August 2008 Archives
August 1, 2008
Bad Education
One principle of medieval warfare I’ve taken to heart is, “Know thy enemy.” Since I am a seething cauldron of hate, I’ve gotten to know quite a few people. Since the advent of Google (I’m no search-engine Johnny Come Lately, but in the pre-Google days, Internet-stalking was little more than a recipe for failure; say what you will about their indexing algorithms, they have hit the chewy nougat center of information-gathering for future serial killers) and the increased popularity of blogs and social networking sites, I’ve gotten to know more about certain enemies than I ever thought possible. I once found Owen’s DeviantArt page and, as such, was able to digest his alarming short stories. I’ve found more about The Manager than I ever thought possible. More importantly, I’ve dug deep into the world of the stupid blogger and have come out on the other side hating her more than ever.
One of her blog’s recurring statements: she teaches high school English to inner-city kids. She’s very proud of this, especially the “inner-city” part, because she thinks it gives her some kind of street cred or insight into this hoary netherworld. But here’s the recurring theme of these posts: she teaches very, very, very badly. She’s one of those people who will post excerpts of student work just to mock them, and not in a good-natured or loving way. (P.S.: she teaches them! isn’t the fact that they do so poorly at least a small reflection of her competence?) She’ll regale her captive audience with distressing stories about kids with serious psychological damage, structured as hilarious anecdotes about misplaced rage! But the absolute worst is when she basically comes out and says, “I have no interest in teaching these kids. I want to be a screenwriter, but teaching English in the inner-city was the only way I could get to L.A., so I guess I’ll have to put up with this miserable job.”
I know the following statement is, unfortunately, untrue, but this has always been my philosophy about teaching (whether it’s in public education or not): it’s a calling. You have to really want to teach these kids, you have to treat it as more than a job, because for a semester or year (or more), they’re the only guidance you have. You can justify it any way you want, but if you suck at your job or are thoroughly disinterested in it because you’re trying to pursue another career, that’s on you, not your students. You are officially a shitty teacher, and they have officially gotten a shitty education from you. Congratulations!
Over the years, I’ve had plenty of teachers who had failed to live their dreams. I had a few who genuinely wanted to be teachers. I had a few, especially the younger ones, who had that “checked-out” attitude of someone still trying to pursue an alternate career while “falling back” on teaching. Then there were the older ones who fell into teaching gigs by accident and wanted a place where they could drink on the job and collect a meager paycheck while doing as little as possible.
The only ones who had any impact were the older ones who once had dreams but had failed to achieve them; instead of growing old and bitter (like most of my college professors), these teachers poured all the energy they wished they could devote to their failed careers…into the classroom. They excited themselves about teaching a bunch of punk kids by looking through the prism of whatever they had failed to achieve — and through that, they somehow excited most of their students into learning.
So here we have the stupid blogger, in one of her many posts illustrating why she should not be allowed anywhere near a school, writing the following:
For the past two years I’ve had the same planning period - third. Third is the best planning period because it straddles our two lunch periods, so while everybody else gets 35 minutes to eat, I get two hours.
Has anyone else noticed where she went wrong? Here’s a hint: planning periods are for planning, not for extra-long lunches. This is the same person who has been known, on occasion, to gripe about — gasp! — her job encroaching on her free time, but when they are paying her to do that work, she elects to fuck off. Maybe this post, which explains her planning period has been moved to first, is some sort of punishment for, I dunno, taking two-hour lunches instead of using the planning period to do the work she’s paid to do.
She follows this up by saying the following:
- She would just sleep in, except her school wisely docks her pay if she doesn’t punch in by a certain, pre-school-starting time.
- Although she did start out using this planning period to do lesson-planning, handout-creating, and researching, that got boring! And she was oh so very tired!
- So she started watching movies via Netflix’s instant video thingamadoo.
- Oh, but she’s limited herself to documentaries, so that’s sort of like doing research.
She spends the rest of the post taking the “documentaries for research purposes” to its logical extreme, pretending that she has been using these documentaries all along to possibly show students while introducing concepts involving persuasive and expository writing. Believable! Especially the part about Super High Me, which is clearly something that could be shown in a public high school with no repercussions.
I’m a pretty spiteful guy. Maybe if I knew the stupid blogger in person and hated her, I’d try to semi-nonymously get her shitcanned. I’m actually tempted to do it anyway; her blog provides more than enough evidence to, at the very least, get her into assloads of trouble with her immediate superiors. But really, it’s not something to retaliate against. It’s something to mourn: a school teacher who devotes more time and energy to being a Hollywood nobody than to educating her students. It’s not bad to have dreams, but low-quality public-school teachers like this once again get me fist-shakingly mad at the state of education in this country. No child left behind…unless your teacher’s budding screenwriting career gets in the way!
