Friday, December 30, 2011

The Worst Characters in Fiction: Mike Teevee

This past holiday season offered an opportunity to re-watch a classic of children’s cinema. As part of their Christmas programming (which begins around October and ends sometime in February), ABC Family recently aired Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the timeless tale of a filthy urchin’s adventures in an insane child murderer’s whimsical confectionery emporium. Unlike many comparable kid’s movies from the same era, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory remains mandatory viewing even today. There are a number of reasons for this: the awesome soundtrack, Gene Wilder, the unbridled imagination, dwarfs covered in toxic body paint, etc. One element I’ve always been particularly taken with is the characters. In addition to being generally well-acted (especially for child performers), the characters are fully realized in an economical fashion. Nearly every kid character is introduced via news clips, and these scenes tell us everything we need to know about each character. But even their names give insight into their personalities and attributes, giving us an accurate impression of them before we hear them speak or see them act. Take “Charlie Bucket”, for example. “Charlie”, rather than Charles, is causal and unrefined, indicating that he comes from an underprivileged background. “Bucket” is a tool used by painters, construction workers, and other blue-collar types, further establishing him as financially disadvantaged. As a final example of the name’s powerful symbolic value, a bucket is also an object that Charlie and his kind are accustomed to bathing/defecating in. This unnecessarily dedicated analysis of names can be applied equally well to most of the other kids. Augustus Gloop is a morbidly obese Hun; his name sounds like the noise ice cream makes when it falls off the cone onto the sidewalk. Violet Beauregard is destined to become purple (well, blue actually, but whatever), and Veruca Salt sounds like the name of a greedy, rude bitch. None of this is especially subtle or clever, but it gets its point across. However, there’s one character whose name and personality overstep the generous boundary established by the movie’s surreal reality. I’m talking about Mike Mother Fucking Teevee. 
Ffffffffffffuck Mike Teevee

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The 6 Worst Songs of 2011

On my previous, now-defunct blog, I used to write a monthly series that saw me brutally eviscerating or mildly praising the current chart toppers. Due to the untimely demise of that blog, I missed out on profiling the various and sundry terrible songs of 2011. This post is a roundup of the most atrocious songs of the year, organized in no particular order.

Note 1: The two criteria for this list were 1) the song must be irredeemably bad, and 2) the song had to enjoy the bulk of its popularity during 2011. So, for example, even though #6 was released as a single in 2010, it received most of its airplay in 2011, making it eligible for inclusion (it’s also fucking awful, fulfilling the other requirement for this list).

Note 2: I had originally planned this as a top 11, but since Clear Channel only plays approximately 40 unique songs per year, it was somewhat difficult to come up with a comprehensive list. I ensured that each artist only appeared once, for maximum variety (otherwise, this list could have exclusively been Rihanna songs). If an artist (like Rihanna) released multiple bad songs over the year, I tried to select the song that best captured that artist’s overall awfulness. There are some horrible songs missing from this list because I couldn’t think of anything funny or interesting to say about them. “Party Rock” by LMFAO is a war crime put to music, but I really can’t articulate why I hate it beyond that. 

Without further ado, I present to you, dear reader, the absolute worst songs of 2011: