Destination: HORROR -- Define "Lucky"

When it comes to the young actors of today, my feelings on Zac Efron generally reside somewhere between "Ambivalent" and "Mildly Irritated," which is also how I feel about Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and all those other guys who are intensely interested in their own abdominal muscles. (To be fair, I don't think Robert Pattinson is actually all that interested in his abdominal muscles... or in shampoo, or personal hygiene in general.) The idea of Zac Efron is more annoying to me than he is, kind of the way the idea of Kim Kardashian is more annoying to me than she is, but the thing that puts Efron closer to my "Mildly Irritated" marker than those other guys is because I have such a hard time taking him seriously, or even of accepting him in anything other than Disney-related projects. And the reason I can't take him seriously is because I think he's a big old fake.

I believe that Efron wants to be a good actor. I believe he really, really wants to be a good actor, and to be taken seriously as an actor, and it's partially that desperation to be seen as legitimate that makes seeing him in the trailer for any kind of movie such an uncomfortable experience. He is appealing in a sparkly teen idol sort of way; he is not appealing in a rebellious, moody, James Dean sort of way, but damn, he wants to be, and he seems to think the best way to achieve that sort of persona is to pose and strut and seem angst-ridden whenever the camera turns his way. But he's not James Dean. He's not even close, which is why when you watch the trailer for a movie like Charlie St. Cloud and one of the female characters actually says, "He's like James Dean or something," it's sort of like saying a green crayon is like a stalk of celery... or something.

Efron's main problem, as far as a I can tell, is that he's far too interested in how he looks, and his entire acting style -- perhaps even his entire acting strategy -- revolves around emphasizing his appearance. You can tell when a person's confidence derives from the symmetry of their face, from the way their hair rests or their arms flex; it's not self-consciousness, necessarily, but a tenuous self-confidence, tinged with a hyper-awareness of one's own exterior. Efron is not the kind of actor who's going to let his body "go" in between films, or the type to let his appearance evolve naturally as he gets older; he's the kind of actor who's going to put a lot of effort into every inch of how he looks, which is why I have a hard time buying him as a rugged soldier type in the upcoming The Lucky One.

Granted, The Lucky One is a Nicholas Sparks movie, so there are a whole host of reasons I won't be seeing it that have nothing to do with Zac Efron. I haven't even seen The Notebook, which is the gold standard of Sparks movies and features two actors I actually like. Efron is the reason, however, that I can't watch anything having to do with The Lucky One without becoming extremely embarrassed and sinking so far down in my seat that I'm at risk of becoming trapped in the sofa. The male character in The Lucky One is obviously supposed to be a very specific type of guy, and Zac Efron is not that type of guy, at all, but he's got himself all dressed up like he is, with the flannel and the beard and throwing-around of the hay bales; whoever persuaded him not to slap a Southern accent on top of all of it is eternally in my good graces, because one hint of twang in his voice and I may have been forced to become an expatriate right there on the spot.

The actress in The Lucky One, Taylor Schilling, also seems much older than Efron, but I looked up their ages, and she's only three months older than I am, and I'm only three years older than Efron. I think the reason for the weird sense of age difference in the movie is because she actually seems appropriate for her role, which may or may not be a good thing for her career, because I have a feeling she's setting herself up to be known as that girl who stuck her hand down the back of Zac Efron's underwear. The producers should have gone with somebody like Scott Porter to play the male lead, or even Porter's Friday Night Lights cast mate Taylor Kitsch, and saved Efron for the Sparks adaptation where he plays a wealthy male model who has to learn to pose again after a terrible accident involving a jeep, a skateboard, and his male model friends, because at least we know he can do that with aplomb -- although not necessarily any more believability.

Destination: HORROR

Destination: HORROR -- Baba Wawa's Ten Most Fascinating

Every December, Barbara Walters reveals her list of the Ten Most Fascinating People of the Year, releasing the runner-ups ahead of time and saving the official Most Fascinating Person for her primetime special, which is always a big surprise, since no one could have ever guessed that, say, President Obama would be the most fascinating person of 2008. This year, the special will air December 14, and yesterday Walters released seven of the luminaries she plans to feature (in no particular order -- yet):

Pippa Middleton
The Kardashian Sisters
Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson
Katy Perry
Derek Jeter
Donald Trump
Simon Cowell

