I don't know why, but I'm not feelin' the new trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I do love the look of the animation, and there's plenty of awe-inspiring spectacle, as usual, in the Lucasverse. But I'm not sure if I'm going to care enough about the story. Something about Darth Sidious/Senator Palpatine embroiling Obi-Wan, Anakin, and the rest of the Jedi in a war sparked by the kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt's son.* The stakes just don't seem high enough, especially since we know already how this all plays out (the movie takes place during the gap between Episode II — Attack of the Clones and Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. The second half of the trailer is all battle scenes and explosions, and while I'm always up for some lightsaber dueling (Darth Maul may have died in Episode I, but his double-bladed 'saber is apparently still wreaking havoc), I'm worried that the film will consist largely of action sequences meant to distract from busy plotting and thin characterizations.
Not that any of this is going to stop me from lining up to see the movie on Aug. 15, mind you.
Tell me, PopWatchers, am I being overly pessimistic? The Clone Wars TV 'toon was really good, but it came in small doses. Can the feature be as involving? Are you more willing than I am to give the Lucasfilm team the benefit of the doubt, especially after geeking out on this clip? Comment below, my young padawans.
*Um, so how do you kidnap a Hutt-sized creature? And Jabba has a son? Does that mean there's a Mrs. Jabba? How do Hutts reproduce, anyway? And do I really want to know the answer to that question? Ewww.
Aniston, shmaniston. Who needs to hear about John Mayer's love life when we can have him show us where the real magic happens? (That would be in the recording studio, you pervs).
In a new Judd Apatow-produced clip on FunnyorDie.com, "Makin' Music With John Mayer," the singer walks us through a typical day, while wearing a Bluetooth headset on each ear, riding a scooter and dropping pearls of wisdom like "People matter, but celebrities matter more." Bonus points for the Kristen Bell cameo, but warning, cubicle monkeys: keep your headpones on, the language is super NSFW.
When I was a kid, there was no country music in our household — except for one song, Eddy Arnold's truly immortal 1955 smash, "Cattle Call," which somehow got a pass. Like a lot of children of the second half of the 20th century, I grew up with parents who had made the transition from farming to suburbia and who probably rejected country, consciously or unconsciously, as an unnecessary reminder of the rural lifestyle they'd worked so hard to get away from. But my father had an inordinate love for "Cattle Call," which featured Arnold breaking into a falsetto yodel between verses about howling coyotes, wide open prairies, and a cowboy who's "lonesome" but also has a "heart (that's) a feather in all kinds of weather." For somebody who'd actually grown up among the cattle, that had to have been a nice, wistful tonic at the end of a hard day of being a CPA, and we nearly wore the grooves off that record. After Eddy Arnold died Thursday, just days short of his 90th birthday, I had "Cattle Call" running through my head all day — but, as I half-joked to friends, there was nothing unusual about that; I often have "Cattle Call" running through my head.
The funny thing is, "Cattle Call" was completely unemblematic of Arnold's career — at least the second, more successful part of his career, when he set aside anything resembling an agrarian image, was seen almost exclusively in tuxedos, and established himself as more of a pop crooner. He was the original king of country crossover. My dad would buy Arnold's later records but always be confounded by how little these cosmopolitan-sounding songs resembled the Western-themed hit he loved; never mind that Arnold's transition from hillbilly icon to formally dressed gentleman roughly mirrored the farm-to-city transition our family had made. Not very many fans considered Arnold's switch to a slicker style selling out, though. Though he had his first No. 1 country hit in 1947, he had his biggest run of hits in the 1960s, after he'd adopted the smooth "Nashville sound," which involved strings and background chorales — crossing over to pop success and becoming the Rascal Flatts or Shania Twain of his day. In the end, many consider him the most successful country singer of all time, if you combine record sales (85 million sold) with radio successes (145 chart hits, including 28 No. 1s).
