Entertainment Weekly, that is. They yanked the flashback feature, whatever that was called, and replaced it with this dreck.
Why? What are we supposed to get out of his comments? He’s not funny. The column is not insightful or informative. If I want to hear someone ramble on about how the entertainment industry is a mystery to them, I can go down to the bagel shop and hang out with the senior citizens. Why does this guy get a full page in any magazine? If EW thought the retrospective column was tired (I didn’t), that’s their deal, but why did they choose this format for a replacement, and why did they choose this fool to write it?
I’m with you on this one, and so is my wife. We got a free subscription to the mag and after just a couple of issues we were driven to comment on just how bad Stein’s column is. Normally last page editorials are funny and/or insightful. Stein is neither. His column is so dull that it raises the suspicion that he’s fucking somebody to keep his job.
I’ve read it a few times - I need to get another subscription - and I found it whimsical, if not outright funny. Pretty okay, for me. Not flashy, not wonderful, but not harmful. Still, the back page of a major magazine should have better stuff in it. I wouldn’t mind them keeping it if it were elsewhere in the issue.
I can’t put my finger on why. I mean, I never have a true “laugh out loud” moment. Maybe just a snicker here or there, and a smile. I learn new things—didn’t know about Ben Afleck’s appeal to not pirate movies before the column. Didn’t know Method Man kicked ass in video games.
And also, I always thought it was a jab at his own industry. When you’re reading the details of his date with Tiffany you realize, “hey that’s not that interesting! I don’t care!” And then yo urealize you just read 3 pages of nothing but stupid gossip of people just as dull as he is, but they might be better looking, and it’s just so fucking ridiculous that you have to laugh.
Well, that’s how I justify it anyway, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I was completely off-base and out on my own planet somewhere.
I also think he’s amusing. I was just reading the Tiffany article last night and loved the part about how even if he was single, she wouldn’t go out with him. For instance, she said if he was single, she would fix him up with a friend. “I pick up on subtle stuff like that.”
I can’t stand the guy. Just being painfully self-aware isn’t automatically funny-sometimes it just means you’re a self-centered smug smartass that somehow convinced some deluded editor you were a funny writer. I don’t even bother with the last page of EW anymore.
I was going to email EW about this (and the fact that 4 people mention Christopher Guest as an idol on their It List, but he doesn’t get a mention), but I couldn’t find a link to email them on their site. Anybody know where this is?
I’ve hated this waste of ink and paper ever since I first read him in Time Magazine. I’ve consider staring a Pit Thread about my loathing of him.
I used to wonder if he was supposed to be the official AOL Time Warner attempt to lure in younger readers/fans of blogs. He can rarely go more than three columns without bringing up his teen years as a D&D gamer or his ongoing obsession with watching porn. Pure smug navel gazing. I’m roughly the same age as the guy, consider myself to be immature, and I still think the punk needs to grow up.
During the whole Jayson Blair/NY Times mess, he wrote an EW column about how it could never happen with him because he’s too lazy to make things up, and because he is so self-absorbed that he doesn’t like to write about anything but himself anyway. How one-note, and not even a good note at that.
He was the last straw when I quit reading Time. I’ve felt they’ve been dumbing down the writing for a while anyway, but hiring this twit confirmed it for me. When he was getting those stupid columns printed and doing those pointless Q&A annoy-a-thon phone interviews with celebrities, where half the questions were asking the subject what they thought of him, I said that was it. At least I get to read a co-worker’s EW’s without buying them, so I’m not putting any money in the hands of the magazines that pay him and give him an expense account to pad, another favorite subject of his.
Now the bastard turns up on TV as a talking head/commentator on those countdown/clip shows. Just as witless as ever.
I sometimes wonder if somebody in organized crime isn’t blackmailing the heads of major media companies to employ him.
I was thinking of writing a Pit thread about it. It’s the Joel Stein Show-- it’s about Joel Stein and his hot wife and his star-studded life and his cool friends and just how much more “ironic” he is than just about everyone else (including his hot wife and cool friends).
I have no idea how they chose Joel Stein as the columnist. Self-promotion maybe? Or maybe because he wrote for Martha Stewart’s show for a week or he got invited to DJ at a “hot new club” or because, even though his wife looks like a European model, he didn’t find her at all attractive when he first met her? EW was in desperate need of a self-important and unfunny semi-writer.
There was a time when I thought that maybe this column, if given time, would build up and go somewhere. That hope died an ugly death with his “I don’t like mixed tapes” column.
Hey, here’s an idea— let’s start a campaign to get Eve the back column in EW.
I guess I’m in the minority - I find him mostly funny, and a HUGE improvement over the flashback thing that used to fill the back page. I was praying for that thing to die for years.
I agree the mix tape column was cringe-worthy, but some of his stuff is good, in the arrogant, shallow, navel-gazing style that Stein has seized as his own. I guess, uh, that style of humor really speaks to me, as unflattering as that might be.
You can count me as another person who hates Joel Stein. He is yet another horrible part of the New Improved Entertainment Weekly, aimed at the people who couldn’t make it through all 15 items in Jim Mullen’s Hot Sheet in one sitting.
Aside from all the on-point complaints made about him so far, I would like to mention my own personal peeve. How the hell many times is he going to mention in his column for Entertainment Weekly that he … you know … writes a column for Entertainment Weekly. It seems every third week he needs to bring up how easy it is to write his column, and how he did something to get a column out of it, and how he writes the column while snorting powdered Froot Loops. Damn, Joel, we know all about the coulm you write. We’re reading the damn thing, aren’t we? There’s no need to remind us. I suppose it’s supposed to be funny, getting all “meta” on us. But after a while it becomes kinda tedious.
I’m with you, Trion. I’ve already ranted and raved to friends about how I hate Entertainment Weekly’s latest format and how it’s becoming less about entertainment and more about self-glorification. Methinks that they’ve seen themselves in more than 1 tv/movie scene. The latest addition: Ask the Critic is just a bore. If the critics want to start their fan club, they should do it on someone else’s pages.
Y’all mean to tell me that Joel Stein actually had a writing gig prior to EW? I thought he was just some schmuck intern they pulled out of the mail room.
Another thing… when my subscription comes up for renewal (I’ve been a subscriber almost since the day the magazine began) I not signing up again. Too disappointed.
They love terrible colmnists at EW. Just read Jim Mullun’s hot sheet where he lists “What the country is talking about this week” which is really “9 things Jim is talking about that no one else is and one token thing everyone is talking about.”