Collective Myth

The End

2009-01-20T21:36:00.003-05:00

As you might have noticed if you're looking, the end has come for Collective Myth. It was fun, but a bit stifling to write only about movies. Now, I have a new blog here, a blog I'm co-writing with Joe, formerly of Handbasket Travel Ventures. Check it out. Many thanks to those who read this one.

I don't think she's right for you.

2008-06-05T22:39:00.004-04:00

The first DVD I ever owned was Rushmore, that 1998 film starring Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer and Bill Murray as Herman Blume. I remember thinking how cool and hi-tech it was that my new computer could function as a DVD player, and Rushmore was on sale, so I couldn’t resist. Still, nearly ten years later, Rushmore remains one of my favorites.

But what makes it so good? Perhaps the most distinct thing about Rushmore is that it has a central character who is a young adolescent, but who seems to have a talent for getting particular adults to treat him as an adult, to give him adult-like responsibilities and allow him to deal with R-rated material in the plays he writes and directs. After one play, which involved live gunfire and drug trade, Blume buys Max a whiskey at a fancy restaurant. And then there’s the irresistibly cool scene early in the film when Max expresses concern to his father that he’s spending too much time on extra-curricular activities and not enough time scoring chicks, which seems to Max to be all anyone cares about. You’re like one of those old clipper ship captains, Max’s father says, you’re married to the sea. Yes, Max replies, that’s true. But I’ve been out to sea for a long time. During this brief exchange, Max and his father stop just outside the door to their modest home, as though the dialogue were so important that it demanded their undivided attention, and as though Max had been a bachelor for decades.

The perfect compliment to Max’s teen precociousness is Herman Blume, a rich industrialist who often acts like a teenager. For instance, both Blume and Max have a crush on Ms. Cross, a teacher at Rushmore. Blume uses his cell phone to call Max and tell him that he doesn’t think Ms. Cross is that great and that she’s not right for Max. At the same time, he’s sneaking through the school grounds to peak at Ms. Cross through her schoolroom window. On his way, he speeds up momentarily so as to cross the basketball court just in time to reject a small child who’s taking a shot. There’s something wildly amusing about the sight of a grown man in a suit seriously rejecting a little kid back into what would be about the fifth row if it were an arena rather than a school playground. And of course, this is Bridger’s favorite moment of the film, and he likes to say “I don’t think she’s right for you” before breaking up passes on the ultimate field.

Along with Blume and Max comes an amazing cast of rad minor characters. There’s Margaret Yang, a role played by Sara Tanaka before her infamous role as Megan Huang in Old School. She’s just as precocious as Max, but cute and savvy to the ways of the public school where Max finds himself after being expelled from Rushmore. She flies a remote controlled plane and acts in one of Max’s plays. There’s Dirk Calloway, Max’s much younger best friend whose mom is rather hot, which generated the rumor that Max picked Dirk as a chapel partner simply to get a piece from Dirk’s mom in her Jaguar. And who could forget Mr. LittleJeans, the Rushmore groundskeeper who laughs in the most creepy and hysterical way at the end of Max’s play at the public school. All of these characters and others give life to Rushmore’s bizarre setting.

I suppose that what it comes down to is that Rushmore is funny, but not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s more like amusingly absurd; for that reason, it’s precisely the sort of movie I’d like.

The Masculine Glory of Figure Skating??

2008-04-02T10:12:00.003-04:00

Mariah and I sometimes argue about whether figure skating is really a sport. I say no for a simple reason: sport involves direct and objective competition against others. In track, for instance, the athletes compete directly with each other to see who can get the best time. They can see the other athletes next to them trying to run faster. In tennis, one competes directly against the opponent across the net. But in figure skating, the skaters simply try to impress judges who, in turn, seem to give their scores for completely subjective reasons. Sure, there are certain penalties for falling and missteps, but then sometimes the judges seem to discount them or increase them. And what about artistic merit? That’s the most subjective thing on Earth. But let me be clear: I don’t intend at all to belittle the strength, dexterity, training, and general physical prowess necessary to do the things that figure skaters do; I simply do not consider that activity a sport because there is no direct, objective competition between the skaters.

Into this semantic mess comes Blades of Glory, a brilliant figure skating comedy starring Jon Heder and Will Ferrell. Mariah and I first saw it in Chicago with Megan on a day when JJ had so much to write about Hegel that he couldn’t come with us.. The film mocks all of the ridiculous crap about figure skating that, in my view, comes from the lack of direct, objective competition between skaters. For instance, it mocks the possibility of ties when officials give two skaters the same score by having Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) and Jimmy MacElroy (Heder) both win the gold at the beginning of the movie. All of the shoving and jostling for position atop the gold medal platform eventually escalates into a full-out fight between the two rivals, hinting at all of the needless tension that must exist between all of these highly trained athletes who have no way of really competing with each other in a fair way for the medals. Between Michaels and MacElroy, each skater believes himself to have earned the medal and performed better than the other, but there’s absolutely no way to settle the dispute on the ice. In real sports, such a dispute would be settled by an overtime period, or a tiebreaker method involving the comparison of win-loss records against identical competition; it would be settled by actual athletic performance, not by a bunch of pretentious, politically influenced fops posing as judges at a table.

But a wonderful side-effect of the absurdity of real-life figure skating is that it puts Will Ferrell at his best. I cannot stop laughing when he slaps the table, or whatever surface is around, and yells “Boom!” after making an offensive or egotistical statement at his circus-style press conferences or during other opportunities to speak. However, the highlight has to be the unglamorous masculinity Ferrell brings to a sport whose male population (so the stereotype goes) generally includes only effeminate prettyboys like MacElroy. But with Michaels, the skating world gets a hairy, slightly chubby, sex-addicted bad boy. While the film suggests that the female population as a whole finds Michaels irresistible, he’s clearly not very attractive, and it’s in these kinds of absurd situations that Ferrell is at his best.

Admittedly, no blog about Blades of Glory written by a straight dude would be complete without at least a brief discussion of Jenna Fischer and her role as the sister of the evil pairs team Stranz and Fairchild. The mainstream discussion of her attractiveness always focuses on how she “dresses down” in The Office so as to look like “an ordinary woman.” While this suggests that “ordinary women” are somehow less attractive than airbrushed, dolled-up movie stars, I happen to think that so-called “ordinary women” are often quite attractive! And in Blades of Glory, Jenna Fischer has another opportunity to “dress down” because she’s playing the role of the supposedly plain sister of the glamorous Stranz and Fairchild. Of course, she’s terribly attractive in that role. Her everygirlness, if that term makes sense, is irresistible. She even manages to bring that characteristic to the scene where she gets all dolled-up because her brother and sister have guilted her into trying to seduce the sex-addicted Michaels in order to create conflict between Michaels and MacElroy, the all-male skating pair. At any rate, Jenna Fischer’s appeal in Blades of Glory, though comedic, does compare to other legendarily attractive female performances like Penelope Cruz in Abre los Ojos and Parminder Nagra in Bend it Like Beckham.

We’ll see how Blades of Glory holds up in the long run, but I suspect that it will take its place alongside titles like Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Old School in the pantheon of great comedies that are always circulating in my DVD player.

Bond

2007-09-04T13:24:00.000-04:00

Daniel Craig revolutionized James Bond. Casino Royale reminded the world that secret agents must often be muscle-bound badasses. And while they might look good in tuxedos and wear them when they have to, just as often they’re covered in blood after beating the shit of someone with their bare hands.

Casino Royale makes that claim right from the start. During the opening scene in Africa, Bond goes after a guy whose parkour is so good it makes him look superhuman. But Bond chases him down, punches the crap out of him, causes his leg to be shot, and finally blows him away execution style on camera and in front of some kind of ambassador. If that weren’t enough, there is also the most painful looking torture scene in modern film. The bad guy puts Bond in a chair with the seat mostly cut out and then proceeds to bull-whip his testicles with a massive, heavy rope. Bond, clearly in pain, still refuses to divulge valuable information and even laughs at his torturer.

Perhaps Casino Royale’s rougher take on Bond was in part a response to XXX, where a ripped and stereotypically masculine Vin Diesel plays a secret agent. One particular scene of that vastly different take on international crime fighting draws the comparison. There, an incompetent agent sticks out like an Isaac Mizrahi-clad Natalie Portman on the South Side of Chicago. He’s wearing a black and white tuxedo to a gathering of hardened, tattooed, underground criminals who make a living by trafficking in drugs and weapons. Not only does he fail in his mission and find out nothing, but he also gets his ass kicked in the process. The scene suggests that the days of slick, tuxedo-wearing, martini-sipping secret agents are over; now, the government needs ex-criminal tough guys like Vin Diesel to accomplish any real international crime fighting. If such a thing demanded a response, Casino Royale answered the call.

The Rain & the Drama

2007-06-30T19:00:00.001-04:00

Today’s rain delay might be depressing, but it provides a fantastic occasion to say a few things about Wimbledon and why it makes for great television. Unlike so many of the TV dramas and reality shows, Wimbledon is completely unpredictable. For instance, in 2005, 31-year-old journeywoman Jill Craybas took out world #4 Serena Williams on Centre Court. How improbable was that? Craybas has never in her career been ranked higher than 47th in the world, and even that had been quite a few years ago. She’s a small woman who does not hit with much power, while Serena Williams might hit the ball harder than anyone else on the WTA tour. Grass is a surface that favors big hitters. Craybas had never in more than a decade on tour defeated anyone ranked in the top twenty. And yet, there it was, the most improbable kind of upset in tennis, a small, older player in the twilight of her career took out the formidable Serena Williams.

Wimbledon also provides some of the most exiting points in tennis because players can dive onto the grass, and thus reach for shots much farther away from them than they could on a hard court. In one of the highest level matches I’ve ever seen, Patrick Rafter beat Andre Agassi in a five-set extravaganza in the 2000 Wimbledon semi-finals. Rafter charged the net and dove for winning volley after volley, barely dinking Agassi’s world-class passing shots back over the net with so much backspin that even quick-footed Agassi couldn’t run in quickly enough to get them. Agassi played the best tennis I’ve ever seen him play, and it still wasn’t enough to beat Rafter at his all-time best. The only bad part of the match was that it tired Rafter out enough for Sampras to beat him in four sets in the final. Still, it was great television that I was fortunate enough to watch on Mike E.’s little TV in the infamous, Skyla Court place in Missoula.

Another great Wimbledon memory comes from the 2004 women’s final. On a tiny TV getting reception from bunny ears on the top floor of an old Toronto bed and breakfast, Mariah and I watched the attractive, teenage Maria Sharapova out hit the heavily favored Serena Williams. She beat Williams at her own hard-hitting game, and at that moment, the tennis world knew that the domination of the two Williams sisters over the women’s circuit was over. It was the end of an era, and for many, it meant that the game would become more exciting since we wouldn’t be seeing the same two women in every Grand Slam final. The previous two women’s finals had been boring, error-filled Venus vs. Serena matches. When Sharapova won, it was the first time in five years that a Williams sister hadn’t taken home the trophy. It was glorious.

This year, we are spending the middle weekend in Seattle with Simon and Ginny. While rain has prevented much of the play since we’ve been here, we did see a spectacular Blake diving volley against “The Mosquito,” Juan Carlos Ferrero. The Mosquito prevailed, and he has been playing as well as I’ve seen him play since he won the French many years ago. Roddick stands as the only American man left in the draw, but will he finally be able to bring his A-game to a match-up with four-time champ Roger Federer? Will a Frenchman win the title for the first time in more than twenty years? Will an Englishman win a doubles title for the first time in more than forty-five years? All of these things are still possible. The rain will certainly let up sometime, and then we’ll find out.

