Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Mega-Post

Hey you crazy characters...

Apparently, I have some business to catch up on...

Sorry I haven't been around this week - I had to go and take photographs of empty penthouses at the suites at 1 King W... Why, you ask? Because that's how G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S my fucking life is. No. Because that's the company I work for... we're handling the selling/renovating of those... anyway - it was pretty nuts... one of them is a WHOLE FLOOR... like I thought that shit only existed in movies. The kind of shit where you take the elevator to the 48th floor and it's just an apartment... not a hall with doors leading to other apartments - oh no - but AN ENTIRE EFFING APARTMENT. Yeah... the kind that billionaire playboys or sultans own and stage spectacular, earth-splitting orgies in... I can't even handle it...

So yeah. That's where I was this week.

My weekend this past weekend was so very eventful, I can't even handle it.

It kicked off Thursday night, a night which saw me get waxed. "Oh. How was that?" you ask. How the fuck is it ever. Painful... for real... and I'm not even kidding - I could definitely see an upside to chemo. I'm not saying that to be insensitive or sensational - I'm just saying I could definitely find a way to see that glass as half-full... anyway...

The esthetician and I were talking about America's Next Top Model and how we both liked sassy plus-sized stunner Whitney (who squeaked by last week within an inch of her life, yet again) and then out of NOWHERE, she produced the random quote of the week: "... You know who's really upped their game? Cotton Ginny."

I fucking lost it. It was so random. Anyballs... thought I'd share...

This passed Friday night saw me, Anth and Heidi FINALLY take in Baby Mama...

I don't think I need to tell you that we LOVED it. LOVED.

I thought it was charming, well-paced and not unsurprising... I thought it was a little outside the formula... I mean it wasn't the sort of female Superbad that I think I was hoping for, but it wasn't 27 Dresses, either.

I'm, for one, THRILLED to see a female buddy comedy score so solidly at the box office, particularly one that stars two comedy goddesses that I adore so, so much... which means - hopefully - that we can expect more. Remember the good ol' days when yer Lily Tomlin's or yer Bette Midler's could open a movie? Or, better yet - remember the Shelley Long film? I'm a firm believer that in the mid-late 1980's, there were only five genres of film - the teen horror film, the Police Academy series, the rom-com, the action-adventure and The Shelley Long film. A light-as-whipped-topping comedy with Shelley Long at its centre typically playing an impossibly quirky-albeit-not completely unfuckable heroine... a-la...

Or...

Or...

Or...

And in particular, in the greatest comedic romp ever committed to celluloid...

I'm not even kidding. TBH is magical. It's the definitive movie of my childhood. I remember actually making a participation script for it a-la The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And may I just add - how the fuck much fun would it have been to be Shelley Long posing for the poster shoots?! Like every picture, the photographer's just yelling "Be Quirkier! Quirkier! QUIRKIER!!!" - oh what it must have been like to be Shelley Long between the years of 1986 and 1991...

Alright - enough of my Shelley Long lust.

Last night I went to see Hairspray - which is in town for one week only at the Princess of Whales theatre featuring the touring cast - and by golly if it didn't turn an otherwise run-of-the-mill Tuesday upside down.

Just a delight... the production itself wasn't AMAAAZING... I was told that touring shows are rather hit-or-miss as they're non-Equity... apparently once they had a touring production of Cats up in there with an INFLATABLE SET - which I can't imagine is terribly practical for a show where the company has claws, but maybe that's just me... always with the logistics - but yeah, this production was not without its charm...

At the top of the show, following the requisite "Hairspray is set in 1962. Back in 1962, they didn't have cell phones. Please turn your cell phone off"- yeah, it's supposed to be funny - they announced that not one, not two, BUT THREE roles this particular night would be played by the understudies including those of Tracy and Edna - YEAH, PIVOTAL. This was met by an audible groan from the audience... it was HILARIOUS. Because immediately after that, the curtain came up and this bitch who's understudying Tracy has to break into "Good Morning, Baltimore" right after basically being told by hoards of people "we don't wanna see you". Nuts!

So yeah... the Tracy chick could sing just fine, but she wasn't fat by a million miles. What they do is pad the bitches down, and they just look like they've got a beer gut, but they're not the portly little outsider that Tracy's supposed to be. Edna's understudy was pretty "meh" as well...

