The Cavillari

My pearl-faced and glorious device that helps me through the long, dark, lonely nights of a reality living in a basement with my two "roommates" (as Grandma's Boy taught me to refer to them) upstairs got to inject itself with a little awesome last week. His name is Saint's Row and he's an aquarius, enjoys long walks with the boys in matching token primary colors, car theft, drug trafficking, and ho-stealing. The homosexual overtones I ascribe to my xbox 360 aside, this is a good game.

Being a literary loser (not to be confused with a literal loser, who may, for instance, live in his parents' basement because his job doesn't pay him enough to move out, which I also am), my focus on 90% of the games I enjoy is the storyline. A lot of the time this means that I am, obviously, left very disappointed by the experience. But every so often, that is not the case. For every "Redneck Rampage" I get a Half-Life, for every Quake2 there is Halo, and so on into eternity. I think our storyline engrossing experience taps out at the original Knights of the Old Republic. You won't fine a better written game than that.

So armed with a desire for razorsharp wit, three dimensional characters, and maybe a helping of decent gameplay to back it up, I dove into Saint's Row. What I got was a little bit of all of the above. It has some fun and engaging characters with some top-notch voiceover work (voiceover luminaries like the dude who was Goliath in Gargoyles, Clancy Brown, the big black guy from The Green Mile, Mila Kunis, Daniel Dae Kim, and so on), a storyline that is about as compelling as a tier 2 summer movie (Crank, or anything with Jet Li in it, for instance), and gameplay pilfered straight from the ultra popular Grand Theft Auto franchise. And, if you're keeping track, a videogame with a storyline as good as Crank basically puts it near Shakespeare compared to the usual stuff.

So the game is good. Not amazing. It's good. It suffers from a clearly limited development cycle, but has enough that we were satisfied when we finished it. There are a few hilarious, laugh-out-loud moments, and the magnitude of what you can tell your little gangbanger (I made my guy look like Eminem because I'm a fag) to go do. My favorite scandal was the Car Insurance scam, whereby you tell your gangbanger to run out into the street and get slammed into by speeding automobiles. The more painful the impact, the more crap you bounce off of, the more bones you shatter? The more money you can claim in your insurance scandal and the more that goes in your pocket to buy stuff like Uzis, hand grenades, hookers, and tricked out rice rockets.

A lot of people are on the fence about this game because it is a clear GTA clone. I say this to them: who the fuck cares? It's as good as those games are, it's the only one available for the 360, and those games are so fun why is a little bit more of it a bad thing? Would you not buy another Japanese RPG because they are clear ripoff's of Final Fantasy? No? So shut the hell up and go grab a Socialite (Saint's Row's version of a Mercedes) from some grandmother, take it to the mechanic, add a giant racing spoiler, gold rims, an iridescent purple paint job, and run over some FBI Agents. With their blood still splattered on your windshield, swerve across the street to the jewlery store and buy a platinum antichrist medallion for $2,000, whip out your Glock 9 on the cashier, and rob the store of the money you just gave them for the beautiful piece of neckware. This isn't rocket science, people.

And if you were still on the fence about your chance to be a real live Kevin Federline? Remember that you can buy a pimp coat. A fully neon pink pimp coat. And a hat. You can bring your green hat, Snoop. We're going streaking.

Huh?

Posted by Derek H. at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

A comedian has probably done something like this already, somewhere, but when the brightest candles in comedy are Dane Cook and Larry the Cable Guy, maybe not. I mean, have you ever honestly watched them do standup? I miss Eddie Murphy.

Anyway, here's the really bad bit that is more a subversive attempt to illuminate a troubling aspect of our society. See if you can read between the lines, gentle readers.

"So I got arrested the other day. I got pulled over by a cop for going 15 over the speed limit on the highway but I was just keeping pace with the flow of traffic. For some reason that smelly piece of shit cop singled me out of the five hundred cars that whizzed by him in the last five minutes. So, when he asked for my license and registration, I said exactly that. I said, 'You smelly piece of shit, what did I do to get singled out?'"

