I Am Chuck Bass

Discussed: What A Weekend, My My, What a Weekend; Our Houses Aren’t On Fire, But Our Brilliance Is…No Wait…Now Our Houses Are On Fire; A Much Needed Monday; The Possible Coming Promiseland; Cars That Go Swoosh; Jacking House

What a great day today is, as it marks our weekly return to sanity through a Mexican food-fueled Gossip Girl Watch-Off!

I’ll make one quick note, then throw out a bunch of questions: This episode is named The Magnificent Archibalds, a pun on The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1942 “Orson Welles” film about a decaying family. The title is part of an ongoing series of Hollywood-cinema-masterpiece inspired names (see: awesome yet-to-be-written post about these movies).

Fun little fact on The Magnificent Ambersons: Welles’ first cut of the film was 135min, and pretty bleak. He went to Brazil to shoot another movie, while he was away RKO recut the movie, removed 40min of the film, reshot the ending (a happier one) and eventually destroyed the 40min of negative to “free up vault space”. I believe the reasoning was that during a World War, bleak two hour & fifteen minute films didn’t exactly bring the box office to its knees.

Here’s the Trailer, then the Open Questions:

• How did Nate’s dad get back into the country? It’s not THAT easy.
• Is Che Nate moving to the Dominican Republic to fish and run rum?
• Are Aaron & Serena going to sleep together, or are they jumping right into the threesomes?
• Is Jenny going to move in with the van der Woodsen’s? And if so, who proposes it? Awesome Lily, or Mr. Don’t-Back-Down
• Is Agnes gone forever?
• Could our prayers be answered and this really is a Dan-free episode?

Ready, Set, Comment.
XOXO

Discussed: David Axelrod vs. David Axelrod; Dan Kind Of Liked It, Nate Liked It More; Sorbonne Is To Guy Debord, as USC Is To … ; Over/Underused NBA Announcer Quotes

Name-calling, war-starting, ignorant, shortsighted, bullish, jammy, idiotic…If the USA picks Barack Obama as it’s next President (as is looking increasingly likely), he’ll have a lot of work in front of him – a lot of bridges to mend in order to make up for the mess that US Government (specifically their foreign policy) has made of the country’s image over the last eight years.

We here at IAmChuckBass are doing our bit to help Barry out, but in the meantime, as we bide our time and count the days until the election, there isn’t much more we can do than draw some much needed comparisons between the current economic and political situations, and the situations currently taking place in the life of everyone’s favorite man-banged super hero, Nate Archibald…

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Discussed:The Peak Oil Apocolypse; Gary Allen’s ‘None Dare Call It Conspiracy’; Spagehetti Westerns; The Chinese Are Good, But He Was Great; The New York Times’ Sky-Rocketing Page Views

Wednesday at Sundown.  How Sergio Leone of them.  That’s when the Senate is to vote on the Paulson Financial Rescue Plan, or the “Bailout” as it has become so fondly referred to as.  Monday’s vote didn’t go over as smoothly as hoped by many (or at least the few who still enjoy having houses, jobs, and food) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a Lougains-ian Dive straight down, closing out at the biggest one day loss in two decades (-777 points).  Its stressful.  Refresh-newyorktimes.com-every–3-minutes stressful.

Now imagine that you are dealing with the exact same situation but you are in your senior year of high school, you have a crazy dependent mother, one bitch of an ex, a sinister best friend, you just got out of an adulterous affair that ended in incest, you’re secretly obsessed with a hot one wedding night stand you had two years ago, your fathers hiding out in the D.R. to evade embezzlement charges and a nasty coke habit (nothing like Latin America to take care of that), and the down-ass-chick you actually like, just simply can’t keep up because you’re that far into Crazy Town; and you’d be Nate Archibald:  Our man-banged, fearless rock through this insane period of change and disruption as an economy and as an audience.

It is exactly times like this that we can’t have Nate-less episodes.  In a time when the everyman needs a hero, someone he can lean on, trust, and be guided by, we cannot lose the only cool-headed one among us.

We must assume some serious lessons were lost about how to deal with the collapse of the Western world, in Nate’s absence, so let’s get some thoughts on what we’ve learned thus far from our boy-faced guru.

Discussed: The Apocalypse, My Complicated Relationship with Maurice R. Greenberg, Duchess Debt, Stealing Banks, Handling Business, Articulating Pubescent Feelings, Mind Control

It was hard to be an awake and functioning human being this week, and not realize that our economic situation is beginning to resemble that of the Archibald family’s. We’re all familiar with Nate’s father’s Season One drug problem come embezzlement indictment, resulting in his fleeing of the country, and how that resulted in the Season Two seizing of the family’s assets, Chuck Bass lending money behind his back, Nate getting the Duchess to pay him back, and ending in Nate’s current no-end-in-sight love woes.

Bank of America buys Merrill Lynch on Sunday, Monday Morning Lehman Brothers files bankruptcy, Barclays buys some of it (”buys” is a bit of an overstatement, when they practically stole it at a cool $1.3bn), then AIG (an insurer of Lehman Brothers) announces they’re fucked, they borrow $20bn from their subsidiaries, but that’s not enough. Will the Fed swoop in? We’re beginning to feel a bit like the Archibalds here. And here’s were it gets good…Gossip Girl good:

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Two guys (B & C) blindsided by their love of Gossip Girl, bring you a slightly more masculine take on the Best Show On Television.