Welcome back! The Top 10 TV Audition Failures continues!

If you’re tuning in late… click at the end of this sentence, right before it says nude boners, to go back and read Part One nude boners.

5. Mikey!
X-Factor
In the movie Better Off Dead, John Cusack was tormented by an Asian drag racer who learned to talk by watching Howard Cossell. Life imitates art, because twenty years later, it really happened. Enter: Mikey. He strides into the audition room announcing, “Hi! My fellow trembuelders!”

Mikey sounds like a game show host having a stroke, who just happens to be doing it near a little Asian man moving his lips. “Trembuelder!” The judges have no idea what they’ve been called. If white people got offended by racists making fun of their accents, Mikey’s top hobby would be getting his ass kicked. “Trem!”

It’s a linguistic fact that due to the power of Eastern magic and Oriental gods, Mikey’s original language only ever required three sounds. This makes many of our words complicated if not impossible for him to form, especially during a Howard Cossell impersonation. He tries again. “Drembuelder!” Still nothing. Then a light bulb goes off: “Drem Construction Worker!”

After he and the three judges finally know that they share the same occupation –Dream Construction Worker– he starts crooning. In his own words, it’s a Frank Cinetra song that he redecorated himself. The whole thing feels like a scene in a comedy about an alien that has to pretend to be Human at a karaoke bar. There’s all this comical tension that he’ll be found out, and Steve Guttenburg can’t help because he’s still in the body of a dog.
Youtube - Watch it, fellow Drem Construction Worker

4. Michael Machell
Britain’s Got Talent
Michael Machell has the personality of pudding in a coma and can’t play piano, but that won’t stop him from achieving his life’s dream: getting the Star Wars theme song to contain fewer trumpet sounds. The thing just doesn’t sound like outer space to him, and he’s tired of living in a world that allows it.

His solution: going on stage and hitting the bossanova beat button on a 1983 keyboard. After a long pre-show of saying whoops and hitting different trumpet sounds, he haltingly pecks out the Star Wars theme while the crowd laughs. You can see that he’s reading from a book called HOW TO PLAY KEYBOARDS, but what we can’t see is that the second part of the title is WHEN YOUR HANDS ARE FLIPPERS. To make things even more confusing, it kind of works! It’s awesome AND makes you feel in space. You would never, ever mistake it for an Earth song.

On most talent shows, that would be the end of it. The ridiculous contestant would be led off camera to the pulping chamber where they could be rendered into chum for the show’s livestock. However, the thing that makes Britain’s Got Talent so good is that two of the judges, Amanda and Piers, will put lunatic contestants through just to piss Simon Cowell off. So Michael Machell’s crazy ass made it to the semi-finals!

In the semi-finals, Michael knew he had to take it to the next level. So he plays the Star Wars song, worse, while descending from the ceiling in a tiny flying saucer. You may feel in space so much that you’ll explosively decompress. You couldn’t mix failure and outer space any better if you invented Ewoks.

Youtube - Meet Michael!
Youtube - Michael in the Semi-Finals

3. Blue Velvet
America’s Got Talent
When we first meet Blue Velvet, they’re backstage having a giggly adrenaline dump. At first glance, it’s a trio made up of a man and two women, but all of them are shaped like potatos and it’s gay enough that no one’s gown or suit should be trusted as a gender indicator. So proceed at your own risk, drunk guys!

They take the stage and introduce themselves, “Hello, everyone! We are Blue Velvet!” I’m not sure if they are a singing act or a weaponized sonic paint remover, but each of them takes turns screeching a part of “Blue Velvet! Blue Velvet! Blue VELVEEEEEEEETT!” The judges, with comic timing more precise than Van Damme punching a Swiss watch maker in the dick, answer back with a rejection of “Ding! Ding! ACCCKKKKKK!!!” It’s like fifty years of fucking up were compressed into ten seconds of nuclear failure. Failure so massive that astronauts could do Tang spit takes as they watched it from space.

The band’s TV career, in its entirety, was screaming its name three times and opening up a wormhole of rejection. To put that into perspective, Failokalypse, the demon who feeds on mistakes, only managed to shout, “NOOO! TOO! MUCH!” before bursting into banana peels. Blue Velvet is the reason America’s Got Talent added a trap door and seven rifle towers to the set. But get this: to make matters worse, Blue Velvet even taints their own perfectly hilarious performance by debunking it on their myspace page.

They link to a video of the “real” performance before the America’s Got Talent editors made their masterpiece, and it turns out the judges actually let these chicken monsters squawk for about a minute before buzzing them. God damn it, that’s like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real and then getting molested by him. Thanks for ruining it, Blue Velvet! You can’t even suck right!

Youtube - The Original, and Best Version

2. Martik Manoukian
American Idol
Sometimes when a woman eats too many thermometers during pregnancy, Mother Nature decides to try a few new things out. Martik “X-Centric” Manoukian is one of them.

If you ask the right person, X-Centric is the most exciting half-panther performer the world has ever seen. He is also very fiery. So much so that he has “fire equaling three men.” I’m not sure, but I think “fire” is Armenian for “overdose of mood regulators.”

For his audition, X-Centric goes through a very typical werepanther preparation process. Keep in mind all of this is done before he says a word or begins singing.

1. He throws his Trapper Keeper. Because singing while you’re holding a Trapper Keeper would just be stupid.

2. He turns his back to the judges and spreads his legs. The average Armenian Werepanther has hearing far greater than ours, so singing the wrong direction is considered polite.

3. Oops, he actually meant to stand the other way, so let him turn around and then spread his legs again.

4. X-Centric removes his sunglasses and flings them! Nearby, an American Idol production assistant is found dead, a smear of paste in the center of a sunglasses-shaped impact crater. They’d ask for a moment of silence, but through a lucky turn of events, most of X-Centric’s performance is already a moment of silence.

5. X-Centric begins the twenty minute process of removing his vest and shirt. During this part of the performance, ladies who like boy-shaped playdough will want to set their X-Centric brand vibrators to FULL.

6. He crawls towards the judges making cat sounds. It’s exactly how I imagine my parents doing foreplay when I’m trying to dislodge a scream from my throat.

7. He stands and lumbers back to his starting position. I think he forgot something. Armenian Werepanthers are often confused when performing near multiple food sources.

8. Oh, I see, it looks like he forgot to dance first. A real treat, he performs a traditional Armenian Werepanther dance of three seconds of full body wiggle, meerkat, meerkat, and super spin. During the super spin, the fake microphone he had in his back pocket flies out, almost certainly because he meant it to. NOW, he struts up the judges to shirtlessly whisper “X-Centric!” Lady viewers, remove your X-Centric brand vibrators and, as quickly as possible, sit in your bucket of X-Centric brand cooling gel before serious injury occurs.

9. Singing! When X-Centric finally sings his original X-Centric song, it’s sort of a rap battle between a baby and its multiple personalities. If the baby had asthma and sang like a little bitch. Ultimate face!!

Youtube - Rowr!

and the number one…

1. Marc Griffin
American Inventor
Everything good has already been invented. You can buy hot dogs with cheese in the center, dolls with vaginas, and hundreds of combinations of all four. So on the show American Inventor, most people come in with a pile of junk and a story about how patent lawyers took all their money and left them with only a prototype for Mayonnaise Mittens, the gloves that make sandwiches safe.

Marc Griffin stood above them all. He sold everything he owned to make BulletBall. BulletBall combines the fun of air hockey with the misplacement of all your air hockey equipment. In it, two players bat a ball across a coffee table and the winner is the one who does the best! Sometimes the best ideas are simple ones. Sometimes.

He invented the game 26 years ago with his ex-wife, a lot of wine, and a cat toy. Coincidentally, those were the exact three things used to invent the first tampon. Wait, I think it wasn’t an ex-wife until right after the invention process.

Marc is certain that BulletBall will be an Olympic sport. Not only because it’s high caliber and for the 21st century, but because it’s age and gender neutral. No listen– no matter who or what you are, you’re as good at BulletBall as anyone who will ever live. If you want proof, I found these pictures of Marc on his website playing BulletBall as hard as he can against disinterested people in wheelchairs. “Who’s the BULLETBALL MASTER!!??”

Where is he now? Marc is still selling and rapping about BulletBall and BulletBall extreme tables. He’s even dropped the price for a limited time from $399.99 to only $299.99. Sorry, poor people, but Marc was a little busy inventing sports to learn how supply and demand work. If you want to bat a cat toy around, you’ll have to do it on a knockoff BulletBall table, also sometimes known as any table.
Youtube - BulletBall, BulletBall, that’s a BulletBall!

Recently I noticed that some monitoring software I have installed was blocking a government IP address, which is funny because, checking the logs, I saw that no government IP had ever attempted an unprompted connection with my computer before oh, say, July 3rd at about 8:30 EST. I looked up some information on this address and found several forum threads regarding it, with many speculating that it was the FBI watchlist. This, coupled with my intense drug-induced paranoia and something I call ‘recreational schizophrenia’ led to an interesting few nights of hysteria that may or may not have resulted in me attacking passerby with a baseball bat while shouting the freedom of information act - literally just shouting the words “the freedom of information act” while ambushing my neighbors from the trees (because the trees are technically in the sky, and no man can own the sky!)

But regardless of what brought the authorities to my doorstep, I would like to take a moment to assure them that we here at Cracked do not pose any danger to the United States Government but are, at worst, merely a danger to ourselves and others. And, in order to further prove our sincerity, all images in this post have been replaced by hot chicks in American flag bikinis with quotes so patriotic that terrorists would vomit bald eagles if they even read them. God bless the USA.

