The Greatness of Bully Beatdown.

Last week, some channel called Music Television produced and released a show that almost made up for the fact that this channel brought us The Hills, The Bay, Laguna Beach, The Seafoam Lodge, and whatever other shows have spawned from vapid people talking about vapid things. This show is simply called Bully Beatdown.

Bully Beatdown's an easy concept to grasp. You get a bully, in the case of episode one, this guy who just knocks out his older brother constantly and looks like a coyote with human features. He proclaims himself THE REAL BULLY at least once and brags about his ability to knock anyone out. So naturally, host Jason "Mayhem" Miller must put this man in his place.

The show's also got a simple idea. You put the bully in the ring for two rounds with a mixed martial arts-trained fighter and if he can survive without tapping out or without getting knocked out, he earns money. Each round has $5,000 on the line which when he taps out (worth $1,000 a tap) or gets knocked out (worth all $5,000), the person bullied gets the money.

Enough of pure explanation, here is why this show is great. First off, the two brothers here are amazingly goofy. The bullied older brother has the strangest and most amazingly stupid haircut in history. And the younger brother is described by Mayhem as "having the body of a meathead and the personality of a douchebag." The younger brother brags constantly, in more entertaining fashion, about how he will take down anything in his path, including the MMA fighter that he must fight at the show's end.

Another positive for this show is that they never spend too much on the small things and get right down to the fighting. They simply show why the bully is a bully and why the brother wants him to get beat down. And then they simply show the fight, complete in all of its MMA glory. And it totally works because it does both of these amazingly simple ideas in a way that's greatly entertaining.

The show is great because it is amazingly simple. It reminds me a lot of what made Pimp My Ride such an awesome show, because, you get what you want out of it. You want to stare at a car's interior with random TVs thrown in the trunk for whatever reason? Then, there you go. The same formula worked with Cribs and it's working in spades here. Mayhem Miller is a goofy guy much like Xzibit was a goofy guy on Pimp My Ride.

Simply put, you want simple greatness on television, you flip it to MTV for some Bully Beatdown. Nuff said.

Yay, Hollywood is political. (The shock of the century, no doubt.)

In an article that was written the day after the SAG Awards were given out and on the heels of the announcement that Golden Globe winner Mickey Rourke has decided to participate in Vince McMahon's sports entertainment spectacle Wrestlemania, pundits and the like think that Mickey Rourke's effort to be a case of life imitating art will cost him an Oscar. Now, there isn't much of an opinion on this to say that this is a legitimate issue. While the NY Mag article says that there's an implicit anti-Wrestlemania bias, they also have not had a major pro wrestling movie that has been solid enough to warrant even caring about such a thing. So basically, no one truly knows the truth in this situation.

However, if the issue of Sean Penn's performance and Mickey Rourke's performance is being decided because the latter actually wants to embrace the thing he portrayed, I see that as a non-issue. Of course, I'm viewing things through the scope of a perfect world where scripted sport is somehow shunned when scripted entertainment is seen as okay. But then again, that's another point for another time.

What is the point is the ridiculous possibility of something that's seen as "lower entertainment" being the cause of another's downfall and not say THE PERFORMANCE. Again, of course, politics is nothing new in Hollywood. Still, you kind of want some release from that perspective and that feeling that hey, maybe the BEST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR can win for such an achievement. Will that future subjectively ever happen? Well, no. But maybe I'm a dreamer. Maybe I'm just idealizing things. Who knows? Maybe Rourke wins an Oscar, goes to the main event of Wrestlemania, beats that Chris Jericho in a match with the Ram Jam, and grins the biggest grin he can. See kids? Idealized futures are pretty cool.

Random subjects of fun interest.

When you have a boring Monday, you tend to pay attention to the ridiculous things going on around you in the world. And they make you laugh, a lot. Here is a mere sampling of these things.

VH1 reality shows are highly implausible, ridiculous, stupid, kind of funny and hard to not watch.

There was yet another sighting of Real Chance of Love today. For those who don't know, Real Chance of Love is a reality show based around the premise that two guys can give random nicknames to semi-attractive, semi-clothed women and choose who really loves them out of this. Mind you that proving their love involves wrestling, which I guess makes it as improbable as Randy Savage fighting in a match for the honor of the late Miss Elizabeth. And so reality television and fake sport meet in some comparison that isn't bringing up Celebrity Championship Wrestling.

More obscure music mentions!

This week, I'm reviewing Andrew Bird's new record Noble Beast. Since you'll get the idea of that record when you read the piece, I think I'll talk a little about Fever Ray. She is one part of the electronic group The Knife, which I realize that it's kind of hard to get name recognition out of that. Still, she has a pretty decent solo record out that's been released digitally, which is very strange but cool territory. This isn't going to be a favorite for album of the year at year's end or anything, but eh, "If I Had A Heart" is a nice January diversion.

