Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made this Three Wheaton Moon shirt. You can buy it! Then you can wear it! Only two steps to total geeky happiness? Sign me up!
Lifetime: The Network Your Aunt Likes (You know that ONE aunt? The one that moved back in with your grandma after her divorce.)
My mom pays for an entire array of cable channels, but she really only uses four of them: Lifetime, Lifetime Movies, Lifetime Real Women and The Hallmark Channel. Around Christmas time (roughly August through February) she parks the TV squarely in the middle of this estrogen programming block and feasts on programming designed to both uplift the spirit and tug at the tear ducts of middle-aged lady types. Also, most of the movies are about your dead relatives returning for Christmas as angels. I saw one over at her place about a dead grandma that just shows up at her family’s house at Christmas, and instead of calling the boys in the grayish-brown suits with the nuclear backpacks they’re all just, “Grandma, it sure is great that Jesus let you come down here and bake cookies for us!” It was intensely creepy. Everything about it that made my mom go, “Awwww,” made me go, “AHAHGHGHGHGHG!!!!” Not 2 weeks later I was back over there and, I shit you not, there was an entirely different movie about a dead relative coming back as a Christmas angel. I expect there are hundreds of them. Like Pokemon.
CONFESSION TIME: I have seen one Lifetime movie that actually made me sad, nearly to the point of tears. I had just finished plowing through 2 or 3 seasons of Dead Like Me and, while flipping channels, saw the star of that show (Ellen Muth) on the screen. Turns out it was a Lifetime movie called The Truth About Jane about a girl (Muth) realizing she’s gay, and how her family treats her like a criminal because of it. They try to “deal with the problem” as if she had been caught with a gun and a bag of PCP. I knew what they were doing! Those bastards were showing me things that I already thought were sad and they were making them even sadder! SHE JUST WANTED TO DATE GIRLS AND BE LOVED! THAT’S ALL! SHE WAS A GOOD GIRL! YOU TREATED HER LIKE A MONSTER! YOU WERE THE MONSTER, MOM! YOU WERE… the… BLOOOO HOOO HOOO HOOOOO!!!!
I have received some very generous gifts from my Amazon Wishlist and from donators in the last couple of weeks. I want to make sure to give big giant holiday-style thanks to Fancy Bastards: Elliot Moss, Cole Parker, Anonymous Ghostbusters gifter, Alyssa Vaughan, Trevor Spratt and Dan & Toni Arthur. Being the father of a 4 year old, I am pretty much primarily on the “giving” side of Xmas, so your gifts were certainly appreciated and made my insides feel all squishy and gross.
COMMENTERS: Sappiest, cheesiest or most unbelievable TV Movie you’ve ever seen? Is there one that actually activated your human emotion chip?
UPDATE 12/28/11:
DAVID WILLIS KEEPS DRAWING ME IN HIS COMICS!!! PLEASE BUY HIS CRUISE FUNDRAISER PRINT (and also THIS ONE) SO HE WILL STOP AND WE CAN GO ON A CRUISE TOGETHER WHICH IS TOTALLY NOT GAY BECAUSE OUR WIVES WILL BE THERE OR MAYBE THEY WON’T I MEAN ACCIDENTS CAN HAPPEN AT SEA.
Also, I have resurrected my TUMBLR and started things off by posting my giant “How to save Terra Nova” rant (mentioned in this comic’s post) and a free mobile desktop wallpaper of “Dino Jesus.” I have plans for this TUMBLR in 2012 that involve changing some of the ways I offer content and who I offer it to. The basic strategy is more content to more people. I do not see this as being a negative.
I once saw part of a Lifetime movie called "My Stepson, My Lover." It was amazing. It ends with the revelation that the stepson killed his father to get closer to the wife, and then he falls out of a treehouse and becomes a quadriplegic. It ends with the wife spoon-feeding him in front of guests.
Yes! "My Stepson, My Lover" is one of the best things about Lifetime Television for Women. Additionally, The Hallmark Channel's "A Dog Named Christmas" is the holiday movies against which I judge all holiday movies.
