Reality television far removed from what’s real

Can you put up with watching the boss of a company you work for argue back and forth with his son in front of other employees almost every day?

If you answered yes then you must be the kind of person who craves such so-called reality television shows like “American Chopper,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “The Apprentice,” and the slew of other such ridiculous programs on the flat screened idiot box. Or you think this stuff goes on and is tolerated in real life.

I am not into reality television shows. In fact, I really don’t watch that much television to begin with. The only reason I have the TV on is to have something to listen to while I’m doing something else. It’s only a rarity that I will stop what I am doing and watch a program thanks to what I am hearing.

That’s the only reason I tuned into such shows as “The Apprentice” (2004) and “Hell’s Kitchen” (2005). What got my attention was hearing Donald Trump in the boardroom listen to excuses why s0-so and so failed at their tasks before Trump said those two famous words, “You’re fired.”

I found “Hell’s Kitchen” twice as entertaining watching celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay lose his temper during lunch and dinner services. When he is not busy calling someone who could be the next head chef at one of his restaurants in Las Vegas a “dumb blonde” or a “fucking donkey,” Ramsay is insulting customers who ask where their food is.



“I will give you more pumpkin risotto right up your fucking ass,” he tells a patron in one episode who has yet to be served the dinner he ordered an hour ago. “Would you like it whole or diced?”

By comparison, I am not into motorcycles. The only reason I have browsed YouTube searching for clips of “American Chopper” recently is to watch Paul Teutel Sr. scold his son, Paul Jr. for always arriving late to work, complaining how the workplace is always a mess, and he never has checklist of what’s been ordered.

Die hard fans of “American Chopper” most likely know how many office doors and windows have been replaced at the Teutel’s motorcycle fabrication company, Orange County Choppers, in Montgomery, New York. I wonder if the number of custom-built motorcycles they’ve done is higher or lower than the number of battles the father and his two sons have had.

If TLC or whoever is the distributor has rights to the series, were to release season box sets on DVD, I’d buy them just to see the fights. Or better still, I’d welcome a compilation of all the arguments that have occurred over the show’s six-year run.



As the elder Teutel’s older son, Michael said on YouTube clip I saw, “Fights around here have become legendary.”

I should have realized that judging how fake most all these other reality shows are with embarrassing background music that builds up whenever someone is either fired, yelled at or put on the spot.

When the elder Teutel fired his son, Paul, during season 6 that ended in February this year, I wondered, for a brief second, if that was for real. Maybe it is and the two just can’t work together. OR maybe it’s all for ratings and to pave the way for a new series called “American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior” that premiered Aug. 12 on TLC. The title explains it all. Both are now working separately with Paul Jr. starting up his own motorcycle company.



“He has never followed through one thing in his life,” the elder Teutel says of his son in the TLC promotion. “They could never in a million years build a bike like we can.”

It reminds me of the run-ins I witnessed at a college newspaper I worked at decades ago, between the editor and his best friend, whom he hired one semester as a photographer who argued on what photos should go in for that week’s issue. When the editor wasn’t busy dealing with him, he was busy fending off other photographers questioning his decision to shoot photos himself of a school fire when he should have assigned other photographer. At other times, the managing editor and his girlfriend, who was the graphics editor at the time, argued with one another.

I admit I enjoyed seeing this play out. The fact is, though, that it was detrimental to the workplace environment.

The activities seen on “American Chopper,” not to mention all the other reality television shows, are all entertainment. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t believe this kind of stuff is likely tolerated in the workplace and if it is, it shouldn’t be.

If these reality television shows prove anything, it’s to show viewers how NOT to act in real life.

©8/24/10

President Obama's vision of ‘best teachers’ questionable

President Barack Obama’s recent remarks about how teachers rather than celebrities like Snooki should be idolized in this country got me thinking about the best teachers I had from grade school on up.

I will be frank here. I didn’t particularly like the instructors who influenced me. The dislike started with practically all the nuns who taught me in grade school.

Sister Petronia, my first-grade teacher, for example, had two trademarks for which I didn’t care. One was when a student stepped out of line, she always declared, “I’m ashamed of you.” And when that student, or any student for that matter, stepped out of line, she’d go out of her way to embarrass that person.