Video for "If I Had A Heart"


Also, not as obscure, but I shall pimp the greatness of the Gaslight Anthem once again with some nice awesome videos.

Videos for "The '59 Sound" and "Old White Lincoln"



These guys have already had a big past two years of going from an unknown band from New Jersey to a band with a serious devoted cult following. It helps that The '59 Sound is a record that's really a great grass roots record. It's just an album that more and more people are finally getting their hands on and enjoying very much and passing on to their friends, which kind of fits the old school aesthetic of the band.

Thoughts I Thought During the Golden Globes.

- Kate Winslet deserved about two Golden Globes and six Oscars for that one scene they showed from The Reader.
Because wow. I didn't think I'd be amazed by a scene that roughly constitutes to a man getting out of a bath and a woman hugging him. That's good filmmaking. No wait, brilliant filmmaking. Stephen Daldry is my hero.

- Ricky Gervais: one of the few men to ever make the Holocaust funny.
And that's only because he mocked the fact that every other movie this year had to have a friggin' Nazi in it.

- Tracy Morgan makes something with Cate Blanchett funny.
"Deal with it, Cate Blanchett!"

- Tina Fey makes something with DianeFan funny.
"Suck it, DianeFan." Basically 30 Rock made the show amazing. Go Sarah Palin!

- Colin Farrell made me forget in roughly two minutes that this man was in Miami Vice, Alexander, Hart's War, The Recruit, Phone Booth, Daredevil, and American Outlaws. (The last two I had to look up.)
Plus he won for In Bruges. Which I hear is mindblowingly awesome, and probably made up for S.W.A.T. and Pride and Glory at least.

- What group of people thought that basically showing the ending to Slumdog Millionaire was a brilliant idea?
Really, what group? Especially when it winning Best Drama Picture or whatever, more people are by default interested. So you basically give them most of the final frames, and tell them to act surprised. Good work, Golden Globes.

- The last two awards. What greatness.
Mickey Rourke takes home Best Actor, and it's well deserved. Even if Penn's performance is more actorly, Rourke's is pure awesome. And then we got a great Globes moment when Darren Aronofsky gives the finger on live TV. And Mickey Rourke made looking really rubbery look cool (and tragic) in The Wrestler, followed now by looking like Johnny Depp circa 2003. Good man. Bring on Iron Man 2!

Slumdog Millionaire takes home Best Drama Picture and it's well deserved. Although, The Reader is probably more jarring, and Benjamin Button probably deserves its praise, Slumdog is the one that at least gives the most joy with its conclusion. (Which you can sum up by the fact that The Reader is about a Nazi war crime trial and Ben Button is about death or Brad Pitt or both.) Come on, it could be worse. Revolutionary Road could've won. Plus, the producer said the "f" word (even if it was blanked) on live TV. Which was pretty funny.

- Most of the funny people gave no crap, and most of the not funny people were friggin' hilarious.
Seth Rogen wasn't funny, which was stunning. Sacha Baron Cohen was painfully unfunny. And then Mickey Rourke thought that Downey should speak for him, and it was hilarious. Same with Colin Farrell talking about cocaine and getting into an almost literary tirade during his acceptance speech. Same with stoned Renee Zellweger. Okay, that was only funny because, wow, she fell off fast.

So yes, fun show that was cool to watch. The three hours went by pretty quickly, and there was a lot of entertainment to be had. The Oscars could learn to just remove that host formality and just get to the awards for once this year.

What I Learned From Saturday Night.

So, it's late December. Late December means watching mediocre college football teams battling it out for who truly deserves a bowl of poinsettias, or a bowl representing the website of a pizza joint. I mean, sure, there's Christmas, but everyone knows about that. There is a pure adoration for Christmas already. Everyone loves Christmas, even if they don't love Christ or Santa or any other figure that impedes into this ritualistic gift-giving time of year.

That said, the best thing I possibly did this weekend, other than watching a few movies I wanted to see, was to immerse myself into the positive effects that professional wrestling can have on soldiers. And how simplistic men (and women) in tights doing fake fighting make a good impact on the armed forces of America.

Yes, I watched WWE's Tribute to the Troops in lieu of the hardcore war between South Florida and...that team South Florida beat in football.

Now mind you, I have an odd fascination with WWE's product. I am talking about a company whose last major storyline involved a seven-foot-tall, 300 pound monster whining about what he and a blonde chick with the same first and last name had together as a couple. The answer, of course, is nothing, but over two hours, we were led to essentially who the blonde was having sex with. This is a product that I cannot justify in the fact that it is pure campiness and upright stupidity. This same company has a Playboy model finding feelings for a man that is functionally retarded excluding when a ring bell is rung. This is hardly the nexus of anything thought-provoking on television.

