Was That Movie Supposed to Be Funny?

Last Friday, it dawned on me that the last time I had been to the movies was to see Tropic Thunder back in September, and even though Robert Downey Jr is a meal of an actor, I decided it was time to see something new.

I threw a dart at the newspaper, to decide which movie from the post-Oscar nightmare-scape to go see. The dart landed fortuitously on Sunshine Cleaning, the remix of the movie Little Miss Sunshine, but with Amy Adams instead of Steve Carell.

I suppose I should put up one of this obnoxious warnings: IF, FOR SOME REASON, YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT OF THIS EXTREMELY ORIGINAL MOVIE, STOP HERE. Seriously, you have never seen anything like it before... That is, if you haven't gone to the movies since 1924.

The idea is simple, two sisters come together to pick the last scraps off the rotting carcass that is their shattered lives. And there is plenty about fifteen minutes of black humour along the way. A solid fifty percent of this movie is close-up shots of Amy Adams about to cry — This movie is an actor's wet dream.

In hopes of making more money, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt (the sisters) open up a crime-scene clean up crew. In going around cleaning up the remains of other people, they learn to cope with the suicide of their own mother, who died like 20 friggin years before the events of the movie. I'm not particularly a huge fan of movies which are about people overcoming a traumatic life events which happened a long time ago... I'm looking at you, Wes Anderson! I will admit, that some of the cleaning scenes were pretty funny, but there are only like two of them in the movie.

The movie follows in the footsteps of Little Miss Sunshine, in its wry humour, and its themes of suicide and following your dreams despite the fact that you screwed them up years ago, and they are pointless anyway. It does tack on new themes like letting go of the past and abusive relationships, and Emily Blunt not noticing that the moderately attractive girl from 24 totally wants to get into her pants.

To sum it up, this movie might be worth seeing, if you are into emo crap (or if you like laughing at emo kids). I spent most of the movie not sure whether I was laughing with the movie makers, or at them. So if you are looking for a good cry, wait a week to see that not even Hugh Jackman looks good in sideburns. Oh, topless Hugh Jackman makes everything better.

The Worst Post Ever

This winter just won't quit. While driving to vist my family for Easter, I was pelted with a "wintery mix,' which is not the assortment of holiday candy my sister thinks it is. I guess God must be pretty mad for the death of his son/self (alternate joke for Jewish readers: Yahweh must be mad at the whole slavery thing). I don't know if you have ever encountered sleet, I'm not sure if people have it outside of New England, but imagine if the weather can't decide which it would rather do: rain or snow. Instead, soggy wads of snow cascade from the sky, spattering on your windshield while you hydroplane.

But I survived, which is the important thing, especially when there are pirates out there. Why are there pirates!? Sure, piracy has been rampant in other parts of the world, but Americans haven't seen pirates in decades (unless you count privateers, which I don't). How can I maintain my blissfully ignorant image of pirates as people who wear eye patches, search for treasure, and occasionally walk into bars, when I am forced to face the fact that there are real pirates out there?

Anyway, I figured I'd get that off my chest. At least there is going to be a new Matthew McConaughey movie, and I'm totally not going to embed a trailer because they won't let me.

Stinkerton out!

Rage Down: Fake Fake Doctors and Women with Balls

I haven't posted a while, so today I bring you a fast breaking rage straight to whatever you kids are tweeting with these days.

First, Dr House M.D. completely defied me with who they decided to kill off this season. I won't give anything away, but it suffices to say that I assume they made this decision because the actor left to pursue his career (and only one actor on that show has a career). Now I'm not counting myself out just yet, maybe the writers on House will take a page out of J.K. Rowling's books and keep one-upping themselves. So this season, two people will die. Next season, a character people actually care about will die. Finally, for the series finale, Hugh Laurie will have to diagnose patients while dodging the frightful curses of Lord Voldemort, who has been brought back from the dead with the blood of Omar Epps.

Now, completely changing pace, lets talk about basketball. This weekend, the Huskies (men) were kicked out of the NCAA finals by Michigan State University. If you ask me, Detroit needs to spend less time training basketballers and more time teaching them how to make cars that run for more than four years. What are we here at Uconn going to do without our boys! All we have left is the best womens team in NCAA history. Great! That is like being the winner of the talent portion of the Miss America Pageant! I don't care how smart, beautiful and talented they are, if they aren't going to run off to the NBA before graduating, I'm just not interested.

Finally, I'd would like to take a second to say: Banana Nut Cheerios... teehee.

