Misery

 

A famous author of schlocky romance novels gets in a snowstorm accident where he almost dies but he is luckily rescued by his number one fan, how sweet! Except, uh, maybe she's a little less than stable, and upset that he killed off her favorite character (named Misery) in his newest novel? Kathy Bates steals the show obviously but I wonder if Stephen King regrets that he never got success in the world of so-called "high literature." He's got several novels where the main character is a writer who laments their commercial success over critical success, and there's a ton of asides in IT about creative writing workshops. Like, sorry for all your international acclaim as perhaps the best known writer of our time? You'd rather have like a National Book Critics Circle award sticker on the cover of your unread books in a bargain bin?

RATING: 78%

Enterprise S1E12 - "Dear Doctor"

Dr. Phlox gets a crush on this one earth lady, but he's nervous that she'll be mad that he already has four wives with two or three husbands each, but then she's like "Woah, marriage? Let's just have some fun." Also the Enterprise meets some pre-warp people with a space-plague and they decide not to help them in a very heavy handed pre-Prime Directive example of non-interference. Archer even says, I'm not kidding, "If only we had a rule... a directive, if you will, to stop this in the future." We already got that, writers!

RATING: 48%

Saw VI

These movies aren't even really horror movies - they're just thrillers with a whole lotta gore. I mean, a horror movie is supposed to about fear, and these are just badly structured police procedurals. No other horror movie spends so much time on cops trying to catch the killer (or secretly be the killer several times) as the Saw movies do, and the victims in these traps are basically props. Anyway, in this one an insurance executive must pay the price for his sins, since he invented insurance and whatever I guess,. but maybe the cop is actually the one being tested (he is)! Wait, am I repeating myself?

RATING: 28%

Symphony No. 2 by Sergei Prokofiev

Everybody hates this piece because it's atonal, unpleasant, and aggressive, but then Chris Brown gets to be on the Grammys so it seems like this is right up America's alley (topical humor). This is pretty good despite the fact that Prokofiev never really went expressionist again for the rest of his career. I guess we all have our phases, and for some of us those phases are maybe brought on by constant threat of execution by the 2nd most murderous tyrant of the 20th Century (write nicer music for workers lol or else ;) - JS).

RATING: 71%

Dark Water

A Month Of Halloweenie Reviews #15

In this movie Jennifer Connelly plays a woman who is divorced and trying to get custody of her daughter. She has to move to a cheaper apartment so she leaves The City (Manhattan) and ends up in the barren wasteland known as Roosevelt Island so she can afford a two bedroom apartment for $900/mo (yeah, right). Unfortunately the place is haunted by a drowned girl's ghost which might be scary if you found out about it less than an hour into the movie. Until then really terrifying things happen, like there is a leak and also the water turns grimy. JESUS! Turn on the lights I'm trembling. I know this is a long review already, but I want to point out that the movie doesn't really do anything to establish why Jennifer Connelly deserves custody of the daughter more than the father. She's always popping pills, she refuses to let her daughter go to a free counselor when she starts talking to invisible people, and she lets her daughter wander unsupervised around the roof of an apartment building. At least the father wasn't trying to keep the girl around dangerous ghosts, lady!

RATING: 22%

The Onion: Our Dumb World

The Onion's "Our Dumb World" is an online map of the world on which users can scroll around and read satirical factoids located at various points on the map. When a country is "featured" for the week (or month, or whatever) the blurbs proliferate within its borders. The problem with "Our Dumb World" is similar to the problems with The Simpsons' "Africa" episode or Hostel's handling of its Slovakian setting: it tries to pass off the writers' utter ignorance of the subject matter as a satirical critique of America's ignorance of the rest of the world. This week's featured country is Romania, and the various jokes include a spooky castle, a spooky path, a picture of Nicolae Ceauşescu dressed as Count Chocula on a box of cereal, a used coffin dealership (bored with the vampire schtick yet?), a gymnast in a Bride of Frankenstein fright wig, and some 11 other jokes about mad scientists, werewolves, vampire bats and reanimated corpses. What is conspicuously absent is evidence of any research whatsoever concerning Romania past or present, despite an abundance of such information on websites an 8-year-old could use. The Ceauşescus, for example, were killed in their dotage by assault rifles on Christmas Day. Or a one-step Google search for "Romanian jokes" yields this communist-era gem:

Q: What's big, black, noisy, makes a lot of smoke and cuts carrots in five?
A: The Romanian machine for cutting carrots in four.

Good satire is supposed to critique ignorance and injustice, not celebrate them. The worst of it is, The Onion's writers (like too many other North Americans) aren't even "dumb"-- they're just too lazy and complacent to care.

RATING: 5% (at least they found it on the map.)

(Image from www.swingingpuss.com.)

Observe And Report

Observation - done.

Report - retarded.

RATING: 12%

Written Courtesy

In a business letter or email*, a formal salutation lets the other person know you're civilized. Opening a business email with "Dear Mr. Crabbit" doesn't mean you want to be Mr. Crabbit's girlfriend or boyfriend, it lets him know that you're a regular user of shoes and toilet paper. I'm so sick of getting emails from American institutions that open with "Hi Jonathan," when 1) we're not on a first name basis; 2) if we were, they'd realize that no one calls me that except my mother and sisters; and 3) it's misspelled and missing a comma. Canadians, who tend to be more formal, will often open a business email with a simple "Hello," which is even worse. It says, "I barely give enough of a shit to greet you, let alone remember your name." And concerning To Whom it May Concern, if you're not the Queen of Sheba posting a royal decree for your unspecified subjects, the way to say it without sounding like a self-important twat is Dear Sir or Madam.