"Five seconds later, I was handcuffed and in the back of his car. Now, what do you do when you're in the process of being arrested? You always try and get out of it. People do whatever they can to avoid a ticket. So I'm sitting there thinking about what an idiot I am, in the back of this cop car, I'm thinking about how my diarrhea of the mouth has gotten me into it again. And then, wham! It hits me. Diarrhea. So I lean forward and start talking to the cop. I say this...”

"You know what is messed up about human beings? We are so germaphobic that we're now buying 'hand sanitizer' that we can carry around in our pockets. We squeeze this magic little goo onto our hands, rub a little bit, and then we are supposedly cured of all the deadly microscopic substances floating on our hands. Somewhere, Johnson and Johnson (that is his real name, right?) is laughing his way to the grave."

"But what is even more interesting about all of this is that, we as a society, being so concerned that we pay $6 for these alleged hand sanitizers, still do exactly this every time they go to the bathroom. We take our crap, then we reach over and we start wiping our ass with toilet paper. We then stand up, spend two minutes tucking our shirt back in, and walk over to the sink to wash our hands. This is the order of events for just about everyone on the planet, right?”

“I took a crap, I wiped that misery from myself with my hand and some toilet paper, and then I went to the sink and started tucking my shirt in with that same hand. I then washed my hands. So what does that mean, officer? That means that every single one of us, except those few friends south of the border who might not ever wipe, is walking around with the same microscopic fecal matter on our shirts, our pants, all of it. It's all over us."

"So the next time I call you a smelly piece of shit after you pull me over on the highway? It isn't personal. You really are."

Posted by Derek H. at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

So thus concludes what has become the predominant source of content on this blog: season three of Entourage. I cannot say that I’m not a little sad with its passing. I’ll be forced to fill my Sunday nights playing with myself while looking at the cover of the latest issue of Maxim. I just hope nobody is recording me.

The pseudo-finale itself was decent, but not outstanding. It had a few strong comedic moments but, like a lot of the things this season, the attempts at a thicker and more poignant dramatic chord didn’t work as well. I’m not sure if it is just a case of last year having been so strong in this department, or if it just isn’t as tightly written this year, but I didn’t find Ari’s plight to save Vince as his client all that perilous. Lloyd’s big reoccurring pick-me-up speech was flat, whereas last year it was juiced with pathos, and suddenly Hollywood Eric’s final line was delivered with all the conviction of a Terrell Owens apology.

About the best element of “Sorry, Ari” had to be the sudden cameo by pretend superagent Josh Weinstein. Those two minutes were some of the best of season three, culminating in the shared look of Eric and Vince as yet another incredibly lame powerpoint presentation flashed. Unfortunately, because the show’s writers wanted Vince to fire Ari, they made the character suddenly oblivious to the fact that claiming your star will be bigger than both Microsoft and McDonalds is probably a bad idea. I don’t for a second believe, as he’s been portrayed previously, Ari would be this retarded. And that’s the crux of the problem. The “real” Ari Gold would have known that Vince had been sitting through those ridiculous agent meetings all day, started a powerpoint, and inserted a shot of Jessica Biel getting hammered by some billionaire’s son over the railing at Atlantis in the Bahamas (replace Jessica Biel with any other twenty-something celebrity) before going on a three minute monologue about how Vince is the sunshine of his eye.

Now, instead, for narrative convenience we’ll have a half a season where Ari tries to woo Vince back into the fold and everyone realizes that they need one another because their ties of friendship are stronger than barf, barf, barf. It’s very telegraphed. They need to find a way to surprise me, like they did when I thought Vince was going to lose Aquaman to Leonardo DiCaprio.

