A Day That Will Live in Infamy: India Declares War on the Oscars

As Hollywood celebutantes and celebutards innocently busied their afternoons with Rystalene and Botox injections, those Mumbai 'bombay-diers' plotted their attack. With a total of eight Oscars in its war chest, Slumdog Millionaire led the chai-fuelled charge to decimate Hollywood at a very vulnerable time. What with SAG strike anxiety rendering even the most vicious CAA agent sexually impotent, coupled with dwindling ratings for the Academy Awards, it was an insidious night of curry flavored ass-kickings. Despite a bevy of bronzed boobed bimbos, ratings were probably the lowest ever, proving that TV viewers prefer to watch Mike Rowe scrub outhouses on Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" than submit to the bloated exercise of red carpet butt-sniffing and reach-arounds. Still, the show had its highlights:

Hugh Jackman - He shaved one beard and brought the other to the party. Now, now. No gay man would dare dry hump Frank Langella's leg with Brad Pitt a two feet away. The triple-threat Jackman may have seemed over-bronzed, but I think we'd all look like the Great Pumpkin next to the ghost of Anne Hathaway. Climbing atop Mt. Oscar and shouting "I'M WOLVERINE!" at the end of your song will keep you in the good graces of Comic Con booger-eaters at least until May. Nice work, Logan. Long live the Sexiest Man Alive!!




MUNG HOUR OSCAR OBSERVATIONS:
- Goldie Hawn – Sweet Jesus! There is a reason they keep the temperature under 50 degrees at Madame Tussaud’s.
- For those of you who never knew that Mrs. Partridge of the Partridge Family won an Oscar. Well, join the club.
- Proposition 8 is the new Iraq War. Rainbow colored ribbons on your lapels, duh, people.
- Daniel Craig looked a lot like James Bond in that tuxedo. Bizarre.
- Sarah Jessica Parker: you can take the horse out of the trailer but you - damn, screwed up another horse-face joke.
- The Duchess, a period film with powdered wigs and corsets won for Best Costume. Always nice when the Academy votes out of the box.
- Missed Joke Opportunity Winners - It's a toss-up between "Warren Beatty Button: The Story About a Man Aging Backwards" and "Any Mention of the Christian Bale Rant".
- Oscar-nominated songs are so much cooler when they have dread-locked musicians beating copper drums.
- Eddie Murphy - "I'd like to thank all of the members of the Razzies."
- Oscar Wall of Death was a visual clusterf*ck. Oh, and Paul Newman's shoes are gonna be tough to fill, Clooney. He's got salad dressing and spaghetti sauce. You've got what, Darfur? Get cracking.
- Ohhhhhh, Danny Booooooyle ... your Oscar's shiniiiiiiing ....
- Ms. Winslet, congratulations on your Oscar. You now have an obligation to honor those Best Actress winners before you by doing a retarded action movie that gets 13% RottenRating, then an over-budgeted period film based on children’s novels before sliding into an Oprah Winfrey produced tele-movie.
- The camera did NOT show us Mickey Rourke’s reaction to Sean Penn’s win, so we cannot fully verify if he has indeed won the Nick Nolte "You-Stole-My-F*cking-Oscar” Award. We think he won, but because Penn sucker-punched him with a speech-closing compliment, we cannot verify the win.

OSCAR 2009 GALLERY

Now We Can State the Obvious Pun - Nice Golden Globes!

The Golden Globes received their lowest ratings ever, even lower than last year which was pretty much limited to Ryan Seacrest wearing headphones on the red carpet rattling off the list of winners. Not surprising since the average broke American is probably not in the mood to watch spoiled celebrities sashay down the red carpet in jewelry costlier than their houses. The only real rags-to-tiches moment was when Sally Hawkins won for Happy Go Lucky. The gauntlet she had to pass (from her table waaaaayyy in the back of the house) included tables with Pierce Brosnan, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise, Robert Downey, Jr, Brad Pitt, and Clint Eastwood. If she didn't pee herself when she heard her name called, she probably soiled her thong when the two Tom's stood up to shake her hand.

