He's Just Not That Into You (2009) movie review

He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) is one of those movies that you watch and tell yourself “This should have been a lot better.” On the other hand, what should you expect from a romantic comedy based on a self-help book of the same name (Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo). Even less promising, the authors of the eponymous book got the title from a line from Sex in the City. It’s not like I didn’t know better. I just happen to like romantic comedies, partly because my wife will pretty dependably watch them with me (the fact that she didn't because she'd seen this one in the theater with our older daughter probably should have been my clue). To be honest, I also wasn’t going to pass up a movie that included both Jennifer Connelly and Scarlett Johansson.

The formula for romantic comedies is actually pretty simple. The audience has to fall in love with and root for at least one of the stars. If you manage that, the movie-going public will forgive a wide range of shortcomings in the script. It’s one of the reasons that once you score in one of these things, they’ll never stop casting you in them. Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Drew Barrymore (the creative force behind He’s Just Not That Into You) have built careers on exactly this. On the guy side, Hugh Grant and Tom Hanks have done the same, though Hanks actually makes serious movies too. Drew Barrymore got together a monster cast for He’s Just Not That Into You. In addition to Connelly and Johansson, you get Drew Barrymore herself, Jennifer Anniston, and Ben Affleck. The only problem is that none of these stars do the heavy lifting in the movie. The bulk of the screen time actually goes to Jinnifer Goodwin, Justin Long (Dodge Ball, the Hangover), and Bradley Cooper (Wedding Crashers), and Kevin Connolly (The Notebook). Unfortunately, you just don’t wind up all that charmed by any of the characters, established or not.

Let’s do the math. Jinnifer Goodwin plays a ditz. Justin Long is a jaded bartender. Bradley Cooper is a cheating husband. Kevin Connolly fakes being gay to sell real estate. Scarlett Johansson seduces a married man. Jennifer Anniston spends most of her onscreen time being annoyed because her longtime boyfriend (Affleck) won’t marry her. Jennifer Connelly is a cigarette nazi. Now, there’s a group that I’m really going to sympathize with. And which one of them do you want to make the emotional heart of your movie? Actually, the bigger question is where was the heart in any form?

To me, it looks like they tried to use Crash (best picture 2006) with its interlinked plots tied together by either a single setting or oblique connections to a single event as the blueprint for a romantic comedy. This, of course, has been the vogue, and it’s done quite effectively in movies like 21 Grams, Babel, and The Air I Breathe where the jigsaw puzzle ultimately serves to underscore the mystical connection of all things in a world spinning into incoherence and alienation. Unfortunately, this one didn’t just copy Crash, it crashed. It’s worth mentioning that the mosaic plot was done well long before Crash. It goes back at least as far as Grand Hotel (1932) and was used very effectively in a romantic comedy in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (2003). The difference being that I still remember how charming Colin Firth was as an awkward writer who falls for his Portugese housekeeper or how poignant Emma Thompson was when she realizes that her husband bought diamonds for his mistress and a Joni Mitchell album for her for Christmas. And no, it didn't help He's Just Not that In to sprinkle in some of those man on the street interview across the movie a la Reds, Harry Met Sally. Does anyone in Hollywood get that a movie is not made to feel original by copying original touches from other peoples' movies?

Sadly, He’s Just Not, simply lacks those kinds of moments. This was Scarlett Johansson’s 47th turn as a sexually-overripe but essentially lonely woman, but I honestly can’t say she’s as good here as she was either in Match Point or Vicki, Cristina, Barcelona. Whatever happened to the little girl from the Horse Whisperer or the confused but chaste young adult in Lost in Tokyo anyway? She’s plenty sexy, but I’m pretty sure she can play other roles. Drew Barrymore gets about three minutes of screen time as the only straight employee of the Baltimore Blade. Half of Anniston’s scenes look like outtakes from when they cut out the serious parts of Wedding Crashers. I think Jennifer Connelly’s a terrific actress, but it strains credibility that she’d be married to a guy who’d want to cheat on her.

What are we left with? There’s a bit about a pen between Goodwin and Justin Long. Minor mechanical note. Connolly and Long’s characters supposedly know one another from childhood, but somehow they never get a scene together. Instead, the various links between the characters are bookmarked then forgotten. All the women work together, Bradley Cooper and Ben Affleck are pals, but nothing really comes of it. Instead, we just get this message “Hey everyone, these miniatures we stuck together, they’re connected somehow!” The one really romantic scene in the movie with Affleck ultimately fails for the simple reason that we just haven’t seen enough of him in the script to care much.

