Hottie Alert: Chris Salvatore

Chris Salvatore has eyes like the devil, and looks nice with his shirt off. He was featured in a leading role in 2009's "Eating Out: All You Can Eat", which was not a porno. He studied voice at Berklee College of Music, a respected conservatory in Boston... so he clearly has some singing chops. For some reason, he has been making these twee little dance tracks, the auto-tuning of which trends toward the irritating. Hopefully we'll see more of him on the big screen, though he's done nothing since 2009 per IMDB.

I wanted to kill myself.

The closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics were last night. I really had high expectations after the amazing spectacle of the opening ceremonies. Chris and I had drinks, snacks, and a comfy spot on the sofa and were ready to watch. I should have remembered to put some Pepto Bismol on the coffee table, or maybe a big rock so I could kill myself. The entire production was painful. Bad singers, worse music, strange bits about London, and an inexplicable (and horrible) interview with Michael Phelps from London that had nothing to do with the event. Here are some highlights from one of the strangest things I've seen on television in a long time.





Here was a very freaky traffic-cone looking thing made entirely of metal scaffolding and random people. It did look pretty cool initially, looking just a bit like orgiastic scenes from 1920s Busby Berkeley movies. This was cool for a few minutes, but they ran it into the ground after that.











Here are some singers (and I do use that term somewhat loosely), performing a song by Kelly Chen called "Beijing, Beijing, I Love Beijing". There was so much that was wrong with this performance, I hardly know where to start. First, the big traffic-cone thingy was ugly and distracting... but there's nothing anyone could do about that. One thing that could have helped was to make sure that the singers they hired could actually carry a tune. It was clear that the musically gifted were in the minority. The song was pedantic and about as irritating as sitting in a saltwater bath after a sunburn.









Here are even more people who can't sing. Jackie Chan is among them, and should never have been given the opportunity to sing to anyone except Jesus. The woman on the left, resplendent in fuchsia tulle, was perhaps the worst of the worst. Her shrill, screen-door-like voice left the impression of lingering irritation, kind of like scabies. It wasn't until later that I learned that this is Wei Wei, dubbed "the most famous pop singer in China". With billions of people, I'm sure they could have found someone better. Anyway, she sang for a while and I ended up going for another glass of bourbon.











In case you think I'm ragging on the Chinese out of some baseline form of bias, here is Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, accepting the Olympic flag from Beijing mayor Guo Jinlong and IOC Commissioner Jacques Rogge. Color me stuffy, but I think that if you're going to be on TV in front of billions of people, you should maybe (a) get a suit that fits you and (b) button the damned jacket so you don't look like a shlub. He looks dissheveled and dumpy... not a good look when the two guys you're on stage with look like advertisements for Savile Row.







Here we have Leona Lewis, an Oprah-endorsed winner of a British television talent show who has made a name for herself singing R&B. She is wearing a gi-normous dress-like thing (a drag-portunity if ever there was one), and standing atop what appears to be a masive meat thermometer. There was no reason why she might be doing this, other than perhaps to escape from the strange, formaldehyde-like smell of Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. There's something about a gray ponytail that only serves to remind me of Dennis Hopper trying to hawk investment services from Ameriprise. The song they performed was not decipherable.








Here we have a double-decker bus from London, ostensibly. There was a performance of umbrella-wielding interpretive dance, the images of which were mercifully omitted from the official olympic picture site. It was painful to watch. The only thing that could have made this spectacle worth watching would have been for Princes Harry and William to step off the bus and start serving drinks to the athletes... but no dice. Instead, the top of the bus started to explode apart (reminiscent of the terrible terrorist bombings in recent years), creating a hard-to-discern model of the London skyline. Out of this popped Lewis and Page (above), as well as David Beckham (below).





In a slightly less-nauseating move, Becks kicked a soccer ball to one of the Chinese volunteers. The volunteer had definite gay-face, and may do terrible things to that ball once he gets it home.

I would have posted a picture of Michael Phelps being interviewed by a nauseatingly gushy male talk show host in London, but none exist. I suppose Phelps' PR people had the whole thing squashed from the internet within moments. No one explained why Phelps was flown to London just to answer some inane questions about what it's like to win so many medals, or what it's like to be an international superstar(!). Phelps has great abs, but is not a riveting speaker. Maybe his mom should send him to the Toastmasters or something. Anyway, this interview was conducted en plein air in front of bajillions of Londoners whose cheers were obviously choreographed. Phelps talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and (tapping watch to see if it's still working) talked and talked and talked. And then we went to commercial, followed by more freakishly bad closing ceremonies.

And here we have the pinnacle of tasteless, money-grubbing, artistic whoremongering. One of the most respected stars in all of opera, Maestro Placido Domingo (he's a conductor now, ya know), singing with someone oxymoronically named Song Zuying. She's known primarily for producing a CD called "The Diva Goes to the Movies: A Centennial Celebration of Chinese Film Song". I still say that the word "diva" is used FAR too loosely, and this is a case in point. This woman sang a duet with Domingo himself, again atop a scaffold. (It looked like he was about to clean the windows of a building in a Naperville office park, but whatever.) She was wearing what looked like a costume from a cancelled "Little Mermaid" sequel project, demonstrating the age-old strategy of covering up a terrible voice with a flashy outfit. She hit a couple of notes that, even from the kitchen (getting another drink), I loudly identified as being offensively out of tune. Terrible singing is terrible singing, no matter what language it's in. I didn't realize that Domingo needed the money so badly.


All in all, this must have been a bone that the Chinese threw to the folks in Vancouver and London. The Olympics ended not with a whimper, but with a blood-curdling screeching, scraping, squeaking noise. Eew. Just... eew.