Oops! They're at it again!

So, after a couple of weeks of titillating the public, Fed-Ex’s mouthpiece comes out with his big bucket of whitewash and tries to repair the wannabe rapper’s non-existent reputation. The sex tape, trumpeted by the media and even the subject of commentary by those who have allegedly seen it, does not exist. Furthermore, a second cleansing brushstroke claims, poor Kev has been the innocent victim of the envious and malicious who have slandered him with untrue allegations that he had such a tape and was shopping it around for the best price. Not a word is true, Lawyer-Boy says. Nary a word.

Yah, right.

I’m guessing there is something, probably tamer than has been advertised. So tame, in fact, that those who would stoop to make money from such a tape have deemed it unmarketable, either through lack of quality (can’t tell who the woman is) or lack of sufficient prurience to generate enough cash to pay back the initial acquisition and distribution costs. So, after a couple of weeks to flog the tape to various internet porn merchants and finding either no takers or receiving offers well below the millions anticipated, what’s a sleazebag to do? Deny, deny, deny!

Other, not-mutually-exclusive, possibilities include Brit’s legal team having a little chat with Kev’s legal team of one, reminding said individuals that her image is her legal property and the release of such a tape could be seen as a serious infringement of Britney’s intellectual (how’s that for an oxymoron?) property…which would mean any money he made from selling such a tape could be awarded to her in an infringement lawsuit, plus damages. Even a porn king might want to sit back and rethink the tape under such conditions, ya know?

And what if a little birdie perched on Kev’s scrawny shoulder and cooed into his ear “Ya know this will make her even more marketable, right? You do this and fans will flock to see her, to buy her music, to attend her concerts…this is priceless promotion that will make her millions and make you look like and even bigger schmuck than you are today. Let the scales fall from your eyes…nobody’s seen that tape yet and it is already happening! You’re doing her a favour, making her money, and you aren’t getting one thin dime of it!”

As much as Britney has shown herself to be a vulgar, under-educated red neck tart, Federline’s various attempts to further blacken her image (and make money off it) are backfiring. His suit for custody and alimony are publicly lampooned and the very media that delighted in catching Brit in all of her thoughtless moments with Sean Preston is now left-handedly defending her by revealing K-Fed’s long list of parental transgressions. Not only did he spend a whopping total of four days with his newest son in the first eight weeks of the child’s life, it’s been revealed that while married to multimillionaire Britney and dropping as much as $50,000 a night at the craps tables, he has paid no child support to the C-list actress, Shar Jackson, for the two children he sired on her. Oh, he pays for their private school, she tells the media. He does? With whose money?

When I last looked in on Fed-Ex’s antics, I was thinking he couldn’t get any more stupid, but I have to admit that I was wrong. With his attorney spewing out nonsense designed to make Kev a sympathetic figure…a victim of someone else’s malicious press and gossip…he just makes the guy look so much more the pathetic loser…and that’s quite an accomplishment.

Dumber than dirt...

In today’s sex-saturated media, can anyone seriously believe that a Britney Spears sex-tape will do any kind of lasting harm to the pop princess’s slutty, trailer-trash public image?

C’mon folks, a tape like this took Paris Hilton from being no more than a scrawny, skanky heiress to being a famous, scrawny, skanky heiress, and Pam Anderson’s career certainly suffered little lasting ill-effect from the release of a similar tape. Can Britney’s career fare any worse?

I get the impression that Fed-Ex, as he is now being called, is a veeeery long distance from being one of the intellectual heavyweights of Hollywood. Not that Britney is the sharpest knife in the drawer, mind you, but she’s got that control freak mother of hers and a battalion of legal sharks swimming in her waters, helping to keep her feather-brained choices from taking too much of a toll on her fortune. Like marrying Jason Alexander without a pre-nup…or marrying Kreep Federline at all. But Federline takes the cake for being the intellectual midget of the moment…the guy who pissed off the Golden Goose to the point that she’s taking all of her golden eggs and going home.

I mean, just how stupid can one person get? He was smart enough to recognize the smell of money when Britney flashed those big baby blues at him, crass enough to dump his heavily pregnant girlfriend and their toddler when Brit’s money started winking seductively his way, and quick enough to make his union with Brit legal, thereby securing himself access to her fortune. But either he didn’t read or understand the pre-nup he signed or he was arrogant enough to figure he’s find a way around it when the time came, or he just figured Britney would put up with his crap. Whatever his reasoning, he may have secured access to the cash cache, but as any strategist worth his salt will tell you, winning the battle is only the beginning: now you have to secure and keep the territory won.

And that’s where Federline has shown himself to be dumber than dirt. Oh, we can add some modifiers as “arrogant” and “over-confident,” too, but the bottom line is, dumb, dumb, dumb. Who in their right mind, after all, manages to land on their feet in a bed of soft, cushy roses and then immediately proceeds to kill the bushes that produced them? Federline could have had his bed feathered for him for life, had he just observed a few very simple rules of relationship conduct: 1) don’t look a gift horse in the mouth; 2) don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; and 3) don’t shit where you eat. Even a puppy knows that last one!

So, after two years of repeatedly pissing off the keeper of the purse strings, after regularly embarrassing the meal ticket with his less-than-committed behaviour, after publicly dissing the diva, the only surprise is that he was surprised when she gave him the old heave-ho. But, like the low-life, scum-sucking loser that he is, rather than consider himself fortunate for his brief ride through the good life on Britney’s back, he’s decided to retaliate for her having the impertinence to divorce his faithless, talentless, conscienceless ass: he’s threatening to release a sex tape of the two of them unless she hands over the kids and a hefty sum of cash. He couldn’t be more stupid if he put actual effort into it! Assuming he is not arrested and charged with blackmail and he succeeds in putting the tape up for internet view, what makes him think it’s going to harm Britney…or make him any money he can keep? She has legal control of her brand (her image), the tape is half hers anyway, and this kind of sleazoid reveal is exactly what her sagging career needs for a boost, if Pam and Paris are anything to go by.