It may come down to this. While the self-help publishing industry may have only recently caught up with the notion of learning to read the signals of mismatched desire, it’s actually been a romantic comedy theme since pre-Jolson. It’s just that no one ever told the producers of this movie that. At one point, they homage John Hughes ( not my favorite director), but it’s like they had no clue how a John Hughes movie or any good romance actually works.
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Water Ghosts- Shawna Yang Ryan (review)

If you’ve ever been to Locke, California (sometimes known as the last self-contained Chinatown in America), it’s an easy place to miss from the roadside partly because the town’s buildings are so unremarkable. More than anything, you remember the combined sensation of heat, fog, and the persistent presence of mildew from being so close to the Sacramento River. One result is that the place has an ethereal quality that photographers and painters often pick up. Thousands of Chinese passed through this refuge, yet they remain just a bit out of our reach. Locke is more felt than seen.

First and foremost Shawna Yang Ryan’s novel Water Ghosts (formerly Locke 1928) gets this right. Her vision of Locke stands outside of time. She describes buildings, plants, a church service, a celebration in a gambling hall, but they feel less than permanent. Ryan achieves this by focusing her energies on literally writing from inside her characters’ skins. She describes in great detail what they hear, see, how they bleed, cough to the point where the novel frequently feels claustrophobic. You don’t just see and hear what they hear, you are seeing and feeling what they see and hear intensely. It wasn’t until the middle of the novel that I noticed how little conventional narration there is to provide “perspective” about time, place, or events within the town in the broader sense. Not many writers can manage this and even fewer can sustain the “unsettled” mood that soaks the pages of Water Ghosts.

The second interesting choice Ryan made was to take the fact that Locke the town was a place where men generally outnumbered women 20 to 1 and to look at it though the lens of the 1. Richard Fong, the manager of the Lucky Fortune, one of the town’s gambling halls, who either escaped to California or stays to support his Chinese family, serves as the nominal “hub” of the plot. Despite that, Ryan’s real focus is on the various women who see Richard (Fong Man Gum) as Locke’s alpha male. These include - Chloe, a white prostitute who is a favorite of Richard’s and whose family is just a few miles away in Sacramento - Poppy, the Chinese madame of the local brothel who worked for her position after being the victim of a disastrous arranged marriage– the minister’s wife and daughter – and Ming Wai, Richard’s Chinese wife who suddenly appears in Locke on a raft with two other mysterious women. Ryan explores the capacity of these women to endure and survive in a town where few intact families existed, but birth and death go on.

Water Ghosts is beautifully and hauntingly written. At the same time, it’s not a breezy read nor was it meant to be one. It seems intent on getting the feel of Locke right. Ryan stayed there for some thirty days to absorb the place. I suspect it was time well spent and was critical to her ability to catch Locke. It never was a simple place. Instead Locke was the sort of American town where dreams, ghosts, and forgotten promises coexisted on equal footing with what most of us think of as day to day life. Water Ghosts makes certain that we get the town’s essence.

I look forward to Ryan’s next book which I understand focuses on Taiwan in 1927.
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Don't Cry for Me South Carolina (Mark Sanford)

Here I thought all these sex scandals were going to end with Monica Lewinsky. I don't know what to make of Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina, or any of the many politicians who have gotten caught up in these things. I'd say only a fool would claim that it's a Republican or a Democratic or a liberal vs. conservative thing to get caught in a sex scandal. The only difference is that when the Democrats get caught, they either get impeached, resign, or otherwise lose their jobs. For some odd reason, the Republicans do a better job of staying in office after they confess. Even Larry Craig managed to stay in office until he termed out.

One of the odd things to me isn't partisan at all. It's how we consider it a major scandal when politicians get caught in affairs, but when other celebrities whether it's entertainers or athletes get caught up in these things it's just part of the deal. I don't now Jennifer Aniston, but she seemed nice enough. Her husband Brad Pitt gets involved with Angelina Jolie and a few years it's all just something to be expected. Aniston made a hit movie with a dog. Jolie and Pitt both got nominated for Oscars. They're flourishing We don't exactly forget the “affair” thing, but we see the making of movies or celebrity as somehow independent of adultery at least enough so that we don't stop watching Angelina Jolie movies because she maybe stole Brad. Several months ago, it came out that Roger Clemens had an affair with singer Mindy Macready, likely when she was underage. A few years before that Barry Bonds's mistress wrote a tell all book. What lingered? It was the whole steroids thing. You can cheat on your wife if you're an athlete, you just can't cheat in the sport.

