FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| MR. SMUTTY As a rich kid w/ a big fat trust fund, it's my job to read magazines & notice stuff, like how alluva sudden there's not-1-but-2 animated-bugs-with-celebrity-voices movies. You may not have picked up on this, but it's true. Ditto for flix about "outsider" (read: deformed) kids w/ big hearts. Start queuing now for the Christmas deluge of movies about cartoon termites who wear Coke-bottle glasses and limp. Weirder still: the proliferation of "hip witch" flicks/TV shows. First there's Sabrina The Teenage Witch, and now there's Practical Magic (starring Sandra "Speed 2" Bullock, as a witch) and Charmed (starring Shannen "Mall Rats" Doherty, as a witch). The former also stars Nicole Kidman, but doesn't look like it's half as kinky as the new S.Kubrick movie starring herself & hubby Tom Cruise, as horny people. The latter (Charmed, not horny people) boasts a rocked-up version of The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" as its theme song - s'cool, but not-so-much when stacked against Ben Vaughn's revved cover of Big Star's "In The Street," as heard on That '70s Show. (Kudos to Mr. Vaughn for this high-irony maneuver, gracing a nostalgia-driven show w/ a theme song only 8 people heard the first time around.) (In an interview designed to "move units" of his boss new El Oso LP, Soul Coughing genius/90210 aficionado M.Doughty astutely observes that S.Doherty's "Brenda" and her replacement, Tiffani Amber Thiessen's "Valerie," are the exact same character. An excellent point, M! On a related note - and I swear this is true - it has been my long-standing pet theory that vixen-with-a-past Valerie murdered her suicide-my-eye father. When she was introduced on the show like 5 yrs ago, I immediately thought "There's something patricidal about the way this girl talks, about the way this girl walks, about the way this girl smokes pot in Brenda's old room." Time has vindicated me. The townsfolk called me insane, said my ideas wouldn't fly, but who's laffing now, huh?) Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) has been showing up an awful lot lately, too, and usually in a most sexified fashion. Exhibit A: there's an au naturel photo of Modest Abe concealing his genitalia on the dust jacket of Jon Stewart's new wise-guy essay collection, Naked Pictures Of Famous People. The former prez has got one of those "porn"-styled black bars across his eyes, but his sunken chest & scrawny arms are a total giveaway. Exhibit B: Sex Lives Of The Presidents by Nigel Cawthorne (St. Martin's Paperbacks, $7.99 Can., available at finer airport newsstands & grocery store checkouts). Truth be told, the chapter entitled "The Great Emancipator" is pretty dull. So Lincoln liked to flirt and sometimes his First Lady flashed a li'l too much bosom during White House dinners, big deal. There's no smut concerning that tall hat of his, or any mention of "free the slaves & my pants will follow" campaign promises. James Garfield (1831-1881), on the other hand, "would astound friends by writing Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, simultaneously." He was also a compulsive masturbator, which raises interesting questions about bilingualism. Exhibit C: The Secret Diary Of Desmond Pfeiffer (9 p.m. Mondays on UPN). In what may be the most hotly anticipated show of the new TV season, Chi McBride portrays Desmond Pfeiffer, Abraham Lincoln's level-headed valet. The show is, by all accounts, super-dirty, w/ a bisexual, foot-fetish'd Abe Lincoln waving his "executive branch" willy-nilly all over Washington DC. Plus: more slavery jokes than any given episode of Felicity. On the subject of woodsy euphemisms: Abe's johnson is called a "branch." The prosthetic scar tissue worn by Oprah in Beloved is called a "tree." There's a "Lincoln log" gag in there somewhe - awww, who'm I kidding? I'm going to Hell, and not even Robin Williams can save me. |