Sky Mall Part Two: My Pets Have Unusually High Expectations

As Part One should have shown you, Sky Mall has discovered that at normal cruising altitude, people lose their fucking minds. They’ll believe that lasers can regrow hair, remove unwanted hair, and give their aching muscles a soothing massage, with happy ending.
Does the same loss of reason apply to pet owners? Oh dear God, yes.

Litter Kwitter 3-Step Cat Toilet Training System
$49.99

“Potty Train Your Cat Faster Than Most People Can Potty Train Their Kids”

“Most people” is a popular catch-all in advertising-speak because, as most people are aware, most people are fucking idiots. But I’m sure you’re one of the special ones that can make your cat go against all of its natural instincts and perch its ass over a toilet bowl.

“The best way to deal with the unpleasant task of cleaning out the litter box is to do away with it for good.”

Yeah, fuck that shit!

“With the Litter Kwitter 3-Step Cat Toilet Training System, you can teach your cat to use any human toilet in eight weeks or less."

Gnomish, Elven, and Orc toilets may take longer.

“The age or weight of your cat doesn't matter”

If you say so, Sky Mall.

“(A)nd it works in multiple cat households too.”

Because nothing adds to that first pee of the morning like having to get in line behind my six cats*

*I like cats.

“This award-winning product has proved itself effective for years, and has been recommended by vets.”

After Jimmy got back from ‘Nam he just wasn’t the same. He’d couldn't hold down a job, he’d get all tense and freak out when he heard a car backfire, and he just started recommending cat toilet-training videos all over the place. He was a mess.

“Enjoy a cleaner home and say good-bye to the litter box forever.
Includes step-by-step training DVD.”

Ok, I might be able to train my cat to use a toilet, but there is no way I can get him to watch an entire training DVD. That's just ridiculous.

Litter Robots
$294.99 - $314.99


Now your cat can finally live out its fantasy of crapping in a diving helmet. FINALLY.

Dog Orthopedic Comfy Couch
$79.95-$169.95


“Our best-in-class Comfy Pet Couch is crafted as well as sofas designed for people.
Ultra-plush, this pet couch offers unsurpassed support that ordinary dog beds can't match. We'll even toss in a bone pillow. Now that's a treat any dog would love!”

Because your dog could give a shit.

Six-Panel Pet Gate/Crate
$299.99



Because your dog needs to know that while he’s not allowed in the living room, the neighborhood he lives in is still extremely gentrified.

And when he’s bad…


…show him what doggie white collar prison would be like. Because normal dog pens are for poor, black dogs.

Hidden Litter Box
$89.95-$169.95



Hide it all you want, people are still going to wonder why your eucalyptus plant smells like cat shit.

Kitty Washroom Cabinet
$99.95

Clearly 90% of Sky Mall’s pet products are devoted to hiding scat. To the people that order these products I have this to say: Maybe if being confronted with the biological necessities of animals bothers you so much, pets aren’t for you; you pretentious, over-monied, WASPy, suburban gated-community dwelling fucksticks.

*Phew*

Come back next time for more light-hearted gentle-prodding at useless, over-priced merchandise that’s sold for hundreds of dollars while people are starving to death in the very country the products are made. The topic will be décor!

Things That Are Killing The American Sitcom Pt. 3

Tyler Perry

I really hate Tyler Perry. Not as a person mind you, as I don’t actually know him and it’s hard to develop strong feelings in any way for someone who smiles blandly as much as he does. No, my issues with Tyler Perry are based entirely on his work, particularly his dominance of original TBS programming. You see, TBS, despite supposedly “knowing funny” whatever that means, has not one, but two original shows painstaking shat out by Mr. Perry on his way to cashing a series of massive checks. This has not only made portions of TBS’ regular programming unwatchable, but it has also made the network itself a minefield of ads for sitcoms that are not only unoriginal, but also deeply offensive to my non-existent African heritage.

My African heritage.

Nothing better encapsulates my feelings towards Tyler Perry’s oeuvre quite like the South Park episode “The Biggest Douche in the Universe.” Except while in South Park Stan accused John Edward of slowing down the progress of humanity, I merely accuse Tyler Perry of slowing down the progress of comedy, and, occasionally, of having an unusual amount of space between his nose and upper lip.

“Hi, I’m Tyler Perry and you could practically ski down my nasal labial trough.”