Whenever she’d look inside a student’s desk and find a mess, she’d pick up the desk, allowing everything inside to slide out in front of the class. The embarrassed student was left to pick up a month’s worth of assignments and parental notices that should have gone home.

I suspect if she caught a student with food, even God wouldn’t be able to bail him out.

My second-grade teacher, Sister Cresentine, was a humorous elderly lady when in a good mood. If you got on her bad side, she’d throw a textbook at you from across the room, telling you to go back and re-study the material.

My seventh-grade teacher, Sister Julleta, who taught religion classes and was in charge of the altar boys, was like Sister Cresentine when it comes to exhibiting her wrath on a student if they stepped out of line. If a student was not careful, Sister Julleta could be their own worst enemy. To this day, I still wonder if she actually struck a student I saw her disciplining in the hallway one year.

There were lessons to be learned from those nuns. I assume in Sister Petronia’s case; she wanted the students to have some respect for themselves. On the other hand, their goal was to not be liked anyway. They were there to teach and administer discipline when the situation warranted it.

By comparison, the best teachers I had in high school were far fewer than the handful of survivors rescued at the end of the ocean liner disaster movie, “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972).

I was thankful that my freshman algebra teacher, Mr. McClusky, doubled as the school’s winning basketball coach and, I was told by a fellow classmate that the guy supposedly hated freshman to the point he came off as a drill sergeant when conducting class.

I wouldn’t be surprised if any students heard his voice from across the hall as he yelled at students for making stupid mistakes when doing algebra problems. He always called me “Joseph,” a name only used by my mother.

Whenever students scored poorly on their tests, McClusky would make them redo the problems again and then write ten times, “I will not make silly mistakes.”

I could have used someone like him for the Algebra II course I took my sophomore year and geometry my junior year as I learned next to nothing. Taking those two upper-level courses, I still to this day wonder who was more of a joke. My fellow classmates, most of whom did nothing but pass notes, talked during class, stole others’ homework, and cheated on tests? Or the instructors who didn’t know shit about how to control a f-----g, g-----n class so the rest of us could learn?

I did not care much for Mr. Poundstone, my junior-year ethics instructor who attended the University of Oxford because he wouldn’t administer multiple choice tests nor did he advocate giving extra credit assignments. His tests were always essay and short-answer questions to determine if you knew the material.

The same went for Father Martin, the instructor who taught social issues my senior year like a college course, which in a way, it was.

When I started college, I got the impression the professors didn’t give a damn whether you attended class. If you didn’t show up and study, you failed. Their job wasn’t to keep after you like your parents.

Dr. Bridges, my media law instructor, who also doubled as my Reporting II professor, got onto me for not taking his journalism courses seriously. Like my first-grade teacher, Sister Petronia, who had no qualms about embarrassing students, Dr. Bridges one time asked me why I didn’t show up for his Reporting II class one day. My reason being was because I was working on a story for the campus newspaper, which I got drafted into doing. An excuse he didn’t accept and rightfully so. He told me in front of other students in the lab that I had better get my priorities straight.

Given the great number of red marks I got on my reporting assignments in Dr. Bridges’ Reporting II course, which suggested I did not know how to write worth a damn, I wondered if the professor who taught me Reporting I, where I got a better grade than the C I received from Dr. Bridges, knew what she was doing.

Are these nuns, high school teachers, and college professors the kinds of instructors President Obama would like to see “idolized” on the front covers of magazines, as opposed to celebrities? Were these the kinds of instructors who made a difference in my life? I am not sure. As I said, I didn’t care much for their strict teaching methods. At least, however, I walked away either having learned the material or realized there was no such thing as an easy A.

©8/17/10

"Torture Porn" - the new craze in disgustingly violent movies!

“It’s just torture and murder. No plot, no characters. Very, very realistic. I think it’s what’s next.”

So said Max Renn, the sleazy cable TV programmer as played by James Woods in director David Cronenberg’s "Videodrome" (1983) who stumbles upon a phantom satellite signal that shows young women being tortured 24/7 by men in leather masks.

