Random Thoughts July 7th

-What a devastating loss for Andy Roddick the other day. I really felt like he outplayed Federer and deserved to win that one, but he just didn't capitalize on opportunities. In Bill Simmons' terminology this was a guillotine game: "Your team's hanging tough (hell, they might even be winning), but you can feel the inevitable breakdown coming, and you keep waiting for the guillotine to drop." That's exactly how I felt during this match.

-Obviously, Sarah Palin's resignation has been a pretty big news item over the past few weeks. I read her resignation letter, and it was about as incompetent and poorly written as a fourteen year old's book report. Her entire political career reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer somehow starts working at a business. I can see the GOP leaders sitting her down and saying "These speeches are incomprehensible. It's almost like you don't have any political experience at all."
-They Might Be Giants is a very underrated band. I just listened to their CD "The Spine" and was very impressed. Just throwing that out there.

-This has been the worst summer for movies in recent memory. Granted, the summer isn't usually known for high-quality fare, but this year seems like a huge let-down in contrast to last year (Iron Man, Dark Knight, Tropic Thunder, etc). Other than The Hangover and Star Trek, the movies haven't been good. I'm putting my hopes on two movies: Public Enemies and Inglorious Basterds. The reviews for Public Enemies have been good but not great (61% at Rotten Tomatoes last time I checked) but it's got great source material, a good director in Michael Mann, and a solid cast. Inglorious Basterds also looks entertaining from the trailers I've seen. I also like the fact that Samm Levine (Neil Schweiber from Freaks and Geeks) and B.J. Novak (Ryan from The Office) are in the cast. If neither of these are good, I might as well book my ticket for I Love You Beth Cooper.
-I'm generally a fan of Geico commercials. However, this one seems to defy logic:

Caveman, how could you possibly believe you're winning this game? You haven't gotten a serve in! I don't know what's more ridiculous, the fact that this Neanderthal thinks he's winning, or the fact that it's taken him three sets to realize the event is being sponsored by Geico.

-The Fourth of July is not America's "birthday". I'm not sure where people got this notion, but the colonies voted to succeed from Britain on July 2nd. In fact, John Adams predicted that people would celebrate July 2nd as a national holiday for years to come, but it ended up being July 4th because that was the date written on the Declaration of Independence.

-This Michael Jackson thing is bizarre. Is it just me, or was this guy absolutely despised by virtually everyone for the past six years? If Michael Jackson was brought up in conversation, you were guaranteed to hear some inappropriate jokes about pedophilia. After his death, people seem to have forgotten all about this part of him. I'm not saying that his eccentric personality should be the focus of all this news coverage, but where were these people five years ago, when he was the subject of ridicule and scorn? I think the guy's a good musician, but I just find it weird that the media and news coverage, as well as the average person you talk to about him, is lionizing him to the degree that they oftentimes don't even mention his personal life.

Review: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
-P.T. Barnum


Transformers 2 just broke some kind of opening day box-office record, despite terrible reviews and a questionable director at the helm. Sadly, I contributed to this box-office juggernaut, slapping down 9 bucks to see the premier of it last Wednesday. Not the best decision I've made as it turns out, but in a summer where the best thing to hit theaters is an animated film about a cranky old guy and his boy-scout companion, there aren't a lot of options.

Background: Transformers are possibly the coolest toy ever created. The great thing about the Transformers as toys was their complexity. Most toys are pretty simple. It's usually up to the person playing with them to create the action. The Transformers, however, were complex in and of themselves. Figuring out how to turn a robot into a tank is a fairly difficult task for your average eight year old. They even had stuff like the Constructicons, which you were able to put together to make one giant robot called Devastator (a watered down version was in this movie).

There was also a Transformers animated movie that came out in 1986 which I adored as a child. Definitely not the best movie to bring a ten year old to, but a classic in my book nonetheless. Ostensibly as a way to create a new line toys, the film was tasked with killing off most of the old characters to make room for newer, cooler Transformers. This included (spoiler warning) the death of Optimus Prime and the kind-of death of Megatron. Needless to say, having a beloved television character murdered by his greatest enemy was pretty controversial, and I can only imagining it being traumatizing to many a youngster.

