I’m going to have to stop watching extra features on DVDs and the like, because I keep running into situations where I see somebody whose work I like a lot, but get the feeling that if I met them in person I’d just never stop wanting to smack them around.
I already bitched about David Cross earlier, but left it kind of vague. Mac and I were watching a little bit of his “stand-up” routine, only enough to see the bit where he said he was pro gay marriage and got a huge round of applause from the crowd. That’s what crystallized what it is that bugs me — it’s not that he’s Varney, it’s that he’s so earnest. I’ve already said I’m getting tired of the whole spirals of irony thing, and appreciate it when people aren’t afraid to just come out and say what they mean.
But if you’re a comedian, don’t you have to keep it funny? I haven’t seen his entire stand-up routine, but I have seen a lot of the stuff he’s done, and I just keep seeing predictable parody in order to Make A Statement. Bob Odenkirk’s stuff is pretty shallow, but at least on “Mr. Show” you got the sense that he was enough of a counterbalance to let things get absurd when they were in danger of getting too much into obvious social commentary.
The image thing would work better if I could say that Jim Varney was always too cross, but I don’t think that was true.
I was watching the special features on the Serenity DVD, and there was Joss Whedon talking about the fans and why they were important and his philosophy of the show and the movie and what they meant to him. And the dude is just fey. I realize that shouldn’t annoy me, but it just made me want to yell at the screen for him to shut the hell up. Serenity is an amazing movie, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is one of the best TV series ever made, I even read the second trade paperback of his Astonishing X-Men series and thought it did everything exactly right. But every time I hear him talk, he just strikes me as a more subduded, more self-aggrandizing, nerdier version of Charles Nelson Reilly. Maybe it’s just me.
And again, the image thing doesn’t really say anything about Tina Fey. The whole concept needs a little bit more work, I think.
I looked around online and it turns out there already are versions of “Celebrity Sudoku,” but they’re just versions of the real Sudoku that use pictures instead of numbers. I think I didn’t understand the rules of real Sudoku, either; apparently the numbers don’t add up to anything, you just have to list all 9 digits. I still think it’d be cool to have a game where you have to put actors into a 3×3 square, with the rule that all 3 of the people in each row or column have to have been in a movie or TV show together. Maybe that would be a fun rainy day project.