In Search of Wine and Women

2007-05-09T12:01:00.000-04:00

When I come across reviews of Sideways, which I still do somehow from time to time despite the fact that it’s been three years since the release date, I’m always surprised by the fact that so many reviewers mention that both protagonists are unlikable. Some go so far as to describe them as “completely unsympathetic.” I mean, I understand that Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is pretty much a tool and that Miles (Paul Giamatti) is some kind of self-confidence-less downer, but I rather like the pair of them, and I think that their faults are part of what makes them sympathetic.

The fact that the road trip Jack and Miles take to California wine country is supposed to be some kind of bachelor party for Jack, who is getting married in less than a week, does quite well at highlighting Jack’s less than desirable qualities. Namely, he wants to get laid before he gets married, and he makes various “you need to get your joint worked on” types of comments to Miles, and acts completely insensitive with respect to Miles’ plans for the trip. I can see how unappealing some of those moments are; after all, who wants to hang out with some horn-dog who makes uncomfortably chauvinistic comments in public and is trying madly to cheat on his fiancé at any cost while being a selfish prick? But I think that what’s really underneath that façade is a man uncertain about a very significant and grown-up life choice. And who wants to grow up? Who’s comfortable with “settling down?” While most of us do that eventually, and are ultimately happy with the decision, change is almost always painful, and thus we can sympathize with Jack. After all, what he really wants is merely to post-pone big change for just a little bit, and that’s understandable even if it’s not admirable. I find that when I watch Sideways, I’m actually rooting for Jack to get laid, even though he’s doing to at the potential expense of his future marriage. Through him, I can see, and experience vicariously to a certain degree, that which I did not (and never would) do during my own bachelor party.

And then there’s Miles. He’s such a downer because he’s still depressed about his divorce years after the fact, and he never wants to do anything on the trip. All he wants is to drink fine wine, eat great food, and crash at the motel. While none of those things sound particularly bad or undesirable, they do sound as though they’re missing something bachelor party-wise. So he’s depressed and boring, hardly the recipe for the protagonist of a great film or a character that audiences will love and find sympathetic. But the things that make him likable for me are his knowledge of fine wine and his appreciation for good literature. The scenes where Miles talks about how to taste wine or about particular varietals evoke high sensory pleasures, the things that really enable one to escape the rigors of the day-to-day grind, or, depending on your point of view, to appreciate this life. Knowledge of those pleasures provides a kind of transcendent perception which enables one to see that there actually is good in the world despite frequent appearances to the contrary. Miles’ depressed personality coupled with this transcendent perception highlight the very same contrast. While he might not seem like much on the surface, an examination for his qualities reveals something worthwhile. As Sarah Vowell says in “California as an Island,” one of the best essays in her magnificent collection entitled The Party Cloudy Patriot, “There’s something educational about trying to see the good in things, holding some old picture in your hands and telling another person why it’s significant and excellent, special.” I’ve always loved that admirable and positive statement and how it avoids cheesy sentimentality. Like the antique maps Vowell sells in that essay, Miles and Jack provide viewers with a chance to see beyond outward appearances, to transcend the everyday and see something “significant and excellent, special.”

It's Mooby Time!

2007-04-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

As my old tennis buddy Melanie said once, when a naked Chris Rock falls out of the sky, you know it’s a good time. And what about Salma Hayek in pigtails and a plaid skirt with a stripper pole between her legs? And Matt Damon laying waste to a bunch of good-for-nothing corporate whores by blowing them away at point blank range? Only Kevin Smith could (or, perhaps, would) bring scenes like those into a movie about Christianity. But then again, why shouldn’t saving the world be a good time?

Of course, every religiously affiliated good time needs a symbol, so Dogma gives us the Buddy Christ. George Carlin, as Cardinal Ignatius Glick, introduces the Buddy Christ statue in the context of retiring the crucifix and replacing it with something a little more friendly in order to attract new faithful to Catholicism. Carlin’s reassuring tone and broad gestures as he speaks at the podium are more those of a politician than those of a priest, which creates a rather slimy character. And then, when the Buddy Christ statue is unveiled, sheer absurdity takes over. The idea of Christ performing a cheesy wink while pointing at the congregation with both hands is fabulous because it’s so far off from everything that the crucifix stands for. Should the prevalent symbol of the faith say “remember my suffering” or some combination of “heaaaaaaay” and “what up, yo?” It’s a tough question.

And there are other tough questions. For instance, how should the Christian faithful deal with the problem of corrupt corporate CEOs who make gobs of money by doing reprehensible things? The clear answer, of course, is to list back to them aloud their most heinous sins in front of their co-workers, taunt them with a voodoo doll, then blow them away with a handgun. I wonder what Kevin Smith was doing when he came up with that one. Maybe he was thinking of what he should do as he sat in the comfort of his spot on the pew some Sunday morning and looked across the aisle at some guy who beat up his sister (who, oddly enough, plays the Caged Animal Masturbator in Clerks) and put sugar in his gas tank while pretending to be a good Catholic. While these certainly wouldn’t be the worst of what people pretending to be good Catholics have done over the course of history, I could understand why Kevin Smith would then come up with something like the aforementioned corporate scene where Matt Damon blows away all but one of the Mooby’s board of directors.

But from the blowing away corporate guys scene, Salma Hayek’s stripper scene takes up the panache a level. As Serendipity, Hayek plays a muse, an inspirer of others. In this case, as she says, she inspires idiots to empty their wallets. It is clear what words do no do justice to the glasses with pigtails and plaid skirt look that she has going on in that scene, but something can be said for her practical knowledge of Christian tradition and her lack of fear in applying it even in the face of the massive Golgothan. After all, there’s nothing like a gorgeous stripper who then turns out to be quite intelligent and full of all kinds of practical tips about saving the world. I do remember that it’s Silent Bob who actually lays waste to the Golgothan, but I recall Serendipity hiding under the bar preparing some kind of holy water and alcohol bomb. She’s so practical, that one. And isn’t it absurd how the Golgothan itself actually looks kind of cute when it finally emerges from the bathroom stall? If it weren’t a shit-demon, I might almost think that it was someone’s crazy manimal-style pet. Ah, the face and little ears of evil.

Beyond its bizarre take on good and evil, though, what I like about Dogma above all is its treatment of Christianity as not only a complex system of thought, but also as a way of life that involves some fun and excitement. I think that it’s quite nice considering what so many people think of as “Christianity” these days.

Bastardizing Seventeenth Century Poetry at the Mall

2007-02-14T12:51:00.000-05:00

If there’s one thing I assert on a regular basis that nearly everyone disagrees with, it’s that Mallrats (1995) is a contender for best Kevin Smith movie ever. And I don’t say that just because it’s the only thing ever made where Claire Forlani and Shannen Doherty actually look good. I say that because it’s a funny but somewhat accurate reflection of what I found it to be like to grow up in suburbia, and because it’s appealing in its capacity as a mid-1990s period piece.

Clearly, the humor comes first. The film opens with a Brodie (Jason Lee) voice over where he tells the story of how his cousin Walter got two cats stuck in his ass. When asked why this kept happening, the cousin replied, “How else am I supposed to get the gerbil out?” This voice over plays while the viewer sees various shots around the mall including the Burning Flesh Tanning Salon and, the crown jewel, Rug Munchers Carpet Outlet. One of the few things that made suburbia an alright place to grow up is that it’s filled with these kinds of bizarre stories and businesses with faux pas phrases or words in their names. The best such business I can think of from my own part of suburbia is the Dick Corporation, a large general contractor. Every time a new TGI Friday’s or Best Buy is erected in the South Hills, there’s a big, long, hard trailer that says “Dick” in big green letters. And I have to say, even now, I chuckle every time I see one. Suburbia plays host to some funny shit, and it’s great to see that characteristic displayed at its most absurd in Mallrats.

But in addition to the comedy, Mallrats nails the accurate reflection part too, even though it can’t be divorced completely from the funny stuff. Early in the film, Brodie’s girlfriend Rene (Shannen Doherty) breaks up with him. This occurs when she wakes him up at 9:30 in the morning, clearly wanting to say something to him, and all he can do is gripe about being roused from his slumber. Then, Brodie searches franticly around his nightstand and bed, without getting up, and pulls out the controller for his Sega Genesis. As he begins to play the hockey game he had paused overnight, Rene dumps him. Afterward, he tells T.S. (Jeremy London), his best friend, about the breakup and says, “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn for Sega.” This memorable quote captures something fundamental about suburbia. The appropriation of such a quote from the late seventeenth century demonstrates the quasi-educated nature of many suburbanites. Many had decent high school and college educations, where they experienced a brief and cursory exposure to the cannon of western literature. While they might not understand it, I sometimes find their attempts at using that exposure in daily life rather endearing. Those attempts indicate that some suburbanites find at least a little value in such things as seventeenth century literature, and the modification of “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” to “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn for Sega” demonstrates creativity as well as some thought about how history and literature affect our present. I find this refreshing as hell. But of course, like most things in suburbia, the use of the quote is half-assed. The quote is not “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and it doesn’t come from Shakespeare as most people would guess. It comes from “The Mourning Bride,” a poem William Congreve wrote and then published in 1697, and the two lines are, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” In this little microcosm of quote appropriation, Mallrats manages to evoke the way in which suburbia misunderstands the world and its affect on the world. It’s funny and serious in its sadness simultaneously and on different levels; this is a sign of a great film.

And as if this weren’t enough, Mallrats is an appealing mid-1990s period piece in that it dates the film in ways that are fun to remember but don’t color the film so much that it falls apart when someone watches it all these years later. Of course, the post-grunge alternative rock/pop that fills the soundtrack sets the film in the 1990s very precisely. Artists like Everclear, Belly, and Bush share all the characteristics of this sort of music. Another example came up recently, when my law school friend and tennis buddy Brooke, who is four years younger than I am and thus across something of a generational line due to the rapid cultural change that happened in the 1990s, asked me what a Henley was. I showed her the pictures from Mallrats that I’ve posted here as an illustration. T.S. is wearing a Helney in classic 1990s style: under a flannel, plaid shirt, something, again quasi-misappropriated, from the grunge era that came and went only a few years before. The Henley adds a neat and preppy, suburban look to the plaid that nobody grunge would have contemplated. And it’s even more preppy when someone ties the flannel plaid shirt around his/her waist. While the Henley is one of several elements that add to the mid-1990s period piece nature of the film, Brodie’s manner of dress serves as a more timeless anchor. I’m sure I could still walk around South Hills Village Mall at the right time and see someone dressed like Brodie. The t-shirt and the casual blazer always seem to have some place in dress, whatever that place may be.

But all of this, Mallrats’s humor combined with its absurdly accurate portrayal of suburbia in the mid-1990s, makes me think that Mallrats is great because that’s the time and place of my coming of age. I believe that each of us most often garners meaning from the world by comparing it to the time and place of our coming of age. Only when I become aware of my own culture can I truly live alongside and appreciate other cultures. Sadly, so many never come to enough awareness of their own culture to reach this end. I guess I like Mallrats so much because it makes me remember the wonderfully powerful and inseparable sadness and enlightenment of coming of age, becoming aware of the world, and becoming educated.

