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!

Finals Fun

So we went to that Nationals game on Saturday, and it was a blast. I was hoping to have pictures to show you, but a) we forgot the camera and b) I can't figure out how to email myself pictures from my phone. You'll have to be content with this:

Clearly a ripoff of Milwaukee's inimitable Sausage Race, but kind of entertaining nonetheless. I bring it up only because of an exchange I witnessed while waiting in line for ice cream. While I was standing there, Honest Abe and Teddy walked by (I have a close-up picture of the latter on my phone...too bad you can't see it). A boy and girl, probably in fourth or fifth grade, were standing in front of me in line, and briefly got quite excited as the characters walked by and waved at them. The kids waved back and stared and uttered a few little exclamations, and after the giant-headed presidents had passed, the boy asked, "were those the Guinness guys?"

It was apparently a rhetorical question (of course those were the Guinness guys), and immediately they were on to something else. But I found it sad and entertaining.

The game was entertaining, too--we were in the first row, right behind the dugout, and could hear the Mets players yell at one another. The Nationals eventually lost, 6-2, having come within one strike of winning it in the 9th and then falling to pieces in the 12th. I also got my first-ever game used baseball (there were no kids around to give it away to that didn't already have one--that's how close to the action we were) and kind of an embarrassing picture of Omar Minaya that I wish I could share. Anyway, it was tremendous fun, and well worth the six hours in the car.

I took my first final of the semester, and third-to-last ever, this morning. It was Professional Responsibility, which is a worthless class the few moderately useful parts of which are entirely redundant with the MPRE (which I passed by, I'm sure, a much better margin than I'll have passed this exam). Utterly, soul-crushingly dull, and terrible to study for. Nothing against the professor or anyone else involved; it's just not a law school class, except that the ABA requires that it be one.

My last two finals, which I haven't started preparing for, should, well, not be that. And that's something.

Turning over a new leaf...eventually

Having received confirmation that Professor Morris has, in fact, found this blog--whether before or after yesterday's shout-out, it's impossible to say--I feel compelled to talk about something that matters. Something about politics or current events, or at least a kind of witty observation about human nature. You know.

So...look for that soon. Today I've got some petty whining about the sale of residential realty.

But before I get to that, on a point cryptically related to the above (the professor, not the whining), I've linked to my friend CS' blog, The Reliant, along the right side of this page. CS (sometimes she uses just her first name, sometimes just her last; we'll use neither to be safe) is a 1L here at UVA. She's brilliant, and also hilarious, though that second part doesn't come through all that well on her blog, which is all about things that really matter. Someday, I hope to understand enough about international politics to make it all the way through an entry like the one from March 12. Very much worth a link nonetheless; maybe you'll get what she's talking about. And there's always the chance that she'll say something characteristically funny. At the very least, you'll think I know smart people, making me appear smarter by extension.

So we're selling our house. I'm a bit sad to be doing so in the first place; I like this house, and it's about twice as large as the sort of place we're likely to end up getting in Chicago (and cost us about 60% as much money as we're likely to spend there). But here's something you don't hear much about (actually, it's something that everybody talks about when they're going through it, but then if you're not going through it--as you aren't--you just sit there and get annoyed and roll your eyes when other people talk about it--as I am--and don't really think about it until you're going through it): selling one's home really sucks. I mean, really.

It's not just all the cleaning and putting things in storage, although that's taken hours and hours and was really quite a colossal pain in the rear. It's having to constantly keep things clean. And not just clean, but the kind of clean that gives the illusion that nobody actually lives here. I have to keep my toothbrush under the sink, for example. And make the bed.

On top of that, I have to be ready to leave at essentially every moment. Some stranger calls and says she's on her way, and I have to take my dog and get the hell out. Of my own home. I mean, I haven't had to do that yet (just went on the market today, in fact), but I will. And I won't be happy.

I mean, I can't complain too much about it, for no reason other than that our real estate agent is also my aunt. But man.

Until next time. I'll keep thinking.