Evans Above

Raunchy, crude and profane. But enough about my weekend.

Dipped into the mailbag last week and pulled out the Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner DVD. As a reformed Trekkie — I don’t live with my parents, I have a girlfriend, and I don’t speak Klingon — I thought it would be amusing to see a roast of a man who is routinely the butt of many jokes, especially about his acting style.

Hosted by Jason Alexander, it would be an understatement to say this roast is uncensored. Nobody, not even Golden Girls’s Betty White is safe from being the target or launcher of sexually explicit and crass jokes. We’re even told Bea Arthur, a fave of the Pamela Anderson roast, won’t be attending because she’s having a testicle removed.

Sandra Bullock talks about Shatner getting his prostate massaged, Andy Dick has a bone to pick with him and Leonard Nimoy, and Farrah Fawcett seems like she’s the one lost in space. While comedians like Greg Giraldo, Patton Oswalt, and Jeffrey Ross target Shatner well, it’s Star Trek’s George Takei who takes a lot of phaser hits for coming out of the closet. Takei gives as good as he gets, but that just sounds like the setup to another joke…

The audience cutaways are quite amusing too, as we see the shocked reactions of Trek’s René Auberjonois and Jeri Ryan and TJ Hooker’s Adrian Zmed.

DVD extras include behind-the-scenes footage, red carpet interviews and a “Making of the Roast” featurette. Not for the faint of heart, but amusing nevertheless.

Sanjaya Malakar has made it though another week of American Idol. What the heck is his appeal?

Considering that the media, especially the right-wingers over at FOX News, love to create moral outrage, I’m surprised that they’re not all over the fact that some of the racy photos of American Idol contestant Antonella Barba were taken at the World War II Memorial in Washington D.C.

Some of Barba’s photos show her in a wet t-shirt, tugging at her panties (with one or two possibly bottomless) while wading in or reclining on a monument where people go to pay respects to their loved ones and the other men and women who fought in WWII.

The stories I’ve seen on TV seem to focus on how she’s a victim of a friend who made private photos public or how all teens these days have nude photos of each other. Surprisingly, they don’t seem to be going for an easy attention-getting hit of playing the offended party. Couldn’t Wolf Blitzer interview some outraged vets? Couldn’t the FOX News gang…oh wait, Idol airs on their sister network and makes tons of money for Rupert Murdoch. As Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella character would say, “Never mind.”

Funnily enough, the real outrage over the issue is coming from the blogosphere’s writers and commenters. The old media entertainment reporters can trash the gossip blogs but while Mary Hart breathlessly tells us all the sordid details of Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral, Todd over at I Don’t Like You In That Way has this to say about Barba’s photos:

If he’s alive, be sure to show them to your grandpa. I’m sure he’d be happy knowing that the freedom he fought for while holding his guts in with his helmet allows a spoiled whore from New Jersey to desecrate his national monument.

When American Idol‘s Alaina Alexander was listening to Paula Abdul after getting eliminated, she somehow caused the mic pack she was holding to pop or click loudly.

Like any quick mistake you make, she quickly tossed off an “Oh shit”. It made it past the censors on the live East Coast feed and surprisingly was broadcast on the West Coast as well, even though censors would have had a chance to beep it for that broadcast.

Wonder if anyone will write to the FCC?

On a different note (no pun intended), was Ryan Seacrest suggesting that Kellie Pickler’s cleavage was surgically-enhanced when he kept asking if she had bought anything new? Do you think she’s changed?

Antonella Barba, one of this year’s American Idol contestants, has ignited a firestorm of web searching frenzy. Racy photographs of the 20-year-old New Jersey native, including one shot from the point-of-view of a guy on the receiving end of a sex act, have appeared on several sites across the ‘net.

A previous Idol contestant, Frenchie Davis, who was a helluva better singer than Barba, was kicked out of the show in her year because she had previously worked for an adult web site. Her talent kept her going, though, and she later joined the cast of Broadway’s Rent.

So the big question is: Will Antonella Barba become this season’s Frenchie?

Has Britney Spears gone off the deep end? I was looking at the AP photo wire this morning and there were shots of Britney Spears with a shaved head. A bald Britney. We’re not talking Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday short, but take-out-the-electric-razor Natalie Portman V for Vendetta hair not there bald.

Britney, who was shown on KABC-TV getting tattoos to go with her haircut, apparently also had a one day stint in rehab and then made the cross-country flight for the new ‘do.