Posted by Stan at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0) | Random Musings
August 4, 2008
Pitched
Last week, Amelia sent me a series of e-mails that went from interesting to scary faster than anything I’ve experienced recently. If you’ll remember, I’ve known her for awhile — so long, in fact, that she was a main character in this story before we were what you’d call friends, and definitely before she received an officially sanctioned Stan Has Issues™ fake name — instead, she got the less impressive Stan Has Issues™ generic description. Observant readers will also note that yes, we know each other personally, although obviously we haven’t seen each other personally in a few years. In fact, the bulk of our contact has been through e-mail, for no other reason than its convenience. We exchanged phone numbers while I was in L.A., we exchanged phone numbers once again when we reconnected after I’d left, and we exchanged phone numbers a third time that I don’t remember. So the phone never seemed like a scary thing…
…until now.
In general, I’m not a big phone-talker. I end up talking on the phone a lot, for long periods of time, by virtue of the fact that I’ve befriended people who ramble as endlessly and incoherently as I do, and by virtue of the fact that most of those people have either moved out-of-state or are just as lazy as I am when it comes to making a 20- or 60-minute drive, and by virtue of the fact that they’re too lazy/incompetent to just type it up in an e-mail (and are too lazy to read it when I do that). I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a double-edged sword. I don’t have any problem with the phone, but if given the choice I’d rather talk in person or write an e-mail.
This has worked pretty well with Amelia, the only person with whom I’m currently on speaking terms who enjoys my long, tedious e-mails. She sends equally long e-mails with the added challenge of never, ever using paragraphs to separate her ideas. It’s not hard to read, but it makes it very difficult to reply. I always feel like I miss something as I scan the original while writing a response.
E-mail became a problem last week, because she had a pitch meeting with Murdstone & Grinby coming up on Friday that she was ready to shit her pants about. For some reason — I don’t know if I should feel good about this or not — she believes I’m really smart, so she wanted to bounce some ideas off me and get some feedback. She asked me to play “studio exec” and try to assess not if the ideas were good so much as whether or not they’d make money. I flashed on William Goldman’s classic “Nobody knows anything” bit and thought, Hey, I am nobody! So I agreed to her little game, with some mild reservations because I feared her ideas would disappoint in some way — whether they seemed commercial or not — and it would diminish my respect for her.
She wrote back, asking if I wanted to do this through e-mail or over the phone, but something about the way she phrased it made me think the phone made her a little uncomfortable. Even though I’m lazy and just wanted her to type up all the ideas so I could think about them — I hate being put on the spot, especially if the ideas are terrible — I decided to keep the ball in her court. She wrote again, saying the phone would be easier because her fingers would explode before she could finish typing the thousands of ideas rattling around in her brain. But, she added, she “didn’t know if our relationship was ready for that step.”
I honestly still can’t tell whether or not she was being sarcastic. My immediate thought was, “But I’ve talked to you in person dozens of times,” followed immediately by, “What relationship? Are we dating and I just didn’t know?” I did the long-distance relationship thing before, but at that time I seemed to have a clearer idea of where things were headed. This came so far out of left field, it seemed to come out of right field (in actuality, it was so far left it had traveled the entire circumference of the planet).
So I tried to play it cool by completely ignoring the bit about the “relationship,” smoothly saying, “The phone’s fine with me,” and giving her my number for the fourth time in our relationship.
After some more awkward exchanges about when the best time for this conversation would be, I played the waiting game. Normally, waiting for a phone call would have made me more annoyed than nervous, but she tossed out the “R” word, so suddenly it felt like a first date — an excruciating, long-distance audition for some kind of future dating in the event that I move back to L.A. I sat in silence and tried to get into a relatively zen state so the stress didn’t cave in my skull, and when she called, I felt a strong urge to just not answer and make up some elaborate, far-fetched excuse as to why I had to miss her call and never, ever call her back.
Instead, I picked it up…
After an initial “I haven’t actually heard your voice in three years” moment of unease, we slipped back into our old routine. It’s amazing to think we even had an old routine, but I had forgotten how easy she is to listen to. You heard me right: she’s one of those people who can just talk, and I’ll just sit there listening and not giving a shit that I haven’t said anything for an hour. Compare that to Lucy, who frustrates me when she won’t give me a word in edgewise after five minutes. It’s just a difference in personality or articulation or something.
We didn’t have a one-sided conversation, though. We could have with no problem, but she forced me into an active role — she pitched these ideas and wanted to know how I felt. Her ideas… I don’t know if I want to say “to my surprise,” because I didn’t expect badness and I wanted them to be good, but I do tend to plan for the worst. Anyway, most of her ideas were…really fucking good. Commercial but not retarded, dense but cinematic, and a few of them really brought out some passion in her. In defense of my fawning all over her, while many of her ideas impressed me, some of them were kinda “meh” and one of them was a total dog (although she even admitted that).
Meanwhile, if this was some kind of dry-run phone-date, I flopped big-time. I had a hard time forming any kind of cogent argument for or against these ideas — I tried my best to stammer through my vague notions. Without having any clue what she intended to pitch, I couldn’t do any preliminary research. I just had to go with my gut, which said, “Awesome,” but chose not to elaborate.
The downside is, neither of us have a clue how her pitches went. I can’t/don’t want to go into details on all that, but she described the Murdstone meeting and one casual pitch session with an assistant she knows, and in both cases, things seem a little strange.
Posted by Stan at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em, Fumbling Attempts at Relationships
August 6, 2008
Hollywood Endings
So, okay, this is kind of an oldie-but-goodie, and it’s not what I’d call a “real” review, but I’m putting it in that category, anyway, just because it sorta is. I watched the 2004 movie The Final Cut today. For those who don’t remember or haven’t heard of it, it takes place in a not-too-distant future where people have biomechanical implants inserted into their brains at birth (or possibly before birth — it’s kind of unclear, which is one of my complaints) that turns every moment of their waking lives into video. Upon their death, editors cut pieces of your life into a nice, feature-length “rememory” (this is the movie’s word for it, not mine) for grieving friends and family members.
A nice concept with a shitload of moments that kinda rip off The Conversation, but at least they’re ripping off a good movie in the service of an interesting sci-fi premise. Unfortunately, as stated above, writer/director Omar Naim could have done a better job fleshing out the conceit of the film. He gives us the impression these chips are implanted after birth, yet on multiple occasions he treats us to footage of births (from the point of view of the baby). Although he shows us that the implant categorizes life moments (in helpful folders like “sleep,” “hygiene,” and “masturbation”), I found myself wondering how Robin Williams’ “cutter” character dealt with people’s faulty memories. Early in the film a grieving brother asks Williams to make sure to include a particular fishing trip. Is there a “fishing trips” category? All the brother can say is the summer the trip occurred. This isn’t like a three-month film shoot, which might yield 100 hours of footage; excluding eight daily hours of sleep, Williams would have to wade through about 1500 hours of footage to find this one particular trip.
You’re lucky I watched this movie a week ago and don’t remember much more to nitpick about; I remember feeling a lot of frustration, but I can only distinctly remember one more nitpick with the premise. And that is: we know these chips are very expensive, but we never get a reason why Williams’ parents would take out a loan to pay for one for their son. We don’t get enough of the outside world — aside from some cartoonish protesters — to understand how this implant has changed things. Aside from a few vague references (like a hellion who turned her life around the day she found out Someone Would Be Watching), we never get a sense of this implant as a status symbol or that it’s perceived as so useful that a middle-class family would go into debt to buy one. Him having a chip is portrayed as a Big Twist (even though it’s obvious from the first scene), but nothing about the movie convinced me that he would or should have one.
Those nitpicks marred a concept that, in better hands, could have made for one of the most thought-provoking sci-fi movies in decades. They didn’t completely destroy my enjoyment of the movie. The ending did, though. If you haven’t seen the movie but still think it’ll be good, don’t read on. I’m trying to explain why you shouldn’t waste your time, so if you ignore me and see it and think it sucks — hey, I warned you.
It goes like this: Jim Caviezel plays an ex-cutter (or assistant — another thing that’s not entirely clear), who keeps showing up around Robin Williams to make vague comments that one might perceive as threats. He’s sort of like the rival sound recordist in The Conversation, the one who keeps needling Caul about teaming up or giving some information about his secret gear and his setups. Except, you know, without the subtlety or purpose. Caviezel shows up haphazardly and implies he’s aligned with these protesters now; eventually, he turns into a plot generator, demanding footage from the EYE (I’m not making that up) Corporation’s recently deceased pedophile attorney. Yeah, I’m not making that up either. They think if they expose a lawyer as some kind of liar and fraud — shocking allegations, to be sure — it will take down EYE and these implants will no longer exist.