Politics is the opposite. Did anyone know who Senator Ensign was.? Even though it wasn't that long ago and it got a fair amount of publicity, does anyone remember that Mark Sanford was the governor who tried to refuse stimulus money? Let's put this another way. Did it matter that Elliot Spitzer was the prosecutor who took on fraud on Wall Street even a little before it became so fashionable. Not that it mattered. We couldn't have a governor who would pay for hookers. What's happened in America that we now seem to care more about who our leaders screw at night than whether or not they're screwing us or helping us in their day jobs?

Sure, sometimes the sex stuff slips over into your actual job like when you give your girlfriend and her husband jobs and contracts or in one case your boyfriend. At the same time, that pales in comparison to Dick Cheney getting out of office and saying “Sure, we never though Iraq had anything to do with 9/11” or learning that the administration was torturing people even though they were getting memos about torture not exactly producing reliable information anyway. Shouldn't we notice that sort of thing instead? It's certainly interesting to find out that Mark Sanford was doing bad things in Argentina, but why is that the bigger news story? I mean which one gets you to the front of the line to hell faster? I started a war for the hell of it and ruined my country's economy in the process or I cheated on my wife in Argentina for a couple weeks? Here's an idea. Why not end all official business in South Carolina completely while they impeach the guy? That certainly would be the patriotic thing to do.

It just strikes me that we have a much more mature view of movie stars. Sure, we're titillated by their private lives and their personal foibles, but we understand that what really matters is that they still look hot enough so that we'll pay 9 dollars to go see one of their movies. We don't especially care if they adopt children from all around the world, save us from global warming, keep us from abusing animals, or serve as president of the NRA. On the other end, we don't care if they spend their offscreen time ingesting black tar heroin, neglecting their children, or beating on hotel clerks for unexplained reasons. We understand that the real job of movie stars is to make us want to watch them in movies. That's the real job. The other stuff might want to make us watch them either more or less, but you can only be dead on screen a certain number of times. Sports has a similar thing. You want our attention, you have to win games at some point. You want to keep our attention, you have to win some more games unless you're Anna Kournikova. Golf, for instance, understands that Tiger Woods is way more interesting than John Daly even if Daly made much better tabloid fodder.

If only we took our politicians that seriously, we might even have universal health care. Personally, if you asked me the public would pay more attention to the issue if instead of talking about insurance premiums they started talking about boob jobs for all adult women and viagra for all males. Then we could pretend that we live like movie stars and athletes and people would treat the policy stuff as if it mattered.

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At this level, I'm not sorry about Michael Jackson

I should probably wait a bit, but I won't. I liked much of Michael Jackson's music and thought that he was a terrific performer in his prime. I'm sorry for the loss of those things and I do find his death sad in that sense. I am, however, not going to mourn the guy. In fact, I'm glad he's dead.

Despite the not guilty verdict, I still believe that Michael Jackson was a child molester. No, he probably didn't lock his victims in a basement and rape them, but he was still a child molester who persuaded young boys to do things with him that they weren't old enough to consent to. In some ways, these are the worst because it's harder for the victim to make the separation between the seeming acts of “kindness/seduction” and the bits of the relationship that constitute molestation. The seduction just lengthens the pain and guilt for the victim. Maybe the King of Pop was some sort of boy at heart, maybe he was abused himself in some way that made his actions more compulsive than chosen, but he never openly repented and there was nothing to ever suggest that he ever stopped trying to do these things or sought treatment.

The fact that Michael Jackson was musically-talented makes no difference to me. In fact, it only made it possible for him to molest more boys than otherwise might have. He also may have done any number of other humanitarian acts, even ones that benefited children. Those were certainly good deeds and I won't question his motives for doing them. I also suppose that there's some possibility that his acts were misunderstood in some way and he wasn't actually molesting boys. If that's the case, I'll take this back.

