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The worst of 2011 Top 10 TV Shows Movies and Songs … Pop Culture
AlterNet / ByJulianne Escobedo Shepherd
10 Pop Monstrosities That Almost Destroyed Our Culture in 2011
Here are the worst TV shows, movies, and songs of 2011.
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Every year, things go down in pop culture that seem to signal the coming armageddon — like offensive and popular reality shows, for instance — and we wonder, could it possibly get worse? And every year, it does. We could list 2011 terrible things in American culture this year and not even come close to completing the list, so for brevity’s sake, here are the top 10 worst things that happened in pop culture this year. May 2012 have fewer of them.
1. Movie: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1
Even if this movie wasn’t predicated on dismal Rand-worship and probably the most tedious/annoying book of her career, it’s bad based on sheer artistry. Set in the dystopian near-future of 2016, it bumps up against every dramatic action film cliche imaginable, a Tea Party fingerpainting of corporate greed. That said, this movie is AMAZING in its hilarity, possibly the best unintentionally humorous American film since National Treasure, with all the requisite deep melodrama and overacting that is somehow also stiff. It’s terrible but a pleasure to watch, particularly when you consider that with all the rich libertarians in the world, no one could pool their money for better talent! Haha.
2. Documentary: The Undefeated
If Sarah Palin’s fawning, lionizing documentary weren’t crafted for the sole purpose of revising her career and casting her in a noble light, the tale of how it came to be might have been funny: gleaming fanboy Stephen K. Bannon piles compliments on his feckless heroine, his love blinding him to her mishaps. It almost deserves a Mel Brooks script—only it’s real, and the Palin faithful brought in around $75k the first week in only 10 theaters. The Palin hustle has quieted down a bit, but expect this to be trotted out as evidence of her wondrousness closer to the election (and as absurd GOP candidates mention her as a potential running mate). It’s just depressing that it requires actual political propaganda to get her there.
3. TV Miniseries: “The Kennedys”
What was up with propagandist revisionism this year? The intensely reviled recasting of the Camelot era was so full of historical inaccuracies that Brave New Films launched a successful effort to keep the History Channel from airing it. With Greg Kinnear as JFK and Katie Holmes as Jackie, the whole piece was criticized as wholesale character assassination, hand in hand with the strange conservative impulse to cast JFK as somehow evil. And they didn’t even use the incriminating Jackie tapes!
4. Reality Show: “Toddlers and Tiaras”
Hitfix called it “a clarion call for a Social Services intervention,” and was it ever. Eager and often deluded moms entering their mostly reluctant tiny, tiny daughters into beauty pageants and stage-momming them into internalizing the princess premium before they can really utter words with three syllables. If the ghost of JonBenet Ramsey doesn’t loom over this show for you in a disturbing way, perhaps some of the choice things moms say to their children will, such as one mom telling her eight-year-old to shake her butt around, but not too much “like a stripper.” Ugh.
5. Novel: Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
It’s unfortunate that an author with the imagination of Charlaine Harris can apparently only make her work more interesting by adding an endless stream of fantastical characters, rather than making said characters do more interesting things. The creator of Sookie Stackhouse, upon which HBO’s popular “True Blood” is based, Harris is up to book 11 in the series, and it might be time to pack it in (or at least create a spin-off). Add this to tossed-off and confusing plot elements that mess around with continunity and logic (many longtime fans have accused Harris of not actually reading the books in her own series), and you have a beach read that’s more frustrating and convoluted than light and fun.
6. Song (and video!): Bruno Mars, “The Lazy Song”
Stumbling over himself to be viewed as America’s least threatening nice guy, Bruno Mars reached the point of pure banality with “The Lazy Song,” which sounds delivered straight from a can. An accomplishment, at least, in that he became the most innocuous person of the year, but even the tempo was boring with “The Lazy Song.” Add a cutesy and inexplicable band of monkeys wearing Wayfarers in the video and it’s like a pipe bomb that, upon explosion, politely delivers a full-scale affront to the senses.