It's not too late to tune in to tomorrow's Pangea Day, an international film event on which short films contributed by people around the world will be broadcast live simultaneously. Pangea, a term you may remember from fifth grade geography (as Pangaea), was the name of the original recipe continent before the land mass split into extra tasty crispy America and Everywhere Else. The four-hour program begins at 2 p.m. EST. Watch it online or on TV, or on your high-tech video phoneor mosey on over a hosted event in your area. One of many trailers is below.
There are some people you just know you'd like. And Marion Ross, a.k.a. Happy Days' Mrs. Cunningham, is one of them. She didn't disappoint when she phoned PopWatch to chat about ABC's latest special, TV's All-Time Funniest (May 9, 8 p.m. ET), and answer reader questions. How did she get cast on Gilmore Girls? Will she return to Brothers & Sisters? Where can you see her in "the greatest fart scene since Blazing Saddles?" (Okay, you didn't ask that last one, but aren't you glad she brought it up?) Read on.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: If you had to submit one scene from Happy Days to secure your win as TV's Funniest Mother, which would you choose? Marion Ross: Well, I had a wonderful one where I did a belly dance for Howard, to put some spunk back in the marriage. It is so funny. The writers said, "Marion comes down the stairs doing a belly dance." I thought, Did anybody ask me if I could do this?
That actually leads nicely into our first reader question: MRS. TAYLOR wants to know how hard it was — or wasn't — for you to perform that dance for Howard (Tom Bosley). [Laughs] I remember it as not being a good day at all. When I see it, it looks very nice and easy. I had lines like, "Treat me rough... Treat me rough." But when you put on that costume, that helps.
BF asks, "What was up with the sexual tension between Mrs. Cunningham and the Fonz?"
[Laughs] Well, we just adored each other, that was all. [Henry
Winkler] always made such a fuss over me, and it would fluster me so. The more flustered I would be, then the more he would do that to me.
We're very, very close friends. I just adore him. We're bronzing the
Fonz in Milwaukee in August. There'll be a statue of the Fonz in the
park.
JAKEEM2007 is curious about what you think of today's more risqué sitcoms, and whether you're an avid watcher of any of them. No, just Brothers & Sisters, which is not a sitcom. I think one of the problems is that we don't know the people on the new sitcoms, the characters. People feel they know us [on Happy Days] — that we're real, and that we really come from Milwaukee. I think it takes awhile to build up something like that, and these shows are faster. Although, I loved Friends. You felt like you were there with them, and you didn't want them to end. You know my daughter, Ellen Plummer, was a writer-producer on Friends. She said she would regale the writers' table with some dumb, dumb thing I had done and try to work it into the script. I'd think, Oh my gosh, I got to be careful what I say.
2CENTS asks whether you'd ever consider doing Desperate Housewives because "a version
of Mrs. C — even someone that dressed and acted like they were in the
'50s would be so cool, and odd, and perfect for that show."
Well, you know, I did a spoof [on the 2005 TV Land Awards] where I played Bree. She killed
her husband, and Tom Bosley was the husband. I think I poisoned him. I
would love to be on Desperate Housewives. I think it would be so funny.
I always wanted to be on Roseanne Barr's show. Like, knock on the door
and just borrow a cup of sugar. Be as sweet and Mrs. C as possible. [Laughs] I would like to be on Monk. [PopWatch gasps] Is that a good idea? Yes. What kind of character would you want to play? Somebody quite insane. He would be trying to deal with me sensibly, you know, but I would be highly, highly neurotic and insane.
It's official: my two favorite fictional worlds are colliding! Upper East Side meets L.A. West Side as Blair Waldorf ditches class at Constance Billard to hang (or perhaps even canoodle?) with leading man Vincent Chase. Okay, so it's not the Queen B herself but alter-ego, actress Leighton Meester (pictured), who will guest star on Entourage, but I'm pretty excited nonetheless. HBO has confirmed to EW.com that the Gossip Girl star will reprise her Entourage season 1 role as Britney Spears-esque pop tart Justine Chapin on an episode of the comedy. Meester has a knack for playing the virginal sexpot, so we can only guess what sparks will fly when she heads back to the left coast.
