Very Badly Hungover Stag Things

I always warn people when they ask for movie advice: "Keep in mind, I loved the movie Very Bad Things." The fact that I love that movie, a dark comedy written and directed by actor Peter Berg as his debut feature, symbolizes all that is wrong with my sense of humor.

You should keep this in mind as we review another movie in the "Bachelor Party" genre. And, yeah, that hoary Tom Hanks flick is probably the progenitor of the modern form (there seems little connection with Paddy Chayefsky's '57 movie). Except that, in the '90s, the form went rogue and started involving dead strippers.

This brings us to The Hangover which, depending on whom you ask, is either the funniest movie ever or the most offensive movie ever. Truthfully, it's neither. Not even close. But it is funny.

And, no, there isn't a dead stripper in it. Or, at least I don't think there is. The twist in this stag film is that the main characters have no idea what happened the night before. (Attentive film students may remember this same device used relatively recently in Dude, Where's My Car?)

Is it offensive? You know, life on this planet has basically broken the needle off my offensensitvity gauge. I didn't regard is as such, particularly, except for a photo shown at the end of the film of one of the characters receiving fellatio from a transvestite. And this, primarily, because they needlessly used a prosthetic to make it look real.

There's a masturbation joke involving a baby that apparently offended some people. I can only assume they don't have, have never been around, and don't remember being young children, since the discovery of the genitals well proceeds any kind of respect for social standards about not playing with them all the time. Actually, I appreciated that there weren't a lot of fart/vomit/urine/feces/sodomy jokes. (I guess I'm more offended by banal repetition than actual content.)

This is really a silly movie, with the characters doing--and having done things while completely out of their gourds--that strain credulity. It never goes into fantasy (like Dude, Where's My Car?), never gets heavy (like Stag), avoids any sort of social commentary (like Very Bad Things), and veers away from the heavily slapstick. It really is more like Bachelor Party: Sort of sweet and good-natured, with a lot of jokes and amusing scene set-ups that are coarser without being mean, and which give the film a kind of shallow feel--sort of like someone exaggerating their "true life" Vegas story.

I was at a low chuckle throughout most, with a few LOL moments. I never fully engaged with the hilarity somehow. It felt like the story was actually written backwards, with writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) starting with a zany set of circumstances ("a tiger...a baby...one friend missing...") and trying to make sense out of how it all happened.

And perhaps it's just me, but this didn't have the ensemble chemistry of a really great comedy. I can't say I didn't like any individual actor--in fact I did like them all--but I'm being a crusty old dude by saying I felt like the timing and chemistry of Bill Murray's old comedies (with John Candy, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, et al) was a lot better.

That said, I give the movie props for avoiding the most clichéd outcomes. Much like Wedding Crashers (apparently script-doctored by Lucas and Moore), this movie ends up being relatively optimistic about marriage, about what makes a good relationship and a bad one, and relatively sweet about friendship--and in the long run, very positive about human nature.

In that sense, the reverse of both Stag and Very Bad Things.

Heather Graham--once white-hot, remember?--plays the escort with the heart of gold, to Ed Helms whipped dentist, Bradley Cooper is the glib high school English teacher, and Zach Galliafianikis is the weird brother-in-law, cause of and solution to most of the plot's problems. Justin Bartha, the groom, ends up being the missing one, and it was great to see Jeffrey Tambor as the future, overly-understanding-about-Vegas father-in-law.

Mike Tyson's in the movie. I thought the whole sequence with him was rather weak. It felt more like "Bwhahahahaha! We got Mike Tyson in our movie!" than actual cleverness.

I probably got the biggest kick out of Ken Jeong, who was also very funny in the previews of an upcoming movie called The Goods. He played the world's second worst obstetrician in Knocked Up and an ubergeek in Role Models. He's perfect here because you never know what he is. He seems both menacing and goofy.

And hey, he gives the movie it's full-frontal male nudity. (Something the 'strom predicted would be a trend back with Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)

Go in with your offense meters off and not too high expectations and you can have a fun time.

Stupid Graph Tricks

My pal Esther, who I hope hires me again someday soon, tweeted about Indeed.com, a site that tracks job listings over multiple sites and allows you to graph trends in relative and absolute terms. (She was lamenting the rise of squooshy terms like "social media" over terms like "editor" and "writer"--though anyone who's been involved with "social media" knows there is a desperate paucity of writers and editors out there.)

So, I did my own research--and after determining that nobody anywhere ever needs the skills I have--I went further afield, as encapsulated in the graph below:

As you can see, job opportunities for "sex", "drugs" and "rock and roll" have been on the rise over the past four years. What's fascinating--and by fascinating, I mean utterly meaningless--is how despite the way drug demands rise and fall, and sex demands spike then plateau, and rock and roll rises steadily, they all pretty much go up at the same speed.

So, I guess this means putting "sex, drugs and rock and roll" could only improve your job prospects.

Or maybe I'm not the sort of person who should be using these tools.

White Devils

I detailed my eight month treadmill desk experiment here and also my water drinking, and noted that neither of them caused any net weight loss. I'm sure I must have swapped some muscle for fat in those eight months, but as the water drinking was accompanied with a reduction in my soda drinking habits, I was expecting some sort of net weight loss. But no dice.

Of course, I started doing the Reams program in solidarity with The Boy and, much to my dismay, it worked. So, now I'm eating a largely vegetable diet, with meat two, three (okay, sometimes four) times a week. And there are things I am not eating.

No white flour. No white sugar. No white potatoes. Also, no corn syrup, and really, I'm not supposed to be eating corn (unless it's white corn on the cob). I do have popcorn and soda at the movies.

Well, I guess it's not mystery where my extra pounds were coming from. I've lost 20 pounds in two months. Without any exercise at all. I'm not supposed to exercise too much yet though I am finally back on that a little bit.

My interpretation of the various food prohibitions fall into two categories: Some foods are bad because they are actually harmful while others are bad because they take up the space you'd normally have for nutritious food. Shellfish, pork, protein bars are examples of food in the actually harmful category--something about the high protein content. (Again, this is my casual impression. I'm not claiming to understand this.)

Sure has made weight loss simple, though. If you call this living....

When Numbers Get Serious

A week ago, The Boy and I took one of our not infrequent road trips to visit the dietitian. I've been a little suspect of his devotion to the whole regime of vegetables, and I thought he'd been a bit lax with some of his supplements (vitamins and minerals).

But the numbers came back great. Mine came back pretty good, too, which sort of surprised me, since they'd been so bad before. I'm allowed to exercise a little and eat a little meat. (This diet discourages heavy meat eating. Three times a week, maximum.)

I spent a year and a half as a mostly-vegetarian. That is, I didn't eat any meat during the week, but since I went home for weekends and mom considers vegetarianism a personal affront, I did eat fish then. It was actually very difficult for me to start eating meat again. I mean, just contemplating it was sort of appalling.

Weird, eh? Well, I just spent six weeks as an actual vegetarian and I assure you my celebratory hot turkey sandwich was quite welcome. (I'm not even a turkey fan but--well, I'm not going to food blog just yet, but the sandwich will be back.)

I could observe that I continue to benefit from this program, and The Boy continues to reduce his insulin, but I see the government has already established that alternative forms of treatment are pretty much universally bunk.

Well, not really: They've apparently spent $2.5B paying other people to test them, in God knows what fashion. I've linked to this guy, Phil Plait, instead of to the direct article because he captures so well the attitude I've seen of some: It's vitally important to them that nobody ever believe anything that can't be proven in a double-blind study.

Frankly, I don't think most of these things work, but since placebos (called "dummy pills" now, apparently) have something like a 20% success rate, I tend to think the placebo is under-prescribed. I mean, I doubt those "male enhancement" pills have any effect whatsoever, but if a guy believes that they do and benefits from that belief, how cruel to take that away from him!

Most of the programs I've seen that seemed very effective were not really pharmaceutical replacements, they were regimens. Lifestyle changes. You could argue (successfully, I think) that the gains were from a variety of banal things, rather than, say, distilled water or walnut tincture.

And I wouldn't really care if you did, so long as I'm free to do whatever crazy thing I want.

My concern, of course, is that the government will get both wrong: Prescribing things that don't work while proscribing things that do. In fact, I can guarantee you that already happens, routinely.

I'm In The Money?

At least, potentially, according to this New Scientist article.

It was actually never my plan to be a Data Scientist. And I don't really know anything about statistics, so I'm not quite there. I think it's probably right, though. We're at the point where we have tons of data, but nobody understand it.

I miss the '90s.

Phrases That Should Begin MORE Movie Synopses, Part I

A bikinied sky diver (Raquel Welch)...

--Fathom (1967)

How To Freak Out A Conservative

Fast forward the following video past where it shows that it's from The Onion.

Then call them over and play it.

Hilarity shall ensue.

Nursery University, or WTF is wrong with New Yorkers

Well, I say "New Yorkers" like they were all the same, but that's my prerogative as a guy from L.A. Really, of course, I'm referring to Manhattanites, who are like our West Siders: Wealthy, mostly white, socially conscious, status seeking, etc.

Not sure they're competing for spots in nursery school for their kids, though, which is what Nursery University is about. This documentary follows around some of these people as they navigate the overcrowded pre-school system in the hopes of pawning their spawn off on somebody.

Sorry. That was needlessly snarky. But I couldn't help but feel that some of these kids would be better off at home. Mostly, though, I found myself marveling at how old everyone was. This is not just prejudice, although I'd be surprised if any of the white folk were under 40. And one woman had twins at 57!

Isn't that nice? She's single, 57 and has twins, one of whom (the boy) pretty clearly has a brain injury. That's gonna be fun when she's 70 and he starts going through puberty.

The big question I had was whether these particular schools actually offer, you know, better education, or if it was just a matter of prestige in getting in and paying for them? It's not addressed clearly in the documentary but it's hard to believe that there aren't some reasonably good $15,000/semester schools that might be nearly as good. Or even $12,000. Laws of supply and demand being what they are, I couldn't figure out what the supply was so small given the degree of the demand. (According to one admittance person, the demand has been going on for five years. Certainly enough time for more schools to open up.)

The pre-school people themselves are quick to point out that the value of the nursery school education, while not insignificant (in some impossible to quantify way) is certainly exaggerated. This doesn't seem to encourage them to expand, but curiously, it also doesn't seem to encourage them to raise prices.

I suppose this is very indicative of my mindset. Normal economics just didn't seem to be in play. Making things more confusing was the fact that most schools used a lottery for admission! So, how prestigious could it be to get into a place that selects (at least in part) through sheer randomity?

And then I had a stylistic question, documentary-wise. When the kids that get into their schools do get in, was triumphant music really in order? I mean, what is it we've witnessed here, exactly? People who have chosen to live in this strange place, by these strange rules, have achieved some sort of victory.

So. Yay for them.

The minority couple from Harlem got into a school, too, along with some financial aid. But I just wasn't clear on what this was buying them.

This is probably because I'm not from Manhattan. And don't think much of status-based education. But I know this can end up being big money and opportunities, so I really had a hard time loathing the parents. Even the guy who seemed really gay and his South American wife were ultimately endearing. Though one can't help but hope that they wouldn't end up warping their poor children--particularly the family that relocated because their child wasn't accepted into nursery school.

It's a strange, distorted world. But, hey, it supplies "Law & Order" with plenty of plots.

Nice documentary. Not great. Left a lot of unanswered questions. But an interesting peek into that particular, peculiar world.

Gun Play

Guns are popular around Casa 'strom which is largely due to The Boy. I've done some gun blogging before--click here or on the "weapons" tag--but if I've written about The Boy as a driving force here, I can't find it.

Basically, I never had a toy gun until I started hanging out a lot with my friend who had a lot of toy guns, and I never held a real gun till I was about 30. And then only once. The Boy, however, loves weapons of all kinds, not least of all guns, so now we go shooting.

I've gotten worse over the years. I'm getting a little better over time, but I'm more subject to the whims of the day. (We go at night, so sometimes I'm tired when we get there.) The Boy, naturally, gets better and better. (With the occasional odd day where he's way off, though not so much since he's gotten his sugar under control.)

Last night, he selected a .22 pistol, which misfired like crazy--and it was the only .22 pistol around, so we swapped it for a .22 rifle. Rifles, of course, are easier to aim than pistols. Submitted for you scorn is my target:
The grouped ones, near-ish the center were done with the rifle. The wilder ones were the pistol.

And now, The Boy's:
The green and yellow shots around the heart were from the pistol. The pinkish holes were from the pistol. And his paper was curling in while he was shooting. Despite this, he put his last few shots through Bambi's head. The big holes in the heart come from shooting in the same place over and over again. The long streaky hole in the comes from the bullet's trajectory matching the curl of the paper.

This is probably the best he's ever done, which made me scratch my head a bit since we really haven't gone much this year. But The Boy has himself some BB and air guns that he loves and shoots around the backyard, so I wonder if that's part of the improvement.

Now I just have to figure out how to set him up a lane where he can practice with his throwing knives and such.

Conversations From The Living Room, Part 14: Teachable Moments

The Boy is playing "Left 4 Dead", blasting away at zombies while I watch.
"Oh, it's fast zombies."
"Yeah."
"I prefer the shambling types."
"Me, too. These are just ugly people who can't use guns."
"So, they're liberals?"
"Exactly."

Drag Me To Hell (but try not to scratch the floors)

Thirty years ago a bunch of kids went out to the woods and a young director made a balls-out horror movie by hanging from the rafters, attaching to cameras to 2x4s and running with them, and (according to some rumors) attaching cameras to motorbikes and nearly running down actors.

The uneven mess that resulted (Evil Dead) made an impact. It created a genre. Inspired a generation. Accidental camp and genuinely effective moments created a uniquely harrowing experience. I'd say it launched a career, but it was 10 years before Sam Raimi got a shot at a real movie (Darkman).

He remade Evil Dead as the much better Evil Dead II, which substituted the accidental camp and amateurishness of the first with an almost bizarrely acute awareness of how horror and humor overlap, and how you could make an audience laugh, squirm and scream at the same time.

This distinguishes it from the grimly serious style of horror and the wisecracking style. This is the William Castle-style, the James Whale-style, and it's remarkably refreshing. Raimi may try to gross us out, but there's no sadism in his film. At the same time, he's never letting his characters out of the vice: they don't get to laugh along with us, no matter how absurd the situations. And there are are a lot of absurd situations here.

The funny thing is, Sam Raimi claims to not even like horror movies. (Hence the near complete transformation of the Evil Dead series to action/comedy in Evil Dead 3, Bruce Campbell vs the Army of Darkness.) But there were occasions to think he missed the genre: The stark presentation of A Simple Plan and the horror overtones of The Gift certainly suggested it, but nothing moreso than the use of his Evil Dead camera tricks and stylistic approaches for the surgery scene in the excellent Spiderman 2.

Well, most (but not all) of those tricks are present in Drag Me To Hell. In fact, there's a seance scene that could have been right out of the original movies, complete with a floating body, and vocal distortions saying a line very close to "I'll swallow your soul." (The only thing conspicuously missing is Raimi's trademark zoom-stop, where the camera zooms in and stops when something makes a big noise.) Which isn't to say he doesn't have a few new tricks in his repertoire.

Still one thing hasn't changed in three decades: Nothing is scarier than an old woman with cataracts who vomits goo.

So, what do we have here?

Christine Brown is a girl from down on the farm who's trying to make her way in the big city, and has made it to bank loan officer. She's landed rich guy psych professor Clay Dalton and she has a nice home in the Hollywood Hills. (A little too nice, I think, to be realistic. It's not big, but those places are expensive.) Her big problem is that her boss is considering new-guy suck-up for the position of Assistant Manager, because she's maybe a little too sweet.

Enter the old gypsy woman. Yeah, you heard me. Next to ancient Indian burial grounds, there's probably nothing more hack. But it's okay. This is a carinval ride: The point is not breaking new thematic ground but to scare you with the familiar. (A harder trick if you think about it.)

Anyway, the gypsy is behind on her payments and already has had two extensions. But Christine's manager leaves it to her: extend again or foreclose. I won't say what she decides to do here, but I will say she ends up with a curse on her. 'cause, you know, that's what the movie is about.

This is a tightly compressed movie where Christine ends up terrorized by an evil spirit (called the Lamia) and she's got three days to get rid of the curse or end up being dragged to Hell (do not pass go, do not collect $200). Along the way, she gets beaten up, terrorized, betrayed and rebuffed in attempt after attempt to make things right.

She looks for help among the gypsies, with a spiritual reader, and finally with the Lamia's old nemesis. The climax of the film has the previously mild-mannered Christine pushing herself to the limit to rid herself of this curse.

And then there's the "twist" ending. The Boy and I were of two minds about it. We both saw it coming. I saw the device they used to set it up, but got distracted by the expertise of the execution. He thought, "Well, this is how they all end," and so was just disappointed by it when it finally came.

So, we both agreed: Excellent movie, disappointing ending. Again, the execution here is top notch. It's just the way Raimi chose to end it was just very typical.

Still, hard to complain: Genuinely good horror movies are few and far between. This one was, in turn, scary, funny, clever, involving, suspenseful, squicky and just plain fun.

I've heard that Raimi was disappointed with the third Spiderman movie, and has said that he wasn't given the creative freedom he was given with the first two. And also that that would be his criteria for moving forward. I tend to believe that, and would rather have him make fewer and lower-budget films he has control over rather than lots of big budget films he doesn't.

Don't drag me to hell for saying so.

"Are you crying?"

"No."

...

"Maybe my eyes are tearing up a little."

"Did someone kick you in the nuts?"

(Discussion between me and my daughter during the first few minutes of Up. Her older brother is going to get a talking to.)

In For A Penny, In For A Pounding

I might as well go full NSFW here--well, not me, but this site which details WWII sexual psyops. The various countries embroiled in WWII used (or tried to use) sexual suggestions to demoralize enemy troops.

This site details the perversion, the anti-semitism, and the psychology used on your (great?)grand-parents to get them to surrender or turn back. In this day of "2 girls 1 cup" (never seen it, thanks) these pictures seem positively quaint, but they're not all blurred out so beVARE (as Bela Lugosi would say).

Interestingly, the author's thesis is that these psychological attacks had the reverse effect. The men would use the naked girl pictures as pin-ups. This tells you something very basic and true about beauty, if true. The picture--the promise of beauty, love and sex--completely overrides any text.

In the soldier's mind, it's the girl he's fighting for. And since she's in his mind, he's not likely to believe any of your libelous statements about her. She's Rita Hayworth in The Strawberry Blonde or Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not or maybe even Judy Garland in Love Finds Andy Hardy.

You're likely to just make him mad by suggesting anything else.

Palette Cleanser: A Totally Sexist and Inappropriate Objectification of a Woman Who, Through Sheer Genetic Chance

...or perhaps surgery, is rather more well-endowed than most.

Yes, that's what my doctor looked like, except she had a way better butt. (Also, she was middle-eastern.)

Again, though, it's her medical advice I'm following. So, maybe Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist isn't conpletely absurd. Well, someone who looks like her, anyway.

More On More: Beauty and Sexuality (Update at bottom)

Although the point of my tennis post was obviously to take a poke at Darcysport (who was my 25,000th visitor, by the way, thanks, Dar!), my return to the local clinic for the ear infection from hell, prompted me with one of those "let's take a closer look at those breasts" moments so common for the Althouse commentariat. (Weirdly, Althouse doesn't come up first for that phrase on Google, but someone linking to her iconic post does.)

The thing is, the doctor was stackedd with a double-D. I guess it was casual dress day, because she was wearing a form fitting sweater and tight jeans (which she also filled out spectacularly). There was nothing especially provocative about the outfit; it was simply her figure. What's more, it was the sort of outfit that wouldn't even have registered a blip on a less curvy woman.

Now, obviously, I didn't pull a Tex Avery Wolf thing. She's the junior in this medical partnership, I think, but she's been pushing a different approach from the head doc. And one that my other nutrionist-nee-MD agrees with, so I respect that.

But there's an interesting mix of life's unfairness all in this one little encounter. It's not fair that a woman, by virtue of her figure, risks being reduced to that figure, despite being an MD. It's also not fair that women get to be the sole arbiters of whether a glance is welcome flattery or perverted lust. Life is a lot less pleasant for everyone as a result, I think.

Large Breasts confer certain benefits on their possessors--er, when they're women--but also bring with them a lot of liabilities which can be particularly difficult for girls who develop early, since they also bring an appearance of maturity. (We'll just assume for the sake of a pleasant illusion that the pigs who leer and catcall after a girl would refrain if they knew she was eleven.)

And other girls (or even fully grown women) seem eager to impute to large breasts sexual promiscuity. Males, as well, but while they do it out of wishful thinking, females do it (apparently) out of jealousy. And not just promiscuity, but shallowness and stupidity.

I remember a friend of mine who worked as a bank teller telling me that a female bank robber had been very successful robbing banks in low-cut blouses, because the male tellers she would select couldn't describe her face. (She was allegedly caught when she selected a gay male teller.) This is probably apocryphal, and certainly more reflective upon men than women.

Then there's stuff like this from F My Life:

Today, I was buying an expensive pillow for my mother from a store clerk who wouldn't stop staring at my boobs. After paying, I saw an elderly lady who had dropped a bag, so I walked to help. I walked back to the clerk, who refused to believe I paid. The reason? He didn't recognize my face. FML

So, what does one do with the yin-and-yang here? Men are going to desire; women are going to envy. Desire and envy make a mess of a lot of things. (The solution is probably some combination of manners and logic, but if those two things ever took hold, breast ogling would be near the bottom of the list of important bad behaviors curbed.)

And it's not just breast size, but beauty. Media Lizzy writes on the perils of being beautiful, in particular as it relates to the Miss California case, and links to Melissa Clouthier on the same topic. I don't necessarily agree with either of them, but I do know that all beautiful women are plagued to some degree with assumptions of limitations in other ways.

Hell, I know women who dowdify themselves (in the sense of "make dowdy", having nothing to do with Maureen Dowd) in order to be taken seriously. (Then there is the Buddhist tale of the beautiful woman who scarred her face in order to be accepted into study, having previously been denied for being a potential distraction.)

I've been struggling with this post for a while, I think because I have no particularly profound insight--or even anything that rises above the banal. I like beauty; I particularly like feminine beauty. Prejudice, whether pro- or anti-beauty disturbs me.

But it doesn't surprise me that certain political elements seek to destroy what is beautiful. A devotion to beauty, like love, sex, family, religion and God, are things that the state cannot control. And what the state cannot control, it seeks to destroy.

Update: And how fitting that while I pondered this list, Playboy.com published a list of 10 women whose ideas (being right of center) were so appallingly hateful, it diminished their true value as sexual objects. Way to go Playboy!

And let's just round (heh) this out with a study that purports to tell what a woman is like (including how she feels about sex) based on her breast shape. Enough of the shapes are women who don't like sex to make me think it's based on the researcher's personal exprience.