In March of last year, Los Angeles was blanketed with some kinda misogynist-seeming billboards in promotion of a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You can check out a post April Flores wrote on the topic for an in-depth analysis of the ad campaign, but the gist of it was finding humor in being insanely hateful about an ex. Not insanely hateful with wit, just insanely hateful. I often find hostile humor funny, but this was just stuff on the cleverness level of “you suck” and “my mommy thinks you suck too”. So, at any rate, I didn’t bother to see the movie.

This weekend, I was feeling a little under the weather and I get free On-Demand, so I thought without much optimism that I’d give a comedy a few minutes to draw me in. I turned on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, fully expecting to turn it off within less than five minutes. Go figure.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is actually a really nice romantic comedy. The humor is done with great humanity and one of the most notable aspects of the movie is precisely that nobody is the villain. Kristen Bell might be the sadistic Elle on Heroes, but, as the character of Sarah Marshall, she plays the role in a fully humanized sympathetic way. Writer and leading man Jason Segal’s jilted Peter Bretter is precisely not the sort of guy who would be really horrible to an ex. Which makes the situation he finds himself in — at a resort where Sarah Marshall is hanging out with her new beau rocker Aldous Snow of Infant Sorrow, played by a hilarious Russell Brand — all the more humorous. Peter Bretter is very sympathetic and he is treated with kindness by front desk hospitality agent Rachel Jansen, played by a very beautiful Mila Kunis. I don’t want to include any spoilers, but the whole cast is amazing and everyone has just perfect comic timing. Maybe it is the writing. Maybe it is first time director Nicholas Stoller’s direction. Mostly, it seems like just a really nice alchemy of big talents coming together. Other notables are SNL’s Bill Hader and Liz Cackowski as the stepbrother Brian Bretter and his wife, Paul Rudd as a cute surfing instructor with limited short term memory, Jonah Hill as a waiter who is just a little too forward, and 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer as a religious innocent who gets honeymoon coaching from Aldous Snow. Plus more fun cameos and a killer spoof of CSI, which Jason Segal actually also had a recurring role on.

Two more fun things about Forgetting Sarah Marshall to endear it to me: First off, as many of you probably know, SLC Punk is one of my favorite movies of all time and the part of Mike, the angry fighting sort of Positive Force punk in the movie, was played by Jason Segal. Secondly, there are muppets by the actual Jim Henson workshop in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Vampire muppets.

When I heard Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg was hosting the MTV Movie Awards, I thought for a split second about whether they would be worth seeing. Hot Rod was an unwatchable mess of a movie, but Andy Samberg brought us Dick in a Box, Natalie Portman Rap, I’m On A Boat, and more awesomeness. My brother went one year and reported it was unutterably dull, but staying home and TiVo can assist with that. But I only really thought about even TiVoing it for a split second. I suspect Eminem, who walked out of the proceedings, wishes he had not even TiVoed it as well.

I wondered what remotely cool or remotely music-related movies even came out last year, besides Twilight? From all reports, the only notable events of the MTV Movie Awards evening were the premiere screening of the Twilight New Moon Trailer (which we’ll have for you here in a moment) and that grody Sacha Baron Cohen creep being dropped on Eminem. Basically Sacha Baron Cohen put on this white outfit which riffs unoriginally on the already satirical White Gold heavy metal milk commercials and shows his ass (which ranks lower than Fred Durst’s ass on the List of Asses Nobody Wants to See) and MTV flew him over the audience on a wire and dropped him in Eminem’s lap, crotch up. If multiplatinum rapper and movie star Eminem, who has the best gothic video on MTV right now, ups the MTV Movie Awards star quotient by gracing them with his presence, how disrespectful and unappreciative is it to stick an unappealing stranger’s tiny groin in his face?

If you don’t know who Sacha Baron Cohen is, count yourself fortunate, but he is basically this disingenuous pseudo-comedian who never owns his own stupid presentation. Sacha Baron Cohen always pretends that he is just playing a character, but most of his characters are exaggerations of someone trying pathetically hard to be cool. The ego protection Sacha Baron Cohen is engaging in there is so obvious, just in case someone notices that he is not cool at all, that I find him painful to watch under the best of circumstances.

I guess one could argue that Eminem plays spoof characters in some of his videos, but I feel that is deeply different because one has a sense that sometimes Eminem is clowning around and sometimes he is being raw and real. And nobody would greenlight flying Eminem over the MTV Movie Awards audience and dropping him in Bret Michaels’ lap, crotch up.

