"I DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA. I DON'T LIKE THEM. I DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA." Does Texas Rangers slugger Carl Everett like the media? Read this interview with the Dallas Observer and find out just how angry one dinosaur-doubter can get.

Indeed, one might turn on the media after being quoted like this by Sports Illustrated back in 2000:

"God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve," Everett said last Friday, before the Red Sox lost two of three in Atlanta. "The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can't say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex."

What about dinosaur bones?

"Made by man," he says.

Everett has trouble, too, with the idea of man actually walking on the moon. After first rejecting the notion, he concedes, "Yeah, that could have happened. It's possible. That is something you could prove. You can't prove dinosaurs ever existed. I feel it's far-fetched."

Obviously, Mr. Everett is not familiar with the work of Was (Not Was).

DADDY, WHERE DO PÖANGS COME FROM? I was recently referred to an excellent article in Business 2.0 Magazine on Swedish furniture retail giant Ikea -- just what is their secret? Lisa Margonelli explains the product design strategy:

After receiving a new set of instructions, [product developer Per] Carlsson strolls up to the showroom on the third floor of Ikea's headquarters, where each of the company's kitchen items is marked with a large red-and-yellow price tag. Then he applies what Ikeans refer to as "the matrix."

Ikea's product managers use a price matrix to identify holes in the company's product lineup -- and how much to charge for a new product. Demonstrating how the matrix works, Carlsson draws a tic-tac-toe grid on a piece of paper, explaining that he can plot the price and style of any Ikea item within it. Ikea has three basic price ranges -- high, medium, and low -- and four basic styles: Scandinavian (sleek wood), modern (minimalist), country (neo-traditional), and young Swede (bare bones). To identify market opportunities, Carlsson takes a product council directive, plots his existing product lineup on the grid, and looks for empty spaces.

You may read the rest of this informative article via this link.

"WHO KNEW THERE WAS A SCREENWRITING CLASS AT BOB JONES UNIVERSITY?" Via the forums at Fametracker.com (thanks, Philyra) comes the standard against all past and future Bringing Down the House reviews will be compared: the Mr. Cranky review.

I encourage you read it in full. It's that good -- angry, funny, and with a great insight into why Steve Martin's character doesn't fall in love with Queen Latifah in the end -- or, at any point:

Here's why the character of Howie Rosenthal (Eugene Levy) exists: Film executives know that white America wouldn't tolerate a romantic relationship between the whitest of white lawyers, Peter Sanderson (Steve Martin), and the blackest of black former prison inmates, Charlene (Queen Latifah). The second Steve Martin put a seriously passionate and romantic lip-lock on Queen Latifah, most white people would run screaming from the theater like they'd been sprayed in the face with oven cleaner. However, it's perfectly okay if the freaky little Jewish guy falls for her, because he's hairy, very weird, and represents only about 8% of the potential market for this film.

Roger Ebert also raises this point, only not as well.

STRAIGHT. TRIPPIN'. BOO! Before continuing this blog's review of the critical digs Bringing Down the House is receiving, candor and my internal sense of objectivity compels me to first note that not all the reviews are negative.

Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose opinions I respect a great deal, says the movie plays with stereotypes without reinforcing them, and calls the movie "a gut-busting, stereotype-busting slapstick comedy, returning Martin to the antic highs of All of Me and The Man With Two Brains and elevating Latifah to goddess status, that is, if we all agree that goddess outranks queen." There are other positive reviews out there, for sure, and let's be clear: Steve Martin is still funny --

-- in general, that is. Just not here. Let's start in our nation's capital, where Rita Kempley of the Washington Post says:

It is the rare film that is capable of offending both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton, but Bringing Down the House gets the job done, and how. An embarrassment for all concerned, this witless, odd-couple comedy slings separate but equal gibes at blacks and whites . . . and still manages to ridicule gays and Hispanics. Why was this picture made?

And what to make of Queen Latifah's involvement in this sorry debacle? Since she has acknowledged cleaning up the crude script, she clearly read the thing and agreed to play a hip-hop Aunt Jemima anyway.

Over to Salon.com, where you'll have to sit through a brief ad to read Charles Taylor write:

Bringing Down the House is for everyone who finds the idea of a white person saying "bitchslapped" hilarious. The movie appears to have been made for an audience that considers the idea of black people terribly exotic. And just who, nowadays, is that, some 30 years after the birth of rap and with hip-hop style everywhere in pop culture? Bringing Down the House seems to be aimed at people who want to consider black style in dress or speech or music some sort of passing fad -- you know, one of those crazy things the kids do before they settle down and start wearing Dockers and listening to Dave Matthews.

Says the Orange County Register:

It's the kind of sitcom-caliber trifle that's designed with only the squarest segments of society in mind - for example, folks who still get a kick out of seeing a middle-age white actor don high-tops and jive like Curtis Blow. . . . The single most astounding thing about Bringing Down the House is that Tim Allen didn't snag this role first.

Michael Medved, of all people, gets all worked up:

Bringing Down the House tries for laughs rather than social commentary, but still unleashes an avalanche of controversial messages, all of them bad. The most offensive aspect of this lame excuse for a comedy involves the most one-dimensional racial stereotyping this side of Birth of a Nation. All black characters happen to be emotional, uneducated, over-sexed, violent, warm-hearted, hip, cool and connected to the criminal underclass. All white characters are uptight, repressed, clumsy, materialistic, shallow, cruel and incurably racist.

To the Las Vegas Mercury:

When the two get together, there's enough bad, sitcomy racial humor to fill 20 seasons of "What's Happening," the difference here being that even Roger and Rerun could generate more laughter than this groaner. . . . It's sort of Planes, Trains and Automobiles meets You've Got Mail meets Sinbad's Houseguest meets dog shit.

The San Francisco Chronicle:

[T]his is strictly formula stuff, made worse by an utterly careless depiction of the characters, whose road to friendship is neither believable nor remotely accounted for. Most of the jokes turn on racial stereotypes, which the movie presents without wit -- and certainly without truth. . . . .. In some early scenes, Charlene [Latifah] is presented as a kind of vulgar beast whose mere presence is considered appalling. The film's pretense may be that it's reproaching white racism, but there are moments here that seem to cross the line -- where Latifah's bigness and blackness are presented as inherently monstrous.

Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times calls the movie "You've Got Bail" and, while loving Queen Latifah's "charisma, wit and independence", notes with regret:

Like the film Housesitter, which also starred Mr. Martin, Bringing Down the House doesn't have the nerve to follow through on what seems like its romantic-comedy setup. Instead, Peter is hung up on his ex-wife, Kate (Jean Smart). In one scene Charlene teaches a drunken Peter to be more of a man — find his inner Treach — and get his ex-wife back. She puts his hand on her breast and the picture becomes a sexual version of a minstrel show. This makes no sense. The movie gropes toward a cheap laugh to shore up its lack of courage.

Finally, AICN really brings down the house here, pleading:

“WHY?” Why Queen Latifah, why?

Sure, Steve Martin I can understand. With his recent string of bad movies it’s obvious that the Three Amigos curse has finally caught up to him as it did Martin Short and Chevy Chase long ago. . . .

But Queen Latifah . . . you?!

Your name means something. You represent strong black women everywhere. Like Ice Cube, you’re much less a good actor as you are a charismatic personality . . . and what a personality, indeed! It garnered you a much-deserved Oscar nomination for your outstanding work in Chicago. Girl, you have arrived!

Which makes this situation all the more baffling. Frankly, Bringing Down the House is a movie I’d be disappointed to know you rented, let alone starred in and executive produced(!!).

