Cher performed on live television for the first time in over 10 years on Tuesday night's live finale of The Voice. She moaned over a backing track on her comeback single...blah blah blah...the real story was her wig. Sorry, wigs.

"It's a woman's world," goes Cher's new song, but throwing two wigs on your head and having them fight it out is a straight-up drag queen move. And oh, what a fight it is. What's happening on top of Cher's head in the clip above is real visceral, like a nature documentary, except instead of animals consuming each other, it's fake hair doing that. Once I saw a car-flattened pigeon just off Washington Square Park that was being eaten by other pigeons like the pancake it had become. Cher's hair situation is almost as cannibalistic.

Or maybe that's just one wig that wants to be all things to all funky moms and Cher's allowing it because it's 2013 and that wig was born this way.

Cher looks like she's trying to be a Muppet by putting another Muppet on top of her head. I would say that's not how being a Muppet works, but then I'd be wrong. Cher's a Muppet. Her new song is an EDM banger. Dance magic dance.

Last night, the U.K.'s Channel 4 aired a special called Scientologists at War, which profiled the Church of Scientology's former Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, Marty Rathbun. Once a spiritual mentor to the likes of Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Greta Van Susteren, Rathbun left the church in 2004 to practice Scientology independently. He runs a blog called Moving On Up a Little Higher, and has been vocal regarding his displeasure over many of the Church's practices. He says this has resulted in harassment.

Last year, footage of such harassment by a group calling themselves the Squirrel Busters went viral. Scientologists at War showed some more of the Squirrel Busters in action, including discussions of Rathbun's sex-toy preferences and a surreal scene in which one cackles with glee when Rathbun turns his sprinklers on her group. The reaction is Westboro Baptist Church-levels of demented-giddy provocation.

The Church of Scientology's various responses to Rathbun's and the documentary's accusations, as well as the Busters' actions, made up the wacky postscript of Scientologists at War. Here it is in full:

The Church of Scientology states that Marty Rathbun has never been part of its ecclesiastical management and although he has been publicly attacking the Church for four years, his claims have had no discernable effect whatsoever. It says there is no evidence of a global independent movement and the Israeli mission in Haifa only ever numbered a few people and that some have since rejoined the Church. The Church of Scientology states there is nothing inappropriate about using sustained legal pressure to obtain legal redress and that the idea harassment was used to achieve tax-exempt status is “obvious nonsense.” It also denies sending the Squirrel Busters. While acknowledging that some were Scientologists, Squirrel Busters Productions is a wholly separate organization. The Church of Scientology denies putting Marty under surveillance but admits conducting a legal investigation into him “in furtherance of potential ligation.”

Rathbun has also posted footage on YouTube of him turning an actual hose on Squirrel Busters to the tune of "Car Wash." He uses the Christina Aguilera/Missy Elliott version from Shark Tale and not Rose Royce's original, so I don't know if he can be fully trusted. He has also posted the entire Scientologists at War documentary on his blog.

There’s nothing like superhero flicks to make a moviegoer feel powerless. They are as inevitable as the changing of the seasons, and the changing of the seasons into summer triggers a bunch of them. Welcome to summer, here is your Superman.

Wrapped within that inevitability is the inevitability of a multi-climax crescendo—rolling destruction that prioritizes implicit ideals of saving the world over the human lives suffocated under the ensuing rubble. This is how almost all of them end. This is how Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel ends, with Superman flinging his intergalactic enemies through buildings, pulverizing Metropolis for the sake of saving the world so that he can save it some more in the film’s “fast-tracked” sequel, which will open the doors for a Justice League movie, fingers crossed.

Granted, this iteration of Superman comes with more internal conflict than most. In this retelling of his origin story, we see a young Superman wrestle with his specialness. He just wants to help people with his superhuman strength, but his adopted father (Kevin Costner) warns him against coming out of the closet/phone booth: “You have to keep this side of yourself a secret.” Greatness is like being gay is like being Jesus (Superman reveals himself to the world and opens himself up for persecution at age 33) is like being an alien. The sci-fi side of Superman has never been more explicit, which is cool. I like aliens, man. I really do like aliens.

