Read it and Weep

Without a doubt, the worst thing about The Iliad is that it doesn’t have Brad Pitt in it.  Wolfgang Peterson fixed that in his 2004 movie that has almost no basis in the works of Homer.

Troy completely re-imagines the epic poem about the Trojan war as an over-long action movie about people fighting for no reason.  It also updates many things modern audiences would find boring.  Instead of an all-stabbing war, the movie includes giant flaming balls of twine.  Instead of a war without a Trojan horse, the movie includes a particularly plausible Trojan horse.  Instead of women being property, they’re people!

It was much less pleasurable than listening to the book, but that was mostly because it was a short nap instead of a good night’s sleep.  Joining us once again is our favorite British blogger, Kyra of FerretBrain.

When we last left our friends, they were killing each other in front of the walls of Troy.  After another 300+ pages, they’re exactly where they started, though with slightly diminished numbers.  But the Iliad, like so many things, is more about the journey than the destination, and like the band Journey, the Iliad tried my patience.

The parts that aren’t boring don’t make a whole lot of sense.  Achilles doesn’t want to fight because of some stupid slight against him, then his friend dies (in a war.  Shocker!) and he fights.  At one point he kicks a river’s ass.  There’s a funeral that lasts 10 days and consists of horse racing and wrestling.  War is hell.

In this episode, we’ve got regular guest Stephen Carter sitting in for the traveling Ezra, and special guest Nick Delehanty.  The two most frequent guests, together at last.

War between the Trojans and the Greeks is like the battle for my Internet service between the cable company and the phone company.  Neither side has moral righteousness, nobody is ever going to be declared the winner, and  people are constantly getting stabbed.

Yet despite the high level of stabbing, the Iliad is mostly about being boring.  There are endless lists of people and where they’re from, none of which are important to the story.  There are speeches on speeches, mostly about how everybody should just keep fighting, just keep fighting.  And the hunting analogies.  Oh the hunting analogies!

Fortunately, even this great work of the Western canon, isn’t safe from our ability to sleep through something and then make fun of it.

Did you know that fairies like to have sex?  I didn’t either.  Turns out it’s pretty much all they do.  They solve a crime here or there, try to kill each other to gain the throne, and they have lots and lots of sex.

A Caress of Twilight is the second book in a series of disgusting fairy porn books in which every kind of magical creature lives in LA and is super horny.  There’s some kind of political intrigue between members of various courts and ancient races of blah blah blah.  And then there’s more sex.  You see, in order to get a fairy pregnant she has to have sex with everybody she meets for about a year, ergo couplings of all kinds are encouraged and described in great detail.

There’s even a parasitic twin attached to a dwarf that can’t talk but has fully functioning genitals.  Have I talked enough about the sex?  Because I want to ram this point home.  Laurell K. Hamilton writes erotica about weird creatures.  That’s it.

We are truly blessed to have three of the worst TV shows ever on at the same time. Rob, Whitney, and Are Your There Chelsea? are impressively bad. Have no doubt, friends, we are living in the…. what’s the opposite of a golden age? Meat age? We are living in the meat age of bad TV. Rejoice!

It’s a race to the bottom of epic proportions. Will it be Rob’s racism and criminal abuse of Latina abuelas and Cheech Marin’s career? Will it be Whitney’s inability to make a joke and put John Cleese to good use? Or will it be Chelsea’s…. uhn. I’m done.

The always entertaining and likeable Bri Pruett helps us destroy these shows. Please someone give Bri her own sitcom already. It will be so much better than this.

Be prepared to meet the coolest dog ever. He drives boats. He breaks up smuggling rings. He orders hot dogs for hobos for crying out loud. This dog is perfect.

Sadly, the plot and the rest of the cast are just not up to Cool Dog’s standards. There’s an evil step mother, a stupid bully, and a sea monster-esque landlady. They all suck, especially compared to Cool Dog.

Thanks so much to the Denver Comedy Co-op’s podcast, The First World Privilege Hour for sponsoring this episode and having great taste in bad movies.

Joining us is comedian Anthony Lopez, who is freaking awesome.

We all know that some parents live out their dreams through their children.  But it’s one thing to know it and another to watch it happen in all it’srhinestoned, overly made-up sadness.  Toddlers and Tiaras is another brick in TLC’s plan to give every psychotic person their own reality show.

This show follows the lives of prepubescent pageant contestants and their mentally ill mothers who force them to compete.  Each episode focuses on three young girls who are hoping to take home the crown for Ultimate Mega Jumbo Laser Supreme, the highest title in beauty pageants.  In almost every case the children hate it but their mothers won’t let them quit.  As an added bonus, some of the moms suffer from another mental illness called Extreme Couponing.

There’s only one person to bring on for an episode about at terrifying TLC reality show: Colleen.  You may remember her from Episode #106 – Hoarders Reviewed and just like Hoarders, she’s already watched this whole series.  It’s sick, but it comes in handy for our podcast.

The second half of Ender’s Game is less good than the first.  Instead of playing laser tag in space, Ender exterminates an entire race of sentient beings, then gets all preachy about it.  The kids who wrote political comments on message boards are given supreme leadership of the world.  There are dirigibles.  It’s the future, and people ride in freaking dirigibles!

Despite the strange turns the story took, we focus on what’s really important: the psychological impacts of all this killing on a child.  And when it comes to children murdering people, there’s only one person to talk to.  You may remember Lisa from our review of The Hunger Games where she dispensed some great insight into the mass-murdering child brain.

Ender’s Game is a sponsored topic by an anonymous fan who hates the book. That makes him a better hater than us, since we had a tough time finding things not to like about genius kids playing laser tag in space.

Still, we do our best to find the hate. Allison Fields from Catwoman is on hand to speculate about a future where polar bears give back rubs along with actual science fiction writer and future overload David Barr Kirtley.

Honestly, we hadn’t felt this good after a reading assignment since The Hunger Games… which also featured kids killing each other… hmmm… well, that’s disturbing.

If you look in the attic, you’ll find flowers.  It’s true.  But more interestingly, you’ll also find four children who are locked in there being slowly poisoned by their mom.  You see, Mom used to be married to her uncle and instead of hobbled British aristocrats, that marriage created adorable, well adjusted blond children.  Grandpa the millionaire correctly identifies this marriage as weird and gross and disowns the lot of them.  No big deal until Uncle Creepo dies mysteriously and Mom wants to win her father’s love back so she can be rich.

Grandpa will only love Mom again if the kids pretend they don’t exist, so they hide in the attic and suck at escaping.  Eventually, he dies and puts Mom back in the will as long as she promises not to have any kids from her previous marriage.  That’s when the kids notice their food tastes more like arsenic than it used to.

It’s a pretty creepy concept, but the 80s horror movie passed through so many creative hands, it lands just south of coherent.  Most importantly, the sexual tension between the kids is unsettling.  Oh, and mom somehow gets strangled to death by a wedding dress.