We are cranky. We are cranky because, as a service to you, the reader, we plowed through very much of GQ's current Hollywood Issue. You know: that's the issue that's given over to stars, movies, and visions of the glamourous life, as propogated by Hollywood. As opposed to the other eleven issues of GQ that come out every year, which are given over to breakthroughs in stem-cell research and the fight against AIDS in Africa.

We plowed through very much of this issue -- though not, we will confess upfront, all of it, for reasons to be explained below. The plowing-through of said issue seemed like a reasonable, even quasi-enjoyable, task at the outset. Hey, it's about Hollywood. We like Hollywood. There you go.

And besides, we're doing you a service, Fametracker reader. We are plowing through this issue so you won't have to.

But then we thought (at about page 284) that it's very unlikely you were planning to plow through this issue at all, regardless of our intervention. We thought, there must be hundreds of thousands of people out there who read GQ regularly, but we can't imagine who any of them are. We're guessing they are not you. We're guessing they are, in fact, paunchy middle-aged men taking a connector flight from Chicago to Phoenix on a Tuesday afternoon.

So it was at about page 284 when we started to get cranky. It was about page 284, and the sentence in the Jennifer Garner profile that read, "Like Sydney, like Elektra, Jennifer lives in two worlds." Or perhaps it was this sentence: "Strange thing about adrenaline: When it kicks in, all bets are off. And truthfully, nobody knows that better than Garner." Or perhaps it was simply the cumulative weight off all those kind of sentences, of which there are perhaps millions in this issue.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We're only trying to explain the crankiness. This issue of GQ isn't worse than most issues of GQ, and most issues of GQ aren't worse than most issues of most magazines. Which is a very, very, very sad statement.

Normally, we avoid this sadness by avoiding most magazines. But sometimes we convince ourselves to plow through a magazine, and then we feel this sadness in full, paralyzing force, and then it ferments into crankiness -- crankiness at you, at ourselves, and at the people who make GQ magazine. Okay, mostly with them.

All right, let's get this over with.

Cover: Hey, it's Jennifer Garner on a motorcycle! Boy, I'd like to fuck her! Too bad I'm a paunchy middle-aged man on a Tuesday afternoon connector flight from Chicago to Phoenix.

Page 56: Okay, we usually don't comment on editor's letters. But we can pass over the fact that Art Cooper, GQ's editor-in-chief, takes the opportunity this month to crow about the recent GQ "Man of the Year" awards in New York. "[A]n NBC reporter gushed that it was 'the Oscars East,'" writes Cooper, "and who are we to disagree with such a smart observation?" Well, let us tell you who we are: we are the people who are going to argue with such a smart observation.

If you want to go to the trouble of producing and hosting a fake, made-up event to hand out fake, made-up awards, so be it. Money and time are wasted in this way, in much larger amounts, every day. But surely you, Editor-in-Chief Art Cooper, must know that the celebrities who show up to your fake event only do so because (a) you've promised to give them a shameless tongue-bath; (b) they get to be on the cover of your magazine as one of the arbitrarily chosen Men of the Year, but that this also requires them to show up to your made-up award ceremony, which they do dutifully; and (c) when they do show up to your made-up awards ceremony, you will publish more photos of them in another issue, standing around at said ceremony, just as you did in this issue.

And there's probably free booze too.

Again, Mr. Cooper, that's your prerogative, if that's the way that you want to live. But does anyone think Hugh Grant or Samuel L. Jackson or Jason Kidd gives a fart in a windstorm about this "honour"? Does Art Cooper really believe that? Does this unnamed reporter? Why is NBC sending a reporter to this "event," anyway?

Hand out your fake awards. Have a fake awards show if you must. But really, the crowing is too much. "Oscars East"? Are you that delusional, Mr. Cooper, or are you being ironic? No doubt you're all in a tizzy about having your picture taken with such fake-award- ceremony-attending luminaries as Drea de Matteo and Monica Lewinsky. But let's not lose perspective. Because when you force us to defend the integrity and legitimacy of the Oscars, you know you're diving in the shallow end of sanity. Or we are. In either case, let's move on.

"Oscars East." Sheesh.

Page 99: FYI: The "Man of the Moment" is Jonas Akerlund, director of Madonna's "Ray of Light" video. Wow, what a sucky moment.

Page 118: So there you have it: It's pronounced Michael "Shay-Bon." "Shea, as in Shea Stadium, and Bon, as in Bon Jovi." We've always wondered about that.

