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Tag: tina fey
Late Night Roundup: Political ‘Friends With Benefactors’

Late Night Roundup: Political ‘Friends With Benefactors’

Jon Stewart noticed a little contradiction from all the right-wingers attacking the alleged influence of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: Many of these people are some of the biggest advocates for the influence of American money in politics.

Larry Wilmore looked at the results of abstinence-only sex education in Texas: The kids are getting more STD’s. And as a consequence, now Larry has to be the one to tell the kids to protect themselves.

Jimmy Kimmel was joined by a cast of moms, to tell the dirty secret of Mother’s Day: They don’t really like any of the gifts they get.

And in a very special appearance with David Letterman, Tina Fey showed the lengths that women must go to in order to conform to gender norms when they wear fancy evening dresses.

‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Is ’30 Rock’ Funny For A Reason: It Was Created By Tina Fey And Robert Carlock

‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Is ’30 Rock’ Funny For A Reason: It Was Created By Tina Fey And Robert Carlock

By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock for NBC, the old home of their 30 Rock, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt instead arrives by way of Netflix, whose participation in prestige television no longer feels remarkable. As is the custom of the house, it is being laid before you all at once, a gift.

Apart from your having to pay to see it, this is good news all around: Where Kimmy, wonderful odd duck that it is, might well have foundered and floundered in the roiling waters of broadcast TV — it is just the sort of left-of-center comedy that NBC once specialized in and has now purged from its schedule. It has already been guaranteed two seasons in its new, commercial-free home.

It is also, it is worth noting, a series in which three of the four lead characters are female, of different ages, and the fourth is a gay black man. Because that never happens.

The series stars Ellie Kemper (from The Office) as a woman freed after 15 years from an underground bunker, where she was held as an unwilling member of a post-apocalyptic cult. After a Today Show appearance with her fellow Indiana Mole Women, Kimmy decides to remain in New York City, to live life. She’s like “That Girl,” out of a bunker.

In short order, she acquires a dotty landlady (Carol Kane) with a radical past, a roommate with show business dreams (Tituss Burgess, star of Broadway), and a rich uptown boss (Jane Krakowski), who hires her and fires and hires her again to watch her entitled, unhappy son (Tanner Flood) and stepdaughter (Dylan Gelula): “I don’t like giving second chances,” Krakowski’s Jacqueline (who shares much with her Jenna Maroney) tells Kimmy, who has asked for her job back, “but I appreciate your lack of pride.”

Kimmy has plenty of pride, in fact; a kind of mix of Leslie Knope, Kenneth the Page and Erin the Office secretary, she has a heroic sense of self and almost desperate optimism. Indomitability, as the title indicates, is a theme of the show.

She is also, in many respects, a child, a person whose ordinary life stopped in middle school. Like Will Ferrell in Elf, she is an enchanted innocent in the big city, eating candy for dinner, swinging “all the way around” on a playground swing.

There are bumps: The creepiness of the premise _ women really have been kidnapped and held underground for years, after all, — is played with but never quite looked at straight on. Kimmy might as easily have been rescued from a desert island or come out of a coma.

It’s a time travel comedy. Much of the humor precedes from what she doesn’t know about how the world has changed: Whitney Houston is dead, “Word up” and “As if” are not things people say anymore. She calls the present “the future.”

This alien aspect is further magnified by making her native Indiana a bizarre and backward place where oysters are called “sea pistachios” and pistachios are called “tree clams” and where courtship is effected with gifts of “flowers and meat.”

Not unusually, it takes a couple of episodes for the show to hit cruising speed, for its characters to warm up, to move from an attitude of suspicion to support. And for some viewers there will be a probationary period, unfair but inevitable, in which Kimmy, still wet behind the ears, is measured against the miracle that was 30 Rock. But it gets there.

Although it is its own creature, the show has the same comic grammar as 30 Rock. It has the same blink-of-an-eye flashbacks and cutaways; the same way of hanging jokes onto jokes, of changing direction twice in a single sentence; the same sideways relation to reality; the same pop-cultural topicality and streets-of-the-city setting; the same random acts of surrealism; the same interest in matters of class, race and gender; the same mix of braininess and feeling.

It’s at once moving and without sentiment.

The leads are all marvelous, with a complementary elemental division of attitudes: Kemper, air; Burrell, fire; Kane, earth; and Krakowski, water, as I reckon it. They rise to the occasion, and make it an event.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Eric Liebowitz for Netflix

This Week In Crazy: Common Core Makes Your Kids Gay, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Common Core Makes Your Kids Gay, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Dinesh D’Souza

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Pseudo-historian Dinsesh D’Souza kicks things off at number five, for putting his own absurd spin on the GOP’s long-abandoned “you didn’t build that!” talking point.

During a 40-minute (!) speech at equally crazy Rep. Louie Gohmert’s birthday party (!!), D’Souza attempted to explain how “Obama and the progressives” are “waging war against the wealth creators.”

“They allege that the wealth of America is based on theft, and it’s the right of the government to come and seize your wealth, and my wealth because that wealth is stolen goods,” D’Souza said. “And they have an elaborate historical and contemporary argument to prove it. In effect, what they’re saying is that your stuff that’s in your house — your TV, your couch, your savings accounts, your kids’ college account — that’s sort of like Nazi stolen art. It belongs to somebody else.”

That’s right — just like the Nazis murdered Jews and stole their possessions, so too will Obama seize your couch. Just like he learned playing African Monopoly!

And that tortured analogy may not even have been the craziest part of D’Souza’s speech; that would be when he praised Gohmert for possessing “the kind of American spirit, and fortitude, and good sense, but also practicality that’s very much needed today.”

