No interest in seeing it. But this review, on the other hand, is worth the price of a movie ticket:

Look, before you start with the chorus of “That movie wasn’t for you” remember this: I enjoy a good chick flick. But this wasn’t good; not by any stretch of the imagination. This was a dick and fart joke movie for women. Make no mistake, the humor in this is as crass and base as anything the boys’ movies have to offer. Someone shits themselves. There’s a close up of some forty-year-old pubic hair poking out of both sides of a swimsuit. A four year old utters the word SEX to the amusement and shock of all present in the room. A Dog repeatedly humps pillows. Sound familiar? I spent a goodly portion of this film wondering when the Farrelly Brothers had decided to cut their balls off and develop a fondness for Prada.

Two and a half god damned hours. . . .

But I just couldn’t get over how much this shared in common with BRATZ: the Movie. Montage after montage after montage with each and every problem finding a solution by the fabulously dressed four getting together, squee-ing in a pitch that will deafen dogs and neuter most of the males in the audience, and realizing that friendship will get you through any bout of rampant self-absorption. Oh, so this is what happens when you leave Bratz dolls in the sun too long. I’m not gonna get on the consumerism trip. Not here. Not with the crowd that will drop a grand on a mint condition Revenge of the Jedi poster and consider it an investment in the future. A COOL investment in the future. Come on, I’ve been to a sci-fi convention. And once you’ve stood in the dealer room and pondered dropping $45 on the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame you had when you were five years old, you can’t really fault a woman for getting excited about a $600 pair of purple fuzzy pumps that look like they should come with their own stripper pole. I mean, who the fuck am I to judge? But Christ in a bucket people, did we need so many montages of them doing it?

I hadn’t heard about Frank Rich’s new gig as a general creative consultant for HBO until I saw Jack Shafer’s sophisticated and worldly column about it. Three thoughts, in no particular order:

(1) Where are the conservative fanboys who turn their noses up at BSG and Veronica Mars while insisting that HBO is where real television happens?

(2) Once again, I’m thunderstruck at how sweet life is if you’re part of the lefty mainstream media. Oh sure, conservatives have their own ghetto, where, if you’re good and doctrinaire, after 10 years you can get speaking gigs at places like Hillsdale College and CPAC. Sigh.

(3) What really, really mystifies me is why Rich is bothering to keep his NYT column at all. The HBO job is so much more interesting. Why would anyone stay in the political/journalistic world given the chance to do something cool that was actually culturally relevant?

Update: Galley Friend J.E. responds:

I think I know why he’s bothering to keep the NYT gig. For one, it’s steady, pays incredibly well, requires (as he’s shown repeatedly these last few years) minimal time and thought, and offers notable ancillary perks. Two, he’s undoubtedly mindful of what happened when Pauline Kael, who thought she knew better than everyone how to make a good movie and what was wrong with bad movies, took an indefinite leave of absence from the New Yorker and went to work at Paramount in development. It was, history records, a colossal failure. Someone who has spent his/her entire adult life criticizing the work of others without having the balls to enter the arena himself will find the going hard, if not impossible. A little voice will keep whispering in his ear, telling him how the Frank Riches of the world will see this particular work, and that will be paralyzing. Then, too, the other above-the-line people will likely find him insufferable as he only criticizes the work in front of him and offers nothing useful. Sadly, though, like Kael, when this is all over and he leaves “to go back to my first love, newspapering,” he will have learned no humility. Or grace.

. . . that Danny Strong?

The Whedonverse expands again. Once he finishes his Astonishing X-Men arc (and finally delivers his Runaways conclusion) there will be no stopping him!

PS: On a totally unrelated comic book note, is anyone else blown away by Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve? It’s like Watchmen, if Watchman was any good.

I forget who’s supposedly writing the big Andrew Sullivan hit piece tough, but fair, profile. So here’s a bit of string:

Andrew Sullivan, Nov. 2007:

“But at least I concede an error when I make one, however innocently.”

Andrew Sullivan, May 2008:

“Michael Goldfarb gets all catty about Barack Obama.”

You have to follow the “catty” link to get the joke. And yes, Sullivan was alerted to the error a couple hours after he wrote the post.

Santino points us toward this train-wreck involving writer Emily Gould. I’m with Sonny all the way here: I rooted for Gould when she was ambushed by Jimmy Kimmel, but now I kind of regret it.

Here’s Gould’s lede, to a giant NYT Magazine cover piece:

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry, whom my readers knew as a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about the contestants on “Project Runway” and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks. I didn’t write about him often, but when I did, I’d quote his best jokes or tell stories about vacationing with his family.

It gets worse from there, with the use of “I” about 3,000 more times. Also, she tells the world–using nearly 8,000 words–how terrible her life was as a famous blogger. I’m not sure which is the larger driver of narcissism here–Gould’s occupation as a blogger or her cultural identity as a New Yorker.

Look, I understand the deep psychological motivations for writing, the most perfect summation of which came from Don Marquis’s Archy the cockroach. Archy was an aspiring writer who produced his craft by hurling himself, headfirst, into typewriter keys, creating his works one letter at a time. As Archy lamented, “Expression is the need of my soul.”

But there is a difference between expression and exhibitionism. To the extent that blogs encourage the latter–even in thoughtful, professional writers–they are a pernicious force in the culture.

The most tortured political analogy of the decade.

A helpful guide.

Courtesy of Galley Friend T.R.

My favorite comic in production (tied with Astonishing X-Men) is Runaways. And now Marvel is putting it to film.

This is a really natural decision. The entire first-series of Runaways lends itself almost perfectly to a two-hour movie. It has a beginning, middle, and end and with only a little cutting should make a great movie with little or no need for structural change in the adaptation.