I think. . . .that maybe. . . . I don’t really want to know the answer. *sigh*

Considering that there was a Civil War movie with Robert E. Lee as the hero (Gods & Generals) released during Black History Month, I think I might have an answer as to reason Bringing Down the House was released after…

Mercy.

And on that note, let's move on. After all, Gwyneth Paltrow's View From The Top, which finished filming in March 2001 (before Paltrow filmed The Royal Tenenbaums) and was first scheduled for release on April 19, 2002 (then October 2002, then January 2003), is now only weeks away. . . .

"THERE'S NO ROOM FOR SHIRLEY TEMPLE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP." The 1972 film The Day The Clown Cried holds a special place in my heart, and in the hearts of those thousands of fans worldwide who would rather live in a world where we all could view a drama in which MDA spokesman Jerry Lewis plays an alcoholic clown at Auschwitz whose job it was to lead all the children into the ovens.

(I'll pause a second so that those of you who hadn't heard of this movie before can compose yourselves.)

Instead, because of issues of financing, litigation and, perhaps, taste, the movie has never been released, and sits in a vault at Lewis's home. "Jerry hopes to someday complete the film," his website maintains, "Which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation."

I won't go into the whole story here -- there is plenty on the web about the movie as-is. Here's one of my favorite articles, for starters, and this website contains copies of the first draft and final script, plus links to other articles on Lewis' opus. Just know this, and it'll tell you enough for now. Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen the movie, once said of it:

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. Oh My God! - that's all you can say.

I bring this up today because Lewis is notoriously silent about the movie, ending his cooperation with biographer Shawn Levy after an initial question about the movie. "What sort of sick childhood did you have, or what's missing in your life that you can sit there and ask me things like that?" Lewis responded, and from that point forward, Levy was on his own.

So whenever Lewis ends up discussing it, to me, it's newsworthy. Last Sunday, he did -- well, sorta. From an interview in the Kansas City Star:

Your official Web site, jerrylewiscomedy.com, calls your unreleased film, "The Day the Clown Cried" -- about a clown interred in a German concentration camp during World War II -- "a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation." Will we ever see it?

That's about the only thing you can mention that I will not talk about.

Why not?

I won't talk about it.

Have you seen Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful"?

They stole the idea. And he's supposed to be the Jerry Lewis of Italy.

Did you like "Life Is Beautiful"?

I thought it was beautifully done.

"One way or another," Lewis has said, "I'll get it done. The picture must be seen, and if by no one else, at least by every kid in the world who's only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust."

We can only hope.

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY: On March 6, 1983, crowds in Arizona, Denver, Tampa, Washington, and Los Angeles gathered to witness inaugural games in a professional sports league destined to be remembered not so much for its players, not for its impact on the game, but for a check in the amount of $3.76, never cashed, representing the total damages suffered by the league on account of monopolistic practices.

Yes, twenty years ago today, the USFL was born -- home of the Memphis Showboats, Donald Trump, Herschel Walker, Anthony Carter, Kelvin Bryant and the Boston/New Orleans/Portland Breakers; birthplace of the zone blitz and run-and-shoot offense.

The league lasted three seasons before folding after an unfavorable antitrust verdict on July 29, 1986, when a federal jury determined that the NFL did violate antitrust laws in attempting to monopolize the professional football market, but that the damages were limited to one dollar, trebled, plus interest, and not quite the $567,000,000 in damages sought by the USFL.

You can enjoy ESPN's rather extensive coverage today of the twenty-year anniversary by starting here. In addition, there are many USFL fansites on the web, including the freakishly comprehensive ThisIsTheUSFL.com and RememberTheUSFL.

Amazingly, two USFL veterans still remain active players in the NFL. You find out who they are via this link.

THE LEGEND OF BAGGER LATIFAH: I love harsh movie reviews. I've had fun highlighting the critical daggers thrust at The Life of David Gale and Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio, among others, in recent months.

To that list, I've been expecting to add Bringing Down The House, the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah movie debuting this week that, based on the trailer, struck me as being yet another awful Magical Negro Movie.