Anyway, getting back to the movie at hand, I enjoyed the first live-action Transformers film when I first saw it. I didn't think it was epic, but that one did a fairly good job with a pretty fantastical premise. I was pretty skeptical going into this one. So, at the risk of rambling on, suffice it to say that I am a huge Transformers fan, and I plan on keeping my toys and my VHS copy of the 86' film until the day I die.

What Worked: The fight scenes are pretty solid. There's a lot of stuff blowing up, at any rate. I mean, there's really an absurd amount of damage dealt out: cities are ruined, entire aircraft carriers are taken out, etc. The CGI is pretty effective. Seeing the robots transform, complete with bad-ass sound effects, is always cool. Oh yeah and this worked pretty well:

Michael Bay may not have made a good movie,but he at least gave us a bevy of opportunities to ogle Megan Fox.

What Didn't Work: The movie is a sequel to the first movie, but it almost feels like a remake in the sense that there's so little that differentiates the two from each other. I don't have a great recollection of the specif plot points from Transformers 1, but I just had the nagging sense while watching that I had seen this movie before.

The Skids and Mudflaps characters have taken a beating for being racially insensitive caricatures of black people. I didn't catch this during the movie, but looking back on it I can totally see that. From Wikipedia: "The characters have been given ape-like appearance, speak in street-slang dialogue, and confess and inability to read." In response, Michael Bay said they were "good clean fun". Not much of a defense.

I mentioned Megan Fox in the "what worked" section solely for her looks. Her acting leaves a lot to be desired. I watched the Big Lebowski the other day, and her acting skills are reminiscent of Tara Reid's Bunny Lebowski in the scene where Maude shows the Dude the porn film with Uri(man that took a lot of explaining, but you know what I'm talking about).

The thing that bothered me the most was the overall tone of the film. A no point in the movie did I feel like there was any real danger. Even in the scene where Sam Whitwicky is on the verge of death , I was thinking "there's no way they're gonna let him die." Even when Optimus Prime died, I knew they'd somehow bring him back to life, I was just waiting to see how it happened. Last summer's big blockbuster, The Dark Knight, was the complete opposite. I had no idea what to expect. I wouldn't have been shocked if Batman had died, or if it was revealed that Alfred and the Joker had been in cahoots the whole time and were plotting to take over the world.

Best Scene: Probably the fight between Optimus Prime and the Decepticons where Optimus gets killed.

Worst Scene: Hmm, I guess I'll go with the entire sequence of events when Sam is at college. Really brutal stuff to sit through, especially at 1 in the morning. Starting with the Sam's dorm was being populated exclusively by models, then the episode with the mom smoking pot, leading up to the ridiculous exchange with the Decepticon disguised as a college student. Just a terrible sequence of events. I'm not expecting a movie about robots that can turn into cars to be picture-perfect representations of reality, but make an effort, man. Also, Transformers cannot turn into humans.

Best Lines: "This is top secret: do not tell my mother" was the only line that I truly laughed at. "Autobots roll out" was a nice throwback to the cheesy lines that dominated the television show.

Worst Lines: Pretty much anything that comes out of Sam's parents' mouths is terrible. These two were moderately funny in the first film, but incredibly annoying in this one.
I don't actually remember hearing this during the film, but in the trailers there's a part where Lennox, the head soldier guy, says, with apparent sincerity "We got a lot of fight coming up" or something along those lines. Terrible.

Unsung Hero: John Turturro is much better in this film than in the previous one. He provides some comic relief that is actually funny, unlike Sam's roomate, his parents, Skids and Mudflap, the annoying dog, etc.

Final Anaylsis: The problem with both of these Transformer movies is that they just do not work in live-action. Transformers 1 got by, I think, because of the novelty of the action sequences. By necessity, the brunt of the story has to fall on the humans in a live-action film, something which was not even close to being the case in the cartoons or the 86' movie. I wouldn't necessarily blame the actors either. Shia LaBeouf does an adequate job, John Turturro is good as usual, Fox is terrible, the army guys are alright. A word about Shia LaBeouf: I think he's a good actor. However, for the past two summers I have seen him in two atrocious movies (this one and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). He was also in Eagle Eye, which was awful.

