Charmin and Quilted Northern toilet paper have been lighting up the bad taste bell of late with their televised ads.
If many people had problems watching ads about tampons and sprays that made you feel fresh "down there," while they polished off their Swanson Salisbury steak TV dinners in front of the tube, these TP pitches should raise even more of a furor.
A Quilted Northern spokes-model informs us that "it's time to get real about what happens in the bathroom." But Phillipe and Jorge believe that most people are quite in tune with what goes on whilst on the thunder mug.
And the Charmin ad featuring a family of bears talking about cleaning up after defecating is too much even for P&J's jaded eyes; the spot features an animated, far-from-cutesy shot of a cub walking past her parents with little bits of toilet paper still clinging from his hirsute derriere. Very nice, how elevating. Maybe the TV censors should take a little time off from polishing their rockets while watching the teens on Skins and let Charmin and Northern know it's time to cut the shit, so to speak.
That sound you hear is Mr. Whipple whirring like an industrial lathe in his grave.
OSCAR BLOWS
Let's make it simple: this year's Academy Awards show co-hosted by part-time RISD student James Franco and the cloying Anne Hathaway suuuuucked!
The contrived bits that were a) not clever and unfunny, and b) ran on too long in the style of Saturday Night Live bombs that leave you wondering, "Who gave the green light to this crap?"
Oh, and did we forget to mention the wince-inducing star turn by Kirk Douglas (bless his old, stroked-out heart), who did a slurred, over-long, forced-laugh presentation that left P&J squirming like electric eels in our Barca-loungers?
Your superior correspondents also have a suggestion for the pre-awards red carpet show: make the celebs go down the path on elbows and knees since this exercise in narcissism and self-absorption makes our skin crawl, and we might as well make the featured posers as miserable as we are.
One of the celeb interviewers was Tim Gunn, who has simply become a cartoon homosexual with the charm of a salt shaker, while his colleague, Robin Roberts, looks like one of the Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker corps in drag — not an especially good idea when she ends up towering over the conga line of blown-dry homunculi who pass for Hollywood leading men these days.
There was one uplifting moment for local viewers when Melissa Leo triumphed in the "Best Supporting Actress" category. Over a decade ago, Melissa was cast in a couple of low-budget independent films that were shot in La Prov (you may recall Code of Ethics). The word from the Biggest Little's crack film crew squad (a little known fact: we've got a coterie of film tech crew types who make Vo Dilun their home and whose skills rival anything that Hollywood has to offer) was that Melissa was wonderful, fun, and hung out a lot with the crew. She was especially friendly with the veteran costumer, set dresser and art designer Bonita Flanders (a true Rhode Island underground art legend — but Bonnie's story is for another time). And dropping an F-bomb during her acceptance speech only endeared her, further, to Vo Dilunduhs.
