Shit that pissed me off this week – 3/30
Anti-Gay group starts Dump Starbucks Campaign
You know, the whole “we don’t hate gay people” drumbeat gets pretty old when you keep doing hateful bullshit like this. The campiagn is in response to the following:
On January 12th, 2012, Starbucks issued a memorandum declaring that same-sex marriage ‘is core to who we are and what we value as a company.’
As annoyed as I am at this petition, I note that some other folks have started a “send a thank you card to Starbucks” campaign, which, as of this morning, had almost twenty times as many supporters. Their initial goal was 40,000. They are almost at 500,000, which doesn’t piss me off – it’s fantastic.
If you haven’t followed the link and thanked Starbucks yet, make sure you do. They earned it.
Alphabetical Movie – Home for the Holidays
Every time I watch Home for the Holidays, I enjoy it. When it comes time to watch the film again, I have absolutely no desire to do so. I’ve never been able to figure out why I respond that way.
Why are some films so re-watchable while other, arguably better, films are watched once and then all but forgotten? A lot of it is personal preference but still, I own a lot of movies that are better than The Mummy and yet, I’ve watched The Mummy more than most of them.
Alphabetical Movie – Hollywoodland
Hollywoodland is about the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of George Reeves. By “questionable,” I mean that there are some conspiracy theorists who believe he was murdered but the odds are pretty good that he killed himself.
I think the movie explores that fundamental disconnect most of us feel when we hear that someone who appeared to have everything to live for choose to end their life. It seems unimaginable that they would do such a thing.
Except for Kurt Cobain. That didn’t surprise anyone.
While many of us have contemplated suicide at some point, very few actually go so far as to attempt it. So while most of us can understand thinking about suicide, very few of us can actually understand doing it.
I was seeing a therapist a while back – because I’m as messed up as anyone else – and she asked me if I’d ever considered suicide. Sure, I said, I’d thought about it once or twice. But, I said, I’m an atheist. I don’t think that there is anything to look forward to after this life. Why would I ever consider giving up even a second of the one life that I have? It isn’t that life can’t suck. What’s the alternative, though? I may not believe in god but I still believe life is one hell of a gift and I’m not about to give up on it just because I had a shitty week.
So I look at George Reeves – who was freakin’ Superman – and I don’t get it. Even as the film shows me how low his life had sunk, it still doesn’t look too bad to me. Not so bad that death seemed like the best alternative.
I would imagine that is where the conspiracy theories come from. We all figure that if we had a job as awesome as being Superman, there is no way we’d kill ourselves. If we wouldn’t do it, there is no way he would do it. Someone else must have killed him! It’s the only thing that makes any sort of logical sense.
Except that people do things that don’t make any logical sense all the time. If we lived our lives purely based on logic, we’d never make rash decisions. Gambling Casinos would close up because we’d all do the basic math. Most of us would never have kids because we’d come to the logical conclusion that we didn’t have the slightest idea how to raise a child. Logic doesn’t rule our lives.
Yet we want George Reeve’s death to be logical because if Superman can end his life in such an illogical way, we could probably do it too.
And we could. The lesson in George Reeve’s suicide is that any one of us can reach that dark place – no matter how certain we are that we’d never find ourselves there. Reeves himself probably never imagined he’d kill himself.
But one night, against all logic, he did. So long, Superman.
Alphabetical Movie – Holiday Inn
I’ve seen Holiday Inn before so the following scene didn’t come as a shock to me but I want you to imagine that you are watching this film for the first time. Maybe this is your first time. That isn’t really important.
So, you are watching this movie for the first time and up to now, you have been watching a pleasant film about Bing Crosby trying to hide his girlfriend from Fred Astaire. I don’t blame him – who wouldn’t pick Fred Astaire over Bing Crosby?
Alphabetical movie – A History of Violence
About sixty minutes into this film, the two main characters have a fight that erupts into rough, angry sex on the stairs. “Angry Sex,” by the way, is not to be confused with “make-up sex.”
Make-up sex takes place when the fight is over and the couple has agreed that is it time to consummate their (at least temporarily) stable relationship with some nookie.
Angry sex, on the other hand, happens when two people are still angry. The fight has not ended but they are overpowered by lust just long enough to bump and grind before they get back to the business of fighting. If the movies are to be believed, angry sex is way better than make-up sex.
I can’t say that I have any first hand knowledge myself. I keep trying to test the hypothesis but every time I get my wife angry enough to explore angry sex, she just looks at my like I’m crazy.
I’m not sure it would even count anyway, since I’m only trying to get her angry so we can try having angry sex and that means I’m not actually angry. I could ask her if it was better afterwards but then I’d probably start another argument because she would be angry that I had gotten her angry just to have angry sex.
Obviously, I would completely spoil the sample if I told her about the plan ahead of time.
Which means I’ve had make-up sex but angry sex continues to elude me.
Science, sadly, offers no solutions. I can find absolutely no research on the difference in pleasure experienced. Biologists I follow regularly talk about fruit flies and ants and squid but they spend no time at all exploring whether these creatures are more satisfied after angry sex.