If this keeps up, we'll all be communicating in grunts and howls and eating our morning cereal out of the toilet in 30 years.

RATING: Ign'nt%

*Email etiquette is a contested issue. See the comments section for a different perspective.

(Image from www.point-spreads.com.)

Other People's Messes

Copy editing for money is good, because you get money, but it's also bad, because if your customer knows a copy editor is going to clean up her mess, she'll leave a whole bunch of mangled citations and misspelled words with the expectation that the copy editor will fix them. I used to wash dishes in this shitty restaurant, and it was kind of the same deal--cooks would drop salmon fillets and pork chops on the floor and just kind of kick them under the counter because they knew some minimum wage-making sucka (i.e. me) would end up getting down on his hands and knees and picking them up. Eventually, a stack of pans fell on my head and cut my dishwater-soaked hand open and I bled all over the floor so I quit, but not before I had to walk by the lineup of people waiting to get into the Rockin' Rodeo like 50 times in a dirty kitchen apron carrying a bunch of gross, leaking garbage bags. Hey, ladies.

RATING: Digital janitor%

(Image from cache.gawker.com.)

AWP Conference

AWP is a yearly conference in which a lot of writers, mainly poets, get together and pretend that if they make it as a poet they will be "famous." They all walk around acting like top shit kissing everybody's ass even though if they were the most famous living poet in America nobody would care outside of the ten thousand people gathered at that one conference. The most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard in my life is "rock star poet" used to describe some young poet who had two moderately successful books. But the thing is that a lot of these poets branded with that asinine label will act accordingly - doing drugs, sleeping with poet groupies (the lowest of all groupies), and showing up an hour late for poetry readings. The demise of poetry in America can only be blamed on poets. AWP is the most wretched display of delusions and sycophancy outside of a graduate workshop but I'm still sorry I couldn't make it this year.

RATING: 24%

Stories

Stories are a kind of thing that are fake and lies, but everybody basically knows that so they like them anyway. Stories have many words, and people or animals known as "characters," and the characters learn something during the story or else get in a big exciting swordfight at the end to give the person reading the story a reason to have read it. Sometimes white people in creative writing programs like to write stories about other cultures to show that they are not racist, but don't worry it's all make believe and we are all better people for reading it. Stories are different from poems because they are hella long, and also people who write them can maybe make money one day doing it, not like poets, so the lesson is don't get an MFA in poetry (too late for me).

RATING: 76%, or Wait-For-The-Movie%

Being All Tired and Shit

No one likes being all tired and shit. Like when you stay up all night drinking with Russian figure skaters, and then go to an NHL game, and then write, like, a 25 page paper in 2 days, and then you stay up until the wee hours of the morning watching Dexter online for a bunch of days in a row, and all of the sudden it's 11:50 on Thursday night and you're not in bed, you're writing a shitty self-indulgent post on your friends' blog like people actually care how you waste your stupid time. I guess it beats eating peanuts and crying while sitting in a bathtub full of cold water. I don't know if anyone's ever really done that but it's fucking pathetic.

RATING: 5%

(Image from cache.daylife.com. These aren't the Russian figure skaters I'm talking about, I just thought they looked the part.)

Grad School

Grad school is a place where pretentious, socially awkward people say "research" when they mean "reading" and pretend that "academic" is a compliment. It's an OK place to spend a couple of years if you have $20,000 and you like watching young nerds fawn over old nerds like they're movie stars.

RATING: Poindexter%

(Image from http://nerd-paradise.com.)

White

White is a color that we all probably know, and if you've never heard of it before then congratulations pallie, you don't live in America. White is the the most useless crayon, but the most common paint. It is also the most common way the pinkest people refer to themselves all over the planet Earth for some reason. Some people say white represents life, and others say it represents death. Vanilla ice cream is white, and while it is the most boring flavor, it is also the most welcoming to the addition of toppings. The KKK wears white because they are chickens and also racist, and also they say things like "White Power," a phrase I am now incapable of hearing without thinking of Dave Chappelle. One of my students claimed today that white was her favorite color, and since she was white I assumed that to be a race thing. White chocolate is not really chocolate at all, but people like it for some reason or other, I don't, it's gross. White is the color of skeletons and ghosts, but not Halloween cats or witches, they are mostly black and green, respectively. If your hair is white it either means you are old or you got scared real bad. Paper is white, but ink is black, a juxtaposition a lot of undergrads think is poetic, but in actuality is nonsensical. Well, in conclusion white is everywhere, especially on this Corn Flakes box next to my computer so see ya wouldn't want to be ya as Shakespeare said (he was also white).

RATING: 50%

Cultivating Humanity by Martha Nussbaum

"As Ellsion says, forming the civic imagination is not the only role for literature, but it is one salient role. Narrative art has the power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist's interest--with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society's refusals of visibility. We come to see how circumstances shape the lives of those who share with us some general goals and projects; and we see that circumstances shape not only people's possibilities for action, but also their aspirations and desires, hopes and fears. All of this seems highly pertinent to the decisions we must make as citizens. Understanding, for example, how a history of racial stereotyping can affect self-esteem, achievement, and love enables us to make more informed judgments on issues relating to affirmative action and education" (Nussbaum 88, italics mine.)

Martha Nussbaum writes like an affirmative action hire. I think she needs a double shot of that "liberal education" she's always talking about.

RATING: 15%, or 65% if you're a card-carrying democrat with a head injury.

(Image from www.justbooks.co.uk.)