Tuesday December 6 2005 Arts & Entertainment, Personal

Llorando

Speaking of being a p—y: I was talking tonight to my friend Matt who’d come out to SF for a business trip, and we got on the subject of being subjected to weepy movies in public places. There is a short list of movies that it’s okay for guys to cry during: Brian’s Song, Old Yeller, and possibly Rudy. I don’t have the final ruling, but I believe Schindler’s List is acceptable, too.

(One thing I forgot to mention tonight: in the “Justice League” animated series, one of the recurring jokes is that the tough ex-marine Green Lantern John Stewart cries at the movie Old Yeller. See, because it’s his one weakness. Which is genius.)

The problem is watching one of these movies in public, like a theater or even worse, an airplane, and having to find a way to cover up the fact that it’s made you cry. For me, sometimes I go for the “I’m just wiping my glasses” maneuver, but these days I usually don’t even bother trying to cover it up. I’m way too over-sentimental and easily manipulated, and for me to deny it would be ridiculous so I’m not even going to try.

I can’t even say that it’s a case of me being all girly, because there have been more than a couple times where I’ve been mocked for crying at a movie by the woman I’d seen the movie with. For example, “Is everything okay? It was just Forrest Gump for crying out loud.”

So I figure: why not embrace it? I’m a big weepy baby. The following is a list of the things that make me cry. (I’m going to limit it to movies and books and the like, not obvious things like bullies, hot sauce, bouts of seasonal depression, nose-hair trimming gone awry, or the current administration. I’m also going to limit it to stuff that works on me consistently, not cheap-shot manipulative things like the aforementioned Forrest Gump, which I admit depressed the hell out of me the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen since then and was able to correctly identify it as Touched By An Angel-level crap.)

  • “The greatest honor of all is having you for a daughter” from Mulan
  • “My friends, you bow to no one” from The Return of the King
  • “I wonder if it remembers me” from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
  • “It’s been a tough year, Dad” from The Royal Tennenbaums
  • Completely random and unpredictable moments in Be Sweet by Roy Blount, Jr.
  • The end of an episode of “Cowboy Bebop” called “Speak Like a Child” where Faye sees a tape of herself as a child cheering her future self to greatness, and she says, “I can’t remember”
  • Finding Nemo in the bit where Marlin leaves Dory and she gets lost
  • The end of The Catcher in the Rye (but in my defense, I was in 7th grade)
  • The beginning of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius where he matter-of-factly talks about his mother’s cancer
  • The last chapter of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • The last scene of Pom Poko, when the man sheds his human disguise to run into a clearing and join a party of tanuki

There are most likely others that aren’t occuring to me now, but it’s good to get that out of my system and onto the internets. Passers-by can feel free to use the comments section to add their own, or mock me.

Update: Ones that got me but I didn’t list, and I’m not trying to cover up:

  • Grave of the Fireflies, because come on. That movie is designed to make you cry.
  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because I was having a very painful infected gall bladder attack
  • The bit in Microserfs where the mom types “MY DOTTR” on the screen, because that’s such a blatantly manipulative moment in a shallow, self-conscious and manipulative book that I can’t believe I ever liked it

Update 2: Because I just realized this looks suspiciously like your typical livejournal post, I suppose I should add: Mood: procrastinating.

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Monday December 5 2005 Arts & Entertainment, Television

That's a Little Cornball

It’s probably just because I’m a big p—y, but I think the best way for a TV series, movie, or any other piece of art to show that it’s got merit is in how it handles sentimentality.

And that’s yet another way that “Arrested Development” gets it exactly right. If you were cynical, you could say that tonight’s episode (“The Ocean Walker”) had all the in-jokes, continuity, and references to previous episodes that helped doom the series from the start — the “every episode I’ve seen is funny, but I’m coming into it too late to get caught up” syndrome. It’s got all the self-referential jokes required for post-modernist humor (including the still shot from Monster) (which was just genius). And it’s got everything you need to make it edgy, since it’s basically about a guy trying to have sex with a retarded woman and his family’s attempts to hide that fact so that they can steal her money.

But then the ending was just sweet, and done so well. To paraphrase Ron Howard, it was “such a nice moment” and a perfect ending to that storyline.

It reminds me of a movie I haven’t seen yet: Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. From what I’ve seen of Silverman’s stand-up routine in the past, I can tell that her whole schtick is taking the anti-PC shock-value routine and putting a little bit of a spin on it. And based on the reviews, it sounds as if the spin is there enough to be detected, but not enough to save the movie. One gag that keeps getting repeated in reviews is the line:

Recognizing the political incorrectness of using the term “retarded,” she facetiously corrects herself with “And by ‘retard,’ I mean ‘They can do anything.”

Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds like she just leaves the joke there — funny, but nothing more than a shock-value joke until you take it in the context of the rest of her show. The bigger joke is that her on-stage persona is so wide-eyed and self-involved and naive that she says something like that and really believes it.

I think that “Arrested Development” started with basically the same gag, but managed to work it into the episode for a real pay-off that’s genuinely sweet and romantic. (And then, of course, only lingered on it for a second before going back to an in-joke, because you don’t want to get too corny.)

The easiest comedy in the world is just doing a reverse on PC speak and patting yourself on the back for being “edgy.” Harder is dodging sensitive material altogether and still making it funny. Harder than that is doing the anti-PC thing for laughs and then layering a bigger message on top of it, like “South Park” and Silverman’s act. And then the hardest of all is to take that and add a genuine layer of sentimentality to it, without coming across as overly earnest and undermining your credibility as someone who’s able to see through the schmaltz.

That’s where “Arrested Development” is too good to be a sitcom, and why it turns out Fox really does suck, after all.

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Monday December 5 2005 Personal

Good Grief

A friend’s e-mail reminded me that it’s already the 5th of December. I keep thinking of this TV movie where Robert Hays gets a gold watch that can stop time and various hilarious hijinx ensue. If I had it, I think I’d just use it to get caught up on work and reading. Which of course raises no end of philosophical questions — in particular, would the internet continue to function if time had stopped for everyone else?

I’d intended to already have flight reservations for the trip back to GA for Christmas. A helpful travel tip: don’t wait until the second week of December to make flight reservations for Christmas, unless you like spending over $900 on plane tickets. I don’t (and really, can’t), so I had to wrestle travelocity to the ground and threaten to spit in its face and tickle it until it started peeing unless it gave me a cheaper flight. What I ended up with routes through Las Vegas, has me flying out the day before Christmas Eve, and still is over five hundred bucks. I just want to say again how much I hate airlines and flying in general.

But apart from that, how about that Christmas spirit, huh? There’s a chill in the air, the frost is lining the car windows, and the new GAP ads are starting up. TV comedians are already starting in with the seasonal “isn’t it funny how people don’t appreciate that Jews don’t celebrate Christmas?” material, and the ultra-violent and/or scatlogoical Rankin Bass parodies are making their way to the internets.

Since I’m going to be in SF for so long, I wonder if I might actually need to get a tree this year. In a depressing turn of events, Urban Outfitters is no longer selling the pathetic Charlie Brown Christmas tree. The alternative would be something that I’d have to find room for and then, I guess, decorate, and then have it just sit there without presents under it. Maybe I’ll just get into the Christmas Spirit by vacuuming instead. Bah!

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