That said, as a non-celebrity, I'll say on behalf of his likely dozens of victims and the families of those victims what the celebrities and media won't say. I'm glad he's dead. I hope it was painful. I won't mourn him and I'm glad he's not around to molest any more boys. I'm also not going to euphemize it by saying the guy was eccentric. If no one else is going to say or write it today, I will.
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Dirty Dansu

After more than forty years of going to a variety of barbers and hairstylists who never learned my name, I started “going steady” with a hairstylist ten years ago. It was my wife’s idea. She’s not Asian, but was convinced that hardly anyone at those ten dollar haircut places had any idea how to cut Asian hair. Most of the people who cut my hair has this knack for doing it in such a way that I looked like Ed Grimley within a couple weeks. One day, my wife and I were shopping when she said I needed a haircut. It happened that the lady cutting my hair was Cambodian and Mrs. Chancelucky declared that from now on this would be the person who cut my hair.

I’ve now gotten used to knowing the name of the person cutting my hair and her knowing mine. For a few years, we mostly talked about places to go to dinner. I had learned a number of random but interesting items about her, the most significant being that my hair cutter and her husband had managed to buy seven houses. We stopped talking about places to go to dinner because during the banking crisis, they lost six of the houses. She also bought her own shop and sold it, something that I found out today when I came for my appointment and the whole salon had been remodeled. To be accurate, it was mostly remodeled. The ceiling still hadn’t been recovered and only half of the new lighting system was in place. Without all the wattage, the place seemed more like a bar than a hair salon.

Anyway, my hair cutting lady asked me about father’s day then told me about how she had gone to a party with her husband over the weekend at which he began dirty dancing with other women including an old girlfriend of his. I suspect that they have a number of Asian friends in the area, but my hair stylist doesn’t know many middle-aged Asian men who aren’t friends or relatives. She was puzzling over why she got as mad at her husband as she did.

I’d heard other stories from her in the past. Once she told me that she’d never learned to swim because she’d almost drowned while crossing a river when her family was leaving Cambodia. This was different, though. Her husband had ultimately apologized and insisted that he wasn’t doing the dirty dancing as much as it was Hennessey. I don’t know them, but that might have been true. I then asked her if she’d been rubbing up on her husband while they were dancing earlier in the evening and she said “Yes.” I figured that eliminated the possibility of his dancing that way with others but not with her.

I then accidentally told her what appeared to be the perfect thing, “Maybe you got him too excited when he was dancing with you.”

This made her smile and we agreed that she needed to go have a normal night of dancing with her husband some time soon so they could get past all this. I felt like Chris Harrison, the host of the Bachelor who always says just the right thing in the Bachelor’s moment of stress.

I’m not sure why I suddenly crossed this line into the inner life of my hair cut lady. I now understand why some people develop such complex relationships with the people who cut their hair and do their nails. It seems like a very American thing, though I did see an Audrey Tatou movie about a French beauty parlor that amounted to the same thing with beauticians as combination confessors, groomers, and friends. Did I need to have an Asian hair stylist before I could form such a relationship?

After that I picked up lunch at Port of Subs where all the people behind the counter were East Indian. Other than Jared? Do people form friendships with the people who make their sandwiches?

In the meantime, it came out during my hairstyling thing that the only females I’ve danced with in the last fifteen years were my wife and my daughter. With my wife we never go out on the dance floor and make like were in a Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey movie or even one with Julia Styles. It’s generally more like Shall We Dansu, only we don’t do ballroom. Maybe once every two years, we wind up at a wedding that happens to have a live band.

Anyway, it seems like every couple develops its own customs about when , how, and who they dance with in public. Some dance with everyone. In fact Bill Clinton’s mom supposedly told him it was bad manners not to dance with every single girl at a party, something that has fascinating psychological ramifications given the rest of Bill Clinton’s life. Some couples dance with others, but only slow dance together. I have no idea what the rules are on dirty dancing, we’re too old for that sort of thing though we did go to a wedding a few months ago where a bunch of the women were making like pole dancers. I didn’t comment on it to Mrs. Chancelucky. At the same time, it’s not like any couple ever sits down and says “These are the rules for when we go out dancing.”

None that has anything to do with being Asian, having a regular hair stylist, or whatever else started this story, yet somehow in some way I can’t explain that has everything to do with how all this came about.
chancelucky

Back

Well, I finished my short story collection, at least for now. Next step, I need to write the perfect query letter, come up with a 30 page sample, and find an agent. My wife tells me that the whole process sent me into an emotional tailspin. After I had a draft that I “liked”, I found myself more frustrated than satisfied. While those of us who write never say such things, I think many of us dream that people will see it and immediately tell you how wonderful it is. It does happen once in a while, but the overwhelming tendency of friends, relatives, etc. is, if they happen to read any of it, to tell you every single thing they think is wrong with whatever you’ve written. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s often like there’s some unwritten obligation to not say anything positive.

