Everybody's a Critic

...but this is all about me right now. Let's try to stay focused on that.

Here we go!

Waitress
Our sixth (!) anniversary was Sunday, and we took in this little flick (for $6, at 10:15 a.m. at the AMC theater downtown--great deal). I thought it was fabulous.

So basically, Felicity is a strong-willed, down-home, too-cute-for-words waitress (and fantastic pie artist) somewhere in the deep south. She's the kind of person who just couldn't possibly exist (or there'd be a fluffy local news story about her every night of the week), but Russell plays it fabulously well. She has a terrible life and it's suddenly looking a lot worse, and she lets her frustration out by dreaming up new pies and naming them things like "I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong and I Don't Want Earl to Kill Me Pie." That's not really the point of the picture, but it's probably the most creative element. And it made me very hungry for pie.

For a good part of the movie, it looks like every man in this whole little world is dumb, hopelessly selfish and/or evil except Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, but Russell is so lovable and the dialogue between Russell and Fillion (and, to a lesser extent, between Russell and her two caricature-ish fellow waitresses, including late writer/director Adrienne Shelly) is so enjoyable that even that part is okay. And it gets better as it goes. Finally, Andy Griffith (who, in keeping with the gimmick, I should call "Andy Taylor," but that just seems silly since it was "The Andy Griffith Show" and all) just has all kinds of fun in his role as the crotchety old miser with (you find out once it turns out that not all men but Mal are evil) a heart of gold.

It does start out slow (the initial dialogue amongst the waitresses is awfully clunky), but it gets good fast and stays good. Grade: 3.14159.

Knocked Up
This was a really fun, enjoyable movie. There are a lot of things about it that are really creative. And funny, of course. But.

You know how is goes. Everyone keeps telling you how good a movie is. Your friends love it. It scores an unreal (for the genre) 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. And there's just no way it can live up to that.

So it felt a little flat to me, but I'm sure it's only compared to what I was expecting. All the characters except the main two and Paul Rudd's seemed underdeveloped to me. There's a girl that pops up at the stoner boys' house halfway through the movie for no apparent reason and with no apparent purpose (I'm guessing a lot of her character was left on the cutting room floor...but all of it probably should've been). Rudd's character and his wife have a falling-out that revolves around fantasy baseball (!) and really makes no sense at all. And even with the main story, after the initial one-night stand, it's hard to tell how the two characters can stand each other at all, hard to figure out exactly why they drift apart again, and even harder to understand how they come back together in the end.

Again, this is nit-picking. It's just that with reviews like this one got, you expect more than just another gross-out comedy. But, other than kind of a half-assed, weird pro-family message thrown in at the end, it's not. It's just very good for what it is. Grade: Dunno. Right between There's Something About Mary and 40 Year-Old Virgin.

UVA Law Professor K.
I had a very simple, very important (to me) request. You didn't see fit to respond with so much as a "no, sorry." For eight weeks, from April into June. Ten emails, a handful of phone calls, a note on your office door. No response at all. There's got to be a stronger term than "inexcusably unprofessional" for that, but that's what I'm going with. Grade: C+. I'd like it to be lower, but that would really throw off the curve.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
This is not a blog about politics. This is not a review about politics. I like to try to keep myself informed a little bit, though, so I picked up Obama's 2006 book about politicky things.

He's a great writer. Really, at least for a non-professional. He has some really interesting ways of expressing things. Unfortunately, I'd like to say "ideas" in place of "ways of expressing things," but I can't, because there aren't any actual ideas in this book. Alternate titles could be The High-School-Graduation-Speech Dullness of 'Hope' or The Joy of Equivocation. Obama is so careful not to offend anybody and not to take an actual stance on anything controversial, you'd think he'd been planning to run for President or something. He does go way out on a limb in coming out against the war, and spends an awful lot of time patting himself on the back. In fact, Obama comes off as a saint in the book...just a really boring one. The patron saint of wet-naps or something. But he is a good, engaging writer, and I'd really like to read what he'd write if he didn't care (or at least wasn't obsessed with) what quite literally everyone in the country would think of it. Grade: Thumbs sideways.

BAR/BRI this week
I don't want to name names or talk about too many details or anything, because I'm not into being mean for the sake of being mean. But the lecture today was basically the worst thing I've ever experienced (I've led a sheltered life, but still). And more of the same tomorrow. Huzzah! Grade: Zero. Zero. Zero. Again, for your notes, Zero.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"
Who goes and reviews a five-year-old movie? Charlie Kaufman films, I find, are either terrible (I won't say which one or you'll never respect me again, but I really hated it) or great (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, still my favorite movie ever). This, I thought, was one of the great ones. Whatever happened to Rising Star Sam Rockwell? Grade: um, let's say 12.

Okay, so Len Kasper is my Non-Sexual Man Crush

There's so much more complaining I could do about BAR/BRI and this whole process. But there's really no point, and it's boring. I'll say this, though: there's something kind of shady about purchasing education from (and having your practice work "graded" by) an organization that has an incentive to induce you to purchase more education. Think about that. And then go through BAR/BRI when your time comes anyway, because they've made sure you really don't have a choice.

Okay, so I did a little more complaining.