No offense to Mickey Rourke, but the GG's always emphasize the foreigners and the outcasts. Brokeback Mountain's 2006 snub could come back to haunt this year's Oscars, so Milk and Sean Penn might squeak in there. The Hollywood Foreign Press probably doesn't realize that Rourke pissed off a lot of Hollywood folks in his day, and his plastic surgery might frighten too many of his peers who wonder if they could end up looking like that with the wrong surgeon. But people do like comebacks, so we shouldn't count him out yet. It would be great if he got in a fight with someone on the red carpet. Maybe if we all pray together, Seacrest will insult Rourke's chihuahua on Oscar night!

• Actress whose cleavage we need to see more of: Salma Hayek
• Actresses whose cleavage normally don't raise the flag but were decently taped up: Elizabeth Banks & Beyonce
• Actresses who we had no idea who they were but would nail in a New York minute: Olivia Wilde & Jennifer Morrison from House
• Actress who satisfies our Michelle Pfeiffer fetish: Amanda Seyfried
• Actor who needs to keep the sunglasses and goatee to hide the damage: Mickey Rourke
• Actress who should wear sunglasses and a fake goatee to hide the damage: Lisa Rinni
• Actor who ditched the fright wig and finally got a decent set of hair grafts: Tom Hanks
• Gayest straight man on the red carpet: Mario Lopez
• Gay man on the red carpet who looked most like an older lesbian: fashion guru Steven Cojacaru
• Skinniest broad in the joint: Wow, too many to pick from, but if we have to, it's a toss-up between Cameron Diaz and Happy Go Lucky's Sally Hawkins. We need some group along the lines of PETA to step in. Maybe a group called "EATS" which stands for "Educating Appetites To Starlets". They ambush anorexic stars with hamburgers and fries.

And now, the Mung Hour Awards:

• The Renee Zellwegger "I'm-Privately-A-Total-Whackjob" Award goes to Anne Hathaway
• "Still Can't Tell 'Em Apart" Award goes to Amy Adams and Isla Fisher
• Angie Dickinson "I-Was-F**ing-Sinatra-20-Minutes-Before-The-Show" Award goes to Drew Barrymore
• "Huckleberry Hound" Award goes to Maggie Gyllenhaal
• Chris Klein "Your-Career-Minutes-Are-Almost-Up" Award, for the person least likely to ever win an award goes to Ashton Kutcher
• "Head! Beer! Now!" Huge Cranium Award is an ironic toss-up between future Kirk, Chris Pine and future Spock, Zachary Quinto
• "It's-Not-1990-Time-For-Normal-Bangs-Haircut" Award goes to Johnny Depp
• We need a new award, something that echoes 1998's "Nick Nolte - Why did the Prancing WOP Take My Oscar" Award. Maybe something like "Baldwin-Shaloub-Laurie AGAIN?" Award. Definite winner of that last night would be Entourage's Kevin Connolly.

Holiday Season 2008: Where Have All the Hobbits Gone?

This has been the most pathetic holiday season at the box office in a while. Remember the days when you asked yourself, "Hmm, should we see Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings? The Aviator or Chicago? A Beautiful Mind or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind?"

Maybe it was the writer's strike pushing a lot of product into 2009 to cover the gaps. Maybe it was the economy. Maybe it was the lack of pre-sold franchises available. Or maybe it was the fact that too many studio weasels were focused on shitty remakes. Regardless, this has been the perfect time to be homebound with a newborn or snowed in, since the best things to watch are all DVD's like Season 4 of Lost and Deadwood. When the best reviewed film of the weekend (Benjamin Button) only merits a 74% RT freshness rating, then even the critics have given up. Niche films like Milk, Doubt and The Wrestler aside, Hollywood simply laid up this season.

The Spirit had none of its namesake at the box office. Today effectively has ended the solo directing career of one Frank Miller, who enjoyed the two weeks humidor rental at the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge cigar room but now has been sent packing back to Los Feliz.

The real B.O. battle this weekend was between tabloid favs Aniston vs. Pitt, with GQ's naked cover girl and the dead dog kicking Brad Pitt's wrinkled old-man-ass by a mile. Who would have thunk? And here some of us were all skeptical for Owen Wilson's post-suicidal return to the big screen in a (SPOILER AHEAD) dog-dies-at-end vehicle. We stand corrected. Hmmm, sequel? Dogs never die in Hollywood. They just produce puppies. How about a cross-over franchise? Marley vs. Beethoven: Dog Eat Dog, coming Christmas 2009.

