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.