The King Is Gone But Not Forgotten

• The Monologue:
• Drew Brees won Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year award, the most shocking news since the sun came up this morning. (For the record, I wanted Josh Hamilton.)
• To protest a rule that low-income people could not use WIC to buy white potatoes, a man in Washington ate only potatoes for two months. The U.S. Department of Agriculture responded by not caring.
• Interpol is searching for the head of WikiLeaks. If only there was some sort of organization that could release information on where he's hiding...
• Random Pop Culture:
• After a relatively weak (or, more appropriately, meandering) season, the Sons of Anarchy finale was outstanding. The whole episode was good, but the point from when SAMCRO was waiting for the Russian Mafia on? Great music, great camera work, great twist, satisfying ending down even to the setup for next season. Bravo.
• Thursday night, 8PM, TNT: Heat at Cavs. I won't watch the whole thing, but I'm sure as hell watching the beginning and tuning in a couple of minutes early.
• I'm going to have to see this movie at some point after this spectacular review. The best is the director's Uwe Boll-esque -- minus the curses -- sentiment at the end.
• Random Video:
• More from 1992. It was a sick year. At some point, I'll list the albums that came out.

The Heat Went 1-2 Since My Last Post

• The Monologue:
• I realized I hadn't posted in almost a week. Not doing posts for almost a week?! I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO...
• A Spider-Man musical? What a great idea!!!
• Giving info to WikiLeaks is treason and treason has to be punished! Just ask Scooter Libby and, um, whoever it was that had him out Valerie Plame!
• Random Pop Culture:
• The end of last night's The Amazing Race pissed me off, big time. Absolute BS.
• Human Target revamped itself with some new characters and a slightly new premise. It was probably the most fun show on the air last year and it will take some time to find itself, but a lot of the pieces are there.
• Season finales this week for Sons of Anarchy, Terriers (hopefully not the series finale), and The Walking Dead. TV gets a lot less entertaining next week.
• Random Video:
• Okay, I'm officially obsessed with the "Class Reunion 1992" station on my Yahoo Music app. Let's do some music from 1992, a great music year, for a while.

Ears Bleeding Like The Guys In Star Trek II After Those Bug Things Crawled Out But Maybe In More Pain Than They Were In

I didn't post last night because all I did was watch college basketball until the wee hours. Duke looks very good. Kentucky and Washington set the bar for most entertaining game of the early season. To make up for it, here's a great new song that all the kids will be talking about. It's Angelina from The Jersey Shore!

An American Tragedy

No need to harp on the lowest common denominator humor to which a lazy How I Met Your Mother writing staff can sink, nor to talk about the obvious Stephen King influences in the writing of The Walking Dead. No, it's November 22, forty-seven years to the day that President Kennedy was assassinated by no fewer than two people in Dallas. The only way to pay homage to such an important date in American history is with one of our national treasures, Bret Michaels, performing the Star Mangled, er, Spangled Banner.

Worst of the Worst: #13, Constellation

After an opening flashback that is so schmaltzy that my laptop veritably oozed, the main character of Constellation -- played by none other than Billy Dee Williams -- walks through an airport concourse. He's finally back home in Alabama after having been away for a long time, drawn because of the death of his sister. He goes towards baggage claim, passing the Starbucks and gates that you'd see in an airport, teeming with passengers. And, as he passes these lines of people, some of the extras turn and stare at the camera. It was at this point that I got a big grin on my face and knew that I was in for something special.

Constellation, recipient of the rare Rotten Tomatoes "Blutarsky" (0%), is perfectly bad. The rare good moment is so incongruent in this film that it, itself, seems bad. The movie follows a family coming together for said funeral. The sister who passed had a long-kept secret; she had a love affair with a white man in the 1940s and paid the price for it. To be fair, I couldn't tell if the rednecks raped her, just beat her up, or merely cracked their knuckles, because nobody ever discussed what happened and she didn't seem to be bruised at all after the event. Just sad. So, so very sad. This sadness is apparent in the constant voice-over narration in the movie from the young version of the sister, played by Gabrielle Union, who was apparently going for some sort of Best Overactor award. When the family comes together -- along with a whole heck of a lot of random white love interests who nobody seems to say anything about even though they are afraid to speak of the dearly departed's one-time affair -- they hash out old problems between them. Lucky for them, none of them actually have even the slightest modicum of animosity towards each other, so the tension is extraordinarily low for a drama movie. Wonderful for the bereaved, but incredibly boring for us.

