Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil, and John Perich to overthink Super Bowl XLIV, especially its downtrodden, misogynistic commercials and its geriatric halftime show.

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Matt: I like Showgirls. And I don’t mean I like it in the “so bad it’s good” way I like The Postman. I actually think Showgirls is a good movie. There, I said it.

Notice I didn’t say it was a GREAT movie. Certainly, it’s nobody’s favorite Paul Verhoeven flick (unless you grew up with a major crush on Jesse Spano). But you know what? I like it better than The Hollow Man.

Showgirls tells the story of Nomi Malone, a tough blond who hitchhikes into Vegas with nothing but a single suitcase (which immediately gets stolen). But she’s got two things nobody can take away: a great body, and a gift for dancing. Nomi starts out at the seediest strip club in town. But soon she breaks into the chorus of Goddess, a lavish stage show at a big casino. There, Nomi faces off with the queen bee, Cristal Connors, who either wants to befriend her, destroy her, or turn her into a sex toy.

Nomi may be a topless dancer, but she repeatedly insists she’s not a whore and she’ll never be like Cristal. But (surprise surprise) the higher she climbs, the more she becomes everything that once made her seethe. It’s a story as old as All About Eve, but with the sex jacked up to eleven. This is the most-expensive NC-17 rated film ever produced, and you will see more breasts than Frank Perdue.

It sounds fun, right? It IS fun, damnit. But for reasons I don’t fully understand, conventional wisdom firmly believes that this film is one of the worst of all time. It has an abysmal 14% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it won the un-coveted “Worst Movie of the Decade” award at the 2000 Razzie Awards. In fact, Showgirls has won more Razzies than any movie ever made. It’s a cinematic punching bag. And I don’t think it deserves it.

Ryan Sheely and Matthew Wrather overthink the latest Gossip Girl and Glee, including micro- and macro-storytelling and whether Glee hates women.

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There will be no spoiler warnings and there will be many naughty words. If either of those things bothers you, don’t click!

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The commercials for Axe Body Spray have always appealed to men’s worst instincts, and recently they’ve taken an even more disturbing turn.  See, Axe used to put out commercials like this:

This one is an absurdly ramped-up version of the standard body-spray commercial in which a guy puts on Axe (or Tag, or whatever) in a public place, causing a bunch of hot women to go mad with lust and physically throw themselves at him.  The message is as clear as it is familiar:  our product will compel hot women to have vigorous monkey sex with you. It’s a little gross, but it’s nothing new.  I think they’ve found versions of this message in the ruins of Herculaneum.  Even so, there has always been something vaguely sinister about the body spray ads, what with their focus on physical violence and pharmaceutical mind-control.  And then the ads changed…

The basic formula is the same.  A dude wears Axe, so he gets an unrealistic level of attention from a hot woman.  But there’s a crucial difference:  the woman’s response isn’t really sexual anymore.  Instead, she just acts like an idiot and embarrasses herself.  The earlier ads always implied that the Axe-wearer and the girl(s) that tackled him would engage in some protracted boinking just as soon as the commercial ended.  The new ads do nothing of the kind.  It’s quite clear from the expression on the woman’s face that she is mortified, and wants nothing more to do with the guy she just fondled.  With these commercials, Axe has definitively stopped marketing to men who desire beautiful women and want to sleep with them, and started marketing to men who resent beautiful women and want to degrade them.