Gawker - Unfortunately, the new J.Lo movie sucks

On the internet, we are all encouraged to become the sort of person who writes letters to the editor

When I was a kid, a friend and I spent around a month prank calling a late night talk-back show. We’d call up, try to disguise our 12-year-old voices as pensioners, tell the producer we wanted to talk about the topic of the day, and then when we were finally let on air, we’d blurt out something devastating like “poo” and be immediately disconnected. While we were waiting to go on we’d have to listen to the other callers — the callers who’d not phoned in to say “poo,” but to discuss the news — and as the weeks went on, I very distinctly remember thinking this to myself: Why the fuck are any of you people doing this?

Now, they may have had the same question of us, but I think our reasons for doing what we did were fairly clear and watertight: it’s fun, whether you’re a 12-year-old boy or the King of England, to hear your own voice say “poo” on the radio. That’s a solid fact that’s been true for as long as we as a species have had the technology to say “poo” to a great many people at once. Less clear to me then was why anyone, anywhere, would want to just call up the radio to shout their opinions on any topic into the void. And not just want to — it was clear that these people felt compelled or obliged to. Nearly all the callers to the show were regulars.

These people were, simply, cranks. I am at this point going to assume we all have some familiarity with cranks. The obsessive writers of letters to the editor, the meticulous hoarders of correspondence, the avid collectors of fine and rare grudges. These people have been a mainstay in the culture from the characters of Dickens to Grandpa Simpson, but recently it seems that the figure of the crank has dropped away from the public imagination. Now, this could be that the art of penning demented letters to metropolitan newspapers on a semi-regular basis may be dying out with the last generation of people to use lead toothpaste, but I don’t think that’s it. I think we’ve lost sight of them not because they went away, but because they became unremarkable. We are all cranks now.

It’ll all be okay 👍

At this very moment, someone, somewhere, is staring at their phone or computer screen trying to decide which skin color hand-emoji to use: the default yellow, whichever one most closely matches their skin, or — mysteriously — something else?

The answer, a recent NPR story asserts, “can be more complex than you think.”

For instance, the piece explores, what if you are mixed-race but feel uncomfortable choosing a skin tone that may be associated with a specific ethnicity? What if you are white but you use the default yellow because you feel uncomfortable drawing attention to your privilege? What if you actually should be drawing attention to your white privilege by choosing the pale hand? What if, even more bafflingly, you are white but you choose the brown emoji — and, actually, you did that as a way to try to be a good ally?

I don’t really have to think about all of these things because I’m Chinese American and default yellow works just fine, but these are real questions that are being asked by some people and explored by academics — specifically, three researchers at the University of Edinburgh, one of whom is also an “emoji researcher at Google,” as well as another, different researcher in Berlin, who in 2018 wrote an article for the Daily Dot titled, "The problem with emoji skin tones that no one talks about.” Now, four years later, we are finally ready to have that conversation.

Let’s look at their houses to decide

The Super Bowl is on Sunday. After you figure out how to balance this celebration of the American ideal with your Valentine’s Day plans the following day, you’ll need to figure out which team to root for: the Los Angeles Rams or the Cincinnati Bengals. Tricky, right? They’re both so good. To make this decision, I suggest looking at the houses that belong to the teams’ respective quarterbacks.

The L.A. Rams quarterback is Matthew Stafford. He’s married to a woman named Kelly and together they have four daughters: Tyler, Chandler, Sawyer, and Hunter. They live in the same Hidden Hills neighborhood as Kylie Jenner, Dwyane Wade, and Gabrielle Union in a 15,000-square foot mansion they purchased for $20 million last year. The architectural firm that designed the property calls it the “Seven Summits Residence.” From the front, it looks like a futuristic penitentiary. In the back, there’s an infinity pool and a concrete deck that looks like a helipad. Check out the kids’ room! And marvel at the fact that the kitchen seems to have three separate marble islands, as pictured in Kelly’s Instagram sponcon for avocados.

The latest J.Lo rom-com is irredeemable

A recent New York Times profile about Jennifer Lopez pegged to her upcoming rom-com Marry Me describes the film’s existence as, “A bet that she can revive a genre that’s been left for dead by both the studio system and the rom-com stars of the past.” They lost that bet.

The film, which is loosely based on a webcomic of the same name, is about Kat Valdez (Lopez) — an international pop sensation (sound familiar?) who is set to marry her boyfriend Bastian (Maluma) on stage in front of millions of people while they sing their hit duet “Marry Me.” In the crowd is a normal divorced dad, Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson) who is at the concert with his coworker and friend Parker (Sarah Silverman) and his daughter. When Kat finds out Bastian had been cheating on her with her assistant, she instead picks Charlie out of the crowd and, to fulfill the promise of on-stage nuptials, marries him. Rather than immediately divorcing him, or abandoning the gimmick, Kat convinces her team to allow her to get to know Charlie because it would prove that she is willing to take chances. Actually, the reason why she goes through with it is never really clear.

The concept is something a pop star at her peak would never in a million years do. And that’s fine, because the suspension of disbelief that love is possible in even the most stupid circumstances is what makes romantic comedies so great. That’s why something like Notting Hill works — both stars have the magnetism to make the target audience, single women like me, believe in the most unlikely type of love.

It's a cruel and unusual thing to say

The new Oscar nominee and better half of Hollywood’s most heterosexual power couple Kirsten Dunst recently revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that another actress once called her nothing but a “dumb cheerleader” for her perfect role in Bring It On, the 2000 movie that Roger Ebert once called “the Citizen Kane of cheerleading movies” with “genuinely talented cheerleaders.”

Who the eff said this about our Kiki, the most famous woman in the world? Some ideas:

Scarlett Johansson

My first thought was “Scarlett Johansson” and the commentariat of the web’s best gossip site (besides Just Jared Junior) Oh No They Didn’t agree. While she was only 16 when Bring It On came out, ONTD commenter beesknees7 points out, “I read this whole post and still think it's Scarlett. She probably would have been working on Ghost World & with the Coen brothers on The Man Who Wasn't There around that time so I can see that making her pretentious and catty.”

And teens are famously mean. Have you not seen Bring It On? Or Bring It On Again? Or Bring It On: All or Nothing?