At first Williams refuses to hand over the footage, but through a series of strange coincidences, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend (Mira Sorvino) shoots the lawyer’s implant, destroying it and all the footage on it. Almost immediately after, we get the “Big Twist” that Williams has an implant. Offscreen, it dawns on Caviezel that if they shoot Williams and extract the chip, they can get the relevant pedo footage (from his viewing of it while editing) and save the world! So he follows Williams to an isolated cemetery (long story) and pulls a gun on him…
…and then, almost immediately, has a change of heart. He shoots the gun into the woods and whispers for him to run away. Williams stands there like a moron, at which point Caviezel’s not-at-all-menacing mercenary friend. It is seriously laughable how tiny, scrawny, and weasel-like this “tough guy” is — he’s like a modern Elisha Cook Jr., only Cook usually played unsuccessful mercenaries. This dude, whoever he is, is eminently successful in his goal of shooting Robin Williams dead.
The final scene has Caviezel frantically editing Williams’ footage and saying something vague like, “Your death won’t be for nothing!”
Here’s the problem: nothing the movie established about their relationship or Caviezel’s thin but very much existent character suggests a reason for Caviezel to back down. He’s portrayed as a guy who will do what he needs to in order to achieve a goal that’s bigger than him. We’re never given any reason to believe that he and Williams had a friendship (in fact, it seems like they were rivals when he still cut), and his backing down seems to go against what little we know about the character’s nature…
So I’m going to go ahead and blame it on Jesus. Because, you know, earlier in 2004, Jim Caviezel played Jesus in a movie that made a shitload of money. A shitload. And you can’t have Jesus, in his immediate follow-up, gun down Mork from Ork in cold blood. Or, at least, I can imagine some haggard production executive thinking that and forcing them to reshoot an ending that makes almost no sense. The Final Cut has a metric assload of problems, but nothing compared to its final moments, which undid all the good that came before it and turned a movie I would have admired for its ambition, despite its flaws, into a total piece of shit. Bravo!
I have nothing to back up my feelings on the tampered-with ending except that, from a story standpoint, the ending makes no sense. Caviezel is the heavy, not his sashaying hired gun. It comes down to the two of them, and Caviezel says throughout the entire movie, “You have to do this because it’s what’s right and it’s bigger than us,” and he bails at the very last second. Williams doesn’t run away and make it hard for him; Caviezel just pussies out for no discernible, character-motivated reason, then acts “shocked” when his pal does the dirty work for him, then goes right back to saying, “It’s bigger than us, so I’m glad we got the footage.” I would have almost accepted this ending if Caviezel had completed his change of heart by destroying Williams’ footage, as well; it still barely makes sense, but at least it’s somewhat consistent with Caviezel’s new attitude.
I know movies are as much about their marketing as anything else, but I guess I don’t look at it that way. Actors act. Caviezel can play Jesus and some nefarious protester. He’s an actor. He’s not actually Jesus, nor is he actually a guy who would gun down someone he knows in order to take down a big corporation. He should be allowed to play it like that, no matter what.
But hey, if I’m wrong and Naim intended to end the movie this way all along, it loses what little sympathy I have left. If that’s the case, it’s just shitty writing.
Posted by Stan at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0) | Reviews
August 8, 2008
Trip to the Post Office
I had to go down to the post office to mail a small package. What should have been a 10-minute errand (including drive time) turned into a 30-minute disaster, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed on this planet since the sinking of the Lusitania.
A few years ago, the post office installed a gigantic kiosk-machine that allows you to automatically do what you normally have to wait in line for years and have someone else do. It has a handy scale, prints out all the postage, and has a gigantic slot to put bulky packages and stuff into. It’s a massive time-saver because so many people fear technology, meaning there’s rarely a line to use the machine. I don’t mean to sound overly detailed or condescending, but I feel the need to explain because I do not believe these machines exist in every post office (for instance, another post office 10 minutes in the other direction doesn’t have one).
So I go to the machine, and I find two little kids, maybe six or seven years old, playing around with the machine, with no adult supervision anywhere to be found. When they first installed the machine, they had a random postal employee sit on a little stool to make sure people used it correctly. I wished someone like that had been around, but alas…
I said to the kids, “Excuse me,” trying to sound polite, gruff, and irritated at the same time.
Both of them turned around, stared at me slackjawed, then resumed their fucking around with the machine.
I don’t know the social etiquette of dealing with little kids. Honestly, it almost never comes up. I just know that I don’t want to be accused of something unsavory or illegal by following my heart and grabbing those kids and shoving them out of the way. So I just kinda…stood there, and contemplated whether or not I should just get in the damn line.