There were also folk who were nice enough to read the whole thing who simply weren’t all that positive. Often, they had criticisms that made sense at the level of “Why didn’t I think of or see that?” Honestly, that just makes it worse. Bottom line, I spent many years working on something an about five people were willing to read the whole thing. Two actually liked it and everyone else essentially dismissed it as unpublishable or not interesting. I think the thing that was harder yet, was how indifferent so many people were as in "What have you been up to lately?" "I just finished my short story collection that I've been working on for years." No response whatsoever. No "hey good luck" No "Gee I'd like to read it some time". No "what's it about?" Instead, it was lots of "Oh someone just knocked on the door, I'll have to talk to you later." My take is that if people who know and like you aren't interested...

Given that, does it really make sense to go look for an agent? Even harder, it felt like the overwhelming message was that I had wasted my time. Instead of being exhilarated about finishing a huge project, I was exhausted and disappointed instead. For the last month, I haven’t even been able to look at my own book. I figured if other people were reading five pages and concluding that it wasn’t worth reading, maybe I’ve been working on something that only I can appreciate.

In the meantime, I slipped away from this blog. Much of that was the short story collection. I also simply hit the fourth wall with reality television. Every time I tried to write about American Idol, I found myself going off about how “tired” the show had gotten. The Bachelor became less of a “reality” show than a soap opera with non-professional actors playing out a not very well-written script. Yes, Mrs. Chancelucky and I have been watching Jillian and guys, but we’re having a hard time deciding if Wes is more annoying than Shane Llamas. As I look at the reality landscape, there seem to be more and more instances of the shows featuring the mentally unstable. With Jon and Kate Gosselin, I keep asking what kind of country lets two people like this have eight kids? I know somehow that the whole business with Susan Boyle could have been avoided. She could easily have had her “moment” without the meltdown. What happened to reality television where the participants got to do something inspiring then disappear back to regular life?

I did like having an audience, a very appreciative one at that, for my reality tv writing. I’d love to find some way to continue that relationship, but I can’t promote shows that I feel have slipped into something that’s essentially unhealthy. Whatever relationship American Idol had to actual “music” and the joys that come with it slipped away in the last three seasons. Any tie the Bachelor had to “romance” gave way to something far more cynical somewhere after Andy and Tessa’s season. More important, my repeating this in post after post would be both stupid and boring.

So what do I post about? Well, I might go back to political commentary. I’d wanted to give President Obama at least a six month honeymoon and he’s had that. There’s also movie and book reviews and the various odd details of Mr. and Mrs. Chancelucky’s lives. Three’s never been much of an audience for those things here, just as there’s likely little to no audience for my fiction, but I like doing it and more important I do miss blogging regularly.

Anyway, I’m back. I wish I could tell you that there are now dozens of agents trying to take me to lunch so that I’ll let them represent “Inventing China”. I probably need to face the fact that it’ll never happen and I have unintentionally created 280 plus pages of random boredom. In the meantime, I like blogging and I like the fact that sometimes people read stuff I’ve written and find it either funny or interesting.
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A Night of Great Disco Ballads (Idol 8 round of 6+1)

Carrie Prejean was recently spotted out with Ryan Seacrest


I’m still trying to figure out why Adam Lambert dressed up as K.D. Lang the other night. While Randy Jackson kept assuring America how great this year’s singers are because they hit all those notes, I kept wondering why they had a Disco night and the only person dancing seemed to be Paula Abdul and her inner-goddess. Just a reminder, in pop music it’s not the notes, it’s the beat especially in Disco. Let me translate, “This is our most talented group ever” really means “America’s not talking about you guys at all and they consider about five of you interchangeable.”

Are there really record executives dreaming of the day they find the next Donna Summer? Apparently, a bunch of these Idol finalists think that. How about that Anoop dressed up as a lounge lizard complete with mustache? You know what? The whole night sucked. Think about this, the apparent highlight was Kris Allen doing “Hard for the Money” unplugged. Did he persuade you that there were layers either to the lyric or the melody that benefited from it? Did you pick up any new resonances in the meaning. I have to say, I liked it better when it just seemed to be a song about prostitution, either literal or figurative. Either that or it’s something you play during lunch hour aerobics class. This is what I think, the guy was mostly just trying to get out of having to do disco. According to the judges, Kris is now a contender for the finals. What other story have they got? The whole Allison thing is not happening. If you have more bottom three appearances than actual memorable performances, you’re just not going to win.

