Pop culture
The photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's twins, Knox and Vivienne, hit the newsstands on Monday in the latest issue of People magazine (the cover photo went live on the magazine's Web site Sunday afternoon and can be seen here). People paid a reported $15 million for the photos, which will be featured in a 19-page spread in the magazine.
The magazine's editors hope interest in the celebrity babies will be strong enough that folks will plunk down their diminishing discretionary dollars to buy the issue. Will you? Do you plan to buy the latest issue of the celebrity magazine? Or will you merely look at the photos while standing in the check-out line instead of buying a copy?
Much has been made of Katharine Heigl's comments that she wasn't worthy of an Emmy nomination this year because the "Grey's Anatomy" writers didn't give her an Emmy-worthy storyline to work with. Mark Harris makes a very thoughtful argument in defense of Heigl in the July 25 issue of Entertainment Weekly (page 18 if you have a copy. I'd post a link but EW.com doesn't have it up yet). Some have argued that the comment was a ploy by Heigl to get herself written off the show so she can pursue her movie career (hopefully with movies much better than "27 Dresses"). Rumor has it that the "Grey's" writers will give Heigl her wish, they are going to give her character, Dr. Isobel "Izzie" Stevens, a fatal brain tumor. All is can say to that is ... YES!
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For those of you who didn't notice (and judging by the comments we've seen, more than a few of you have), we've made some changes to Test Pattern in the past few weeks.
Gael Fashingbauer Cooper was the sole author of this blog for the past several years. While she was on maternity leave, we wondered what we would do about Test Pattern, and it was suggested -- by Gael -- that we make it a section-wide blog. And that's exactly what we did.
So now, instead of just sending the funny, bizarre, infuriating and thoughtful items we spot on the Internet to each other, we're sharing them with you. Our internal musings have become the fodder for posts, from Anna Chan's confessions of a band girlfriend to Paige Newman's dismay about Gil Grissom's depature from "CSI" to Kurt Schlosser's love of watching people fall. And while Gael now will only be writing one post per week, for those of you who want more of her unique perspective, check out her own blog, Pop Culture Junk Mail.
I hope you enjoy the wider (or as we say here at msnbc.com, fuller) spectrum of opinions and tastes. And I look forward to sharing more of my musings in the future.
Denise Hazlick
Entertainment editor
Everyone has always misspelled my first name. But the more I read about celebrity baby names, the less I feel like complaining. With this weekend's arrival of Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt, let's review this latest batch of star baby monikers.
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By now, in our hyper-immediate, straight-to-the-Web culture of infotainment, I guess I would have expected most people to be familiar with Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat, aka Ali G, aka Bruno. Thankfully, for the sake of comedy, many people are not familiar with him.
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Rodney King famously asked during the 1992 Los Angeles riots: “Can we all get along?” Despite the fact that his iconic plea was made so close to Hollywood, and has since been mockingly uttered by every meathead within earshot of a disagreement, apparently the phrase is lost on the modern-day celebrity.
A few examples of recent, public celeb-on-celeb nastiness have me wondering what else these people need in life since fame and money apparently aren’t enough to satisfy their easily bruised egos.
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See a certain celebrity’s name pop up in the news and you just know it’s for nothing good. Courtney Love used to be the perfect example. Then it was Pete Doherty. For a long period of time it was Britney Spears. Now it’s Amy Winehouse. There’s no question the woman is talented, but will she ever get to share any more of her talents, or will she self-destruct first?
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There are two groups of people in this world who take delight in watching people fall down. One group is probably teenage boys. The other is Japanese television audiences. I don't belong to either of these groups, but I might as well because when it comes to moving pictures of people, nothing's better than when those people leave their feet.
I've spent a good deal of time on the Internet (YouTube specifically) watching videos of people accidentally slipping and tripping. I've laughed at people falling off treadmills and others crashing hard on buttered floors. I also laugh pretty hard every time I come across "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" on cable, which basically answers the question, "What would happen if that guy lost his balance while jumping over that moving thing 8 feet above that muddy water?" Sadistic? Perhaps. Hilarious? Indeed.
Tuesday night ABC brought "Wipeout" to American audiences and for an hour I laughed while 24 mostly talentless people humiliated themselves on national TV (kind of like "American Idol" only with a lot of slippery water hazards). For my money, the entire hour could have been filled with the obstacle where contestants jump from a stable platform onto a big, bouncy ball suspended above water -- Boing! Splash! Repeat.
Hosts John Henson (E!'s "Talk Soup") and John Anderson (ESPN's "Sportscenter") managed to come up with enough nicknames for those involved to keep my wife laughing. I like that there's no sappy backstory to the contestants. It's pretty much all action. We know their names, what they do for a living and what they look like before, during and after a nasty fall. What else is there?
A few weeks ago, while I was attending the TV critics' summer press tour, a friend and I decided we were tired of being surrounded by today's stars. So we headed off just a few miles from our hotel to visit the final resting places of some of yesterday's stars.
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The Wall Street Journal had one of those so-weird-it-almost-can't-be-real stories a week ago. It's about how some parents are now paying hundreds of dollars to "name consultants" to help them name their babies.
I am thisclose to thinking the story is a late April Fool's Day hoax, because...what? How hard is it to come up with a baby name? CONTINUED >>