Because of his lack of humor, cultural sensitivity, or really any sense of quality control whatsoever, Tyler Perry may well have already done more to kill the American sitcom than any other single person. Now, this is actually pretty impressive considering it wasn’t so long ago that Perry was just a weird theater kid in Georgia, except instead of writing wish-fulfillment coming of age rock operas, Perry wrote musicals about child abuse that made his audience really uncomfortable.

Pictured: Tyler Perry’s early work.

Over time Perry adjusted his plays bit by bit until they started getting good reviews. Presumably by the time he realized that what had once been a deeply personal expression of his adolescence had now become him doing a two hour drag performance of what it would be like if you put How Stella Got Her Groove Back in a blender with the comic strip Crankshaft, it was already far too late. And once the dump trucks full of money, cocaine and hookers showed up Perry decided he no longer needed to express himself in any medium but awful, awful comedy.

The world's worst game of Shoot, Screw, or Marry.

The problem with Tyler Perry’s comedy isn’t just that he does it rather than following his bliss and making terrible plays no one wants to see. It’s that in abandoning his dreams for commercial success, he also abandoned all semblance of creativity. Sure by all accounts his pre-success writings were awful, but at least they were somewhat original. Now Perry just uses the same stock characters and situations that have been around for 50 years, occasionally exaggerating already exaggerated aspects and re-contriving the most contrived of plot devices. Fat, goofy neighbors, annoying in-laws, and aggressive disdain for one’s own off-spring based simply on the fact that their sensibilities differ from that of their elders in some way, all built around a nougat core of Tyler Perry not giving a shit anymore. There’s nothing that is ostensibly “funny” about Perry’s shows that wasn’t already played out by shows like Good Times, All in the Family, and Family Matters.

If you put Jaleel White in that outfit you would swear this was the episode where Urkel travels to the future.

A further problem is that those who criticize Perry’s creations are commonly presumed to simply “not get it.” I realize that as an Irishman raised in the southwest by East Coast elitists I’m not exactly Tyler Perry’s target demographic. And I can understand defending Perry’s style of humor by claiming that it’s a “black thing” or a “southern thing” or, even more accurately, a “specific to distinct regions of the dirty south, as seen by African-Americans of specific economic, social, political, religious, and educational backgrounds living therein thing.”

Or a “cross-dressing and fat suits worked for Eddie Murphy thing."

I can actually sympathize with this, because, as you may or may not know, there is such a thing as Irish Catholic humor. It’s a particular brand of humor usually passed down through Irish families that emigrated during the potato famine and clustered in specific neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and Boston. It’s a humor that is extremely juvenile, can be easily understood by a small child, and makes use of well-worn comedy conventions.

As opposed to Tyler Perry, who weaves a spider’s web of intricate satire regarding inter-generational conflict.

The hallmark of the Irish Catholic style of humor is the Pat and Mike joke which features an understood premise: There’s these two guys named Pat and Mike, and they do silly things, usually somehow involving alcohol. The punchlines usually involve piss, the clergy, general idiocy, or all three.

I thought I was going to have a hard time finding a picture that succinctly represented piss, the clergy, and idiocy all at once, but what can I say? God bless you, modern art.

So I get how Tyler Perry could be playing to a very specific demographic with his humor, but here’s the thing: I would never try and market Pat and Mike as a national television show. It would essentially be like building a TV franchise around a “you had to be there” joke. While to me and people from the same very specific shared background Pat and Mike jokes are observational satire, to everyone else they're lowest common denominator slapstick played out with offensive caricatures. And if there’s any better way to describe Tyler Perry’s comedy, I can’t think of it.

Unless I'm allowed to use made up words like “shitastical” or “offensipalooza.”

Simply put, Tyler Perry manages to create sitcoms that are paradoxically so familiar they’re tiresome AND so specific that they’re unrelatable. Still, I would happily forgive him for all of this if he would just do something about that upper lip thing.

Just a thought.

Check back next time when I'll be wrapping up this series by talking about: Censorship. Look forward to more swears!

The Best and Worst Teacher in Film Pt. 2

Alright, kids, best pack light ‘cause this is a long one.

The Good:
Sean Connery in Finding Forrester

Finding Forrester really walks the razors edge when it comes to good teachers in film. It’s got all of the staples of sappy teacher movies: Urban youth at risk, the Caucasian mentor, an all-or-nothing cinematic climax, and sweet, sweet, interracial jailbait.