After the first episode, Aquamom, aired this season I said the following: “If you go back and watch the season 2 premiere or even the season 1 premiere, neither of them were horrendously funny but they setup the themes of the season. Last year, Aquaman was floated as Vinny's only option for a lagging career, E's love life, Turtle's underappreciated sense of worth, and Johnny's continued sagging career. By the end of the season, we'd seen these threads followed through: Vince did Aquaman and his career is back in the upswing, E has a new rich and very cool girlfriend while establishing that he can manage in Hollywood, Turtle had branched into the recording industry, and only Drama stayed where he started due to his own neurosis.”

So what was the theme for season three? Season two was all about the climb to the top, and season three was the battle to stay there, and ended with the characters in the exact opposite condition they had been the previous season. Turtle lost Saigon, his client, and now again seems to have no particular goal in life beyond being Vince’s driver. Vince has no job, no movie, and no prospects on the horizon instead of walking into the biggest movie in cinema history. Eric’s mismanaged his only client to the point he might be out a career by advocating he fire his incredibly dedicated superagent and badmouth a studio before the Hollywood Foreign Press. And, where last season Drama was the one character who didn’t progress towards potential success, this year he’s also the only character who ends the season on a high note. He’s turned in a fantastic performance in a potentially huge television pilot.

Posted by Derek H. at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

"Okay, Eric, but only because you have very soft eyes," and with that, I am reminded why I should be a lifelong fan of Martin Landau. There aren't very many people alive who can play an elderly Jewish man who you have to feel compassion for as well as him. Witness his role as the Judge in Rounders and tell me you don't wish he was your father. That's why the about face, "You fucked me I'll fuck you" turn at the end of this episode worked so well. You actually feel more bad for Bob than you do for Ari.

That, unfortunately, may be the limit of what I liked about this new direction Entourage is taking into the pseudo-season finale (it isn't the real finale, they just broke one season into two for $ because The Sopranos got bumped back until Marchish). Unlike last season, we're actually in the middle point, near the end of Act II and charging towards Act III, so I anticipate a lot of people will feel a little let down after next week's "finale." That all aside, the new direction of the foursome + Ari's dynamic is questionable. I'm not totally buying it.

Ari Gold sticks with Vince through thick and thin, and Vince sticks with Ari through thick and thin. Ari is a superagent but is strangely devoted to making Vince into the biggest movie star on the planet. So he makes one questionabley bad decision and suddenly we're supposed to buy that they actually want to fire Ari? Sure, we bought it in the beginning of season two when Vince didn't want to take the fat studio paycheck and Ari threatened him with finding a new agent, but now the group has been through so much I'm having a harder time stomaching it.

Do I think they will actually fire Ari? Yes. Do I think it will remain that way? No. Do I think Malcolm McDowell will somehow be involved? Yes. Am I excited for that? A little bit. But I'm having to suspend my disbelief if it actually happens, and I really doubt it'll all be wrapped up in 24 minutes next week. Even to a suitable cliffhangar.

Speaking more about What About Bob, I'm sure everyone loved the Johnny Drama onset disaster #10. It is debatable which is more embarassing, getting caught on tape slapping the salami or popping a huge erection while scening with Brooke Shields. Luckily for Johnny, this time, Ed Burns laughed it off and used it to wrestle a performance where his previous erectile error cost him his gig in the Movie of the Week.

It was also nice to see a little bit of just Vince and Turtle. I'm not sure we've ever actually seen that happen, just the two of them interacting together. There was some surprisingly good chemistry. In a whining, wounded, pet dog to master kind of way, anyway. Perhaps that is why Doug Ellin made sure to show us Turtle's dog chasing the boys as they stormed out of their five million dollar estate to tackle the day?

There's been some facetious talk about Marky Mark actually wanting to produce a real Aquaman movie with some crazy life imitating art element by having Vinny Chase as the lead, but I can't help but think I would much rather see I Wanna Be Sedated become a real, legitimate, film. It's actually a brilliant concept and a role I could see Adrian Grenier playing. He, at least, looks the part and has the goofy, dumpy, we're not sure if there is anything behind that boyish smile, look going for him.