For the first two thirds of Man of Steel, Snyder and his screenwriter David S. Goyer do a deft job of justifying the retelling of Superman’s origin, teasing out the vulnerability of a virtually unbeatable man, resting so much on his caped shoulders (the continuation of his own people versus citizens of Earth), and hinting at Nolan-style gravity without getting too preachy. This is a story about every person’s inherent ability to be a “force for good,” one that wears hope not on its sleeve but blazing on its chest (that “S,” see, is not an S but a Kryptonian symbol of hope, because they said so). Like last year’s origin-story retelling The Amazing Spider-Man, Man of Steel strikes a good balance, neither becoming overly ponderous or so amused with itself that it’s impossible to take seriously. Washed out and full of Giger-esque imagery, it’s an uncommonly gorgeous blockbuster featuring an uncommonly gorgeous man as its hero — Henry Cavill’s performance is mostly blank, but that symmetrical, broad face with its pronounced features are all the assertiveness that he needs.

All of the explaining about Superman led to more questions in my head: If he strains while holding up a burning barge, there must be limits to his strength and if so, what are they? Why does everyone on his home planet speak English? How did he learn to control the powers that we see disorient him as a young boy? How is Superman’s father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) still able to interact with the world if he’s dead? Why is he interested in Lois Lane (Amy Adams), with whom he has no chemistry? I’d rather let these questions play out in my head than have them shoved down my throat, but Man of Steel’s final hour bludgeoned whatever investment I had about this movie out of me. That its protagonist is so extraordinary makes it even more disappointing that in the end, Man of Steel is just another superhero movie. Watch it so you know what’s going on in the next one, which probably won’t be so great, either.

What amazes me is how much evidence we have that living an A-list life sucks and how many people still aspire to it. It's really disconcerting to see so many people studying fame and not absorbing the fundamental message of all of this nonsense.

If you want to wrap your head around the absurdity of celebrity in 2013, the New York Times Magazine's recent profile of Stalker Sarah is a good place to start. Sarah, 17, spends 40 hours a week hunting down celebrities so she can take pictures with them for little to no monetary profit on her end. From the profile:

The fans had come to meet the band, but for some, a photo with someone who had met them (multiple times) before was almost as exciting. When One Direction performed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show a month earlier, Sarah was mobbed by dozens of the band’s fans; some tore at her clothes. At LAX, a girl approached her nervously. “Hi, Sarah?” she said. “Could I get a picture with you?” Then another.

On the one hand, our culture takes fame deathly serious: fame consumes consumers; it shapes the dreams of children (a.k.a. our future, according to at least one celebrity); it eats holes through the lives of those who experience it and are desperate to maintain it. On the other hand, fame's elasticity—the loose rules for what constitutes it, the ever-evolving requirements for achieving it, the democratization the Internet has visited on it—suggests that at the same time we don't take it seriously at all. Anything goes! Anyone can be a star with the right angle and marketing and also if there's no angle or marketing at all. Celebrity today can come from standing next famous people. #YOLO!

The whole thing is chaos. To watch fame play out can feel euphoric or like a bad trip, or both simultaneously. The unending saga of Amanda Bynes is reminiscent of Britney Spears in 2008: a dark, dark time for that mentally ill girl made darker by the fact that almost everyone sort of just laughed at her while she crumbled and surrendered to the public, in public. Bynes' crash is just as disturbing, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't giggle at her outlandish wig and conversational peculiarities ("You're ugly!" is her go-to comeback). What an amazing specimen of extreme human behavior. Does it matter that, unlike other beleaguered starlets we've ogled, she's writing her own narrative (literally – most of the action is happening on Twitter)? That this could all be Joaquin Phoenix-styled performance art, calculated to draw attention? Or is that just the comforting veneer of control for a child star who never really had a shot at owning her own life, anyway?