It is now the morning after and Twilight unsurprisingly swept the MTV Movie Awards with standard award show fare like Best Movie and MTV special awards like Best Fight Scene. So Robert Pattinson who played vampire leading man Edward Cullen, Kristen Stewart who played viewpoint character Bella Swan, and Cam Gigandet who played bad boy vampire James all spent a lot of time clutching boxes of gold popcorn on stage. Apparently the other music-related movie worthy of MTV consideration was High School Musical 3: Senior Year which starred Zac Efron. Zac Efron is nice-looking enough and I saw him host SNL and so I can’t say whether High School Musical 3: Senior Year was robbed when Zac Efron lost in the Best Kiss category he was nominated in which was won by Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from Twilight. I’m not sure what Zac Efron did win, as even the clips from the MTV Movie Awards show this year are kinda unwatchable and IMDB shows no 2009 wins, but, when he was called to the stage by Sacha Baron Cohen, who was apparently a presenter, poor Zac Efron, being put on the spot, looked like he wanted no part of it and was considering following Eminem out of the building. Edit: MTV reports that, although most viewers missed it in the hubbub, Zac Efron won for Best Male Performance (as opposed to Robert Pattinson’s win for Best Breakthrough Performance Male Winner.)

I’m going to get on posting that Twilight New Moon trailer now, but, seriously, I think Eminem should get a Get Out of Jail Free card for pistol-whipping Sacha Baron Cohen any time he feels like it. Ideally without warning and in the (tiny) crotch area.

Some pundits are suggesting today that Eminem was not really annoyed and just acted angry as part of the gag. If Eminem was not actually disgusted, then he deserves an Oscar or at least an MTV Movie Award for his convincing performance.

There’s a lady that I know, if I didn’t know her…
she’d be the lady, I didn’t know…

Doesn’t Paula Collins look like the prototype Kara ‘Studio 57‘ DioGuardi in this sketch? Anyway, watching the AI8 finally tonight, I just couldn’t get past the similarity between the lyrical stylings of these classic Derek Stevens (Dana Carvey) hits. Poor Adam Lambert and Kris Allen had to suck it up for their final performance and belt out their best version of a comically bad song ‘No Boundaries‘, courtesy of Idol Judge DioGuardi. Someone had it right when they decided that the losing contestant tomorrow is the one that gets to face the further humiliation of having this gem of a track on their next album. Welcome to L.A. I think we’ve got a hit on our hands.

Tonight’s Saturday Night Live was hosted by John Malkovich and featured T.I. as the musical guest, but it is notable for a few other things as well.

(1) Amy Poehler is back from having her baby and she really rocked her Hilary Clinton impression and the news with Seth Myers and Amy Poehler was very funny.

(2) Not one, but two sketches featured Kristin Wiig’s enormous cleavage. If you are rereading that sentence, yeah, I notice breasts and I never noticed her to be stacked before. So I think this episode debuted either Kristin Wiig’s new boob job or some impressive new falsies technology.

(3) Almost every SNL Digital Short demonstrates that SNL is on top of their fake hair technology because I normally don’t like wigs, but Andy Samberg regularly sports spot-on counterculture hairstyle wigs. Hip hop, club kid, punk rock, rasta, or gloomy brooding synth europop like tonight and they all look pretty convincing, even to my extremely trained eye. Tonights SNL Digital Short was, in a sense, the sequel to
Dick in a Box. In case this is the first time you’ve logged onto the internet this year (just got out of maximum security solitary, desert island castaway, whatever) and you are unfamiliar with the “Dick in a Box” video, “Dick in a Box” is probably the most popular viral web video after “Two Girls, One Cup” and possibly (but probably not) “Lazy Sunday”. It starred Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake singing a sweet ballad about the best gift to wrap up for your girl. The song was funny to begin with, while disturbingly catchy, but what really put it over the top was the hilarious acting and the fact that they actually had Justin Timberlake doing essentially a lewd Justin Timberlake in it. Justin Timberlake also makes an appearance in the new “Jizz in My Pants” video, which NBC was not too embarrassed to air or place on their web site, but was too embarrassed to spell out Ji****. “Jizz in My Pants” is the first single from The Lonely Island, which is the comedy troupe/band by Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. It stars Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone. I guessed Andy Samberg’s costar was Chris Martin from Coldplay or possibly a stray member of Depeche Mode, but I was mistaken. Convincing in his role, I guess. The love jizz interests in the music video are played by former model Molly Sims and former Meadow Soprano/current Turtle squeeze from Entourage Jamie Lyn Sigler.

Fun fact to know and share: “Dick in a Box” won an Emmy. Can you imagine winning an Emmy and having to wonder how to break it to your parents?

If you go to NBC.com right now, it looks like you can watch a full replay of last Sunday’s episode of The Apprentice: Los Angeles. Only the link on the front page of the site 404’s. I don’t blame them one bit. If my name were on that pale imitation of their earlier success, I wouldn’t want to extend the viewership of that show either.

Full disclosure: I have watched every single episode of The Apprentice. I watched all of the Donald Trump Coke Classic shows. And I watched all of the Martha Stewart New Coke shows, even with the lackluster candidates provided to Martha, and even though I have never seen anything else of Martha Stewart. Unless you count SNL sketches. Realistically, I think my viewing habits re: The Apprentice make it more meaningful when I say that I expect to permanently remove it from my TiVo queue later today. I’m writing this at 2am Saturday night/Sunday morning, January 14, and the show airs Sunday nights. At the end of this article, I’m going to tell you a spoiler for tonight’s episode. I know this secret info either because (a) I went to college with some big muckymucks at NBC or because (b) I have committed my valuable time and sharp business acumen to the lame task of figuring this out.

There was a lot I really loved about the first season of The Apprentice. I loved the whole businessman-as-rockstar vibe of the show. Before I lived in Los Angeles myself, I used to constantly get asked if I was in a band. There is no reason why living your life passionately and flamboyantly and taking the road less traveled should equate to being good at singing or playing popular music. Of course, living in Los Angeles has sapped some of my desire to put on some over-the-top outfit and traipse around town. Sure, I’m a writer and a photographer and those might sound like creative pursuits to someone who hadn’t been overexposed to La-La-Land. Truly, people in my town tend to view anyone dressed very creatively as either (a) a stylist or (b) a tourist or (c) talent. And, when LA people say “talent,” they do not mean it as in “good at something,” but rather as the raw meat of the Hollywood machine, the stuff they grind up every day. Coming out of a punk rock DIY background, I find the idea of “talent” as another species anathema. I started off publishing pictures of my friends and peers. When I picked up a camera, I wasn’t documenting something I felt separate from. But I found that dressing the way I did was a drag.

If someone had directly yelled at me and overtly told me I had to change, I would have spit on them. They could not have forced me. But the Los Angeles pressure was more subtle than that. I found that, if I looked hot on a shoot day, the photos often didn’t work out as well, as models were likely to get either competitive or amorous or both. It is easier to not bother blow-drying my hair when I got out of the tub, so I wasn’t going to bother, if it made my day harder. And I found it difficult to do business. I would meet with people where I thought we could make win/win deals and they would try to take advantage of me and be shocked when I noticed. My kinky and freaky clothing and my multi-colored hair seemed to make the businesspeople assume I was wet behind the ears. It made it a lot more likely that there were going to be sharks circling me. Sharks who were sure my looks meant blood in the water. Sharks who were going to be really really pissed when they didn’t get a meal. And I definitely bear more than a few scars from sharks I didn’t manage to get away from in time.

So, I know I’m not as obviously flamboyant as I once was, but Donald Trump became a bit of a personal hero to me, when he displayed a combination of business wisdom and charismatic garishness. Most CEOs do not get in front of the camera and I appreciated that he did. In his famous boardroom scenes, where contestants on the show were eliminated, Trump had two very businesslike lieutenants in Carolyn Kepcher and George Ross. That first season of the show, Trump also had an amazingly impressive assortment of candidates. The structure of the show was to split the candidates into two teams and have them compete against one another in business tasks. The first season candidates seemed like truly exceptionally capable and innovative businesspeople. They impressed and intrigued even with the ways they addressed a task as simple as running a lemonade stand. At the part of each episode where Trump would tell the viewers some nugget of Trumpian wisdom, I used to hang on his every word.

This makes my disappointment in The Apprentice: Los Angeles much worse. The NBC web site has nicknames for all of this season’s candidates. They are pretty uniformly stupid and include such winning phrases as The Webhead and The Believer and The Blonde. The candidates from the first season of The Apprentice appeared to be, perhaps lower on the totem pole of life than Donald Trump, at least as presented. But they were still presented as all being winners. Many had achieved greatness before the show and many went on to still greater achievements after it and perhaps partly because of it. The name of the game this season, however, appears to be to degrade the candidates as much as possible. Why Trump would want to work with someone he has already humiliated is anyone’s guess.

