Love, love that film.
Here ends my cogent film criticism.
I've already watched one movie today. It can't top Tremors.
We really enjoyed it, but then stayed up way too late watching other Netflix comedies.
Mrs. K-sky and I started xXx, in which Vin Diesel has a very serious discussion about anarchy with the bad guy, who leads a criminal group called "Anarchy 99." As a conversational languor, it does a lot to vary the pace in what is otherwise a series of Absolutely Batshit Sequences That Someone Thought It Would Be Fun to See (they were right). We stopped after 90 minutes with a 40-minute third act left to go and decided to stretch out the pleasure.
I loved Bernie, and wrote about it at Kotsko's joint.
Is it so sad though? He did (hopefully this isn't too spoilery) commit a very serious crime.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm on the record as being no fan of prisons, but I also have problems with the idea that it's fine to kill a person everyone else in the community doesn't like.
If everybody has to not like that person, that's a pretty big collective action problem.
I think it's fine to have spoilers in the thread. Should I say so in the OP?
Because he's been in there for 16 years, now, which seems insane.
I consider the abusive relationship to be somewhat mitigating. I don't consider him innocent, though.
I don't think anybody considers him innocent, even himself. Once you stuff a body on a freezer, you pretty well should figure you're done something wrong.
Step up from the wood chipper though.
Given the guy's job, he should have buried her under another grave.
In fairness, this was a guy who'd probably stuffed quite a few bodies into freezers.
If I called you up in the middle of the night and asked you to help me dispose of a body, would you be a friend?
Interesting to see that Shirley McLaine is in it. Way back when, a very young and very stunning McLaine starred in Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble with Harry, a movie about an offbeat collection of characters' attempts to deal with a dead body. Worth seeing if you haven't.
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Tomorrow I have to waste a day doing some kind of stupid "outreach" thing at a local high school that I agreed to do in a moment of stupidity. Presumably I'm not supposed to tell them not to go to grad school or what a major pain in the ass many of my cow-orkers have been. What should I tell them?
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20: "everything you know about the death of the dinosaurs is wrong."
Oh, this is probably too early for pause/play-abuse. I've added Bernie to my instant queue and would watch it now except apparently high school days begin really early. Who knew?
20: to pick a college where they won't be drowning in student debt.
These people are paying insane amounts of money for tuition at their fancy-ass high-school anyway, I think, so presumably that isn't an issue.
18: I'd probably ask nosy questions first.
24: oh! Then you should tell them to follow their dreams whatever they are, and no matter how unremunerative and dependent on endless parental support they might be.
20: "Don't fly with luggage provided by a bikini model you've never met who says she loves you."
Or you could tell them that they're the problem, spraypaint "eat the rich" on the wall of the classroom, and peel out in one of their cars.
My answer was going to be like 27, but Moby got there first.
26, 28: Or you could just tell them to give you some money.
Did the people who asked you to do this say anything about what they wanted you to say?
Print out this comment from a rural primary care doctor, tell them a personal story about something you love and that excites you about your work, and tell them they only get one life.
And that if they can live it without crushing debt, it'll be a lot more fun.
tell them a personal story about something you love and that excites you about your work
"Today, I'm here to talk about a little show called Veronica Mars"
Make lots of references to current fads, and always use the article 'the', as in 'the Justin Timberlake' and 'the angry birds'.
Ask the girls to raise their hands if they're over 18, and then do the "call me" hand gesture and mouth the words.
Honk the teacher on the breast and say "a-ooga!"
"Okay, who here likes waffles?!?!?" and then just start whipping 'em at the kids frisbee style.
Oh, and bring waffles.
Open up a tin of hissing Madagascar cockroaches and tell them you've locked all the exits, and no one is going anywhere until all of your preciouses are safely back in the tin.
"I like two things in life, kids. Drinkin', fuckin', and cussin'."
[ wait ]
"DID I SAY I LIKED COUNTIN'?"
Show them how you can lift a cinder block by chains attached to your nipple rings.
Tell them about the time you lost your virginity.
Do you have a t-shirt cannon, essear?
Or I guess whatever kind of cannon.
That has been retrofitted to hold kittens?
If he doesn't he can just go down to his local ship's chandler and pick one up.
"I'm going to write a problem on the board. If you can't solve it in twenty-five minutes, one of you will die. Still think science is for nerds???"