Speaking of interracial love, how much does this look like a romantic comedy poster?

There are two things that keep Finding Forrester from going from realistically sweet to movie-diabetes and that’s the complexity of the characters relationship and good acting.

The best real life student-teacher relationships are two-way streets. Almost every film about teaching forgets this, but Finding Forrester doesn’t. Sean Connery’s character is an old bastard, but he’s bored and watching the main character, Jamal, develop as a writer entertains him. Unlike a lot of movie teachers, Connery didn’t set out to change the world through teaching, he just stumbled across a kid who happens to be really good at something Connery knows a lot about. Similarly, Jamal gets a kick out of being a pain in whitey’s ass just as much as he likes having him as a mentor. This is the kind of depth of human experience that a lot films gloss over or forget entirely, but it makes or breaks this movie.

No, Dog, it is you who are the man now.

The complexity and depth of their relationship wouldn’t work without good actors, though. I can’t imagine anyone but Sean Connery in this role. He’s one of the few actors who can play both racist asshole and nurturing tutor in the same breath. Anyone else would either come off as too condescending or too eager, but Connery is neither. Rob Brown has only been in a few films, but just like Connery he plays a sweet spot that few can pull off. It’s the subtle ways that you see Jamal as a three-dimensional person that keeps his character from being the kind of interchangeable street toughs you see in similar movies.

That said, every still shot makes it look like they’re about to kiss.

The Bad:
Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society is such a staple of the “inspiring teaching” genre that no one even questions what’s supposed to be so inspiring about it.

Oddly, “giggling while schoolboys cup your balls” is not one of this film’s IMDB tags. But it really should be.

Don’t get me wrong, Robin Williams is a fantastic actor when the director remembers to hide the cocaine. Unfortunately, in this case Peter Weir didn’t remember that in an “inspiring” film it’s usually a good idea for the characters to actually be inspired somehow.

Robin Williams renegade literature teacher sticks it to the uptight, conservative administration primarily by being slightly less uptight and conservative in comparison. He shocks the authority of the school by referencing Walt Whitman, flouts the rules by taking students outside and teaching them Latin, and spits in the eye of God by encouraging his pupils to form a literary society.

Now, Williams does have his kids rip a chapter out of their textbooks, and we get it, the setting is literally old school, but it takes place in 1959, not the Dark Ages.

Standing on desks? He’s a witch!

This film takes place in the same year the Vietnam War started, four years before JFK is assassinated, nine years before the slayings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and a mere decade before Woodstock, and you’re telling me a prep school student’s dad is flipping a shit over his son performing Shakespeare?

Granted, I was not alive in the 1950s and cannot truly know the prevailing zeitgeist, but if Robin Williams got fired for advocating Walt Whitman, Latin, and Shakespeare, what was he supposed to be teaching? The most efficient method for torturing a confession from a suspected heretic? The proper method for balancing the humors? How to prevent the rusting of chastity belts?

This is the ultimate inspiration letdown because not only does the audience not understand what the big deal is, but neither do the characters. One student kills himself, another helps fire Williams and the others don’t really do anything, until the very end when some of them stand on their desks and recite Walt Whitman again.

In other movies borderline-retarded inner city kids get into Harvard and the best these silver spoons can do is get off their asses and remember what their teacher liked to be called. That’s either the least inspiring message ever put to celluloid or it’s the most mind-blowingly complex biblical allegory in history. You be the judge.

Any guesses which one is supposed to represent Mary Magdalene?

Next time around we’ll be looking at a couple of more recent films, Mean Girls and Precious, so get ready for me to make fun of obesity, incest, and HIV. It’ll be like if Family Guy was a blog!

The Best and Worst Teacher in Film Pt. 1

Some time ago a friend of mine, Katie, requested suggestions from her Facebook friends for examples of teachers in film being good at their job. She also specifically said she didn’t want “cheesy” examples like Michel Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds and the like.

As the child of teachers (and as a critical bastard when it comes to education in general) I was inspired, and with the help of http://www.movieteacher46.com/ I compiled a list of what I think are the best moments of teaching ever seen in film.

For each good example I’m going to include a bad one to illustrate the kind of cheesy fuckery that passes for “inspirational teaching” in most movies.

So, in no particular order, here are my best and worst examples of teaching on film:

The Good:

Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle in Donnie Darko

Writer/director Richard Kelly may not be able to string together a coherent plot to save his life, but one thing he can do is show what good teaching really looks like.

Look at this poster. Congratulations, you now understand the plot as much as anyone who has seen this film.

Both Noah Wyle and Drew Barrymore’s characters are perfect exemplifications of the kind of teachers who have meant the most to me. They’re a bittersweet blend of respect, irresponsibility, honesty, and “off the record” conversations. I once had a psych teacher tell me the best way for me to deal with my problems was to “stop being such a pussy” and she was dead on and she knew it. A really good teacher has enough respect and intelligence to read when a student is mature enough to handle harsh truths and complex ideas and these characters are perfect examples of that.

Donnie Darko: A scathing critique of the Furry-lifestyle.

The Bad:

Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds

I figured I might as well start with my friend’s previously mentioned example of teacher cheese, since it illustrates so many things that make for a shit teacher in film.

The school dress code emphasized leather jackets and flannel.

First of all, a bad movie teacher would be a very good real life teacher. This is perfectly true of Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Dangerous Minds. If someone in real life could really confront the system and get through to a bunch of undereducated street toughs, they would change the world. The problem is, as Hamlet 2 parodies, that’s a laughably unrealistic interpretation of education and it gives people unrealistic expectations of the roles of teacher and student.

In the real world putting on a leather jacket and being a badass Marine will not let you “get through” to an entire class that’s been slipping through the cracks of education for the past 12 years. It’s possible to show really inspirational teaching without going into the realm of the impossible and Dangerous Minds fails at that.

What is that, a Go-Gurt? She is so not prepared for the Gangsta Paradise.

On another point, it’s pretty racially insensitive to suggest that a white person can completely “fix” blacks and Latinos. The idea that any teacher can have an all-encompassing impact on their entire class is unrealistic, but when that class is strictly comprised of minorities and that teacher looks like a successful S.S. coupling, we enter a whole new, more troubling, realm. This is why every “teacher inspires a dysfunctional class” movie since has A) tried to toss in a white kid with the “urban youth,” and B) Had the teacher be played by either Denzel Washington or the living death mask that is Edward James Olmos.*

*I would have included Samuel L. Jackson for Coach Carter, but I refuse to call a basketball coach a “teacher.” Sorry coaches, but Craig T. Nelson and Gil Thorp ruined whatever esteem your position once had.

Comments? Frothy, bile-fueled disagreement? Let me know and come back next time for Finding Forrester and Dead Poets Society. Which will I applaud and which will I teabag via teh internetz? Tune in to find out.

Things I've Noticed About the World of Harry Potter PT. 3

Ethnic Discrimination: Pakis GTFO

Last week I wrote about how Hogwarts seems to let in anyone who’s magically-inclined within the British Isles. This is closely related to today’s point: where the hell are all the brown wizards? This is mainly a movie issue since I'll give Rowling the benefit of the doubt and assume she left a lot of characters races un-described and we're the assholes for assuming they're all white, but the movies are WAY disproportionately Caucasoid.

I know there's Harry's Asian crush, and a couple black kids are Harry's friends, and he and Ron took Indian twins to the big ball, but according to the 2001 Census, the UK (where Hogwarts seems to get all of their students) has a 16% non-white population. That's not a lot. In the school where I went for the 9th grade 16% of the school would be one Latino kid's ankle.

But I went to a pitifully small school. According to an interview with J.K. Rowling there are around 1,000 students at Hogwarts each semester. My rudimentary math skills tell me that means about 160 non-white students. And while big group shots of the Hogwarts dining hall do look pretty racially mixed, 160 students spread over 4 houses means there should be around 40 non-white kids to each house. You would think Harry would at least know all the kids in his house, but as I said, I can only think of about 5 students Harry knows who aren't whiter than soda bread.

If not for the red hair, Ron would be completely invisible.

This leads me to several upsetting possibilities. One possibility is that Harry is fucking racist and intentionally distances himself from as many wizards of color as he can. This adds a whole, weird subtext to the stories.

The other possibility is that the houses are not equally racially mixed, which suggests the even weirder theory that the sorting hat is racist. Which actually kind of makes sense. His whole deal is he makes snap judgments five seconds after meeting someone AND he does look kind of like an anthropomorphic KKK hood.

The third possible scenario is that for some reason non-whites are disproportionately less likely to be born with magic powers. That's right, you heard it here first: Magic Doesn't Care About Black People.