Fortunately, a few moments after I showed up, a kindly old postal employee came up next to me. We exchanged confused/annoyed looks, and then he tried in his kindly-old-man way to coax the kids away from the machine, or at least find out who they came to the post office with. They finally admitted they were waiting for “Mommy,” but they refused to move.
The kindly old man went into the waiting room and called, “Anybody out here got two kids waiting? We got an SOS.”
I shit you not — the mom was standing there, but she pretended not to hear. I watched her tense up with potential embarrassment even before she turned — after the postal clerk sighed and turned his back on her — and started making shooing motions at her apathetic kids.
I hate to get on my old-man soapbox and complain about parenting skills, but what else can I do? In my day, my mom would have smacked the shit out of my sister and me — publicly and awesomely and deservedly — if we had behaved like this. But, in fact, we wouldn’t have even gotten the chance, because she would have forced us to wait with her through the whole line, no matter how long and boring it seemed. And, hell, even if she had hypothetically let us run loose, we were well-trained enough by that age to know that if we were doing something flagrantly wrong, and Grown-Ups wanted us to stop, we’d fucking stop. To that end, I seemed to recall people in kindly-old-man authority positions being fucking assholes. None of this mamby-pamby, “Would you mind letting this gentleman use the machine, please?” Fuck that, man. I have vivid memories of balding men with snooty voices barking orders at me, and you know what? I deserved it, and I knew I deserved it. And again, in a hypothetical land where a situation had escalated to the point where a kindly old man came searching for my mom, she would have gotten out of line to deal with it, and I probably would have gotten the shit smacked out of me twice — once for misbehaving, once for making her have to wait in the line a second time.
Kids these days need to get smacked. Repeatedly. So do parents.
Posted by Stan at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
August 31, 2008
Book Review: The Timewaster Letters by Robert Popper
For years, BAFTA-winning writer/producer Robert Popper (Peep Show, Look Around You) has wasted both his time and others writing absurd letters to equally absurd corporations, organizations and government institutions. The Timewaster Letters compiles some of these letters for our amusement. It’s a slim book—less than 200 pages—that most people could enjoy over the course of an afternoon. It also contains the type of strange, breathless humor that’s hilarious but easy forgotten, which is not necessarily a criticism. It merely adds reread value to it—you can pick it up at any time and laugh all over again.
When I first started reading, the book made me laugh consistently. Each letter is a miniature comic gem, and in many cases the oblivious responses enhance the humor. However, like every piece of humor that gets its laughs at the expense of others, the more I read, the more I considered the dark side. While a few of the recipients seemed to, at the very least, find amusement in these odd letters, the overwhelming majority are just innocent folks who just happen to enjoy halibut or have a job affiliated with insulation. These letters, then, become a slightly more highbrow version of a prank phone call. I felt bad for the recipients, who mostly replied in good faith, and I felt guilty for finding “Cooper“‘s letters so funny.
One shining example of what this book could have—and should have—been occurs early on, when “Cooper” exchanges letters with the employee of a children’s-book publisher. She seems to catch on to the joke after the second or third letter, and after awhile it seems like she’s prolonging the correspondence for her own amusement. Another example—perhaps the apex of guilt-free hilarity in this book—occurs when “Cooper” writes a letter to the head of a Ball-Bearing enthusiasts’ club, complaining that his fictitious son has a collection so enormous, his frustrated parents don’t know how to deal with it. Rather than responding to “Cooper,” the enthusiast responds directly to the son, urging him to continue his collection and giving him tips to prevent his parents from keeping him down. A few other respondents send similarly ridiculous or sarcastic letters, but I still felt sorry for the chipper, serious replies.
Despite my misgivings with the humiliation-based humor, Robert Popper has a great comic mindd, a penchant for the absurd and a gift for inventing a certain continuity within the nonexistent Cooper brood. For instance, early on he makes an offhanded remark about his wife getting an ankle X-Ray. His wife’s broken ankle quickly turns into a running gag, referred to in letters to a variety of sources. Popper’s attention to these details gives “Cooper” a very life-like quality, which perhaps makes his letters more believable.
I’d recommend this book to fans of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy (Borat, Da Ali G Show) or perhaps fans of the Meet the Parents movies. If you like that style of humor, this book is a big winner. If you’re prone to feeling guilt over elaborate practical jokes you have no part of or control over, you might want to stay away.
Posted by Stan at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0) | Reviews
