(courtesy movieline)

He is the son of Michael Eisner, former head of Disney/ABC for 21 years, who is worth over $800 million, and he didn't know he needed a good script when you start shooting a movie? He had to learn that lesson while on the payroll of an enormous corporation, as captain of a coulda-been blockbuster?

Huh. I wonder what the future has in store for the ruggedly handsome young Eisner, one of the finest artistic minds in the vanguard of his generation...

Only the fates know for sure, but I'll bet whatever it is, it's of a rosy hue.

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Logic, Disney-Style

Disney is desperately trying to figure out what boys want.

So they hired an 'expert'--a middle-aged woman who worked for a riverboat casino company to ask boys questions, dig through their closets, and observe them. They call her "the kid whisperer" and no doubt pay her a boatload; she has an entire "team of anthropologists" working under her.

After 18 months, she discovered that boys want to see R-rated movies, carry their skateboards a certain way, and think most of the shows on TV are purposeless bullshit.

Are those really not obvious? A team of researchers had to find this out?

"What do you mean by the term 'crash?'"
"Ummm...the same thing everybody means when they say it, you dumb bitch..."

Not only that, but the bottom line is that men in their thirties and pre-teen boys are pretty much the same. So...why not hire a fucking man to just sit there and tell you what little boys are like, what they want, etc? It would take a week, tops. Is that just too easy?

If they like to makes things difficult, why didn't they just hire a scary hobo clown who only speaks German?

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