That wasn’t the case with Adam Lambert. I’d say when Ryan starts asking, “Say Adam, how are you going to surprise us this week?” It’s time to just throw the fast ball knee high on the outside corner. I know Adam Lambert has both the voice and the stage presence to do that, but now I keep sitting on the curve ball. Let’s see him perform in a clown outfit. Maybe they’ll do Broadway night and he’ll go Freddie Mercury. Maybe he’ll shop in the women’s section like Kris and Paula, but maybe for different reasons. The way the judges have gone lately, Adam’s chances of winning are better than even against the field. This is Secretariat, the Chuck Noll era Steelers, like betting on Clay Aiken coming out some day.

Okay, that one didn’t fit, but the only real drama (not to say the show won’t manufacture some) about the next 4 episodes of American Guydol (Jordin Sparks was the last female finalist and Katharine Mcphee was the last one over 18) has to do with the coming reality show collision between the Miss USA Contest and American Idol 8. If you wonder how they might have made Miss USA more with it, instead of asking Carrie Prejean (this year’s Miss California, well except for parts of San Francisco) about gay marriage they could have said “Do you think American Idol is ready for an openly gay winner?”

If you haven’t been following the news, Carrie Prejean may have lost the Miss USA title because she told the judges she felt gay marriage was wrong and stuck by her answer. Given that half the male audience and a similar percentage of the men working behind the scenes at your average Pageant are gay men, some people didn’t like her answer. It also seemed mildly odd for a woman to parade around in a skimpy bikini, high heels, and makeup then start talking about the Bible being her guide in life. I just didn’t know that Ephesians came with a centerfold. Nonetheless, much of America is giving her credit for not playing the politician and sticking up for what she believes. Would they be saying the same thing if Carrie Prejean had suggested that we burn gay couples at the stake or mentioned that the Jews killed Jesus? Who knows? It’s all a matter of degree I guess.

In the meantime, they’re saying that she went on a date with Michael Phelps. Maybe if they’d asked her about legalizing marijuana, she’d go on a date with Rosie O’donnell? I do think they’re making too big a deal of it. When’s the last time you ever heard of a former beauty pageant winner getting into politics? You betcha, it’s not like Carrie Prejean is going to run for vice-president of the US or something. This is just Miss USA. Can you imagine the other four finalists that night though? How many do you think agreed with Carrie Prejean and America just didn’t get to find out.

Enough with the Adam and Steve business, I assume you want me to talk about Adam and Ryan. Here in California, we recently had Proposition 8 where the Mormon Church spent millions to make sure that we were all clear on the concept of traditional marriage being between a man and one or more women. You wanna talk about Big Love, what bigger love is there in protecting us from the horrors of gay people being in committed relationships. Proposition 8 split California voters right down the middle with slightly more of them siding with Miss USA.

Idol 8 is in this fascinating position of healing the cultural divide. According to most, the likely final is the openly gay guy who really can sing against the widower who works as a church music director. If it weren’t in such bad taste, I’d say it. This isn’t American Idol, it’s like a special episode of Wife Swap. I can see a final where Adam and Danny duet to Ebony and Ivory except with pink keys marking the sharps and flats. For a couple weeks, we may get to watch the finalists engage in all this camaraderie and exchange various tokens of mutual respect.

Adam can sing Bobby Goldsboro's 'Honey' in memory of Danny’s wife. In the middle when gets to 'I long to be with you", the camera cuts to Danny who has to take off his glasses to wipe away tears. The judges tell Adam how he can sing anything and Paula compares Adam to Bob Dylan and Tim Buckley. Danny then sing “It’s Raining Men” and blame it on Jasmine Trias. Just before the final chorus, he points to Adam then Ryan and winks. Paula tells Danny how on key he always is no matter what he sings. Simon thanks Danny for dedicating a song to him. Kara says something about how David Hernandez is probably dancing around right now if he's watching. Carrie Prejean comes out to hug both contenders and to tell America who she loves the sinner and not the sin. Adam gives her an odd look.

American picks a winner based on talent not sexual preference and our country will be whole again, though still 80 trillion dollars in debt. We’re probably not far from a time when instead of a recording contract, the winner of the show just gets a job.

If you ask me, I’d just like to see one season of the show where the winner at the end is pop music itself. Just don’t think that’s going to be this year.
Other Chancelucky Idol Reviews

Sir Linksalot American Idol articles

Buddy TV AMerican Idol Page

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