Rant of the Week: Empire Magazine is just a bunch of Monkeys with Typewriters

So it looks like Briton based film mag Empire is making a run at dethroning ESPN for the title of Most Retarded List of Excellence Ever Accumulated.

We're Retarded

A year and 1/2 ago Empire came out with a list of the Greatest Movie Characters of ALL TIME.  And wow, to put it like our friends across the pond might, it was one piece of rubbish alright.

Sure it was almost two years ago now but I just saw it yesterday so it is new to me.

Now, the whole list was an atrocity but lets take a look at some of the highlights.

#1 Tyler Durden.

The guy from Fight Club.  Seriously?  Wow.  I mean it was a cool movie and all but... wow. Just... This must have been a readers poll, right?  Please tell me it was a readers poll.

Hi, I'm the greatest, most interesting, complex, and charismatic character ever created in film. I'm also Brad Pitt, wanna see my abs?

#3 The Joker (Dark Knight).

Classic case of people having the memory of a goldfish.  If this had come out a year earlier this would have been Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

#8 Captain Jack Sparrow.

Oh, but this makes sense. Yeah, twenty years from now everyone will talk about the Pirates of the Caribbean series and compare it to Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Die Hard.  Yeah, its just as good as those movies...

#16 Neo.

Yeah, cause Keanu Reeves is what everyone loved about the original Matrix movie.

#22 Ellis "Red" Redding (Shawshank Redemption)

Really?  I'm more surprised that anyone knew this character's full name than anything else.

It Ain't Easy Being Dane Cook

I'm a stand-up comedian. And if there is one thing I know about comics, its that they hate dead crowds, couples that make out through your whole show, Carlos Mencia, and Dane Cook. Dane Cook is the go to dump on comic for any given situation in stand up.

Things aren't going well? Wanna make fun of the guy who went on before you? Dane Cook is the answer. He's always doing that with his fingers. What the eff is that supposed to mean? Retardedness To be honest, part of me wants to defend the guy. Because I really do think his first album, "Harmful If Swallowed", is pretty decent. I mean, its not George Carlin, but it gets the job done.

But when it comes down to it, Dane really is a victim of his own success. He just got too big for his talent. It was the perfect storm. Cook's material pandered directly to college kids just at the time when file sharing on campuses was in full swing. He's got jokes about Kool-aid and Slip-n-Slide and he spreads like herpes in Paris Hilton's phone book.

Before anyone knows it, they guy is the obnoxious side-kick in crappy raunch-coms and he's got an HBO special. This is about where the shit really started to hit the fan for Mr. Cook.

His limited talent began to show in a big way.

Even when he started appearing on t.v. shows to promote himself he almost exclusively did material from his first album, a tell tale sign of a lack of material. His second album was a huge disappointment, and he turned out to be a pretty horrible actor.

Since then, Daney boy has suffered a pariah label that a comparison for can scarce be found in the modern comedy world. Even guys like Larry the Cable Guy get enough respect to be left alone and since Carlos Mencia's show got cancelled the world seemed to just forget about him.

I'm not saying he isn't deserving of a lot of his criticism. I hate most of his stuff as much as the next frustrated comic. But if you asked me if I would trade careers with him... I'd say yes faster than Dane can take his shirt off. So this is a tough call. With compelling arguments, by me, on both sides... I'm going to be forced to say: Dane Cook: You're Rated Right!, wow.

Ask a Hater: Blasting the Radio

Question: Why does every other person that drives by my street facing bedroom seem to think I want to know what song is playing on their stereo?

-Ricky

Dear Ricky,

What, you didn't know?  All of those people have the baddest stereos and are playing the dopest songs to ever be heard by human ears.  You'd be crazy to not want to hear it!

I had a crazy teacher in college that used to say about people who did this, "You know how big an asshole you have to be to blare your music like that?  Look at me!  'My music is the best music ever, listen to it!'"  The most valuable thing I ever learned in my four years there.

If the back of your car looks like this, everyone in your neighborhood hates you.

This may be one of the most obnoxious, a-hole things total strangers can do to one another without ever realizing they're even being douche rockets.

The guy who lives across the street from me is a great example.

This individual (who has two cars which he parks in front of my apartment) loves blasting his tunes.  Not only that, but he loves blasting them at 2:30 in the morning while he aligns his two cars for five minutes.  Also, he has this super annoying ringtone that goes off about once every 30 seconds, ANSWER YOUR DAMN PHONE!  I actually am starting to suspect that it isn't a ringtone at all, but rather some noise his truck makes when he puts it in reverse (which is about a million times more obnoxious).

The thing that really gets me about this guy though, is that I can't pinpoint his ethnicity.  I would really like to curse him out under my breath at 3AM in as a specific way as possible but the music he listens to completely throws me.  He looks latino but the music is very white.  Tom Petty, one time I saw him playing air guitar outside his truck to Collective Soul, another time he was just blasting radio commercials.  COMMERCIALS he was making me listen to, this guy.

I'm not surprised by humanity's stupidity, but I am disappointed.

-The Hater