Page 128: "Hi, I'm Vanessa Ferlito. I'm twenty-five years old, and I'm at exactly that stage in my career at which I'll pose for a single page photo in the front of a men's magazine wearing a see-through baby tee and skimpy panties. Enjoy my nipples."

Page 156: Undershirts for men! They're so hot right now!

Page 158: Surfing shorts for men! They're so hot right now!

Page 160: Leather jackets! Hot!

Page 168: Finally, some real journalism: a pictorial on stars and what car they drive. Jamie Foxx? Hummer 2! Gina Gershon? Eldorado! Robert Evans? Jaguar convertible!

Two quick notes:

1) In his Q&A, Evans says, "If I go to a party and someone compliments my suit, I give it away. I don't want to make the suit look good, I want the suit to make me look good. I think of the car as background. I'm foreground."

Cute quote. He said exactly the same thing in Esquire a month or so ago, except instead of a suit, it was a tie. Is he just spouting the same story again and again, or do these magazines pull copy from some Starfucker wire service?

2) One of the people featured showing off his car is Neal Moritz, producer of The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Two excerpts from his answers: "I'm addicted to Range Rovers" and "I'm a pretty big fan of money." Amazing. You've never heard of this man before, but just twelve words later, you already think he's an asshole.

Page 180: Here's an interesting tidbit: actor Galen Gering on the soap Passions not only wears flesh-toned leotards during sex scenes to suppress his erections, but he calls them his "weiner pants."

Hee hee. "Interesting tidbit."

Page 213: Hey, it's Peter Bart, editor of Variety, writing on the spate of gross-out Hollywood movies! Here's a question, Peter Bart. Since you are the editor of Variety, one would think that you would know that this piece has been written, oh, about 1,742 times already. And we'll guess that 1,660 of them were better than this one. Did you write this in your sleep? On a plane? In a boat? On a goat? We could not, would not read it all. To you, humble reader, here's the synopsis, taken from the article's subheadline: "You never go broke by appealing to the lowest common denominator." What? Really? Does the President know about this? Get on the red phone!

Page 230: "Screw You, GQ: I'm Off to Hollywood." This is a cute story. It's about an assistant who used to work at GQ, then he sold a screenplay. It's readable and enjoyable. On the downside, it's written in that flip-literate style that's so popular these days, as evidenced by the thousands of novels/memoirs about young singles working lower-rung jobs in the New York media, biding their time until they can quit and write a flip-literate novel/memoir about their time working in the New York media. Oh, and navigating that crazy Manhattan singles scene! It's crazy! Who did I just wake up with?!

Are these people really so interesting to the rest of us? Apparently they are.

Page 240: "Ponyboy Stays Gold," an oral history of the making of The Outsiders, which we imagine will be of great interest to many of you. Speaking personally, I have never seen The Outsiders and it plays no part in my formation. But if you did, and it did, you will enjoy reading this. Ideally, you have a bunch of friends who feel the same way, so you can buy one issue of GQ and share it among all of you. Or steal one from your barber. Most of the highlights come courtesy of C. Thomas Howell, who speaks with a my-career's-over- so-I-don't- give-a-fuck candour, spilling about Leif Garrett's coke problems, Rob Lowe "jamming Leif's girlfriend," and the fact that he lost his virginity to "some Tulsa skank from the wrong side of the tracks."

Page 260: Boy, it's hard to get laid in Tinseltown. We understand that GQ's audience is made up of men, and that these men are interested in issues concerning sex. But are they interested in reading articles about other men trying to get laid? Perhaps they are. We concede that, in this matter, Art "Look at me! I'm standing next to the chick that blew the President!" Cooper knows much, much better than we do.

Page 272: The Jennifer Garner profile. You might think: Hey, you said it took you until page 284 to get fed up with this article! That's twelve whole pages! Yes, but those pages are made up mostly of Dolce & Gabbana ads and really big pictures of Jennifer Garner.

The article, on the other hand, is, like all the profiles in this issue (George Hamilton, Michael Caine, David Arquette, DMX) written in a sort of gibberish. Yes, it's English, but it's a subset of the language you could call "Profilese." It involves writing sentences that sound good or, failing that, remind you of sentences you've read elsewhere that sounded good. It involves stringing the sentences together with a pleasing rhythm that's just distracting enough to fill the three hours or so that it takes to fly from Chicago to Phoenix, but that will leave you with no impression whatsoever. Because these sentences are meaningless, by many different definitions.

