Macaulay Culkin was the kid who was the closest thing we’re going to get to a Justin Bieber of 90’s kid’s movies. He was in everything, and paid handsomely.

Now he is not doing movies anymore, and should get himself to an In N’ Out as soon as possible. Though the last few times he was mentioned in the media was for being the significant other of bombshell actress Mila Kunis, after Black Swan was a hit she split with him. Now, he wanders the streets looking straight out of the walking dead. Maybe I shouldn’t mock Macaulay – maybe he has bigger problems that we don’t know about – but his representative say that he’s absolutely fine with no health conditions that we know about.

Maybe he’s losing weight for a film role? Maybe he’s gotten wind of the miracle drug of meth? Maybe he just naturally looks like he’s the skeletal charts they have in the office of every doctor across America?

Or he’s vegan. They tend to get incredibly skinny. You know what – why are we speculating on Macaulya’s weight – when we could just petition for him to play the Riddler in the next Batman?

The Bourne series helmed by Doug Liman, starring Matt Damon was not only a critical rout worldwide, but also a cash printing machine – grossing close to a billion dollars worldwide and providing a base for Matt Damon to be kicking ass over the period of half a decade. And now, it’s time for the series to reboot with a new man at the helm…Jeremy Renner. The man’s been getting work like a madman, appearing in The Avengers, the new Mission Impossible, and now he’s getting the reins of the Bourne series handed over to him. Basically, in the course of the year, Jeremy Renner has gone from an actor doing alright to the biggest action star in the world.

He deserves it. The Bourne Legacy’s trailer has been thrown on the internet with a resoundingly positive response. He plays a character named Aaron Cross – who is supposedly more formidable than Jason Bourne himself. Scary stuff.

You know what’s scarier? I bet you this’ll be the highest grossing entry in the entire series – all thanks to Jeremy Renner.

The answer is the league’s first Taiwanese player, a player who until recently had been relegated to the back-burner despite obvious displays of potential — Jeremy Lin. Can he save Knicks basketball? I sure hope so. For what purports to be the ‘greatest city in the world’, when was the last time they actually had a run or a chance of winning a title. Back in the early 90’s? This is a city whose residents thrive on playing basketball — yet you can’t produce a single dominating team for the past few decades? Pathetic. Orange and blue in NYC doesn’t seem to the colors of honor and pride — more like a badge that you’re on a squad who’ll be undercut, poorly organized, but still vehemently cheered for because of the pride in the big apple.

So it has been fun watching someone that’d typically get overlooked in a pro setting — Taiwanese, Harvard-grad — be the kind of leader that most of the overpaid, overexposed players with million-dollar contracts couldn’t be.

He put up his first career double-double last night against the Wizards, and his first dunk — terribly uncontested.

Watch what’s happening in New York…it’s one thing their sports teams typically aren’t. Exciting.

Proposition 8 has been overturned by a federals appeal panel in San Francisco as unconstitutional. People will no longer be able to point to the law or try to make laws the point to ones dictate what defines a loving and consensual relationship. There will be no more buzzwords like the sanctity of marriage tossed around, there’ll be no more conservatives wasting time on amendments that will define the world in a narrow scope, none of that. There will be celebrating out in the streets, and finally California will be able to catch up to all the other progressive states – like Iowa.

So if you’ve been waiting to marry your girlfriend because not everyone can get married – they can now. Provided they’re located in very specific states around the US. Now, it’s time for all states to follow suit, until there’s nowhere two members of the same gender can’t file their taxes together. In a few decades, people will wonder why we never let gay people get married in the first place. And that’s progress.

Leave the date and time of your gay wedding in the comments below, and we’ll try to crash it.

Their bad luck specifically came to a head when the almost Britishly named Chauncey Billups tore his Achilles tendon, grinding the season to a halt that had a lot of NBA analysts turning their heads and going, ‘GOOD LORD,’ the season where the Clippers transformed themselves into an ongoing joke and from the place people played when they wanted to stay in LA but weren’t good enough for the Lakers. Most impressively, watching the Clippers play this year has made for a sensation that the NBA has been lacking for quite some time – fun. Fun. At a certain point, a lot of basketball games start looking similar and it no longer becomes satiating to watch great play for the sake of great play. Sometimes you want an underdog story – and what’s more of a good story than a team that’s been operating in the red for decades coming to angrily bully the bullies?

Nothing. The loss of Billups will put a dent in that, though. The 35 year-old veteran was a mentor to Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and would always put up big shots. He’s committed to playing again this season, and we’re rooting for him.