America is a tune.  It must be sung together.  ~Gerald Stanley Lee

First off, the amount of anti-government propaganda produced by Cracked is really rather small; for every scathing tirade we publish regarding the injustices inflicted upon the common man by a corrupt empire, there are precisely eighteen thousand essays about why we, as grown men, still care deeply about action figures. In terms of sheer volume, the amount of treacherous content that the Cracked engine belches out from its furnace of rapier-witted man-boys is entirely negligible. Even if our readers were stirred to action by our sterling words of shining brilliance, please keep in mind that Cracked updates daily, and that the next day’s call to action will likely come in the form of a Steven Seagal Ponytail Retrospective.

A man’s country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.  ~George William Curtis

As Cracked authors, we primarily write for a demographic of twenty-something middle-class white males - notoriously the most content and apathetic demographic imaginable, falling just short of post-orgasmic Pillsbury Doughboy on the “likelihood of revolutionary action” scale. I could post absolute, irrefutable proof that every single government conspiracy from the JFK assassination to the fake moon landing was true and, unless this proof was well under 1500 words and all on one page, not one single person would actually read the entire thing. The atrocities and injustices that, in other gathering places, would single handedly spark a revolution will, within these relatively sticky halls, be simply considered ‘tl’ and thusly ‘dr.’

There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream.  They are right.  It is the American dream.  ~Archibald MacLeish

Let’s face it, United States Government: The internet wants to take you down. The only thing more popular than anti-American news stories on the internet is titties - and titties are more popular than everything on anything, so that doesn’t really count. Even if you have an elite anti-comedy SWAT team out there devoted solely to eliminating the ever-increasing menace of Wikipedia-quoting fancy-boys - we’re nowhere near as bad as those guys at Funny or Die. Seriously, take my word for it, every other video on that site is a terrorist how-to film. Take a look at what they posted just yesterday: A video titled “Death to the Corrupt American Empire (Starring Will Ferrell!)” That link doesn’t seem to work right now (they must have pulled it as soon as they noticed you were looking,) but lucky for you I took a screencap.

Go get ‘em, boys.

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.  ~Elmer Davis

We here at Cracked are, first and foremost, Comedy Writers - not ‘Fact Checkers’ or ‘Researchers’ or ‘Science Understanders’ - we try to write humorously about interesting things and, in the process, often end up referencing disputed facts, unreliable sources, or simply making some shit up at the last minute because we spent our research time drinking Russian cologne when the guy at the liquor store refused to sell to us just because we frequently come in wearing nothing but a beer hat and a smile (and sometimes not even the smile.)

In a nutshell: Our credibility is shot.

For example, take this article I wrote about comic books. It is simply riddled with inaccuracy, disinformation, and mean-spirited lies. Clearly, I wrote this article with an anti-comic book agenda that was barely concealed beneath a thin veneer of incompetency. And that was something as trivial as comics! Imagine our validity as a political source! We could post live streaming video of Obama selling children to starving alien soul-rapists, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the ghost of George Washington himself and we would still be called a Photoshop. I’m not sure exactly why people call us that, but I assume it means something akin to ‘liar.’ So don’t worry about us! We have all the believability of The Boy Who Cried Wolf if, instead of a boy, he was a functionally retarded blind man and, instead of a wolf, he was crying Loch Ness Sasquatch Elvis.

“I was brought up on the street / I’m facing up to freedom / And chasing down my dream / I was made in America.” -Jon Bon Jovi

Seriously, it was DOB. Did you guys not see this? Look at it! He’s a traitor! We’re not even a real website! It was all a sting! An elaborate ruse to sniff out the traitor in our midst! McCarthy forever, betrayal never! Better dead than red! These colors don’t run! Never forget! Buy American!

Uh…Thunder Road!

So apparently wealthy Russians are paying up to $5,000 a pop to go on pirate hunting vacations. On board yachts manned by heavily armed mercenaries, they cruise around the coast of Africa trying to lure Somalian pirates into attacking them. Should any pirates be foolhardy enough to do so, the Russians then fire a flurry of bullets and explosives at them, who often react to this surprising development by dying. If this sounds to you like wealthy assholes murdering people under the thinnest possible pretense of “self defense,” congratulations on not being a monster. Your parents clearly didn’t fuck up that bad.

Killing people for sport used to be one of our cultures most hallowed touchpoints. From short stories to novels to about 30 different episodes of Star Trek, the premise has been used in dozens of different forms. Which is great, when it’s fiction. Normal healthy people like comedy writers have long learned to enjoy fiction as a release when we have those “I wonder what killing some dudes with a crossbow feels like” moments. So why haven’t the Russians?

It occurred to me that Russians haven’t had nearly the same exposure to Western pop culture that I have, me having been born in a video store and raised by a tape of recorded Knight Rider episodes. So I decided that to help Cracked’s wealthy Russian readership, I’d enumerate the best fictional examples of people being hunted for sport that civilization ever produced on the VHS format. Non-wealthy-Russian readers will derive no pleasure from this at all.

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Death Race 2000
People hunted for sport: Pedestrians
The low down:
America is a dystopic wasteland in the quaintly old-fashioned futuristic year of 2000. A fascist government led by Mister President (that is his name), keeps the people entertained by staging bloody gladiatorial style contests. The most notable of these contests is the Transcontinental Road Race, where competitors get bonus points for running down innocent pedestrians while driving themed automobiles.

Why it’s awesome:
Well, it’s got men in costumes running down people in themed automobiles. Do I have to continue? All right. Less awesome, but interesting is the presence of Sylvester Stallone, during that part of his career after he stopped doing porn, but before he did Rocky. Also notable is the part of Frankenstein as played by David Carradine, whose recent probable-penis-related death makes enjoying this tale of butchery somewhat more bittersweet.

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The Running Man
People hunted for sport: Criminals
The low down:
Another one set in a dystopic future, The Running Man focuses on a popular game show where contestants are expected to run and die. Convicted of a crime he didn’t boo-fucking-hoo, Arnold Schwarzenegger is forced to compete in this horrible game, and as you can imagine, is gruesomely killed. Ha, no seriously, it’s Arnold–he tears the place apart and ruins everyone’s fucking day. When you throw a 230-pound Austrian mutant in your death arena, try not to look surprised when he rips your neck out through your ass and says some glib neck related pun to the camera.

Why it’s awesome:
This movie is from back in the day, and back in the day, Arnold was rad, full stop. But aside from Arnie, this movie also featured “stalkers”–hunters who who chase the contestants on the show, and kill them with various themed weapons. Subzero, Buzzkill and Fireball were all lunatics with themes made guessable by the show’s stalker naming conventions. But the true star of the show was Dynamo, a huge tub of hilarity who cruises around the game zone in an armored golf cart, wearing hockey pads with blinking LEDs stuck to them. He’s eventually defeated when he falls over and is unable to right himself. It’s so pathetic that Arnold refuses to kill him. That’s pretty terrible–in 80s movies Arnold rarely walked away from an alive bad guy–he once punched a camel to death for bumping in to him slightly.

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Hard Target
People hunted for sport: Homeless people
The low down:
Jean Claude Van Damme is a homeless man who, like all homeless men, has a body of banded steel and a magnificent mane of hair. After agreeing to help a female who is probably a reporter, he begins investigating a group of wealthy businessmen who hunt homeless people for sport.

Why it’s awesome:
Those glorious locks of hair for one. This was also Van Damme at his peak, but before he started playing two characters in the same movie–which math tells us should be twice as good, but somehow isn’t. Thanks math. This movie also features Wilford Brimley killing guys with a hunting bow, which makes the film at least twice as badass as Cocoon, Brimley’s previous most badass film.

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Gymkata
People hunted for sport: Gymnasts
The low down:
An Olympic gymnast is asked by the American government to participate in a deadly competition in the possibly fictional country of Parmistan. The competition, creatively called “The Game,” is a sort of endurance race that features obstacles like ninjas and pitchforks. Our hero uses his twin skills of gymnastics and karate to win the game and kill some asshole who’d been hassling him.

Why it’s awesome:
Here’s a fight scene set in the Pommel Horse Square of a Parmistanian village:

This will be familiar to most foreign readers, but I should mention for any unworldly American readers that Pommel Horse Squares are a common gathering place in many rural European communities, and you should be embarrassed you’d never heard about it until now. Your education system is a joke.

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The Man with the Golden Gun
People hunted for sport: British Secret Agents
The low down:
Francisco Scaramanga is an assassin with an extra nipple and a taste for bloodsport. At multiple times during the film he hunts people on the grounds of his island in the South China Sea with the help of his pet midget.

Why it’s awesome:
The fact that killing people for sport was the least ridiculous part of that description should tell you how incredible Bond movies of the Roger Moore vintage were. Not bloodsport related, but still awesome: The Man with the Golden Gun has maybe the most impressive car stunt ever, the infamous spiral ramp jump. While dinking around on the Internet I found out that during the 70s, they used to do this shit in front of paying audiences, I guess while everyone was waiting for YouTube to be invented.

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Predator
People hunted for sport: Wise talking soldiers
The low down:
An alien hunter lands on Earth and begins hunting the Earth’s most powerful warriors, including Conan the Barbarian and Apollo Creed.

Why it’s awesome:
Because it’s fucking Predator, that’s why. Broken down into its discrete elements, it’s got gunplay, a ragtag group of soldiers, an alien and homemade booby traps. This movie won 28 Academy Awards in the imaginary land where I go when I sleep.

