Conversations From The Living Room, Part 31: Never Mind!

Flower (to her brother): "Shut up!"

Barbarienne (echoes): "Yeah! Shut up!"

The Boy (to the Barb): "I can eat you."

Barbarienne: "Oh. Never mind, then."

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

This is the story of an architect—which I suppose requires me to reference Martin Mull's quote, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

No, it's not really relevant, since there's no dancing in this movie, but I bet you didn't know Martin Mull said that.

So, Norman Foster is the guy who builds these sorts of buildings: Click. Swoopy, glassy, bright, sci-fi-ish looking buildings. Recently, for example, he built the Peking airport for the Olympics.

This is a nice, short movie, that mostly curbs the documentarian's urge to use as much of the dozens of hours of footage he shoots as he can.

The movie veers briefly into politics. Not in a polemic way, but more of a reflective look at Mr. Foster's world view. Which is surprisingly fascist. Communist. Whatever word the kids are using these days to describe a totalitarian world view.

I shouldn't say that: It wasn't all that surprising, on reflection, nor is it necessarily all that statist. Architects basically do with people what computer programmers do with bits, but people are very unruly. And freedom is often ugly and inefficient. So Foster's pining about certain kinds of control is predictably about aesthetics.

I think architects are all trying to play SimCity.

Anyway, fun movie. Perhaps not as interesting as Sydney Pollack's Gehry, but maybe Foster's buildings don't leak as much.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

This is the second in the "The Girl..." trilogy, the Swedish series that's become a sensation of sorts over here in America, taking up where The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo left off.

It feels like a lot of "second" movies, in that the first one actually resolved very well, and didn't feel open ended—you know, when they probably weren't sure there were going to be second and third movies?—whereas this one demands the third movie in the trilogy.

That said, the books were a trilogy (with a fourth one being written when the author Stieg Larsson died) so there are a lot of unresolved questions that reveal a lot more of the history of the titular girl.

And there's a lot of history to be learned. How did Lisbeth end up in state care? What's up with her mother? Where's her father? Who's the giant albino who seems to be chasing her? And why?

This movie is generally less well reviewed than the first, and it's certainly less shocking and seamy, but in a lot of ways I liked it better. Lisbeth seems to have more depth to her character.

You may recall that I called the first movie very Swedish? Well, this movie is possibly even more so. Where Lisbeth seems to have more depth and history both ancient and recent, Mikael, our crusading reporter, is a supporting character. And barely supporting at that.

Lisbeth pretty much has to handle everything on her own here, as Mikael frets and broods from a safe distance. He's the epitome of a "beta" in a lot ways. But it really is Lisbeth's story.

I enjoyed this movie, as I said, but I tend to think these movies are being over-estimated. They're really just lurid crime dramas, and while they're well done, they're not that remarkable.

Still we liked it, and—well, the final movie in the trilogy is more legal wrangling than crime drama.

Cyrus

"I know! Let's make a movie about a couple of ugly, doughy dudes."

"John C. Reilly!"

"Yeah, and that Jonah Hill kid."

"That's pushing the definition of doughy."

"Roll with it. OK, how do we get people to go see it, then?"

"We need some hot, to counteract the doughy."

And so it came to pass that Marisa Tomei co-starred in Cyrus, a movie about a broken-hearted man who finds the woman of his dreams, and her goofy, manipulative, adult son. Or so I like to imagine it, anyway.

Cyrus is a low-key, low-budget movie, which has some of the uncomfortable intimacy of a Woody Allen movie, some (but not much) of the zaniness of a Will Ferrell movie, and moments that are occasionally dark and are-we-supposed-to-be-laughing-at-this type stuff.

I didn't put it together, but this film is by the Duplass brothers, whose last feature, Baghead, I reviewed a couple of years ago. My reaction to this film is much the same: It's good in parts, well-worn in others, awkward in other parts, a little slow at times, but short and ultimately pleasing.

