Daily Archives: April 28, 2005

Spork flicks

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feverpitch.jpgRecently, my wife pulled me to the new Farrelly Brothers’ (Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary) movie, Fever Pitch, which billed itself as a chick flick disguised as a sports movie. Or, as ESPN’s Bill Simmons explains in this absolutely hilarious article on the movie, a “Spork Flick.”
Mr. Simmons recently attended Fever Pitch with his father because the film was billed as a funny spork flick, but he realized after enduring the movie that it was really just a straightforward chick flick:

Here’s the plot for “Fever Pitch” in one sentence: Guy loves the Red Sox, meets Drew Barrymore, tries to love them both, nearly loses her because of the Sox, decides to give up his season tickets next to the Red Sox dugout because he loves her, she stops him just in time, and they get back together and end up making out on the field after the first Red Sox championship in 86 years. The end.

Mr. Simmons goes on compare the movie with other chick flicks (don’t miss his analysis of My Best Friend’s Wedding), and then reveals that the key to success of a chick flick is hitting on the top ten generic themes of chick flicks, a couple of which are the following:

4. If you’re dating someone who is passionate about something, he will absolutely give that up for you because all men change once they fall in love. Especially if you have a nice apartment.
5. You can have only three friends: A smart friend who’s pretty in a quirky way, a calculating beauty who’s morally corrupt and an overweight girl who doesn’t say much. You can only hang out with these people all at once. If there’s anyone in your life who doesn’t fit one of those three categories, get rid of them.

Trust me on this one — read the entire article. Hat tip to Craig Newmark for the link.

KPMG’s tax shelter purge

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Kpmg1.gifThese days, it seems as if a new interesting revelation from one of the big U.S. accounting firms occurs every few hours or so.
This CBS Marketwatch snippet reports this morning that KPMG LLP fired Richard Smith, a senior executive who had headed its tax-services division as it promoted questionable tax shelters over the past decade, and also canned two partners — David Brockway of Washington, D.C. and Michael Burke of Los Angeles — who had sat on the firm’s 15-member board. As these previous posts over the past year reflect, KPMG is enduring some serious heat in various governmental investigations of its involvement in the tax shelter sales effort.
Until the tax shelter probes, Mr. Smith had been a rising star at KPMG. He became a partner at KPMG in 1995 and was named the chief of the firm’s tax-services unit in 2002. However, as the tax shelter probes came to light in February, 2004, KPMG had said Mr. Smith was being reassigned to take on the dreaded “different practice responsibilities.”
Such purges usually indicate that indictments in such cases are on their way. Stay tuned.