Unsurprisingly the one that America’s talking about features an icon of our film industry – Clint Eastwood, talking about second acts in America. Chrysler has been making a comeback that the government has been hoping for, displacing Toyota as the world’s largest automaker. Outside there’s a climate of toxicity, in our politics, beliefs, and the fact that we’re at the worst point in our nation’s history – in danger of being usurped by larger superpowers with more natural resources or workforces more motivated than our own. Sometimes we need an authoritarian figure to tell us what the right way to proceed, in this case, none other than Clint Eastwood’s iron jaw would suffice.

Watch the ad. It’s at the top. And wouldn’t you know it, our friends over at Fox News and different right-wing websites are claiming that it was a cloying ad with the intent to re-elect Obama.

I’d like to watch them TRY to tell Clint Eastwood that to his face. Then see what happens. It’s time to man up like Dirty Harry told you to.

Blog Hipster Runoff is run by a man named Carles who writes horribly misspelled screeds about modern pop culture, under the ironic position that he is the last authentic content farmer on the internet. Nevermind that everyone is bored with hipster bashing — everyone. Doesn’t matter how many levels of irony steeped it is, they’re like a demon, if you break eye contact with them or stop talking about them, hipsters will go away. We’ve been mocking them for what, nine years now? Anyway, he’s taking issue with the indie music scene being inauthentic – never mind that most music scenes are inauthentic — and took to trying to bash Justin Vernon. Who took to calling out the guy on Twitter and talking about what a terrible person he is.

Really, some indie rock is going to be mellow and slow. If you have a problem with that, listen to the fast and hard indie rock. If you hate something because it’s popular, you’re engaging in the timeless measurement of trying to out-man it, but because you’re a hipster, all you can do is engage in internet backtalk.

Unfortunately, the new one doesn’t look to be as vivacious as Sam Raimi’s foray into the Marvel world, though technology has progressed and the story should be better because we’ve been given years to adjust to Spiderman as a concept. One thing it does have is Emma Stone and Martin Sheen, though – so who knows? Maybe the new Spiderman will be the most amazing entry in superhero movies – surpassing all expectations and finally turning Rhys Ifans into an unpronounceable household name. Maybe Andrew Garfield will be the most popular superhero character to ever grace the screen, and win an Oscar for his portrayal.

Maybe all the comic book fans worldwide will drool over themselves, or what I’m hoping to happen will be this — people will finally realize how pointless and boring remakes are. That movies aren’t pieces of product to be served, and when you treat them as such, it degrades their value the more the marketplace is flooded with shoddy, emotionless copies.

BUT HEY. SPIDERMAN. You know that you’ll be in line if you have nothing better to do that weekend.

I don’t know if they’re just content with the popular knowledge that commercials are worth a ton of money now that they’re in the Super Bowl, and stopped working as productively because they’ve internalized that lesson – but there seem to be a few continuing trends that have popped up repetitively.

1. Dogs will make your Super Bowl ad more lovable.

There are hundreds of millions of people watching the broadcast around the world, all of differing political affiliations, ethnicities, and creeds. They might not be able to agree on a lot, but once thing they all think? Puppies! So instead of writing a Super Bowl ad that’s contingent on structure or story, make puppies rain from the sky. Or fetch beer.

2. The majority of the companies who advertise make manly  chips and cars.

Why? Are there other companies with deep pockets clamoring to get a better audience for their products? Probably. But apparently the big impulse buys people are hoping for after a football game are cars filled with bags upon bags of Doritos.

3. When you replace Kim Kardashian as your spokesperson, magic happens.

Such is the case for Sketchers, who made the right choice in not pumping any more money into the swollen fame-vacuum of Kim Kardashian and replaced  her with a French bulldog in tennis shoes.

Who can sell shoes just as well as she can. Watch and enjoy one of the best Super Bowl commercials.

Anybody who saw the Black-Eyed Peas display their desperately cloying attrition on live entertainment and dancing last year would have welcomed any respite. I mean, if you have focused on a cloud in a wide shot, and watched it drift over the stadium, it would’ve made more sense than dressing up like robots from the future and performing the Black-Eyed Peas hits…most of which sound like they were crafted in the most inoffensive vacuum possible. Anything would be a welcome distraction. So, instead of the Black-Eyed Peas, the fine people over at the NFL decided to hire Madonna on to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show. Madonna. In the most manly game of the year, because she’s got an album to plug, everybody loved what she did thirty years ago, in the 80’s. The truth is that Madonna hasn’t put out a decent album since the late 90’s — and her pop sensibilities are waning as we speak, so she has to collaborate with big names to try to sell — like Hard Candy. With Justin Timberlake and Timbaland.