My New BFF

While Stinkerton may be my partner in crime and rage filled blogging, I think I may have stumbled upon my new potential BFF (Best Friend Forever for all you old people). I am referring to YouTube's jimmy0010. I'm not sure how old Master 0010 is, but I'm pretty sure we could have a good time hangin' round the park throwing sticks in front of roller bladers. His hair style might change from time to time, but his quirky anger never fades. A bit of Ricky Gervais, a bit of British angst, and a whole lot of rage. And maybe a bit Adam Lambert without the guyliner?

See for yourself.

I'd have to agree, it is a bit mental that the Queen's never had a cream egg.



I have also noticed that there always is some guy in the back of the bus playing music on his speakers and have frequently noticed crying women on buses.



Lovin' the new doo Jimmy.

So come on Jimmy, be my new BFF. I think I might be kinda older than you, but it's cool, yo, I have babysitting experience.

Maybe I should get to screen writing

Why? Because I'm pretty damn sure that I could come up with a more interesting story while on the toilet than James Gray and Ric Menello did for the movie Two Lovers. This post will be entirely devoted to crapshow that is this movie, so if you don't know want to know what happens (as if you couldn't figure it out within the first five minutes), then don't read. I guess I should throw in some of these:

*SPOILER ALERT**88**@#(*$_()@$*!!-------------------------------------

Now that you've been appropriately warned, here's the plot. Joaquin Pheonix plays this messed up guy named Leonard who lives in his parents apartment. He works at his father's dry cleaning store and was apparently once engaged but now is bipolar and tries to kill himself by jumping off a boardwalk, which is only a few feet above the water. Nice. His parents are buddies with another dry cleaning family and are coming up with a business deal for the two stores. They just happen to have a daughter, Sandra, who is kinda obsessed with Leonard because she once saw him dance with his mom. The two have a thing and she falls totally in love with him. Meanwhile, Leonard falls in love with his neighbor Michelle, played by the ever (not so) convincing Gwyneth Paltrow. Michelle, a drug addicted law firm assistant, is having an affair with her boss-who of course, has a wife and family. In the end, Michelle gets her boss to leave his family for her and Leonard winds up getting engaged to Sandra. Aww, everyone's happy, right? No. Not me. Here are my top reasons for not getting the hype:

1) Hmmm, I feel like I might have seen this movie before? Oh yeah, Match point. Except Match point was more interesting and kept my attention for longer than two minutes at a time.

2) The casting. Yes, Phoenix did a really good job, and so did Vinessa Shaw who played Sandra. However, how old are these people and how old are they meant to be? All of them either living at home or pretending to be about 25? Well, I remember seeing Paltrow playing the same types of rolls 10 years ago, so I'm a little unconvinced. Has Paltrow ever played anything other than a straight blond haired object of someone's affection? I think the only thing I've ever really liked her in was Shakespeare in Love. Her acting was pretty bad and so was her over the top New York accent. I really had a hard time believing that Phoenix was supposed to be whatever age he was supposed to be. 

3) The screenplay. How many movies are there about women in dead end affairs hoping that their lovers will leave their families for them? A whole lot. If you were to write a text book about how these scenes are typically done in movies, wouldn't you include a piece that goes something like this?

Woman to friend: You just don't understand. I know, this is awful, but he's different. He's a really nice guy. You don't think I'm crazy do you? What am I doing?

Friend says either: No, you're not crazy

OR

End it now, for your own sake and his family's.

Woman: But I love him. And he's promised that he's going to leave his wife for me. He promised! (Begins crying, maybe storms off)

And that's what Two Lovers did. Exactly. No variation of its own, nothing new, nothing surprising, just boring and entirely predictable. And cheezy, in a bad way, not in an awww my heart melted way. 

At the end, Leonard buys a ring for Michelle. However, once he realizes that she's going off with her boss, he tries to throw it into the water. He walks into the sea, and somehow a pair of gloves that Sandra gave him fall out of his pocket and into the water. He slowly picks up the gloves and realizes that he still has her. Oh, and then he magically finds the ring again so he can conveniently give it to Sandra. Didn't see that one coming!

4) This would never happen in real life. About 30 minutes into this movie I could tell that it was written by a man. Why? Because there was an utter lack of understanding of how a real woman would react to Leonard's stalkerish ways in real life. He's tried to kill himself a few times, lives in a creepy room, looks kind of like Big Foot, and you're expecting me to believe that two beautiful women become obsessed with him? Not just kinda like him, or flirt with him, but develop immediate attachments to him in the period of a couple of weeks? 

