20 favorite Current TV stories (Part 2)

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: #20-#11.


My favorite Current TV show is a recent addition to the channel's lineup, The Rotten Tomatoes Show, a unique movie review show that's reminiscent of both the earlier years of G4's X-Play (the hosts participate in movie parody sketches) and ReelzChannel's Movie Mob (it features webcam reviews that are less obnoxious and insipid than the ones on Movie Mob because they're submitted by film bloggers who have a sense of film history and professional comedians, instead of anonymous morons who think they're funny and make the review about themselves instead of the movie). Two of my selections on this post are examples of why The Rotten Tomatoes Show is the most entertaining movie review show since the time Ebert threatened to sit on Siskel.

10. "YouTube's Worst Parents"
Brett Erlich's "Viral Video Film School" is always a highlight of infoMania.



9. "Hipsters in Space"
When's South Park going to skewer hipsters? SuperNews! beat them to the punch.



8. "Beatboxing the Flute"
One thing that's missing from this piece about Nathan "Flutebox" Lee is his ill cover of the Knight Rider theme. I assume the music clearance fee would cost more than a new chassis for KITT.



7. "Hookers are the Best Roles in Town by Ellen Fox"
The Rotten Tomatoes Show co-host sardonically sings about Hollywood's fixation on hoes-with-hearts-of-gold. On the shallow side, Fox looks hotter in the Pretty Woman hooker outfit than Julia Roberts does.



6. "Joe Gets Game"
Even though I know very little about Harry Potter (the first movie was so ponderous I never got into the rest of the franchise), Joe's bad pick-up lines in Potter slang are amusing.



5. "Blue Scholars Seattle"
This mini-doc featuring Geo and DJ Sabzi is actually more about Seattle than Blue Scholars, but any segment with them is worthwhile viewing. The video title makes the duo sound like a bad prime-time procedural franchise (Blue Scholars: Seattle, Blue Scholars: Miami...).



4. "La Vida Flamenco"
Damn.



3. "Sexy Scientist"
Double damn.



2. "Ode to the Indie by Ellen & Brett"
There's one frequent indie comedy element that's missing from this Rotten Tomatoes Show list of indie clichés: "Oh, those funny-talking yellow-faced and brown-faced people!" humor.



1. "Sarah Haskins in Target Women: Cleaning"
Each week on infoMania, Haskins' great "Target Women" segment shows how advertising panders to female viewers. The funniest of these "Target Women" pieces spoofs dumb bathroom cleaning product commercials.

Transformers: Revenge of The Onion

Here's the best one-paragraph summary of Michael Bay's Transformers I've ever come across (while reading the A.V. Club):

Everyone complaining that Michael Bay's 2007 blockbuster Transformers had inappropriate sexual contact with their childhoods is forgetting one thing: The original '80s cartoon had an awful lot of problems too, starting with wildly inconsistent animation and some pretty basic '80s cartoon plots, in which the bad guys engaged in generally harebrained schemes unworthy of titanic alien-robot forces of destruction. That said, Bay's movie should have been a slam-dunk in the "scary robots" department, simply by virtue of introducing giant, homicidal, heavily armed metal men to Earth. Instead, much like Lucas in Phantom Menace, Bay went for goofy designs and goofier behavior. His Autobots and Decepticons look like unassembled, building-sized Erector sets, and their use of already-dated human slang and contemporary references, plus the generally insipid, adolescent tone of the movie, robbed them of all majesty and menace. And hey, more of them are on the way this summer.

It's as if the A.V. Club read my mind. The '80s Transformers cartoon's animation was choppier than whatever the ShamWow guy does to his nuts.