7. Musical Group: Lady Antebellum
Aside from the obvious—that the group’s name fetishizes an era in which black people were enslaved—this year the Nashville trio released Own the Night, an album that was completely offensive in its non-offensiveness. Ciphoning any semblance of personality until it was an opaque wisp of music, it thrived on cliche lyrics, boring harmonies, terrible interludes and completely generic everything. The musical equivalent of being inside a shopping mall, the place that varies only slightly no matter where you are in the world, Own the Night is an attempt to whitewash its own world into empty vertigo. Horrifying.
8. Twilight Movie: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Going into the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s ridiculously popular vampire love stories, we knew they were highly Christian, but Breaking Dawn is too much: an entire (pretty long!) treatise that basically says sex is 1) only for married people; and 2) for the sole purpose of procreation and abortion is never, ever an option, even if it means the mother is going to die. Pro-life to the point of squeamishness, and even the gorgeous visage of Rob Pattinson couldn’t take away the sting.
9. Non-Reality Television Show: “Last Man Standing” (ABC)
There was a lot of competition for this category in 2011: The short-lived, regressive Playboy Club; the incredibly racist and blogger-cutesy 2 Broke Girls; the ridiculous bro-show Man Up, which reached the infantilized nadir of the Peter Pan syndrome comedy wrought by Judd Apatow and his ilk. But nothing was more offensive, less funny, and more harmful to every gender and sexual orientation than Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen vehicle based on the premise that traditional masculinity is being bled out by independent women and femme-y men, whose proliferation is ripping apart the fabric of tradition and ruining a world where manly (white) men rule.
When he’s not trying to decipher the arcane and impenetrable language of women, he’s ascribing his masculinity to things that are frankly unisex (such as sports) and mocking as somehow emasculated men who prefer, for instance, Mel Gibson’s romantic movies over his violent ones. Aside from the feeling that the misogynists writing this show are of the he-man, woman-haters club variety, they also seem not funny at all.
10. Dramatic Moment of Outrage from Right-Wingers: Parents Television Council on Janet Jackson Nipplegate
The Parents Television Council is a source of endless, paranoid hilarity of handwringing over relatively minor infractions on TV, but one point was the funniest this year: when it responded in outrage over the accidental exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on the 2004 Superbowl halftime. In November, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a fine was not necessary for the incident, which as anyone who’s seen it knows, was clearly an accident (unless Jackson and Justin Timberlake are such exceptional actors they can register pure horror before an entire stadium midway through a strenuous performance). But of course, the PTC called it a “striptease” (which is repulsive, sexualized and racialized) and called for an appeal to the appeal.
Let’s hope 2012 brings less of this stuff.
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The Untold Story … Horne of Africa
The recent images of men, women and children starving in the Horn of Africa tell a painful story of famine and suffering. How does a nation recover from a devastating food crisis? To find out, Chip Duncan and Salim Amin returned to a Ethiopia, to a place where famine caused a massive death toll over 25 years ago. What they discovered was surprising and hopeful. In partnership with One, they created a documentary showing the contrast between 1984 and present-day Tigray. Read their words below, view a preview and watch their powerful short film. << click on link for VIDEO
In Somalia, innocent people are dying needless deaths due to a famine driven by politics and war. Those who are dying need our help and our voice.
Drought is a challenge faced by people around the world. Climate change is now making droughts more common and less predictable. But drought shouldn’t equal famine. Famine is the outcome of poor infrastructure, corrupt governments and warring factions who choose to use food as a weapon.
During our recent work in Ethiopia, we had a chance to revisit the site of the 1984 famine. Our film uses footage and stills from that famine to remind us of the suffering and of its causes. Our story also chronicles the policies and infrastructure put in place during the last two decades to build sustainable agriculture. Water retention systems, irrigation, improved transportation systems, terraced farming, training programs, improved seeds and fertilizers – this is the new legacy in Tigray Province. It’s a story worth sharing so people everywhere can promote small scale agriculture while motivating governments to make similar investments in the future.
Chip Duncan
Director, “The Untold Story”
I made a journey following the footsteps of my father from 25 years ago. When Mohamed Amin made that journey a quarter of a century ago, he never imagined it was one that would change his life forever. He had covered every major story in Africa over four decades, but nothing prepared him for what he saw in Korem in October 1984.
A famine of biblical proportions, with more than 5 million people on the verge of starvation. A famine that was, to a large extent, man-made. The ruler of Ethiopia at the time, Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu, was using the famine as a tool to suppress the rebel movement that was rising against his brutal regime from the north of the country. He didn’t want the world to know this famine existed.
The pictures that my father shot on the plains of Korem changed his life and changed the world. They prompted the greatest single act of charity of the 20th century and saved the lives of millions of Ethiopians. After this story, he changed the way he looked at news coverage. He cared for the first time in his life and did everything he could to keep the story in the headlines. Those images were amongst the most powerful and iconic images in television history.
I was expecting to see Korem still reeling from the effects of that massive famine. It takes generations to repair that kind of damage, but I was in for a shock. I went in with the best TV production team I had ever worked with, and what we saw stunned us all! A massive drought is taking hold of the Horn of Africa once again, but Korem and Tigray Province is an oasis of crops. Irrigation schemes that have been put in place over the last decade. There’s also a new awareness of the types of crops to grow and how to market and sell them for the best prices; and new resilient seeds have all transformed a community from being “takers” to being “providers”.
The farmers of Tigray Province have proved that drought doesn’t have to equal famine, and smart aid can work.
Salim Amin
Chairman
Camerapix/A24 Media
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Banks, Guns, Children And Coats
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Payroll Tax Cut: Putting Money Back in the Pockets of Middles Class Washington Families
Payroll Tax Cut: Putting Money Back in the Pockets of Middles Class Washington Families
This week I will continue fighting for the Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011, a bill that would extend and expand the payroll tax cut for middle class workers. I was disappointed that Republicans blocked this important legislation last week, but I will not give up. I feel very strongly that at a time when so many middle class families are struggling, we owe it to them to extend and expand a provision that puts money back into their pocket – particularly as the holiday season approaches.
Last week, I launched an interactive map on my website to highlight the potential impact on Washington state families if Congress fails to extend the payroll tax cut into next year. The median Washington family has a yearly income of $56,479. Under the current 2% payroll tax cut – that I am fighting to extend – that family is saving approximately $1,130 per year on their tax bill. If the current tax cut expires, their yearly tax bill will go up by that amount. If the payroll tax cut is expanded to 3.1%, as proposed in this bill, that family’s savings will increase to $1,751 per year.
Unacceptable Wait Times for VA Mental Health Care
Last week, I chaired a hearing focused on the long wait for mental health care at some VA facilities across the country – the second hearing on this topic I’ve held this year. At the first hearing, on July 14th of this year, the Committee heard the first-hand stories of two service members, who even after attempting to take their own lives, had mental health care appointments postponed and difficulties cutting through the red tape in order to get care. At last week’s hearing, the Committee heard from a VA psychologist and mental health care coordinator who testified about delays in providing mental health care treatment, including care for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). That hearing also raised questions on whether VA providers were using techniques to ensure initial mental health care appointments fall within the VA’s required 14 day window, without providing true access to care at those appointments.
Following last week’s hearing, I called on the VA’s Inspector General to launch an investigation into wait times for mental health care at VA facilities.
“Senators tell VA to speed up mental health help for veterans” – The Seattle Times
A Huge Victory for Aerospace in Washington
Last week, I applauded the announcement by Boeing and the International Association of Machinists that a tentative agreement had been reached over contract negotiations and production of the 737 MAX in Washington state. This is a monumental announcement for the future of aerospace in Washington state. There is no better news for our region’s economy than a contract agreement between Boeing and the Machinists, and confirmation that Renton will remain home to the 737 line. The ramifications of this news will be felt in businesses large and small, around kitchen tables, and in communities throughout the Puget Sound for years to come. I commend the leadership of both IAM and Boeing for coming to the table, negotiating in good faith, and putting the needs of our region and its workers first. Our state has the skilled workforce, infrastructure, and education resources to continue to be the world’s leader in aerospace. But it’s up to us to ensure that leaders across our state continue to work hand-in-hand to maximize all of our resources. When Boeing and IAM work together, our region wins. I look forward to continued cooperation between both sides as they build on the trust and achievements forged in these negotiations.
“A substantial accomplishment for Boeing, Machinists and the state”
– The Seattle Times
“Big win, huge opportunity”
– The Everett Herald
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