Halo 3 comes out tomorrow, and it’s a sure bet to make Bungie enough money to choke a whole fleet of Arabian stallions (which is the unit by which I measure money). Their innovative advertising, depicting a diorama of the ubiquitous final battle between the Covenant and Master Chief, has been no small part of the hype machine leading up to the game.

On one hand, it’s nice to see that we’ve progressed beyond the need to prove in our gaming ads that our game can function successfully while wide-eyed eight-year-olds play and an urban stereotype declares it “radical.” Gears of War kicked things off nicely with their cinematic ad, and the Halo 3 team has followed in kind. On the other hand? The above ad, depicting a thinly veiled Russian Holocaust survivor reminiscing about how Master Chief allowed him to hold out hope against the invading Naz…uh, Covenant horde.

Major Czerneck even describes how they “ran out of ammo” and had to scavenge bullets from bodies on the ground, a familiar scenario for anyone who’s played the Russian part of Call of Duty. Maybe I’m a little oversensitive, but come on, are we really going to start marketing the HOLOCAUST now? Look out for Bungie’s next title, World of Warcraft: Birkenau.

Believe: in the power of American advertising.

After canceling a White Stripes tour citing Meg White’s “acute anxiety” on September 11th, a mediocre-at-best sex tape is now floating around the web featuring a girl who kinda sorta looks like Meg White (NSFW). Is there a correlation between White’s “anxiety” and this tape, or was she just nervous about another terrorist attack on 9/11? She never struck me as much of a patriot. I watched the video (for research purposes, of course - CRACKED has always been known for its tradition of responsible journalism), and while I can’t say for sure if it’s Meg White or not, I can say with authority that it’s definitely a video of two people boning. Good enough for me. What do you guys think?

In other news, Rodney Dangerfield’s wife Joan is suing a former friend to prevent him from making public “highly private, extremely sensitive and very personal” video footage of the late comedian. He says it’s for a documentary that he intends to premiere at Sundance next year, but it’s also 200 hours of footage - there’s probably some fucking in there somewhere. When that one leaks I think I’ll probably skip it.

Okay, fine - maybe just a peek.

September 26, 2007 is the premiere of ABC’s new series Dirty Sexy Money starring former Six Feet Under star, Peter Krause. Inexplicably, I’m looking forward to this show about a highly powerful Kennedy-esque family, despite some of the show’s obvious problems. First off, Billy Baldwin also has a role in it. Yeah, I know. He was kind of good in The Squid and the Whale, but you can’t just make Fair Game go away overnight. (Or even 12 years later). Second, while Krause was a central character in HBO’s masterful Six Feet Under, crediting him for that show’s quality is like honoring me for fighting urban violence because I went to the see The Brave One last week. But the show’s biggest problem —by far— is its title: Dirty Sexy Money. ABC execs clearly hit the “random” button on their focus group supercomputer to come up with that one. Follow up entries were New Booty Diamonds and Happy Candy Blowjob.

Dane Cook, the coked up Fraggle who took the comedy world by storm last year, has his first star vehicle coming out today. Since I’m a fan of comedy, seeing it ranks somewhere around taking a jog while holding in an immense dump on the list of things I want to do this weekend. But I’ve been closely monitoring its reviews on Rotten Tomatoes because I’m utterly convinced that this movie will end Dane Cook’s career. I’m not saying that because of the Fuck Dane Cook sentiment that’s been growing on the web over the past 12 months (the internet was fucking PSYCHED for Snakes on a Plane, and look where that movie landed).

But when I saw the previews for Good Luck Chuck at the beginning of the summer there were audible groans in the theatre, a bad sign since these folks would soon be laughing uproariously at a wise cracking Justin Long.

It wasn’t clear what was wrong. The premise isn’t any worse than your typical Farelly Brothers flick, Jessica Alba was showing dramatic range by wearing panties with a penguin over the pubic mound, and Dane Cook was doing his zany fist pumping thing. And then I noticed it: Dane Cook has Polar Express eyes. That is to say they are creepily dead, and incapable of conveying emotion.

See?

Polar Express performed horribly at the box office, presumably because children and adults alike were terrified of characters that were supposed to be cute and empathetic. Well, Chuck is a romantic comedy, which means it relies on it’s male lead to be charismatic (it’s why Luke Wilson’s romantic comedies suck and Hugh Grants are awesome). When a charismatic actor won’t take no for an answer in his pursuit of a woman, it’s chivalrous. When someone with the cold dead eyes of a video game character won’t take no for an answer, he’s going to remind you of a serial rapist.  The Tomatometer is hovering at 3% right now, which would make it the worst reviewed movie of the year. I’m setting the over-under for the weekend Box Office at $10 Million and taking the under. Good luck indeed.

