The Jimmy Fallon Experiment: Day Two (LOST Bum Night)

Now that Coco is gone, I have been trying Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. This is my second episode. You can read the run-down of the first episode I watched here.

Don't get excited, Hall & Oates had to cancel.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010:

• This was Jimmy's one year anniversary episode. With him as always was The Roots. (Is it me or are The Roots mostly just drummers)? He started by saying, "Welcome to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, NBC's longest running comedy show. I remember when we started, Jay Leno was still hosting the Tonight Show." Stupid NBC. Jimmy sang a song that he wrote called "Freshman 15." It was all with Blacklights and stuff. It was OK.
• After the first break, Jimmy showed the second installment of LATE (his parody of LOST). I never saw the first one. The premise is that his elevator just crashed on a deserted floor of the building. I liked the guy who was trying to find his son and then found him. There WAS a pretty good MC Escher reference. And why did it take him so long to take a mint? It was funny, but kind of long.
• The first guest was that Robert Pattinson from those Twilight movies. He did some movie with Claire from LOST. (It was like LOST night). The thing about Pattinson being a guest is that Jimmy does these video parodies of him called "Robert is Bothered." They showed one with Pattinson and Jimmy together where Jimmy basically tried to get him to say he was bothered. And then he did. Then he shot lazers out of his eyes. Jimmy asked Pattinson if he watches LOST (I told you it was LOST night) and he said that he watched the first half of the first episode, but it was too confusing for him. I don't know much about this guy. He seems like an OK guy, but he sort of looks like a bum. The clip they showed from his new movie looked kind of terrible.
• The second guest was Judah Friedlander the guy who wears hats on 30 Rock. He also looks like a bum. Besides being LOST night, it was also kind of bum night. He basically brought out a bunch of stuff like a dancing doll from China that didn't work and a coconut sculpture that some guy he went to high school with made.
• The musical guest was supposed to be Hall & Oates, but they had to cancel. In their place was chef Mario Batali. He was a guest during the show's first week. He is also a record guest - he has been on the show more than anyone else. He also likes PBR. He's like some kind of hipster chef. He made some crack about Peta and was apparently going to kill some lobsters on the show, so I stopped watching.

Overall, it was an OK show. If this was a Conan anniversary show, I imagine there would have been more excitement and crazy guests/skits. This seemed just like a regular show. Maybe it was the lack of Hall & Oates.

Movies I Wouldn't Mind Seeing This Holiday Season

My family usually goes to the movies over the holiday. Here are some movies I wouldn't mind seeing.

The Princess and the Frog: It looks cute.

The Young Victoria: British Costume Dramas - Hooray!

Sherlock Holmes: I am so excited!!

What else? Um... maybe that Twilight movie?

Sorry, I thought this list would be longer.

Anyway, I'm really excited about Sherlock Holmes.

Twilight

So I broke down and read the four Stephanie Meyer Twilight books recently. A well-read friend of mine tried to get me to read it a couple of years ago, but I never found the time. After watching the MTV movie awards (which were all about the movie) I caved. Here are some of my thoughts on the books:

Twilight (Book 1): This is the "best" book of the four, I guess. I wish I could say you can just read this one and skip the other three, but it leaves everything so open-ended! Part of the charm of this book seems to be the way that Meyer breaks the rules of writing - not just of writing, but of... I guess you could call it political correctness. Meyer is a Mormon (like my roommates from college) so some of the things that happen in the book that seem unusual are not that unusual to her, but still... a book about a seventeen year old girl who is willing to lose her family and friends and give up everything (even her life - especially her life) to be with her boyfriend she's know for a few months just seems like such a bad idea. What is this teaching young girls today, etc. But, as it turns out - this is a big part of what makes the book hard to put down. Who wants to read a book where the heroine does everything she's supposed to do?

Meyer's writing style is bad. Like her politically incorrect storyline, however, the bad writing and the way she breaks the rules of what you would normally expect to find in such a book, actually makes the book interesting. There is no real plot to the book - it's mostly just people talking, but the talking is the best part. In the last half where some action finally takes place - evil tracker vampires with red eyes and ballet studios - it can't match the excitement of a conversation in a car driving a little too fast on the way home from a shopping trip gone wrong earlier in the book.

New Moon (Book 2): So, will clumsy Bella become a vampire and be with her cool (pun intended) boyfriend forever and ever? This book doesn't really tell you- but it does have werewolves and motorcycles!

Eclipse (Book 3):I don't really remember what happened in this book, it was basically just wrapping up loose ends from the other two and preparing for the final book. Mostly more talking.

Breaking Dawn (Book 4): This one was different from the others. It was the only book of the four where I actually became restless reading and just wanted to get to the end. The best part of the three other books was seeing the whole crazy situation through the human eyes of Bella, but in this book her observations are mostly just annoying. I was also peeved about a sub-plot of sorts that involved sister Alice running away and abandoning everyone, when it was obvious that she didn't really run away and she must have had a good reason, though no one seemed to realize that despite the fact that they have known her for a hundred years and I have only been reading the books for about two weeks.

If you get as far as the third book, you might as well go ahead and read the last one, but you can skip a ton of the island stuff at the beginning and pretty much all of the stuff that happens once the "witnesses" arrive until the end.