No, I'm not kidding. I feel bad for her.
She's made a record. She said in an interview it was so good it made her cry. So I looked it up on the iTunes Music Store and listened to the 30-second samples. After all, in this age of electronically-enhanced singing, how bad could it be?
Well.
To be fair, her singing wasn't bad, at least after all the computer tweaks. Ordinary, certainly; but on-key and perfectly pleasant to listen to. The problem with this album is the songs. You'd think being heiress to a hotel fortune would buy you some decent songwriters. The songs aren't bland or ordinary - they are BAD. Not stupid-obscenities bad; just bad melodies, bad lyrics, bad structure. And what possessed her to do a cover of "Do You Think I'm Sexy?" I'm still traumatized from the original Rod Stewart version of that song.
So I feel bad for her. I don't care if she's just as ditzy and shallow as her public image suggests. In a universe full of mediocre dance albums, she's actually made a bad one, and that can't be fun for her. And I already see reviews attacking her as a person - like we all should have known she was talentless, just because of her public persona - when really, I think the one big flaw on her record isn't her fault at all.
As long as I'm on a media kick: I've been searching for TV shows. We don't have broadcast TV, so everything we watch we get on DVD. Our latest addiction is Battlestar Galactica (the new series); but now we're stuck until the second half of Season 2 comes out on DVD (9/19, I think). So I've been sampling some stuff on Netflix.
I have two shows I use for comparison. Battlestar is one; the other is a Showtime production called Dead Like Me, that was cancelled after two seasons. (The second season was actually better than the first, which surprised me; it's a difficult premise to sustain, but the writers did a very nice job.) So far I've rented two, and I haven't hit anything I wanted to buy.
1) Wonderfalls. This show was cancelled by Fox after four episodes, but they've released on DVD all 13 that were produced. The premise: A recent college graduate, working at a gift shop in Niagara Falls, finds her apathetic approach to life challenged when the tchotchkes she's selling start to talk to her. The instructions they give lead, in an often VERY convoluted fashion, to Good Deeds for strangers that cross Our Heroine's path. Unfortunately, those instructions also tend to make Our Heroine look like an inconsiderate idiot.
Sometimes it works well. An episode focusing on Our Heroine's 6-1/2 year high school reunion is quite funny, if occasionally painful to watch. But in general, the first four episodes were too erratic to keep me watching. Some of the black humor worked; some was WAY over the top. Our disaffected heroine is certainly pretty and bright enough, but why would Cute Bartender Guy go for someone underemployed and sarcastic?
It just didn't grab me.
2) The 4400. This one is still in production, starting its 4th (I think) season this fall. The premise: 4400 people who'd been kidnapped by aliens over the last 80 years reappear one day in Washington State. The Department of Homeland Security sets up a group to study them, and some of them begin to exhibit strange abilities as they return to their old lives.
Some of this show works really, really well. The abductees we meet are an interesting bunch, and very well drawn (one man, a black soldier abducted during the Korean War right after his buddies beat him up for having a white woman as a girlfriend, observes with bewilderment the marvelous differences in how his ethnicity is viewed today - and then gets glared at for lighting up a cigarette in a restaurant). The earliest abductee is a girl of about 8, played by a really good child actress. She's sweet, patient, and gently cheerful - and she has a habit of casually remarking on events before they happen.
Good stuff, right? Except I HATE the two leads. Hate. Despise. Man-and-woman team from the Department of Homeland Security. Instant animosity, of course hiding incipient attraction. Stupid conversations, aggressive non-flirting, inappropriate sharing of personal information in the same conversation where they insist they can't stand each other. Predictable and tedious.
I tried, I really did. I figured they pilot could be forgiven for the ham-handed characterization of the two leads, so I watched two other episodes (the first season is only five episodes long, so I saw more than half of it). As much as I was interested in the lives and fates of the abductees, I could not get past the annoyance I felt every time our two government agents appeared on screen. I don't even think it was the actors - I think it was the writing. If you feel you have to whack it with a sledgehammer, you probably shouldn't be saying it in the first place.
So I'm 0 for 2 so far. Next up: Carnivale, a weird, apocalyptic-like thing set during the Great Depression. It was cancelled after two seasons, which apparently frustrates a lot of people. I don't know if that's a recommendation or not!