What's really infuriating about this film is that the one storyline that could have saved the film was destroyed before it ever got off the ground. The Watchmen-esque story featuring the guy who wants to ban the Autobots because they are bringing the Decepticons to Earth was the one part of the plot with any ambiguity to it, but Michael Bay dissolved that one in the bluntest, stupidest way possible: he literally had the guy thrown out of a plane. That about sums up Michael Bay as a director. Rather than letting a nuanced, morally ambiguous plotline develop, Bay chucks it out of a plane.
Grade:3/10

Defining Yourself Through Pop Culture

Ordinarily, I think Facebook applications are fine. With things like Jetman, Scrabble (aka Lexulous), that March Madness Challenge thing, and Risk on the market, what's not to love? In the past few months, though, seemingly every time I log onto Facebook I get hit with a barrage of "which ______ are you quizzes." For example, my newsfeed right now is displaying "which Happy Days character are you", "which Friends character are you?", "which Seinfeld Character are you?" and "Which Wes Anderson character are you?" quizzes. In and of themselves, these quizzes are kind of fun I suppose. You answer some rudimentary questions which clearly correspond to how certain characters from these shows or movies would react, your results show up on your profile and the Facebook community gets a good laugh out of your similarity to Jack Bauer.


These quizzes are wildly popular. The primary "Which Friends character are you?" application has an astonishing 7,378 monthly users. The Seinfeld one has about 4,000. I think the number of people who sign onto these types of applications is indicative of a larger trend. The influence of pop culture has created a situation in which, for most people, it's not enough to be you. Everything about you-your persona, situation, life events,dating history etc.-has to be akin to someone else. It's not enough to be a drug-addicted history teacher in inner-city Brooklyn. You have to consciously model your behavior after Dan Dunne, Ryan Gosling's character in Half Nelson. You can't be any nerdy, anachronostic-looking high schooler: you have to be McLovin from Superbad. It's not enough to be a middle-aged, neurotic Jewish guy with a penchant for getting into absurd arguments: you have to be Larry David.

I remember reading a Chuck Klosterman article a few years ago about The Real World. In it, Klosterman wrote that people were initially intrigued by the show due to the uniqueness of the characters on it. After a few seasons, though, characters on the show started to group themselves into highly specific personality types, like "the angry, militant black guy" or "the extremely gay guy." I don't actively watch this show, but it makes sense: candidates for the show look at what has been popular in the past and try to play up these specific parts of their personality. I see the quizzes as an extension of this.

People tend to define themselves through pop culture. Anytime you see a popular or critically acclaimed film, chances are someone will comment on how relatable the characters were. On some level, this is why people go to the movies in the first place. Sure, entertainment is a big part of it, but it's also because we see ourselves on the screen. Who hasn't imagined himself swinging through the streets and battling criminals like Spiderman? What girl hasn't imagined themselves falling in love like Rachel McAdams in The Notebook? Who hasn't compared their group of friends to the gang on Seinfeld? The Facebook quizzes are popular because they provide confirmation (albeit artificial confirmation) that we are similar to our favorite characters. People would rather be analogous to Richie Tenenbaum or Chandler Bing instead of just being another random person.

Failblog, Spider Solitaire, and the Perils of Procrastination

We're enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much.
-George Herbert Walker Bush

Hello all...sorry I haven't posted in a few weeks, but I've had an absurd amount of work. Right now, I've got a paper on the Cultural Revolution in China due at midnight tonight. It's supposed to be 8 to 12 pages, which should have been no problem given that I had all day to do it. But rather than diligently working I have been procrastinating for hours. I've been doing two things: playing spider solitaire and laughing hysterically at failblog.org in the middle of the library as people look at me like I'm a lunatic.

First off, let me say that spider solitaire on the difficult level might be the hardest fucking game I've ever played. Has any human ever beat this thing? I played for a solid hour, and didn't come close. For some reason, I feel a bizarre correlation between my ability to conquer this beast and my ability to finish my paper. I'm convinced that once I win, the words will come flowing out of me and I'll bang out the paper in 20 minutes. Consequently, if anyone has any strategic advice, I'm all ears.

The second thing that has been taking up my time is failblog. This is a great site, but I wouldn't recommend going on it unless you have a good half-hour to kill. I actually put together my own, modeled after this girl in one of my classes who tried to pass off Wikipedia as a legitimate source. Pretty embarrassing, really. Check it out:
Alright, time to buckle down. I hear Mao Zedong calling my name. Peace...