Case in point, Give Me All Your Luvin’ — the single Madonna released yesterday.

Listen to it and try to tell yourself it’s not shrill.

They’ve shut down the Pirate Bay. The resource people have been using for years in order to get free albums, music, movies, eBooks, comics, all without the hassle of paying for it. Some might refer to this as pirating, but in reality, it’s just being ‘too lazy for a library card’. You could get everything for free for a nominal fee that supports your city’s infrastructure — but the internet is about turning entitlement up to 11. You want things your way? Great. You want to sit down, have everything your way without paying the keepers of secrets and information? Prepare to be shut down. Prepare to have our government pirates beat the hell out of your internet pirates

The Pirate Bay has contributed to open information exchange and by their own words, assisted in leaks and revolutions around the world, but which revolutions? The ‘Bobby Anderson’ doesn’t want to pay for U2’s entire discography, because they’re already rich revolution?

So they can shut down the Pirate Bay. Realistically, it’s like stopping real pirates. When you think you’ve shut down a few important ones, the other ones come to your wharf and commandeer your dinghys.

Such is the situation the media faces when talking about Leslie Carter, who was found dead Tuesday in New York. The only reason the death is drawing so much publicity is she had the misfortune of being from a famous family that has battled substance abuse demons — preliminary reports are that those demons did her in, specifically through the intake of prescription drugs. The saddest thing about this story, besides the fact that the press really can’t ascribe much of an identity to her, is that Carter is leaving behind a one-year-old girl. Sad, sad, sad. Aaron left the run of his off-broadway production of ‘The Fantasticks’ to be with his family.

You gotta wonder what type of things are going on behind the scenes to make drug abuse so prevalent in one family – what type of emotional pain they had to go through growing up being the scions of showbiz parents and the siblings of teen stars, but wherever Leslie is, we hope she’s peaceful.

And that the media can be respectful. I’m sure she was more than someone’s sister.

But realistically, nobody cares this year. The weather has been so bizarre for the last five months, I wouldn’t be surprised if good ol’ Punxsutawney Phil comes out of his hole, freaks out, and tries to hang himself from a nearby tree. I was in New York for a better part of the year – and there was no snow until December. December. You know what that means? Somewhere up in the sky, there’s a weather god slowly dwindling away and losing his powers as we dump all sorts of pollutants on the earth. You don’t want to kill the friendly man in the sky, do you? Of course not. So we all need to shape up to do our part so the man in the sky doesn’t wither away and fall to Earth like life is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story.

Tomorrow’s the big day. More importantly, when’s the day we’re going to domesticate groundhogs? When’s that day? We’re supposed to sit idly by while we watch one predict the weather? Isn’t that much harder than ANYTHING a dog does?

We should all have pet groundhogs. To the point where people can walk their groundhogs at the groundhog park, and we can all communally think about what the sky will look like in the coming days.

There are few women that are more legendary and overlooked than Joan Rivers – from paving the way for female comics, to being the first woman who hosts a primetime talk-show, she’s a dynamo.

And she’s still got a spark inside her that wants to break the rules and live her life, by getting high on camera in her new reality show on WE. Joan Rivers has told stories about getting high back in the day with Betty White, America’s sweetheart, but rarely are there shows which show actual drug use as it goes down. Usually, it’s so a group of people can intercede and make sure that the person stops shooting heroin into their neck or taking computer duster to the mouth – but this is Joan Rivers being unbridled and goofy. It’s pretty much the first time anyone has ever been drawn to watching a reality show about Joan Rivers, based on how goofy she is.

What does Joan Rivers do when she’s high?

–drinks water out of a shoe

–demands to go to a food truck

–talks about how many people are looking at the sky all over the world

–pulls her daughter into a jacuzzi

She’s earned all of that, and more.

The X-Factor, Simon Cowell’s babe, debuted this past year on American television. Where he once bragged about the ratings it would garner, it barely managed to eek past The Voice, NBC’s big hit, certain weeks, and wound up crowning a winner that will probably go right into the bargain bins, as she’s as compelling as a freshly painted fence. Cowell’s after the ratings, though, so as a result, he’s axed most of the show’s staff in an effort to look like he can control the fact that people are sick of singing shows and don’t want to tune in. Steve Jones has been canned, Nicole ‘Pussycat Doll’ Scherzinger has left, and now – Paula Abdul has been fired. Sweet pill-guzzling grace, if Paula Abdul isn’t safe, then nobody is. Abdul was reportedly fired for being too sweet.

There you have it – the key to music competitions is being mean and not actually finding stars. The X-Factor will return next summer to Fox.