The Action and Glamour of Graduate Study in English

2007-01-26T15:49:00.000-05:00

As many of you know or could surmise, I spent most of the fall of 2001 holed up in my old bedroom at my parents’ house in Bethel Park. There, when I was not reading the fiction of Henry James, Edith Wharton, or W.E.B. DuBois, I tried to compose my own fiction or respond to the stories of others in my graduate program at Pitt with constructive criticism based upon thoughtful reading of their work. If someone were to adapt what I just described into a movie, much of it would consist of me sitting there, not moving, except for my eyes from line to line and the occasional action of the hand to turn a page. Say what you will about the educational rewards I garnered from this period of my life, but it was neither action-packed nor glamorous. It was the graduate study of English.

I only bring up the aforementioned semester to illustrate the Herculean task successfully undertaken by the film Possession. That movie made the graduate study of English both action-packed and glamorous. The action began in casting, with the selection of Aaron Eckhart as protagonist Roland Mitchell. This is the same guy who played Miami Sharks Offensive Coordinator Nick Crozier in Any Given Sunday, a role which placed him square in the middle of a screaming match between the characters of LL Cool J and Al Pacino, the chief opponents in Crozier’s quest to modernize the offense Willie Beamen style. This is the guy they picked to play Professor Blackadder’s research assistant in Possession. There’s even a fistfight slash wrestling match toward the end of the film, when Mitchell and Maud Bailey (played by the glamorous Gwyneth Paltrow) discover bad-guy literary acquisitionist Cropper exhuming the corpse of a literary figure to unearth certain previously unread documents. I sure as hell didn’t have any corpse-inspired fistfights over undiscovered Victorian manuscripts during my tenure as a graduate student in the English department at Pitt.

Oh yes, and one must not forget the glamorous parts. The whole film, much like A.S. Byatt’s masterpiece novel upon which it was based, is quite glamorous, and details the parallel romances of Maud Bailey / Roland Mitchell and the fictional Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The romance of Bailey and Mitchell centers around their discoveries about the relationship between the two Victorians I just mentioned, and it suggests that the graduate study of English can be sexy as well as romantic. The lines upon lines of believably Victorian verse that Byatt composed for the novel come across fabulously when read aloud in the film; they suggest a sensuousness, an urgency, and a passion rarely associated with poetry these days. Needless to say, there was no romance during that semester I described above. Mariah was in Montana finishing her first two undergraduate degrees, and I was in Pittsburgh reading either depressing tales of failed upper-class romance or awful stories of horrid racism. It certainly wasn’t naked Gwyneth Paltrow reading aloud from hot and sexy undiscovered poems that would rock literary circles worldwide upon publication.

Ah, well; at least I have the DVD.

"Da-da-da, da-da-da!"

2006-12-23T15:38:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows those unique, theme song-ending six notes, and recognizes that they stand for SportsCenter. While multifarious other shows have familiar theme songs, few themes have such specific and immediate connotations. SportsCenter, with its beginning immortally signified by those six notes, stands for everything that sports fans love about sports; like a well-covered live game, it manages to be simultaneously entertaining, funny, moving, and disappointing.

The first of those characteristics, entertainment, always involves a good degree of escapism. When I watch a Steelers game, I take a break from thinking about the cases I should be reading and the papers I should be grading. Thoughts about all of the work in need of completion, about all of the tiresome pressures of life, fade for three glorious hours on Sunday during the NFL season. Even if the Bengals (Don, you bastard) or the Ravens (you too, Boyer) are pounding the Steelers into the ground, I still watch the game and care about the outcome. Otherwise, I would not be able to tell Bill Cowher in so many violent words screamed into the television what he should be doing differently, nor would I be able to mourn the loss and analyze the possibilities of the rest of the season with the rest of a depressed Steeler Nation the next day. Similarly distracting from the grind, SportsCenter provides a respite of sorts. For that one hour each morning, I get to think about and absorb the day’s sports news.

Part of what makes that escape so good, of course, is the humor. Any good live sports telecast has its share of jokes, particularly if tricksters like John Madden or Bob Costas are in the booth, but SportsCenter is all about being funny. Its commercials in particular set the standard for the dry, absurdist humor of which I am such a fan. First of all, the absurdity of using commercial time during a program to run advertising for that same program speaks for itself. But then, there are the commercials themselves. One of the more recent examples features SportsCenter anchor Steve Levy arriving one morning in the ESPN parking lot. On his way from car to building, he encounters Jimmy Johnson, a notable NASCAR driver. Johnson’s hacking away at a speed bump with a pick, but stops for a moment as Levy pauses to say hello, a quick “Jimmy.” Johnson says, “Steve,” and as Levy walks away, Johnson goes back to work on the speed bump with the pick. There’s no laughter, and no mention whatsoever about what Levy was doing. The commercials are all about the camaraderie and everyday interaction of the anchor and athlete, which I think is perfectly absurd and fabulous.

But apart from the escape and the humor, good sports, and good sportscasting in particular, can be quite moving. SportsCenter must be one of the most moving examples because it inspired a remarkable TV sitcom/drama called Sports Night. The mainstream media in this country are quite fond of trivializing sports, particularly college sports. They often point out the difficulty many college athletes have on the academic side of things as well as the high salaries of pro athletes in order to imply that our priorities in this country are all wrong. But they always fail to mention the benefits of sports, as I have above. Those benefits are not to be taken lightly; the working people of the world need sport to keep them sane and give them something to look forward to when they have breaks from the grind. If it’s either sport or revolution, those mainstream ignoramuses at pro-establishment places like CBS and CNN better be content with sport. Part of what makes Sports Night a good show is that it portrays sportscasters as hard-working and intelligent people with admirable goals and values. It often deals with the issues surrounding the benefits of sports and why they have taken such a prominent spot in American culture. And of course Sabrina Lloyd, who plays Natalie, is so adorable that it’s difficult to look away from the show because that would constitute the risk of missing a glimpse of her being endearingly engaged in the world of sports.

However, the world of SportsCenter is not always all flowers and potpourri. A few nights ago, I saw a SportsCenter special bowl breakdown. Early in the show, a graphic came onto the screen to demonstrate bowl bids by conference. Every single conference was represented on that screen, even “Independents,” who are not really a conference, but a collection of colleges unaffiliated with conferences. Well, every single conference appeared on the screen except the Big East. That’s right: ESPN forgot about one of the BCS conferences, a conference with no less than five teams in bowls. This could not have been on purpose, but it was still quite upsetting to me and I believe that it goes a long way toward demonstrating SportsCenter’s bias against the Big East. For some reason, they never want to cover the teams from that conference, even when those teams are highly ranked or involved in high-profile match-ups. And then when the coverage actually exist, there’s the classic Pitt basketball SportsCenter highlight: they show clips of the other team dunking and making baskets, talk about how great the other team is, and then barely mention that, despite that team’s greatness, they could not manage to win the game. It would seem difficult to cover a basketball game without mentioning the winning team by name or showing a single highlight of that team making a basket, but I’ve seen SportsCenter do this to Pitt several times. Of course, disappointment is no stranger to Pitt fans, and thus I feel at home watching SportsCenter and feeling disrespected.

But in the end, I think that the reason I am so disappointed when SportsCenter does not cover Big East teams or covers them poorly is because I have so much respect for that show and I know that others feel the same way about it. It’s difficult enough to see something you respect and believe to be important get disregarded by a respectable source; it’s even worse to know that all of your friends saw it happen too. After all, SportsCenter sets the standard for sports journalism. If you’re an athlete, you know you’ve made it when you’re mentioned on SportsCenter, where everyone will have seen you. Nonetheless, I love SportsCenter and continue to watch; it’s still funny, entertaining, and at least somewhat informative. Plus, on the rare occasion when I actually see a flattering Pitt highlight, it is so choice.

Dearth of Posting

2006-12-13T10:26:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd post this to tell anyone who might be looking that I haven't abandoned my blog; I've simply been bogged down with law school work. After finals are over, I'll be posting again. This will begin around the 21st or 22nd of December.

Until then...

Keeping it Real in the Workplace

2006-10-02T22:28:00.000-04:00

Waiting strikes me as one of the better films of the last few years. I like it because it’s witty without being pretentious, and while one might say that it makes some fairly serious social commentary, it does so without taking itself too seriously.

The film’s “wit” of course, comes mostly from Ryan Reynolds of all people in his role as Monty. As the protagonist of sorts, Monty gets to take Mitch the trainee around the restaurant and explain the workings of the place to him with some degree of style. The highlight of this throughout the film has to be the so-called “penis-showing game.”

The object of the game, of course, if for a male employee of the restaurant to whip it out at some random time and get the other guys to look at it. Then, he gets to call the other guys “fags” and literally kick their asses with his foot. There are all kinds of bizarre positions and side-rules as well, but I don’t want to sit here retelling the story. The point is twofold. First, from an outside point of view, this peculiar game happens behind the scenes at this completely normal seeming box-store chain restaurant. Hence, there might be life, excitement, and creativity somewhere in suburban strip malls. To me, this is both an inspiring and an amusing thought, as I generally consider such places the hubs of consumerist depravity and fakeness. Second, from an inside point of view, the “penis-showing game” provides the employees with a bit of something beyond the mundane routines involved in the running of a chain restaurant. It gives them something to strive for, something challenging, in an otherwise mind-rotting work environment. And, of course, it’s funny as hell.

But beyond the “penis-showing game,” I note the slightest hint of Fight Club at work here. When an obnoxious woman gives one of the waitresses a hard time, the whole kitchen staff conspires in an oddly militaristic and dark fashion to add some disgusting things to her food. And when he delivers the soiled food, which is dressed up on the plate to look good, Monty says something like, “Don’t fuck with people who handle your food.” I’m reminded of the infamous bathroom scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden threatens the politician about his proposed crackdown on the new sort of crime that people have noticed. He says things along the lines of, “We cook your food; we take out your garbage, we guard you while you sleep; do not fuck with us.” Both films, in this sense, are getting at the same thing, but I think that Waiting’s take is a bit more realistic and believable than what happens in Fight Club, even if it might not be quite as appealing.

Those two films, Fight Club and Waiting, are big-time factors behind why I treat wait staff at restaurants with as much respect as possible and why I tip 20%. Films that can influence people to behave in better ways are good, right? Or are they disturbing in that regard? I do have a certain innate respect for people in the service industry, even if I only dabbled in it myself for a total of something like six months over the course of two summers when I fried chicken. Well, and then there was the landscaping beyond that. But at any rate, I find many people in that industry to be pretty interesting. I know some of you have decent wait staff stories…

Care to Tango?

2006-08-16T10:25:00.000-04:00

There’s something to be said for the moxie of the ridiculous spy movie. It’s fun to escape our often mundane culture for a moment and enter a world in which the things that people do on a daily basis actually matter. And even while those actions are so important, any good spy movie contains a myriad of preposterous jokes. For the moment, my favorite example of such a film is True Lies with the Governator as American spy Harry Tasker and Jamie Lee Curtis as his wife Helen.

In True Lies, the high-consequence premise is that a terrorist organization has obtained a nuclear bomb and managed to transport it within U.S. borders. This counter-terrorism theme, especially given the present political spectrum in our country, seems pretty tired on the surface. But the movie manages to make that premise interesting by contrasting it with some of the more mundane elements of our culture. For instance, Harry Tasker’s cover story, that he is a sales rep for a computer company, comes to the forefront in a bathroom scene with Helen in which he ties his tie and goes off on a fairly detailed monologue about some new software that his company wants to market. The monologue sounds just dull enough to make the audience laugh, but not boring enough to make them lose interest. The banality of such a thing makes the terrorist premise tolerable because it’s absurd that a highly trained, talented spy would have to live under such a tedious cover story. And as many of you know, there are few things I love more in films than absurdity and its inherent moxie.

Perhaps the best and most absurd part of True Lies occurs at the very beginning when Harry Tasker invades this huge Bavarian-looking mansion to get some kind of secret computer files. He sneaks in under the frozen moat or river or whatever using scuba gear. Then we see him putting on a miraculously dry tuxedo in preparation for entering the mansion. He comes in through the service door, handles a chef who questions by complaining about the garlic content of the buffet and asking the chef if he is preparing food for his dog in what is probably supposed to be perfect French, but what ends up being extraordinarily amusing German/Austrian-accented French. Then, when the guards notice the crack in the ice and people begin to look for an imposter in the party, Harry dances a spirited tango with suspicious and sexy Persian art dealer Juno Skinner. Then, he makes a dramatic escape right out of the front gate during which, on foot, he outruns armed pursuers on skis and snowmobiles. Now that’s moxie. It’s completely ridiculous, but it’s moxie, and it’s tremendously entertaining in a fun, escapist sort of way.

Does anyone else share my tendency toward ridiculous spy movies? Any Bond fans out there, for instance? What about XXX, that particularly ridiculous Vin Diesel film that takes a horribly serious shot at Bond and the effectiveness of spies like him? Am I a philistine simply for bringing up XXX?

Chillin' and Killin'

2006-07-15T17:44:00.000-04:00

Once in a while comes a film that crosses the bad-good continuum in reverse, a film so terrible that somehow it becomes good. For many, Starship Troopers comes to mind, but the movie I have in mind had a far lower budget and an exponentially lower profile. To a great many who have seen it, Jack Frost (not the Michael Keaton family film, of course, but the 1996 B-movie that can be found in the horror section of most video stores) serves as the quintessential film in the so-bad-it’s-good genre.

Some of the readership of this blog might recall the first time I saw Jack Frost. Out at Joe’s ancestral manse in what has come to be known as the BP, a group of us rented it over some kind of holiday break with no idea what a surprise we were in for. I mean, this is a movie in which a random serial killer, while being transported to a different prison or something, gets genetically altered in an accident with a truck carrying some kind of scientific waste and becomes a mutant, killer snowman who can melt and re-freeze at will while he lays waste to the townsfolk of a small, snowy mountain hamlet. Of course, we should have known what was coming because, on the rental covers, there used to be a hologram designed so that, depending on how the light hit the cover, you might see the head of a normal snowman or the head of an evil snowman with menacingly green eyes and humungous fangs. To that original group, I think that the aforementioned ludicrous plot and horrendous, low-budget special effects (imagine a white oven mit being used as the killer snowman’s murdering hand) provided the most important comedic element.

But when I watched Jack Frost back at college, my friends there liked it for a different reason: the ridiculous puns. My roommate of three years, a man often referred to simply as “The Sex,” demonstrated a particular fondness for the following pun. When the killer snowman refreezes in the back yard of one of his early victims, the poor guy comes out of his house to smoke a cigarette when he hears a mysterious voice first ask to bum a smoke and then begin to taunt him. The guy runs around with an axe looking for the other person he can hear. How he could have been clueless to the fact the enormous, looming snowman, which must have come from nowhere from his point of view and which must have stood at least six feet tall, was the dangerous taunter is beyond me, but that only adds to the scene’s humor. Suddenly, the snowman takes the axe from the man’s hand and literally shoves it down the man’s throat, handle first so that the clean blade is sticking out of the victim’s mouth. The snowman says, “I only axed you for a smoke.” I can see people cringing now…but it’s so bad it’s good.

And of course, the most famous scene, the scene which inspired me to write this blog when Sean and I saw most of Jack Frost last night, has to be the one in which the snowman rapes Shannon Elizabeth’s character, Jill, in the bathtub. Now, Jack Frost was Shannon Elizabeth’s film debut, and I always have to wonder how she ever got any work afterward, but I digress. At any rate, she takes off her clothes and gets into a mysteriously drawn warm bath. After some gratuitous, mock-sensual shots of her legs, feet, and neck as she bathes, the water becomes mysteriously cold, and the snowman refreezes as Jill screams. It then bangs her against the tile wall, its carrot nose prominently absent. When the rape is over, the snowman utters “Looks like Christmas came a little early this year.” It then puts its literally steaming carrot nose back on. Who couldn’t find the humor in something like that? I tell you, Jack Frost is one for the ages.

"Hard deck my ass...we nailed that son of a bitch!"

2006-06-20T07:59:00.000-04:00

If I were to list a few of the films I think to be great, I’m sure that many would shoot me an are-you-out-of-your-mind facial expression. This, of course, since I’m terribly arrogant and always right, means that these people simply don’t understand those particular films’ claims to greatness. Top Gun immediately comes to mind. If a person in his/her mid twenties were to watch Top Gun now, having never seen it before, surely this person would think it a terrible movie. I mean, the whole thing essentially consists of a bunch of ass-slapping, ex-fratboy types flying fighter jets for the Navy, playing beach volleyball, and trying to pick up women. In this case, the greatness seems to come, at least initially, not from Top Gun’s actual merits, but from what some of us have made of it.

As many of you might know, this all began at some point in high school with Joe’s famous impression of the locker room scene in which Tom “Iceman” Kazanski (Val Kilmer) tries to console Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) after Goose’s death. Joe’s impression selects for particularly ridiculous mocking those tense facial expressions that Val Kilmer suffers through as he says, “Mitchell…I’m sorry about Goose…Everybody liked him…I’m sorry.” In the impression, those four short lines might take a full minute to articulate what with all the tongue flicking and lip movements involved in those ellipses and the requisite nose-high-in-the-air nasal deep breath before some of the lines. I suppose that the humor in this comes not only from our not being said ass-slapping, ex-fratboy types, but from those sorts of characters trying to be serious and consoling, a big stretch after all the flipping-the-bird-to-a-mig, beach volleyball, and carnal knowledge bets in bars that come before the locker room consolation scene.

But even beyond “the impression,” some of us have become far too skilled in carrying on conversations which consist primarily of Top Gun lines. JJ and I, for instance, have made extensive use of the “I hate it when she does that” and “That’s the way he flies—ice cold—no mistakes” lines. Both of these come from the bar scene in which Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood (Kelly McGinnis) makes her first appearance. The ability to use these lines in conversation stems from a rather extensive understanding of, or at least familiarity with, their context in the film. For example, if someone is rather arrogant, but still good at something, the “That’s the way he flies” line might be appropriate. And the “I hate it when she does that” line, well, the possibilities are endless.

So I’m wondering…does all of this actually affect my perception of Top Gun’s quality as a film? Is there some inherent aspect that makes it especially useful for the sort of appropriation we’ve done and that therefore increases its quality? Or is all of that a load of crap and our appropriation a highly successful attempt at making something out of a particularly bad movie? There’s a cliché I’ve heard that might apply here, one that goes something like, “It’s so bad it’s good.” Does this apply here? I’m just dying to hear what some of you have to say about this classic movie from the era of our childhood.

Dude!

2006-05-27T10:58:00.000-04:00

Since I almost always have a DVD playing when I’m hanging out at the apartment, I’ve seen some of the movies on that shelf countless times. Oddly enough, one of the films that holds up viewing after viewing and that I continue to watch quite often is 40 Days and 40 Nights, that 2002 comedy in which Josh Hartnett’s character, Matt, gives up sex for lent. So lately I’ve been wondering—what makes this movie, which seems on paper like it would suck, so appealing?

One of the scenes that I always think about with respect to 40 Days and 40 Nights is the one in which Matt, in the confessional opposite his priest-in-training brother John, comes up with the idea of giving up all this sexual for lent. At one point, while John tries to talk Matt out of the idea, Matt opens up the confessional door and points directly at the large crucifix in the cathedral while he smiles and says, “Dude!” I think that what makes this so great is the contrast between the striking informality of the “Dude!” gesture and the seriousness of the suffering Christ on the crucifix in the dark, severe interior of the cathedral. It’s absurd, and I’m all about absurdity. In addition, “dude,” like “fuck,” is an extraordinarily versatile term. There are several possible meanings when Matt points at Christ and says “Dude!” He could be expressing newfound comradeship with his savior, praising Christ for having figured it all out so long ago, slapping him a spiritual high-five of sorts, or even looking to the crucifix for strength to go through with the vow. All of this potential adds a pleasant depth to the scene. Also, like “cool," "dude" as a slang term seems as though it will persist, unlike terms such as "tubular" and "bodacious." This means that the “Dude!” scene won’t necessarily seem dated in a few years. This whole thing reminds me of the “Buddy Christ” in Dogma because it’s an example of pop culture using some form of the crucifix for comedic purposes. Anyhow, there you have it. Look for spiritual enlightenment in bad Josh Hartnett comedy.

Brian the Chicken Fryer?

2006-05-09T18:03:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, I played Risk, the classic game of world domination. JJ, Megan, Mariah and I sat on a blanket in the park and let the sun warm our bodies as we slaughtered hordes of imaginary millions for our own amusement. A puppy someone else brought bounded around awkwardly nearby as its owner seemed to take pleasure in sharing with it what must have been one of its first park experiences. Even more nearby, a large group of twentysomethings arranged a first-rate picnic. They had a little hibachi, coolers, multifarious blankets, and more importantly, several kites, including a pink Barbie kite, which they proceeded to lodge in a tree, one of barky those millions that line the aesthetically pleasing modern shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago. But why would I tell you people all of that? This doesn’t seem like that kind of blog, does it? Of course it doesn’t. And isn’t. But think about those twentysomethings. Think about the four of us, and think about the puppy’s owner. Does the fact that one of the twentysomethings is about to move to Nashville for his residency matter? Do we need to know that he’s in med school? Do you need to know that I teach English? Much like Martin Blank, “I don’t think necessarily what a person does for a living reflects who he is.”

Like Martin Blank, Tyler Durden in Fight Club holds a system of belief that doesn’t associate vocation with identity in the sense that most Americans do. Tyler Durden doesn’t care if you’re a waiter, an auto mechanic, janitor, a junior associate manager, or an accountant. That makes no difference to him. What matters instead is how effectively you can battle against the system in order to break free of it. By the end of the film, Tyler doesn’t pay big-time rent. He doesn’t own a car. He doesn’t want digital cable, or a clever end table in the shape of a yin-yang. Instead, he’s destroyed credit card companies and set the credit record back to zero. He’s managed to extort a year’s salary out of a despicable automobile company. He’s destroyed a number of those horrid chain retailers that make our landscape so disgustingly uniform that an intelligent person might no longer be able to tell whether he or she were in the suburbs of Seattle, Austin, or Newark. Our hero, Durden’s transcended the work week and made something interesting of himself. He is not Tyler Durden the waiter or Tyler Durden the Soapmaker.

I can only hope that in my future as an attorney, people will know me as Brian, not as Brian the Lawyer, and that at present, people know me as Brian, not as Brian the Disgruntled English Instructor. At the same time, how could our occupations, those things with which we spend exponentially more hours than we do with each other each week, not affect our identities? If I go to law school and spend 60 hours a week studying law, how do I avoid becoming Brian the Law Student? How much do you consider your identities to include your vocations? Does this bother you?