Nostalgia Machine

I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory... and I didn't have a good time.
-Kicking and Screaming

Americans are obsessed with the past. Let me qualify that statement. We're not obsessed so much with history, but with cultural aspects of the extremely recent past. I'm hesitant to make such a sweeping generalization, but no matter where you look you can see some form of entertainment set, for no reasons other than nostalgia, ten to twenty years ago. Whether it's 80's day during school spirit week, some crappy VH1 show where third rate comedians discuss cultural relics from the years gone by, or a "Punk Goes 90's" compilation CD, at times it seems like we want to move backwards in time, not forwards.

Those who point this out (and by "those" I mean the Chuck Klosterman article I read which talked about this) often point to a number of forums that illustrate this phenomenom. Whether it's television shows like "The Wonder Years," "Freaks and Geeks," and “I Love the 80's"-like shows, films such as Napoleon Dynamite, Donnie Darko, and The Wedding Singer, or new music that deliberately tries to sound like old music (The Killers, Shiny Toy Guns, etc.), this stuff plays on an imagined, supposedly shared vision that we're all supposed to intrinsically identify with as part of our cultural heritage. It caters specifically to the apparent need people have to be nostalgic about the past. However, this kind of thing is marketed towards an impersonal, culture-specific past. A new phenomenon has sprung up that is doing something similar, yet operating on a far more personal level. In fact, it brings people's own pasts right onto their computer screen on a daily basis.

compare with:

Do you have a facebook?

Facebook is a form of instant nostalgia that can be accessed at any time. It is essentially a journal that documents your development via wall posts, photos, and a shit-load of applications. It allows you to view your own past as it is happening. What's more interesting, and creepier, is that anyone you happen to be friends with, or anyone within your network, has access to this information as well. Never before have we been able to reminisce so vividly about events that took place just a few hours ago. Not only that, but the constant stream of new photos, applications, and groups lets us experience nostalgia for our friends (or complete strangers) just as easily. It's a fascinating, post-modern phenomenon.

I think that Facebook is one of the better innovations of the internet era. Its ability to connect people across the world is astounding. However, FB creates an unusual situation: it allows people who no longer have a "normal" or "traditional" relationship to have a quasi-real one that is ultimately unfullfilling for both parties.

Let me use an example to illustrate . It’s 1986. Boston native Bill decides to attend MIT. Freshmen year, he meets Amy from California. They fall in love at orientation and are inseparable thereafter. Until disaster strikes; Amy has been spending so much time with Bill that she's failed three of her classes and kicked out of school. They are both crushed, as their relationship is effectively over unless one of them decides to pull some romantic comedy-esque shenanigans. During the next year, they exchange phone calls or send letters on an increasingly irregular basis. By the end of college, the two have, for all practical purposes, forgotten about each other.

Push the clock ahead twenty-three years. It’s 2009. The same situation occurs, yet something is drastically different in terms of their relationship post-Amy’s move. The advent of Facebook allows them to get a constant reminder of what they’ve lost. They regularly check each other’s pages, send each other messages, look at new pictures.

You might think that this situation is actually preferable to the original one. After all, these two people were so close at one point in their lives; it must be a positive that they now have an easy way to stay in touch. It could be argued, though, that Facebook is making things much worse. Unless Bill attempts some harebrained, Lloyd Dobbler-like move to California, their relationship is over. Sometimes, the best thing to do to get over someone is just to forget about them. I'm not suggesting that either one should pull an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type procedure and literally erase all memory of each other. But in this kind of situation it's very possible that Bill and Amy should, in the words of Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins, put the past away.

Facebook doesn’t allow for this though. When either Amy or Bill signs on it’s a virtual guarantee they’re checking out their former lover’s page. And this extends beyond the boyfriend/girlfriend paradigm. Say you used to be close with a group of people, but things fizzled out once college started. With Facebook, you can see your former best friends yucking it up without you on a daily basis. Or imagine an unrequited love interest from high school that you were friends with, but never had the balls to ask out. What about people who move to different states or countries? They are not allowed to forget about their prior life. Facebook is like the ghosts that visited Ebenezer Scrooge in a Christmas Carol, effortlessly taking us back to points in our life in an easy and often depressing way. It gives us a daily update of what we no longer have, or what we never had in the first place.