Geeze, Federline, why not just shoot yourself in the head? (But be sure to have someone help you point the barrel in the right direction.)

Lifestyles of the Crazy and Famous

I am among the growing numbers of people who think Tom Cruise has slipped a cog or two and is now paddling his canoe up Cuckoo Creek. Craziness, however, does not necessarily mean a person lacks intelligence or the ability to think and plan well…it just means the person’s thinking and planning are carried out within a framework of standards, beliefs, and perceptions that the bulk of us do not share.

Yesterday it was announced that Cruise and Paramount had, after 14 years, parted ways. Since there was a controversy as to who bounced whom, I spent a little time perusing a variety of websites dedicated to celebrity news, hoping to gather enough diverse crumbs to piece together the most likely scenario.

All things considered, I’m taking Paramount’s version of the event. In the Wall Street Journal Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone remarked “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.” Reducing euphemism to Corporate-Speak, what Redstone is saying that due to his increasingly nutty personal behaviour, Cruise’s box-office appeal is declining and, now that contract renewal time affords an ideal opportunity to divest itself of what is beginning to look like a growing liability, Paramount doesn’t want to be chained to a sinking stone. In plain English, Tom’s crazy behaviour is starting to drive people away from the box office and Paramount wants to ends its association with Tom before its profits are hurt. Continues Redstone: “…we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

Yah, he’s cost Paramount a chunk of money…it’s reported that he gets a 25 percent cut of the gross of his movies…one quarter of every coin you spend on a ticket…and the cost of the production has to be borne by what remains. His antics have caused his box office to decline, so fewer people are seeing his movies than in the past…but his budgets aren’t declining. Apparently the production costs of MI3 exceeded the US box office take, of which Cruise got 25% off the top, leaving Paramount to make up the difference. The movie may have been a box office hit, but it left a dent in Paramount’s bottom line. Had Cruise not poisoned his well, more of us would have gone to the movie and maybe Paramount would have made a buck.

One of the problems with this kind of production deal is that misbehaving stars like Cruise, Lohan, or Gibson don’t actually bear the brunt of their behaviour. If they have a substantial cut of the gross of the film, success or failure are immaterial because they make money whether the film does or not…and whether they behaviour influences the ticket-buying public or not. So, Cruise can insult women with post-partum depression, talk down to his host on national television, and revert to his simian ancestry on Oprah with relative financial impunity…even if we stay away from his movie in droves and the thing is a box office flop, he still gets 25% of the take and Paramount drowns in red ink.

Shame…I used to like Tom Cruise movies, but I have to side with Paramount. As a movie-goer, I find it difficult to watch Tom on-screen without images of his embarrassing couch-hopping or his incredibly supercilious pillorying of Brook Shields or his arrogant behaviour towards Matt Lauer overlaying his on-screen character. I don’t want to go to his movies anymore…I don’t want MY hard-won money to fund a silly pseudo-religious cult that was founded by a crazy conman-cum-crappy science fiction writer. I don’t want to be a party to the kind of insanity that publicly scorns the users of legitimate medical treatment absent solid scientific reasons. And I especially do not want my ticket money ending up helping to fund the exploitation of the innocent.

Yes, I’m talking about Suri Cruise. The fact that her daddy is virtually certifiable at this stage does not mean he is bereft of guile and cunning…or greed. “Crazy like a fox” is a phrase that comes to mind here. With the world hanging on the imminent birth of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Crazy Tom had the business acumen to realize that his little gift to humanity would be upstaged by the arrival of Brangelina’s babe, so he took the sly tack of hiding Suri from the world until it was sated with Shiloh and suddenly remembered that there was a little Cruise cruisin’ around, sight unseen. And, once Shiloh’s pictures were sold, the value of Suri’s photos could then be established…and if the offers weren’t high enough, she could continue to be hidden from view until the value inched up enough to surpass the benchmark figure of Shiloh’s photoshoot.

Aw, do I really think he is that mercenary and calculating? Yup, I do. Over the past year or so it has become increasingly obvious that Cruise veered sharply off the path of compassion and common sense sometime between his divorce from Nicole and his ensorcelment of Katie…oops—Kate…Holmes. His suffocating control of Holmes, from dictating what she will be called to how she would be permitted to give birth (silently and without drugs!) bespeaks a bone-deep misogyny and ingrained controlling nature that has flourished since the departure of the strong (and strong-willed) Kidman. Pity the girl child raised by such a father…a man who can do no wrong in his own eyes, a man for whom the accumulated wisdom of the world fades into subordination to his own concepts.

Yup, I got to go along with Paramount. They took a sound business decision to unhitch their wagon from a falling star, to a man spiralling out of control for lack of rational touchstones outside his own microcosm of incestuous thought and support. Tom Cruise and Company can contradict Paramount’s announcement with claims of having quit rather been fired, but the fact remains that contract negotiations broke down when Paramount balked at renewing their old, profit-bleeding deal (confirmed by Cruise’s production partner, Paula Wagner). Whether Cruise then walked or Paramount chucked him out the door is virtually immaterial: Paramount made the decision that Cruise wasn’t worth the cost to them anymore and calculatedly made an offer that they knew Cruise had to refuse. Damned by faint praise, as it were.

So the question now becomes, what is to happen to Crazy Tom and his entourage? Will he feather his nest by leaking the occasional multi-million dollar pic of little Suri? Will Kate Holmes ever make another movie? Will Tom? Does anybody really care anymore?