The Boy and the Old Man both liked it, the latter more than the former, I think, as he felt the resolution was reasonably just.

Inception

Of course, the problem with lagging so far behind in my reviews is that, by now, you've heard everything about the big movies like Inception and probably seen them parodied by now. (See "South Park" and Mary Katherine Ham on the "Rally For Whatever".)

Well, that's one problem. Another problem is remembering the movies.

Anyway.

Inception answers the question, "What if one of our greatest younger directors, Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) remade that cheesy 1984 Dennis Quaid movie Dreamscape?"

And the crowd goes wild! (Raaaaaah!) But they always do with Nolan. Your mission is figuring out whether or not it's a good movie regardless of the hype surrounding it.

And?

Well, it's...okay. Good, even. The cheesy 1984 movie was a fun, dopey popcorn flick. This is neither cheesy nor dopey, but it's also not as much fun. It's loud and serious; kind of grim, even.

The premise is that a team of people operate in the dream-sphere, influencing important people through their unconscious minds. (Not, like with the original, killing them.) What makes this particular mission special is that instead of influencing the person, the team is going to plant an idea. Hence, Inception.

The rules are as follows: Time in the dream world moves an order of magnitude slower than in real life. To wake someone up, you just need to push them so that they fall backwards—that triggers a reflex.

Also, it's recursive: You can dream up a dream-within-a-dream. And the dream-within-a-dream will be another order of magnitude slower. You can, in the logic of the movie, go down about four layers before hitting "limbo", a place where time moves so slowly that you can live a lifetime in seconds.

So, with our rules set up neatly and well in advance—okay, we've lost about a third of the audience, but 2/3rds of us ready for a good time! Sort of like Memento.

I actually didn't find the rules difficult to understand. But I didn't feel like the filmmaker was following the rules. And I found myself irritated by that. One of the best examples comes from one of the more famous scenes: A fight scene where because of a car accident on a higher level, the lower level is being made to go all topsy-turvey and the fight takes place on the walls and ceilings and so on.

But at the same time, there's a level under that which is completely unaffected by the tumbling around. Huh? Now, that's something that I'm pretty sure they didn't qualify, and even if it had, I'd probably have found it asking a bit much.

And this movie does ask a lot of you in the suspension of disbelief department. Falling backwards is the magic that pulls you out of one dream level back up to the previous one, but tumbling every which way doesn't?

I blame Leo DiCaprio. Heh.

I actually don't think I'm kidding. The real problem with this movie for me isn't the rules, it's that it just never engaged me emotionally enough to where I fully set aside my attention to those rules.

Now, I didn't have this problem with Memento. I didn't have it with Insomnia (which a lot of people viewed as a let-down after Memento). I had a little bit of this kind of detachment for the Batman movies. But here it's in spades.

And I think it's because I just don't care what happens to DiCaprio. It doesn't matter what movie it is. I didn't care if he was insane in Shutter Island. I didn't care if he lived or died in The Departed. I didn't care what was eating him as Gilbert Grape. The Titanic? Glad to see him go. (And the scenes in the staterooms with the poor people drowning makes me tear up every time, so it's not about the movie.)

It's not a personal thing, either. I've defended his performances; I don't think he's trading on his looks. (He actually looks kind of rough these days, I think.) But it happens that sometimes you just don't connect with an artist, an actor, a director, whatever. And it's pointless to try to describe why in the same way it's pointless to try to describe why you don't like brussels sprouts.

But where I felt for Al Pacino's weary, compromised cop (Insomnia) and Guy Pearce's complex amnesiac, I just don't connect with DiCaprio at all. And, while we're on it, all the characters are thinly drawn. As is the motivation for all these shenanigans.

Anyway, I'm overcompensating here. It's a good movie. There's a lot to admire. The score. The use of special effects, which is actually very restrained. (cf. the cheesy excesses of Dreamscape) The occasional moment of "Oh, wow, that's right, we're in a dream."

I'd probably write a lot more positive review if people weren't gushing over it like it was the next coming of Blade Runner. It's good. But I don't think it's the sixth greatest movie of all time, as IMDB voters would have it.

The Boy liked it quite a bit. The Old Man enjoyed it, though not without observing more plot flaws than I did. My advice, though, at this point is: If you haven't seen it, scale down your expectations a bit. Worst case is you end up being pleasantly surprised.

Case 39

Conversations From The Living Room, Part 30: You know, I don't remember!

"I recorded My Dinner With André!"

"What's it about?"

"It's two guys having dinner."

"Sounds boring."

"It does! But I really liked it--and I was The Boy's age when I saw it."

"Well, what did they eat?"

". . ."

Despicable Me

Evil genius adopts three orphans to aid him in his battle against another evil genius. In the course of his travails he finds himself changing to accommodate his newest minions.

Sounds cute, eh?

Well, it is. Very cute. In fact, going in, my big concern in going to see Despicable Me was that it would be overly cute. I mean, kiddie movie, right? Not everyone can be Pixar. The traditional mistake is to go overboard on the sweetness and cute for kiddie fare—you may recall how "edgy" Nickelodeon was by having kid game shows involving a lot of goo—though Dreamworks often goes the other way.

Despicable me does a delicate balancing act, being at times sweet, silly, and also lightly dark and edgy with some nice grown up humor.

The cast is wall-to-wall celebrity, with Steve Carrell playing the lead "villain", Gru, with a Eastern European-ish accent, Jason Segel as Vector, his Bill Gates-ish nemesis, Russell Brand as Gru's assistant and Julie Andrews as his mom.

But they're actually voice acting, so you don't necessarily hear them, which is kind of nice. I mean, if celebrities are going to take jobs from real voice actors, they could at least, you know, do some real voice acting!

We had a full contingent for this one, with The Old Man, The Boy, The Flower and The Barbarienne all giving thumbs up. And me, too.

A Solitary Man

Ben Kalmen is a hard-driven, successful middle-aged (okay, that's a bit of a stretch given Michael Douglas is 65) family man/car dealership owner having his yearly physical when the doctor gives him some news. What news? Well, maybe nothing, but the doctor wants to run some more tests.

Flash forward a few years. Kalmen's life is in ruins. He's lost all his car dealerships due to ethics issues. He's split from his wife. He's using his considerable charms to bed every hot chick he runs into. He's trying to stage a comeback, but—well, see the thing about bedding hot chicks, even when it compromises his ability to function otherwise.

This is the kind of movie that rests heavily on the performance of its lead, and Michael Douglas pulls it off amazingly. In real life, guys like this are pretty creepy. Kalmen is pretty creepy but Douglas' charisma and acting chops make him a palatable character somehow, even as he's trying to seduce women who are involved with his fractured family, women who are involved with guys he's supposed to be friends with, women who are the daughters of women he's bedded before...

He descends further and further, burning bridges, until he's down to working in a diner with stable, nice-guy college buddy Danny De Vito. Even there he can't escape his inclinations or the ramifications of his past acts.

The movie avoids pat answers and neat conclusions, threatening to tie the ending into the beginning, and leaving us to wonder whether Ben will get his act together or whether he'll just keep spiraling downward. The effectiveness of the movie is in that it feels very satisfying without doing these things.

Susan Sarandon provides solid backup as Kalmen's baffled wife, Mary-Louise Parker, Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jenna Fischer and Richard Schiff round out the cast. Brian Kopelman directs his (with David Levien) script but this 2009 film never gained any traction last year.

Which is interesting. It has a truer ring and is a lot more intelligently written than most of what gets made, and Douglas' acting is stronger than ever. The Boy and The Old Man both approved, as did I—but its current IMDB rating is just 6.6.

The A-Team

In 1983, a motley assortment of actors were assembled by a team of crack TV writers and sent to a TV series that was a successful as it was goofy. Today, these men are mostly forgotten but the characters they created live on. If you need a mindless way to blow a couple of hours, and if it's playing at your cineplex—maybe you can go see The A-Team.