Adam Sandler's hopes that Bedtime Stories would be his Night at the Museum aren't totally dashed just yet. $28M is respectable, if not low by Sandler standards, but it can play and play in January. Nobody believes it's going to be the hit that Disney hoped it would be, marking a pedestrian year for the Mouse House. Disney has now also dropped out of the Narnia franchise after Prince Caspian tanked. Too bad too since the movie garnered good reviews.

Frankly, someone over in Disney marketing should be summarily fired up top. No way they should have released the Narnia sequel in the summer, particularly sandwiching it in between Iron Man and Indy. The original Narnia was a holiday release, and as we like to quote Crash Davis a lot on this site, "You don't fuck with a winning streak." They'd still be in the C.S. Lewis money-printing business if they had simply released the movie this past weekend instead of last June. Overall, there were NO big budget genre films, and that's a travesty during Christmas. Disney above all the other studios, dropped the ball. Adam Sandler won't save them either.

Disney also should be spanked for not marketing Bolt until right before it was released. Someone drew a chart of internet hits for Madagascar 2 vs. Bolt. The line of online interest for Madagascar showed a steady increase from summer through October, indicating the level of awareness. The line for Bolt started roughly a month out. In typical Disney fashion, they waited until right before it opened to tell people about it. It backfired. They've done the same thing with most everything else, save for the Pirates franchise and the Pixar films.

But this past week has just been BORING at the box office. Not a single movie made $40M or more. Most of that is the due to the films themselves, but there is no doubt that snow storms hurt a lot of these films on some level. Normally, it's just the east that gets hit. This month, it was entire sections of the countries and both coasts.

Will Smith's Seven Pounds (of Shit) only cost around $55M and has already made $40M. It may be a bomb by Will Smith standards, but he got his $20M worth of flesh and got to cry on camera while reading the treatments for I Am Still Legend, Hancock Returns and Badder Boys.

Keanu Reeve's The Day The Pants Should Fill is turning out to be an expensive bomb for Fox. Hell even Keanu is babbling about another Speed movie with Sandra Bullock. Fox's only silver lining this past week is that their current legal victory with Watchmen, but they don't have much else to celebrate until Wolverine five months from now, and that could be iffy. And is it us, or is Fox responsible for most of the mediocre Marvel films? X-Men and X2 aside, they've got turds like X3, Daredevil and the Fantastic Fours to account for.

Again, the holidays should include at least two big genre films. Hell even something bloated like Jackson's King Kong would suffice. Hollywood gave us a gnarled up Brad Pitt, a dead dog rom-com, Scientologists vs. Nazis and a pedestrian Adam Sandler FX film. Tsk. Tsk. Let's hope there is no SAG strike. Holiday 2009 could be even worse, if that's at all possible.

TOP 10 THINGS TO DO ON CHRISTMAS DAY

1) Marvel at how much money the cast of A Christmas Story is NOT making from the TNT marathon.

2) Reminisce about the times you braved snow and ice on Christmas night, so you could nail your college girlfriend.

3) Race to the nearest Santa you can find still working and stammer, "I know you're not THE Santa I screamed at and pee'd on 30 years ago, but please accept this apology anyway!"

4) Drink a toast to all the many talented Jewish folks who wrote your favorite Christmas songs.

5) At brunch, compliment your mother's scrambled eggs and then quickly drop that you've switched political parties and are now in fact gay and dating Neil Patrick Harris.

6) Get ripped, cover yourself completely in mud, climb onto your roof at 2am and, torch in hand scream, "Santa! I'm here! Do it! Do it now!" and see how many of your neighbors get your Predator homage.

7) Wrap a box of Magnum condoms for tonight's family white elephant game.

8) Tell your Latino buddy that you hate the song "Feliz Navidad" but that you hope it won't damage your friendship.

9) Tell your wife that her Christmas present is a two-week trip to Paris and Italy, leaving out the part about you not actually booking it until you both retire for the following morning.

10) Nude Christmas caroling outside of 7-11.

TOP 5 INNOCENT BABES WHO DIED ON BOND'S WATCH

Every conceivable list has been coughed up in honor of the latest Bond installment, Quantum of Solace. Here's ours:

TOP 5 INNOCENT BABES WHO DIED ON BOND'S WATCH
5) Aki, You Only Live Twice. Poison slips down a string meant for Bond's mouth. He farts and rolls over, sending the poison into his lover's mouth instead. I know being a spy is tiring, but how could you be such a heavy sleeper, 007?