Get your popcorn ready. Nobody knows who’s going to take the reins.

But besides those roles she’s sparkled in, she seems like she’d be a hoot to be around. Case in point? She visited Ellen Degeneres in the morning and told a story about her having an emotional breakdown because she was about to see a sloth in person — she’s been obsessed with sloths and how cute they are for as long as she can remember. Cut to her birthday party, where her boyfriend, Dax Shepard, decided to get her a sloth as a present for her birthday party. She goes absolutely insane. Absolutely insane. It’s an amazing thing to watch somebody being overcome with conflicting emotions – and much funnier when it’s someone that you haven’t ever seen react powerfully to something, like Kristen Bell.

Could a sloth make you break down in tears? Could a sloth then wipe those tears away, super slowly?

The answer, judging from Bell’s reaction, is hells to the effing yes. Watch her break down in tears on Ellen’s morning show – the video is probably one of the most priceless things she’s done.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a smash, one of myriad hits that John Hughes produced in the 80’s to highlight the world-weary teenagers of the world and cater to their tastes. The movie’s direct-to-camera dialogue, soundtrack, and ridiculous scenarios won America’s hearts and turned Matthew Broderick into the soft-talking star we see today. The first thing the internet did once it learned some sort of follow-up was going to be made with Broderick in the lead? Freak the hell out. Assumptions were made – was somebody making a Ferris Buehler sequel, where he’s an adult? Are we going to have a continuation of one of the most beloved movies of the 80’s?

No, turns out Matthew Broderick has broken the precious promise he made to himself to comb his hair until the end of days and give us something harkening back to the era where he was one of the world’s biggest rising stars. And here, featured in its entirety, is the commercial that everyone was losing our minds over  – Matthew Broderick and his Honda.

He’s still got charisma.

The man is one of the greatest NBA players currently in a league that sports the most athletic humans to ever have existed, through science and intense training which would make other NBA players at different eras balk. That’s gotta be worth something. Also worth something? The fact that he can jump over your head whenever he wants to — as evidenced by his recent play against the Chicago Bulls.

Bron-Bron caught a pass running up the baseline and literally dunked over a man. He jumped plum over a man, John Lucas, who is more than six feet tall.

You can’t watch this and tell me that if he wanted to, LeBron couldn’t make it rain basketballs from the heavens, if only he wished hard enough. The Heat routed Chicago 97-93 on Sunday, disappointing Derrick Rose, who missed two free-throws and gave a post-game interview where, despite knocking down 12 out of 12 at the line before, at 22.7 seconds left, couldn’t deliver.

Worry not, D. Rose. You’ll get them next time.

That’s how the pitch meeting went, and surprisingly, The Grey shocked everybody this weekend at the box office.

Maybe it’s because all the good movies get released in a single stretch in December — or at least all the movies that studios want critics to pay attention to, but the box office this weekend has been pretty dismal — save for one spot. One GREY spot, if you will. That spot is Liam Neeson fighting wolves…a movie that’s managed to pull in 20 million dollars over the weekend,  shocking box-office analysts, and more importantly, the wolves that were planning Liam Neeson’s demise. I bet it really, really annoys them. Nothing can kill Liam, can it? He’s been trundling along for such a long time, enjoying his height, and the odd fact that he’s been starring in a string of action movies lately — mostly financially successful — and the wolves that he no doubt wrestles in real life have been unable to overpower him thus far.

Bravo, Mr. Neeson.

Coming in at a distant second was Underworld : Awakening with 12 million, and Katherine Heigl bringing up the rear — One For The Money managed to bring in a paltry 11.75 million dollars.

But of all the cities, it seems to be obvious that Oakland has had the most problems with the protestor’s relationships with police, as evidenced by them being tear-gassed before, one being beaten into a coma, and now they’re arresting the protestors. Most likely because the protestors broke into City Hall and burnt an American flag. If you’re going to make a point to try to make things better…it’s great that you feel really emotionally about your cause, but don’t burn the flag of the country that allows you to have free and open protests; that makes it easier for the police to come in and use your head as target practice for their cudgels.

Police and protestors clashed all day, with reports of bottles and rocks being thrown at the police, then the police arrested 300 protestors, and then my cousin Sally was all, ‘Oh, no, they’re going to hit them with the beanbags,’ and I had to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about.

The mayor encouraged participants of Occupy Oakland to stop using their city as a playground, probably the first time anyone in history has compared Oakland to a place where children get joy.