Fun at Work?

2006-04-20T15:21:00.000-04:00

Sports Night, a show that ABC cancelled inexplicably after it won several Emmy Awards in its third season, presents a workplace that is friendly in senses that go beyond anything I've ever experienced. Dan and Casey, the sports news show anchors featured on the show, are best friends. Natalie and Jeremy, both high-up producers, are dating for most of the series. Dana, the executive producer, has a fling with Casey. And between all of that, everyone on the show obviously works in an environment where they're at the office late into the night working on an extremely collaborative sort of project, which seems to create an almost homelike situation in that workplace. On the show, that kind of scenario is downright irresistible; when someone messes up at work, his or her job is not immediately on the line, and everyone helps to fix the mistake. And everyone's at work with their friends, which makes "work" itself seem more appealing. Plus, these people are all doing a sports show, talking and working with the very sort of information by which many of us are distracted at our jobs that have nothing to do with it. I would love working in an environment like that, but none of the workplaces I've seen (or really even heard of) in my lifetime are anything like that.

Let's take as an example the office at Pitt in which I work as a tutor. It's quite an amicable place; all of the staff get along for the most part, and all are quite friendly and professional when at work. But with one very discreet exception, there has been no intra-office romance. And except for Josh and I, no one who works there seems to be very close friends with anyone else in the office. So while the place is great when compared to the average office with at least a few incompetant and/or rude people, it's nothing compared to the idyllic work environment depicted on Sports Night. Of course, I'm willing to throw out there the possibility that I'm completely full of it and that many of those who read this blog work in places that are like the one on Sports Night, but from what many of you have said to me about your various jobs, this seems unlikely.

So when I think about Sports Night, one of the questions is always how a show that depicts something so utterly unrealistic nonetheless manages to be so appealing. And here's what I've come up with. When I'm in one of my offices, there are always escapist moments here and there when I fantasize about what it's going to be like when I can actually leave the office. In addition to a workplace pastime, escapism is often the motive for various entertainment as well. I mean, seriously, why do millions flock to theaters for films like Under Siege and Speed? The average moviegoer likes these sorts of things because they provide him/her with an escape from the constant, nagging thoughts about when he/she will have to return to work. But Sports Night is the ultimate escapist fantasy, one much better than what the aforementioned films provide. It proposes something ridiculously appealing: What if the workplace were so great we didn't want to escape it? Oh, would that it were...

The Disappearance of Home

2006-04-06T14:24:00.000-04:00

During the middle weeks of August 1997, I lived well. My friends had copious amounts of fun simply by sitting around someone's house and, in the parlance of those times, "enjoying each other's company." This might have involved capture the flag in Carolyn's back yard, listening to Joe narrate the muted Discovery Channel documentary on the wildebeest, or even deciding to go out and get the "weggie patch pizza" at Applebee's. And I had Janelle, that girl I loved madly and could just look at for hours without ever becoming bored. So things were pretty good in those last days of my seventeenth year, but then everything essentially vanished. It's that period of change that I'm interested in right now, that period which takes place many times over the course of an average American's life. Everyone moves, meets different people, loses touch with some, acquires entirely new sensibilities with which to relate to the world, and can never go back on any of these changes. In Anywhere But Here, Natalie Portman does a tremendous job of capturing that period in her role as Ann August. Although many people don't like that film because of the liberties it takes with the adaptation of Mona Simpson's fabulous novel, I think it's a pretty decent movie.

Ann's mother Adele (Susan Sarandon) decides that the two of them need to move to California to escape the "nothing town" of Bay City, Wisconsin. Of course, the irony is that Bay City, in an early flashback where Adele buys the Mercedes to take to California, is portrayed as something of a lush, green dreamland while Adele and Ann drive through dry, uninhabited scrubland in Utah. In Bay City, the original owner walks out of his cozy-looking home and over his soft lawn with a beer in his hand to show the car to Adele and Ann. A sprinkler is audible in the background. One thinks, during that flashback, of the so-called "American Dream," and Natalie Portman does dejection extraordinarily well to convey how upset she is over her mother's constant ramblings about leaving town. In Utah, Ann says to Adele, "This is like being kidnapped; you don't understand that, do you?" She's left her entire life behind in Bay City. She has friends, family, and familiar surroundings there, but is forced to leave.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I wasn't forced to leave Bethel Park or the Pittsburgh area as Ann was forced to leave Bay City, but I chose to go to school nearly 2100 miles from home in part because I wanted to save the image I had of that place and that time. I knew that if I stuck around, others would move away, and everything would change around me and leave me behind. By leaving for Missoula, an entirely new place in which I knew no one, I could maintain that home in my head. That's the quintessential part of the period of change I'm talking about: preservation of the image of home. While that image was inevitably depressing in my new location because of its inaccessibility, I felt as though I'd die without it. Similarly, Ann tries to maintain the image in her head on numerous occasions in Anywhere But Here, and is quite upset at her failure.

In the California diner where Adele fortuitously meets her real estate agent friend, Ann calls her grandmother's house in Bay City, but Adele interrupts her before anyone picks up. Ann leaves the diner for the impersonal, uncaring street outside and can't prevent herself from crying. Later in the film, she makes an illicit phone call to her cousin from a house she visits with her mother as a potential homebuyer. These types of incidents lead to an increasingly successful image of home in Ann's head, though inevitably that fight for preservation is a no-win kind of deal. Those incidents do remind me of the ridiculous phone bills I ran up calling Janelle in her Michigan Tech dorm room and the crazy amount of time I spent emailing everyone else, but like the movie suggests, no one can ever really "go home" after this kind of period of change.

Ann's cousin Benny dies late in the film, so Ann and Adele head back to Bay City for the funeral. In those scenes, the houses in Bay City don't look cozy; they look cramped and dull. The lighting isn't as bright, and it's raining. Ann's extended family is fighting. Nothing is the same. Similarly, when I go back to the South Hills these days, the place just doesn't look like it used to. Now, instead of the sprinklers and the nice-looking lawns, I notice all the Republican campaign signs in the yards, the gratuitous SUVs in every driveway, and the complete lack of sidewalks so that no one can safely walk anywhere. And just like Benny vanishes from Ann's Bay City, if you Google Janelle, you won't find anything, and no one I know has heard from her in years.

The Mad Munchies

2006-03-26T22:15:00.000-05:00

Food for Thought is a small restaurant along Arthur in Missoula, right across the street from Jesse Hall, that infamous and immense U of M dorm where, according to legend, a thick cloud of the most glorious and moist Portland ganja smoke hangs perpetually around the tenth floor. But this place across the street, Food for Thought, makes a mean grilled cheese. They make this masterpiece on twelve-grain bread with a blend of three cheeses, and should you desire, you can get tomato, bacon, or both added to the melty goodness. To me, part of the greatness of the Food for Thought grilled cheese with bacon is that particular dining establishment's ambiance. On a warm spring or autumn day, patrons can sit at the tables outside and watch everyone walk by on the sidewalks and be visible to those looking out of windows on the west side of the west wing of Jesse Hall. It's a kind of see-and-be-seen shangri-la. To someone from sidewalkless suburbia like me, the place has always seemed like the epitome of glamor, or perhaps the Garden City of the Northwest's answer to the Parisian cafe.

But speaking of grub in glamorous or famous locations, Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) in Ocean's Eleven really seems to have the mad munchies. The first time we see him eat in that film, he's in Los Angeles, that American pop-culture mecca to which so many people seem to dream of moving and in which so many of our movies and television shows are produced. As Rusty waits for Topher Grace to show up for the B-movie superstar poker class, he eats what appears to be an order of nachos out of one of those notorious fast-food paper boats. That food, evidently so glorious that it merits hallway finger licking, proves to be merely the beginning. When Rusty and Daniel Ocean (George Clooney) scout out Yen as part of their team, Rusty sips from a big old styrofoam cup of soda in the circus tent where Yen performs. On the way out of the tent, he's fingering cotton candy out of one of those plastic stick-bags in which cotton candy is packaged at amusement parks. Then, when he goes to Florida to recruit Saul (Carl Reiner), he mocks Saul for eating an orange and proceeds to eat some kind of jello-looking concoction with a plastic spoon in the box seats at the racetrack, a concoction which seems magically to get fuller, and by the end of the scene seems to be some kind of mixed fruit cup. But the most famous (and perhaps the most glamorous) consumption on Rusty's part has to be the shrimp cocktail at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. While Linus (Matt Damon) tells him about Benedict and Tess, Rusty munches away on a sweet-looking shrimp cocktail, the kind actually served in a cocktail glass. He even goes so far as to have the little hand towel on his arm so as not to get cocktail sauce on his ridiculously nice suit. But why all the grub? Many movies simply ignore the whole eating thing. But in Ocean's Eleven, the eating, especially the eating of such munchie-type food, creates a nice contrast with Rusty's stellar wardrobe and also compliments his laid-back demeanor. And it's glamorous as hell. I mean, who doesn't want that shrimp cocktail?

And who doesn't want that Food for Thought grilled cheese with bacon? Such thoughts remind me of Christine Scanlon's wonderful poem "The Grilled Cheese Sandwich," which was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. In it, she writes, "A well-made grilled cheese sandwich can open a vista/leading to popularity and the possibilities/for 'a good time.'" Indeed. Perhaps munching on the right thing makes us look glamorous now just as smoking cigarettes might have made us look glamorous in the 50s. And the location becomes important too. As Scanlon writes, "Where the perfect grilled cheese sandwich is/the successful party is also." So you have to look like Brad Pitt to be glamorous, then you have to munch on the right thing (a shrimp cocktail perhaps), and finally the place of your snack, something like the Bellagio in Vegas, becomes glamorous. For me, the height of glamour and sophistication is a grilled cheese and bacon on the corner of Arthur and Daly in Missoula. If you haven't had one there, I highly recommend it. It is so choice.

The Nobility of Servitude

2006-03-21T13:49:00.000-05:00

My close friend Laura, who is also a friend to many of you, started waiting tables at some point back in the day, right around the same time I started working as as a "landscaper," a glorified title that, in actuality, is only a fancy name for someone who mows other people's lawns. These two things, occurring in rough simultaneity when they did, gave me an awareness of the plight of those who work in the service industry. As a result of Laura's experience, I always try to tip generously and in cash. From the landscaping, I began to understand why the term "customer" often can be secret code for asshole. These sympathies, mentioned here in such an unrefined manner, are drawn wonderfully and in all their complexity in the well-done film Gosford Park.

In the film's chaotic beginning, while Robert Parks (Clive Owen) and Mary Maceachran (Kelly Macdonald) arrive as servants carrying their employers' baggage into the enormous country home to which members of the nobility have been invited as part of a shooting party, the audience gets a wonderful insight into the world as it exists "belowstairs." The servants down there run around in a frenzy ironing and washing clothes, putting away and organizing guns, as well as preparing hors d'oeuvres and the evening meal. One gets the impression that without this army of manpower (if you'll excuse a word with such blatantly patriarchal roots), nothing on the estate would function. Their diligence and drudgery, of course, go largely unnoticed by the ungrateful sots who employ them and whine incessantly about how difficult their lives of leisure are.