Through the corroded lives we ogle, we have enough evidence to suggest that aspiring to fame for the sake of fame is idiotic. That is why there is a perverse pleasure in watching the self-entitled little shits get their comeuppance in Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring. The film portrays a group of teenagers from Calabasas, California, who rubbed elbows with the stars at Hollywood clubs, and were so obsessed with celebrity that they robbed the houses of stars like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson and Megan Fox/Brian Austin Green in 2008 and 2009. The story, which lingers on unlocked doors in the visually metaphoric glass homes of stars, and on those stars' failure to engage their home security systems, would be impossible to believe if it weren't true.

The movie plays like living parody. Its driving force, Rebecca (a thinly veiled version of Rachel Lee played by Katie Chang) is cartoonishly obsessed with stars to the point of toying with the idea of attending the Fashion Institute of Design because "it's where all the Hills girls went." When she is finally apprehended by the police, she compulsively asks the officer who's questioning her, "Did you speak to any of the victims?" He spoke with all of them. "Really? What did Lindsay say?"

That last sentence is quoted verbatim from Nancy Jo Sales' 2010 Vanity Fair article, "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," on which Coppola's movie is based. While that article reads like a true-crime short story—low on the mystery, heavy on the intrigue and read-between-the-lines armchair sociology—Coppola's film unfolds like a horror movie with bludgeoning repetition as the Ring's numerous robberies are recreated.

The editorializing is apparent, too, in Emma Watson's brilliant performance as Nicki (based on Alexis Neiers, whose E! reality show Pretty Wild is occasionally recreated in Bling Ring scenes but never referenced directly). Watson plays Nicki with mercurial affect, able to turn on earnestness at a moment's notice and, with an impenetrable straight face, say ridiculous things: "I am a firm believer in karma...I wanna lead a charity organization. I wanna lead a country one day for all I know!" Sales is also fictionalized for the big screen as a Vanity Fair writer named "Kate," who is far more openly skeptical of Nicki than Sales seemed to be of Neiers when she appeared on Pretty Wild. Sales poured on the counterfeit sympathy, at one point even hugging Neiers. Her piece ended up leading to one of the most hilarious meltdowns in the history of reality TV, a culmination of the entire affair's absurdity and the pettiness of other people's problems.

The Bling Ring attempts to solve our culture's fame problem by casting those who seek it as criminals. When the Nick Prugo character, Marc (Israel Broussard), tells the Sales character how his clique's misdeeds against the rich and famous scored them their own fame, it plays like a punch line but feels like a punch in the gut. Chaos.

A much gentler managing of fame, this time from the inside out, comes via another movie released this week, This Is the End. It is co-directed, co-written and co-starring Seth Rogen, who plays himself. Everyone in the movie does: James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Jay Baruchel, Mindy Kaling, Emma Watson (funnily enough), and an unsurprisingly movie-stealing Danny McBride, all play versions of themselves alongside high-profile cameos from Rihanna (who gets to slap Michael Cera) and Michael Cera (who gets to do blow and have his ass eaten).

Armageddon strikes and the movie turns into a big, bro-y sleepover that is occasionally grumpy and frequently hilarious. As if to reclaim the indignities of Ricky Gervais awards show monologues, we watch celebrities take no-risk shots at each other's and their own images. There are jokes about the shittiness of flops like The Green Hornet and Your Highness, as well as James Franco's ambiguous sexuality. Jonah Hill begins a prayer, "It's me, Jonah Hill. From Moneyball." James Franco talks about fucking Lindsay Lohan: "She was fucked up, she was high. She kept calling me Jake Gyllenhaal."

These celebrities speak about themselves in the very same language that we do when we talk about them, and so it’s not surprising when, discussing the possibility of eternal damnation, James Franco says earnestly, "We're good people. We bring joy to people's lives." There is nothing mercurial in his affect at all. He is as deep and sincere as he always wants you to think he is, even when he isn't in this movie.

(Spoiler: Most of his peers end up in heaven.)

While the jokes are good and McBride's improvisational prowess is always incredible to behold, the movie is fundamentally self-serving. The desired reaction seems to be, “Wow, they're multi-talented and they don't take themselves too seriously? These must be the good guys.” Channing Tatum's 11^th hour cameo is a self-degradation of the reigning Sexiest Man Alive unlike any we've ever seen before. This guy is a hero. Relatively, at least.

