It's got to be the same kind of sweet spot that's hit by the "redneck" comedians, right? Like, it's so exciting to see "your people" on the screen that it doesn't matter as much if it's actually good or not?

I'll stand up for my homies here and maintain that a number of the people on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour are actually quite good comedians, like Bill Engvall and Ron White (whose act is particularly clever) if you can get past the Southern accents. Even Jeff Foxworthy has some pretty true and funny things to say.

Admittedly, Rodney Carrington is basically an hour of dick jokes set to music, but there's a place for that.(As for Backwoods SatanLarry the Cable Guy, I got nothin'.)

If people haven't seen the Boondocks parody, they should seek it out.

Seconded.

So I went to see Haywire last night, it's Soderbergh's spies-and-guns thriller with Gina Carano.

Man, that was great. Not the best movie ever made, and Carano's got some work to do on her acting chops, but the action scenes were excellent, the cast was great (except for Channing Tatum, who I just see as a boring block of wood, undistinguishable from all the other big blocks of wood in Hollywood right now), and they treated Carano's character like a person, not like a pretty girl pretending to kick ass.

The movie fails the Bechdel test pretty comprehensively (there isn't another named female character in the movie), but it also takes her seriously and doesn't ever do that skeevy thing where they shoot the woman like a piece of meat instead of a person.

I really enjoyed it.

undistinguishable from all the other big blocks of wood in Hollywood right now

I find him quit distinguishable, in that he stand out as a big block of wood in his own special way. I never fail to recognise him and shiver in response. The other big zero is Sam Worthington, who fails to impress himself on my neurons properly, but at least he's generically goodlooking I don't think Channing is even that.

Who do you find Tatum interchangeable with?

I have hurt myself laughing to Bill Engvall. And possibly the funniest bit in the Blue Collar Comedy Tour is at the end of the show, when someone says something about opening a beer at a funeral and Engvall slowly puts his hand up, and they start telling stories about funerals.

Then again, I'm from the borders of that neck of the woods, so I probably come by it honestly.

Who do you find Tatum interchangeable with?

All of the heroic-looking young proto-stars? I mean, I can't recognize him. I've seen tons of photographs of him and he's in videos and I saw the trailer for 21 Jump Street last night, and I cannot retain my recognition of him for more than a few minutes. It's like his looks are so bland & ordinary that my mind cannot latch onto anything to remember him by.

I wasn't even sure that, in Haywire, the guy in the diner was the same guy as in the job in Barcelona, until the dialog made it obvious (and he showed up at her father's house with a broken arm ).

He's fungible to me.

Next time one of them comes up, if you remember, could you mention it? I'm possessed of such a seething dislike of the guy I don't get how anyone could forget him. He just dumbs up the room to me--he seems to be labouring at a pace half as fast as everyone else on camera, and he's not goodlooking either, and is radiating negative charisma. Most of the proto-stars I can think of (Liam Hemsworth comes to mind, for someone who's not much of anything, but he's much less famous than Channing), are at least neutral to me. Channing...ugh...so negative.

I kind of like Channing; he seems like a nice if somewhat dim guy in interviews and commentary tracks; he has zero shyness about taking his clothes off in movies, which I appreciate in men who are my physical type; he does good dance and passable fight scenes; and in getting his life story filmed—my mind reels at the thought of how many blowjobs it must have taken to get that greenlighted by a studio executive—he will provide me with Joe Manganiello doing a striptease in a fireman costume and going full (prosthetic) monty.

My first Channing movie was Step Up, and he's well enough suited for that role. So I have a bit of fondness for him, but a rather small bit.

if you must see a Uwe Boll movie, make it In the Name of the King: a Dungeon Siege Tale. It's worth it just for Ron Perlman chewing the scenery and you get bonus Jason Statham.