It really takes a lot of effort to do this, but Spears seems to be working overtime to make Kevin Federline look like the responsible parent in the custody battle over their two children. The crotch shots, the excessive partying with Paris Hilton, and now this. The folks over at E! True Hollywood Stories must be casting for the reenactments as we speak. If Britney truly has gone nuts, then this is an amazingly fast rise and fall.

Even ex-beau Justin Timberlake told Vanity Fair’s Fashion Rocks supplement that, “I dated Britney half my life, but I don’t know that woman anymore.”

The news media is in a tizzy over the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Yes, it’s a sad story because a young baby has been left without her mother and even the identity of her father remains a riddle.

But c’mon, the entertainment news media, using their frequent flyer points to send crews to Hollywood, Florida, are really dishing up a healthy dose of saccharine hyperbole.

Watching shows like The Insider, ET and Access Hollywood last night, I learned that Anna Nicole Smith was someone “the world was mourning” and we should stay tuned to learn more about the death of a “woman everyone loved.”

I love it when newscasts make generalizations like that.

The world was mourning? Really? Surely that explains why Fatah and Hamas signed a pact to settle their differences and try and form a unity government. The news coming out of Hollywood, Florida made those leaders realize what life is really about. Somewhere in Afghanistan, a farmer burnt his poppy field, because he figured he didn’t want to add to any more suffering.

And poor Marilyn Monroe must be rolling over in her grave with all the comparisons people are making, one news story even using Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” as a lead-in. I admit to only seeing a few minutes of Monroe’s films, but the perception of her as an iconic sex symbol is something that’s hard to avoid. Anna Nicole may have been a Playboy Playmate of the Year and Guess? Jeans model, but after that she slid pretty rapidly into being a second-rate punchline.

The 24-hour news cycle makes things worse too. Do we really need to segue from Larry King interviewing people who knew her to Anderson Cooper talking to experts speculating on what caused her death and who the father of Dannielyn might be? Remember when a story happened and you just got the facts?

I wonder what Walter Cronkite thinks at moments like this?

Yes, the opening kick TD was exciting, but halftime performer Prince scored the biggest touchdown during the Super Bowl tonight. Forget all the lip-syncing wannabes out there, the Purple One commanded the stage with an energetic set that touched his catalog, CCR’s, Bob Dylan’s, and the Foo Fighters’. It’s just great to see an artist not hiding behind 20 dancers and man, can he play that axe.

Simply a great performance.

Another week, another sex tape.

This time the ‘net is all, um, a titter, about a sex tape featuring British page three topless model Keeley Hazell. Apparently the busty lass made the tape while on vacation with her boyfriend, Lloyd Miller. Hazell, who once said she wouldn’t do Playboy because of its “full nudity” is said to be upset by the tape’s release. You know, if you’re afraid of leaks, don’t take a video camera to bed with you…take a sketch pad and some charcoal instead.

So, perhaps the Keeley Hazell sex tape is a private moment that should never have been released. But what about the attention hungry celebs who are actively involved in the distribution of their most imtimate moments?

It was the release of One Night in Paris that turned talentless heiress Paris Hilton into a talentless starlet. So it only makes sense that her gal pal, Kim Kardashian, is said to be shopping around a tape of her and R&B singer Ray J. It’s rumoured that the couple is upset that they sold the rights for too low a price.

Any mention of C-list celebrity sex tapes would not be complete without mentioning Dustin Diamond, who once played Screech on Saved By The Bell. His sex tape, which featured some fetish scenes, met with as much interest as his post-SBTB career.

If we’ve learned anything today, it’s that you need a sex tape to make it as a respected star. Apparently, the pantyless crotch shots just aren’t enough.

If there is just one DVD you buy for friends and family this year, then it should be the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. When I saw this film at a press screening I was deeply moved and highly motivated. A few days later I attended the Toronto premiere. We photographed Al Gore at the premiere and he spoke briefly to the assembled press. This is a core issue for Gore as it should be for everyone who happens to live on this planet.

I think Roger Ebert said it best in his review: “In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.”

The DVD obviously has some extras. They are:

• Commentary by director Davis Guggenheim
• Commentary by producers Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, and Lesley Chilcott
• “An Update with Former Vice-President Al Gore”
• “The Making of An Inconvenient Truth”
• A music video by Melissa Etheridge

Heck, even the DVD package is made from 100% post-consumer recycled materials. But these extras aren’t important. If everyone just made a few choices in their daily lives like buying a hybrid, using energy-saving light bulbs and taking transit, then real progress could start being made.

I think that’s one of the most important lessons this DVD offers. The situation may be global, but the solution starts with you.