And yet, that loon Vince McMahon does something that no one else probably will. He's made a tradition ever since the war in Iraq broke out to send his group of superstars to Iraq to entertain the soldiers. Even now, when the celebritocracy avoids Iraq like the plague on the basis of the war being unjustified, WWE spends a random time in December actually giving their moral support to the soldiers. It's not a pro-war sentiment, either. It's merely a pro-soldier sentiment.

I didn't even think I could stand a show in which an address by George W. Bush opened the telecast, but the show is impartial. It merely states the situation, and that WWE helps the soldiers' morale. And then there are good guys versus bad guys and the good guys always have to win. It's a feel good special, except replacing the overbearing Christmas sentiment with American sentiment. And it's a time where something ironic and great happens, in that the "fake sport" brings a sentiment that's very much genuine and stunningly respectful. Maybe something even more genuine than a football team fighting for the Meineke Car Care Bowl.

Diversion: Yes, I'm blogging about True Life.

There are a lot of things in this world that shape it. All kinds of music, film, and even television. And what's the most decrepit influence on our society right now? Clearly MTV, right? Actually, not so much. I can't lie, I don't mind being an apologist for MTV's campy programming, because it's all terrible in the cognitive sense. They focus on the vapid. Place people on high pedestals that hardly deserve it. But wait, isn't that life's general path anyway? Look around you at the popular kids, the sorority queens, and the frat guys. What have they all achieved? The success of being attractive to a general audience of people with mostly no other redeeming qualities otherwise. That's exactly MTV for you, and yes, this immediately makes it a repellent. And yes, it's the perfect ideology of why people hate MTV. They hate it because it represents the people they equally can't stand and yet are forced to see on a daily basis. They maybe are even friends with "those people" despite their actual apprehension against them.

Of course, this leads to True Life, which weirdly is not entirely vapid in some instances. The stories tend to be engrossing because there's usually an example of relatibility in at least one of the stories involved. The episode I saw had to do with embarrassing parents with the point being to over-exaggerate the parents, the embarrassment they cause their kids, and the rift between kid and parent that ultimately humanizes the parents at the end.

We are shown a portrait of two girls, one a reserved teen girl who's more or less trying to find normalcy in her life and another who's craving desperately for individualism and to kind of sort of get away from the shadow of her bimbo-esque mother.

The more reserved girl's parents are clowns who work at a circus and have a house with tons of memorabilia. They're also crazy and stunned whenever she decides to go out on a date with a kid nicknamed Squirrel (I kid you not). Of course, they also demand that this date be at the circus and that of course, they watch from a faraway glance. But this brings on a nice bit of idealism. We get the idea that the reserved girl is pretty average, in the good sort of way. She has the friend with the Jack Skellington jacket and the slightly gothy overtones, but they're all normal, and even by the episode's climax of the parents bringing their clown buddies over to "embarrass" the child, you find out that it's all in good fun and that embracing eccentricities over fighting them ultimately is more rewarding.

Yes, such a universal message of unity came from a frickin' MTV show. I'm as amazed as you.

The other story is more vapid, but as similar to a point. It's more of an examination that first digs into the idea of the "cool parent" and why kids are going to be embarrassed regardless by that type of parent, because that's of course the job of a teenager to rebel. But then it digs into something that is more involving and gripping, dealing with the issue of parents who never let their kids truly be themselves by influencing their decisions with an iron fist and taking away their individualism. This reaches its climax over the 14-year-old girl asking her mother for a lip ring. Her mother vehemently rejects the idea at first, but after a series of events including a party in which the mother turns into your typical Los Angeles bimbo in the process of a night, the idea is questioned.

The reason this is gripping to the viewer is not the lip ring at all. For all we know, the war could be over anything such as trying out for the volleyball team or the school production of Hansel and Gretel or whatever. The fact that it's about a lip ring is completely useless to the point. The war itself is just about some sense of individualism. If the mother is allowed to "be herself" by dressing in Pamela Anderson-esque clothes, then why doesn't the kid try to show what she feels she needs to be herself? And yet, she's still a kid who's going to playfully mock her mother after the mother agrees with this decision, because that's normal. That's teenage rebellion.

True Life is not always nearly as engrossing, but there's a lot of intriguing morals to get out of any episode. And for any show on MTV of all things to emphasize the themes of being yourself and having fun with the people you're around and the experiences you get to share, it's an accomplishment.

Not that the other shows on the channel aren't gripping in that "oh, this is ironically awesome" sort of way, of course.

(Writer's Note: I know this has nothing at all to do with music, despite the fact that it involves a show on a channel that has music in the name. I also know that I could make a tired joke about that channel no longer playing music, but that's far too painfully obvious, so I'm not. I also realize that this could read as "In Defense Of...MTV" but it's not really. I don't watch enough of it to defend it successfully, really.

The final edition of In Defense Of shall be up on the weekend. Thank you for reading.)