Friday, May 14, 2010

Enough with the platforms already

I was inspired by Stephanie's movie rant yesterday about how too many summer movies were written for a seventeen year old boy, by people with the attention span of a four year old boy.

And then heard that a publisher has given a young, famousish model money to publish a book on inner beauty. And there it is, the last straw, dropping through the crack.

So I am taking a pledge.

I will not buy a book written by a celebrity who has not written for a tv show or is not a stand up comedian.
This especially includes Lauren Conrad, and Pamela Anderson.
(almost got caught there ending the sentence too early. Had I finshed at celebrity, I would have included Tina Fey, or Craig Ferguson in there, and I'd read their grocery lists)

I will not buy a perfume with a celebrity's name in the title.
I do not want to smell like Kim Kardashian, or Avril Lavigne. I don't care how sexy Mariah Carey feels when she gets out of the shower and I do not want a spritz of eau du Paris Hilton or Paula Abdul.

I will not buy a piece of clothing designed(?) by a celebrity whose only experience with fashion is trying on clothes.
Being a fashion designer requires the ability to tailor and sketch, and better still an encyclopedic knowledge of fabrics, usually garnered through years of interning for another designer, experimenting on their own, school, or a combination of the three. So I will not buy a clothes simply because some chick from the Hills, like decided, that clothing was too cool and she simply could not find the right kind of simple mini jersey dress and therefore had to, like, design her own. It sort of insults the people that trained and sweated and really worked at something they love.

I get that these people have access to Oprah, or US weekly, or the National Enquirer and what's better than free publicity, but I can control what I do, and I choose not to play this game any more.

I want to read books by people who love the written word, and breathe, sleep and eat story telling. I want to buy a perfume created by a person who can identity, individually, the twelve different ingredients in the scent, and if I buy a dress, I want to know that the person who designed it knows at the very least what a hemline is.

If we don't buy tickets to badly reviewed movies, chances are they won't make money and movie exec's will put their money into actual scripts and not a four page opus where every second word is 'boom'. If we refused to buy books written by people who don't understand what a sentence fragment is, publishers will stop giving them money.

At least that's the way it's supposed to work.

Rant over, now I have to go ponder when the CW became my favourite non-specialty cable network. Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries in one night, it's almost too much.

5 comments:

Eileen said...

Why didn't anyone tell me it was rant week at DWT? I'm sure I'm indignant about something. I usually am.

Great post, Sinead! I totally agree. Let us vote with our feet, our seats and our dollars!

Stephanie Doyle said...

Amen! Sing it sister. Love this.

I'm going to add... I will not watch a crappy movie in 3D and be impressed just because it's 3D.

And so right about the fashion stuff. That is hard work that these famous people basically crap on by suggesting they can do it because they "know" fashion!

Ugh - kills me.

Anonymous said...

I don't want to be preached to by people that have no qualifications.
Like a model telling me to love the inner me, or Jerry Seinfeld's wife telling me how to feed veggies to my kids, when she is not, or has never been a cook.

I want to read a book written by the writers of Mad Men, not the actors in the show..
Although my love for Jon Hamm knows no bounds.

Maureen McGowan said...

Wasn't that Vamp Diaries finale AWESOME??? Talk about setting up and reversing expectations. Over and over.

Everytime they have a celebrity judge on Project Runway who "is designing their own line" I am outraged for the designers. A few of them were relatively cool about it (Sarah Jessica Parker comes to mind) and there was some mutual respect going on and an acknowledgment from her that she had trained designers working for her to create "her line", but some others made me angry for the contestants.

Lauren Conrad's book makes me more angry than her clothes, because she did, supposedly, go to whatever that famous design school is in LA... FIDM. At least they showed scenes with her there and doing homework assignments on the show. (yes, I watched a couple of seasons. **Hangs head in shame**) Same with that ridiculous Whitney chick.

I just read another book announcement on PM that enraged me. OH. Tara Banks is writing a YA Fantasy series. Yes. Miss Queen of Redundancy, Miss I wouldn't know how to use the correct preposition in a sentence if it was banging on the side of my head, is now an author.

Anonymous said...

Definitely. So you're a celebrity - big deal - you have to impress with what you do to count.

Ah, another Jon Hamm lover. :)

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