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I get a lot of emails from Cracked readers with questions and comments and articulate suggestions for improving my writing (”U wood be a bettr writer if u took that cock outta ur mouth,” which, admittedly has made the physical act of writing a lot easier, though I do maintain that the stylistic impact is negligible). Still, I have to say that the question I get asked more than any other is, “Dan, I’ve kidnapped the president’s daughter(s) and I can’t remember why. What should I do?!” I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe I seem more approachable than the other writers, or more knowledgeable on the subject of kidnapping, or maybe it’s because rumors that I once kidnapped Amy Carter are still circulating around the Internet (fucking prove it, Geraldo). But regardless of the reason, it’s clear that I’m the go-to guy when it comes to stealing, storing and eventually releasing First Children. For reasons that I refuse to publicly acknowledge, I will admit that I am uniquely qualified to handle these questions and, as such, I’ve put together this helpful guide. At the very least, this should severely cut down the amount of kidnapping-related emails that pour into my inbox every day.

Oh, and for the record, if you’ve got questions about kidnapping the loved one of the Prime Minister of Britain, please be advised that I am unqualified to assist you. That’s really more of a Swaim thing.

You kidnapped these two.

#1. Your Motive:

So you can’t remember why you stole these kids, which is totally natural. At the end of the day, your motives aren’t important. Your motive or lack of motive is your thing and, I’m not here to judge, while someone eventually will judge you (a judge), and you will be found guilty, that’s all down-the-line stuff, and the first rule of Stealing Presidential Children Club is Live in the moment (second rule: No snacks after 8pm). If you’re curious, I’ve been around the block enough times to know that your motive most likely falls under one of the following categories:
Chicks: It is a well-known fact that women love babies and bad boys. When it comes to wooing ladies, walking around with stolen children is the most effective way of getting laid that doesn’t directly involve rape. A close runner-up would be stealing the president’s adorable puppy and, if the woman you’re trying to woo happens to be Jodie Foster, murdering the president (not recommended).

Eight history nerds just wet dreamed over that joke.

Retribution: You’re angry about something and it might as well be the president’s fault. Retrace your steps, ask yourself what you were doing before you woke up with a headache and Sasha and Malia Obama tied up in your basement. Did you have to wait in a long line at the bank? Think back. While you were waiting in that aggravating line, did you find yourself thinking, “Man, I bet the president never has to wait in line. Fuck that guy.” It’s true, the president doesn’t wait in lines, and it’s even more true that, seriously, fuck that guy. It’s his fault that you have to wait in lines (I’m guessing). There’s a gap between audibly whining about the president’s ability to cut all lines and actively wondering whether or not you should, no joke, for real just fucking take his kids one of these days, and this gap is much thinner than anyone would like to admit.

“Seriously I’m just gonna fucking take those kids.”

Rock Band: You’re hoping to cash in on the whole Hannah Montana/Jonas Brothers, inoffensive bubblegum pop money train by creating and perfecting “the next big thing” in harmless pop music. It’s not exactly clear to me why you chose to steal kids to form this supergroup, particularly the president’s kids, but the point is you have them and the big concert is in a week. Finding out if this is your motive completely comes down to context. When you found Sasha and Malia bound and gagged in your basement, did one of them have a four-stringed acoustic guitar that you bought from a JCPenney catalog awkwardly taped to their hands? If so, you probably kidnapped the president’s daughters because you wanted to start a rock band so, you know, act accordingly.

#2. Bragging:

You’re going to want to tell everyone you know that you kidnapped the president’s daughters, that is a fact. I would advise you not to mention it, but we both know that’s impossible. In the unlikely event that you never get caught, you’d like the insurance of holding this over your friends until the end of time. “Your son’s a doctor? Oh, that’s cool. I didn’t have time to prep my kid for med school because I was busy committing the greatest crime of the 21st century.” The temptation to brag is simply too strong to resist. All I ask is that you only tell one or two people, and only do so in very vague terms. Offhandedly mention something that only the Obama children would know, something like “Man, it sure is a shame how much Sasha and Malia miss their parents. Wink.” Your friend won’t be so suspicious that he’ll call the cops, but he’ll be just suspicious enough that he’ll never let you near his kids.

#3. Brainwashing:

What’s infinitely easier than getting stolen kids to stop complaining about their lost parents is convincing them that they never lost their parents in the first place. And you’re in luck! Sasha and Malia are young enough that their tiny memories are not completely hard-wired into their puny, as-yet-undeveloped brains. With enough dedication and a little bit of ole’ fashioned elbow grease, you can convince Sasha and Malia that you were their father the whole time. Tell a bunch of made-up stories about their childhood and always cap them off with, “Really? You sure you don’t remember that? Weird, you must get these memory problems from your mother, who, by the way, is Megan Fox.” With time and patience, their actual memories will bleed into the manufactured memories that you’ve pounded into their brains, and you’ll be like one, giant happy family that never leaves the house or watches television.

“You’re award-winning poker stars who hate Washington, are you positive you don’t remember?”

Tip: Make sure you give them new names to both avoid suspicion and rob them of their past lives, but be aware that I’m also planning on kidnapping these girls when you are eventually captured and executed, and I’ve already called dibs on renaming them “Blasha and Kablia.”

#4. Their Goddamned Bullshit, and How Sick of it You Are:

Right? God, how annoying is that? Anyway there’s no way to stop it. They’re children, and children are bullshit. You’ll just have to ride the storm on this one.

“Oooh, look at me, I’m wearing a dress.” Get a job.

#5. What To Do When You’re Bored With Your Sasha and Malia:

I know, I know, you’re sick of keeping them around. Taking care of two children is hard work, I don’t envy you. You have to keep them safe, feed them Pokemons and make sure they have enough hip fashion accessories and Twilight paraphernalia so that the other kidnapped children in your basement won’t make fun of them. They’re always whining about their living conditions and going on and on about what their Daddy will do when he finds you. You thought the girls would be fun and sweet and, above all else, another tool in your arsenal of ass-gettery (recall Motive Number 1). You probably imagined yourself spending your days “tripping the Vag Poontastic” and surfing an ocean of sex on a surfboard of fellatio, but you forgot that kids are, at the end of the day, sticky-fingered shit machines that never sleep. The chicks aren’t pouring in, you forgot why you’re mad at the president and it turns out that Sasha can’t keep rhythm for shit. It’s time to walk away.

So, you want to give up, deciding that, like golf, that pottery class you took and Devil’s sticks, raising two illegally acquired children is just another one of those crazy hobbies that you couldn’t follow through with. (You really should work on that, by the way. Just once I’d like to see you finish something you’ve started.) Still, we can all agree that this little experiment, while fun, is over. All you can do at this point is cut your losses and hope that things will be different next time, after you’ve spent some time finding yourself and getting your act together. Here are your options:

Bringing Them Back to the White House:
I’m telling you right now that this won’t work. People hate when their stuff is stolen, especially presidents, and there’s nothing more infuriating than having the thief give it back. Even if you’re intentions are pure, it’s just going to come off as bragging. Like, “Hey, here, I’m giving you your kids back because you weren’t man enough to find them on your own.” Doesn’t that seem smug? Right, so bringing them back to the White House will only emasculate the president (whoever he may currently be), and it’ll ruin any chance you two would have had to be friends.
Also, you’ll be shot on sight.

Leaving Them Somewhere (The Ocean):
It’s easy to see an ocean or lake and think, “That’s the ticket.” After all, the ocean is nature’s garbage dump (incidentally, it’s also my garbage dump, because I don’t pay my garbage man and I live on a boat). And it sure is tempting to toss them in the water as a symbolic way of saying, “With this I am clean; the purity of the uncorrupted waves washes my hands of this entire sordid business.” Kind of poetic, actually. Like something Walt Whitman would’ve done if Franklin Pierce had any kids worth stealing.

His children actually all died tragically.

Still, as appealing as that might sound, there are downsides. Now, I don’t know if presidential children go through a pretty serious swim program when they enter the White House or what, but if these little girls are half as good at swimming as Amy Carter was, then you’re up shit creek: They’ll swim-sprint to the shore, contact the authorities and wait patiently at the dock while you’re still trying to figure out how to turn your boat around, which, as it turns out, is also stolen.

On the off chance that Sasha and Malia are as aquatically gifted as the shockingly-fast Amy Carter (like a god damned dolphin, I swear), I would strongly caution against dumping them in an ocean.

Leaving Them Somewhere (Not the Ocean):
As with everything, there is a right and wrong way to abandon your stolen Sasha and Malia. You don’t, for example, want to leave them somewhere close to your house, because then it would be so easy for them to find you. On the flip side, you don’t want to leave them somewhere dangerous where anyone could just walk up and harm, or worse, kidnap, these innocent little girls; so dark alleys, active battlefields and most strip clubs are out. Ideally, you’d want to leave them in a place where it would be easy for someone to spot them to ensure their safe return, but not so easy that someone would notice you WITH Sasha and Malia. So, what’s instantly noticeable but difficult to retrieve? Exactly: A hot air balloon. Ever since cavemen first dreamed of idly snatching the children of their cavepresident, they’ve been similarly dreaming of releasing those stolen cavebabies in a giant, colorful balloon (there are several cave drawings that will confirm this). While Sasha and Malia are floating in the air, screaming for help, you’ll have plenty of time to mosey on back to your apartment.
Tip: If the balloon happens to float over to your town, make sure you exit your house yawning and stretching and saying things like, “Why, what’s going on here? I’ve been asleep.” Boom. There’s your alibi. Plus, chicks love sleepers.

