If Michael Jackson were to write a song about this razor, it would be called “Bad.” If this razor were a woman, it would be Roseanne Barr. If this razor were a space shuttle, it would be the Challenger. If this razor were a car, it would be a Ford Festiva. If this razor were a Band-Aid, it would be the kind that doesn’t have enough adhesive to stick.

The Xtreme3 is loaded with three blades as the name would suggest. It’s called the Fitstyle Refresh because it has a strip below the razor with both a mysterious “pre-shave oil” and Vitamin E, meant to coat your skin as you glide along the rest of your face. Though marketed as having a “new refreshing scented handle for an invigorating shave,” I didn’t find that to be the case.

While I was shaving with it, I didn’t notice any additional scent, so I placed it directly under my nose to take a whiff and still couldn’t detect a scent other than a plastic handle. I smelled all four razors in the package and none of them smelled like anything.

According to the packaging the razor came in, the Fitstyle Refresh is the “#1 flexible blade disposable razor.” But I wouldn’t agree it all; I don’t even think it’s the #1 disposable razor in its own family, sort of like Emilio Estevez. There is no way it is better than the Schick Xtreme3 (Martin Sheen) or the Schick Hydro 5 Power Select (Charlie Sheen).

Compared to several of Schick’s other offerings, I wasn’t very impressed with the Xtreme3 Fitstyle Refresh. I found it to be incredibly stiff, like Newt Gingrich at a Wham reunion concert, because it didn’t move with the contours of my face at all. I know it’s a disposable razor, but there was no weight to it whatsoever, which I think was a problem in terms of effectiveness.

Several times during the shave, I had to re-shave an area more than once, particularly the area where my mustache would be if I could grow one. Which is pretty bad, because if you can grow a mustache, plan on shaving that area about five times. And getting way more chicks than me; congrats. Somehow, it took more skin off of my face than hair.

I was extremely disappointed with the lack of effectiveness exhibited by the Fitstyle Refresh. Ff you want a good disposable razor from Schick, check out the Schick Xtreme3 or the Schick Hydro 5 Power Select instead.

What made Two and a Half Men a great show? The raunchy humor was a part of it, but the lines were delivered by great actors playing hilarious characters. Charlie Sheen carried the show with his portrayal of Charlie Harper, and Jon Cryer’s Alan was the perfect foil. The contrast between the two men was real and created the perfect setting for all sorts of situations, and each character made us laugh along the way.

We shouldn’t expect Chuck Lorre and the writers to create a new version of this formula overnight, and it’s impossible to judge the new version of Men after one episode, but there was something missing in the first episode.

I’m not referring to the over-the-top swipes at Sheen’s character and the need to create a new storyline. I thought most of the jokes about Charlie’s death were forced and fell flat, while some of the cameos were funny, particularly the Dharma and Greg appearance. Lorre and his writers will move on, and these scenes have nothing to do with the future of the show.

The problem so far rests with Ashton Kutcher’s new character, billionaire Walden Schmidt, who meets Alan after trying to kill himself. I thought Kutcher was a great choice to replace Sheen, but Lorre seems to have created a flat character with the charisma and humor of a dead fish. He’s good-looking and bags beautiful babes like Charlie with little effort, but he’s also pathetic and boring, at least so far.

Cryer was excellent as usual, and he had many of the laugh lines in this first episode playing off of Walden Schmidt’s good looks and huge assets. His line that he “masturbated and cried myself to sleep” after Walden hooked up with the two babes they brought back to the beach house was classic Alan. But his loser routine worked great when played off of the charismatic and brutally funny Charlie Harper. How long can this work, however, opposite the dour Walden Schmidt?

Maybe the writers will have this character undergo a metamorphosis in part 2 of this opening episode or in future episodes as he embraces all the advantages he has in life. They have to do something, because none of Kutcher’s lines made me chuckle, let alone laugh out loud. Kutcher seemed like a good choice because he’s pulled off a zany and provocative character in the past. He can find a voice here if given the chance. Yet so far he’s more like a straight man, and that has to change. As great as Jon Cryer can be, he can’t carry this show all by himself, and so far the writers are giving Kutcher very little to work with.

This is by nature a fun column, designed to get people pumped up for whatever weekend festivities they may have planned. Sometimes, though, something comes up that is just begging for some kind of commentary. This is one of those times.

This weekend (starting yesterday, actually), deep in the heart of southern Illinois, the twelfth (!) annual Gathering of the Juggalos is taking place. Now, we’ve seen the word ‘Juggalo’ pop up here and there in the news cycle – usually near the word ‘Gallagher’ – but we were quick to dismiss it because Juggalos are fans of the Detroit hip-hop group Insane Clown Posse, who hit their commercial peak in the late ’90s and were perhaps best known for a feud with fellow Motowner Eminem. Are there really enough of these Juggalos to merit their own festival?

One of our friends set us straight. He said, “You have to see this video. Wow. Just…wow.” The song: “Miracles,” by Insane Clown Posse, currently sporting just under 7.8 million hits on YouTube.

Now, the back story to this song is that the two guys in the band (we will not bother mentioning them by name, because it just doesn’t matter) liked the wide-eyed wonder with which they viewed the world as kids, and resented finding out that there is a logical, scientific explanation for everything. Fine, we’ll buy that, but they weren’t content to write a song about these small wonders of the world that says, “Look at this stuff. Isn’t it cool?” No, instead they turned it into an anti-intellectual battle cry. We won’t break the song down line by line, but here are some of our favorite lines:

“Water, fire, air and dirt / Fucking magnets, how do they work?”
“I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay / He tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away”
“Fucking rainbows after it rains…”
“Magic everywhere in this bitch…”
“And I don’t want to talk to a scientist / Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed”

So, to summarize, pelicans eating your cell phone is a miracle, as are fucking magnets and fucking rainbows. Scientists, however, are filthy, filthy liars. Got it. Enjoy your life of aggressive ignorance, guys.

So, back to “SNL.” They’ve been running fake ads for Under Underground Records for two years now, and until we saw the three minute-trailer for this year’s Juggalos gathering, we didn’t get the joke. Then at once, it all came together. Bad voiceovers, blond girl with pigtails, ridiculous graphics, check, check, checkmate. They even lampooned “Miracles,” which, to be fair, wasn’t terribly difficult. What the fuck is a clock?

Ass Dan, you will be missed. But not for the reasons you might think.

The lineup of bands playing this year’s event is frankly shocking. It’s mostly old school hip hop guys and other assorted clowns (namely, Charlie Sheen and Flavor Flav), but they also got George Clinton and Ice Cube, who I’m sure got an earful from his agent before signing on. “I’m going to have a hard time spinning this to Disney, Ice.” The one that stood out to us, though, was Lil Jon, since we never miss an opportunity to share this hilariously obscene mash-up of Lil Jon with the Icelandic kids show “LazyTown.” You’ll never look at cake the same way again. Booooo, muthafucka!

Lil Jon – Cooking by the Book

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.

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 »