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.

These shoes are three hundred f^&%ing dollars.

Saw 300 on Saturday night. That movie sucked hard. Powerful hard. It was a lot like Braveheart, if Braveheart had been written, produced and directed by developmentally challenged seven year-olds who had played a lot of really unrealistically violent video games rather than by a drunken anti-Semite who happens to be really, really good at making movies.

On Friday we had about a dozen friends over for a four-days-late birthday party. The classic combination of wine, gourmet pizza, cookies and leftover birthday cake. It was a great time. Not much more to say about it, except some of my friends showed me the video below. There's a whole lot of amateur crap masquerading as comedy on YouTube, but this almost makes it all worthwhile. Some dirty language and stuff, and it gets better as it goes:


We had our first Libel Show run through last night. We have another tonight and one tomorrow before the show opens on Wednesday. At the end of this week (Saturday through Friday), I'll have spent approximately 42 hours in Caplin Auditorium, around the same amount of time sleeping, perhaps eight hours in class, and precisely 0 hours studying. In other words, it'll be the best week ever, and then I'll sleep for a day or so.

Past my peak

Among baseball geeks, there's a school of thought (formed, basically, by exaggerating the importance of and grossly misapplying a real statistical trend) that essentially holds that age 27 is the ideal, peak-performance year for a ballplayer. It's been inflated by some to the point where a player's "age-27 season" has kind of a mystical, magical quality to it.

On the other hand, another, more realistic group says that a player's "peak years" run right up through age 32. So I've got five good years left in me.

I'm not thrilled to be spending my birthday in Libel Show rehearsals until 10:00 p.m., but there are worse things. I mean, I'm sure there are going to be people at the school at that time that will be, like, studying and stuff. No one I know (or care to), but people.

When I said away back in February that I'd be bringing you stuff from other places that I find funny, I never would have guessed that the very second one I brought to you would be a stand-up comedienne, or, even less likely, a ventriloquist, but I find this woman kind of awkwardly hilarious (it's a bit raunchy, but just a bit):



Her name (as it may say in that clip) is Nina Conti. We watched For Your Consideration two nights ago, and while it had its moments, I found it really disappointingly lazy for a Christopher Guest film (basically Waiting for Guffman goes Hollywood and loses most of its wit and charm on the way). But Conti (with her monkey) plays a weather woman on the local a.m. news program, and there's a lengthy clip of her doing her material in the bonus features, and I think the DVD is worth a look just for her. Cute and funny. And really a very talented ventriloquist, for whatever that's worth.

Off to continue "enjoying" my "birthday."

Kids, imagination, and tragedy, take two

I think the best book I ever read as a kid was Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, which I read in either third or fourth grade. It seems most people I know around my age read it at some point and have at least a vague memory of it. I wasn't exactly averse to reading as a kid, but I remember attacking that book like no other. It's the story of a boy and girl, both just a year or two older than I was then, who develop a powerful friendship and help each other through difficulties at school and at home by imagining a rich fantasy world that they create in the nearby woods. The girl in particular, Leslie, is an unusually endearing character; a bit awkward and bizarre but astoundingly self-confident and imaginative, she becomes in an odd way sort of the wise old sage to the boy's (Jess') naive apprentice--though they're the same age--teaching him how to use his imagination and talents to enliven and enrich his otherwise awkward and frustrating preadolescent life. Then real life intervenes, in a surprising and heartbreaking way.

It's hard to describe how deeply this book affected me way back when, though I suppose the fact that I remember it so well almost twenty years later gives you a hint. The characters were so well drawn (for a children's book, especially) that I was completely engrossed. I felt like Jess, and I really, really wanted a friend like Leslie (as I suspect almost every boy that age does). And it was the first book I remember reading--in fact, probably the first story I ever came across in any medium--in which real-life tragedy strikes a "good guy" (let alone one I could really identify with). I cried, a lot, and had to have a long talk with my mom about it. I don't think I was the same for a few days after that, which, when you consider how quickly kids recover, was really something for a little book.

So when I saw the trailer for the Disney film based on the book, I was (to overstate it slightly) offended. The book was about fantasy as an aspect of a lively imagination, not about fantasy as a film genre. The trailer, which you can see here, and other advertisements promise a non-stop adventure with trolls and other creatures (possibly even robots?), a la Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. That's a complete bastardization of the book's heart and message--in other words, pretty much how you expect Disney to roll.