I have seen the same thing play out in reality. For instance, I've seen people berate a hostess for the long wait when the poor hostess has absolutely no control over the crowded nature of the restaurant and can do nothing to speed the dining of those who arrived early enough to be seated or who have already completed the wait. I've seen angry customers fail to tip a waitress (who had an entire bar to wait on and was actually jogging from table to table) because the service was too slow. Who do such arrogant pricks think they are? If it weren't for those service employees they so easily frown upon, these "customers" actually would have to (shudder) cook for themselves instead of enjoying a night out. When I see these kinds of things, I'm always much more fascinated with those in service; I wonder how they deal with such things and I watch how (and how effectively) they are able to difuse the situation. In Gosford Park, Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren) and Mrs. Croft (Eileen Atkins) are nothing short of heroic in their dealings with the problems that come up. For instance, when Mr. Weissman is revealed to be a vegetarian, they arrange an entirely special meal for him without losing a step in the preparation of the ridiculously elaborate feast everyone else will enjoy.

Of course, beyond all this conceptual stuff, the costumes, the acting, the set, the rain, everything about the film is quite beautiful and easy on the eye. There are few better films to watch with a bottle of wine on a rainy, cold spring day than Gosford Park.

A Worthy Adversary

2006-03-13T20:41:00.000-05:00

There's something unbelievably appealing to me about games of mental skill. In college, I relished the opportunity to compete with others on my floor in Civilization II, a turn-based game in which participants created and managed competing civilizations. There were far-flung commercial trade routes, secret alliances, and brilliant tactical maneuvers carried out in times of war. Imagine commanding an empire over the course of several millennia, from the stone age to the launching of the first inter-continental ballistic missile, all at the age of nineteen from your own dorm room. The length of such games as well as the intelligence of the competitors always proved mentally taxing in a rewarding, adrenaline-pumping kind of way. Sadly, my opportunities for such things have dwindled in recent years. Oh, there is always the odd game of Settlers of Catan with any of the growing number of my friends who play, and I did play a fairly interesting game of Risk something like a year and a half ago with Jon, Lope, and Don. However, those two games, while primarily considered games of strategy, involve luck in the form of dice-rolling more than I would like. And these odd instances of gaming, though extraordinarily worthwhile and fun, do not satiate my yen for extended, hard-core, nearly pure strategy competition. It is through the memory of those dorm floor games of Civ II and my current craving for such turn-based glory that I have come to love The Hunt for Red October.

In that infamous Sean Connery submarine flick, one of the earliest actions of Captain Marko Ramius (played by Connery, of course) is to announce the ship's "orders" to the crew. He says, "...and once more we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old aversary: the American navy. For forty years, your fathers before you and your older brothers played this game and played it well. But today the game is different. We have the advantage, and it reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now, they will tremble again at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive. Comrades, our own fleet doesn't know our full potential. They will do everything possible to test us, but they will only test their own embarrassment. We will leave our fleet behind, we will pass through the American patrols, pass their sonar nets, and lay off their largest city and listen to their rock n' roll while we conduct missile drills. Then, when we are finished, the only sound they will hear is our laughter while we sail to Havana, where the sun is warm and so is the...comradeship." Firstly, the comparison of a military maneuver like the one Ramius has in mind here to chess is quite apt, no? It will involve thorough planning, the prediction of what one's adversaries will think and do, and a certain degree of mental fortitude in order to respond to the inevitable things that will not go as planned. But secondly, what a speech. Here, Ramius is addressing his crew of patriotic Soviet conscripts, an audience not as well educated as he is and far more susceptible to the blind nationalism that characterized the stereotypical, cold war era military personnel commanded by the USSR. For that audience, the mere suggestion of hot cuban women and the use of some form of the word "comrade" several times is more than enough to inspire blind loyalty toward Ramius, however misdirected it might be if the crew really is a group of proud Soviets.

As the film goes on, Ramius and his Russians sweat and smoke through the difficult ordeal of turning over an enormous, cutting-edge sub to the Americans while making the crew think it is destroyed and ensuring the cooperation of those same Americans. And I love it all. But really, it's the end scene that gets me. As they sail the Red October up Maine's Penobscot River, Ramius and Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) discuss the Russian captain's motivations for defection. The scene takes place in a blue twilight sublime enough to have post-coital connotations. This discussion reminds me of the post-Civ II glass of Chianti that sometimes happend back in those halcyon days of dorm room gaming glory. For instance, "Damn," someone might have said, "when I saw that caravan from Dhaka just strolling across Europe..." and then the hearty laughter. Oh boy; I'm a bigger dork than I thought.

How does one take down the man when one is the man?

2006-03-06T23:10:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that I love "stickin' it to the man." But I always do it in ways that might be interpreted as, well, less than ballsy. For instance, I might stick it to the man by buying my steak from Wholey's instead of Giant Eagle. I might get a copy of Sarah Vowell's latest collection of thoughtful essays at Jay's instead of Barnes & Noble. I'll feast upon a succulent cheesburger at Tesaro's instead of T.G.I. Friday's. And these ways are all consumerism anyway; the man wants me to spend money, and that's precisely what I'm doing. I'm just not spending it exactly where "he" wants me to. Or maybe I stick it to the man by voting for the Green Party candidates in local elections. But who's kidding who? I'm just taking my vote away from the man's opposition, aren't I? But then again, Democrats are just less evil versions of Republicans, aren't they? If Republicans are 90% evil, then Democrats are something like 70% evil. Big business is big business, right? But perhaps I might look to The Thomas Crown Affair for something interesting about sticking it to the man.

Thomas Crown, who for all intents and purposes is the man, lives exceptionally well. He can eat at whatever spendy restaurants he wants to whenever he feels like it, can travel anywhere for the weekend, and can play philanthropist. Being ridiculously wealthy obviously provides a certain amount of freedom from the day-to-day concerns that the rest of us face. Simply by virtue of living well, is Thomas Crown "sticking it to the man," or is he merely perpetuating the status quo by living as the establishment dictates that the rich should live? He would seem to spend a lot of time at work, dealing as he does in the hyper-intense world of finance, and so perhaps the man has him in that way just as he has the rest of us. Crown has ridiculous sums of money, but can only enjoy them on the weekends and certain free evenings. The man has him. If I had a tenth of Crown's net wealth, I'd already be retired. But not him; something about the competition involved in finance pulled him in, and the man has him. Until, of course, he decides to leave.

At the end of the film, when it becomes known that Crown is an art theif, he leaves the country never to return. We are to understand that he takes an immense sum of money with him. Now here's the dilemma: does he, by escaping from the day-to-day snares of "the man's" system, stick it to the man? Or has he simply acted as "the man" and fleeced the rest of us by depriving the public forever of the millions he would have payed in taxes had he stayed legally in the United States?

At the risk of revealing an embarassing individualistic aspect of myself, I must admire the guy. He loves and understands good art and fine wine. And he has the means to enjoy both to the fullest because he has been able to manipulate the system to his advantage. Should all of us who possess the ability to do that act in the same way? Or should we, as so many of us do, teach at universities for poor wages, work for non-profits, etc., living relatively pauper-like lives in comparison to those of similar intellect who chose to persue the field of capitalism? Or is there some middle route? This, of course, is a question as old as organized human society. It reminds me of the Matthew 19:24, one of those Bible verses firmly entrenched in my mind as a result of attending Sunday school at a wealthy, suburban church: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Taken in the context of The Thomas Crown Affair and this blog about it, Matthew would seem to imply that Thomas Crown is himself "the man" because he remains rich, and presumably gives none of this wealth toward the general well-being of the world once he leaves the country. At least while he lived in New York, he gave substantially to a great museum. As much as Crown's escape appeals to me, I don't think I could stand for doing it myself from a moral standpoint. I'd rather just retire and be a philanthropist. Imagine how rewarding it would be to travel all over the world giving money to worthwhile causes for a career. Hell, if I had that much money, I could give half of it to the Green party, and they'd be able to compete for press attention in the next presidential election. Of course, that would probably bring another Republican president since everyone with even a quarter of a brain and a tenth of a heart already would never vote Republican. Oh well. I guess all hope has been lost and if I become ridiculously rich, I should just take my money and get out while I can.

Taking solace in, well, something.

2006-02-26T17:10:00.000-05:00

In Sideways, it's clear what Miles does to get through the day-to-day slog. His appreciation of fine wine provides a pleasure that allows him a momentary distance from whatever crap each day shovels at him. The most telling example of this comes late in the film when he drinks his '61 Cheval Blanc. He has just acted as best man at Jack's wedding, where he saw his ex-wife and her new husband. There are a lot of people around after the ceremony, but viewers get the idea that Miles doesn't know most of them and isn't quite in the mood to socialize given what he's been through over the past week. So he goes to this diner, where we see him eating a burger with onion rings and drinking from a styrofoam cup, the formal nature of his tux contrasting the crummy booth's cheap upholstery. He has the bottle of '61 Cheval Blanc on the seat of the booth next to him, and he pours its contents into his styrofoam cup serving by serving when no one's looking. The uncrowded diner with only a few people ordering at the counter and a man and a woman each eating alone on the other side of the room creates the perfect aesthetic environment for the emotional goals of the scene. As Miles drinks from the wine after a bite of his burger, we see in his face and hear in his slight moan that the '61 Cheval Blanc lives up to the weighty expectations surrounding it. This moment gives us the delicate balance between the sadness of being alone while experiencing such an extraordinary pleasure and the exquisite, comforting nature of the same pleasure.

Of course, I'm sure we can all relate to such a thing. In my case, for instance, it's not uncommon for me to stop after a particularly thoughtless, sloppy, and unintelligent student essay I've graded at my dining room table. I'll get up at such a moment, sometimes near tears at the hopeless states of education and intelligence in this country. I'll walk over to my bookshelf and pick up my thick volume of Robert Creeley's early poems. The weight of the book is comforting in and of itself, suggesting as it does the quantity of wonderfully crafted poetry inside. Creeley's hyper-intelligence as a poet, his ability to create hope from ambiguity, and the elegant grace with which he deals with the concepts central to his poems never fail to make me feel something similar to what I imagine Miles to be feeling as he drinks his '61 Cheval Blanc.

I wonder if there's something more to the solitary nature of the two aforementioned pleasures. Is there a sad comfort in being among the small population of those who can appreciate the most exquisitely constructed poetry or the most delicately subtle wines? The sadness of solitude, such as it is, might be countered by the pleasures afforded through these sorts of things. Or maybe not. Maybe these things are just pretentious and sad unless we can find others with whom to share them. Who can say?

Making peace with the ignorance of the masses, or something equally pretentious yet desireable.

2006-02-19T22:45:00.000-05:00

These last few weeks, I've graded mindless student essay after mindless student essay. I wonder how many more self-righteous, ignorant, lazy 18-year-olds who drive around SUVs that daddy bought them will tell me that some of the best literature ever produced in the English language is "dumb," "stupid," or, my favorite, "gay," before I lose it completely. Fortunately, as I'm sure many of you know (if, in fact, some of the people I know really read this), I don't plan to stay in my bust-your-ass-for-nothing line of work much longer. But while I'm still here doing adjunct faculty slave-wage work for three different colleges and universities, I can really get into Sideways. That film portrays sympathetically, and perhaps even glamorizes, the pathetic and sad yet beautiful and necessary existence of those who teach English.