I never saw the original TV series, though something of a fan of Stephen Cannell's work on "Maverick""Rockford Files" and an admitted fan of the short-lived, never quite realized "Greatest American Hero". (Actually, by 1983, I had already given up on the prime-time TV thing.)

I don't have a whole lot to go on, therefore, as concerns the original compared to the movie version. There's some corny patriotism, some absurd action, some silly character development—I think that all fits in with the original series.

As a summer movie, it's not—well, it's not boring. You can follow the plot and the action, and most of the action is pretty well laid out. It never really engages beyond an almost aggressively superficial level which makes one aspect of the movie very jarring to me.

In what is basically a comic book world of ridiculous stunts, tone is usually kept by minimizing any real sense of consequences for violence. (This is parodied in this "Family Guy" clip at about 2:25.) While that's mostly done here, there is a plot point involving a character killing, and the killing is shown.

It's rather seriously done and struck me as gratuitously brutal.

Anyway, the Boy was not displeased (which counts as fair prize from him for this type of movie), though the Old Man seemed a little grumpy. He thought it was corny, but in the same breath said it was like the old show in that regard—and he was a huge fan of the old show. So I think he liked it but something rubbed him the wrong way. (Maybe the passage of the past 30 years.)

Toy Story 3

Movie trilogies. There never really has been a great one. It's rare enough to get a good sequel. OK, yeah, you got your Star Wars fans, but Return of the Jedi? Let's just say "Ewoks" and leave it at that. Lord of the Rings? I'd argue against it on two fronts: First, it sucked. Second, it's really just one really long movie. The Frankenstein movies come close, but the third entry is pretty weak.

Are there any other contenders? Rocky II was adequate, and Rocky III turned the franchise into a cartoon. The less said about Godfather III the better. Alien 3 is an epic tragedy of filmmaking (oh, what might have been!). Terminator 3 was...well, I didn't see it, but it wasn't regarded as a classic by anyone.

Let's face it: As rare as it is to get one great movie, it's vanishingly rare to get two great movies in a row. A trilogy seems nigh impossible.

Well, until now.

The only question about Toy Story 3? Is it the best of the three movies? It's possibly as funny as the first one (the funniest), and it has all the heart of the second one, without the heart-rending tragedy (I hate you, Randy Newman).

Continuing a trend that started with The Incredibles, this movie has at least as much to appeal for adults. What's more, the a lot of the kids who grew up with Toy Story are now in or on their way to college, just like Andy is in this movie. (One of the interns at the office talked about going to see it with all his friends, who would've been about 5 in 1995.)

The movie opens with the opening play scene of Toy Story 1 combined with the closing play scene of Toy Story 2, only instead of listening to Andy narrate the action, they actually render it, rather spectacularly.

After that, the story picks up about a decade after Toy Story 2 and the toys have met the fate that was the plot point of Toy Story 2. Andy is about to go off to college, and while the toys are still around (most of them—Bo Peep is conspicuously absent).

The question is, what to do with his toys? Attic? Or donation?

Andy sets them aside for the attic, but through a series of unfortunate events, mom donates them to a local pre-school. Woody wants to get back to Andy, while the other toys are enjoying the prospect of being played with, something that Andy hasn't done for years. It soon turns out, however, that a cadre of bullying toys run the place and decide which toys go in which room—with one room being filled with brutal pre-schoolers.

On a practical, philosophical level, the problem with the Toy Story movies is that they've always encouraged children to cling to their toys. (And, really, in Toy Story 1, Sid is really the creative one, however villainous.) The Boy and The Flower both refused to ever throw away/give/sell any toy after Sarah MacLachlan ripped their hearts out.

And dramatically, this creates a difficult problem, set up by the first movie: Andy is a good kid, based in large part in how he plays with his toys. But obviously they can't have a kid going to college still playing with dolls. (Otherwise you end up with Michael Richards circa 1980. Actually, I sort of wonder if Michael Richards and Marydith Burrell weren't the inspiration for Sid and his sister.)