Do the "I said brrr! It's cold in here! There must be some clovers in the atmosphere," cheer and dance routine.
"ABC: A Always, B Be, C Calculating."
Show them how you can suction a cup around your mouth until it leaves a perfect red circle.
If you start a fire, pick the right moment.
Tell them that for a limited time, they may invest funds in your new company, Intrade.
There's always the whole monkey-in-a-rocket routine. That did wonders to promote STEM careers in the '60s.
Wear roller skates and overalls and act out The Warriors.
Make fun of celebrities with diseases.
Do what others have found to make for a successful and memorable classroom visit: bring a fucksaw.
Ask all the minority students to stand up, and then launch into a forty minute shaggy dog story.
57: like, use diseases to make fun of celebrities? "Hey Travolta: DIABETES! Hah. You look like an asshole now."
Do what others have found to make for a successful and memorable classroom visit: bring a fucksaw.
Then fire it out of the cannon!
"hey Michael J Fox! How's your PARKINSON'S? Hahahahahaha"
Wait, these are rich kids, right? Obviously what you need to do is steal all their fancy watches.
"Betcha don't think much about SICKLE CELL ANEMIA, Hanks!"
Wear a black unitard and act out some Walt Whitman poetry.
Just wear a black unitard. Make them recite the poetry. (heebie's such a rookie.)
Oh man, if you can get them to do the whole stand-on-their-desks o captain my captain thing I don't even.
Tell them stories of Alaska. You know the ones.
Wear a big necklace-clock and make them call you Flava.
Oh, wait, you're a physicist: PINK FLOYD LASER SHOW!
Divide them in half, and then in half again, and so on into infinitesimally small pieces, to illustrate how limits work.
71 gets it right. Or maybe the dorm party from Real Genius with the pool and the cosmetologists? One of the two.
Tell them faeries are real. Then prove it.
Use a bow and arrow to shoot an apple off the head of one of the kittens. Weigh the kitten down with the cinder block if your aim isn't great.
Show them highlights from America's Funniest Home Videos.
No shit, essear, tell us about Denise Milani.
I wonder how much butter you could buy with departmental funds...
Show them how fast you can text message.
77: and then do a google search for her with the kids.
Would you feel uncomfortable showing them some porn? If so, bring wine coolers.
You do know Aramaic, don't you? I though you said you had a PhD.
Do the thing where you're like, "Good morning, everyone!" [muted response] "No, that wasn't nearly good enough. Let's try it again. I said, GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE!"
Kids love that.
High school kids these days are pretty into face tattoos, too.
Make them pledge allegiance to the flag.
You should explain the Harlem Shake to them.
Show them how, topologically, you can remove your underwear without removing your pants.
Show them how many marshmallows you can stuff in your mouth and still say "fuzzy bunny".
Bring them bug juice. And kosher cookies. Then say a bracha and eat.
Marshmallows! Do the marshmallow test with them. But dose the marshmallows with LSD.
Do the Stanford Prison Experiment on them!
I mean, after you dose the kids with LSD.
Then the Milgram Experiment, but with real shocks.
Make everybody sit cross-legged in a circle then try and get them to open up about any past satanic ritual abuse.
Whatever you do, do it wearing vampire teeth.
And bring those wax tubes filled with sugar water. Those are excellent ice breakers.
A pickaxe is an even better ice breaker.
Have them line up according to how many people they've slept with, so that you can tailor your talk more specifically to whether they're studs, or sluts, or prudes, or whatever.
Jetpack is right. Open the wax cylinders with a pickaxe. The kids will thank you.
French braid all the girls' hair.
Read them Vonnegut. Linger over the phrase "wide open beaver."
Do 'light as a feather, stiff as a board' and try to communicate with any kid from the school that died in the past five yeas.
Do you have any pamphlets about communism, essear?
Get at least one student pregnant.
Tell them they can have class outside, but then summon a tornado. Tell them you got your godlike powers by studying hard and avoiding snacks.
A pickaxe is an even better ice breaker.
Sure, but if you're going to use an icebreaker you might as well go all out.
Get the giggles until you can't complete the dirty limerick you started telling them
Arrive on a lama. Insist it is a camel. Then admit, under duress, that it's a dromedary.
And then, at the end, say "the aristocrats!"
Check their moles for the ABCDs: asymmetry, border, color and diameter.