Let’s see how that’s working out for him…
4. Louie Gohmert

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Unfortunately, turning 61 doesn’t appear to have made Congressman Gohmert any wiser.

During an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Wilkow Majority, Gohmert explained why President Obama won’t actually do anything to stop ISIS from taking over Iraq: Because “six top advisors to President Obama are Muslim brothers.”

“If you’re Commander-in-Chief you can’t be listening to Muslim brothers advise on when it’s time to stop destroying Muslim brothers,” Gohmert explained.

Of course, this is far from the first time that Gohmert has claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is secretly pulling the strings in the White House.

But if Obama’s “Muslim brothers” are really manipulating events to ISIS’ benefit, they aren’t doing a very good job.

3. Sarah Palin

 

Image: TaraLivesOn/Flickr

Image: TaraLivesOn/Flickr

Failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin apparently still hasn’t gotten over the 2008 presidential election. In excerpts released this week from a new book on the history of Saturday Night Live, Palin claims that Tina Fey — who infamously mocked Palin’s inept interviews — owes her career to Palin.

“I know that they portrayed me as an idiot, and I hated that,” Palin says in the book, apparently unaware that Fey quoted her nearly verbatim on SNL.

“If I ran into Tina Fey again today, I would say: ‘You need to at least pay for my kids’ braces or something from all the money that you made off of pretending that you’re me!'” Palin added. “‘My goodness, you capitalized on that! Can’t you contribute a little bit? Jeez!'”

Of course, by any objective measure, Fey — who had won five Emmy awards by the time John McCain made the worst mistake of his career — was already plenty successful before she began mocking the half-term governor of Alaska. But if, for some reason, Fey does feel the need to pay Palin back, maybe she could give some advice on how to make Palin TV a bit more intentionally hilarious.

2. Pat Robertson

Televangelist Pat Robertson is not the first conservative to call for a revolution, but he definitely has the weirdest reason.

On Wednesday’s edition of The 700 Club, Robertson recounted his last visit to the doctor. It took longer than he wanted, because the nurse questioned him at length about his medical history and logged the information into a computer. This, naturally, is Obamacare’s fault. And that, naturally, leaves us with no choice but to overthrow the government.

“It isn’t right,” Robertson lamented. “Ladies and gentlemen, we need a revolution to stop these so-called progressives from destroying this country anymore. But they’re getting pretty close to the tipping point. It is not a pleasant scenario.”

Of course, not everybody will want to overthrow the socialist government because of long doctor’s appointments. After all, some people enjoy their sickness.

1. Tea Party of Louisiana

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Senator David Vitter (R-LA) is consistently rated as one of the most conservative members of Congress, but that’s not good enough for this week’s “winners,” the Tea Party of Louisiana. On Monday, the group expressed its “shock and outrage” at Vitter for supporting the Common Core educational standards, and declared that he is a “turncoat of liberty.”

Why does the group hate Common Core so badly? As the Times-Picayunereports, it was upset that the lessons will turn the students gay:

Tea Party Common Core screenshot

Screenshot viaRight Wing Watch

That first bulletpoint from the Tea Party group’s press release comes from a website called Broken World News. As the Times-Picayune notes, the site’s about page contains the disclaimer, “If you believe any of the shit you read here you are a freaking moron.”

The group eventually realized that Common Core is not an official gay indoctrination plot, and removed the link from its website. No word on whether Lenar Whitney is also satire, though.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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Tina Fey Shuts Down ‘Mean Girls’ Reunion-Film Talk

Tina Fey Shuts Down ‘Mean Girls’ Reunion-Film Talk

By Nardine Saad, Los Angeles Times

Tina Fey is working on a “Mean Girls” reunion of sorts, but sadly it won’t be in the form of another movie.

The 2004 comedy, which will celebrate its 10-year anniversary in April, was adapted by Fey from Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence.”

The cult classic starred a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan, now 27, pre-“Notebook” Rachel McAdams, now 35, and the troupe of “Plastics” — pre-“Veronica Mars” Amanda Seyfriend and post-“Party of Five” Lacey Chabert. Fey and her longtime pal Amy Poehler also appear in the film, which remains one of the standout movies in Lohan’s repertoire and still comes up in interviews for Seyfried, 28, and Chabert, 31.

News of a reunion to commemorate the milestone has been buzzing since Fey and Lohan appeared on the first episode of Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” in February. Lohan took the story one step further last week when she told Fallon that the reunion was on (and he even asked if they could make it happen on his show).

Doing the press rounds for her latest comedy, “Muppets Most Wanted,” Fey addressed the rumors and her role in starting them.

“Yeah, I saw her at the first episode of the ‘Tonight Show.’ We did that bit with Jimmy, and I said to her, ‘Oh, I think someone may call us about doing some kind of reunion because next month is the 10th anniversary of the movie,’” Fey told Access Hollywood in a piece published Tuesday.

The “Saturday Night Live” alum said that, realistically, the get-together would just be a panel discussion of some sort, “not another movie.”

“At most it would be like a panel discussion with a plate of hot wings,” she quipped.

She insisted said it’s been too long since the original hit theaters.

“No, it’s definitely not a movie,” Fey said. “It’s just the anniversary is coming up, so everybody get your pink shirts. It’s been 10 years. You can tell when you look at me. It’s been 10 years.”

Fey echoed the sentiment Tuesday night at the premiere of “Muppets Most Wanted” at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.

“We’re coming up next month on the 10-year anniversary of the original movie,” she told Extra. “I can’t believe it either. We’re going to see if there’s any way to get everyone together, but not a movie, sadly. We’re all past high school age.”

Photo: PBS Press Room via Flickr