And can somebody explain to me "DJ AM's" popularity? How did this rich, white, Jewish guy become the DJ-of-the-stars, land a gig on E!, and a cameo on Entourage? Would I ever want some upper-upper-class white guy to "spin" his fancy tunes at my wedding? I don't get this guy. He fascinates me. I wonder if he's secretly Hollywood's A-list drug dealer. There's gotta be more to it. I can't see Doctor Dre calling up his boy Goldstein to come slice a few beats. This isn't Hustle and Flow. White dudes do not know how to spin. And if DJ AM actually does? How did he learn? What's going on?

So one episode left before we go on hiatus for 6 months or so (unless HBO decides to again change the scheduling). Overall, season three has brought more of the same, but didn't quite have the edge that season two felt. At this point last year, Ari had just had his Jerry Maguire-esque expulsion from his agency and was spiraling into decay. We didn't know what would happen to him and we had the fantastic sequence from floor eviction, to garage punching, to drunk in the driveway. It was probably the finest episode of television that year.

This year, we spend 20 minutes watching Turtle try and get a pair of shoes.

Posted by Derek H. at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Johnny Drama hurt his arm in his battle royale with Seth Green, and I missed last night's episode while I was in the hospital with him. Review will be posted sometime tonight or tomorrow.

Hail to to my TiVo masters.

Posted by Derek H. at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

I fell pray to my own hype this week. Vegas Baby, Vegas! had all the strappings to be a legendary episode. I knew about the boys taking a trip to Vegas since before season 3 aired, thanks to the vast majority of their press junkets being held while they were filming at the lovely Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

I knew about Seth Green's impending second cameo and the fact that he was rolling four deep with his own entourage. I knew that, for some reason, they would get into a fight and that Kevin Dillon would -- in the course of things -- break his arm (this being in reality, not Kevin-as-Drama breaking his arm).

There really wasn't very much that I didn't know about the foursome's trip to the happiest place on earth. And, knowing what I knew, I couldn't think of anything that could be potentially better than this episode. In my mind I had flashes of Ocean's 11 meeting Swingers and all shaken up with a dash of Chevy Chase's Vegas Family Vacation (huh?). You get the idea. I was fully aroused for way too long. I gave myself Entourage Blue Balls.

So there is no way I can realistically evaluate this episode's merits or lack there of. I had such high expectations. I had impossible hopes. I will say that I enjoyed the episode, but obviously, it didn't quite live up to the billing in my mind. How could it? Would they have ever been able to recover if Vince was banging four strippers in the back of a Taxi Cab while being recorded for Taxi Cab Confessions XXVII? Or if Johnny Drama and Turtle got in a fight with a gay transvestite at the Bunny Ranch when he tried to steal their chosen girl? It just wasn't possible.

What was funny about this episode, which for being in the land of love was surprisingly serious, were Ari Gold's gambling hysterics. Mostly because he acted exactly how I like to act when, nine red bull and vodka's deep, I'm swearing at the Thailandian black jack dealer after she slams me with 16 after 16. How on a cruise, where the only option a casino has to deal with a belligerent gambler is to leave them at a communist depot off the cost of Cuba, I passed the threshold of being a loud and obnoxious guy at the blackjack table and straight into an endearing and loud character that people wanted to be around. That's funny, when people give up and just join you.

That digression aside (playing $5 blackjack and swearing isn't quite the same as $300,000 a hand), Drama's head of steam is probably going to come back to haunt him. His temper, once again, was in full effect. They're really playing up that aspect of the character in recent episodes. While I always preferred him a neurotic mess, now it seems easier to just make him a hot-head who loses his cool over the weirdest things. Like his ex-NFL Wideout massage therapist admitting that the adoration bestowed upon him has tempted him to offer Drama some gay sex. What's wrong with that? Give him the decline, Johnny, and then use him to land some of those strippers.