Invite them to sit in your lap. Give them blessings.
I can only assume essear's absence from the thread is due to him furiously taking notes on these suggestions.
Tell them about Spanx and Shapewear. It's physics.
Can you juggle chainsaws? Swallow swords? Shoot ping-pong balls from your vagina?
I though you said you had a PhD.
Tell them spoilers to the new Twilight movie.
Don't be afraid to wing it. But make sure your powerpoint times out to the second.
But make sure your powerpoint times out to the second as it shoots out of your vagina.
I CAN'T FUCKING SPELL "THOUGHT"!
I thought you had a PhD.
Make them take the super-long Meyers-Briggs, and then throw them away and set the trash can on fire. Probably cue up the Pink Floyd.
Hold the cinderblock over your head while the Floyd is playing, like Lloyd Dobler but with the crazy eyes.
Friend them all on Facebook. Post a group photo and caption it "My besties!"
See how many wooden spoons you can go through.
Tell them, in painstaking detail, about the politics and pecking order in your department. Make sure that you leave nothing out. Nothing at all.
The most important thing is to be well-rested. Go to bed two hours ago.
Or, if you're still up, make sure you have two stiff drinks at 5 am and then do two lines of coke right before you enter the classroom. Pretend that you're Robin Williams. Or Robin Gibb. Whichever, really.
Tell them to imagine that the campus is the Large Hadron Collider. Make them run laps.
Scream, "FASTER, YOU LITTLE BITCHES! WE'LL NEVER WIN A NOBEL IF YOU'RE SO FUCKING LAZY!"
Read them Bridge To Terabithia.
Mix a drink. Take your shoes off. Clip your toenails. Stay awhile.
Write equations on the window in a grease pencil. Say nothing. Not a word. Leave the moment the bell rings.
The most important thing is to be well-rested. Go to bed two hours ago.
I think he did, actually. Hopefully he'll have time to check back on the thread in the morning.
Do the hokey pokey and then turn yourself around.
No, seriously, you should have the Wall of Science thing from Bozos play over the PA. Man, woman, child, all are up against the wall of science!
You'll have them blinking in astonishment across the face of time.
Think any of them are Unfogged readers? Find out by beginning your talk with a hearty "WHO WANTS TO SEX MUTOMBO!"
These suggestions have been fantastic.
This thread has lifted my Monday morning spirits.
my Monday morning spirits
Hardcore.
Nice thread, all.
It's not even 8 am and I'm already out and about! Maybe my job isn't usually so bad after all.
Write on the blackboard, "My Personal Quest for the God Particle". The rest you can improvise.
140: Robyn Bird.
This thread is the best.
Pretend non-verbally to be the Higgs Boson. Don't leave until they guess what you are.
Augh pwned.
Set up a dunking booth that seems like the fun carnival kind, but is actually the will-the-witch-drown? kind.
Ask one of the cool kids if the cool kids still meet out back behind the library to smoke cigarettes before Civics.
Wear furry cloven hoof feet, shoved into your shoes, and mince around, and add a prosthetic forked tongue to your real tongue.
Ask one of the cool kids if the cool kids still meet at the Peach Pit to share a malted with the prettiest gal in school.
Bring a Lunchable and then show off how cool your new-fangled lunch is.
The NYT magazine had an article partly about Lunchables. The guy who invented them more or less admits they were a horrible thing to foist upon humanity. The article also mentions Hilary Clinton's love of Dr. Pepper so I am voting for her if she runs next time.
Tell them someone you know has invented a truly novel sex act. Ask them all to guess what it might be. Then tell them.
The kids super-collided essear, I guess.
Essear isn't used to waking up so early and came home and took a long nap. And now has to finish writing a normal lecture for tomorrow.
I talked to 3 sections of one class and found one totally engaged and fun to talk to, one completely zoned out and uninterested, and one somewhere in between. The contrast was kind of weird, although I wonder if it was just a function of the time of day-- the after-lunch class was the one that paid no attention at all. I also talked to one small "advanced topics" class who asked really remarkably sharp questions.
Mighta been something else. Did you run out of kittens for the cannon?
essear's veldtish explanations from complex human behaviors are typical of a physicist.
Were your nipples tearing from the cinder blocks?
Uh oh maybe the unitard got not-so-fresh.