    Judge Scott Gordon has ruled that Britney Spears must undergo random drug and alcohol tests to see if she’s fit to be a mother. If her last, glassy-eyed, painful-to-watch performance is any indication, there’s more than a good chance that she will fail those tests, leaving her two children in the sole custody of ex-husband Kevin Federline.

To be honest, I’m psyched because I really feel like I’m finally a part of a pop star’s meltdown. I was born in the late eighties, so I really only caught the tail end of Michael Jackson’s Mutant Train to Sodomy Town, and I wasn’t really old enough for him to be a relevant figure when I was growing up. His transformation didn’t really register with me because the only Jackson I knew was Crazy Jackson.

But Britney? Man, I remember when she was the cock of the god damn walk. I was never a fan, but growing up I certainly understood that she was a Pop Star. She was a super huge deal.

I loved watching her go from Untouchable Superstar to Sinead O’VaginaOnDisplay in record time. Maybe it’s a generational thing, I don’t know. Some people watched Elvis go from super-sexy to fat-sexy and eventually to dead-on-a-toilet-sexy. Some people saw the slow transition from a black superstar to a white pedarest. Me, I got to watch the innocent school girl shave her head and transform into the Weekly World News’s Bat Child. When I watched her bounce around on stage at the VMA’s, like a big hunk of ham in black underwear, I thought “This has got to be the low point.” But now a judge is making her take a drug test to find out if she’s as responsible as Kevin Federline. To really drive this point home, I’d like to close things out by quoting Federline’s “America’s Most Hated” off of 2006’s Playing With Fire:

So I duck and roll
Middle fingers still up sayin’ fuck the globe
And my dawgs still down
We dont trust them hoes
I live life like a King
I was extra stoned
Kevin Federline

In the aftermath of his recent suicide attempt, the media has focussed on Owen Wilson’s relationship with Kate Hudson, and ignored the more interesting relationship between Wilson and director Wes Anderson.

Wilson and Anderson were college roommates, got their big break together co-writing Bottle Rocket, and went on to collaborate on the scripts for Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, making their creative partnership responsible for three of the greatest comedies of the past quarter century. After Tenenbaums they stopped writing together, and Anderson’s subsequent film Life Aquatic, a gorgeous, humorless exercise in the quirky use of the color turquoise, was a Paul McCartney level disappointment of a solo project.

Being the sort of person who thinks too much about these sorts of things, I always suspected there was an element of truth in Wilson’s character Eli Cash, probably the funniest and most resonant in The Royal Tenenbaums. Cash was an approval-seeking author who got addicted to drugs after becoming suddenly and randomly famous for a ridiculous novel (”Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t?”). The rumors of Wilson’s drug use were already circulating at the time, so it wasn’t a stretch to think that the character came from a place of truth, or possibly concern on Anderson’s behalf.

I was just reading an unremarkable statement issued by Anderson in the wake of Wilson’s suicide attempt when I came across something that gave me the chills. It said that in Anderson’s upcoming film Darjeeling Limited, a film Wilson stars in but didn’t co-write, “Wilson plays a distraught man — bandaged throughout the film — who other characters imply has attempted suicide.” Sort of creepy right?

All of this might not add up to much more than a couple of coincidences, but while everyone’s asking Kate Hudson if she saw the warning signs, it’s worth noting that like any romantic relationship, a good creative partnership requires that you lay yourself bare. Anderson and Wilson had one of the good ones and both have seemed lost since it ended.

The movies they collaborated on always told sad stories that ended on hopeful notes. The most hopeful ending I can think of to this sad story (and sad blog post, sorry, I’ll try to make my next one about penises with mustaches drawn on) would be to have Anderson and Wilson collaborate on another script at some point down the road.

Last week, Michigan, (ranked 5th in the country), lost to the Appalachian State Mountaineers, (ranked nothing in nowhere). Also, it was opening day. Also, Michigan was at home. Also, this is the biggest goddamn upset in college football history.

When you’re a nationally ranked, Big Ten team with aspirations of snagging the championship, you do NOT lose to the Junior Varsity. That’s not a rule I ever thought I’d have to spell out.

For anyone who either doesn’t follow sports or doesn’t care enough to understand just how devastating of an upset this is, I’ve provided a handy list of non-sports-related parallels to illustrate:

- Chuck Norris enters a kickboxing competition only to lose out to Dakota Fanning.
- After losing to David, Goliath proceeds to lose to David’s younger, slower, not-nationally-ranked brother, Stanley.
- Superman loses a wrestling match to Rick Allen, one-armed drummer of Def Leppard.
- The reanimated corpse of Franklin Delano Roosevelt runs as a nominee of both the Republicans and Democrats in 2010, only to lose to a Green-party-affiliated bag of ham.
-The Beatles, circa 1967, enter a battle of the bands but lose to The Plain White T’s and nine and a half minutes of Hey There Delilah.