Jimmy Fallon vs. Justin Long
Battle of the Shuffling Slacker Princes

These aren't easy times for Jimmy Fallon. We're not sure why his movie career hasn't taken off. Actually, we're kind of sure, and it's called Taxi. (One of the new TV season's funnier shows, Knights Of Prosperity, makes a "Taxi is bad" joke the way an earlier generation would make a "D.C. Cab is bad" joke.)

Good people can disagree on the depth and breadth of Fallon's talent, as the estimable Wing Chun and I did here. And Fallon's particular cutie-pie charms, shown off to such advantage in the vacuum of SNL, are of a kind that will always spawn challengers, which Fallon must fend off from time to time like a grizzled gunfighter. (As he did to Dax Shepherd. Remember him?) After all, Hollywood loves shuffling, shrugging slacker boys. Or, rather, teenaged girls love shuffling, shrugging slacker boys, and Hollywood loves teenaged girls. In fact, we saw Hollywood loving some the other day behind a dumpster out back of a Jack In The Box.

But even though Fallon had Taxi, he also had the surprisingly not-terrible Fever Pitch, which, if memory serves, even the estimable Wing Chun was mildly charmed by. ["True." -- Wing Chun] Which is to say, it's not impossible to imagine a movie starring Jimmy Fallon that you'd actually want to go see. Difficult, but not impossible.

But the sun may be setting on our grizzled gunfighter -- now almost thirty-two and the elder statesman of shuffling slacker boys. For behold, over yonder in the dusty haze, who's that, approaching in a jangle of spurs, fingers twitching by his side-irons? Why, it's the Apple Computer Guy!

Now, we'd contend that those Apple-vs.-PC ads with John Hodgman from The Daily Show as the doofus-PC and Justin Long as the hipster-Mac are as, if not more, annoying than anything Fallon's ever done. And we actually like Macs -- the overheating computers, that is, not the slap-me-again-sir slacker personification in those ads. It took us a long while to put together that the too-cool hipster in the ad was the minor player from Dodgeball, and now he's back with a new teen-oriented larf-fest, Accepted.

We won't bank on the quality of that film, but we do suspect this is one whippersnapper who will whip, then snap, what's left of Fallon's film chances. Because, in essence, his stage name could be Younger Cuter Jimmy Fallon. We wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if one day they end of playing brothers. If they do, though, you know which one's going to wind up with the teenaged girl.

Advantage: Justin Long