Friday Talkback + "What Goes Around Comes Around"

Extra! Extra! Read all about:

• Seven Up! + 7 Plus Seven (Ian Pugh)
• Ginger and Fred (Travis Mackenzie Hoover)
• South Pacific (Walter Chaw)
• The Devil's Rain (Alex Jackson)
• The Last Kiss + Trust the Man (WC)
• Breach (TMH)

Finally some Fellini, huh?

In the meantime, has anyone seen the despicable video for Justin Timberlake's "What Goes Around ...Comes Around"? Another sweeping epic from "Wake Me Up When September Ends" faux-teur Samuel Bayer complete with opening titles (the credit "written by Nick Cassavetes" might as well read "not written by John Cassavetes," given the pathetic attempts at Papa John's verisimilitude), this 9-minute X-ray of Timberlake's petty little head single-handedly justifies every knee-jerk bit of vitriol I've wanted to spew at him. Here's the premise: claiming to have already met her no-talent assclown quota for the evening (she motions to her "date," Shawn Hatosy), a blonde, noirishly-attired Scarlett Johansson--on whom one-time fan Glenn Kenny recently closed "the iron door" for this betrayal of her gender--spurns Timberlake's advances; proving he is the true inheritor of Vanilla Ice's mantle, Timberlake basically tries the drop-the-zero-and-get-with-the-hero approach, which, though the chronology is difficult to parse, apparently works, as just a few shots later he's making out with her. Scarlett subsequently does what any sensible woman would do after coming in direct contact with Timberlake and submerges herself in the nearest body of water, an act of Karen Silkwood self-preservation that JT immediately annuls by jumping in the pool after her.

Then the blind chimpanzee holding the camera has fun with the incongruity of au courant Timberlake--whose co-opting of black culture is so comprehensive that he's annexed LL Cool J's lip-licking tic--in a Carnival of Venice mise-en-scène and the AVID stutters out that Scarlett and Timberlake have become an item, that Hatosy is actually a close acquaintance of the two, and that Scarlett is a chubby-chaser with eyes for Hatosy. Timberlake is livid when he discovers his best friend and his best girl snogging in a stairwell and tries to beat up both until Scarlett, through the magic of lazy editing, manages to get in her car and drive away. The jealous Mouseketeer pursues her in a high-speed chase that ends with Scarlett spinning out of control into a flaming wreck Bayer oh-so-cleverly match-cuts with some fire-eaters back at the club. As Timberlake surveys the scene and cops a feel of Scarlett's corpse, the song's titular refrain adopts a malicious chuckle--and starts to conspicuously sound, in its passive-aggressive way, like an O.J.-ish warning to JT's on-again/off-again paramour Cameron Diaz. (Again we see that no black icon is sacred to Timberlake.) Indeed, this video confirms he was far too juvenile to be dating a woman ten years his senior in the first place; if nothing else, the hermetic seal of fame only seems to have made him less accountable since he commemorated his Britney Spears break-up with a stalker's lament ("Cry Me a River"), the video for which has him trashing an ex-girlfriend's pad in bullet-time then spying on her as she takes a shower. I've really had enough of this dick in a box.