"No one in novels watches TV," a character declares early in Jane Austen Book Club author Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End, by way of explaining why she no longer thinks printed literature is a truly living medium. There are several levels of irony included in that casual dismissal: This character happens to be a wildly successful novelist herself, for one. And Wit's End happens to be a novel in which lots of people watch a lot of TV. Fowler's characters chat casually about Lost, Prison Break, 24, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, Bones, and more. She really does capture what it's like to be a post-millennial pop-culture junkie without beating the theme into readers' heads, and that alone makes me respectfully differ with the solid B that Wit's End received in EW recently. I wolfed it down over the course of two recent plane flights, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Wit's End has also gotten much attention for the way its plot turns on characters' use of Wikipedia, LiveJournal, and fanfic sites. The websites themselves come to life practically as vividly as some of Fowler's secondary characters. As io9's Annalee Newitz has put it, this makes the novel a kind of "science fiction in the present": "While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit's End
manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully,
hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction
without us noticing." And these big, explicit nods to the world that Web 2.0 has wrought aren't so different from those incidental TV references, are they? In both, Fowler is playing with the communities created by a popular medium — the incredible collective experiences shared by people who watch a series or user-edit a website.
I think the reason I like Wit's End so much is because it fits into one of my favorite kinds of entertainment: pop culture about other kinds of pop culture. The Truman Show was a movie about TV; the fourth-season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm was a TV episode about Broadway (Mel Brooks' The Producers). Have any of you out there read Wit's End? And even if not, do you have any other favorite cross-media works of art like this?
Yes, PEHDTSCKJMBA. It's pronounced "pesskah-jumbah," roughly, and, as Tom Waits explains in the transfixing press-conference clip below, it's an acronym for the cities he'll be playing on this summer's "Glitter and Doom" tour: Phoenix, El Paso, Houston, Dallas... PEHDTSCKJMBA can also stand for "People Envy Happiness; Dogs, Though, Sense Courage, Knowing Jubilation Means Better Assets," Waits informs us. Really, you should just watch the whole thing as soon as possible. (Make positively sure to stay through the end — it's only 4 minutes long.) Waits deconstructs the meet-the-press ritual with his typical oddball panache, leading to a Q&A session that's about as surreal as any of Dylan's in Don't Look Back.
So what do you think of this bit of performance art? Does it make you any more interested in Waits' tour? And perhaps most importantly, as a friend of mine asked after seeing this clip, which is stranger: This stunt or the fact that Scarlett Johansson is actually releasing an album of Waits covers in a couple weeks? PEHDTSCKJMBA!
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I don't know why, but I'm not feelin' the new trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I do love the look of the animation, and there's plenty of awe-inspiring spectacle, as usual, in the Lucasverse. But I'm not sure if I'm going to care enough about the story. Something about Darth Sidious/Senator Palpatine embroiling Obi-Wan, Anakin, and the rest of the Jedi in a war sparked by the kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt's son.* The stakes just don't seem high enough, especially since we know already how this all plays out (the movie takes place during the gap between Episode II — Attack of the Clones and Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. The second half of the trailer is all battle scenes and explosions, and while I'm always up for some lightsaber dueling (Darth Maul may have died in Episode I, but his double-bladed 'saber is apparently still wreaking havoc), I'm worried that the film will consist largely of action sequences meant to distract from busy plotting and thin characterizations.
When I was a kid, there was no country music in our household — except for one song, Eddy Arnold's truly immortal 1955 smash, 
There are some people you just know you'd like. And 
It's official: my two favorite fictional worlds are colliding! Upper East Side meets L.A. West Side as Blair Waldorf ditches class at Constance Billard to hang (or perhaps even canoodle?) with leading man Vincent Chase. Okay, so it's not the Queen B herself but alter-ego, actress Leighton Meester (pictured), 
"No one in novels watches TV," a character declares early in Jane Austen Book Club author Karen Joy Fowler's 
