| Most of the jokes in "The Real Wedding Crashers" are far from ...
NBC's latest experiment in desperation air fare, "The Real Wedding Crashers," is an HD broadcast: Hugely Dumb. The network, which recently celebrated its worst week of prime-time ratings ever, isn't going to climb out of any sewers with this slimy little gutter-dweller. The "real" in the title is meant to distinguish the reality-comedy ordeal from a funny 2005 movie comedy called "Wedding Crashers," with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as two goofs who go to strangers' weddings ISO available women who are ISO available men. These boys are nothing if not available. Forget all that, because the NBC show bears no resemblance and contains, at the most, three laughs within its one-hour running time — not that it ever revs itself up to so much as a lope, much less a run. It's sometimes been the case in movies and television that tastelessness has its own inherent crude energy, but not "Wedding Crashers." It manages to be that rare bird (but maybe not rare enough), a boring horror.
Trivia Night at Haggin Museum
STOCKTON - The Haggin Museum has teamed up with members of the Pacific Historical Society of University of the Pacific to host an entertaining and educational Trivia Night from 7 to 9 p.m. today. With inspiration from the mid-'90s Nickelodeon game show "Legends of the Hidden Temple," the evening event will challenge teams of players with questions about pre-Columbian culture, pop culture and more. The winning team and other participants will receive prizes. Admission is $5 per person at the door, and free snacks will be provided. Soda, mixed drinks and beer will be available for purchase. For more information, contact Eddie Hargreaves at (209) 940-6312 or info@hagginmuseum.org. .
Roads to Freedom
Forty-four years after the March on Washington, the civil rights movement is in no danger of being forgotten. The image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is familiar to every American. Ground was broken on the national King monument in Washington, DC, in November 2006, within a year of huge media extravaganzas over the funerals of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. Nearly all American politicians pay lip service to the memory of the struggle--even President Bush had himself photographed hugging Mrs. King in front of King's tomb in Atlanta on King's seventy-fifth birthday in 2004, over a chorus of boos from protesters. A rich crop of new books does much more than continue to remind the nation of its great radical movement. These works compel readers to see that civil rights leaders' choices were never as straightforward as people today nostalgically assume.
Beverly Hills, 90210 - The Second Season
Beverly Hills, 90210 first aired in 1990 and ran for ten seasons. It was a popular series that had a huge influence on pop culture in the 90s and made actors/actresses Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, Luke Perry, Jennie Garth, Tori Spelling, David Austin Green, and Ian Ziering famous. The series is credited as a soap opera and it is filled to the brink with melodramatic content. However, this season, like the first, is not nearly as "soapy" as the later seasons. The content focuses on the Walsh family, specifically the kids Brenda and Brandon, and their lives and friends in Beverly Hills. For more details about this series, please refer to DVD Talk's review of season one. In Beverly Hills, 90210's second season, the appeal and format remain unchanged. And it does not come off as too over-the-top (even though it is pretty thick.) The show continues to offer melodramatic content surrounding the Walshes and their closest friends.
A host of support for Imus on Colorado's conservative talk radio
Summary: Several of Colorado's conservative talk-show hosts defended radio personality Don Imus in the controversy over his most recent racial slurs, ignoring his long history of making offensive and bigoted remarks on his nationally syndicated program. Mike Rosen, Peter Boyles, Dan Caplis, Joseph Michelli, and Amy Oliver downplayed the slur or suggested pop culture, especially rap music, was to blame. In the wake of the controversy regarding radio personality Don Imus' reference to the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos," several Colorado-based conservative radio hosts defended Imus but ignored his history of making racist and bigoted remarks on the air. Newsradio 850 KOA's Mike Rosen, 630 KHOW-AM's Peter Boyles, 630 KHOW-AM's Dan Caplis, News Radio 740 KVOR's Joseph Michelli, and 1310 KFKA's Amy Oliver either downplayed the offensive comment or attempted to shift blame away from Imus and onto popular culture, specifically rap music, as the source of his racial slur.
Heroes of a different sort
Parody Press Comics has announced the upcoming release of Hewoes #1, a comic book satire of NBC's popular superhero drama, Heroes. The title is written and illustrated by longtime comics veteran Bill Maus and will ship with two different covers, a "Good Hewoes" cover and a "Bad Hewoes" cover. "When cheerleader Klair Bendit discovers her weird flexibility powers playing Twister and her dad's secret project involving strangers from around the world, the fun begins," said Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Don Chin. "Bill Maus has a keen eye at poking fun at pop culture, and his art style on this book is much in the vein of the classic Mad Magazine satires, complete with grey tones and square word balloons." "Hewoes introduces readers to the enigmatic Pastrami brothers, Internet Weathergirl Sniki Sanders, constipated Japanese office worker Hewoe, and Mohinder Night Shalaman, who is trying to make sense of the whole thing while a berserk hairdresser named Styler is on the rampage!" said Maus, from his studio in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Panel at OU discusses new trend of casual voyeuristic violence
There's a new mischievous teenage pastime coming to town, and this time the stakes are higher than sneaking into Dad's cabinet to find that R-rated movie you weren't supposed to watch. Look out, America: Here comes happy-slapping. Three panelists discussed happy-slapping, the London teenage phenomenon that is also the subject of an upcoming Ohio University School of Theater production, during the school's regular brownbag lunch meeting Friday. "American gangs have been beating people randomly as a part of that culture for a long time," Thomas Vander Ven, criminology director and sociologist at OU, said of America's violent tendencies. "Filming the violence is new, but the behavior is not." At the brownbag meeting, participants explained that happy-slapping is a random violent act that has becoming popular among London youth and has begun to spread to the United States and other places via online forums such as YouTube.
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