Metta On Film: A Preview of the Former Ron-Ron's Lifetime Channel Debut

It is one thing, very certainly a thing and one thing of its own, when Metta World Peace is cast as a "vampire boss" named Gossamer in a "scripted spoof series" called Real Vampire Housewives, for the internet . It is a real thing, as attentive Classical readers and fans of scripted spoof series already know, but it's also a comfortably Artest-ian thing for MWP to do. Metta World Peace will also get up early in the morning to go shoot free throws for a Hasidic Jewish telethon. He will give an earnest and searching disquisition cockroaches as an answer to a question that isn't about cockroaches. Putting on some frilled-up Erotic Vampire, Male costume that came in a Halloween City bag and then acting like a vampire boss is not at all something that Metta World Peace would not or should not do, and not just because he already kind of acts like a vampire boss all the time, anyway.

As hobbies go, acting is not a bad one for a NBA player. The ceiling is low even before Amazing Grace and Chuck and Steel are brought into the conversation, and mumbling a few lines down towards the tops of much shorter co-stars heads is a better-paying hobby than, say, starting a record label or selling knitted things on Etsy. But there is some reason for concern in the news that MWP appears (as Ron Artest) as a character named Garlin Fincher in Lifetime's The 11th Victim. The concerning part being that this is a movie based on a book by Nancy Grace, the ulcerous cable news persecutrix who has a decent case as the worst non-Mariotti person in our culture. Not having read the book, I can't speak to its merits relative to such other Grace books as Death on the D-List or Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorney's Celebrity Defendents, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System. All we have to go on is Grace's track record as a barking-mad, bile-greased judgment machine obsessed in the loudest and dumbest possible way with a perverse concept of justice, and who also looks like the angriest person in Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" video. That, and the clip below, in which Artest acts very quietly and a little strangely opposite Jennie Garth and, in a horrifying cameo, a leering and crazy-faced Grace herself.

So, taken altogether, this would seem to be something to worry about. He does put some real pride into the way he blurts "NEW YAWK" in response to Garth, and it's generally hard to imagine any actor, from Sir Peter O'Toole to Ray Allen, doing much with the lines MWP has in the clip. I'm just mostly concerned about him hanging around Nancy Grace. I'm mostly worried about anyone hanging around Nancy Grace, but maybe especially worried about Metta doing it.