The comment Woods’ character says seems certainly appropriate in today’s movie world unfortunately. The past few years filmmakers have attempted to pass their sick works showing innocent characters in despicably unthinkable predicaments as so-called entertainment. Watching them go through such imaginative acts of masochism, the only hope I could have for the characters is that death comes quickly, even if it's just a movie.

Films like the Saw franchise (2004-2010), which has been going strong at the box office since the first one was released in 2004, P2 (2007), Captivity (2007), Eli Roth’s "Hostel" (2005) and "Hostel: Part II" (2007), and The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009), currently in limited theatrical release, all feature characters, women in particular, being brutally terrorized. Perhaps a new category should be created. Instead of a horror or psychological section, these movies, some of which boast unrated extended versions when released on DVD and Blu-ray, should be placed into a category called “Torture Porn.”

I came to that conclusion after reading a May 11 article on CNN about the most recent horror film, "The Human Centipede" (2009), which got a lot of attention last Spring after being granted a limited release in theaters showing independent movies. The controversy over the film was far from the positive word-of-mouth last October's unexpected supernatural box office hit, "Paranormal Activity" (2009), received.

The highest amount of praise "The Human Centipede" received came from Entertainment Weekly movie critic, Owen Gleiberman, who awarded it a B+. Gleiberman opened his April 30 review saying how certain horror-film junkies, which he calls himself, "craves the extreme and the dosage of awesome ickiness has to keep getting upped."

The worst review came from Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert who gave it no stars in his May 5 critique saying, "the star rating system is unsuited to this film."

"Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine," Ebert wrote.

For those not familiar with the never-been-done before premise which on that level I do give Centipede director Tom Six a small, miniscule of credit, let me enlighten you. Two American women on vacation overseas are kidnapped by a brilliant yet demented German surgeon (Dieter Laser) who has plans of connecting their digestive tracts from mouth to anus to a male victim he’s already got imprisoned in his secluded home, hence “the human centipede.” Just try watching that as you and your significant other are munching down on your popcorn and Raisinets in the privacy of your own home as the first victim in the chain has to defecate, as described in the CNN article.

Don’t lie. I know for a fact just reading that description is enough to peak your grim curiosity. You know you want to watch. Personally, I don’t see where the entertainment value is in any of this. I challenge anyone who can offer up a good enough reason to justify sitting through such celluloid junk that if it were any worse and people were actually murdered on screen, they’d be snuff films.

I, for one, am thankful I still have not seen the original "Saw" (2004) and "Hostel" (2007) and won’t be seeing them anytime soon except maybe to bash them in a review. I did not like "P2" (2007) and the most I saw of "Hostel: Part II" (2007) was about five- or ten-minutes' worth while flipping channels. I was just in time to see some poor female character hung upside down and having her back torn to shreds by a nude woman wielding a scythe as she bathes in the victim’s blood. Then there was the ending I later caught of a group of young kids kicking around a woman’s decapitated head like a soccer ball. Nice, huh?

The way I see it movies like these are for two, if not three groups of viewers. The first are those who continue to annoy the living crap out of me every time there is a bad accident on the interstate. They always slow down when I am trying to get somewhere, and I could care less what the Hell’s going on.

There is only one reason why drivers do this and it's not to stop, get out and help. They slow down in hopes they will see some bodies, buckets of blood, body parts or a combination of all three lying on the road.

The second group is those who want to sexually get off seeing themselves as either the one in the films doing the terrorizing or as the victim.

I don’t mind controversial movies so long as the filmmaker is trying to make a point with the unpleasant subject matter. I did not like Videodrome and found it to be a trashy, weird, sci-fi, horror movie that featured Deborah Harry of the singing group, Blondie. I did, however, see the point Cronenberg attempted to get across. That point was no matter how disgusting and violent a movie is, some, if not all people can’t bring themselves to NOT watch it. It’s almost like a sick addiction.

If there is any point in making graphically violent movies today like "The Human Centipede" or the upcoming remake of "I Spit on Your Grave" (2010) due out this October, I suspect it’s to see how far a filmmaker can go in grossing out their viewers. There is no entertainment in that.

As Woods’ Max Renn says when he stumbled upon that satellite signal in Cronenberg’s film, these movies being released today, even if they’re just films, have no plot and no characters. It’s just torture and murder.

Oh, how I really wish that wasn’t so.

©8/7/10