The parents come into town tomorrow, and then my lovely wife (to stay, finally, thank goodness) and my mother-in-law on Thursday. These are good things. Nay, necessary things. I'm spending so much time by myself in this tiny little apartment that I'm pretty sure that given a few more days of this, I'd be drawing a face on and befriending a volleyball. If I even had a volleyball.

The Cubs, while they're the only one of the two baseball teams in this city that I can watch without wanting to vomit a little (and then to think that this man has children!), also are a really, really bad baseball team. I keep thinking, and everybody else does too, that they've got to get better sometime soon, and they do play in the worst division in baseball (where, as of this writing, they're a scant five games out of first). But they've been so terrible, it's getting harder and harder to imagine.

But, I've discovered, there's at least one member of the Cubs organization that's doing his job really, really well, and that's broadcaster Len Kasper. See, if you don't watch much baseball (why are you still reading?), you should know that most baseball announcers and color commentators currently are, well, terrible. They tend to be former players at some level, by and large, and yet tend to know very, very little about the game itself. There's a lot of senseless blather, a lot of "in my day" nonsense. A bizarre fear of most statistics. A little bit of latent racism (there's an unnerving tendency for funny little white guys who can't actually play to be labeled "scrappy" and athletic African American or Latino guys who can to be "lazy"). You know, fun stuff like that.

Kasper's different. First, he's young (36, give or take), and a real live professional broadcaster (most play-by-play guys are, to be fair, but the very worst offenders, like The Hawk, are emphatically not). Second, he actually focuses on the game (whenever he's allowed to, with mandated diversions such as last night, when Larry the Cable Guy wasted 15 minutes of my life in the booth). Third, and most importantly, he understands the game the way people who are paid to present and analyze the game should. He knows the importance of on base percentage, and drawing a walk every now and then.

The best thing about Kasper, and I'm basing this on precisely one moment in time, is that he does his homework. Broadcasters, and baseball media folk in general, have this tendency to go with their gut and make stuff up. Watching Twins games on MLB.TV, I've heard the opposing teams' broadcasters say things about Twins players that are plainly false, and could have been verified with an internet connection and approximately three free seconds. In contrast, earlier tonight, Kasper wanted to know a certain statistic. He said what all broadcasters say, which is something like "I don't know what the Cubs' batting average is this year in extra innings, but it sure seems like they struggle," only then, Kasper got on his laptop, pulled up the best site in the world, and found out what he wanted to know. You just don't know how unusual this is. Baseball-reference.com should be the single most important resource for anyone who works in the game, and most of them seem never even to have heard of it. Unfortunately, he's teamed with Bob Brenly, a horrible manager and a worse-than-average commentator. But that's how it goes.

As Mike was just mentioning to me a moment ago, there's one great baseball announcer left. And Vin Scully can't last forever. What Kasper doesn't have is that classic, soothing sort of baseball voice; but did Vin always have that? I'm hoping that Kasper keeps it up for another 40 or 50 years and finds his unique voice, and then he can be like a stathead version of Vin Scully.

Also, Scully can't rock like this. Or this. Heh. (Actually, if you ever wondered what "Folsom Prison Blues" would sound like performed live karaoke style with every last ounce of soul sucked out of it, click on the second link. It's still mildly entertaining, and I'm not sure whether that's because it's so bad or something else.)

I wish I hadn't lost my passport, and I wish someone would buy our house already.

So, as I've said, I've been sitting around with some time on my hands, and I've looked more than I should at this site. The comments (particularly the long strings of comments after any associate-salary-related post) are terribly depressing. These people are apparently among the top young lawyers in the country, or at least have weaseled their way into the top law firms in the country, but almost to a person they're petty, greedy, offensive, and in many ways just plain foolish. It's become to me kind of like what Jerry Springer is to some people--I know I should look away, and that I'd be happier and healthier for it, but I can't.

To bed!

So bored.

It's not that I haven't had time to post. As much work as studying for the bar exam is (and there's really a lot to do), if you've only got one single thing to focus on in your entire life, odds are you'll be able to find time to do that one thing and much more besides. And with my beautiful wife and dumb but adorable dog still sweltering down in Charlottesville, with not having a whole lot of money, and with most of my friends busy with the same thing I am (only on different schedules), bar review has pretty much been my one thing. So I've had the time...just haven't had anything to say. Because, you know, all I'm doing is bar review.

Studying for the bar exam is dreadful. There're no two ways about that. You're spoken to like an eight-year-old about things 90% of which you already learned in law school, some 50% of which are so dumbed-down for bar exam purposes as to actually have been made blatantly false, and at the end of the day you're likely to have forgotten most of it anyway. For you visually oriented people, it's really very much like this, only much, much less funny.



I'm sure the exam itself will be markedly less pleasant than even this. But then I'll go to Europe and be happy for two weeks.

I almost feel bad about posting this, because this guy was so obviously trying to draw otherwise undeserved national attention to himself, and it's an awful example for the kids that play baseball for him and all that (not that the five people who will watch it on here add appreciably to the two million or so who have seen it on YouTube or the untold millions who saw it on SportsCenter, but it's the principle of the thing). But nonetheless, it's pretty funny.



Still probably not quite as good as this one from last season. This one was slightly more creative, but not nearly as crazy (crazy though it was). But enough of that.

I know I had something more to say, but it's gone right through my already empty head. I suppose that's good; maybe I'll remember and come back in something less than three weeks.