#6. Your Eventual Capture:

I won’t sugarcoat this, the government is really good at finding people who piss them off (excepting Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for about 13 years), and you are really, really dumb. Malia will lead the authorities back to your house (or boat) or maybe you’ll have done something stupid like sign the hot air balloon, but the bottom line is that you will get caught. When you get to the courthouse, address the jury with respect, and beg that they look within their hearts to forgive you. It wouldn’t hurt if you appealed to their patriotic side. Say things like, “Taking babies is one of the principles on which this country was founded.” Sing the National Anthem, eat hot dogs. Whip out those drawings you made of Thomas Jefferson stealing John Adams’s kids and try to admit them as “Exhibit Proof.” Ask the jury if they haven’t, once in a while, considered stealing a president’s daughter, and then say “Bullshit” when they promise you that the thought had never crossed their minds. If all else fails–it will–try to appeal to the softer side of Sasha and Malia. Remind them of all the fun times the three of you had (Note: only works if you had fun times with your kidnapped victims) and remind the president that you only stole his kids because he was too busy dicking around in the Middle Whatever to pay attention to them. Assure the courtroom that we’ve all learned a valuable lesson, and then try not to wet yourself too aggressively when the judge sentences you to a slow and embarrassing death.

Happy Independence Day!

TV talent competitions are generally regarded as the lowest shared experience of human society. It’s easy to think you’re better than someone who texts in their vote to American Idol, because you are. That person is going to die alone, and it will only make Adam Lambert stronger.

But if you get over yourself, these shows have the most genuine hilarity on TV. Watching desperate people volunteer to suck… it’s the greatest gift they can give us. True, unstaged failure is a joy for every part of the human mind. I’ve selected the 10 best from the premiere shows: X-Factor, America’s Got Talent, Britain’s Got Talent, American Idol and American Inventor.

What makes a great failure? Aside from a terrible performance, each audition has to tell a story. A story of delusion… of irrational dreams that slowly, slowly get crushed as the judging panel’s criticism eats through their fantasy world. It only sounds tragic on paper–when done properly, it’s like a comedy dream.

10. Dave Allen
Britain’s Got Talent
One of the things I love about America’s/Britain’s Got Talent is that they only allow magicians on if they’re terrible. And if the casting directors screw up and let a good magician on stage, the judges just fucking hate wizards anyway. If he knew this, he didn’t care, because magician Dave Allen comes to them with one trick: Duck to the Future. It’s a cannon with flames that shoots ducks through time. Which should be a big help for people trying to finally check off that last box on their scavenger hunt.

The trick fails in three ways: First, magic is supposed to make you wonder how it’s done. If a duck impossibly teleports across a room, I’m going to guess I’m dealing with a duck look-alike, not a violation of spacetime. So if Dave Allen came to me looking for credit for his duck shopping skills… kudos, asshole. You picked out two ducks that look like ducks. I would have been more impressed you hadn’t.

Second… Duck to the Future? Is that a pun? You can’t change the first letter AND the vowel sound in a pun. You might as well call it Magical to the Duck Trick-uture. Plus, what’s wrong with Quack to the Future? That only took me 15 seconds to come up with, and I’m not even a homo. Did this guy decide to kill ducks on stage after he lost his job as a birthday card writer?

Third, he straight-up blows it. In what must be the easiest trick ever conceived, he puts the duck into a box under a cannon, sets off a crappy bomb, then clumsily knocks the lock off the box. So by the time he walks across to the duck look-alike, the first one escapes, unimpressively still in the proper dimension. I never thought I’d say this, but I hope he’s having sex with these ducks, just so all of this isn’t a huge waste of their time.

To add insult to failure, it cuts to crowd shots of black people laughing at him. As a cultured reader, you of course know that black people calmly remaining near you is the international sign that you’re a shitty, shitty sorcerer. And I don’t even know what you call it if one of them is so unterrified that he then picks his nose.
YouTube - Prepare your soul for Duck Cannon

9. Ankar Judge
X-Factor
X-Factor is a singing competition in the U.K. that allows nutbars of all ages to try out. One of those nutbars is Ankar Judge, part-time singer and full-size World’s Shortest Man. He, in his own words, is as good as Michael Jackson, Daniel Bedingfield and George Michael. And there’s one thing you can count on when someone says something like that–it’s never not true.

Ankar performs “What About Us?” the song Michael Jackson wrote to make “Heal the World” sound more death metal. God rest Michael’s soul, his song “What About Us?” would have to grow 50 mustaches just to be considered tough enough for a breast pump commercial.

Ankar Judge spent years studying the sounds of two-year-olds dropping their ice cream, and has incorporated this into his music flawlessly. He sounds like a chipmunk’s vagina blowing its nose, and 80 percent of the lyrics is whine. Then, without warning or reason, he starts muttering to himself and jogs backwards to throw himself into the X-Factor backdrop.

It’s crazy. Not only because it’s a weird thing to do during a song about skinning your elbow at the pillow factory, but I know enough about religion to know that if a little foreign man starts chittering something under his breath and backing away from an X on the floor, there’s a seriously good chance that the Destructor is about to emerge from the rune circle.

Ankar, after interrupting his own song, stutters as he walks back to his mark, apologizing for thinking it was a real wall. The judges are stunned. But Ankar isn’t the type to give up just because there’s a 30 second pause in the music and a conversation has started. Arms outstretched… KNEE PLANT! He smacks into the floor with such an incredible impact that I think he has metal kneecaps and the auditions are being held on a giant electromagnet.

The judges again are stunned. For 10 seconds, they talk about how much it must have hurt. Apparently, this is all part of the song because he tells them, “It really doesn’t hurt.” Now, after all this, you’d think he’d stop. But hell, why not sing the rest? So he closes his eyes… finds his womanly center… and finishes. Too bad the only thing left in the song is half a second of “nnnnghhhhh.” By the time he got to it, it had so little to do with what was going on that if he was just laying an egg, it would be less stupid.

Ankar has a method–stick to the plan even after everything’s gone to hell. And before he came in, he had the most awesome catchphrase worked out. Yes, he already had his singing career planned all the way up to his marketing catchphrase. Unfortunately, like his performance, he kind of fucked it up. He huffs off saying, “There’s only one judge!”

Simon Cowell is a master of squeezing every little bit of crazy out of a person, so he asked “Who’s that?” Ankar shouts from far off camera, “That’s me! Ankar Judge!”

OK, so he screwed that up. Luckily, cameras captured his second attempt: “Don’t judge the judge please! Because there is only one judge… because my name is Mr. Ankar Judge.” I think it’s pretty catchy.

YouTube - Don’t Judge the Judge. Please.

8. Mary Roach
American Idol
When we first meet Mary Roach, she calls her vocal style “Pop Rock meets Broadway meets Jazz and R&B–a very unique combination of all the three.” So we know this unfortunately shaped woman isn’t a math scientist, or the world’s greatest explainer. I, however, have won multiple explaining awards and am happy to prove it by saying that she looks like Charlie Brown fell out of an airplane with a plastic surgeon and they quickly decided that if Charlie Brown was about to smash into the ground, he should do so as a woman.

After a vigorous warm up, she sang “I Feel the Earth Move,” as performed by a chimpanzee neck losing a fight to a boa constrictor, only sadder. Luckily, she enhanced her vocals with the art of dance… a very unique combination of seven things: gluing your feet to the floor and begging a mob of villagers to stop throwing rocks. She also had a move almost like a nervous tick where she pressed both hands into her left hip. It’s as if the dance was so weird that it was putting a strain on an organ humans don’t even have.

When the judges were unmoved by her performance and my award-winning description of it being the sputtering death throes of a flesh golem in the wrong size pants, she had an easy solution: She could just sing in one of her many other voices. The problem is, those other voices were too busy clawing against the inside of her brain to sing, or to tell her it was over. So she instead started nervously babbling about how great she did. You could almost see Reality crouched behind her, inching in for the right moment to attack.

As is their nature, crazy people deal with rejection in unpredictable ways.

In her emotional breakdown, she issued a threat to the world that she may give up a singing career completely. And in what might also be a threat, she angrily settles on styling hair because that’s what she’s good at. The following analogy failed to even place in the regional analogue-offs, but I’m still going to use it: That threat is like someone with irritable bowel syndrome and a dog named XYZLPLP saying, “Fine! I guess I won’t pursue a career in sitting on wedding cakes! I’ll go back to naming dogs because that’s what I’m good at!”
YouTube - Mary Roach, but she’ll change it to Guilbeaux if she makes it to Hollywood. It has more “Star Quality.”

7. Dennis Keith
America’s Got Talent

Magic has been waging war against gravity for years, and Dennis Keith has been drafted into it. He tells the judges, “I will demonstrate for you! My ability! In the art! Of self-levitation!” The only problem is that he’s too fat to self-levitate without an assistant, and wait there’s a second problem:

No amount of prestidigitation is a match for a lifetime of doughnut abuse. Dennis lays down between two folding chairs, and when his assistant pulls one out from under him… ta da-WHAM! Thanks for being a dick, science: fat people still can’t fly. Maybe the magic part is that his lungs didn’t liquefy when his torso slammed into the stage with the force of a thousand exploding hams.

YouTube - This Just In: Fat Idiot Levitates Badly

6. Hector Ortega
American Inventor
The contestants on American Inventor are a unique kind of failure. On American Idol, the kids are relatable. We’ve all pictured being a rock star, and it only takes one boy band video to support the theory that anyone can do it. Even if you’ve never hit a note in your life, there’s a five minute window during anyone’s childhood where you’d try out for American Idol AND expect to win. American Inventor isn’t like that.

These people have been stewing in their own crazy for decades, driven by pet rock dreams. Right now, someone out there is making a helmet that screams for up to three kinds of help or a cannon that no duck can escape, and nothing in the world will convince them that they’re not holding the patent this generation’s cotton gin. Hector Ortega is that kind of man.

The years of inventing have not been kind to Hector Ortega. If local police ever get a report of Christopher Walken’s week-old corpse rising from the grave, Hector Ortega will be shot on sight. Luckily, with the Bladder Buddy he invented, he can piss his pants discretely. It’s the bathroom you carry with you!

The Bladder Buddy combines a suit carrier and pissing in a bag for an exciting public urination experience. It’s a simple 917 step process. First, you have it with you. Next, you pull the Bladder Buddy out of its convenient tent bag. Third, apply it to your entire body. Finally, place your dick in a plastic bag and pee. With only your head exposed, it safely keeps your arms and hands trapped away from disgusted, punching onlookers.

Cleanup is a snap too! Simply store whatever urine made it into the bag in your hand while you begin the fun process of removing and refolding the Bladder Buddy. Oh, and ladies, he’s thought of you too! Why walk all the way to the bathroom in those high heels when you can jam a paper funnel up in there and piss in a plastic cocoon where you stand? You filthy bitch!

Sadly, they didn’t let Hector and his piss bag through. But I imagine on the way home, while shitting out the window of his moving car, he had his greatest idea yet: Autopants–The Toilet You Wear. It also holds two drinks and charges with a cigarette lighter. Sorry ladies, funnel attachment not included.

YouTube - Blah! Bladda Buddy! Blah!

Tune in Next Thursday for the gripping Top Five conclusion!

A couple weeks ago, while on a visit to the White House for a Fathers Day celebration, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk managed to sneak a little skating within the White House itself. He later posted a picture of this executive branch shredding on Twitter, setting off a predictable avalanche of ‘@TonyHawk: DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!’ tweets in response.

Although he received permission from White House staff before the stunt, this incident did provoke a negative reaction from some commentators. Noted moron Greg Gutfeld, of Fox’s Red Eye, actually cried a little when he described the great shame he felt that Tony Hawk would be allowed to skateboard in the White House “while all this Iranian crap is going down.” What Tony Hawk has to do with the events occurring in Iran is beyond me, but I’d suggest we not prevent him from skating, because if he’s going to be any help to the Iranian people at all, it will be while he is on a skateboard, doing something awesome.

Even though several celebrities did die following this incident, possibly because of shame at having their nation’s seat of power defaced, I’m sort of coming down on the other side of this issue. My thinking is that if I invited Tony Hawk to my home, I’d be offended if he didn’t do a little skateboarding. You want to grind my coffee table, Mr. Hawk? You go right ahead, sir. I hate that damned coffee table.

Why is my table out in the rain you ask? It knows what it did.

In his Twitter feed, Tony Hawk has been unrepentant, pointing out that he caused no damage. Technically he did less harm than the time Elvis clogged the White House toilet, an event I just made up right now, but which sounds plausible enough to be true. Hawk did little more than skate in a straight line down a well-trafficked hallway and perform a Manual, a simple trick which would involve no chance of damaging the property. Unless I was doing it, in which case I would almost certainly obliterate my teeth and a nearby vase of some importance.

But if we take as given that a Manual is an acceptable trick to perform while skateboarding in the White House, does that mean there are unacceptable tricks? Are they unacceptable because of their chance for causing damage, or their potential for freaking out squares? Using Google Image Search and the knowledge of skateboarding I earned from a semester playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, I’ve ranked the following White House skateboarding tricks in terms of difficulty and offensiveness to the American spirit–as measured in weeping bald eagles.

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Lincoln Bedroom

Trick: Ollie to Heelflip to Nosegrind across back of slipper chair (foreground) to Kickflip.
Difficulty: 3
Offensiveness to the American Spirit: 4 Weeping Bald Eagles

This one can be done at low speed and follows the basic kickflip to grind to kickflip combo that is the bread and butter of the Tony Hawk games. Although the great emancipator never lived to see the invention of skateboards, historians widely agree he would be appreciative of technical street skating in this form.

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White House Bowling Alley

Trick: Ollie to Pop Shove It to Tailslide (right rail) to Ollie to Kickflip to Tailslide (left rail) to Ollie to Hardflip to Feeble (right rail) to Kickflip to Nosegrind (right rail) to Heelflip into bowling pins.
Difficulty: 7
Offensiveness to the American Spirit: 1 Weeping Bald Eagle

Famously constructed during the Nixon presidency, the bowling alley is one of the homeliest rooms in the world. Located in the basement, it seems an ideal location for skating. Getting speed is easily done, and nothing of value is here to be disturbed, aside from Nixon’s ghost, whom White House staff assure is harmless, if foul-mouthed.

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Rose Garden

Trick: While dressed as Spiderman, Ollie to 360 Melon over the President during a summertime event.
Difficulty: 8
Offensiveness to the American Spirit: 8 Weeping Bald Eagles

A fairly straightforward trick, complicated by having to hope that Secret Service personal don’t interfere with a man in pajamas hurtling towards the Commander in Chief.

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Situation Room

Trick: A Nose Manual across the briefing table
Difficulty: 7
Offensiveness to the American Spirit: 5 Weeping Bald Eagles

This is the room where the President and his senior advisers are kept up to speed on events rapidly unfolding around the world, like military actions or NASCAR races. It’s in the basement, which means vertical space is limited. Although nothing within the room is terribly historical or symbolic, security is very tight, so pulling off any trick in here could be deeply embarrassing and cause the U.S. to lose face in front of the Russians.

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Grand Staircase

Trick: Wallride to Bluntside (on banister) to Ollie to Tailgrab to SMASH THE CHANDELIER!!!!
Difficulty: 6
Offensiveness to the American Spirit: 0 Weeping Bald Eagles

Although this staircase is used regularly for formal White House gatherings and ceremonies, chandeliers are a decidedly French invention, so their destruction is considered a positive benefit for the American Spirit.

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Oval Office

Trick: Nose Manual to MANUAL THE PRESIDENTIAL SEAL!!!! to Ollie to Overcrook (on Resolute desk) to Ollie to Varial Heelflip to STOMP THE PRESIDENTIAL SEAL!!!!
Difficulty: 4
Offensiveness to the American Spirit: 9 Weeping Bald Eagles

Not a lot to work with in the Oval Office, given its odd shape and lack of grindable edges. Disrespecting the Presidential Seal twice in one combo is probably the savviest play here, but advanced skaters/anarchists might want to work in a wallride across the portrait of Washington on the back wall somehow. Historians agree Washington was an old man, and would have hated skateboarders.

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The Whole Shebang

Trick: Starting in the Jacqueline Kennedy Ceremonial Garden, face towards the East Wing and get a huge amount of speed. Ollie to Wallride to Ollie to Wallride to Ollie to Nosegrind across the roof edge of the East Colonnade. From there, Ollie to Manual on the roof, hit the secret Dan Quayle quarter pipe to the roof of the Executive Residence. Grind along the roof of the Executive Residence, knocking down Secret Service Snipers. On the far side, Ollie down to the West Colonnade, landing in a Manual. Ollie to a grind on the edge of the roof of the West Wing until you reach the roof above the Oval Office. Jump onto the oddly textured spot in the middle of the roof to crash down into the Oval Office, stomping the Presidential Seal, again. Shake hands with the President to complete the trick.
Difficulty: 10
Offensiveness to American Spirit: 100 Weeping Bald Eagles

Completing this trick will require much practice and a bit of luck, but if correctly pulled off, will prod Congress into renaming Flag Day into Tony Hawk Day.

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Hey, Michael, thanks for sending over these storyboards, we’re super psyched to have you on board for The Great Gatsby. We did have a couple of issues. Nothing major, just some… Well, let’s just get right into it.

OPENING SCENE

Really spectacular opening. I suppose the original might be a tad dated, at this point. Now, instead of Gatsby and Daisy being separated from the general population by their considerable wealth, they’ll be separated as a byproduct of them being the only property owners in an apocalyptic desert wasteland. And instead of having that fancy, eye-catching car, it looks like Tom will own a rocket-equipped school bus, which is equally memorable. Really great stuff.

MEETING DAISY

OK, this is really interesting. I get that you’re trying to make Daisy seem like the most desirable woman ever, to justify the lengths to which Gatsby goes to win her affection, it just seems like you may be taking it a little too far. I worry because you’ve made Daisy such a strong, independent woman, it makes me wonder why she would need Tom to begin with. Also, is Tom Buchanan in this movie? He’s kind of a pretty big part of the book. I noticed that Daisy has a robot named “Tom-E.” That can’t be Tom, right?
Also, just for future reference, you don’t… you don’t really need a word bubble and dialogue. I get it, I see that Nick is very impressed.

GATSBY’S PARTY

This is in conflict both with the book and the wasteland you’ve already set up, so I think you might need to change everything. Also, am I reading this right? Is Linkin Park playing in the background of a scene that already has different music playing? Should I assume there are two simultaneous soundtracks in this movie and that one of them is always Linkin Park? I can’t imagine that working. Also worried about MC Baha Men for a number of reasons.

MEETING GATSBY

It’s going to be tough to get fans of the book and representatives of the Fitzgerald estate behind the idea of putting robots in this movie. And it’ll also be hard just getting your average, general audience-member behind the idea of introducing robots out of nowhere 40 minutes into what is either an apocalyptic party film or a romantic tale about obsession and class wars. I’m not doubting your abilities (loved Transformers), I’m just suggesting that you might want to either introduce the robots earlier and explain their presence, or not introduce them at all. I’m leaning towards the second one, but you’re the hottest director in town right now, so it’s your call I guess.

SUIT UP

Why? Why does he call it that? It’s almost like you just scanned the book for words you thought were neat and added them into the screenplay. Oh, actually, speaking of which, is there a screenplay we can take a look at, or do you just sort of only work in pictures and boom noises? And, this might be nitpicking, but “it was the best of times” is from A Tale of Two Cities, not The Great Gatsby. Do you think that all books are the same book?