It was nice to see Laissez-faire Vincent Chase return to the table. You know who I mean. The shrugging, give-a-shit about his image, Vince from season one and two. Rather than championing independent values and the moral highroad, Vince just smiles, waves, and lets his unending pool of charm and luck carry him through the day. The fact that he stood there with Ari, laughing as his boys took down Seth Green (I didn't catch if he was getting beat down with his Entourage too), was great.

Still, I can't help but feel like Doug Ellin should have checked out a few of Bill Simmons -- The Sport's Guy -- columns about his trips to Vegas with three of his best friends. And Simmons isn't even The Biggest Movie Star on the Planet and him and his boys had a more romantic, hilarious, few trips down to the Strip than Vince and E. But hey, maybe they'll save all that for season four, when a washed up Vince moves to Vegas to headline a Magic Show with Penn and Teller.

Posted by Derek H. at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

"VICTORY!"

The sly return of Johnny Drama's trademark catchphrase was perfectly placed, not over the top at all, and completely believable. The rest of this episode could have consisted of Dom banging Turtle behind the yellow Hummer while Vince talked to E about mortgage payments and I would still have liked this episode.

What was good about this episode were all the callbacks to season two. There was the return of indie directory Billy Walsh, full of his usual artiste neurosis and about fifteen different "suit"-bombs lobbed at Eric. What was even better was the reemergence of the Drama Audition Fever, wherein the dude goes completely batshit insane on the day of any major audition. I love that. They could make a show about his meltdowns that aired 24-hours a day and I'd watch it. The fact that Turtle is always the one there with him to witness the explosions is even better. The traffic cop pointing his 'laser' guns at Drama and firing was great.

What wasn't so great was the pacing of everything else. Where last week was a huge injection of character, this week was a huge injection of plot. The pacing is off a little bit; they aren't doing as good of a job this season in weaving it all together. Most people seem to think that Vince is totally trashing his chances of becoming the Biggest Movie Star on the Planet by enraging yet another studio in his public PR debacle, but I think this was a precalculated move by Vince and Eric.

Remember something here, Eric is the smart one who makes the good decisions. He was involved in this decision, unlike Vince's diva denial of breakfast with the Aquaman studio. Could it be possible that they're doing this deliberately now? That they are building the aura of Vincent Chase as this super-principled anti-authority pop culture figure who says "Fuck you" to the studios and just wants to make kickass movies? If, say, Matt Damon did this sort of thing in real life wouldn't you instantly become a fan? Wouldn't you want to see the movies he was in?

Vince could be helping his career on two-sides by doing this. He is building gigantic street cred with the American population by not being a corporate stooge. He's also making it clear to anyone who wants to work with him that he isn't going to compromise his ethics and values of what good cinema is for an easy paycheck. That'll strike a cord with the directors, the real power of Hollywood, at the expense of all the studio executives. So he'll become a figure in popular culture who is incredibly popular for his rebel with a cause ethics (forcing the studios to buckle and put this guy in films anyway) and he'll have the respect of the creative Hollywood community.

Or it could all explode in his face. But I think that is the goal, anyway. I think that is Eric trying to play spin doctor. If you're already Terrell Owens, why not take a shot? And Terrell Owens, my friends, is still getting paid because his talent outweighs his insanity. So might Vincent Chase.

The much anticipated trip to Vegas is next week. Seth Green returns in a second cameo and looks like his entourage is prepared to square off against our foursome. The new dynamic of Ari's second wife nagging him looks delicious, and I'll sit patiently waiting to see how Drama will self-destruct his big chance on Ed Burns pilot. You know it will happen, just like his erectile poking of Brooke Shields in the movie of the week last year came out of left field and floored you.

"He's hard," she said.

"Fuck anger management!" he said.

Posted by Derek H. at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post