What we've got here is three men (Cowell, Trump, and Jeter) who could have been on the list any time in the past ten years, yet haven't done anything all that fascinating this year -- Cowell's X Factor has sort of been a bomb, Trump's bid for a presidential nomination was a sham, and Jeter...did what? Dated celebrities and played baseball, same as he always does? We've also got two actors (Stonestreet and Ferguson) who became famous for playing a gay couple on TV last year, and a singer who...look, I've got no beef with Katy Perry, and I know she recently tied Michael Jackson's record for most number one singles released from the same album, but the three biggest singles off of Teenage Dream (the title track, "California Gurls" and "Firework") were, again, released last year, and it seems like you would want to highlight a singer whose career is currently associated more with 2011, like Adele or Nicki Minaj, no? Because at the top of the list, you've got four people (all three Kardashians, plus Pippa Middleton) who are famous for doing nothing, which is rather fascinating, but probably not in the way Barbara intended.

Now, to be fair, I'll admit that the Kardashians' presence on the list actually makes the most sense to me out of the entire group, because as maddening as I may find them and their fame, a significant portion of the American public is fascinated by them -- there's no other word for it -- and with all the wedding shenanigans of the past few months, this year is as good as any to put them on the list. Pippa Middleton, meanwhile, really is an egregious choice, because other than being the sister of the potential future consort to the King of England, and wearing a tight dress to said sister's wedding, what the hell else has she done? Kate Middleton is sort of fascinating, in that she was a commoner who married a prince and went on an American tour with him this year and has generally brought more positive attention to the royal family than they've had in a long time, but she was on Barbara's list last year, so why not pick somebody completely different, rather than throwing her sister into the mix? Mind you, I don't fault Pippa for this debacle; I fault Barbara Walters, because the weird way she decides who's fascinating and who isn't is starting to become more embarrassing than that time she asked Katharine Hepburn if she were a tree, what tree would she be?

Destination: HORROR.

Destination: HORROR -- Labor Day Special

Websites, especially entertainment websites, like lists. I understand that. Lists are easy to write, they're easy to read, they spark debate, and most importantly, they give whichever site is using them a ton of page views, because all the site has to do is come up with some random premise like "The Top 50 Badass Women in Norwegian History" and put each woman on a different page and suddenly they've got fifty page views from a single computer. More page views = higher ad sales, especially when they can point to the comments section and say, "Look how many people are reading our site! Look how interested they are in what we have to say! Give us more money!"

The problem with lists like this is that they're often completely arbitrary, based either on whatever is topical at the moment or on an idea the author came up with five minutes before his deadline. In other words, they're usually pointless. Lists are tailor-made for people who like looking at pictures while arguing ("What do you mean that was included and this wasn't?"), and the little blip descriptions that go along with each item rarely have anything interesting to say, because how much depth can you achieve when you're working with a maximum of one hundred words or less? Lists are a lot like plums: you think they're going to be good, but more often than not when you bite into them they're sour and tough and all-around disappointing.

I should have been more wary, then, when I opened up the website AfterElton on Monday and found a holiday list entitled Celebrating Labor Day...With Hot Laborers. AfterElton is a gay entertainment site that I sometimes skim when I'm bored but otherwise try to avoid because it irritates me, for reasons too numerous to name here. (Except one: the editors and writing staff of AfterElton are generally very anti-Old Media -- meaning newspapers and print magazines -- and take great delight whenever they can highlight a headline that The New York Times allowed to go to press with a typo, yet they also champion Twitter, the place where grammar goes to die, and get defensive whenever readers point out the myriad typos in their own articles.) You're probably asking yourself, "Why would you even open an article called 'Celebrating Labor Day With Hot Laborers'?", and for that I don't have a good answer, any more than I do for why I occasionally stop and waste a half hour watching The Real Housewives franchise, except to say that the Shallowness Vortex has a strong pull. I readily admit that I had ample warning that the list was going to be stupid, including the fact that the picture accompanying the article was a publicity shot of George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm.