MEETING WOLFSHEIM

Please let me send you a copy of this book. Please please let me do that, I think it could really help the story. And you, it could help you with basic literacy.
Are you in this movie now? I thought this was just a typo or you including your own notes or something, but the next I’ll say 60 pages or so have some pretty aggressive sexual stuff between you and Daisy…

THE DOCTOR’S EYES

A few things.
1.) These are clearly stills from Transformers.
2.) Telling me you can’t wait until I see something isn’t exactly helpful.
3.) Why is MC Baha Men back? Subquestion: Have you ever met a black person?
4.) Is that a typo, or does Gatsby only speak in explosions now?

THE FINAL BATTLE

You’re mixing Atlas Shrugged, Star Wars, a Gatorade commercial and down syndrome all together in one jumbled, miserable final scene and, frankly, it’s condescending and a little insulting. Do you want Shia AND Ben Affleck to play Nick? Also, you’re thinking of the wrong “Jordan,” by the way, you have to… you have to read the whole name. And, reading on to the epilogue, you’ve got it so that Gatsby saves the day and lives, Tom-E learns how to love, MC Baha Men gets arrested and Daisy, who you’ve renamed “Meganfoxatron,” ends up marrying you, which is offensive on all levels to anyone who is even vaguely aware of not just The Great Gatsby, but of books in general and basic plot structure. Really, anyone with even a cursory understanding of the difference between film and real life will be horrified when they see what you’ve done.

We’ll give you $280 billion to make this movie by next summer.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is arguably our country’s greatest president. He has a fight record of 4078-0 with 831 no contests due to Doing the Splits and Punching Balls. He gets a boner on international television every 46 hours, at precisely the same mathematical rate that humans are attacked by sharks, but science calls this “coincidence.” He has crushed enough testicles to fill 14 oatmeal museums. Yet despite these impressive figures, our love affair with him has gone cold. For many years, America’s only interaction with Van Damme has been when fat people collapse at exactly the right spot of Blockbuster video.

The film JCVD, his first theatrical release in many years, was like a heartfelt apology letter to us. He knows he’s no angel. There was that movie with Dennis Rodman, some rough legal battles, drugs, a movie about exploding pants starring Rob Schneider… and just when he thought he had his shit together and was ready to patch things up, he saw us with Scary Movie 1, 2, 3 and 4. The point is, Jean-Claude can’t take all the blame in this relationship. We’ve both made a lot of mistakes.

I’ve decided to go back to Jean-Claude, determined to make it work. But can his latest straight-to-DVD movies and I rekindle the spark we had back when he first dipped his fists in broken glass and it made me grow a beard? Or when he used the Dim Mak to explode a brick he wasn’t even fucking touching and Dr. Karate appeared on my shoulder as a special friend only I could see? Or when every second of Hard Target made my girlfriend pregnant.

Before we start, the film secrets of Jean-Claude Van Damme are extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. Because of this, analysis of his film has to be carefully encoded. Please cut out these official JCVD data decoding funglasses out and apply them to your head. In fact, take out the word “please.” If you don’t do it, your eyes will only see a series of shapes that will tell your brain to die, so quit screwing around.

Now that you can gaze upon it without going mad, I will be using the standard Van Dammeter for each DVD. It’s the standardized system I developed to measure the Van Dammajesty of any movie, except ones without Jean-Claude Van Damme in them. It’s a scale from one to 10 that takes into consideration all of the important qualities of a picture. Naked, muscly ass with or without an excuse? Is the romantic lead a sassy female reporter? Is there a muddy fight in the rain, with everything on the line? And of course, splits. Other criteria are also taken into consideration but you’d have to wear five sets of goggles to even read a description of how complicated they are. I’m risking a lot with even how much I’ve said already.

Imagine this: Nothing survives the apocalypse except for Jean-Claude Van Damme DVD boxes. All future communication and society would be based on the plotlines of his movies. That’s the only, but valid, reason I invented this system to quickly categorize a JCVD plotline. All his plots fall into one of five funegories.

A: Revenge over a lost loved one drives Jean-Claude Van Damme into karate-filled circumstances.
B: On the run from the law, military or mafia, Van Damme flees to karate-filled circumstances.
C: Jean-Claude Van Damme is unwillingly involved in karate-filled circumstances by a second Jean-Claude Van Damme.
D: This movie is a rehashing of a different movie, only now it stars Jean-Claude Van Damme.
E: If the film’s plot is described by E, this simply indicates that it is profoundly insane.

Jean-Claude Van Damme as… Ben Archer, a bouncer who kicks ass first and talks never.

The Villain: Ben Archer’s wife works for INS, and after finding a container filled with Chinese immigrants, she brings one home with her. Now, what she doesn’t know is that this is the daughter of international criminal Sun Quan, played by Simon Yam (Naked Killer 2). You might not recognize that movie because it was also distributed with the title Legal Rape, and then again as Raped by an Angel. Then finally as just Super Rape. In the film industry, starring in a movie called three different kinds of rape is what’s called “a triple threat.”

Plot: Sometimes people in movies can do crazy things like train oil drillers to be astronauts or decide child custody cases through arm wrestling contests, and it’s okay because movies are stupid. But in Wake of Death, the Super Rape of American cinema, there are realistic consequences to things as stupid as an immigration officer stealing an alien from her office. Within 30 minutes, Sun Quan kills Jean-Claude’s wife. You know what that means, Sun Quan. Killing Jean-Claude’s wife was your first mistake; not wearing a cup was your LAST mistake. Fun with Science: Every time someone types that last sentence, a gas station explodes.

Cinematography: Now you have to realize that this is not only not a classic JCVD movie, it’s barely even a movie. Hours pass between action scenes, and after JCVD’s wife dies, there’s no one left alive that talks. It’s like an uncompromising exploration of cinematic violence as art. No car is crashed without a visual metaphor and 40 crane shots. Knocking on a door in Wake of Death requires 15 camera setups and twice as many jump cuts. I can’t tell if Jean-Claude is working with a brilliant cinematographer or the International Society for Triggering Epileptic Seizures.

Dialogue: When tracking down your wife’s killer, a normal movie would have you interrogate someone, and their words would create information depending on what order they were put in. Sometimes we call this “language.” In Wake of Death, it goes like this: Jean-Claude and his friends tazer someone who might know where Sun Quan is, and everyone screams Chewbacca sounds while he’s tied to a chair and power-drilled. Then they put the film into a blender with a bottle of ketchup. My working theory is that Wake of Death was made as a way to sneak jerkoff material to serial killers in prison.

Editing: Action scenes are more complicated than you might think to edit together. One wrong move, and the audience has no idea where the other gunfighters are in relation to the hostages or, if you’re lucky, the Terminator robots and Krull blades. When the editing is in the hands of someone who might suddenly spend 20 seconds doing a self-indulgent deliberation on the light contrast between brain matter and floor tile, you’ll be so goddamn lost. By the time Wake of Death is done with an action scene, it feels like your brain has been fleeing from a gorilla attack in an art museum. Or as Simon Yam knows it, the plot of Super Rape 2: Let’s Go Bananas.

Sample Script:

INT. Strip Bar - Night
A crane shot spins around BEN ARCHER as he steps over the pool of blood flowing from the dismembered hooker bodies. His shadow trickles across their tits and liquid remains like a ghost.

INSERT: A closeup of BEN ARCHER’S EYE reflects the grim scene. In his pupil, an image of his wife’s butchered body dissolves in, flying on the body of a raven… a symbol for the soul’s unrest that is not lost on Ben Archer.

BEN ARCHER
“Shit the fuck. Mumble.”

BACK TO SCENE: Framed by the foreground naked legs of a stripper corpse, 20 gunmen drive through the wall in a motorcycle with 19 sidecars. The camera follows one piece of wall shrapnel on its lonely flight to the gory floor below. So like BEN ARCHER it is… its purpose gone, yet its destiny so defined.

SLOW MOTION PAN: The chunk clatters to the floor, the ripping sounds of strip bar gunfire its only eulogy. The focus pulls to a tit behind it exploding. A children’s choir sings… FADE TO BEN ARCHER’S ASS fucking tenderly in the moonlight, his cheeks clenching against one another so powerfully that the crack threatens to ignite. A raven crows!!!

Jean-Claude Van Damme as… Phillippe Sauvage, an Iraq veteran plagued with Iraq flashbacks.

The Name: How did filmmakers make it all the way to 2006 without anyone thinking of the name The Hard Corps? That’s like logging onto the Internet tomorrow and realizing the domain name puddingfarts.com is available. Or being the guy who invented the barbed wire tattoo… it’s so simple and clever that you’re sure someone must have already done it.

The movie itself might not live up to the title. The Hard Corps is about a former boxer turned business mogul and the rapper determined to kill him. If the Deadliest Warrior did an episode where the historical figures of George Foreman and Suge Knight met in the field of battle, this would be the movie based on it. And George Foreman gets a Jean-Claude Van Damme on his team.

The Rapper Factor: Jet Li and Steven Segal both revitalized their American careers by sharing the spotlight with rappers like Mos Def and DMX. But fuck that. Jean-Claude Van Damme only shares the spotlight with one man: a second Jean-Claude Van Damme. So despite its hip-hop theme and almost entirely African American cast, it’s as approachable to the hip-hop community as a haunted hockey game at Burning Man.