Leonard asks Michelle into his apartment after she gets in a fight with her father. The two chat in a friendly, neighborly way. Fine. But then, Leonard follows her to the train station, gets on her train, gets off at her stop, and accompanies her to work. She offers him her phone number and he starts to text and call her right away. What? Do you know how this would go down in real life? Michelle would be friendly to Leonard, but would avoid directly giving him her number unless asked. Being stalked is not really sweet, but a bit sketchy. She doesn't even show any signs of apprehension. Sandra, on the other hand, is a normal girl who apparently has guys chasing her. Yet, she wants to "fix" Leonard? Do men really think that all women are that weak and need to mother someone at all times? What would have happened if Leonard had been a woman, and Michelle and Sandra were two guys. Would Michelle's male character accept a nerdy, somewhat disturbed, woman chasing after him? I don't think so. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've always been wary of overly eager guys. It's just not attractive or mysterious, or whatever the screenwriters wanted it to be. Yes, his character was sweet but Michelle's instant BFF? Come on.

Best moment of the movie:

Michelle yells to Leonard: You're crazy!

Leonard looks up with crazy face: That's what they told me! (Because they did...) 

Unfortunately, I don't have a screen shot, but just remember, this is what Joaquin Phoenix looks like now: 

Daylight Savings? Sounds more like schmaylight schmavings to me

What is this time change business? I never used to question it that much in the past but I've come to realize that it's utterly useless. Twice a year our whole schedules get messed up because for some reason we need to have darkness or extra light. Friends get confused about lunch dates, people show up to work extra early or super late, I get confused as to which clocks I've already changed/need to be changed and am never sure which clock is tellin' the truth. 

From my understanding, Daylight Saving was introduced for a few reasons. It first appeared around World War I so that factory workers could actually spend some time outside in the sunshine after working hours were over. It also helps to reduce energy spent on artificial lighting. From almost everything I've read about it, Daylight Saving appears to be viewed more positively than "regular" time in the fall and winter (with the exception of that extra hour to sleep in, of course. Oh, and the fact that it gets too dark in the mornings so the time shift makes that less of a problem, or something). 

So, if more people like having that extra sunshine in the evening, then why bother "falling back" later in the year? Why not just stick with this schedule? I really don't think Earth gives a crap. Would it somehow mess up our calendar? I'm not really seeing the big deal here. Many countries in the world don't follow these stupid time changes and, as far as I know, they haven't exploded yet. Would anyone miss the time changes? I know I certainly wouldn't. If keeping the extra hour saves energy, then why bother going back in time at all? It can't possibly be just because of the morning light business. Farmers, construction workers, and all them other folks who tend to work outside don't tend to do as much outdoors during the colder months. 

I remember learning a theory about how businesses would try to figure out how to maximize worker productivity. Almost out of the blue, workers would begin to receive rewards or bonuses for good work. After the reward system was introduced, productivity would go up. After several months, productivity would remain reasonably high, but wasn't as great as right after the introduction because rewards were expected. So after about six months, the reward system was taken away, which left workers feeling like they no longer deserved to be rewarded. Again, productivity would rise. Eventually, the reward system could be introduced again. Is this what daylight savings is all about? Is our extra hour of sunshine in the spring just a reward for being good all winter? Then our schedules get mixed up again in the fall so we don't get into too much of a routine. Daylight Saving isn't mandatory so maybe there's some sort of mentality that if we don't work well, our daylight will be taken from us. 

Maybe what needs to change are our own attitudes towards schedules and the outdoors. We are obsessed with time, being on time, working for a certain period of time, waking up on time, etc. Of course being aware of time does increase productivity, but why should we need to rely on an enforced time change to make sure we're waking up at the right hours and going outside at a certain time of day? Shouldn't everyone be responsible for that?

Here's what I mean: 

You work in an office for eight hours a day (okay it's more like 9 hours because of your lunch break). Other than your lunch break, you are not able to leave the office unless you have an appointment of some sort. This means that in winter, the only time you will spend in the daylight, is the time it takes you to walk to your car in the morning and your trip to and from lunch. When you leave work, it will be pitch black outside. Your entire day has been spent in artificial light, looking at the fleeting sunlight outside. However, during the summer, you actually get a few hours of sunlight after you leave work. No wonder people suffer from seasonal depression! For half the year, you don't really get to see the sun, other than on weekends of course. Shouldn't employers be responsible for ensuring that workers get to spend time outside during the day? Wouldn't productivity levels be higher if employees felt good about life? Artificial light may temporarily alter moods, but it doesn't provide vitamin D. It doesn't provide a sense of fresh air or wind on your face. Altering the work schedule so that employees get at least 30 minutes outside during the day would probably help to increase attention levels and focus. It shouldn't be up to the government to force sunshine upon us-it should automatically be part of our lives. 

