Articles tagged with: Strike
Previously, the only way you'd see Tom Hanks fighting Mel Gibson was to watch the unmade movie Forrest Gump Punches Mad Max In Space. But now Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson have emerged as figureheads on opposing sides of a dispute over whether actors should go on strike because there aren't enough fame-blinded young nymphomaniacs who'll indulge their every fleeting sexual whim or whatever. Mel Gibson is for the strike, Tom Hanks is against it. Sadly Mel Gibson will win, because the dispute will be settled by charging at each other across a field. Poor Tom Hanks - if only it involved growing a crap mullet and ranting about Jesus.
It looks like 2008 has turned into the year of strikes - even the most comically pointless, vanity-fuelled professions are packing up their tools in a huff.
By which we, of course, mean acting. Just a few short months after the Hollywood writers strike came bumbling to an end, the two big actor unions are squabbling over whether or not they should go on strike too. And in times as troubled as these a wise, near-biblical hero figure is needed to set everything back on course.
And, with thudding inevitability, that figure is George Clooney. George Clooney has written a letter to both the Screen Actors Guild (which wants to strike) and the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists (which doesn't) proclaiming his clear and ineffably correct opinion on who's right and who's wrong. Turns out he thinks that everyone's right. Nice going George, that could have got nasty.
While everyone can agree that the writers' strike has gone on for too long, they all also secretly agree that it'd be nice if it just went on for long enough to screw up the Oscars.
However, as signs of a deal tentatively edge ever-closer, it looks like the Oscars might be business as usual again. And all the Oscar nominees had the traditional Oscar nominees' luncheon yesterday to prove it, with Academy president Sid Ganis promising that the show would go on regardless of the strike.
But that begs the question: what will the Oscars be like with no jokes, no song-and-dance numbers and no fun? Why, they'll be just like the Oscars, you halfwit.
This weekend it emerged that a 10-tonne satellite the size of a bus will smash into Earth at 22,000mph in the next couple of weeks - leaking all sorts of hazardous substances - and nobody knows where it'll hit, putting millions at risk.
In other news, some actors think that Daniel Day-Lewis is quite good at acting.
The SAG awards took place last night, and because it's just about the only awards show where nobody will get booed by the people who write Smallville just for attending, almost every single actor in the world turned up. And by now you'll already be able to guess who won.
The good news is that the striking writers aren't going to picket the Grammy awards this year, meaning that the show can go on as normal - no, wait, is that the good or the bad news?
Because now that the writers won't be picketing, we'll all be free to witness the arse-numbing, life-sapping 52-hour marathon of back-slapping, lecturing and ill-thought-out musical collaborations that the Grammys have all but copyrighted.
And one of those ill-thought-out musical collaborations will be a frankly terrifying-sounding duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner. Hold us.
Thanks to the writers' strike, last night's pared-down Golden Globes took the form of a news conference - like the ones appealing for the return of missing children, only bleaker.
It was the oddest Golden Globes you're ever likely to see - no stars attended, no fancy frocks were worn, results were blasted through in a matter of minutes and the traditional Golden Globes pursuit of trying to second-guess which rabbit-eyed young starlet would be fighting off the advances of Jack Nicholson by the end of the night was put on hold.
And if that wasn't harrowing enough, Atonement won a Golden Globe as well. We're all doomed.
Thanks to the ongoing writers' strike, shows like 24 have been indefinitely postponed much to everyone's disappointment - but on the other hand the Golden Globes might be cancelled too, so it all evens out.
The Golden Globes - the all-singing, all-dancing, glitzy, foreign-voted cousin to the Oscars - is set to take place on Sunday, but the writers' strike means that it will be boycotted by all the nominees if it gets televised by NBC as planned. And now the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is pushing NBC to not broadcast the awards at all so that the stars won't face picket lines on their way in. Of course, without cameras there to capture them in their pretty dresses and painstaking make-up jobs, there's a good chance that the cast of Desperate Housewives will disintegrate into clouds of dust at some point during the ceremony, but that's the chance they'll have to take.
Jay Leno is going about this writers strike all wrong. Here he sits with a rare opportunity to experiment in a writer-free world, and you know what he's doing? Nothing!
Non existence is the ultimate freedom!
But as much as he is impartial to the enslavement of children and probably their parents in Johnson's cellar, Jay Leno is un-impartial about the writers strike. He went back to work recently with the blessing of the Writers Guild, and delivered an impeccable monologue. The thing was so good that the Writers Guild thinks he may be using a secret writing staff and now they want to kill him forever.
We wrote that lat bit from scratch. Sweeping and powerful, right? We're not union.