Of course, the fact that Miles is an English teacher might escape many who watch the film. It's not a central part of the plot or even of Miles's character. But there's a gorgeous scene very near the end of the film in which we see Miles in the classroom. In it, the boys in the obviously private school all wear khaki pants and sit quietly with blank looks on their faces as one of them reads from the moving, sad scene of Phineas' funeral in John Knowles' novel A Seperate Peace. In the golden light, the camera moves in to focus on Miles as he savors Knowles' words and their clear implications concerning his own life. When the student finishes that infamous passage about how you do not cry at your own funeral and asks if he should continue, Miles says "No. No; we'll pick up there Monday." When he asks Miles if he should continue, the student refers to him as Mr. England or something like that (it's difficult to discern). With that disorienting Mr. something, Miles' alienation in that environment is rendered complete and understandable. Those kids have no idea who he is and most likely don't care.

In my own case, it seems to me that most of my students don't really think of me as a real person, and they often seem shocked when I relate to them some anecdote from my own life that happens to be relevant to what we're reading. Presumably, the shocking part to them is that I am human, a real person with real experiences sometimes similar to theirs, not some kind of anomaly who exists only in their English classroom for three hours each week. At any rate, as much as I am able to relate with and be liked by my students more so than many of my colleagues, those students, by virtue of their treatment of the classroom environment and the ways in which they speak to me (or don't), sometimes seem less than the real people I know they are, the real people who would make teaching an extraordinary thing. Thus, they create an appropriately alienating environment. The way in which the camera moves in on Miles as one of his students reads from A Seperate Peace mirrors for me exactly what I go through every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I can see it now--one of my students reads aloud from a Scott Silsbe poem and looks up blankly. No, I think, not wanting to ruin the beauty of the poem with the inevitable classroom bullshit, we'll pick up there on Monday. And so will we.

Winter in Pittsburgh is for pansies.

2006-02-02T13:56:00.000-05:00

I must admit my excitement when I saw that my parents had purchased the March of the Penguins DVD. Antarctica has always fascinated me; places with vast open spaces and few human inhabitants are rare indeed these days. Rarer still are glimpses into what goes on in such places. Plus, I figured that a documentary about such a mundane group of animals that did so well in the box office had to be good. I mean, from what I've seen, penguins spend most of their time standing around making noises at one another with occasional trips into frigid seawater to feed. Surely a film about things as dull as that had to be great to get so many people out to see it. But clearly I should have known better. After all, this is a country just over half full of people so stupid and clueless that they elected the village idiot as their President. Then again, documentary films like Buena Vista Social Club and Bowling for Columbine did well at the box office too, and dammit, I wanted to see a film that takes place entirely in Antarctica, so I borrowed the DVD from my parents and watched the thing.

As you might be able to tell from that less than enthusiastic opening, I didn't much like March of the Penguins. In fact, I nearly turned it off about 20 minutes in when the mating scene began. Morgan Freeman has a good voice, but even he can't save a script with more meaningless, cliched phrases than this week's State of the Union Address and such clunky language that my 18-year-old composition students could have written something better. And the music! My God; I didn't think it was possible to compliment such awful voice-over with worse music, but these uber-talented filmmakers did just that. During the mating scene, while Morgan Freeman went on and on about these birds' love for each other and the screen displayed seemingly endless beak-to-beak action and penguin neck rubbing, the speakers blared the most awful, tinkly-piano laced, lovey-dovey string music ever conceived by man. But I did make it through the mating scene, and gradually I learned to tune out the ridiculously bad voice-over that kept attributing human emotions and thought processes to birds and implying all kinds of crap about the penguins' caring, spectacular, monogamous mating relationships while also informing the viewers that each penguin chooses a new mate every year.

But those filmmakers did get some spectacular footage. The shots of Antarctica look amazing, desolate, beautiful. The shots of the penguins' claws catch viewers unaware, and all the footage of penguins transferring their eggs back and forth and waddling around balancing the eggs on their claws looks unbelievable. The process through which these penguin eggs reach maturity and hatch (or don't) could be fascinating subject matter. And the underwater scenes with penguins darting this way and that so quickly seem so surreal that people might wonder whether or not they're computer generated. What a shame that such amazingly good footage has to go to waste. But maybe not. Maybe after they've had a few good beers, people could watch the film on mute and fast-forward through the mating montage.

Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut...what could be better?

2006-01-16T20:41:00.000-05:00

If I'm going to talk about "going home" movies, or high school reunion movies, it's clear that I cannot neglect Beautiful Girls. Of course, the "going home" that takes place for Timothy Hutton's character is almost wholly different from what Martin Blank experiences in Grosse Pointe Blank. In Beautiful Girls, Willie (Hutton's character), goes home to a small town that seems to be populated almost entirely by his old friends from high school. He has remarkably interesting conversations with these people about all sorts of bigtime topics, and there are still old conflicts playing out that date from the high school days. And, as a huge bonus, this teenage girl named Marty (played by Natalie Portman) now lives in town and an old friend's cousin Andera (played by Uma Thurman) is visiting. So not only is Willie's old world still intact and populated by these interesting people from the good old days who still seem to have endless things to talk about together, there's the novelty of two new and equally interesting people. This sort of thing might seem a bit unrealistic to me because my hometown is completely devoid of such things, but perhaps it still exists in small towns like the one in Beautiful Girls. To me, the world of this film is at once quite depressing yet wonderfully comforting and appealing.

The depressing part, I think, starts with what Willie's childhood home has become. His father seems practically comatose (see the scene in which he asks Willie to watch some golf with him), and his brother is caught up in some sort of vulgar, adolescent funk. As Marty says, Willie's brother is missing "that thing that having a mom gives you." Clearly, this isn't much of a home to come back to. And then, there's the twofold reason for Willie's visit home. His career as a pianist in New York City isn't going well enough, and he's been offered a sales position. So he's come home to ponder "what he's going to do for the rest of his life" as well as whether or not he's going to marry this girl he's been seeing seriously in the City. I suppose that this mid-life crisis-like situation is rather depressing as well, but at least Willie has this fully-realized world of the past to revisit in order to decide what to do.

And what a great world it seems to be. I wish I could go back to Bethel Park and have such great conversations with interesting people I used to know from high school. One of the particular conversations from Beautiful Girls that sticks out in my head is the one between Willie and Paul (played by Michael Rapaport) during which Paul goes off on his monologue about supermodels. He says that they're bottled promise, promise of a new day, promise of a better time, etc. Of course, this comes off in the film sounding creepy and pathetic, but I seem to remember something about this from my college and high school days. In my bedroom or dormroom, I always had a picture or two of Natalie Portman up on my walls. I'd look at it for something like inspiration. She's so damn cute in some of those pictures, and then she's remarkably talented and intelligent as evidenced by her body of film work and her matriculation at Harvard. At the risk of sounding awfully tacky and sentimental, those little pictures of her got me through some tough study days and rough times. Am I the only one who's ever actually practiced this sort of quintessentially American thing? Did any of you do something similar? So anyway, for me, Natalie Portman served something like the same function that Paul's supermodels served for him in Beautiful Girls. Is that creepy?

And also, what about the little ice fishing date Willie has with Andera? They have this great conversation about how the grass is always greener on the other side relationshipwise, and I can't help thinking that it's true on some level. Familiarity seems to breed discontent for so many, such that after a person is in a stable relationship for a long time, he or she begins to get bored or "look around" as they say. But there's always someone else looking at that significant other of which person A is bored, thinking, "wow," and wishing he or she were in the so-called boring situation. But probably having that nice, crisp little conversation with Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut would keep any "bored" man sane and happy.

"You can never go home, Oatman. But I guess you can shop there."

2006-01-01T17:23:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite films of all time is Grosse Pointe Blank, a movie in which the male protagonist "goes home" for his ten-year high school reunion. For those of you who haven't seen the film in a while, John Cusack's character Martin Blank returns to his affluent suburban hometown outside of Detroit. His old girlfriend still lives there, as do a number of the people who seem to have figured prominently into the social world of his high school. Of course, he hasn't seen or heard from any of them in ten years and he vanished mysteriously on prom night. Plus, Blank gets to tell everyone that he's a professional killer at the reunion. What could be better?

Of course, it's impossible to "go home" like Cusack's character does, especially if one's "hometown" is an affluent suburb. For instance, if I were to "go home" to Bethel Park, I would find only one of my friends who figured prominently into my high school social world still living there. I would find that, in some cases, even people's parents have moved away. While I would still be able to drive around using all the back roads and recognize the landmarks, the place would not be anything like the home that Martin Blank finds ten years later in Grosse Pointe because I would know hardly anyone besides my parents and my lone friend who still lives there.

But Grosse Pointe Blank at least makes a nod to this by locating the ill-fated Ultimart on the lot where Blank's childhood home once stood. And his mother has gone senile. That, at least, is something. In addition to the line that is the title of this post, there's also the scene in which Blank tells Oatman, his shrink, that he doesn't know what he has in common with "those people" anymore and that he thinks the reunion would be depressing. "They've all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do," he says, "and what am I going to say? I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How have you been?" So while the film certainly acknowledges the idea of change making a homecoming impossible, that homecoming still takes place and is still meaningful because Blank does end up re-uniting with his old girlfriend and seeing some people he used to know.

Perhaps the filmmakers can get away with this precisely because of the 10-year reunion, an event that could explain the lingering presence of so many old-school "pointers." There's Paul, who still lives in town and now sells real estate, Bob, who owns a BMW dealership, Ken, who seems to be some kind of lawyer, and of course Debi, who works at a local radio station. So even the people in the reunion seem all to have stayed in town. But it's with Debi that the most convenient "going home" twist takes place. Since a fire took place in her apartment, she's now living at home with her father, in her old bedroom which looks pretty much the same as it did in high school. So Martin Blank gets to visit her there, in that museum of personal history. Then he gets to pick her up at her father's house for the reunion to make up for standing her up on prom night to join the army. And to top it all off, he gets to save her father's life in that very home. Talk about "going home" and being able to sort things out. I wonder how things might have been different if she'd still been living in her own apartment when Martin returned to town.

Still, I'm left with one thought. Of course I love Grosse Point Blank because it's so absurd and funny yet still true on some kind of base level. But where's the movie in which some guy goes home to his affluent suburban town and finds that no one he knows is there and that the place means absolutely nothing to him now? Isn't that, after all, the fate of most of those kind of places for the people who grow up there?

Seriously, how has cocaine come up twice already?

2005-12-11T23:21:00.000-05:00

Although it’s been a few weeks since my last post, I remember vividly where I left off. I seem to have been grudgingly admitting that I find the question of drinking in combination with various films far more fascinating than I should. But without further ado, let’s get to it: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle must take its place among films that go fabulously well with drinking, particularly after the night-before-Thanksgiving heroics that went on in our apartment during that evening’s viewing of said film.

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle presents a few obvious potential drinking games. First, participants could drink whenever someone makes reference to marijuana. And maybe there could be a waterfall during the various bag-of-weed-as-hottie/girlfriend/wife montages. A bit extreme, perhaps, but I think it sounds like a solid idea. Second, a more laid-back game might entail a drink whenever something happens to distract Harold and Kumar from their goal of reaching White Castle. Any other ideas? Obviously, these games haven’t even reached the equivalent of the pupa stage yet, and assistance in their development into legend is much appreciated.

But neither of those two games would involve the payment of appropriate attention to the best, most absurd scene in the movie: the infamous Doogie Houser drive-by scene. There’s no reference to pot in that scene, though of course cocaine is snorted directly off of a scantily-clad woman’s ass, and the scene serves only as a minor distraction from the goal of Harold and Kumar. Maybe an additional caveat of the first game could include drinking double whenever Doogie Houser makes any kind of reference, verbal or otherwise, to sex or drugs. In any case, Neil Patrick Harris is certainly the minor character star of the movie, and props must be given.