So please, get rid of this time change business. Stick with one time (preferably daylight savings) and we'll all be happy. Why bother with a tradition picked up from World War I?

Shepard Guide Us

I was debating between this title and "This Fairey Steals Your Money", but that's what this dude gets for having two professions as his name.

Shepard Fairey's plagerism case, has been pissing me off a lot lately. I don't really care that he stole the image for the Barack Obama "Hope," poster from a (probably underpaid) member of the Associated Press, but Shepard is really getting on my nerves by turning around and suing the Associated Press because of the famous "he who hast smelt it, is the party that dealt it" law.

I suppose I shouldn't expect anything less, since Shepard has made his name by skirting vandalism laws, to draw attention, and give himself that bad boy image that gets you laid. However, what is really getting to me, is this Huffington post post which Fairey posted, and which I heard of through this Bostonist article (It turns out that HuffPost is the Kevin Bacon of Blogs). In his post, Fairey defends his idea-thievery in true "the kid with glasses and straight A's totally cheated off of me" fashion. His arguments range from legally prudent douche-baggery to the proclamation of an truly disturbing world-view.

"...I did not think (and do not think) I needed permission to make an art piece using a reference photo. From the beginning, I openly acknowledged that my illustration of Obama was based on a reference photograph... which I found out much later was taken by Mannie Garcia..." It is not a reference if you do not cite your source, which you clearly cannot do if you don't know who created the work.

Admittedly, it takes balls to do this and then complain that "...people try to demean my Obama poster as being 'stolen' or that because I used a photo I 'cheated'." This is like having a conversation with a cheating student &mdash What you don't seem to understand, Shepard, is that you aren't cheating because you used Wikipedia, you are cheating because you passed someone else's work off as your own. You say that many great painters worked from photos, but the difference here is that paintings are made in a studio, and your poster was made in photoshop.

Almost universally, the only thing interesting about Fairey's work is his use and contrast of colors, and the actual images are always taken from other sources. So while the pictures are evocative and exciting (until you realize that this Fairey is a one trick pony), a remix loses a considerable amount of depth if the original is not available.

Fairey claims that he went to Rhode Island School of Design, an impressive alma mater &mdash "At RISD I was taught to draw from life, to draw from photo references..." Well it's too bad this fancy school didn't teach you to reference your works. This is surprising, in academia people are only worth as much as their ideas. So when you steal someone's ideas, you steal their lively-hood. It is a big deal. I also find it interesting that for all his defense of working from photo references, Fairey sure doesn't seem to have a very high opinion of photography.

On this point, Fairey's post isn't all juvenile, there is plenty of room for the asinine. He argues that it was okay to use the image because he wasn't reporting news, but instead using the image to promote Obama. This actually makes matters worse. Shepard Fairey was using the photo to make "a political statement" that he had no idea that Mannie Garcia was even cool with. Even though Mannie did turn out to be an Obama supporter, Shepard admits that he didn't even know Mannie's name when the poster was created, so he obviously had no respect for the photographer's intent. I know I would hate if Shepard Fairey somehow managed to use my words here to steal money from the AP in this lawsuit.

My personal favorite argument from Fairey is that Garcia's work would have "faded into obscurity" without the Obama poster. What sort of arrogant asshole sells himself as a gritty street artist, then asserts that he can get away with copying someone else because he is more famous? Although Fairey claims that he is defending the artistic expression from excessive copyright laws, this is actually what copyright laws are meant to do. Even though in recent years it seems like copyright laws are there to protect large company trademarks and the canned crap which we hear on the radio, they are actually there to protect the small time artist from having his (or her) work stolen by larger more famous bullies. Despite his image, Shepard Fairey is the bully in this case, and he is using his fame to control lesser known work.

Of course there is nothing wrong with being a bully, it is nearly impossible to be successful without being at least a little bit of a bully. But don't try to shove some idealistic crap down my throat so that I think that you are freeing my mind when you are really just giving me a wedgie.