Whatevs... Amber, Penny and Motormouth were all fierce, fierce and fiercer... However the highlight of my evening came in the form of a celebrity sighting... it's not a celebrity that will mean anything to many of you, but to the select few of you - ha-cha-cha... in attendance at last night's performance of Hairspray was none other than Eddie Stone - pictured, to the left...

Yeah, he's a gay porn star. An apparently Toronto-based one, now. Anyway - this was perhaps the weirdest celebrity sighting I've ever encountered... because it's a very different sphere that porn stars occupy in one's mind than movie stars... like the feeling of recognition I felt when I was sitting at a table next to Naomi Watts was very different than the feeling of recognition upon seeing Eddie Stone...

With Naomi Watts it was like "Holy fuck! Hollywood A-Lister! Oscar Nominee! Nikki Kidman's Bestie! FUCK!"... whereas with Eddie Stone it was like "... ... ... I've totally seen you felch before... hey, how's it goin'?" NUTS!

So that was that... Anyballs... Idol last night...

General Note: YAWN. This is thoroughly anti-climactic at this point. It's 8 million % going to be a David v. David showdown.

David Cook did absolutely nothing different with Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf", as he claimed. And anutha thang: You get 500 songs marked as the most influential songs in rock 'n roll history and you choose something by DURAN DURAN? Was Hall & Oates' "Private Eyes" not available for clearance? (Although, not gonna lie, would have been pretty awesome if someone did "Private Eyes"...) His second offering, "Baba O'Reilly" was thoroughly "meh" as well - the only reason anyone would have been excited about it was because someone was doing The Who, not because of anything that David did to it. Daniel Feinenberg of Zap2it.com said something interesting about David Cook... "nights like this remind us of just how anonymous he would have been on CBS' Rock Star"... it's very true... if there's one thing I can say about David at this point is how when he's off, or he doesn't do something exceptionally 'him', he's really off and really indistinguishable... read: he's lacking X Factor, and people are embracing him as this year's "resident rocker" - a role he occupies tidily. At least with yer Bo Bice's or your Daughtry's, whenever they did something and it wasn't exactly great, it still reeked of being them... can't say the same for David Cook...

Whereas if that's the one thing I can say about David Cook, the one thing I can say about YeYe Mercado is that she sure picked a fuck of a time to show up. Really - would it have killed you to have started this momentum say, 8 weeks ago? Well, no. Anyway - she went up first singing "Proud Mary", and although did it nowhere near the justice that Tina Turner - or for that matter, Season 2's Trenyce - did, no one can say she didn't go for it. But t'was certainly her second song, Sam Cooke's "A Change Gonna Come", that goes down in Idol history as one of the greatest 11th hour plea-bargains that might just pardon her from Idol death row. Did that make sense? Here's hoping. YeYe worked it out on this one... it's the first time I've been excited by her, and that she actually understood what she was singing about (really, it's so refreshing whenever a contestant actually understands what they're singing... such a treat)... also, her torrent of tears following Simon's rave ain't gonnna hurt either...

Jason Castro doesn't want to be there anymore and that's all there is to it. I don't really think I need to say too, too much more about it. "I Shot The Sherrif" was actually for Jason's own shits and giggles. And his substitution of "hmm hmm hmm hmm" for that verse of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" was so blatant, I'd believe it was planned. I can't really fault him though... I guess...

D'Archuleta continues to give the people what they want, which is more of the same. His "Stand By Me" was likely his best performance in weeks... His "Love Me Tender" was probably lovely, too... I wouldn't know, I fast-forwarded right through it because I assumed it was more of the same... And I really, really can't stand his overwhelmed modesty after he receives gushing from the judges... whatevs... he's finalista material...

BOTTOM 2

Given last night's performances, Jason and YeYe. Given the fact that this was always an inevitability that everyone except for the David's days being numbered, Jason and YeYe.

GOING...

Did YeYe finally do enough to stay last night? I'd say so, but who knows how the flyover states feel. Did Jason finally not do enough to keep his fangirls power-dialing for him? It's anyone's guess. My bets are on Jason going... but if not, expect Syesha to throw the shit down. I can just tell that she's the type of person who would not even feign diplomacy and just say "WHAT THE FUCK, MOTHAFUCKAZ?!"... then, in an Idol first, expect Jason to resign himself in favour of YeYe...

Yeah... Unlikely... well who knows...

In other news: I promise to blog with more frequency for precisely the next three weeks. (read: another Bitch Salad is coming up...)

--- Aj