Could I have predicted just how stupid it was going to be, though? No. For starters, a more accurate title for the article would have been "Celebrating Halloween...With Hot Costume Ideas," because the "laborers" included on the list seem more likely to compose the bargain bin at Trick'or'Treat World: gladiators, firemen, cops, fishermen, cowboys, road workers, pool boys and gardeners, superheroes, and coal miners. (Who doesn't have an active Gladiator Union in their hometown?) Canned, uninteresting pictures of Hollywood actors illustrate each of these jobs for us, along with enlightening commentary by author Kelley Mathys: "Road Worker: Most people have probably forgotten at this point that many of our favorite True Blood boys were all employed together on the county's road crew way back in Season One. Luckily, I am a dork, so I know these things, and now we have an excuse to post some gratuitous photos of Ryan Kwanten shirtless."

Naturally, the editors of AfterElton chose to follow that write-up with a helpful picture of Ryan Kwanten...with his shirt on:

I understand, of course, that the point of a list like this is to entertain people, and that I shouldn't analyze it the same way I would an article on the condition of the American economy, but parts of this particular list are so offensively dumb that I don't see how it could entertain anybody. The worst entry is the write-up for "Fishermen," with the aforementioned picture of Clooney and Wahlberg: "I don’t think that most people realized what a difficult job it was to be a fisherman until the TLC show Deadliest Catch came out. Unfortunately for TLC, most people don't look like movie stars, and those guys are in Alaska where folks don't worry as much about appearances, so that show isn’t exactly chock-full of shameless man-candy. But you know what is? The Perfect Storm, which was a pretty bad movie but nonetheless, had some very nice looking lead actors." I assume what Mathys was trying to say was that guys like the fishermen on Deadliest Catch don't have time to maintain the perfect stubble of an actor like George Clooney, which is true, but what she actually says is that people in Alaska don't care as much about how they look, and that the only way you're going to be "shamless man-candy" is if you do care a lot about how you look, and therefore let's not burn our retinas looking at real fishermen when we can look at movie stars instead. I'm going to take the opposite point-of-view and say that the only way this list might have been interesting is if they actually had used pictures of real fishermen (and construction workers, and coal miners), but that would have prevented them from mentioning Spartacus: Blood and Sand for the eleventy-billionth time, so I don't suppose there was much chance of that happening.

Truth be told, I might have forgiven all of this if it hadn't been for the Cowboy write-up, which went on about Brokeback Mountain for awhile and then gave this list of "Sample Hotties": "Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain); Daniel Craig (Cowboys and Aliens); Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)." And then used this picture:

Hell no. Denigrating an entire state by claiming they don't care how they look is one thing, but to give a list of hot cowboys and mention Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy without mentiong Paul Newman, even when he is right in front of you -- well, ma'am, you have gone too far. Too far. I wash my hands of the entire situation.

DESTINATION: HORROR.

Destination: HORROR

The singer Matt Nathanson has never made much of an impression on me one way or the other. Some of his songs, like the radio hit "Come On Get Higher" from a couple years ago, are catchy, and he has a decent cover of the James song "Laid," but at best I'd describe his music as low-impact pop rock, the sort of thing you'd hear in the background of a Kate Hudson movie. He's the modern-day equivalent of James Taylor: not without credibility, but not exactly shaking the world, either. Take a look at him -- doesn't he look like he belongs in the same crowd as Gavin DeGraw and Howie Day?

At least, that's how he used to look, before the release of his most recent album, Modern Love. I can't speak of the quality of the music on the album because I haven't heard it, but I can speak of the album's cover art, in which Nathanson announces to the world that he's apparently decided to become the world's least-convincing Springsteen impersonator:

Wispy facial hair? Check. Greasy sideburns? Double check. General appearance of a New Jersey street rat? Check check check. I'm all for people dressing how they want to dress, but I'm also wary of artists in any genre of music whose appearances undergo an about-face (so to speak) from one album to the next. Growing a beard is one thing, but most people don't completely alter their dress sense from one year to the next after the age of eighteen -- unless they have something to sell.

To fully appreciate what Nathanson has done to himself, take a look at the video for his single "Faster." The video is generally horrible, but the real issue is Nathanson himself, who spends the duration of the clip shimmying and making cutesy faces at the camera like a girl in a Clearisil ad. Men who try to look sexy, whether it's sexy in a musclely sort of way or sexy in a slouchy, just-rolled-out-of-bed sort of way, invariably end up looking like fools, especially when they're shoving their mustaches into a camera lens. And that's not even adressing the real elephant in the room, shiny and gold and affixed to Nathanson's left nostril. Is it...? Yes. It is. It's a nose ring. Like he's Lenny Kravitz.



Destination: HORROR.  

(Springsteen pic via here)