What are they doing with themselves? Don’t they realize that while they are doing all their research on genes and amino acids and stuff, they are completely failing to research what is actually important.
Meanwhile Maria Bello and Viggo Mortenson are going at it on the stairs while moviegoers watch and wonder if there is something missing from their sex lives.
I suppose that there is a lot of danger to this kind of research. If people discover that angry sex is really better, couples will be in arguments all the time. Is that the kind of society we want? A society filled with people fighting on airplanes and then sneaking off to the lavatory to join the mile high club (and most likely having to wait in a long line)?
The downsides are pretty obvious.
That is where the research can help, though. Suppose it turns out that there is a kind of sex that is better than angry sex or make-up sex. If science finds, for instance, that bear skin rug sex is the best sex, it would be a big problem for bears but not so much for anyone else.
I recognize the risks that these findings would have but it is important to remember that science is the search for what is true. If they find out that angry sex is the best sex, they cannot be held responsible for what the rest of us do with those findings. And if we are upset with them about it, we can just find ourselves a hot biologist and start a fight….
Alphabetical Movie – His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is about the newspaper business in the same way that Casablanca is about running a nightclub. The characters in the film work for a newspaper but what they really do is engage in entertainingly witty banter while, theoretically, doing their job.
Coming from a background in theatre (and by “background in theatre” I mean “I have a degree in theatre that I haven’t used in twenty years”), I find that I often look at films and jump to the conclusion that they are based on a play and when I jump to that conclusion, I’m usually right.
Alphabetical Movie – Highlander
I watched Highlander a lot last year in preparation to write “Highlander: The Musical.” The show was a part of the 2011 Minnesota Fringe Festival and did pretty well. We didn’t win any major awards but most of the people who watched it said they thought it was funny so – you know – go us.
Here’s the thing – and I know that I’m a bad geek when I say this – Highlander is not a very good movie.
Alphabetical Movie – High Noon
High Noon is known to be an allegory for the HUAC by Senator McCarthy. Gary Cooper searches a town for someone who will help him defeat a gang of men looking to kill him and finds that at the end of the day, he must face them on his own. It is a bleak film about a bleak time. Cooper looks old, tired and utterly alone.
Watching clips of the McCarthy hearings, the film looks like a pretty well constructed allegory.
Shit that pissed me off this week – 3/2
Forgive the absence of my weekly bitch session – I’ve been on vacation for the last two weeks. Some of this stuff is a little old but I wanted to bitch about it anyway.
Alphabetical Movie – High Fidelity
I don’t read a lot of fiction. When someone asks me if I’ve read “The Hunger Games,” I respond with some variation of “I really want to” and then comment that my son read it and loved it. In fact, I have several friends who are published writers and to date, I’ve read none of their books.
I’m a pathetic excuse for a friend. I know that.
I actually enjoy fiction but the problem is, I also enjoy sleep. When I start reading a good book, I want to finish it. Immediately. If that means I have to stay up until 3:00 A.M. to finish it, that is what I will do.
I have the same problem with seasons of “Dexter.”
If I’m going to read fiction, I need to be sure that the sleep deprivation is worth it.
It is notable, then, that when I watched High Fidelity the first time, I really wanted to read the book. I enjoyed the film a lot but I knew there had to be more to the story in the book and, to the film’s credit, I wanted to know the rest of the story.
Reading the book may have been a mistake because while I still like the film, the book is one of the funniest I’ve ever read.
“High Fidelity” is one of the few books I’ve read that made me genuinely laugh out loud. I read humor books all the time and they certainly make me smile. This book made me laugh. In the middle of the night. When my wife was trying to sleep.
When thinking about it, getting someone to laugh out loud while reading to themselves is extremely hard. Reading is a private experience so we are programmed to keep it private. We don’t shout out in triumph when a character wins an important victory and if someone writes a good joke, we typically don’t bust out laughing.
So even though I’ve only read the book once, I remember “High Fidelity” because it made me react in a way most books don’t. When I re-watched the movie, I was thinking “I really should re-read this book.”
I’ve been encouraging my wife to read the book because she didn’t like the movie. She believes (rightly) that the main character is a man-child who is, for a large part of the film, pretty unlikable. I agree with her but like the character’s journey from man-child to (sort of) man.
After I watched the movie this time, she said she should really give the movie another try because I enjoy it and maybe she would like it better if she watched it again. She may be right.
Still, given the book has left a more lasting impression on me than the film, I feel she’d have a better experience with the story if she reads the book first.
Books and movies are different mediums. I don’t believe one is inherently superior to another although I imagine I’d get a lot of argument on that point of view. I believe there are times when the source material is better than the film and times when the film manages to surpass the source material. Frequently, I will argue that they are both good, but in vastly different ways.
In the case of High Fidelity, I can say that I recommend the movie. If you really want a good laugh, though, read the book.
Grail Diary 
