Ah, The Onion, How You Tickle Me So

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

I Found This Onion Clip to Be Hilarious

12-Year-Old Boy Scouts Volunteer To Give Women Breast Exams

The Greatest Onion Video

Diet Book Author Advocates New 'No Food Diet'

They've outdone themselves with this one.

The Aesthetics Of Barf

A recent list from The A.V. Club, entitled "I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence": 17 Notorious Living, Working Cinematic Provocateurs," manages to name just about every single director whom I find artistically gifted and yet morally and spiritually misguided: Catherine Breillat, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noe, etc. etc. For me the point of cinema is not simply to be emotionally powerful; a good film also needs to add something of value to the viewer's life. Apparently Gaspar Noe's goal when filming Irreversible was "to make viewers feel like they were losing their minds." I have yet to see Irreversible. Unless I was gearing myself up to commit suicide, why would I? The A.V. Club writes that Haneke's films "are so starkly brilliant that they're difficult to dismiss." Can I dismiss them anyway? I mean, stark brilliance in the service of what?

Some of the directors listed here actually do make films with genuine soul and value, such as Werner Herzog, Oliver Stone, and Todd Solondz (although Solondz is possibly borderline). But no list can be perfect. Vincent Gallo's films are more entertaining for the attendant publicity than the actual movies, but at least he isn't laughing in your face. And even I must admit that I may need to see James Toback's Black And White, "a wholly improvised, wildly self-indulgent free-form essay on sex and race featuring a notorious scene where Robert Downey Jr. hits on Mike Tyson while Downey's turned-on wife (a cornrows-sporting Brooke Shields) tapes it all for posterity." Well I'll be damned!

Other highlights:

Michel Gondry Entertained For Days By New Cardboard Box

Economic Stimulus Check Burned For Warmth

Chillin' In The O.N.I.O.N.

The Onion has a pretty good batch of stuff this week:

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

I Love My Country-Aw, Who Am I Kidding? My Country Can Go Fuck Itself

(Favorite part: "O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, like Ray Charles ever saw amber fucking anything. Amber waves of nimrods trying to cut in front of me at the supermarket, maybe.")

We Care A Lot: 14 Overblown Charity/Advocacy Songs Besides "We Are The World"

There's also a terrific interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker from that show...you know...the one with the rodent that crawls around inside Paris Hilton's intestines. They come off better here than they did in last year's Rolling Stone interview; they sound more like the guys that I would expect would be capable of making a show like South Park. The most affirming aspect of the interview is how it comfirms what I already suspected about their work ethic - they actually have high standards. Highlights:

Parker: "I always like, in the interviews too, I like to fancy myself more of a musician than anything else, but it really is—for me, writing an episode of South Park, it's like sitting down and writing a song. When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it. Things are so workshopped and so run around the room, and so overthought. And finally, once you have a draft and then a draft of the draft, then they go in there and they work on every single little joke, and "Is there a gag here? Is there something here?" You would never do that with a song. You would never sit around for a month and talk about what a song should sound like, and what the chorus is going to be. To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand. And that's basically my long-winded answer of saying I'm a procrastinator. [Laughs.]"

Stone: "The overriding pressure we feel… On one hand, I'm feeling less pressure lately. We have a four-year contract. No one in television has a four-year contract. We have crazy job security, so it's in our own hands. And so the pressure is more like, we have this body of work that we're pretty proud of, and we don't want to muck it up in the last couple of years. Although, obviously, you're trying to get an emotional charge out of a show that's been around for a while, so you're looking for fresh snow to clomp around in. We don't feel pressure of, "Let's make this really raunchy." It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us. We just really are offensive, raunchy people. The work part of it is making it have a story and make sense and make it worth 22 minutes of your time, which I feel is a tough thing."

I also like the reportage from the SXSW Festival, particularly this bit about Lou Reed:

"I gave myself the assignment of attending this year’s keynote speech from Lou Reed, but seeing as I went to bed around 4:30 a.m. and the only R.E.M. sleep I got was at last night’s show (hardy har), I decide to just blow it off. But here’s how I imagine it went: “Whatever your interpretation of my work is, it’s wrong. The ’60s were an amazing time and full of lots of political turmoil—kind of like now. Ahem: Berlin song cycle, transcendental meditation, my photography. No, I don’t want to talk about the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, or anything else you might actually be interested in. Thanks, and to my all my fans out there, fuck you sincerely.” Hey, this is easy! Maybe I should just cover the whole festival this way."

On that note, apparently someone else found that Honda commercial clip on YouTube because here it is in the wryly amusing (and quite accurate) piece called "The Five Faces Of Lou Reed."

Carrots, Potatoes, Broccoli, and...The Onion

World Leaders Gather To Roast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Area Senior Remembers A Simpler Time When His Anus Didn't Leak

Patriots' Season Perfect For Rest Of Nation

Tom Petty To Play Some New Stuff He's Been Working On At Super Bowl

Seriously, Cleveland, How Are You?

Bill Clinton: "Screw It, I'm Running For President"

Interesting Interviews at the Onion A.V. Club

Malcolm Mcdowell seems like a good guy.

"You're telling me to do a love scene, you actually have to have penetration? That's absolutely beyond pathetic. If you can't think of any way of making that exciting, you're in the wrong job."

This one with Wes Anderson is decent. But this one with Uwe Boll is better.

"If you want a career in Germany as a filmmaker, you shoot another fucking movie about "My old uncle tried to kill Hitler." Right? You do Sophie's Choice Part 11, and you get an L.A. agent and make a career in America because you showed you were against Hitler. But in reality, 98 percent of the people were not against Hitler."

Wes Anderson Week at the AV Club

Wes Anderson Interview - AV Club

16 Films Without Which Wes Anderson Wouldn't Have Happened - AV Club

10 Films That Couldn't Have Happened Without Wes Anderson - AV Club

There seems to be a pretty complicated little subculture developing over at the Onion AV Club lately. This week the AV Club had the "crazy" idea of writing a bunch of pieces about Wes Anderson (given that there's a new Wes Anderson film coming out - not that shocking, folks). Apparently several different factions have formed on the AV Club message boards in response to this editorial decision. First of all, there's the people who like Wes Anderson and think he's worthy of the attention the AV Club is giving him. Secondly, there are the "Anti-Wes Anderson" people, who seem to think he's an overrated, self-indulgent bore, and even suggest that the AV Club has been paid by the movie studio to promote Anderson's new movie in their publication. But thirdly, and most interestingly of all, there are the "Anti-anti-Wes Anderson" people, whose stance roughly amounts to, "Yeah, maybe he's not that great, but he's still a really interesting director and I'd rather read articles about him than most other directors, so would these other people please just shut up already."

I've thought about making some comments on the AV Club message boards, but ultimately I just haven't felt like screaming my opinions like a madman only to be drowned out by the suffocating din of the insane and intolerant masses. It makes me appreciate the relative civility and maturity of the comments on my own blog. Seriously. I don't know how they put up with it over there.

Kill the Spiders

Most people hate them. The girl I liked in elementary school ate one.