Fired Up!

Fired Up! is a film so desperate to telegraph its jokes to the audience that even its title has an exclamation mark. Cheeleaders in the film like to shout the title by chanting "F! U!" and if you think that joke is clever, please buy a gas oven so you can place your head in it. Then again, given how the camera constantly frames these teenagers as if they're trying to cheer at the film's audience, these chants appear to be aimed at those who would lay down good money to watch this, and frankly, we all deserve it.

Fired Up! concerns two coagulated sacks of douche resin contained by the sewn-together flesh of Chinese workers who died in a sweatshop owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. Their names are Shawn and Nick, and I shall withhold the names of the actors who portray because I'm feeling particularly charitable today. That any woman would sleep with them is inherently sexist, but the girls of their high school are so uniformly stupid that one wonders if these boys aren't crossing some severe ethical boundaries as well.

Shawn and Nick are on the football team and have hooked up with every girl on campus. Except, apparently, any of the cheerleaders. As such, Shawn and Nick decide to quit the football team -- over the perfunctory threats from Phillip Baker Hall, who deserves some civilian medal of courage for this, or at least some sort of fundraiser to prevent him taking these roles again -- in order to go to cheerleading camp to score some of these fine ladies. Comedy!

To compensate for the staggering inanity of these two idiots, the cheerleading squad has about as much flexibility as a group of wounded veterans undergoing arduous physical rehabilitation. Neither Shawn nor Nick does much for the team other than do their damnedest to ensure that the next generation of cheerleaders will soon be on their way, yet Carly, the head cheerleader ostensibly too smart to fall for these dopes' tricks, mentions that the squad has never been better, leading to a love connection. Well, maybe she is sufficiently intelligent to spot Nick's come-ons -- Shawn by this point is of course in love with her -- as anyone could see through his shtick.

The accredited screenwriter for Fired Up! is Freedom Jones, the only funny aspect of this film as I felt trapped by the barrage of clichés and a sorely misguided appraisal of wit. At one point, Carly's pre-med boyfriend Rick (who looks like some horrible experiment to cross-breed with David Hasselhoff and Nick Cave) boasts that he's taking her to Red Lobster where, "We've got a seat behind a plant so people can't see how much we'll be all-you-can-eating. If you know what I mean." Is that a double entendre? And then Rick mimes hip-thrusting. Well, whatever half-assed euphemism he just used for oral sex doesn't even apply anymore. However, I've found absolutely nothing on this Freedom Jones; hell, I can't even find this person's gender. Is it possible then, that the real writer took a gander at the final draft and suffered a crisis of conscience? If Freedom Jones is a false name and it continues to appear on films such as this, it could prove a match for Alan Smithee in no time.

The film ends, of course, with a competition, following the obligatory Big Misunderstanding. The Tigers face off against the Panthers, who are clad in all-black which is a perfectly ordinary thing. As it turns out, oh who gives a damn? If you like mincing gay stereotypes, sexist depictions of women, nonexistent wit, a little child who swears as if it was inherently funny and repugnant assholes presented as heroes, then have I got a film for you. Also, could you move a bit more to the left? Just a bit more. Near the big X.

The Late Shift

Conan's ascension to the Tonight Show and what that move subsequently means for a generation of geeks who demand more from their comedy than tired monologues and obsequious interviews has rekindled a love in T.V. as a whole for me, at least outside of my usual practice of waiting for the DVD: while a talk show has no real bearing on scripted fictional programming, it validated people who liked something a bit outside of the mainstream (though Conan isn't half as weird as some claim). The geek had inherited the Earth.

Then Jay Leno had to ruin it all. His decision to not go quietly into that good night threw a monkey wrench into Conan's promotion before he even switched shows. Not only did it display the network's lack of faith in Conan, but it undermined the notion that T.V. might step it up a bit, as the news that Jay would move to a primetime slot suggested that, in the future, narrative programs might not make it to air in favor of not only exploitative, generic "reality" programming but talk shows as well. People drew parallels to the infamous Leno/Letterman face off of the early '90s over succeeding Johnny Carson, a story I've heard in passing without any concrete details (read: juicy bits). I heard of a film called The Late Shift, which chronicled Leno's upstaging of Dave, and put it in my Netflix queue before bothering to learn it was actually based on an acclaimed book. "Never mind," I figured, "I can just watch this while I hunt down a copy."

I wish I'd waited. The Late Shift barely scratches the surface of what went wrong, and that's coming from someone who watched this solely because I have no clue what happened. I'm barely more educated now. While the scheming of the executives works well in places, at other times the film just treads water.

It certainly doesn't help that both John Michael Higgins' Letterman and Daniel Roebuck's Leno are some of the most laughably bad impersonations you've seen outside of an amateur video. Both are less concerned about getting into these characters as they are with looking the part (they don't) and sounding the part (oh Lord, you don't even wanna know). If the entire movie is supposed to be about how Leno pulled the wool over Letterman's head, and how Letterman rebelled in outrage, shouldn't we get in their heads a little bit?

However, the terrible leads do not automatically ensure the film's failure, as The Late Shift focuses more on the executives who so idly cast aside the man who'd been with them for a decade and managed to take an ambitious and wildly audacious program and turn it into a success. Seriously, while people my age might not look at the current Letterman and see someone that much better than Jay (though he really, really is, even at his laziest), we owe him for making what Conan refers to as "the anti-talk show." His Late Night more or less gave young viewers something to care about -- as great as Carson was, his guests tended to be more familial and the show was based on the old form of comedy. Dave paved the way for Arsenio, Conan, Craig Kilborn, Craig Ferguson, even The Daily Show. I really wanted to see how that man, that legend, could be so utterly crushed.

At times, I get my wish. We see Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia look at Leno's ratings when he fills in for a vacationing Johnny to Letterman's, as if it's fair to compare the ratings of two different time slots, especially so late at night. They move to lock in Leno as they already have Dave secured for two more years. But we don't see Carson being pressured over the infighting to the point of resigning, nor do we see Dave's on-air bashing of NBC bosses which turned them against him. According to the descriptions of the book -- which is seriously the only place I can find any information regarding the snafu at all -- these executives behaved more like a high school clique than businessmen, but we are very much presented with cold, calculating sharks.

The lone bright spot in all of this is Kathy Bates as Leno's tyrannical agent Helen Kushnick, who discovered him on the stand-up circuit and launched his career. She's the one who convinces the executives to undercut Dave, and when they start on the Tonight Show, she oversteps every boundary of authority: she cancels guests for having the audacity to appear on other talk shows and even sends an audience home when live coverage of the Republican National Convention runs long. There's a hint of tragedy to her relationship with Jay, as she lost her son when he contracted AIDS from an infected transfusion, and lost her husband shortly thereafter. Leno promised the husband to look after her, and now the suits, understandably outraged by her antics, want her gone. It could have been an interesting thread if it got more than three minutes total of screen time.

So, while parts of it were interesting, The Late Shift fails to shed much light on the feud, and it's poorly acted to boot. Sadly, the book seems to be out of print, so it might take me a while to get a copy, so I'll remain in the dark as to many of the figures and anecdotes concerning the events. If you're a kid like me who wants to know what went down 16 years ago, you might want to give it a shot. But fair warning: don't expect to leave knowing much more than you did when you started.