A Strange Twist: The boxer hires former soldier JCVD to protect him from the rapper, and here’s where it gets insane. Instead of letting Jean-Claude put together a trained security force, he has to select from random people at the gym. If you’re hoping there’s a good reason for this, you’ve got to be fucking kidding. If the Beyonder teleported the gym to Battleworld and told them to pick teams for the Barbecue of Destiny ribs cookoff, it would make about as much sense in relation to the rest of the screenplay.

JCVD, accustomed to madness, is unfazed by this assignment. He selects a small Asian man doing shitty taekwondo and another guy doing capoeira cartwheels. And a cowboy. I think in the director’s cut he also gets an Eskimo and a teenwolf, who fit together to form a truck. He almost overlooks a miniature kickboxing girl until she proves she can fight by standing toe-to-toe with Jean-Claude’s kneecaps and wildly missing with 300 punches in a row. Keep in mind that JCVD is an actor and a martial artist, the two tiniest genres of people aside from chocolate factory workers and shrink ray victims. So the fact that she came up to his waist means she is negative two-feet tall. And now she’s on the Hard Corps.

Or is She? After a 15 second montage of the Hard Corps training, nearly all of them are never seen again.

Screenwriter: “Jean-Claude, I can’t help but notice that there are all of a sudden a bunch of random martial artists in the middle of the script. Did you paste in a couple pages of Bloodsport?”

JCVD: “You can have dat… free of chirge.”

Screenwriter: “Great, but it really screws up OWW! You punched me in the balls!!!”

Jean-Claude Van Damme as… Detective Anthony Stowe, worst cop ever.

Challenge: After starring as two different people in so many films, JCVD may have gotten cocky about his acting chops. But can even he carry a movie without a single good guy and no splits?

I Swear to God, This is Really the Plot: The first thing JCVD does is screw up an undercover art smuggling sting and get his female partner killed. Then he kicks the hell out of her mourning husband. He blows off a date with his wife to drink alone in a bar where he and a barfly discover that he’s a cop and she’s a hooker. “I won’t charge you if you won’t charge me,” he tells her, right before it cuts to him pounding her over a pool table. To give you the moral barometer of the film, that’s the only line in the movie that doesn’t have the word fuck in it.

It Doesn’t Stop: He pulls out as she shouts after him, “I don’t care if you’re a fucking cop! You’re not a fucking human being!” He tells a valet to fuck off as he parks illegally at a karaoke bar where his wife tells him she’s pregnant with another man’s baby. I think he mumbles something about fucking birth control, but between the anger and him being Jean-Claude Van Damme no one will ever know for sure. I did understand him when he growled, “Don’t try to fuck the valet on the way out. Fuck.” Mirroring much of his early work, it seems to be the first screenplay written entirely during painful dick accidents.

Whew. He beats the crap out of two tow truck operators trying to tow his car, buys and injects heroin, then passes out by a dumpster. The next day, he rats out a retiring cop for asking for a harmless favor. After he loses his pension and almost shoots himself, JCVD tells him, “You deserve it.” By this point, I’m sure they made this movie only because it’s illegal to film a baby panda being slowly punched to death.

You’re a Loose Cannon! In most cop movies, the police chief hates you, and the mayor is always up his ass about it. In this movie, it’s “Good morning, scotch-soaked heroin addict with a dead partner! Here’s a special assignment!” Well, surprise: Van Damme blows it. A few minutes later, he gets executed with a gunshot to the head.

The End, Right? In a gruesome ER scene, doctors manage to keep the worst character to ever live alive. As they pull the bullet out of Van Damme’s head, it’s strangely realistic. Maybe too realistic. I wouldn’t put it past the monsters who made this movie if they just killed one of his stuntmen. Which might explain why several of the steaks that craft services put out the next day had tattoos.

Let’s Recover From a Coma, Gang! Since no one in this movie is nice, his wife’s new boyfriend mocks Van Damme’s recovery with, “From asshole to vegetable in one bullet!” Van Damme slowly relearns how to walk and talk, and I intend no insult when I say that he performs not knowing how to do these things very well. In fact, I’d say “Recovering Coma Guy” was the role he was born for if he hadn’t already played “Gay Karate Man” in Monaco Forever and “Timecop” in Timecop.

Spoiler Alert You know in John Woo movies when the two adversaries hold a gun to each other’s heads? If you’re like me, you’ve always wondered what would happen if they both pulled the trigger. Until Death answers that question, and it turns out that it’s Duh. I guess I shouldn’t have expected a happy ending after 90 minutes of heroin and executions.

Jean-Claude Van Damme as… Jack Robideaux, a cop who counters his lack of personality by carrying a bunny.

Touchy Subject: When a cop is transferred to a border town and put in charge of keeping illegals out, a normal movie would have him start as a hard-nosed xenophobe that slowly empathizes with the hardships these proud people are trying to escape. Well, Jean-Claude doesn’t make normal movies– he kicks them until his leg breaks. In this movie about border crossing, he only meets two Mexicans, and neither time does it go well.

His First Mexican Encounter: Van Damme sees a group of illegals crossing the border, and tackles one. He’s wearing a C4 vest and trying to do something that sounds like talking but isn’t. Untrained in bomb disposal, Van Damme starts fiddling with wires, because why not? The bomb squad guy shows up and makes him go away, probably moments before he tried kicking it inert.

Dramatic Defusing! The bomb squad guy shouts, “It’s an optical fiber based CLC casing!” to Jean-Claude and several other people who wouldn’t know what that means. If he expected someone to say something about how smart he was, no one did, and he snips his first wire. Oops. He briefly exchanges with the Latin gentleman the international expression for “oh shit,” and dives away from him and his exploding chunks. It seems like the only real training he received in bomb school was the ability to awesomely somersault away from detonating Mexicans, so he might as well have let JCVD take a crack at it.

]]> http://www.cracked.com/blog/jcvdvd-the-latest-in-van-damme-hits/feed/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/hollywood-is-remaking-the-gobots/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/hollywood-is-remaking-the-gobots/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:00:33 +0000 Chris Bucholz http://www.cracked.com/blog/?p=10199

Well it was only a matter of time I suppose. With the first Transformers movie succeeding despite its substantial terribleness, and the inevitable success of the sequel and it’s even more inevitable terribleness set to hit theaters this week, two facts have become obvious to the beady eyes of the Hollywood Producer:

1) Giant robots are awesome
2) People are stupid.

And what better way to capitalize on those two key facts than by making a giant robot movie guaranteed to be worse than the Transformers: a resuscitation of the Gobots franchise - the original Transformers knock off?

Well it’s happened, and thanks to the help of a naïve young production assistant who thinks I’m going to put in a good word for him with Tom Hanks (I’m not even going to mention him the next time I see Tom) I’ve managed to obtain a few select pages from the Gobot movie script. It’s pretty thrilling stuff, but I should caution any Gofans out there that Gospoilers lie within. Gotread carefully.

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Note: We think we’ve talked Segway up to $300 for the product placement. We could use it.

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Note: If we can get “Highway to the Danger Zone” for this scene we definitely should.

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When I got into work last Thursday, Cracked.com Editor-in-Chief Jack O’Brien gave me a company credit card with a modest amount of cash and instructed me to buy a ticket to Iran. He said it was essential to the site that we be a part of this “monumentally important election” and that I should do it because my “socially degenerative drinking habits” and “frequent bouts of nudity” have made me impossible to be around. He assured me that this election is easily one of the most important events in my lifetime, and that it is my obligation as a journalist to witness this history-making moment.

Anyway I used the money to buy tickets to a porn convention that was happening at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Erotica LA is a once-a-year convention that celebrates adult film, sex toys, sexual advancements and at least one website that boasts nothing except “EXTREME VAGINA SHAVING.” Basically, Erotica is an appreciation of all things sweaty, heaving and perfect in this world. It’s like a writhing, pulsing beanbag chair of bodily fluids and daddy issues and I love it. I didn’t know it when I walked in the door, but Erotica LA, and specifically the porn stars contained therein, had more to teach me about current events and the future of the entertainment industry as we know it than I ever could have expected.
I don’t know why I didn’t realize it at the time. I guess I must have been distracted by something.

The most effective Red Bull ad I’ve ever seen, even if the can is backwards.

The PornBot caused great conflict in me, as a result of my love of pornography and paralyzing fear of technology.

Porn stars giving free candy. Porn stars giving free candy. Porn stars giving free candy.

These are my people.

Every second, 28, 258 Web surfers are viewing Internet pornography, and “sex” is the most-searched word on the entire Internet. To find out why this might be (and because I’d already eaten my share of free ass-shaped candy, played a porn themed video game and matched wits with the PornBot), I decided to track down some porn stars and do some interviews.

The first person I interviewed was Gianna Michaels who, in addition to being super good at porning, is genuinely one of the sweetest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. If the image of her getting rammed in the back of a van wasn’t already burned into my retinas, I could really see myself settling down and raising a bunch of kids with her.

[Full Disclosure: A) I don't know anything about proper journalism and B) when I asked porn stars for interviews, I guess I didn't actually expect them to say yes. So, when it came time to conduct the actual interviews, I didn't technically have any questions prepared. Still, that didn't in any way stop me from holding a little notebook up to my face to present the illusion that I was reading questions. For the record, this is what I was looking at during our interview:]

DOB: Gianna, thanks very much for meeting with me.

Gianna: No problem. Who did you say you were with?

DOB: Cracked.com!

[Blank stare]

DOB: Cracked….Dot com?

Gianna: OK…

DOB: It’s a comedy website, we’re… It’s not important. Comedy website.

Gianna: OK, sounds fun.

DOB: Alright, now, first… first question….