[You know the genre by now -- movies like Bulworth, The Green Mile, The Family Man, Ghost, Jerry Maguire, Men of Honor, What Dreams May Come and The Legend of Bagger Vance -- movies in which black people with deep spiritual skills have nothing better to do with their lives than help white men with their problems. Of Bagger Vance, Spike Lee has noted: “How is it that when your brothers are being lynched, your sisters are being raped, Jim Crow is at its height in the state of Georgia, how is that the only thing this guy is worried about is teaching Matt Damon a golf swing? Where do they get these people?”]

[For more on the genre, go here.]

"It won't be a bad movie," Jen said to me when I expressed my fears. "Well, it shouldn't." After all, she noted, Steve Martin had a pretty good track record in picking his movies (except for this, this and this, perhaps), and Queen Latifah is really funny, and she wouldn't stand to be in a degrading movie like that.

Unfortunately, it seems, she has. The early reviews are out, and it ain't pretty.

After noting the structural "similarities" between this movie, Martin's Housesitter with Goldie Hawn and the Phil Hartman/Sinbad comedy Houseguest, the Associated Press gets down to business on this "baffling" movie:

[I]t's chock full of outdated racial stereotypes. All the white people are uptight, racist WASPs, all the black people are ghetto fabulous, and none of them resembles a human being. . . .

Despite his initial disdain, Peter [Steve Martin] forms a friendship with this woman, chiefly because she functions as a Magical Black Person — a cinematic character, like Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Don Cheadle in The Family Man, who swoops down, solves everyone's problems and provides clarity. . . .

No, this is not funny. And it doesn't get funnier when Peter goes to an all-black nightclub, dressed in baggy clothes with bling-bling draped around his pasty neck, and takes part in a break dancing contest. (This wasn't terribly amusing when Warren Beatty did a similar thing in Bulworth back in 1998, either.)

From the Philadelphia Weekly, still more early warning:

Bringing Down the House is both unbelievably stupid and unbelievably racist, though I'm guessing everybody involved -- from the filmmakers to the stars to the studio execs -- are praying people will dismiss it as the former.

Call it a case of bad timing that Queen Latifah follows up her Oscar-nominated, firing-from-all-cylinders performance in Chicago with this flagrantly unglued race farce. Basically a sitcom pilot stretched out into a 105-minute guffaw-a-thon, House shows white people that if you bring a loud, rambunctious sista into your life, you'll see how much you've been missing out on. . . .

Martin and Latifah do their best to mine raucous laughs out of clashing race relations, but the whole thing just ain't right. Director Adam Shankman goes about the nasty business of making racism and bigotry look, well, cute. But the movie ends up being the kind of insulting Hollywood bullshit comedian Dave Chappelle mercilessly skewers on his new Comedy Central show.

edited to add: The Onion's A.V. Club helpfully jumps onto the pile:

"Dignity... Always dignity," Gene Kelly espoused as his motto in Singin' In The Rain, shortly before a sequence illustrating the depths of humiliation that had made his career. Or, to put it another way, as Steve Martin did on one of his comedy albums: Comedy is not pretty. Which is fine as long as it's funny, but when it's not funny, it's just sad. Falling firmly on the sad side of the equation, Bringing Down The House is yet another comedy that suggests someone should take Martin aside and remind him that he can do better. Suggesting a big-screen version of the Nell Carter sitcom Gimme A Break! . . . . (blah blah blah plot summary) . . . .

To be fair, the movie has a good nature that could allow it to pass as the most enlightened portrayal of race relations of the 19th century. At one point, Martin even suggests that with her intelligence, savvy, quick comprehension, and ability to de-ghettoize her speech, Latifah could someday become a paralegal. Oh, the dizzying heights. "A girl has to get her cheese on," Latifah exclaims at one point, and it's not hard to hear the actress behind the character.

More on Friday.