My mother and grandmother watch these movies all season. And your right it lasts august to february. But I love teasing them at the beginning of each movie and predicting how it ends. They are all so simple, they are all summed as "A women down on her luck learns the true meaning of christmas." The rest are just incidentals, so I watch the first 10-20 minutes fill in the rest then come back at the end to gloat. My mother and grandmother dont seem as amused.
Every artist is unappreciated in his own time. Future generations will look back on your genius with admiration.
It wasn't quite a Lifetime movie, but it was along similar veins. The movie "Bastard Out of Carolina" was one of those films that stuck with me. At first, I thought it was just another one of those "Hey, did you know rape and abuse are bad?" movies, but the tragic story coupled with the brilliant performances turned it into something much greater than the sum of its parts.
Lifetime is one of the reasons I believe that I am not, in fact, a woman, but a butch gay man trapped in a woman's body. I will gnaw off a leg (anyone's leg) to escape watching that crap. Another reason is the many times I pace and say, "C'mon! We're gonna be late!" as I wait for my husband to finish dressing to go out.
I was unfortunate enough to catch part of "The Search for Santa Paws" on Disney this past weekend. It is truly one of the most emotionally uneven and frightening movies directly marketed to children I have ever seen. To give you an idea, Santa has a dog that comes to life when it wears a magic power crystal (santa has one too). Santa goes to NYC and his dog almost gets hit by a car until Santa runs out AND GETS HIT BY A TAXI! A homeless dude steals Santa's crystal, and Santa has amnesia, so he gets a job…. being Santa at a toystore, meanwhile you've got orphans at an evil orphanage run by an evil woman who hates Christmas so much she will incinerate any orphan's toys she finds – EVEN THOUGH THESE TOYS WERE GIVEN TO THE ORPHANS BY THEIR PARENTS WHO "WENT TO HEAVEN" and haven't come back. They literally spend minutes showing this one girl's doll sitting in the incinerator before it falls into the consuming flames. I managed to distract my son and turn it off before the inevitable conclusion where Santa almost dies but saves himself with his dog's power crystal, turning the dog back into a stuffed animal. W… t… f… also there is some dark stuff about a couple not being able to have children (no doubt setting up a happy ending for at least one orphan)… but this movie is dark dark dark and messed up… you have to watch it to fully appreciate how messed up it is.
ok that is a bit creepy. Is it just me or does someone/something good always have to die in a Disney movie? Look at Old Yeller, Bambi, Lion King, Dumbo,Finding Nemo,The Fox and the Hound,..etc. Heck even Villains die horribly,… Ursala was impaled by the Princes ship,…. Frollo [Hunchback of Notre Dame] falls to his death into fiery inferno,…. Scar is eaten alive by the Hyenas,…The Mongolian from Mulan is hit by a humongous firework rocket,..the Hunter in Tarzan is basically hung. Seriously this is some twisted stuff from Disney,..people who are supposed to be a good part of a kids life,….
It's like how practically every book that's ever won a Newbery award has the main character's parent, pet, or best friend die in it. People who make stuff for kids are twisted motherfuckers.
Disney loves orphans, hates parents according to my husband. I have to agree.
Poor Joel, don't you know that "Gay" is now slang for gun crime and PCP? Don't worry, it just makes your comic seem quaint, like "Peanuts", which is actually the new slang for homosexual relations.
Though not a Made-For-TV, "I'll Be Home For Christmas" with Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Jessica Biel makes me cry like a baby. I blame it on the fact that the first time I saw it, I was mid-finals my first semester in college (2,000 miles away from home) and literally counting down the days until I was flying back.
This year, however I was 'treated' to 45 minutes of "A Holiday to Remember" with Rue McClanahan and Randy Travis. There was a runaway kid, Randy was the Sheriff, and it was 1995. I had to leave the room.
Wow. There are actually TV movies about dead grandmothers coming back to life? (I'm guessing those are the ones on the Hallmark Channel; Lifetime is more famous for over-the-top films about domestic-abuse victims.) And here I thought "The Christmas Shoes" was the most ludicrous thing Hallmark had ever produced.