4) Andrea Anders, The Man With the Golden Gun. Knowing her boyfriend is hot for a duel, Bond smacks her around for info then nails her WHILE his other lover Goodnight is hiding in the closet. Finally, the poor girl gets a bullet in her chess by Scaramanga for her troubles. Bond, we hope you wrote a nice note of apology to her parents.

3) Solange, Casino Royale. Bond wins her boyfriend's Aston Martin in a poker match, then takes her back to his place for a quick romp before chasing after said boyfriend to Miami where he stabs him, then returns to the Bahamas resort to find the poor girl tangled in a hammock looking like the victim Dreyfuss examines in Jaws.

2) Plenty O' Toole, Diamonds Are Forever. Even her D-Cups couldn't keep poor Plenty afloat when she was found drowned in Bond's girlfriend's swimming pool.

1) Jill and Tilly Masterson, Goldfinger. A two-fer, 007? This really takes the cake. First, you get knocked out with one chop to the neck and wake up with a dead, gold chick in your hotel room. Then if that's not enough, you later meet up with her vengeful sister in Austria where you take her on a terrifying chase in the Aston only to see her neck busted by a hat-wielding Oddjob. Kudos.

Nobody Does it Better - Unless You Ask A Bond Fan

Inundated with blog after blog of Bond-age on the eve of the 22nd 007 outing, The Mung Hour would be remiss if it did not join the pack. TheAge.com has offered up one of the best summaries of the franchise so far this month. We agree for the most part, particularly with the praise of The Spy Who Loved Me as the quintessential Bond movie (usually reserved for Goldfinger). In terms of the perfect blend of action, humor, romance and action shaken and stirred with the cliches that launched Austin Powers, the 1977 Roger Moore hit really has it all. For the young'ins that want to sum up the Roger Moore era (and pretty much all of the seventies, for that matter), rent this film on a date and make sure you ply her with champagne first.

However we feel many blogs like Cinetopia dismiss Brosnan's tenure prematurely. While the films don't hold up as well now that they're all firmly in the rear view mirror of the Daniel Craig era, one must remember that amid worsening reviews, the films did better and better at the box office. While the critics griped about the movies, audiences truly loved Pierce Brosnan in the role. All the more reason in retrospect to afford Brosnan praise for single-handedly carrying that franchise. Imagine what he could have done with a really good script and freedom to explore the character, a request he tirelessly whined for. When you look back at all the casting choices, it was the choice of Pierce that people were actually waiting for. He was the people's choice.


But let's not leave Timothy Dalton at the curb, as he deserves a day-late and dollar-short round of applause for grounding the character back into the firmament, something both Brosnan and Craig should pay him a finder's fee for. While he could have brought a bit more flourish to the role, especially when up against the likes of Martin Riggs and John McClane at the 1980s box office, he rescued the character of James Bond, if not the franchise itself. Basically, Dalton was the Barack Obama of his time, left to clean up years of damage done by Roger Moore.

Lastly, Roger. Roger. Roger. The one Bond saddled with the worst decade of fashion. Just awful. Even at his fittest, the poor guy had polyester pants riding up above his waistline like my grandfather and had collars wider than Christina Ricci's forehead. But before we bag on Moore too badly, above all, he is owed the most respect for keeping the entire franchise afloat. Beyond George Lazenby, Moore proved that someone could follow Connery and keep the series prospering longer than any other actor. Without Moore's tenure, there would be no Dalton, Brosnan or Craig. In all fairness, Moore stayed past his freshness date, so perhaps he should have left his Trilby permanently on Moneypenny's hat rack in Octopussy. We all would have been spared what apparently is universally viewed as the worst of them all, A View To A Kill.

But damn, don't we all love that Duran Duran song?

The Next Big Hollywood Political Comedy

Rarely does The Mung Hour stray into the political arena, since The Onion has drafted a non-compete clause into our contract. However, it must be noted that since Sarah Palin really is the biggest political star of this election, we can't help but notice her potential political fortunes. If Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens does hang onto his Senate seat, then there is the possibility that he could be forced to resign when sentenced for his corruption conviction. That being the case, Gov. Palin could very well appoint herself the seat.

We would wish her well and hope that Hollywood capitalizes on her success with such potential films as:

Mrs. Smith Goes To Washington
Bride of Forrest Gump
Being There 2
Legally Brunette
Primary Lip Colors
Boobworth