Ever fantasize about sleeping in the bed Jersey Shore’s Ronnie threw out onto the deck that one night? Or cooking in the kitchen that the girls can never be bothered to clean? Perhaps you’d like to use the toilet that was so famously clogged by a wifebeater? Well, friend, The Daily is here to tell you that dreams really do come true: You, too, can live like a guido if you’re ready to throw down $2,500 to spend a night at the notorious six-bedroom, three-bathroom Seaside Heights house. Apparently, MTV rents the place out in the off season.
Call us ungrateful, but we probably wouldn’t be tempted to stay at the shore house even if it were free. The duck phone is cute and all, but we can’t imagine that the novelty of it all would outweigh the squickiness of laying our head in a place where so much hair gel-and-Bacardi-lubricated sex has taken place. Besides, although unscripted series have featured more than their share of tacky homes, there are plenty of gorgeous reality TV dwellings that we’d be thrilled to rent out (if only we had the money). Check out eight such houses after the jump.
Hollywood has a way of telling us who we are and who we should be, and there’s no one more amenable to its requests than its own biggest commodities — actors. The handful of molds are generally unchanging: the blonde bimbo, the unmarriageable brunette, the debonair gentleman, the dopey, dorky friend. Any number of people can fill these steadfast forms — Jean Harlows are replaced by Grace Kellys are replaced by Marilyn Monroes are replaced by Madonnas. But once an actor has been molded into an archetype, it’s often difficult for them to be anything else. Still, even those who get caught in the quicksand of typecasting can sometimes eventually make it out, like these pigeonholed actors, who, for better or for worse, finally played a kind of different role.
Let’s try a mental exercise: Picture some of your favorite TV shows of the ’70s and ’80s — maybe Three’s Company or the original Hawaii Five-0. How do the characters look in your imagination? Crisp and bright, or somewhat blurry and washed out? For us, it’s always been the latter, either because our memories of them are dim or simply due to the desaturated look of decades-old TV. So it’s remarkable to see how closely San Francisco-based artist Kelly Falzone Inouye’s watercolor portraits of sitcoms from that era our own recollections. “For me, the medium of watercolor is extremely nostalgic and sentimental,” writes Inouye. “In using this medium in its loosest, most watery form to depict fictional characters, my intent is to examine issues of portrayal vs. portraiture.” Check out Sitcoms Series after the jump, and then visit Inouye’s website to see more of her work.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the color television. CBS is credited with making the first color broadcast on five East Coast stations in 1951, and on this day the company started selling their CBS-Columbia color television model. The product was discontinued just a few months later, but RCA picked up the slack a few years later in 1954. Today, it seems strange that companies had trouble selling color models, but back then buying a TV was as important of a choice as was buying a car (they were expensive!). Before we were warning about the dangers of too much TV, the color television represented a kind of sophistication and style. It was the best connection families had to the world around them and the new technology represented the dreamy possibilities of the future. We thought we’d take a peek back at some of the best color television print advertisements, which represented a time when the TV repairman was actually a lucrative career choice.
As much as we love SNL digital shorts and all the vulgar laughs and Justin Timberlake cameos they may bring, let’s take a break before this weekend’s season premiere to acknowledge another variety of Saturday Night Live music videos, shall we? Y’know, the ones that weren’t produced by Lorne Michaels. Every now and then, a current or former “Not Ready For Prime Time Player” will lend a hand as the protagonist of a real music video for an actual musician, and some of these guest appearances are pretty great. Check out ten of our favorites after the jump.
In case we haven’t made enough noise about it already, we’d like to restate our enthusiasm for Sarah Michelle Gellar’s return to television with the CW’s new series Ringer. We already used the show’s twins-in-trouble element as a springboard to look at our favorite twins in popular culture, but the dualism got us thinking about something else, too — specifically, how many other actors have been able to successfully star in more than one show during their career, shrugging off typecasting to embody a whole new, equally welcome persona. As Gellar takes on this feat in 2011, here’s a look back at some of the others who have done it, and done it well. Don’t see your favorite? We know we left some out, so feel free to add more in the comments.
Lou Reed may have written what is arguably the best drug song of all time with “Heroin,” but by the 1980s he’d gotten clean. This much we knew. We were not, however, aware that Reed had made an anti-drug PSA until Dangerous Minds pointed us to a brief, odd clip he did for a late-’80s campaign called Rock Against Drugs (RAD). The spots, which also included everyone from Belinda Carlisle and Sex Pistol Steve Jones to Bon Jovi and Phil Collins, aired largely on MTV and pushed the message that you could still be a bad-ass without taking illegal substances. Watch Reed’s ad and a slew of other entertaining/vaguely educational RAD clips after the jump.
Mad Men may not be coming back until 2012, but starting August 11th you can dress like its beloved characters. Well, sort of. Banana Republic and Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant have teamed up to create a 65-piece collection for both men and women. The first images of the clothing surfaced last week, and for a line with such great source material, it seems a bit lackluster: lots of gray suits and A-line dresses, none of which look much different from what Banana Republic already sells. Since it seems like the designers need some help, we’ve rounded up some great costumes that definitely should have earned a place in the collection.
One of the buzziest movie trailers making the rounds this week is for Horrible Bosses – a comedy that finds three working stiffs (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day) plotting to kill their evil superiors (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, and Jennifer Aniston). We can’t wait to see it, but it did get us thinking: How will these villains compare to some of film and TV’s worst bosses to date? From the negligent to the scheming to the downright reprehensible, we’ve listed ten of pop culture’s most memorably awful head honchos after the jump.
So apparently it’s 1993 again, because there are two competing Wyatt Earp movies in development. Upon reading this, we immediately checked to make sure we weren’t perusing the movie news page on Prodigy via dial-up connection. But no, we’ve not entered some kind of wormhole: instead of Tombstoneand Wyatt Earpracing each other to theaters, we’ve got Tombstone co-star Val Kilmer signing on to the indie Western The First Ride of Wyatt Earp, while Warner Brothers has picked up the spec script for the fictionalized Earp-and-Holliday adventure tale Wild Guns.
Parallel thinking is nothing new in Hollywood — hell, there’s half a dozen (no exaggeration) Peter Pan-related projects in development now, and nearly as many re-bootings, re-imaginings, and re-whatevers of Wizard of Oz and Snow White in the pipeline. Sometimes executives, writers, and producers just have the same ideas (or the idea to go back to the same ideas) at the same time. Often, competing projects will disappear as one gets into production first — but sometimes that game of Hollywood chicken leads to multiple versions of, basically, the same movie or TV show making it all the way to release (witness Deep Impact and Armageddon, Dante’s Peak and Volcano, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and many more). Usually, the better project ultimately wins the respect of critics and audiences — though there have been a few occasions when the second place runner is unfairly overlooked. Join us after the jump for a few unjustly forgotten runners-up.
