Everything is evovling these days and that includes men’s underwear. 2EROS sent us a pair of men’s briefs and they are as stylish as some fancy shirts I’ve bought in the past – no kidding. The 2EROS brand offers a line of sleek and eye catching men’s sportswear and underwear for those who want style all the way and all day. Designed with the male physique in mind, 2EROS products accentuate the male form as long as you keep yourself in shape. Get in decent shape first then go out and buy your 2EROS gear.

There are plenty of different styles to choose from and, although the pricing is more than your average men’s underwear, there is a reason why 2EROS were featured in a gifting suite for the 68th Golden Globes! The U04*08 style we were sent retails for approximately $30 and has that quality look and feel right when you first check them out. Also, if you are as curious as I am about the name, here is the lowdown: “The name ’2EROS’ can be read in two ways, either as ‘Zeros’ or ‘To Eros’. ‘Zeros’ symbolizes the two circles within the 2EROS logo, which visually represents the male assets. Alternatively, Eros, the Greek god of lust and love, symbolically represents sex, male virility and passion. As a result, ‘To Eros’ can also mean ‘to the god of love’, swimwear apparel designed for men looking for a point of difference on the beach, resort or pool party. “

We were recently contacted by the folks at Hairbond, where all the products are designed and manufactured in the UK. According to a Hairbond press release the company “bases its brand on luxury, style and ‘Britishness’, positioning itself as a top of the line professional brand with top quality hair grooming products. Hairbond provides young, urban, cosmopolitan, working men with a touch of luxury in their hair grooming routine and are the brand that corresponds to the lifestyle and aspirations of young, successful and demanding men. Experienced hair stylist Scott Michaels founded Hairbond after growing tired of what are about to become his competitors.” That had our expectations pretty darn high. This bloke was looking forward to testing these men’s hair styling waxes and find out if they live up to the hype.

First and foremost, the clear containers for the Moulder and Sculptor products looked extraordinary. I first tried the Hairbond Moulder Professional Hair Shaper, which creates separations with a matte finish. The Moulder boasts a strong flexible hold that gives immediate grab and high density texture while thickening your hair’s appearance. Hairbond Moulder worked like a charm and the red apple and pineapple scents were right on.

Next up was the Sculptor Professional Hair Putty, which is soft and gives great texture to one’s hair while also providing great finish on dry hair. Sculptor is perfect for guys who want to achieve the wet look and the sweet apple fragrance is great insurance to keep your lady friend happy!

Overall, Hairbond is a great line of products because the company shares your desire to be your best. I found both products to be as good as advertised and that’s a real pleasure these days.

We love the Oscars. We just wish that they loved us back. Every year we get excited about the big show, and every year we feel a little sad when they’re over, and not because the show is over, but because they just can’t surprise us anymore. The major categories are all decided weeks before the show, and the non-award pieces, save the brilliant Auto-Tune bit, were pretty flat. At least there weren’t any dancers this year.

Ah, but the show did have its good points, along with some less than good points. Here’s the Bullz-Eye breakdown of the 2011 Academy Awards.

The show was short

It was over in three hours and 15 minutes, making it the shortest broadcast since 2005. And had Kirk Douglas not done that “You know…” bit over and over, it would have been five minutes shorter. But it’s hard to fault Douglas for that since it was one of the better improv moments of the evening.

Anne Hathaway

Did we mention that she’s hot, as in ‘would look good in a suit of armor’ hot? And the bit where she poked fun at her own movie by saying, “You know, it used to be that you get naked, you get an Oscar. Not anymore.” Then, one more time, wistfully, “Not anymore.” Gold. And that last dress she wore…wow. We found it extremely difficult to take our eyes off of her breasts, which was surely the point.

“Inception” won more Oscars than we were expecting

We knew the technical awards were a lock, but stealing the Cinematography Oscar from the Deke (that would be Roger Deakins, who shot “True Grit“) was a shocker. And yet, despite winning four Oscars and being nominated for Best Picture and Original Screenplay, the Academy didn’t see fit to nominate Christopher Nolan for Best Director. Ugh.

They weren’t afraid to make fun of Charlie Sheen

Though, as one of our Popdose colleagues observed, the show probably would have been a lot more entertaining had he hosted.

Randy Newman

God love him. Even he knows the score that if you’re on screen, you damn well better be entertaining. “I want to be good television!” The sad thing is that, as we watched him win his second Oscar – in 20 attempts – we had a horrible thought: if he came along today, no major label would even think of signing him.