But, praise be, it was the marketing firm that ruined it, not the filmmakers (and actually, the filmmakers have disavowed any connection with those terrible ads). Aside from the fact that the film took place in 2007 rather than 1977 and has just a bit of awful Hillary Duff-like pop music, I felt very much like I was back in third or fourth grade reading the book. The few fantasy elements that are actually depicted are merely (and clearly) representations of the children's imagination, and take up a very small portion of the film. And when the movie takes its tragic turn (which I fear parents will be unprepared for, thanks to those ads), it's handled very, very well. I cried again--not quite as much as when I read the book, perhaps, but that's because I already knew the ending, not because I'm too mature for it or any such crap. This is a good film for anyone of any age that has at least some memory of once being a kid. So that means you.

One thing about this film, and all kids' movies where the main characters are outcasts: they're too pretty. I know 5th-8th grade is tough for everybody, but no one who looks like this:


and has any sort of personality at all is going to be made fun of much. The above is AnnaSophia Robb, who was also Violet Beauregarde in the excellent remake of Charlie in the Chocolate Factory and is going to be a star for at least the next couple years and possibly many more (but at age 13 you can never tell), as Leslie. The thing is, though, she's so engaging and likable that it's impossible not to suspend one's disbelief over the fact that she's supposed to be a nerd who gets ostracized just because her family doesn't own a television. It's hard to imagine any child other than Dakota Fanning getting as much out of this (already excellent) role as she does. And who wants to see yet another Dakota Fanning flick?

The boy, Josh Hutcherson from Zathura (which I will never see), does almost equally well in a less shiny but equally important featured role. Evil Terminator Robert Patrick, who once kicked the lifeless corpse of X-Files square in the head for an entire, painful season, plays the first 3/4 of the movie rather listlessly, but really shines in the final scenes. And Zooey Deschanel, who was adorable opposite Will Ferrell in Elf, is almost equally adorable here in a small but important role as the kids' hippie music teacher.

All in all, this is a great film, for kids (who are old enough to handle it) and for everybody else, whether you loved the book as a kid as I did or never heard of it. I'll be buying the DVD when it comes out, and it'll get more than a few viewings well before our children-to-be are old enough to see it.

In other news, my beautiful wife just learned that she was accepted into the University of Chicago's Master of Arts in the Humanities Program for next year. Huzzah for her! I'm very proud, and alternatives to sitting in a condo watching TV all day are good.

A Collection of Clearly Connected, Non-Random Items

This is my all-time favorite SportsCenter commercial (and there have been so many great ones):



I went to see Pan's Labyrinth tonight with my beautiful wife. It was gory, and weird, and subtitled, and fabulous. I cried. (I cry at movies sometimes...I'm okay with that.) I probably wouldn't be able to sit through it again, but I'd recommend it to anyone who could handle, say, the first eleven minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

When we were waiting in line for popcorn--which is really the only reason we go to the movies rather than waiting for the DVD--we discovered that waiting behind us was one of Charlottesville's three biggest stars. No, not Dave Matthews, and not John Grisham. It was none other than Howie Long, star of many enjoyable commercials and such action-packed cinematical smash hits as Firestorm.



He's much taller than he looks on TV, but I suppose one should expect that of an action superstar (I heard he used to be a decent football player, too, and they're sometimes kinda tall). He was also very scruffy, and oblivious--the poor girl behind the counter must've said "I can help the next person" half a dozen times before she finally said "Mr. Long?" in a kind of politely irritated voice.

I mean, I shouldn't make fun of the guy, except for that Firestorm thing. Seems like a good guy, from what one can tell (which is to say, from nothing at all), and of the two most visible personalities on the Fox Sports NFL pregame show, he's the one who doesn't typically have me reevaluating the merits of eugenics. So, it was good to see ol' Howie. I guess. Honestly, I'll have forgotten it by next week. My mother, sister, and wife saw (-slash-stalked) Dave Matthews on the downtown mall some three months ago, and will never forget it. I'm pretty sure my little sister's life has been forever changed.

That's pretty much all I got. Here's an old picture of my dog: