Tag Archives: satire

Spoilers for “It’s a Wonderful Life 2: the Final Bell Rings”

November 20, 2013 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

It's a Wonderful Life

Nope. They don’t believe it, either.

Because nothing good can remain untarnished and self-contained:

Variety reported Tuesday a small movie company that doesn’t own It’s a Wonderful Life is planning an official sequel — somehow, for some reason, possibly because greed minus self-awareness. Tentatively titled It’s a Wonderful Life: The Rest of the Story, the superfluous production will show George’s grandson being taught a lesson by his aunt Zuzu, now transformed into an angel. The company is hoping for a holiday 2015 release so it can compete against Star Wars Episode VII and look that much more foolish.

So what else could they possibly do?

Your New Black Thursday Strategy Guide

November 15, 2013 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Christmas toys

If you want to be first in line to buy Christmas presents for your loved ones for nickels on the dollar, even if they’re worth pennies at best, you need to be prepared.

Last year on this site I wrote at length about my frustration with the ongoing dilution of my personal Black Friday tradition. What was once a fun, singular day of people-watching and movie-hoarding has lost its charm for me as retail stores continue to reopen earlier and earlier that weekend to accommodate America’s lust to begin Christmas shopping as soon as possible, even if their Thanksgiving turkey dinner is still digesting and most of their relatives remain unvisited.

Last year’s new fad was for stores to reopen at midnight Friday instead of waiting until Friday’s been up and running for a few hours first. This year, many stores think midnight is too long to wait for shoppers to come fork over all the monies, and are reopening Thanksgiving evening, around the same time that some families are accustomed to holding their Thanksgiving. On the bolder end of the spectrum, Old Navy plans to open on Thanksgiving at 9 a.m. I’m sure they’re not alone in rejecting the holiday’s existence altogether.

Clearly if one wants to win at two-day Black Friday, the old single-day Black Friday playbook needs to be shredded and competitive shoppers need to rethink their strategies. Because, like Black Friday, this new tradition of Black Thursday isn’t just about Christmas survival. It’s about Christmas victory.

How to win Christmas and ignore people!

So You Want to Be a Super Awesome “Freshly Pressed” All-Star

October 28, 2013 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , 9 Comments

WordPress "Freshly Pressed" badgeA fake reader lurking within my subconscious writes:

Dear Mr. Crossover,

Hello! How are you? I am fine. I have been using WordPress.com for four years. Please follow my blog and reblog all three of my posts so far, because I just Liked a random post you wrote last month without reading it and now you owe me. I have another question. I read your About page and it says you had three different posts on Freshly Pressed, which is a really big deal because it means WordPress likes you best. I think that’s really unfair and you didn’t deserve it and I want to know your secret. How can I be more like you and get Freshly Pressed so that I can become famous and everyone will like me and then I can write for Hollywood and make enough money to buy your website and set it on fire and run over the ashes in my new Humvee? Also, I nominated you for a Liebster Award and I will Follow you if you Follow me.

Sincerely,
N.V.S. Strawman
Exposition, WY
http://ripoffsweatshopfashions.wordpress.com

Dear Mr. Strawman,

I wish you hadn’t asked, but I can tell you what I’ve learned from the experiences that changed my life forever and made me Hero of the Internets. As you begin reading, prepare to rethink your entire existence piece by piece, until every second becomes retroactively spectacular from Day Zero onward.

Click here for handy tips on how to be me!

My Super Awesome Blockbuster Reboot of “E.T.”

September 12, 2013 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Those eyes are pretty in the right light, but the rest of this will have to go.

February 2014 will see The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman taking over for Peter Weller as the new Robocop. This fall Ironside returns to TV with Blair Underwood somehow replacing Raymond Burr. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Lone Ranger, and the Green Hornet are but a few of the myriad characters to return from pop-culture limbo in overhauled guises. And this is the sentence I had set aside for DC Comics if I could narrow the possible examples down to less than four hundred.

At the rate our entertainment recyclers are plowing through their back catalogs, every intellectual property from the last fifty years will have been remade and/or rebooted before I’m fifty. Even if 90% of them flop, every producer, editor, or writer will convince themselves their attempt will be different from all the rest because they truly believe in themselves, if not their work. Maybe 10% of them will hit the jackpot, reap the rewards, and retire at forty.

Sounds like a sweet deal to me, even though I’m running dozens of laps behind the competition. If I’m to win, I need to move now. That’s why I’m calling dibs on E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s not taken, right? Excellent.

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How Not to Respond to Aurora: a Plainspoken Primer for Pundit Pretenders

July 22, 2012 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m not sure how healthy or productive it would be for me to dwell on current events for too extended a time frame. Last night’s writing jag became one of my most uncomfortable sessions in years, so I’m still trying to get my head back in the right space, or at least within the same area code as said space. It absolutely does not involve any cessation of prayers, but it does involve a bit of disengagement from the single-subject “news” stream and minimizing my additional reading, which has been winnowed down to links passed along by well-meaning online friends.

I realize that reading and writing about the subject must go on for others, whether it’s the quixotic quest for understanding the incomprehensible or the hypnotic allure of a true-crime drama destined someday to be reenacted awkwardly on numerous low-budget basic-cable true-crime shows. All I ask is that such commentators show a modicum of decorum, restraint, and best judgment. (I can dream.)

The following would be examples of opening lines and excerpts from articles and opinion pieces I do not want to see, that should neither exist nor have readers:

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