DOB: [Clearing throat] How… long have you been in this business, and how often do you work? And how long will you plan on staying in the business? That… I’m sorry, that was three questions…

Gianna: I’ve been in the business four years, and I work about three days a week, minimum, but I make my own schedule. It’s really like a freelance business, but a very consistent one. You wake up in the morning and you check and see if there’s any work that day, and you go if you want to go, or you stay home if you want to stay home. I’m going to keep doing this as long as it pays, because I love it. I work three days a week, and I’m making my living just fine.

DOB: (Three days?! Son of a bitch!) Oh, cool, that’s terrific. Moving on, how do you think the Internet’s impacted the adult film industry, as a result of the sudden rise in easily available amateur material as well as multiple websites that provide free, streaming porn?

[This was actually a really cool moment, because it was clear that it was a topic about which Gianna was particularly passionate, I've never seen her so worked up or excited before. Except, you know, in all those videos.]

Gianna: It can be an incredibly destructive force, that’s a good question. It’s really troubling for the industry. More and more studios are going under everyday, they have to close shop. I mean, look at music. We’re facing the same problem that the music industry was facing a few years ago.

DOB: Uh huh.

Gianna: Because, I mean, look at the amount of options people have these days. And sure the Internet’s great, but it just might not be worth it based on all the businesses it’s ruining. It might just completely destroy and break the porn industry. Seriously.

DOB: Get outta town.

Gianna: Because, I mean, look around, there’s fuckin’ a hundred different fuckin’ sites about sex, and they’re all free and they’re all amateur. The viewers, they don’t fuckin’ care where it comes from, they don’t have a fuckin’ obligation to a fuckin’ professional studio, you know? To them, they don’t fuckin’ care. Pussy’s pussy, you know?

DOB: Yes, I do.

Gianna: And there’s a million fuckin’ other options. Fuck, what do you do?

DOB: Yeah… Well, what are you gonna do?

Gianna: Well, this is the time, because here is the reality check: Everyone is going to get free porn. And if people are going to get porn fuckin’ everywhere, you’ve got to give them something special. You build a website, get a more personal experience, give the consumer an extra something, something personalized, some incentive that gets them to follow you and care what happens to you. And some people
will be able to do this, and some won’t, and I guess we’ll just see in a few years who’s fuckin’ still standing.

[Note: If I was a more up-on-my-toes kind of reporter, I'd have quickly said something to the effect of "More like who's standing, still fuckin', am I right?" Instead, I said:]

DOB: Totally. Cool. So, next… Next question, what’s the next step in porn for you, what’s the next… thing you’re gonna do?

Gianna: Make my own website, and take some editing classes and get into editing for adult film.

DOB: Totally. Cool. Final question: It was recently announced that President Barack Obama is going to be rescinding his previous promise to put a cap on salaries for the higher-ups of businesses that have already received bailouts. This abrupt change has certainly turned a few heads. Your thoughts?

Gianna: Well, that’s unfortunate, but I mean, did you know that one of the reasons General Motors lost so much fuckin’ money in the first place, and the reason a lot of people didn’t get bonuses is because they’re spending so fuckin’ much on health care for their employees?

DOB: I…wasn’t…actually…aware, no-

Gianna: I mean they had to cut back on so much because the alternative was they couldn’t give health care to their workers. So it sucks about what Obama did, but the whole thing…(She pauses, searching for the right words.) It’s a Fucked Situation. It’s tough everywhere for everyone. It’s tough all over. No one is having an easy time right now. It’s a Fucked Situation.

[Again, another perfect set up for me to say something charming like "And you know a thing or two about fucked situations, am I right?" Instead...]

DOB: Awesome, that’s awesome. I think… I think that’s about all the questions I had prepared.

DOB: Thanks very much for your time.

Gianna: Oh, no problem… This wasn’t comical at all, by the way.

DOB: Yeah, that’ll happen, with us.

I left Gianna’s booth, still sort of enchanted both by her thorough knowledge of the Internet as well as that filthy filthy mouth of hers when I ran into another porn star, Kiera King, who was also kind enough to meet with me.

You’d think I’d wise up and be more prepared for her interview but my life is nothing if not an infinite series of repeated mistakes and unlearned lessons. Kiera was certainly attentive, but I’m pretty sure she sort of hated me (what are you gonna do?). Technologically speaking, she was a little bit farther along than Gianna in that she already had a website that she had total control over, but what Gianna lacked in tech savviness, she more than made up for in not-hating-me-ness, so I think it’s kind of a tie. A sexy, filthy tie.

DOB: Hey, Kiera, thanks for agreeing to do this interview.

Kiera: Sure thing.

DOB: First question: How long have you been in the industry and often do you work?

Kiera: Just eight months, but I love it. I work about four or five days a week. I danced, stripping, for about a week and then someone said, “Hey, you should do this, you should do movies.”

DOB: Neat. So, I was talking to Gianna Michaels a little bit earlier and she doesn’t seem too optimistic about the future of the industry as a result of the Internet.

[Long pause.]

Kiera: OK.

DOB: Oh, I- Did you have anything to say about… that? Any thoughts?

Kiera: Not really.

DOB: Oh. No, it’s just, Gianna said that it might destroy the industry, so…

Kiera: Well, I’m not going to worry about it.

DOB: [Quietly.] But…Gianna said-

Kiera: Look, the way I see, it, whatever is going to happen with the Internet is going to happen. I can control my website, but not the Internet or the industry, so I’m not going to waste my time worrying about something I have no control over. Why would I waste time on that?

DOB: Gianna said-

Kiera: Like I said, I got into this business eight months ago, the economy was already shit, you know? I’m thriving right now because I’m new, and I’m not used to getting paid what the other girls who’ve been doing this for awhile got paid, so I’m making my website work. I’m in complete control of my website, I’m thriving, I enjoy this and I’m not going to bother about anything else.

[Maybe it was because I was wasting her time --and Kiera was staunchly anti-time-wasting-- or maybe it was because this was a sensitive subject, or maybe she just happened to notice the fact that I clearly didn't have any notes prepared, but this is when I started to get the feeling that Kiera wanted nothing to do with me or this interview. She kept shooting me dirty looks and actively trying to walk away, but she wasn't allowed to leave her booth and I'm incapable of picking up on social cues, so the interview continued. Still, in a horribly misguided attempt to diffuse the situation, I decided to change the subject to something non-Internet-porn-related.]

DOB: Final question, Obama’s decision to close up the Guantanamo Bay Prison has pretty clearly divided the nation. Some worry about known and suspected terrorists ending up on our soil in our prisons, while others applaud the president’s efforts to move the prisoners from such a, let’s say, “less democratic” holding facility to something more in keeping with America’s ideals and character. What, uh… What are your thoughts on that?

Kiera: What?

[I'm the worst fucking interviewer on the planet.]

DOB: The… he wants to close the prison and move them-

Kiera: Move them here? No, that’s a terrible idea. Our prisons are already so overcrowded, the whole penal system is completely screwed up. With overpopulation in prisons already a problem, I can’t see a reason to throw more prisoners in there and close one prison, I just feel like there’s a better way to spend the taxpayer’s money.

[I know much less than porn stars on every single conceivable subject.]

Kiera: Anymore questions?

DOB: Uh…

DOB: No, no I think… I think I’m all set, here, this was great.

Whether it was luck, skill or porn star witchcraft, Gianna and Kiera provided some of the most insightful and important ideas regarding future of online entertainment I’d ever heard. I mean, I think it’s already pretty obvious that the Internet is what it is today almost entirely because of porn–high speed Internet, higher quality videos, streaming sites; it all can be traced back to our overwhelming need for immediate porn. Still, I didn’t realize just how on target Gianna and Kiera were when I interviewed them. You might have missed it the first time around. You know Gianna’s plans for creating specific, personalized incentives for her consumers? The fact that she acknowledges the need for connecting directly with her audience, finding what they want and giving it to them? That’s Niche Marketing and, according to Entrepreneur, that’s exactly how you cultivate, strengthen and profit off of a dedicated following and if, as some have speculated, there’s no way to save television at this point, then this is basically the future. Whether you’re writing a book, promoting a movie or breaking new ground in ass-to-mouth technology, what’s essential in today’s entertainment industry is building a dedicated audience that will follow you.

And just look at those glasses. Look how smart she is.

By meeting with her audience, finding out what they want and giving it to them, Gianna’s not just another Jane Q. Pornstar, she’s actively providing a specific service that people need. She’s creating something new that fills the void as defined by her audience. That, according to lots of smart people, is how you build an audience and develop your brand. She’s not just a standout in the adult film industry, she’s already standing head and shoulders above every existing mainstream studio. While most studios and networks are actively ignoring the Internet’s impact, Gianna’s already learned how to thrive on it by finding what problems her audience has and solving them. That’s what Gianna’s going to be doing while Fox waits around for this whole Internet fad to pass.

“I’m so hot for New Media.”

And Kiera is equally well-equipped for the future. Until we figure out how to make loads and loads of money off the Internet (never gonna happen), people are going to need to be prepared to work for less than the bloated salaries that are currently being thrown around. A lot of executive, fancypants elitist porn stars probably aren’t prepared to make the leap to the Internet because it means a pay cut, which means less money to spend on dick-top hats and vagina monocles. Kiera is new and eager and hungry. She’s ready to work often on a website over which she has total control and she’s willing to do it for less money than porn veterans. When, as Gianna predicts, the studios do collapse, Kiera is going to be one of the ones left standing because of her aggressive work schedule and lean salary.

Just makes you think. We can already credit porn for getting the Internet where it is today. And they’re certainly ahead of the curve when it comes to figuring out and managing the future of the Internet. And they clearly know more than I do about everything, so it just makes you wonder.
Why the hell aren’t porn stars running this country?