Well, I should probably end this particular entry before I start talking about absurdities like a game involving a drink every time Brad Pitt’s character in 12 Monkeys puts a hand to his mouth. Until next time…

Ah, the beer flick...

2005-11-21T10:32:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, while in Chicago visiting JJ and Megan, I had the good fortune to see Wedding Crashers at the Brew & View, an old converted theatre where patrons come to see a double feature for five bucks and drink the beer that can be purchased at the two bars in the back of the room. This, like many things tend to do, got me thinking. What are some of the best drinking movies? Now, I'm not talking necessarily about movies that involve a lot of drinking, though some of the ones I'll mention do, but about those during which viewers might particularly enjoy a few brewskies.

Of course, The Big Lebowski warrants first mention. My old roommate and compadre Bridger introduced me to this film, which I saw for the first time (for all you Griz alumni) in Urey Lecture Hall. I know that people have tried to match the dude white russian for white russian while watching this film, but that's impossible, and it's just inviting disaster. No one wants to consume that many mixed drinks in 117 minutes. I've also heard of people playing a game in which participants have to take a sip of their drink every time someone says an obscenity. If the white russian for white russian thing is inviting disaster, this other game is inviting death itself. I mean, seriously, the dude knows how to swear. But the point is that this film must be one of the best drinking films since it is so absurd and since it has inspired such hard-core drinking games in the past. I'm sure there are reasonable ways to practice structured drinking during The Big Lebowski, but I haven't devoted much time to thinking of them. Suggestions, perhaps?

Top Gun seems to come to mind at this point, and I know JJ and I have often suggested playing a drinking game in which participants take a drink every time there's a reference to sex. A bit extreme, perhaps, but nothing like the swearing game accompanying The Big Lebowski. In any case, Top Gun's classic cheesiness seems to lend itself to the sort of mindset involved in drinking beer while watching a film. And this film is so familiar to many of us that we don't even have to pay much attention to it while we watch. I know I could flip off some belligerent mig pilots and make a pass at my flight instructor while fetching beers from the fridge.

But anyway, even though I've only suggested two films, I'm calling it a blog. I'm sure there are many possibilities here, and perhaps over this season of holidays some of us will get together and explore them.

Lines of coke? In Jersey? Never...

2005-11-12T19:38:00.000-05:00

My friend Jeff claims that Method Man saved Garden State when, in the motel hallway for voyeurs where his patrons watch the motel's guests having sex, he says, "Who here just saw some titties? Raise your hand if you just saw some titties!" While this is clearly a pivotal scene in the film, I propse that it is but one in that film's long line of similar absurd yet somehow enlightening moments. Of course, since this is a blog and I don't want to bore all of you, I'm only going to talk about one.

The one I'm thinking about occurs just after Andrew Largeman takes out his old motorbike with the sidecar that his grandfather left him for the first time in the film. He's speeding down the road when a policeman pulls him over. The cop takes a hard-ass attitude the moment he steps out of his cruiser, and when Largeman attemps to respond to his initial question, the cop says "Shut up!" and Largeman turns around. The cop then says, "Put your motherfucking hands on your head...please." As the cop approaches, Largeman does a double-take when he realizes that it's his old high school friend Kenny. Largeman says, sounding a bit indignantly shocked, "You're a cop now, Kenny? Last time I saw you, you were doing lines of coke off a urinal." Then Kenny puts his fingers in his ears, says, "Lalalalala," and then makes some remark about having to move on and grow up because he wasn't making shit at "that fish market" and because he was having trouble getting laid.

This cop scene, I think, does a wonderful job of expressing the sort of bizarre, post-Generation X vocational wandering around that seems to be going on these days. While I can admit something of the scene's absurdity, I think it does illustrate how good people of our age seem to lose their authentic selves for the sake of gainful employment. If Kenny was a party animal who liked to do lines of coke off urinals and had a job working for a fishmonger, so what? Why isn't that a valid lifestyle? Why should such a guy have trouble getting laid? Poor Kenny. Here's to hoping he gets shot in the line of duty so he can collect that fat workman's comp check about which he seems so excited.

"I'm here for the gang bang."

2005-11-04T10:58:00.000-05:00

There’s a scene in the film Old School, close to the beginning, in which something momentous happens. It occurs after Mitch Martin takes the early flight home from San Diego and catches his girlfriend Heidi “pre the act,” so to speak. Mitch walks into their bedroom and finds Heidi on the bed watching porn, and then sees two mostly-naked, blindfolded strangers come out of the bathroom ready to “doubleteam” his girlfriend. But the scene I’m really talking about, shortly after that traumatizing scene, is the one in which Mitch and Heidi are speaking in the kitchen after the blindfolded strangers incident. The doorbell rings, Heidi gets this “oh-no-I-forgot-about-that” look on her face, and Mitch answers the door. Outside the door, there’s a man with 70s looking curly hair and a cheesy outfit who says “Hello.” Mitch says “Yeah,” to which the man responds, in a very comfortable tone, “I’m here for the gang bang.”

So first of all, this tacky, doorbell ringing guy is actually played by Todd Phillips, the director of the film, who is credited for said performance as “Gang Bang Guy.” But more importantly, have we appropriated this Hollywood gem or what? Since Mariah and I live in a large apartment building, people have to call up so that we can buzz them into the lobby. It’s not uncommon, particularly for Jeff and Josh, to call up and say “I’m here for gang bang.” For me, at least, this NEVER gets old, and so I encourage all of you, next time you come over and need us to buzz you up, to say “I’m here for the gang bang.” It’ll lighten the mood and remind me of one of the greatest comedies Hollywood has ever produced.

Wimbledon?

2005-10-30T00:24:00.000-04:00

Of course, I haven’t even scratched the surface with that whole High Fidelity thing, but I spent today at St. Vincent College out in Latrobe playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament. And now the ubiquitous Saturday college football is on TV, so I’m thinking about sports movies. I know there are a lot of people out there who would bring up Rudy, Field of Dreams, Hoosiers, or even Major League here to my Any Given Sunday and Bend it Like Beckham, but I want to take a minute to talk about Wimbledon, that 2004 movie most people have never seen. I think that when people see something like that (it was billed as a romantic comedy for crying out loud), they assume automatically that it’s going to suck. Usually they’re right, but this time it isn’t so.

Instead, Wimbledon opens up with a rad and accurate voiceover describing the thought process of this likeable pro tennis player who is, of all things, an Englishman. As this is going on, you see the guy playing at some red-clay European event probably intended to resemble ATP tour’s actual Monte-Carlo event. Red clay, of course, is the most authentic, the most hard-core surface in pro tennis. There are professionals who could go through their whole careers without ever leaving the dirt. And even though (or perhaps, I’m willing to concede, because) events on that surface get horrible ratings in American and are famously unpopular here, that’s where we see our first glimpse of Peter Colt. This, for me, was an unexpected and creative way to start the film.

And it’s not just the beginning that’s good from a tennis player’s point of view. At no point in Wimbledon is there a scene in which someone practices in the pouring rain. Every other tennis movie I’ve seen includes such a scene, and any jackass who’s ever picked up a racquet knows that when tennis balls get wet, they simply don’t bounce. Therefore, it’s literally impossible to practice in the pouring rain. How does something so simple escape so many moviemakers? But this time, at least, it hasn’t.

Of course, I wouldn’t be talking about this if Mariah hadn’t suggested once when we were marooned in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport for something like 10 hours that we rent one of those portable DVD players and watch a movie right there in the departures gate. Wimbledon was quite a suitable movie for a situation like that because it allows its viewers to escape completely into the story of, well, mostly of Peter Colt, but also of Lizzie Bradbury (played by Kirsten Dunst), a famous American woman at the top of the sport. But anyway, viewers are able to escape into their story in part because it’s done in a clever way that’s funny without the usual tired jokes of the romantic comedy genre. It also helps that their little tryst doesn’t quite overshadow the tennis. The film manages to do all of this while depicting something of the tradition of Wimbledon and the frenzy which surrounds it in England.

Wimbledon brings to mind the greatest Wimbledons I can recall. A number of years ago, I watched Patrick Rafter beat Andre Agassi on the grass in what might be the best match I’ve ever seen. Agassi played the best tennis of his career, and Rafter dove all over centre court to produce what might be the greatest single-match performance of all time. As I watched that match in Mike E’s room, back when he lived with JJ, Megan, and Mariah in the Skyla place in Missoula, I was jumping up and down, cheering to the TV, etc. Those of you who know me understand that I’m not generally the sort of person who does things like that, but hey man, it was Wimbledon. For a little over two weeks, there exists a society over there in England where hordes of real, normal people watch, care about, know about, and talk about tennis. They get excited about it. Something like that, as you can imagine, is quite appealing to me, and my DVD copy of Wimbledon enables me to experience a taste of that society for an hour and a half whenever I feel like it. And if that doesn’t constitute a good sports movie, I don’t know what does.

In the beginning, there was High Fidelity

2005-10-27T00:48:00.000-04:00

Clearly, the logical place to start something like this is that film from the year 2000, that film entitled High Fidelity. Even if it didn’t bring about as original material the idea that what we read, listen to, and watch is important, certainly it gave a certain cinematic presence to it, or articulated it in ways the rest of us didn’t imagine. Its top-five lists and constant references to popular movies and music place it in the same genre as this potentially ill-fated blog. Without the popular culture surrounding it, the film High Fidelity couldn’t have existed in any meaningful way.

When I think actively about this movie, which I frequently do, I can’t help pondering the scene near the beginning of the film in which Rob and Dick are listening to “the new Belle & Sebastian” in the record store when Barry barges in and replaces Belle & Sebastian’s melodious melancholy with a mix tape populated by some kind of offensive 80s-sounding pop. Before Barry barges in, Dick lovingly and curiously mentions that what he and Rob are listening to is, in fact, “the new Belle & Sebastian.” I can’t help remembering at this point, from my own experience, Carolyn C’s awareness of said band in high school, and her presenting to several of us that album cover of “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant,” on which a woman seems to interrogate some manifestation of her own reflection. At any rate, I can recall Carolyn playing this music for us, and I can recall feeling as the result of this band’s work the same sort of comforting, homelike presence which Dick and Rob clearly experience in that early morning, workaday scene of High Fidelity. But then Barry comes in with his offensive mix tape, representing the mass of mainstream culture who have no appreciation for the harmonies of something like Belle & Sebastian. During that era, in the mid to late nineties, neither Carolyn nor I could very well have gone to school and talked to anyone about Belle & Sebastian. Bethel Park and Peters Township are not communities suited to the appreciation of that sort of cultural pleasure.

But apart from the Belle & Sebastian scene, the thing I revisit most frequently in High Fidelity has to be the scene featuring Rob standing outside, nearly under the L in the Chicago rain, yelling “Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let’s work it out!” toward his ex-girlfriend’s condensation-filled window. I’ve visited JJ and Megan’s place in Chicago and gone places on the L many times, and this scene seems to encapsulate that quintessentially Chicago experience while at the same time paying respect to the hurt everyone has felt at the breakup of some significant relationship. JJ and I have, at intervals too frequent to enumerate, recited this line to one another, albeit with mostly humorous intentions. Still, it’s at least a second something that resonates with the film’s audience, and this constitutes a presence in viewers’ minds that most films can’t claim to generate.