The theme this month: YOU CRAZY TO WATCH THIS!
5. For god sake, don’t watch this. Don’t. It’s disgusting. What the hell’s wrong with you? Why would you want to have any part of an Italian gore flick like this? Yes, yes, we all sneak a peek when we drive by a car accident, but ‘peek’ is the operative word here. We don’t pull up lawn chairs and start cooking up popcorn. You’re sick, I tell you, sick!
4. Mother of God…Glenn Beck has written a political thriller. Yes, that’s right, Glenn Beck. And Fox has brought Donald Lafountaine and his gravelly voice back from the dead to do the trailer. I promise that watching it will be like swallowing Morpheus’ red pill: you will never trust anyone EVER again. Avert your eyes! (One line from the trailer: “The Dog returns to his vomit”) No! Don’t do it!
3. There is no need to watch this public service announcement about sex, because we all know that for young women in school, there is nothing sexier than a male virgin.
2. There is something wrong with Dennis Hopper reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” to a country and western audience. I have no problem with Hopper, Kipling or the country crowd. It’s just something about the mix that is not right. It’s like seeing Santa in July; or a drag queen singing The Star Spangled Banner at the Indianapolis 500, in Spanish, and the crowd actually loves it!
It’s wrong, just plain wrong.
1. Ok. I was joking about the first four videos. Go ahead and watch them, they’re mildly entertaining. But I’m absolutely serious about the next one. It’s from the video blog series staring a young and cute Florida couple. The videos, which I beg you to boycott, for the most part are about them as they go about their day to day lives: shopping, swimming, and taking the dogs for a walk. They talk, they laugh, they watch TV.
My problem is not with this couple. My problem is with the viewers and subscribers.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how each 20-minute segment can get anywhere around 750,000 views. This means that close to a million people will watch a sitcom-length ‘episode’ of these two – I never learned their names, I suppose it doesn’t matter – window shopping at Mall of America and going to lunch at Fuddruckers.
What are we becoming? There was a time where we would rack our brains to get out of watching a filmstrip of the neighbour’s trip to Egypt. We had better things to do. We had standards! Now, we have no problem with watching Jack and Jane check their dog for grey hairs. Could they – and vloggers like them – be the new generation’s quiet reprieve from the mainstream media’s sensory bombardment? Are they the new Saved by the Bell? Something to be watched with a Saturday morning hangover?
I don’t know the answer, but I think we can use some standards. Comedian Louis CK once opined about his childhood in Boston, where people would “beat the shit” out of each other for no reason at all. Harsh, yes. But as Louis CK put, “it kept quality control”. I like this couple, and I am not advocating that people go and pummelled boring bloggers….just the people who have nothing better to do than watch them. So, watch this one at your own risk…