Trent Reznor is an Oscar winner

And rightfully so, though in a perfect world, he and Atticus Ross would have been dueling it out with Daft Punk (“TRON: Legacy“) for Best Score. The Frenchies was robbed, we tells ya.

James Franco

We love James Franco. He turned in our favorite performance of the year in “127 Hours.” But he was, um, off last night, leading some to speculate that he was high. Personally, we think Franco is way too smart to do something so boneheaded; just because he played a friendly stoner in “Pineapple Express” doesn’t mean he is one. Dude’s too busy to get high. But it seemed as though he was playing his character in “Freaks and Geeks,” as if that was at all a good idea.

Cate Blanchett’s dress

Everything else about Cate was stunning. Cute hair, lovely figure, wry smile, ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom. But that dress…what the hell? It looked like a tablecloth, one that had lemon cream pie spilled at the shoulders.

Tom Hooper winning Best Director

There is an argument that there is no bad acting, only bad direction, and by that standard, Tom Hooper did an outstanding job directing “The King’s Speech.” And truth be told, he did do an outstanding job directing that movie. But look at what David Fincher had to put together, the number of moving pieces, and the dialogue that his actors had to get just right. He should have won, plain and simple.

Christian Bale plugging a web site in his acceptance speech

Tacky, and the crowd let him know it.

Celine Dion singing during the “In Memoriam” piece

There wasn’t anyone else you could have found to sing that song? Really? Anne Hathaway is sitting right backstage. She can sing. And she doesn’t look like an alien.

Susanne Bier

The Danish filmmaker just won her first Academy Award for her film “In a Better World,” and here was the reaction from one of our party guests: “She has pit stains!” Ow.

It’s late, and I didn’t win the pool in our annual Oscar party (this year’s winner: Kristin Dreyer Kramer of Nights and Weekends), so I’m understandably sore, and perhaps a bit drunk. Kidding about that last part (a better word would be tipsy), but yes, I am sore that I voted against my heart in every category and proved to be wrong on most of them. There will be a full recap tomorrow, but here are the big takeaways from the evening’s events.

There is nothing that Anne Hathaway can’t do

She can act, she can sing, she can do more accents than Meryl Streep, and she’s fucking gorgeous. We knew all of this already, of course, but seeing her do the Bahston accent in the opening sequence to the Oscars, plus seeing her pretend to be Russian and Texan in “Valentine’s Day” (to be honest, I can’t remember if she did a Russian voice; I tried to forget that movie as quickly as I could), proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is the official girl of our dreams.

You can’t shake Aaron Sorkin off with ‘wrap it up’ music

Dude just kept talking a good 45 seconds to a minute after the strings kicked in. Better yet, he didn’t even acknowledge them. Why dignify it? Awesome.

Maybe everything is better with Auto Tune

That musical sequence was the best joke of the evening, by a country mile. And in case any of you were wondering where they got the idea…

Melissa Leo is the Guns ‘n Roses of actresses

I was rooting for her to win – I guess my belief that she was an underdog was just that – but I have to say that I was hoping that she would give a better acceptance speech than that. She looked like a wide-eyed teenager. I bet Anna Paquin gave a more composed acceptance speech than that.

Funniest one-liner while watching the show

Jason Zingale, upon seeing Oprah Winfrey: “You get an Oscar, and you get an Oscar! And you get an Oscar!” We were laughing so hard that we didn’t have the heart to tell him that Oprah could have him killed for saying that.

If you play in a dead pool, you should probably have Kirk Douglas on your 2011 list

I don’t endorse dead pools, because that’s just a ghoulish thing to do, but damn, man, Kirk is in a bad way. Just sayin’.

More commentary tomorrow, but until then, let us just say: what the hell was up with Cate Blanchett’s dress? Did she lose a bet?

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the entertainment news coming out of Hollywood in the past few weeks, then you can’t help but be aware of Charlie Sheen’s increasingly strange shenanigans and how they’ve directly affected the rest of the cast and crew of CBS’s long-running and ridiculously-successful sitcom, “Two and a Half Men.” Who would’ve thought that the infamous hotel incident in October 2010 would’ve proven to be one of the lesser moments on the actor’s ever-lengthening list of embarrassing incidents?

Now, after making the decision to bypass traditional rehab in favor of curing his drug and alcohol issues with his mind, Sheen has been running off at the mouth so much that CBS has pulled the plug and decided to call off the remainder of the episodes that had been planned for this season.

But what of next season? More importantly, given all of the nasty remarks that Sheen’s made toward series creator Chuck Lorre, will there even be a next season?

We know that CBS, Warner Brothers Television, and Lorre have ostensibly ruled out continuing “Two and a Half Men” without Sheen, but if we’re to be honest, it seems like the better tactic would be for the whole lot of them to say, “Hey, Charlie, read our lips: one monkey don’t stop no show,” then find a new man to join Jon Cryer and Angus T. Jones and keep the title intact. We know things are kind of crazy over there at the moment, though, so we thought we’d at least try to help them a bit with the casting process.

Sure, they say they won’t continue without Charlie…but, then, they haven’t seen our suggestions yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, the band makes a clip for our favorite song from their (awesome) 2010 album Night Work. And it’s weird, even by Scissor Sisters standards. We’re not sure what it’s about, really, but there’s some strange, psycho-sexual mind trip going on, one littered with religious symbolism and quite possibly traveling through time. Just try not to drool when you see the girl in the riding breeches. Hot damn.

It should be stated for the record that while the editorial ‘we’ was used for the title of this column, the truth is that these are my picks and solely my picks. Let the first person speak begin.

The Academy Awards have become a bit of a bore in the last few years. There have been next to no surprises in the major categories, except for perhaps Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress in 2008 for “La Vie en Rose” or Alan Arkin winning Best Supporting actor in 2007 for “Little Miss Sunshine.” For the most part, it’s decided pretty early who’s going to win, which totally sucks, if you ask me. Of course, there are categories where there is a performance that clearly stands out above the others, but in many instances, people win their Oscars not because they’ve delivered something otherworldly, but because it’s their time, and they’re due, or other such nonsense. These aren’t lifetime achievement awards, and this isn’t a welfare system. If you give the award to the worthy party the first time around, there will be no need to “pay them back” later (cough, Al Pacino and Denzel Washington).

Take Tilda Swinton, for example. Do you know why she won the Academy Award for Supporting Actress? It’s because the voters knew that “Michael Clayton” was going to be shut out in every other category, so they threw Swinton a bone just so the movie walked away with at least one award. What the hell kind of logic is that? Did she really give the best performance or not? She was perfectly fine in the movie, but there was nothing extraordinary about it, certainly not compared to her hilariously stone-hearted harpy in “Burn After Reading.” Needless to say, the Academy’s predictability of late has led me to rebel, which is why on Sunday, I’d love nothing more than to hear the following five names be read instead of what we will probably hear.

Best Original Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, “Inception“

Current Frontrunner: David Seidler, “The King’s Speech”

“The King’s Speech” is a wonderful little film. It was #7 on my list of top movies of 2010. But that story has been done many, many times before, while “Inception” was so layered that it took 10 years for Christopher Nolan to finish it. Small stories are good stories, but when someone dares to, pardon the pun, dream like Nolan did here – and better yet, pull it off, which he does in spades – that should be rewarded. It would also serve as a warning shot across the bows of every action movie director that story matters, damn it, and to get rid of the jive-talking robots.

Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush, “The King’s Speech“

Current Frontrunner: Christian Bale, “The Fighter“

We called it three years ago: Christian Bale will win an Oscar before it’s said and done, and more likely sooner than later. Now it’s about to happen, and strangely, I wish it weren’t.

First off, credit where credit is due. Bale positively disappeared into the role of Dicky Eklund, shedding a bunch of weight to resemble the body type of a crack addict and sounding like an authentic born-and-raised Southie. It was flashy without being gimmicky, and that is the key to Oscar glory. There is just one teensy problem; his character doesn’t support the story – he’s a distraction to it, and every time the movie becomes Dicky-centric, it loses momentum. Which brings us to Rush, the heart and soul of “The King’s Speech” and without whom, as Roger Ebert astutely observed, “the movie is unthinkable.” “The Fighter” could survive without Dicky; “The King’s Speech” is dead in the water without Lionel.

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, “The Fighter”

Current Frontrunner: Hailee Steinfeld, “True Grit“

Now, here is the supporting performance that drives “The Fighter.” Like Bale, Melissa Leo also disappears into the character of Alice Ward, but unlike Bale, there isn’t that sense of watching someone act. Instead, it was more like watching someone be, something Leo is remarkably good at. She also seems to have a fondness for getting ugly on screen, if this and “Conviction” are any indication.

Of course, the general consensus is that Leo and Amy Adams will split the “Fighter” vote, opening the door for Steinfeld to become the latest child to win an Oscar…but she’s not really in a supporting role, is she? Nope, the academy rigged the vote so she wouldn’t have to go up against Annette Bening and Natalie Portman. Don’t you think that, should Steinfeld win, it would feel a little hollow that they bent the rules for her? Just sayin’.

Best Actor: James Franco, “127 Hours“

Current Frontrunner: Colin Firth, “The King’s Speech”
Colin Firth was humbled and regal. Jesse Eisenberg fired Aaron Sorkin’s one-liners like a sharpshooter. James Franco, meanwhile, carried his movie from start to finish. It was a one-man show, and better yet, thanks to the savvy editing, it didn’t feel like a one-man show. I think Franco’s biggest problem is that a lot of people refused to see the movie on principle once they realized they would have to watch someone (pretend to) cut his arm off, and I get that; I didn’t want to see it either, but was positively blown away by the movie, and Franco’s performance, once I did.

Firth has the buzz because he’s well liked and has carved out a nice, well regarded filmography for himself. But the race to an Oscar isn’t a marathon; it’s a sprint. And from here, Franco was running faster than everyone else.

Best Picture: “The Social Network“

Current Frontrunner: “The King’s Speech”

In the interest of full disclosure, my #1 movie of 2010 was “Black Swan.” For the sake of the awards, though, I’m changing my tune.

What we’re looking at is something akin to when “Forrest Gump” beat “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shawshank Redemption” for Best Picture in 1995 (though if we’re honest, few of us knew how truly great “Shawshank” was until it was released on video a few months after the Oscars). The Academy has a chance to award a movie that will transcend time – there is a reason many people speak of “The Social Network” as a movie that will define a generation – but they won’t, and I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps the elder members of the academy can relate to “The King’s Speech” better than they can to a movie about a group of kids haggling in court over Internet money, so they’re choosing what makes them comfortable. That makes sense, I suppose. But here’s the thing – odds are, someone is going to make a movie a lot like “The King’s Speech” in the next 12 to 18 months. You won’t see another movie like “The Social Network,” however, for a long, long time.

Oh, and I’d also love to see “Exit Through the Gift Shop” win Best Documentary. The movie rules.

When the press release for “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” rolled in, it had our attention. We see bad movies for a living, after all, and this flick was hailed as the “best worst movie of all time,” which puts it in some illustrious company. Then we watched it, and they weren’t kidding: it’s a terrible movie all right, filled with bad acting, bad dialogue, bad sound, bad editing, bad special effects, a cut & paste score, continuity errors, etc. You name it, it’s here.

There is just one problem with it: it’s bad on purpose. And if you ask us, that’s cheating.

Anyone can make a bad movie. Anyone can deliberately underwrite and overact something, and piece it together like they had hooks for hands. Praising “Birdemic” is like applauding the 1919 Chicago White Sox for finishing the World Series after they had already decided to throw the games for money. Forget that; give us a movie that someone assembled because they thought it was a great idea and had tremendous emotional depth, only to be horribly, horribly wrong. The best bad movies are that ones that are desperately trying to be good. Like, say, “Troll 2.”

Now, this movie is spectacularly bad, the true heavyweight champion of good bad movies. There’s even a documentary about it, “Best Worst Movie,” made by the film’s then-child star Michael Stephenson, and its best scene comes when the film’s director, Italian B-movie veteran Claudio Fragasso, attends a screening of the movie, and doesn’t understand why people are laughing at parts where they shouldn’t be laughing. He truly has no idea how bad his movie is. Isn’t that beautiful?

The same goes for “Death Bed: The Bed That Eats,” a 1977 film so bad that it went unreleased until 2003, and thanks to Patton Oswalt discussing the movie on his album Werewolves and Lollipops, the movie is now a cult classic. Still, George Barry was not trying to make a bad movie. To him, the idea of a demonic tree, who then turned into a breeze and then human form, possessing a bed and devouring anyone who dared sleep on it, seemed like a good idea. He even threw in commentary from an artist trapped in a painting on the wall, you know, to class it up. It’s ridiculous, but it thinks it’s terrifying. Definitely the hallmarks of a good bad movie.

Then there is “The Human Centipede,” which could go either way. Director Tom Six claims the idea was inspired by a joke (that child molestors should have their mouths stitched to the ass of a fat truck driver), but doesn’t appear to be kidding about the movie’s plot and is even convinced that such a procedure could actually be done. Everyone we know who’s seen it, though, says the movie isn’t bad so much as it’s boring. It’s bad too, but mostly boring, which makes it ineligible for Best Bad Movie, since it’s lacking in the unintentional humor department.

“Black Sheep,” on the other hand, is funny, and bad, but it’s also in on the joke, which disquallifies it from Best Bad Movie status as well. The truly good bad movie does not know its weaknesses, and lacks self-awareness.

Which brings us back to “Birdemic” – the damn thing is just lazy. Had they tried to make something good and then filled with crap special effects, that would have been a movie worth watching. But writing 40 seconds of score, and clumsily looping it over a five-minute title sequence? That joke was old after the second spin. “Birdemic” does not qualify for the Best Bad Movie discussion – it’s just bad.

Everyone has taken that soul-sucking job in order to pay the bills. And while we proles may tease them for living the glamorous life, actors probably take that job more often than anyone, since they never know when the next job is going to come. (Case in point: Michael Madsen told us that he categorizes the movies he’s made as “good,” “bad,” and “unwatchable.”) Putting this theory to the test, we scoured the filmographies of this year’s nominees in the acting categories, looking for movie titles that screamed ‘bad idea.,’ and we were not disappointed with what we found. Jesse Eisenberg, for example, did a TV movie called “Lightning: Fire from the Sky,” which will be the main feature at our next Bad Movie night. Here are ten other films that this year’s candidates would probably prefer remained unseen.

Colin Firth (Best Actor, “The King’s Speech”)

Movie: Femme Fatale (1991)
IMDb rating: 4.6
The plot: An English artist-turned park ranger falls for and marries a stranger, only for her to disappear days later. As he learns more about his wife, he gets deeper and deeper into the Los Angeles underworld looking for clues that will lead him to her.
Firth’s character: Joe Prince, the aforementioned artist/ranger.
How bad is it?: You may not see the ending coming, but that is about the only thing this movie has going for it. Armed with one of the most awkward love scenes we’ve seen in ages, this movie does not gel on any level, using mental illness as a means of providing psychological depth, not to mention Acting!, with that last word ideally spoken like Jon Lovitz. Firth is actually passable here, given the material, and Danny Trejo pops up as a tattoo artist. But you can bet that when someone assembles a clip show of Firth’s finest moments, this movie will not make the cut.

Jeremy Renner (Best Supporting Actor, “The Town”)

Movie: National Lampoon’s Senior Trip (1995)
IMDb rating: 4.9
The plot: A group of delinquent kids takes a bus trip to Washington D.C. to tell the President first-hand what is wrong with the education system, something a couple of corrupt politicians intend to exploit.
Renner’s character: Mark “Dags” D’agostino, a slacker stoner. With pierced ears.
How bad is it?: Put it this way: the first actor listed in the credits is Matt “Max Headroom” Frewer, and the movie’s few laughs come from Tommy Chong as the drug-addled bus driver. On the “National Lampoon” movie scale, this one lands somewhere in between “Class Reunion” and “Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj.”

Men are such easy targets for advertising. Show us a woman in lingerie, photographed in compromising positions, holding a product that’s a third the size of her cans and we’re sunk. Mention the words ‘video game’ in the advertisement and we’re doubly sunk. Thrown in an angel fantasy and, well, let’s hope we can remember to lock the door before cracking the lid to the spank bank.

The new Lynx Excite fragrance campaign has all of the above, featuring the gorgeous Kelly Brook as the aforementioned Fallen Angel. As part of the Excite promotion, Lynx put together an Xbox/Facebook game that asks players to use the Lynx Effect to tempt Kelly down from heaven. It is absurd, and yet the usage statistics will doubtlessly be through the roof. We’ll do a lot for a pretty…face. Yes, that’s it…pretty face.

Feel free to browse through the gallery above, but don’t miss the video below for a behind the scenes look at the photo shoot that made such a hot gallery possible. As always, you can find more Kelly Brook at her Bullz-Eye.com Celebrity Babes page.