While This Is The End wants to soften the perception of celebrity, The Bling Ring is mesmerizing hate-watching fare, plain and simple. Coppola's method is disciplinarian. Despite using the actual Bling Ring's words verbatim, she opted to change the convicts' names in her movie "so that those young people don't become more well known" (as if Google won't lead you to them). She and Sales profit from these kids and their disdain for them. In multiple profiles and the introduction to Sales' Bling Ring book, Coppola has distanced herself from relating to the fame-centric, Hollywood world of her subjects, despite her own charmed, Hollywood upbringing. Maybe she can't relate because she never had to want fame – it was always there waiting for her.

I hear you.

Oh boy, I’ll bet you do.

This woman!

Writer and fame sculptor Cat Marnell is too busy getting paid more than most people to write her memoir, so she has hired 18-year-old Alex Kazemi to handle her "publicity." (He's not pictured above; that's Riff Raff. He's not organized enough to be anyone's publicist but his own and even that seems accidental.) This partnership was announced via TwitLonger:

Hello world this is Cat Marnell's new TEEN PUBLICIST @alexkazemi . I'm in her account for the time being but she will be tweeting regularly via ME on this account, in her voice. - AK

So far, Kazemi's duties have consisted of tweeting as himself from Marnell's account and in the process, animating the voices that go through anyone's head but especially a head that's as active and sometimes addled as Marnell's. You'd think that Kazemi needing to resort to TwitLonger to send his first tweet through Marnell's twitter might be an omen, but it's going great:

“@msemilymccombs: @cat_marnell @alexkazemi WHAT IS THIS SHIT CAT”Cat says: "What, are you JEALOUS of my TEEN PUBLICIST?" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

"Cat Says: @janepratt, don't YOU think @msemilymccombs seems JEALOUS of my TEEN PUBLICIST?!" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

CAT says: "You know, if more teens were publicists and felt less... DISPOSABLE, then they wouldn't get all meat cleaver-y on themselves"- AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

#CatSays

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat has been isolated in her apartment accompanied by the sounds ofBlackout by Britney Spears as she writes her S&S memoir... - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

I apologize, the last statement was false. Cat says: "I made that up and she would never say that!" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

CAT says: "I'm making her look like a loser to all the guys she wants to get with" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

I'm learning a lot.. - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat says:"I'm 18, so I can tweet a sensual teen masturbation story if I want to..." - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat says, I, AK, am using quotes wrong and am making HER sound like the sensual teen masturbator.

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat says: "Go do your homework, bitch!"- AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

I reached out to Cat to ask her what is up with this. Below is our ensuing exchange.

I don't feel like taking another screenshot, but regarding Marnell's good deed, she added, "It's like what Jung said how a ton of his patients didn't have a diagnosis, just aimlessness and senselessness in their lives! This teen WANTS to be someone!"

Update: Full disclosure: Cat Marnell and I have done poppers together.

[Cat Marnell/Riff Raff image via Facebook]

The most recent issue of Rolling Stone — the one with the This Is The End guys on the cover and the accompanying story all about how James Franco farts a lot, and how Jonah Hill won't discuss farts, and how Danny McBride's underwear becomes unwearably dirty after just a day — has a special "The New Stoned Age" section all about weed. In all but two of this section's big stories, Snoop Dogg is name-dropped. This happens casually in pieces that he has no formal link to, such as "Weed City, USA," which is about the booming growing business in Denver:

If you nose is Snoop Dogg-calibrated to sniff out only majorly primo herb, you just might end up at Gaia Plant-Based Medicine, a booming high-end cannabis enterprise with big-time ambitions.

It happens in Bill Maher's brief "The New Stoned Age" essay to illustrate marijuana's bipartisanship:

There’s just as much pot on Willie Nelson’s tour bus as there is on Snoop Dogg’s tour bus. Marijuana is bridging the red and blue divide and becoming a purple issue.

