May contain scenes of violence, sexuality, fowl language about ducks and chickens, prolonged gratuitous nudity for fun, sexual situations involving horses, graphic moral debasment of an adorable midget wearing a posh suit, meandering geriatric stories about onion prices during the Crimean War, drug use, suicide, and smoking.
Wait, what? Smoking? Really? I was all-in until I saw that one. What is up with entertainment trigger warnings these days? They seem to be getting overly sensitive about everything.
Maybe a more useful warning would be TV-BA—bad actor—for those movies and episodes that have hack actors, called hactors, who frequently ruin otherwise satisfactory productions. Katee “Ripyer” Sackhoff chewing her way through dialog while making that face with clenched teeth and furrowed brow as if she just smelled the stench of her own mediocrity wafting through the air, affecting everyone on set.
Some hactors are so bad that they define the ruinination of an entire country’s production value. As soon as their names appear in the credits, right away you know this is going to be terrible and it was made in either Vancouver or Toronto pretending to be anywhere else. I would like to put together a book called, The Big Book of Canadian Hactors, and it’s companion, The Big Book of British Hactors. Once the villainous characters are enumerated, we can just refer to them by catalog number and be done with all of them. It would also include a description of their worst crimes, or the hackyness that they are most know for. Eva Green hams up every scene she is in, so I call her Hammy. Oh, look, it has Hammy in it; this is going to suck! Since her name is Green, I sometimes refer to her as Green Eggs and Hammy.
Another useful warning would be TV-BD, for bad director. May contain long, boring scenes that are misframed, unfocused, and vomit-inducing shaky to appear more artistic and meaningful than the director has talent to pull off organically. TV-AW, for amateur writing. Caution woke plot and revisionist history, based on a real story, but absolutely no research was done, and everyone speaks profanely like they are eleven years old.
May contain smoking. Avert your eyes children, and don’t mention the time not too long ago when doctors prescribed cigarettes for treating a range of chronic lung issues. They also used to think lobotomies and eugenics were beneficial, too. What will they praise and villify next?
—DG.
Inside Doug's Head 