One of the tactics of Profilese on display in the Garner profile is the one by which you cram your articles with references, both high and low, to prove to the reader that you are not just a profile-churning-out hack, but rather you are well-versed in kitsch and the classics alike. You are Übermensch!

To this end, the profile makes reference to all of the following, all on the very first page, and all in service of describing just what kind of show Alias is: Bettie Page, Kafka, La Femme Nikita, Freud, Nabokov, Charlie's Angels, Michael Crichton, and Dostoyevsky. Phew! Thank goodness all those things existed, or we wouldn't have Alias today!

Another tenet of Profilese is that you must write overly literate-sounding sentences; again, to convince the reader that (a) you are really a much better writer than all this; and (b) this subject actually merits their interest, let alone their attention.

So we have sentences such as: "So those are the hands that pick the pockets that hold the keys that lock the doors that guard the secrets that threaten our sleepy world." Which sounds pretty, but makes about as much sense as the teacher's speeches to the class in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

Or this: "She is the daughter of a chemical engineer who left Texas for points east when Dow and Carbide, lured by the twin sirens of cheap land and lax pollution regulation, flooded the area with money." She's not just Jennifer Garner, she's the heroine in a Richard Ford short story!

Or this: "Like Sydney, like Elektra, Jennifer lives in two worlds." This is the I've Figured Her Out sentence. It is a requisite in every celebrity profile. Note the use of the first name, which drives home just how precisely the writer has nailed the very essence of Garner -- nay, of Jennifer.

Anyway, the whole article is made up of these meaningful-sounding but meaningless sentences. We could go on about this, but we'll just say: celebrity profiles suck. They all suck. And trying to dress them up in flouncy language and fake-resonant observations makes them suck more.

We know people have to write them and make a living and we don't begrudge those people, but understand this: the profiles suck. Sorry, but they do. You might consider yourself a chef, but you are working at McDonald's and you are making Big Macs.

Let's put this another way: Art Cooper is currently locked in a death-feud with the editor of Stuff magazine. Cooper is constantly deriding magazines like Stuff and Maxim as sub-literate. We don't read or like Maxim (and we're not sure that you can actually "read" Stuff), but we have to say that if this kind of Profilese writing is what Cooper is going to the barricades for, he might want to redirect his energies.

Page 318: Okay, one more thing. From the profile of DMX, the "next Tom Cruise": "Spend time with DMX and soon enough the rapper mystique falls away. What you are left with is someone who seems utterly genuine -- someone as vulnerable as he is occasionally vicious, who can say and do only what he feels in the moment -- and you are struck by how rare that is." Subsitute DMX with, say, "Brendan Fraser" or "Hugh Grant" or "Whoever the Fuck" and this could be any celebrity profile written in the last ten years. Mwaa, mwaa, mwaa Charlie Brown, mwaa mwaa Linus, mwaa mwaa mwaa DMX, mwaa mwaa Kate Hudson, mwaa mwaa mwaa.

Page 322: Here we have something interesting. GQ placed an anonymous ad in an L.A. paper that said "We're looking to discover the next big star," and called for "female actors, 18 to 25." What resulted is a photo essay of the women who showed up, aspiring actresses all.

There is something interesting about flipping through and looking at all the generically pretty faces flushed with low-level desperation. There is a good idea in here somewhere. But it also spurs a few questions, most of them creepy.

For example: when exactly did GQ reveal to these women that this wasn't a casting call at all, but rather a photo essay about desperate, aspiring actresses? Before the photo shoot? Right after? Or are these women learning this only now, with the release of the magazine?

Furthermore, since many of the women either (a) have their shirts off, or (b) have their shirts unbuttoned or are otherwise actively exposing their cleavages, you also have to wonder when exactly they were made aware of the true nature of the photo shoot. Was it pre- or post-chest-baring? "Yes, the photos are actually for GQ, but would you mind still taking your shirt off? Just, you know, for that added splash of desperation?"

There are even more articles in this issue -- many, many more articles -- but we'll leave you, and the issue, with this:

Do you remember that scene in the movie Fame? The one in which Coco goes to an audition, which turns out to be in the apartment of a sleazy guy who pretends to be French, and who coaxes her to take her top off while he videotapes it? And all the while he's saying "Très jolie, Coco. Très jolie"?

That scene had a certain resonance about the lengths to which people will go to chase their "dream." And so does this photo essay in GQ. Except that, in this scenario, GQ is the sleazy pretend-French guy with the video camera.

Très jolie, GQ. Très jolie.