Fug The Cover Archives

July 2, 2009

Fug The Cover: Sandra Bullock

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In Style

I find Sandra Bullock a bit fabulous. Once, I saw her at a hockey game with her husband, and they randomly were sitting next to Kid Rock and his Pammy-lite date having a gay old time in totally arena-appropriate casual clothes, and she and Jesse helped out a kid who took a puck to the head by getting him some water or something -- I don't know, the memory is fuzzy, as if maybe it was ME that got walloped on the head -- and the whole thing was endearing. She seems like she'd be incredibly fun to go get a beer and some BBQ with, while we talk about how jumpsuits are stupid and maybe get shouty over some sports on the TV and end up having to call cabs home because, oops, that was one too many pitchers of Shiner Bock.

So I wish this cover had done her more justice:

[Photo: Splash News]

At least UK In Style agrees that I'd like to grab a meal with her, but is this really the best picture of Sandra's face? There is something so aggressive and overly intense about it. Like she was on a break during the photo shoot, and the photographer came up to her and said, "Look, I'm having a really bad day -- I just ate a cat for breakfast and I'm pretty sure my underwear is on backwards and my cousin just came back from the dead after a tragic decapitation accident," and Sandy paused for a sec, hoisted her leg up on a chair, leaned forward and said, "You're shitting me, right?" And of course then the photographer would scream with joy and snap a photo, because clearly that mixture of barely suppressed revulsion, confusion, disbelief, and one squished boob is SO 2009.

July 1, 2009

Fug or Fab the Cover: Emma Watson

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Elle

We have gotten many a concerned email about this cover from readers, and I must admit that I feel you. But not really because of Emma, so much -- her face looks great, I think, and the rocker girl hair is a fun change from Hermione Granger (not that I don't love you, Hermione). We don't get to see her look hot very often and this is a nice youthful hot that doesn't feel all awkward. It's more that I am totally weirded out by the office stool they're making her straddle. This photo feels like....well, picture it: you're sitting at your desk at Elle, just minding your own business. You know your wacky officemate Emma Watson is off in the beauty closet, doing something. But she totally surprises you when she straddles her office chair and pushes herself across the room to your desk to pay you a visit and show off her hilarious/fierce Chanel get-up and massive eyeliner. You pick up the Polaroid on your desk and take a few jokey pictures of her. (If this were a movie, a montage would break out, obviously.) And this is like your jokey montage pictures somehow landed on the cover of Elle. Which would be fine if she wasn't on an office chair. It's just...weird to me. Also, that bodice looks like a chalice, but who am I to argue?

poll by twiigs.com

June 19, 2009

Fug the Cover: Kate Hudson

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random-ass magazines

So, we got this cover shot several times from a variety of our lovely Australian readers, and I meant to get to it before now, but...I don't know what happened. You know how it goes. You're minding your own business, just standing in front of the fridge for hours and eating peanut butter from a spoon, and then before you know it, the week is out and you didn't get nearly as much done as you intended and your pants don't fit anymore. Here's the thing: Kate Hudson is as cute as a basket of babies. THIS GIRL is cute too, but she's much pointier and more neckless than K. Hud and, call me crazy, but do any of us take a photo in the hopes that we'll turn out with less neck? Generally, the answer is no. On the other hand, I clearly need to read about what guys think of my outfits. Right now, my guess is that they're thinking, "damn. That girl has peanut butter all down the front of her shirt."

June 16, 2009

Fug the Cover: Sienna Miller

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polls,
Vogue

Sienna Miller. On the cover of Vogue. AGAIN. Has there EVER been an actress more fawned over by Vogue with less cause? Yes, I know she's in a Broadway play opening this summer, and she's in GI Joe, but COME ON. I feel like she could be guest-starring in a ShamWow commercial and A Dubs would toss her on a cover with a headline like, "SIENNA MILLER: On tough spills, two-for-one specials, and OxyClean." Also, we KNOW it's not hard for you to fall in love, Sienna. We were all here for the Balthazar Getty debacle. You might as well say something like, "It's not hard for me to land on the cover of Vogue." It's, like, common knowledge. That being said -- and in the name of fairness -- I must admit that she looks much better here than she did on this Vogue cover. But good God, is that damning with faint praise. And there's something hilarious about the fact that they've given her a long, faux ponytail and then slapped her with the headline, "Are You Ready to Cut Your Hair?" According to something I recently read about The September Issue (the documentary about the making of the particular Vogue issue to which I just linked, which I have not seen myself, although in the interest of full disclosure, I know people who worked on it, although I have no juicy inside information about it -- are those enough disclaimers for now? Jeez), Lady Bobbingsworth was irked that Sienna wouldn't do anything with her hair for them for THAT cover, so this particular headline actually might just be passive-aggressiveness. Which actually sort of makes me like the whole thing a lot better all of a sudden.