Clapping Man Thinks He's Some Kind of Hero

Get a load of this guy...


Nobody likes a braggart, and Mr. Kent "Toast" French is the epitome of a braggart. What makes it worse is that he's bragging about his ability to applaud. He's out there waving around some bullshit certificate like it's an Olympic medal. Give me a break, Toast. Being the fastest clapper in the world is nice, I guess. But how much of an accomplishment is it really? From what I've seen, the world of competitive clapping is a small one. Given a few weeks training time, I'm sure there are some pro baseball players who could out-clap the shit out of this fool. Also, he clearly hasn't been able to translate this into any discernible skill, unless you consider making terrible YouTube videos a skill. Next time I need to start a clap-gang, Toast will be the first guy I grab. Until then, keep clapping, friendo.

Final Four/Championship Game

I think it's safe to say that the Final Four and the championship game were a huge disappointment, at least from an entertainment perspective. The only drama in the last game was seeing how much UNC would win by.

-Kudos to the Tar Heels for putting the kibosh on a tough Michigan State team. Even though I hate them, especially Tyler "get me some tissues I'm crying again" Hansbrough, I have to admit they deserved it.

Not what I wanted to see...

-Danny Green is one of my most feared players in basketball. If I'm rooting against UNC, every time this guy so much as glances at the rim I get a little hot under the collar. I swear, I've seen him miss maybe 10 threes over the course of his career.

-The Villanova-UNC game brought up a debate I find myself having each time I watch a game where a team that normally makes threes is struggling. If you're Jay Wright,and your team can't make a shot, do you encourage the guys to keep shooting or do you try to figure out something else? There are solid arguments on both sides. On one hand, if you've advanced to the Final Four because of great shooting, it seems antithetical to go away from what has worked in the past. At the same time though, sometimes the shots you normally make just don't fall. I tend to side with the latter argument, depending on the situation. In that particular game, Nova would have given themselves a better chance if they started taking it to the bucket more. Lawson, Hansbrough, and Green were all in foul trouble. There comes a point in the game where you have to say, "We're not making threes. The seasons on the line. Let's try something different."

-Clark Kellog was atrocious throughout the tourney, especially in the Nova/UNC game (I missed the other game due to a tennis match). He seemed to be pulling phrases out of thin air. During one stretch, he referred to Ty Lawson's "rush hour handle." Umm, what? I'm guessing he's talking about the perturbing traffic situation and not the Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker series of films, but no one is sure at this point. During the same stretch, Kellog called Lawson a "high level custodian." I've conducted a number of informal polls and have scoured the internet, and no one has been able to explain to me how being a "high level custodian" is a positive characteristic of a basketball player. Also, in the championship game, he claimed that a player can't back up while boxing out. From my admittedly rudimentary understanding of the concept of boxing out, backing up is the prime component. Granted, my forays into boxing out are few and far between, so I could be dead wrong here.
-Bobby Frasor inexplicably pulled down an absurd amount of offensive rebounds in these two games. Actually, check that it's not inexplicable at all. The teams focus so much on keeping guys like Hansbrough and Deon Thompson that it's easy to forget about the squirrely little white guy.

-Good job by MSU to get to the title game, but what a poor showing in the championship. The Spartans turned the ball over on 21 of 89 possessions and were never in any position to win the game. I can't figure out if they just played that badly or if UNC is just much, much better.

-This year's One Shining Moment was sub-par. They showed the Scotty Reynolds shot against Pitt too early, for one thing. It also seemed like there was an excessive amount of Blake Griffin as well. To be fair, it's tough to work a Final Four that was essentially devoid of drama into a quality One Shining Moment.

Nothing could live up to the greatness of the 2002 One Shining Moment. I don't know why, but I love this one...


-I've had some horrible brackets before, but this year my level of incompetence reached an all time high. I'm in dead last in both of the brackets I had on Facebook, despite picking a completely different Final Four in each one. Ditto for the two brackets I actually put money on. Not one of my better efforts, but I feel confident about next year.

Anyway, I'm taking a break from writing about sports for a while, probably until the NBA playoffs start. Coming soon: a bunch of random shit and possibly a review of Watchmen if I get around to seeing it again. Speaking of film, very excited about Adventureland. I'm not going in hoping for the Citizen Kane of comedies, but for a spring release it looks solid. Ok, bye.