It means that if you’re a singer-songwriter in a mecca for entertainment like New York, if you have an image team behind you pushing you towards fame, it’s much easier to achieve. It may also mean that people will only accept a limited amount of phoniness from their artists before a backlash comes, even though we let entities like Beyonce, Britney, and countless pop stars thrive with far less scrutiny than they deserve. So, why is it Del Rey is a subject of our ire? Why is it when you play the album out loud, it sounds like an artist desperately trying to make more than a dozen different James Bond themes?

Who knows? All I know is that Entertainment Weekly, publication that would give an adorable picture of a puppy a premium rating, scored the album a C+. It’s been trending poorly on Metacritic, making it the fastest hipsters have ever got over something. Literally, she popped on our radars in November, and now almost everybody is tired of talking about her.

What an amazing thing. In case you’ve forgotten what debutante debuts look like when they fail, here’s a video.

Rihanna is interesting as a performance project, because she’s managed to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world whilst having other people write her songs for her entirely. Literally. She hasn’t written one. People are hired to go to a songwriting camp, and for the low price of a million dollars a day, they pump out Rihanna’s greatest hits. So it’s no surprise that yesterday, Rihanna got ‘Thug Life’ tattooed across her knuckles – what’s more thug than a pop star with too much money and time?

Nothing. That’s the thuggiest it gets. Really, it’s silly for Rihanna to get anything tattooed on her knuckles except the lyrics to her greatest hit – ‘Ella, Ella’. That’d work. She could wear brass knuckle-type rings that said ‘Thug Life’, so when she actually did thuggish things and hit people, it’d leave an indentation. But no. She had to actually get it done on her skin like a real thug.

The tattoo was done with invisible white ink – and you can judge it for yourself.

Time to wreck all of your stomachs in the morning. Taco Bell has just unveiled their new breakfast menu.

Launching in 14 states, the belle of the Taco Bell ball, it’s still ignoring the question – how much self-hatred do you have to have to start your day off right with a belly full of anything from Taco Bell? Do you rage at your life and want to die in a fiery car wreck once the gas bowls you over when you’re trying to switch gears? Or perhaps leave a good impression by constantly farting when shaking the hands of other people around the office or standing around the water cooler? Whose terrible idea was this to inflict on not only themselves, but the rest of the world? Somebody had to taste Taco Bell’s

Breakfast foods are the fast food industry’s biggest market share, and prior to this, Taco Bell didn’t have a breakfast menu. For good reason. It’s one thing to invent a breakfast menu to try to help your company, another to just let it slide so the death toll doesn’t rise. Now they do, and they’re testing the launch to see if people are drawn to their breakfast menu – which includes items like Johnsonville’s sausage and egg wraps, burritos stuffed with egg and cheese, and orange juice.

‘Hey, Bobby, let’s go to Taco Bell and get some orange juice!’ ‘Okay!’

Some stores are remaining open 24 hours to accommodate the launch, as we all know, bad decisions happy at any hour.

50 Cent, why do you need publicity so bad? Don’t you have years worth of not rapping to bank off of? Not releasing anything interesting?

50 Cent is straight from the streets. So much, he knows the ancient thug code that if your team is ever in the Super Bowl, and they lose, you have to show your penis on Twitter. It’s one of the 10 crack commandments – don’t smoke your own stash, don’t snitch, and you best be making sure that your penis winds up on Twitter. The New York Giants will be going head-to-head with the New England Patriots, but rappers like 50 have been making headlines for the ridiculous bets they’ve been making on sporting events. To me, it’s not news that rappers are blowing their money on ridiculous things – but it is that they’re so intense and masculine about a football team that they’re dying to show their piece to the world.

Nobody wants the Giants to win. They won during the last meeting, messing up the Pats’ perfect season. And it’s New York. Purports to be the greatest city in the world, but the only team they have that has been able to win consistently is the Yankees.

Wheel of Fortune has been running for a long, long time, making it one of the most lucrative gameshows to ever be put on the air, and stars of the hosts, Pat Sajak and Vanna White. But in a recent interview, he revealed one of his biggest running secrets – that during early tapings of the show, he’d host while drunk. Good on him. I think you’d be able to do most things during a taping of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ completely inebriated and under the influence. You’d have to be nearly comatose to not be able to talk briefly to contestants and tell them that their letters weren’t on the board. Apparently, White and Sajak would head over to a happy-hour bar in Burbank, get loaded on margaritas, then come back and make the show. The earlier tapes of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ that are floating around feature an inebriated Sajak.

Here’s hoping this spurs on more celebrity confessions, like, Alex Trebek. With the way his mustache looks, I’m sure he busied his time doing scandalous things like taking upskirt photos of whomever catches his fancy.