Seatin (or Putgal), the latest portmanteau craze
Steven Seagal is known for his many talents — a regular jack of all trades, we’d say. The martial arts aficionado has the good-guy-CIA-operative-with-feelings character down. He’s also known as a bad-ass hit man who won’t take no shit from nobody. Sometimes these characters even appear in the same film (yes, his movies deserve that pretentious title.) Seagal is the perfect action hero to take down anyone and everyone seeking revenge, justified or unjustified, in that slam-bang thriller kind of way. And the ponytail. We can’t overlook the ponytail. That beautiful specimen of dead cells deserves the adjective swashbuckling all on its own. It should also have its own part in the movies, along with its own line in the rolling credits. “Seagal’s ponytail played by Seagal’s ponytail.” We can see it now.
So it should come as no surprise in this new fantasy world we find ourselves living in to hear that Seagal just got the biggest role of his career to date. (Whoever says ageism is a real thing affecting white men in their 60s is dead wrong.) Coming soon to a New World Order near you, Seagal will be the “special representative for Russian-U.S. humanitarian ties,” according to the Facebook page for the Embassy of Russia in the U.S. (Yes, the Russians use Facebook for important, and perhaps clandestine, government tasks, if you haven’t heard.)
But what does this new role entail, you ask? “The task is to facilitate relations between Russia and the United States in the humanitarian field, including cooperation in culture, arts, public and youth exchanges, and so on,” the announcement says.
And so the plot thickens. Will the Russian citizen Seagal (yes he really is one) risk life and limb to preserve his new homeland? Or will he pledge allegiance to the only country that has given him life, liberty and the relentless and rewarding pursuit of glory, money and fame? You’ll have to keep watching to find out.
We can hardly handle the suspense.
Reliving High School
Those of us who flew under the radar in high school could seek comfort in the knowledge that those with popularity did not always have the highest quality hearts. Well, we strongly suggest you call up the cheerleaders and football players from your school days and tell them to tune in to the 2019 Academy Awards.
With ratings tumbling in recent years, the Oscars have decided to do what it takes to gain popularity, not unlike Lindsay Lohan in the under-decorated but nonetheless popular film Mean Girls. Yes, to help boost television ratings the Oscars announced that it will be adding a category for “outstanding achievement in popular film,” a motion that raised quite a bit of confusion. Does this mean that a film has to be unpopular to be the best picture of the year? What if a film was a box-office smash for a good reason, like in the rare circumstance that it was actually technically impressive? Or is this just another move to vindicate film-festival-attending Brooklyn hipsters that the films they watch deserve a completely different category from us lowlifes who watch what could be considered “popular?”
An Academy spokeswoman later clarified that a film could be considered in both the “popular” and “best” categories, easing the nerves of at least some Black Panther fans. But as the Oscars fight to stay relevant in ratings, one has to wonder if they will pair their effort to be more accessible with an effort to actually nominate a racially and socioeconomically diverse spread of artists, as well as appoint a more diverse array of Academy members.
