5 Celebrities Whose Side Projects Are Pure Yikes

So, when we heard Aoki was making pizza with "lit herb infused dough," we didn't get super excited or rush out to try it. We left that to other people, who ordered from the delivery-only location at 444 N La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. And those other people, scrolling through their delivery app, noticed that Aoki's wasn't the only pizza place said to be at 444 N La Cienega Boulevard. There was also a place called "Thick & Tasty." And another called "Gabriella's New York City Pizza." And "Froman's Chicago Deep Dish Pizza," which sounds an awful lot like a sly Ferris Bueller reference meaning, "Haha, we are frauds."

Let's offer the most charitable explanation for what's going on here. If restaurants are delivery-only, they don't need to carve out a whole lot of space for tables and stuff, so it makes sense for multiple restaurants to share a location, make the whole thing kitchens, and scale up. Cool, cool. But then people thought to give the place a visit, and they reported seeing just two guys working there alone, surrounded by boxes with different labels. Phone, and they won't know which restaurant to identify themselves as. Sometimes, you'll order from one restaurant, and they'll send you the pizza in the wrong box.

Why would one place pretend to be a dozen different restaurants? Aoki's people say this system lets them sell a bunch of different kinds of pizzas under different menus. But since one restaurant could do that just fine, and since reviews on these pizzas are less than stellar, here's the conspiracy theory: They keep coming up with new names so when one gets a bad rep, they can just drop it and replace it with another. Which has to be an odds with Aoki's personal goal here, since he's all about branding.

But also: Hey, did you know Steve Aoki's dad founded Benihana? Maybe this is all just a sad Act 2 detour in the Aoki biopic, about a son pressured into following in his restauranteur father's footsteps, when he's really born to flip records, not pizzas.

Which brings us to the allegations. So, paying to get naked for James Franco isn't very fun. But getting coerced into doing so is worse, and that what some of his students said happened. Plus, if some of these shoots involved no script and the footage was never released anywhere, it sounds like these sessions of women exposing their breasts and wearing animal skulls while dancing around James Franco weren't so much film projects as recordings for James Franco's private sexual adventure library.

Then come the allegations which send lawyers flipping past "misconduct" and fearfully checking for the precise legal definition of assault. During sex scenes, participants are supposed to wear plastic guarding to keep their genitals from touching anything, but Franco's students said he removed theirs and plowed on anyway.

Franco is starting to sound exactly like the director who forced unprofessional sex scenes on an actress in The Disaster Artist, a director played by James Franco. Which his lawyers, when denying the allegations, would surely use to argue that the women are just making the whole thing up, but hey, wasn't Franco also preying on students in Palo Alto, which was based on his own book? And in Spring Breakers, and weren't these his three best roles? We'd almost say this pattern means something, but then again, he also starred in three different movies where his goal was to find the true identity of Spider-Man.

In this first ad, Jeremy Renner is in a diner, and he gets an arriving couple to switch rides with him -- his tour bus for their jeep. As a result, they never get a chance to actually enter the restaurant and eat their meal. In the end, they all arrive at the same place (a Jeremy Renner concert). But first, in the jeep, he tunes the radio to listen to his own music, which is vain, and he takes the vehicle off-road and drives through a river, which is inconsiderate. Also, he gets out and kicks at some sand, so maybe he never liked driving the jeep after all.

The next ad could be even weirder. Jeremy Renner is in a tux at a party, then he ditches it and gets into a Jeep -- but since it's valet parking and he seems to stealth his way past the valets and doesn't collect the keys, maybe he's stealing the Jeep. Once again, he tunes the sound system to play his own music. He arrives at the same concert as in the other ad. This creates a serious time paradox if we're trying to figure out which method he used to get there.

If we isolate this ad from the greater Renner Cinematic Jeepiverse, we can ignore the questionable chronology and just allow the theme to shine. We see Jeremy Renner abandon his formal engagement for something impromptu. But hold on, dammit -- the place he's going to was the event he was already booked to play. Jeremy, you didn't loosen your tie because you wanted the freedom of Jeep travel, you liar. You just had to leave because you had an appointment. Though, you did book another party for earlier the same night because even Jeremy Renner can't attach that much importance to a Jeremy Renner concert.