It happens anecdotally in the cover story via Seth Rogen:

“I once got to smoke weed with Snoop Dogg and his guys, and it was actually like a dream come true,” [Seth Rogen] says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to keep smoking no matter what,’ and I did for five or six hours. At the end of the night, one of the guys looks over at me and says, ‘Seth, you can really smoke, man!’ and it was like the greatest compliment ever.”

It happens anecdotally (and creepily) in the story about the Hollywood princess who keeps Snoop blazed, "The Hollywood Princess Who Keeps Snoop Blazed":

One night, [a then-teenage Dr. Dina] went over to a friend’s house, whose dad happened to be David Kenner, Snoop’s lawyer during his murder trial in the 1990s (he was acquitted). “Snoop was in the backyard smoking a joint, and the kids said, ‘Ooh, you better be careful around Deeny Weeny, she’s going to rat you out,’” she says. “And he was like, ‘Oh yeah? Come on over here, girl. You hit this.’ I said, ‘No way.’ He’s like, ‘You hit this right now.’ So I did. He made me hit it so I wouldn’t tattle on him.”

It happens in reference to his art (but not the art he's primarily known for) in "Hollywood High – The Greatest Stoner Movies of All Time":

9. Soul Plane 2004 – The crown jewel of Snoop Dogg’s cinesplifferamic oeuvre.

Snoop seems exactly like the kind of obvious go-to reference the reputedly stuffy, rockist institution like Rolling Stone would latch onto. Excessive invoking aside, though, I wonder: if not Snoop then whom? There are other references to star potheads like Woody Harrelson and Wiz Khalifa in the issue, and the cover-story actors — Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, James Franco and Jonah Hill — are referred to as "The Doobie Brothers," per their story's title (despite only the first two actually owning up to being active smokers). But none of those guys alone quite seems to have the stoney charisma combined with years of visible weed smoking (I mean standing-on-the-MTV Awards-stage visible) put in to warrant Snoop's indica icon status. (Very few women are specifically mentioned in all of the issue's weed coverage.)

But is Snoop really the best we can do? He's a decent rapper who practically sent out a press release declaring himself past his prime when he signed up for that family reality show on E! a while back. Not that it wasn't obvious that he peaked almost two decades ago, anyway. For years he had an impressive knack for turning out one utterly unmissable single per album, though none exactly blazed with bonkers, marijuana-fueled creativity. And then he cut that Snoop Lion reggae-drag thing.

Also, he once made a young girl smoke her first joint so that she wouldn't tattle on him (as though tattling for that wouldn't have been even worse than just saying, "That stoner is getting stoned").

I feel like we could do better than Snoop, but I can't come up with the right name to replace his in our THC-pumping hearts. It's all fuzzy and I'm sleepy and I want a sandwich or some chocolate-covered pretzels or a chocolate-covered pretzels sandwich. I don't know, I guess I don't care that much anyway.

[Image via Getty]

"That's why I douche with vinegar...cunt vinaigrette...to make it more appetizing...you know, like browned chicken."

Liar and professional bisexual Tila Tequila isn't that much worse than her co-stars (including Hulk Hogan's ex-con son Nick, and The Wire's Tray Chaney) in the direct-to-video shitfest Masterminds, but that's like saying that a lobotomy isn't that much worse than losing an eyeball. It all sucks.

The movie is worse than everyone in it, but in this clip reel alone we get at least four best-worst classic lines:

• "No baby, I'm a paralegal."
• "When you physically put your hands on me like that, it hurts me."
• "Why don't you suck your own dick?"
• "Well guess what? I love your vibe, too."

The movie was way too boring to sit through. I don't even know what it's about. I think Tila Tequila's boyfriend wants Nick Hogan's money and jewels so he pimps her out as bait and she charms him by talking like Honey Boo Boo? Sometimes she runs, sometimes she hides, sometimes she's scared of you. Whatever. I fast-forwarded through and watched every second of her performance, though, so at least that's something. Compelling stuff.

Plus, yeah, limited time/different focus. I had to get to that Patti LaBelle wig.