THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

The Occupy Wall Street movement was declared moribund by almost everyone at the beginning of the week, then it surged forward again, only to peter out by today.   It seems the surge is typical of people who are at the last stages before death, as the body fights the inevitable with whatever energy is left.  I’m still hopeful that the focus of OWS, however unfocused it is, will shift and they will take the show on the road, gain some snowball momentum, and then come back to the point of origin with a proper revolution.

Despite the fact I Photoshopped a great meme for him, which I had hoped would go viral on Reddit.com and then force him into action, Eliot Spitzer never showed up to save the day by parting Wall Street like the Red Sea and leading the Chosen Children of Discontent to a promised land of stricter financial regulation and accountability.  I haven’t seen anyone with true authority in OWS who can engage the authorities on a peer-to-peer level to get something done—Michael Moore is a buffoon and a whale, a talented whale, but a whale nonetheless.  What I am seeing is a lot of 23-year-old “leaders” of the OWS movement organizing demonstrations, which seem well managed and mobilized, but I’m not seeing the manifestos here, no declarations of rights and intents that can be worked into law and real change.  Revolt is an action. Discontent is just a mood.

When she called the death of OWS a bit too early this week on her Daily Beast TV, Tina Brown said something to the effect that the Arab countries had something viable to protest against—i.e., decades of tyranny and repression—whereas Westerners just have discontent with an unfair system, which implies that life is unfair, so just suck it up, bitch.  I do agree with Brown to a certain extent, but I would also blame prescription drugs and modern strains of weed so powerful that a friend of mine had to go lie down the other day after two tokes.  How are you supposed to start a revolution with those handicaps?  The US government, which as we all know is controlled by the nefarious, mustache-twirling pharmaceutical industry, has most protestors so doped up they feel too happy to be effective, or too dazed on medicinal marijuana to make cohesive demands.

I am entirely for the prescription drug industry.  Aside from the fact that nothing will stop a Killough Rage Stampede in its tracks like a couple of Clonazepam and a Xanax 2 mg chased down with a martini so dirty it looks like a Clint Eastwood revenge film, I am hopeful that one day the industry will kill Rush Limbaugh in an accidental overdose, if the double fat bitch bacon cheeseburgers and deep-fried cardiac fries don’t stop his heart and silence his mouth for good first.

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A bit of old news surfaced today regarding the death of Natalie Wood.  The case has been reopened thirty years later, after one of the more suspicious Hollywood Insider cover-ups ever.

I remember when this happened and it was always known to be foul play.  The basics: Wood and her husband Robert Wagner were hosting Christopher Walken aboard their boat.  After a terrible fight between Wagner and Wood, she somehow hit her head, fell off the boat and drowned.  Now the boat’s captain is coming forward thirty years later, to say Wagner is responsible.

Here’s what I heard at the time, when I was hanging out as part of R. Couri Hay’s entourage, albeit reluctantly—he was bangin’ my best friend, basically, so I had to put up with him, no matter how distasteful I found him to be.  Hay was by far the most powerful gossip columnist in America, with his own byline in The National Enquirer.  His downfall began when Carol Burnett successfully sued him and the tabloid for defamation of character, something very hard to do in the States.  He had erroneously claimed Burnett was drunk at a party, when she had been sober for years; she was just being a goofy horse-toothed comedienne. This threw into doubt all of Hay’s information, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t accurate to some degree, as a lot of the stuff that is printed in those rags usually is.

What is never talked about is the cause of the Wagner-Wood smackdown, which according to Hay’s stringers was because Natalie Wood walked in on her husband having sex with Christopher Walken.  She wasn’t a very good drunk to begin with, they had this huge fight, things were broken, then she tried to storm out, but the only taxi around was the lifeboat.  When she tried to get into it, she hit her head and drowned.  There was some sort of negligence on Wagner’s part for not making an effort to save her, which seems to match up with the captain’s story that Wagner told him not to turn on the search lights to look for her.

Dear God, we have officially become a gossip site.  Yeah, well.  We’re much better looking and better dressed than Perez.

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Despite predictions to the contrary, my buddy Tarsem Singh killed it at the box office last weekend with his Immortals exceeding studio expectations by $7 million, which is no mean feat these days, so hats off to him.  I haven’t seen it, but my own stringers tell me its gorgeous, although the script is a bit wobbly.  What doesn’t seem wobbly is the script from Tarsem’s forthcoming Mirror Mirror starring Julia Roberts in something she does quite well, broad comedy.  The trailer looks absolutely hilarious:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpLVO396eHs&w=560&h=315]

My new line when I look in the mirror and try to magic away the years by pouting and shifting my head hither and thither to catch the best light is, “It’s not a wrinkle, it’s a crinkle.”  Bwahahahaha.  Love it.  I’m glad to see Tarsem showing his comedy chops; he has a great, twisted sense of humor.

For those not in the loop on film industry civil wars, Mirror Mirror was in a race to the finish with another Snow White project, Snow White and the Huntsman, which from that trailer looks a lot like a rip off of Immortals and Tarsem’s style in general, except he would probably do more of the effects in camera that what I’m seeing from the trailer.  Let’s see what Kristen’s Stewart does for the movie; she’s not exactly being played up in the trailer.  My bet is  Mirror Mirror is going to stomp and shatter SWATH completely, but I am proudly biased about that.

(Many thanks to Dame Bea for bringing this item to my attention.)

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Bradley Cooper was controversially named the sexiest man alive, about which I am ambivalent.  The good thing about the sexiest man announcement, as opposed to the sexiest woman, is I can actually imagine myself having sex with the winner in the shower of a college locker room, and that determines for me if he is indeed the sexiest man alive, because sex is what sexy is all about, right?

I’m not sure Cooper is my type, to be honest.  However, the perpetually silly Daily Beast shot back with a list of men who were sexy inside, some of whom I agreed with—Joseph Gorgon-Levitt, for instance—and some who almost made puke my post-workout protein shake.  Yes, Jonah Hill, I mean you.  I was happy to see that my hunny Seth Rogen made the top of the inwardly sexy men.  I could definitely see myself enjoying post-coital bagels and lox with him in bed on a rainy day, writing witty dialogue together, and I say something so funny he throws his head back and roars with laughter in that way he has, which I love so much, and then I roll onto him and…

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There is nothing like the ads on Manhunt.net to make you either throw up a bit in your mouth or scream with laughter, or both.  First it was lube that looks and feels like cum, which was such an unlikely hit it now comes in several brands, full pun intended.  And now they’ve introduced a throat-numbing spray that will help you go down on an 11-incher like Linda Lovelace.  Truly, hilariously revolting:

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The Schizo of the Week is nobody I’ve actually encountered, but wins the crown by default: Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernadez, who fired bullets at the White House in an attempt to kill Obama, even though the president was traveling at the time.  Oscar thinks he’s Jesus, but apparently not enough to change his name to Jesús, which he could have easily done because he is clearly Hispanic.  It’s a custom that is always a little unsettling for non-Hispanic Christians, rather like calling yourself Madonna is for Italians, but she’s a whole other personality disorder: