Kate Winslet has been called the “best English-speaking actress of her generation.” I have analyzed the acting style of this beautiful film icon and I can confidently say what it is that makes her unique.
Bewilderment.
Bewilderment?
That’s right! Confusion! Bemusement! Consternation! All these similar emotions and more pepper Winslet’s stellar technique. This breakthrough observation came to me when I saw The Reader, the film which won Winslet an Oscar. And when she won that Oscar? There was the face.
Oscar?
It’s a specific confusion, a sort of wonderment at the beauty/pain/anger/actual confusion that she is currently experiencing. In The Reader it is a constant hint of “how can I deserve to feel this way about what I am doing right now?” Whether she is swimming, running a trolley, watching children sing, or just sort of sitting around being naked.
Now it is time for me to do my part towards raising a new generation of actresses- a Separated Chaff acting lesson. Stand in front of a mirror so you know when you are making the right expression. Have a friend talk to you normally. Note your expression. Have them continue the conversation in Welch. Congratulations, you are an amazing actress! Keep your puzzled eyes peeled because if we start doing video features we could use your help. Ratings are down and winning an Oscar is apparently a big deal.
With the economy in the toilet, there have been more and more ads for people who have bad credit but want all the perks of good credit. That’s cool, wanting what you don’t have, that’s America, baby. What I love is how coddling these ads come across.
The one I hear the most is also the most oddly specific. “Does your bad credit keep you from getting the laptop you’ve always wanted? We can help!” Well damn, thank you! I wanted to get a loan for a home so my fiancée and I can start our life but yeah, actually, the laptop thing sounds a lot better, thank you!
Ads like this always paint people with bad credit with the same brush- an innocent mistake and then the credit companies start to hammer you with fees and fines and generalized unfairness. Maybe you have bad credit because you’re rubbish with your money!
Credit exists for a reason. If I take out a loan and miss a few payments and then don’t return my flat screen television to the Rent-A-Center when I’m supposed to maybe, just maybe, I don’t deserve a laptop right now.
The first time I ever heard of “I Love College” it was because a friend told me someone wrote some of the lyrics on her Facebook wall. She didn’t know where the hell it came from. Later, another friend mentioned it. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He quoted it. I related the first two sentences of this post to him.
Tonight I heard the song for myself and it was even stupider than I expected.
Now so we’re clear the lyrics quoted to me were “That party last night was awfully crazy I wish we taped it / I danced my ass off and had this one girl completely naked / Drink my beer and smoke my weed but my good friends is all I need / Pass out at 3, wake up at 10, go out to eat then do it again. / Man, I love college”
If you haven’t heard the song, turn those lyrics over in your mind. Meditate on them for a second. Imagine how bad a song must be to contain lyrics like that. Now imagine something worse and you’re closer to the final cut of Asher Roth’s “I Love College.”
I was surprised to hear that Roth sounds vaguely like Eminem. That is, if Eminem were a bit mellower and perhaps swallowed a few bottles of NyQuil. Content-wise, though, the song lacks Eminiem’s gritty in-your-face “I’m gonna kill myself with my pregnant girlfriend in the car” vibe. This is more of a National Lampoon type of a song. By which I mean it’s devoid of any real substance and it’s really just about people between eighteen and twenty-four doing stupid, and more importantly unoriginal, crap.
I can only imagine the song came into existence thusly: Late one night a small group of friends were sitting around. A haze of marijuana smoke hung in the air as Dave Matthews played softly on the stereo. Finally one of the brain-fried sophomores looked up and said “Dudes! We should, like, make a rap song!” The sudden noise startles one of his friends who rolls off the sofa and lands noisily on a half eaten bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. “What?” He says, through the orange dust cloud. “Lets make a rap song, I downloaded Fruity Loops last night, we could make a beat and rap and record it.” “Why?” “Cause.” “Oh, yeah, okay.” So these budding songwriters stumble into a dorm room, bunk beds on the left, poster of Jim Belushi in a “College” sweater on the right, and begin to half-ass a rap song by tossing in bits and pieces of college life. It’s the sort of thing you’d spend a night on, maybe a weekend if a lot of people were off campus. Then you’d play it for your floor, they’d laugh, maybe it would be on the God-awful radio station that broadcasts so weakly the other side of campus can’t even hear it and that would be it. Instead, through some fluke, be it stupidity, malice, or some bizarre clerical error, the damn thing explodes into society at large. It’s like some sort of horrible bio-engineered disease, only instead of uncontrollable vomiting and anal bleeding there’s a guy singing rather sleepily about beer pong.
The following was a pitch article for a project. The project has been changed so this is no longer needed. Enjoy this second-hand material.
I’m a sucker for word games. Text Twist was my number one “not doing my work” distraction at my old job. I have a copy of Bookworm on my phone. And when it gets to that part of a family get-together where it’s either a board game or more staring at one another, I always vote for Scrabble. So it was a notable day when that game of wooden tiles and triple-word-scores lost its throne to a little fabric banana.
Bananagrams is a game for up to eight players. The polished letter tiles are dumped out of the aforementioned fabric banana into a pile called the “bunch.” Each player proceeds to take tiles. (The amount of tiles is based on the amount of players.) The rest of the bunch is left in the center of the table. Take a deep breath and enjoy the peace and quiet of your tiles because things are about to get a bit heated.
One player yells “Split!” and the game begins. Turn over your tiles as fast as you can and start building. The goal is to make your own personal crossword quickly and completely. Stuck with a difficult letter like “j?” Shout “Dump!” and then throw it back into the bunch, replacing it with three fresh ones. Used up all your tiles? Nice work, but you’re not done yet. Call out “Peel!” and grab another one. The catch is that every time a player calls out a peel, everyone has to take a tile. Play continues along until there are fewer tiles in the center than there are players. Then once you’ve used up all your tiles you shout “Bananas!” and you’ve won!
Bananagrams quickly ran the full spectrum from “fun” to “favorite” to “game my family won’t play with me anymore.” If Scrabble is a war, with strategy and planning and evaluating your opponents, Bananagrams is one of those brawls in Old West saloons. (Yeah I compare board games to fighting, it’s one of the reasons my family won’t play with me anymore.) You’ll be sitting there trying to figure out a way to fit your last “t” into a crossword of “potion,” “new,” and “octopus” (good word, by the way) and someone’ll shout “Peel!” Now you’ve got to take another tile and you have two to place. How do you get rid of letters once you’ve built a crossword? Take bits of it apart and rearrange them. That’s where the “-anagrams” part of the name fits in. Say you have the word “and.” You pull an “s.” “Sand.” Now you pull an “h.” You can pull the “s” off the front, move it to the end and put down your “h.” “Hands.” Fun, right? Now imagine doing it on a larger scale with four or five words to rearrange while your family works feverishly on their own consonant shuffling and Granny keeps shouting “peel” so your extra tiles just add up faster and faster and you start to get a feel of the glory of Bananagrams.
Do you have kids? Are you a kid yourself? Are you drifting rudderless through life? If so, you may be in need of a role model. Role models are important. You look up to them and try and live your life like they have lived theirs, hoping to yield similar results. It stands to reason, then, that selecting a role model is a very important task that should be done carefully and with great deliberation. Perhaps you find that you look up to your mom or dad. That’s an easy one because they’re around a lot which gives you plenty of opportunity to observe them. (If they are frequently absent from your life you may want to rethink them as role models.) Maybe you really admire your local pastor or rabbi. Good for you, religious figures often have very strong moral compasses. (Barring any sort of unpleasantness revolving around media scandals.) Or do you hold a civil rights activist in high regard? He could be someone you want to select as a role model. You know who usually winds up as a disappointment as a role model, though? Celebrities.
Being very good at being recognized when you are out at dinner is not a hallmark of being a good person. Being a good singer or a talented actor or an exceptional athlete doesn’t automatically make you smart and ethical and admirable. Parents, be advised that if your child is looking to a teenage actress on the Disney channel as a paragon of virtue and good life choices you may be doing something wrong.
Don’t misunderstand, I don’t have an axe to grind with celebrities in general. However, it’s important to realize that these are just people who are good at their jobs. Robert Downey, Jr, for example, is very good at acting in movies. Do I want to live like Robert Downey, Jr? Not particularly. Using him as a template for my life because he is good at acting is like following in the footsteps of a lumberjack just because he can cut down a tree very well. (One might argue the latter is actually a better role model, what with the healthy outdoor living and all.)
Every so often there is a small scandal involving some young celebrity. Actually, there are always several scandals involving celebrities of all ages to the extent that a whole magazine industry can flourish, but for the sake of simplicity (and the dear sweet children) I’m focusing on the younger set. Most recently Michael Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals at the last Olympics, was photographed apparently smoking pot at a college party. Oh man! I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s the sort of thing college students get up to. Marijuana, alcohol, coitus out of wedlock, these are staples of the college lifestyle. I’m sorry! Before that, Miley Cyrus, star of the popular show Hannah Montana, was caught sending provocative photos to one of the Jonas brothers. Faith and begorrah, a teenage girl all jacked up on hormones is doing vaguely sexual things with a teenage boy similarly jacked up on similar (but hopefully not identical) hormones? What are the odds? The odds are about one in one, that’s simple teenage mathematics.
So what do we do?! Can we not trust celebrities to guide our children so that we can slope off to bowl a few frames or try on some new hats? The answer is a resounding no. If you needed me to tell you that, really, you need a role model of your own. Celebrities, particularly young ones, are idiots just like the rest of us. Do we need a new role model in the fifteen to twenty-five age bracket who is so dazzlingly honest and pure that we can safely point out to our children? Probably not. The more perfect a young celebrity seems the worse it will be when they crack. And they will crack, especially with the strain of having to be a wholly amazing beacon of hope and light and what-have-you. If you’re still grasping for someone to look up to, I’m available Tuesdays and Thursdays after dinnertime. I’m in the proper age range and I have been known to make stupid choices. Drop me a line! If I don’t get back to you right away it’s because I’m out drinking and avoiding the paparazzi.
Nancy Grace is a hero and a national treasure. There. I said it. No eloquent pre-amble, no slow buildup to a crescendo of praise, just the honest truth right there in the first sentence.
Nancy is a strong independent woman who has a show on CNN. She is a former prosecutor who uses her time slot to cover a wide range of intriguing and multi-faceted cases. For the past five months, all of those cases have been Casey Anthony’s comings and goings.
Nancy Grace is all about getting to the bottom of things. She is not afraid to ask the hard-hitting questions. Casey Anthony is in prison! I know this because Nancy told me. Like, a lot. Nancy makes sure I am well informed. Do you know what she’s been doing in prison? Sitting around! Nancy told me so! Corpus Christi, can you believe the nerve?! Police are investigating her daughter’s death, her parents are a wreck and she’s just locked in a prison not doing anything? What, so now just because you’re in prison you can’t do anything but sit around and stare at things and sometimes talk to people when they come see you through those panes of glass? What a lazy bitch! Damn it Nancy, give her what for!
Nancy! You are a guiding force of what is right in the world! I was of the opinion that “Casey Anthony” was too much of a mouthful. Five syllables? Screw that. Nancy Grace coined the term “tot mom.” Two. Syllables. Brilliant! Okay, so, it sounds a little weird. Halfway between an adorable little rag doll and a “baby momma” but it’s still shorter. Nancy Grace is all about efficiency!
Nancy Grace you are a beacon of light in these dark times. Remember when the defense was all like “we want our own expert to do an autopsy?” Haha those whiney bastards! You gave them the hell they deserved! Fair trial? Due process? Whatever, right? Like, okay, the law is there for a reason and stuff but sometimes you can just skip it if you know the person is guilty. That ability to really see what we should do instead of what we’re supposed to do is rare these days. Luckily, one former prosecutor knows what’s right. Even when it’s just a matter of being louder than everyone else.
Author’s note: What happened to Caylee Anthony is sickening and the harshest penalties should be brought down upon any and all guilty parties. This praise of Nancy Grace (totally sincere, not sarcastic or ironic or anything) does not reflect on the crime itself, merely its sterling coverage.
I don’t like scary movies, really. Well, I say I don’t and I tend to avoid them, so I’m probably not the most qualified guy to make the accusation that scary movies are doing it wrong but who cares.
Here’s how I got to where I am. I’m climbing into bed and I glance at a small pile of movies on the floor. I can just read a comment on the back of the unrated DVD of “Dawn of the Dead.” It bills it as the version too scary for theaters.
Is it scary? Yeah, I dunno, I guess. It’s gory, absolutely, and it does have zombies in it, so maybe? If I recall correctly it did give me a nightmare, but that was based more on the odd “half-second of screaming zombie footage every three seconds” editing technique applied to the end credits.
Scary movies should be scary. To me that means inducing fear in the audience. Fear. A tense, drawn out whine of single violin note followed by a guy jumping out and stabbing someone? That’s startling. It isn’t scary.
Actually, personally, I don’t necessarily classify zombie movies as scary anyway. They’re about people. Different people thrown together trying to survive. It’s just scary around the edges.
So what is scary? Not “Final Destination” or its ilk. Don’t misunderstand, I love those movies (2 is the best) but they aren’t scary. Mostly gore (hilarious gore, at times) and a bit of startling.
“Hostel” on the other hand, I had to turn off almost immediately after the action started. “Gore?” I had thought, “gore is fine, haha, good times!” No! It was most decidedly bad times! There is a key difference between “Final Destination” violence and “Hostel” violence. In the former, death is being doled out by coincidences, bad timing, and an implication of fate or death actively working against these kids. The latter is people who are, to use a clinical term, totally bat-shit crazy torturing innocent tourists. It is phenomenally unsettling and downright disturbing. That’s closer to what I’m talking about.
Maybe the first “Saw” movie. Not so deeply disgusting as “Hostel” but still a man inflicting pain and horror on his victims for some maladjusted reasons. “Seven” has a similar thing going on. A scary movie, a really good one, should derive its fear from the psychological, not the visual.
And, ironically, if they do it right, I totally won’t go see it.
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