They all have names that are supposed to be folksy, but nobody actually has in real life, and the director gives us a great treat each time they meet each other. While the script is so cheesy that I couldn't eat meat while I was watching the movie, there is a smattering of ad-libbed scenes as the characters eat meals or have drinks. Chemistry between actors can be a powerful boon -- look at Swingers or Terriers -- but there is no chemistry here. They either talk over each other or wait way too long to make sure the other isn't still going to speak. One of the best laugh-out-loud moments of the movie happens during one of these ad-libs. The movie is rated PG13 and the director seemed to be shooting for that, given the violence that seemed to be cut from on-screen, but not explained. PG13 only allows for one "f-word" in the entire movie and that one occurrence comes in a big dramatic spot. So, later when one of the actors is ad-libbing and drops the "f-bomb," the audio cuts out. Better to not waste money on another take!

The music sounds like it came from someone's keyboard, and not someone horribly skilled at writing music. This music is used for background in one of the many, many, many scenes where characters stare at each other or just into space, thinking about how they can fix their lives. I assume that's what they're thinking since, again, there's little exposition as to what they learned from staring into space and what resolution there is in the end doesn't make much sense with the rest of the movie.

Billy Dee Williams is at his I-just-don't-give-a-crap best as he does the Billy Dee Williams chuckle and then stares into space. There are other actors that I recognized, but I won't embarrass them here. I will point out that Zoe Saldana acts circles around the rest of the cast. She came into her own last year with a good performance in Star Trek and a great -- and very underrated -- one in Avatar. She's so good in this movie that it makes you wonder if it could be only half-bad if everyone else was up to par with her. Unfortunately, because she is so much better than everyone else, it actually makes her parts not work at all because she doesn't fit with the rest of the garbage performances put up.

This, the review for the sixty-second film I've seen on this list, is one of the longest I've written yet and there is so much to love/hate about this movie that I could keep going. Like many funny-bad movies, the awfulness ends up taking over so any humor wears off. By the end, most of the things I had laughed at in the beginning became merely boring. Still, the humor that I found here was not only rich, but because I had never heard of this movie it was a surprise, which goes a long way. I like laughing at bad movies, and overwrought writing, bad acting, and poor direction? It works every time.

High-Fiving A Million Angels

• Random Pop Culture:
• Even with no Shirley and only a very strange two-second appearance by Pierce, tonight's Community may have been the best non-paintball episode of the show. Everything fit together perfectly and there were many -- many -- laugh-out-loud moments.
• 30 Rock was funny throughout, but it can be summed up in one line from Alec Baldwin. "It wasn't the feces, it was the poorly-scribbled hand-written notes that said, 'Help me.'" Monkey escape, indeed.
• House has taken a big step back from last season. It's not having a season anywhere close to as good as Grey's Anatomy is having. Ugh.
• Forget the fact that they always find a way to choke in the tournament (I've been burned by picking them too many times), #4 Pittsburgh is way overrated.
• Random Video:
• I hadn't actually seen or heard the Palin/Situation video until today. It is even worse (read: better) than any of us could have imagined. Best part is Bristol talking about why she's saving herself for marriage. Sex doesn't count if it results in a freaking out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy.

I Can't Be More Direct -- Watch 'Terriers'

• The Monologue:
• Best line from this article: "U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday's verdict confirms that the Obama administration's decision to try Gitmo detainees in civilian courts 'was a mistake and will not work.'" Also not working for Rep. Hoekstra: the 14th amendment.
• The Air Force is warning its troops not to use FourSquare or Facebook Places. Private Johnson is now Mayor of Fallujah! (@Fallujah with 13,999 others)
• Bristol Palin and Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino teamed up to make a PSA in favor of abstinence and safe sex. That video is so like a black fly in my Chardonnay.
• Random Pop Culture:
• I can't say it any more clearly -- FX's Terriers is the best show airing on TV right now, by far. It's funny, sad, suspenseful, and brilliantly acted and written. I can't recommend it enough.
• Now the two best players in this season of Survivor -- it's all relative -- are out and it's wide open between six of the remaining nine contestants. A big twist in tonight's episode shows that even in an off-year, the format still works.
• Human Target returned tonight. No better mindless fun on TV. Hawaii Five-0 is a distant second.
• I was playing with my Yahoo Music app and I found that with its new Pandora-like format, you can get stations called "Class Reunion" that let you pick only songs from a specific year. Now I can totally avoid any new music.
• Random Video:
• Wherever does Lady Antebellum get the ideas for their music?