poll by twiigs.com

June 12, 2009

Fug-or-Fab The Cover: UK Cosmo

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Cosmo

As with a lot of magazine covers out there, it's not so much that Cameron Diaz looks BAD here:

[Photo: Splash News]

She just doesn't look like herself. In fact, this whole cover feels cracked-out, like it's a designer-impostor publication called Cosmicpolitan that's trying to trick people at the newsstand into thinking it's the real thing. Even the cover lines -- which, incidentally, match her lipstick -- read like a joke issue of Cosmo and totally dwarf her presence. Seriously, there are a bajillion things I notice on this page before I even notice the ID that it's Cameron Diaz: "great sex," "dress sexy," "butt naked," "Super Diet," and "sex toy." My eye actually even went to "stalker" first.

So as far as the casual onlooker is concerned, this might as well be some random blonde chick who -- thanks to sexy clothes and a 10-day wheat purge -- just had the best bronco ride of her life atop a butt-naked man that she stalked for a year, who knows how to use props. And maybe that's all true of Cammy here (I don't know her life), but if you're going to all the trouble of putting her on and in your magazine, don't you want to make it feel more unique? As opposed to using a photo that looks as if it got pulled from a 2003 archive that went on clearance sale, and which is now used exclusively in those 150 Great Looks For Blondes magazines you only see at your hairdresser's?

poll by twiigs.com

June 10, 2009

Fug the Cover: Scarlett Johansson

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Elle

I don't speak French, per se; though I can recognize what some words are and how to say them, I took Spanish as my foreign language in high school. So while I can't be positive what some of the cover lines are on this issue of French Elle, I get a lot more enjoyment out of filling in the blanks myself with what I think is applicable:

For example, right by Scarlett's right arm, I decided it says, "New home, new baby? WHY SWEET JESUS WHY?!? I HAVEN'T SLEPT IN TWO MONTHS." Further down, I've decided the "affaire courjault" one is suggesting that she have a torrid and slightly gross orgy with three dudes who dress as court jesters for a living, which will tire her out a LOT, but at least she'll have a good story to tell people over coffee the next day while she tries to wake up enough to go to work.

You get the idea. I don't care or want to know what they ACTUALLY say (so, no e-mails necessary): It's impossible for me to look at any of this without thinking that Scarlett looks like she posed for this cover after four sleepless nights in a row, which involved a lot of wine and some Rock Band and possibly that jester orgy, and then at least three viewings of Beaches, during which cried herself silly. I appreciate au naturel as much as the next girl, but there is a gray area between "Photoshopped into a cartoon" and "It's 3 a.m. and I am still wearing last Thursday's bra." So the problem for Elle becomes, I'm not sure I'd want to buy this magazine based on the cover image of a really exhausted, hungry-looking girl and a story about how to lose a size in three weeks. Because whatever it is she's doing, I think I want to do the opposite.

May 28, 2009

Fug The Cover: Lady Gaga

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We have gotten a ton of e-mails about this cover in the last few days, and since it's a slow week thanks to the recent holiday -- I guess all our celebrities are too hung over to put much effort into their fuggery? -- I decided to go ahead and post it even though it might give us all nightmares.

Considering this woman routinely wears leotards, or bra-and-panty sets, or uses pieces of actual tape to cover her boobs where most of the sane world would use this revolutionary thing called a "shirt," then being clad entirely in bubbles is really not even that shocking. It's only really a step or two removed from the norm (and she's practically already done it on stage anyway).

But I wonder if, in actuality, she would like this cover. Yes, she's naked, and yes, she looks curvy, and yes, she fancies herself a performance artist. But did the whole thing HAVE to come together and create the twisted visage of a cross between Dita Von Teese and Dee Snyder?

I think I'll just back away slowly and thank the magazine gods that Rolling Stone stopped publishing on that really huge paper.