I just read this thread and I have to say that you all offered essear which is pretty much uniformly awful.
Essear, I hope you didn't do any of that.
We offered essear that they might know essear. There is awfulness in the knowing of essear as there is awfulness in the knowing of the mountain, or war. In essear is the beating heart of life lived. So we offered essear.
I remember when I could put together three sentences successively, none of which contained any mistakes.
176: I still maintain that 27 is good advice.
But Moby, they had met when she made the request, hadn't they?
I didn't think they ever actually met.
Wouldn't it be spooky if he was actually talking to Manti Te'o that whole time?
Weird coincidence.
Let's ask. Essear, have you met Denise Milani?
I wonder if the purported Denise Milani used a talkbox on the phone, just 'cuz Frampton. He probably gets that a lot.
Thank you. I've been trying to figure out how to make a "Frampton Comes Alive"-related joke and failing.
It would be fair to say that, in the end, she did not feel like he do.
essear's summation: "I am that I am. I am the rock of ages, thou cannot move I at all. I am the son of david, thou cannot move I at all. I am that I am, I am, I am, I am."
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Movies!
Spoilers, but this movie is seen for the art, and the way the narrative is told. I started crying during the opening credits, and never let up, mostly for the fucking beauty.
And the opening credits? Our lead, the mother of the wolf children, is a type:not cute or beautiful, but ordinary Japanese. Miyazaki uses the design a lot. This, and other artistic choices made in the open, reassured me I was in the hands of an artist with a good heart.
So, ok, I told you spoilers, werewolf boy and girl raised near the mountains, which one is going all Call of the Wild, and which will repress the wolf and become human. Well, sheeet. Mark Schilling, who reviews movies for the Japan Times, and is an American and shallow feminist, gave it only three of five stars for "predictability."
Wrong, Mark, 5 stars. What is neat and disturbing about Wolf Children is the process (and the real point), the little scenes and gestures that shows the way socialization and de-socialization, usually gendered, happens with children.
The boy and girl start equally wolf. Little wolf-girl likes catching snakes, laughs and shows snakes to girlfriends, girlfriends run away, wolfgirl stops catching snakes, becomes popular. Do I really blame the patriarchy? Maybe
Little wolfboy doesn't stop catching snakes. Fuck em all. Fuck em all hard. I don't need any of them. They'd hate me if they knew, and that's their fault. Bye.
Little wolfgirl:"Never ever let them know, because I need them"
Lots of little scenes of mother raising children, making choices, favoring one over the other. Close watching could be rewarded.
So should these roles be reversed? Should wolfgirl run wild and free and alone on the mountain? Miyazaki would do that, in fact Miyazaki did several times. But isn't that just a pandering wish-fulfillment fantasy for girls and women who will never ever make that choice? After eight years watching at this blog, I could never write a woman as a loner hero. Not honestly.
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Come to think of that's unfair.
Not to Miyazaki, who is a pandering hack, but to Hosoda, the writer/director of Wolf Children.
Because the mother is a loner hero herself, driven to the mountain by a cruel society.
And the movie is all about the mother.
Wolf Children is available at Funimation
I gotta write this. Spoilers but again, its the way it is visualized that counts, and it is beautiful.
So toward the end of the movie, wolfboy has stopped going to school and spends his days in the mountains. Mom has asked him to stick around tho he wants to go. He has been learning the land and how to read the skies, which are darkening this morning.
Mom and wolfdaughter are doing the morning ritual and wolf son is standing in the doorway. As wolfdaughter grabs her pack as heads for the bus, wolfboy says:"You should stay home with mom today." She glances at him and goes her way.
Bad storm, excitement danger lots of stuff even romance. Nobody is really at fault. Nobody says:"He was right." Not the point.
I could say mom and daughter didn't hear him, but that is not true. He just doesn't register. Why didn't he yell? Good question. Why couldn't they hear him?
Cause they live in different worlds in the same space.
Yeah, it's been around, in Tennessee Williams many times, but I have never seen this distance portrayed so simply and devastatingly.
And you know what? The way it is "filmed and acted" you don't feel all that sorry for the boy. For one thing, he has become kinda alien, barely speaking anymore. For another, pensive and wistful describe him.
It is mother and daughter, laughing and living their ordinary lives that break your heart in that scene, because they won't see what's coming.
And why can't they, why won't they? The movie asks that question.