Hollywood Babble On & On #752: You Gotta Know When To Hold'Em

I don't normally talk about celebrity news, but these stories have a little more to them than the usual sex-tape type antics we normally hear about.

YOU GOTTA KNOW WHEN TO HOLD'EM

Recently venerable critic Roger Ebert created a twit-storm that raged across the entire internet. If you don't know the full story, here's the gist of it. Former Jackass co-star Ryan Dunn died in a car crash after an evening at a bar with friends. He drove his Porsche off the road at 140 mph, killing himself and a friend, with what turned out to be a blood alcohol level of .196, over twice the legal limit.

When word got out, Ebert tweeted "Friends don't let Jackasses drink and drive."

Then the shit started to fly.

Co-star and friend Bam Margera got the ball rolling with his own outraged Twitter, and soon Ebert was being slandered from one end of the internet to the others.

It got so bad that Ebert's Facebook account was temporarily suspended because of the volume of obscene comments being left on it.

Now who is right in this issue, and who is wrong?

They're all wrong.

Roger Ebert loves to be smug and condescending, not knowing that being smug and condescending is my job, and loves to come up with a clever bit of wordplay to make himself feel even cleverer. The fact that he did it right on the day the poor bastard died, taking a friend with him, is a case of poor timing caused by the sense that his piquant brand of snark was somehow protected by his status as America's critic emeritus, and by the fact that his usual targets are people who don't vote the same way as him.

At the time the tweet was written the toxicology on Dunn wasn't done yet, and the bartender was telling anyone who would listen that the man wasn't drunk.* The fans, looking for something to be outraged about used that as an excuse to go after Ebert hammer and tongs, complete with slurs, threats, and almost incoherent anger.

Now it looks like they were ranting in defense of a guy who drove drunk and killed himself and a friend. That's something that deserves scorn however, this whole thing was screwed up by both timing and method.

Ebert was too soon and too pompous, the angry fans were too aggressive and too crude.

Both sides should have just stepped back, and held their opinions until after the full story was known.

Of course since this is the internet we're talking about, there's no fun in that.

*I'm sure the fact that bars often get sued by the families of drunk driving victims had absolutely nothing to do with the bar's claim the Ryan Dunn wasn't intonxicated.

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD'EM

Tobey Maguire, Leo Dicaprio, Matt Damon and other Hollywood hot shots are up to their gonads in a lawsuit over illegal underground poker games, especially Maguire.

Maguire allegedly out pokered a hedge fund guy out of $300,000+ and the guy alleges that it forced him to turn his hedge fund into a ponzi scheme to get out debt. Now that ponzi scammer wants his money back from Maguire. (I wonder how many items in the hedge fund guy's garage alone could have been sold to pay off the debt without resorting to criminality?)

It doesn't surprise me that Maguire's good at poker. He's got the right face for it, I've seen him go through whole movies with a sort of blank expression that it pretty near impossible to read.

As for me, I'm filing my own lawsuit against Maguire for this movie:



I'm taking applications for my class action. Join now!

Anyway, this sounds a lot like an attempt by a con man to try to con his way out of trouble by passing as much as he can onto others. I think he shouldn't have gambled with money that wasn't his in the first place, and he'd be a free man now.

UPDATE: Now reports are coming that Toby Maguire "stomped" the swindler at the heart of the lawsuit for his poker money.

I'm sorry, but I never conceived of the words "Toby Maguire" and the word "stomp" in the same sentence, especially one where he's giving, instead of receiving. This isn't Lee Marvin we're talking about here.

KNOW WHEN TO WALK AWAY

Interesting op-ed about the rock band U2. The author is a fan, I sort of drifted away from them back in the 90s for reasons I will explain momentarily.

Well, it turns out that not only are they poseurs, they're also big jerks. Their "charity" raised $14,993,873 from fans, but only gave $184,732 (1%) to charitable causes. The other 99% went to pay executive salaries, and for Bono's trips around the world telling people that they aren't giving him enough to pay for telling people that they aren't giving him enough. They're also big time tax avoiders, environmental hypocrites, and still have the stones to go around telling people that they need to be more giving like them.

Of course U2 probably won't stop their alleged "activism," or their proven perfidy, they live in a cozy, luxurious bubble where they hear nothing about how wonderful they are, and that everything they do is the best thing ever done.

I saw signs of that bubble forming around them in the 90s, and that's when I decided to just walk away from U2, and I go back a way with them, first hearing from older kids about the edgy new album called Boy by an edgy new band, and becoming a fan when War broke them in North America.

They were new, sincere, and original. Then all the praise went to their heads, Bono started wearing sunglasses 24/7, and it was starting to show in their music, and I sort of gave up on them.

KNOW WHEN TO RUN

Well, that's all for now. See you later.