May 27, 2009

Fug The Cover: Beyonce

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Marie Claire

I saw this on the newsstand while in line at the pharmacy yesterday, and felt so uncomfortable I had to avert my eyes. Not because of the outfit -- although I suppose the dress does subtract her actual figure from this equation, making her look rather straight up-and-down, and the bracelet seems like it's made from the digits of one of her robot hands:

No, instead, I just wanted Beyonce to stop STARING AT ME like that. Presumably, this choice of photo has nothing to do with pimping "317 Sexy Looks," because that particular expression on Beyonce's face is not so much sexy as stalker-manic, as if she's both crazy and deeply high on Red Bull and Mountain Dew -- which makes it deliciously amusing that the cover line about caffeine junkies is plastered just southeast of her possessed countenance. Her face looks like she's ten seconds away from stalking up to a dude in a bar and blabbering, "Hey baby, I think you're really cute, and I think we should go back to your place and I'll make you my mother's special omelet recipe tomorrow morning and then we can go to the park and pet some dogs but I'm allergic to dogs so we can't go out and buy a dog together which is FINE because we SHOULDN'T do that anyway until you've met my mother BUT SHE'S GOING TO LOVE YOU, AND THIS BAR DOESN'T SELL ESPRESSO AND OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO NEED ONE SO IF YOU DON'T HAVE AN ESPRESSO MACHINE THEN WE'LL HAVE TO REGISTER FOR ONE WHEN WE GET MARRIED, AND I DON'T BELIEVE IN GETTING HITCHED DURING FOOTBALL SEASON BUT APRIL WOULD BE A GREAT TIME SO LET'S CHECK OUR CALENDARS TONIGHT AND PICK A DATE AND WE'RE ALSO THROWING OUT ALL YOUR SHIRTS BECAUSE THEY'RE UGLY AND NO MORE NINTENDO AND COULD YOU PLEASE JUST ORDER ME A GODDAMN DIET COKE OR A CAPPUCCINO OR SOMETHING BECAUSE I WANT TO BE REEEEEEEEEEEEEALLY AWAKE TONIGHT WHEN WE CONSUMMATE OUR ENGAGEMENT!!!!!"

The above explanation ALSO could pertain to the stories about how pillow talk could land a girl in jail. All of which is unfortunate when you consider her recent movie was called Obsessed. Beyonce might want to burn all these covers before anyone discovers she and Sasha Fierce have another alter-ego sister, Bertha Nutjob.

May 27, 2009

Fug or Fab the Cover: Cameron Diaz

Here's the thing about this cover: it's fine. Cammy D looks approachable and crisp. And maybe a little older than she actually is. But it's not HIDEOUS. She has all her body parts attached, she's not wearing a beach ball as a hat, she doesn't look as though she's had someone else's eyes photoshopped onto her face. And yet. One would hope, I imagine, that one would look AMAZING on the cover of Vogue, especially considering the fact that she looks fantastic in the photoshoot on the inside (and was actually, I thought, quite charming in the interview). The choices magazines make about their cover shots are often kind of beyond me -- obviously -- and I know there are a lot of factors to consider, but wouldn't you want the BEST picture to be the one on the cover? I know smiley photos sell better, as well as approachable ones, but I suspect that one of the reasons Cameron Diaz is successful in general is that she is almost ALWAYS smiling and approachable-seeming (excluding that time she was dating Justin Timberlake and they were both unbearable crabapples) so I'm pretty sure we're not in a situation where this was like the ONLY Smiley Approachable picture. I don't know. This just isn't filling me with the unbearable desire to plonk down $4 for the magazine. And while I've got you here: I'm thrilled Vogue is including "the fashion steal of the month" -- it's smart, considering Our Terrible Hideous Crumbling Economy RUN RUN TO THE HILLS -- but someone needs to give A Dubs the tip that a $300 bikini is NOT A GREAT DEAL. IT'S A BIKINI. TARGET HAS THEM FOR $30. SWEET FANCY SNICKERS, LADY, A $300 BIKINI IS STILL INSANE WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING I LOVE YOU DON'T HURT ME.

poll by twiigs.com

May 13, 2009

Fug the Cover: Kat Dennings and Olivia Thirlby

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Nylon

[Photo: Nylon Magazine]

I'M SO SURE. The 80s flashbacks on this week's Gossip Girl felt less contrived than this does. I can't imagine either Kat Dennings or Olivia Thirlby got this in the mail and clasped her hands together with glee and gasped, "fabulous! Now more people are going to want to punch me in the face! Just what I wanted!" And yet that is exactly what this has achieved. Girls, allow me to impart a valuable lesson: when someone asks you if you're interested in recreating scenes from The Wedding Singer on camera, you are allowed to say no. A little restraint in this area will only help your career in the long run.

Fug The Cover

Fug The Cover: Sandra Bullock

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Fug or Fab the Cover: Emma Watson

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Fug the Cover: Kate Hudson

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Fug the Cover: Sienna Miller

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Fug-or-Fab The Cover: UK Cosmo

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Fug the Cover: Scarlett Johansson

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Fug The Cover: Lady Gaga

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Fug The Cover: Beyonce

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Fug or Fab the Cover: Cameron Diaz

Fug the Cover: Kat Dennings and Olivia Thirlby

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