The first twist on the show this season is that the losing team has to sleep outside. Essentially the two teams compete against one another on various basic business tasks and whichever team loses, not only has a member fired, but they have to sleep in tents in the backyard of a house. They refer to the house where the winning team sleeps as “The Mansion,” but the view from their backyard doesn’t look to me like Mark Burnett and Donald Trump sprang for the best Los Angeles real estate. Actually, it looks like “The Mansion” is in Southern California, but not technically in Los Angeles at all. Additionally, the entire winning team sleeps in the same room on beds which look like they were purchased last minute at Ikea. “The Mansion” looks like a decent enough house and placing a whole television show in a house or two is difficult, but glorifying that pedestrian abode just gives the lie to everything Trump has ever praised or bragged about in the past. Trump Tower, where the New York-based seasons were shot, looked nice. Candidates had roommates, but at least it was not a summer camp style dormitory. I cringe in embarrassment for this season’s crop as they go on for the cameras about the haves and the have nots and how sleeping outside makes people hungrier to win and being indoors makes victory so much sweeter. Keep in mind that we don’t really have weather in Los Angeles, so it is not like the people in the backyard are getting snowed on. Has Trump actually fallen so far that the best thing he could offer winners was the opportunity to sleep indoors? Has he actually managed to find people he thinks are good at business who are dazzled merely by having a roof over their heads? Mind you, a central plot point of the season opener for The Apprentice: Los Angeles was refusing to let businesspeople go to the bathroom. I’m not making that up. I wish I were. Each season of The Apprentice has shown less of the interesting business aspects than the last. I thought the shift in focus towards personality conflicts between contestants was bad, but telling professionals they can’t use the toilet and filming how they react is just pathetic.

Other things which suck about The Apprentice: Los Angeles include Trump having fired one of his lieutenants, Carolyn Kepcher, for enjoying the limelight too much. This suggests that the mere act of pointing a camera at someone makes people think they are a greater person at the very same moment it turns them into a lesser person. Maybe true and maybe a justified rightsizing, but it makes it look like working for Trump is not quite the “job of a lifetime” that the commercials for his show suggest. George Ross, with his brilliant insight and professional gravitas, apparently still works for the Trump organization, but he doesn’t really care for LA and has work to do in New York. So this past week’s boardroom, Trump had his daughter Ivanka Trump on one side and the leader of the winning team on the other. Of course, the leader of the winning team had to act like a jerk and rub her victory in the face of the losers (even thought they lost by a very very slim margin.) Here is the big twist coming up tonight: The candidates already know that the winning team’s leader (The Hottie) will remain the leader as long as she is winning, but what they do not know is that she is going to have to switch teams and try to lead the people she just lorded it over in the boardroom. Hardy-har-har.

I thought Ivanka Trump came across great on the most recent season of the show, when she guested. Her image then was tough, beautiful, flawless, brutal but fair. Unfortunately, she apparently went to image coaches over the summer and she just comes across as a mean person with bad manners now. Her taking Carolyn’s place on Donald’s left also gives one the sense that nepotism is going to be the way in the Trump organization and it may make no difference how hard someone works. Which makes viewers ask why anyone would compete hard to get a job working for the Trump family, especially when they never let anyone else finish a sentence.

Speaking of Ivanka, most internet users will have been unable to escape the recent feud between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ll give the Cliff’s notes, so anyone who missed it previously will now have this data filling up their gray matter. Trump owns a pageant or two. A couple of pageant girls were seen out on the town, behaving in a supposedly unseemly manner i.e. allegedly drinking, doing lines, possibly having sex partners back to her place, and maybe kissing girls. The implication was that the two pageant babes were lovers. There was a big public brouhaha where stripping one girl of her crown was discussed but she was given a second chance and the whole thing was unseemly for all involved. So Rosie stated publicly that she felt Donald did not have the moral high ground or compass to judge a twenty-year-old girl. So Trump called Rosie fat and is suing her and Ivanka told the press she felt Rosie was a bully. I’d feel more sympathy there, if Ivanka and her father were not both coming across as such bullies on The Apprentice: Los Angeles.

Full disclosure: Although I understand that Rosie appears on the show and has said inflammatory things on it before, I have never watched The View. Unless you count SNL sketches. It is my understanding that Rosie O’Donnell is a famous lesbian and my opinion that she may have felt a responsibility to speak out about the pageant nonsense. Or she could be a jerk. I have no idea.

Now, maybe I’m just letting my own sexual fantasies intrude here, but I get the impression Ivanka Trump knows how to please a woman. On the list of things this former Trump fan is horrified by is his apparent homophobia. Is it really that awful if some pageant winners make out? Is it really that awful if Rosie O’Donnell is not physically attractive to Donald Trump? Is Ivanka Trump not on the cover of The Advocate because Trump would consider it unseemly? And, most importantly, by being on the show The Apprentice, does Trump have the right to go after Rosie in court? Does The Advocate have the right to put Ivanka on their cover whether or not she wants to be there? Are they public figures who are subject to public comment? What makes someone a public figure? Does becoming a public figure make someone a worse person? I don’t know all the answers, but watching the tragic devolution of this brilliant TV show, I am definitely thinking about the questions. I hope I am not causing any damage by pointing my own cameras at people I think are cool.

At any rate, I think I won’t be buying any more Trump books or watching any more Apprentice shows after tonight. I do intend to continue to watch Saturday Night Live. But I won’t be watching Donald Trump any more. Unless you count SNL sketches.