I don't want to give anything away, but let me say that I thought at one point that Pixar had decided to end the series by destroying all the toys. And I thought that both times I saw the movie.

But that's pretty typical for Pixar: They do suspense well. And there's plenty of action, humor, drama—and if you have a kid who's about college-age, you'll probably spend the last five minutes of the movie crying.

And, of course, it's technically flawless. Beautifully rendered to make the dolls' features seem both expressive and plastic. (We don't need plastic surgery, we need CGI.) Music by Randy Newman (again) though without the mid-movie song. There really wasn't time for it.

The voices are all back: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Jodi Benson, R. Lee Ermey as Woody, Buzz, Jessie, Rex, Hamm, Barbie and Sarge. 76-year-old Estelle Harris and 84-year-old Don Rickles return as Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. Laurie Metcalf is back as Andy's mom, and even John Morris—who hasn't acted since 1999's Toy Story 2—is back as grown-up Andy.

Annie Potts is missing, as Bo Peep, and Blake Clark fills in for the late Jim Varney as Slinky.

Joining the cast are Pixar favorites Bonnie Hunt as Dolly, gravelly-voiced animator Bud Luckey as Chuckles the Clown, Richard Kind as the Bookworm, Jeff Garlin as Buttercup and Michael Keaton as Ken. Newcomers include Whoopi Goldberg as a menacing octopus, and Timothy Dalton in a hilarious turn as Mr. Pricklepants.

Ned Beatty turns in a great performance as Lotso, the CareBear-esque lord of the day care center.

It will doubtless win the Oscar for animated feature, but there's going to have to be some real quality put out by Hollywood to beat this in any way. Here's a film that ends a beloved story in a satisfying way, while introducing new characters, and still coming in at around 90 minutes. (Yeah, the official running time is 1:40, but half of that is end credits.)

Interestingly, the previous Pixar tradition of having mid-credit scenes is revived here, though not in outtakes form, as seen in the '90s movies. I wonder if that's not because they didn't want to break the fourth wall.

Yeah, everyone loved it: The Old Man, The Flower, The Barb and The Boy. And me? Well, I said I'd seen it twice.

So far.

Brain--er, Breathless, 50th Anniversary

The 50th Anniversary of Breathless is this year and, this being a seminal film, it was given a limited re-release so that we could all enjoy its, uh, seminal-ness.

And it surely is seminally. It's black-and-white, hand-held camera, minimal sets and cast. There hasn't been a movie this seminal since Blair Witch Project. Which of course was 40 years later. But still.

OK, here's the thing: You absolutely can see in this 1960 movie the future of the ambitious art film, a style which persists to this day, but dominated cinema more and more till the late '60s and early '70s. A lot of movie critics mourn the passing of this era, which was pretty much done in by Jaws and Star Wars.

Thing is I hate this era of cinema. Hate hate hate it!

But let me explain what this movie is about: Sociopath Michel steals a car then kills a cop who pulls him over. The editing is awful—excuse me, seminal—to where it's really unclear what happens in this and the other semi-action scene. He then sort of sulks around, bedding some women and stealing their money, while setting his cap for Patricia, who's apparently taken by his psychotic ways.

In between ducking cops (in the least suspenseful running-from-the-cops scenes ever), Michel and Patricia have long, meaningless conversations in bed about—well, who really cares. They're not likable people. They're not even interesting.

So, I guess there's the low budget aspect of it. The handheld camera. People praise the acting, but it's as stilted as Metropolis without any of the charm, scope or aesthetic.

The Boy was meh, but then he was shocked to find out it was only 90 minutes long. "Seemed a lot longer," quoth he, and I agree. The Old Man and I enjoyed looking at the Citroens. (The Old Man had a couple when I was growing up. Great, unusual cars.)

You know, I'm not the audience for these kinds of movies. This is a movie I think, I dunno, maybe Althouse would like.

It reminded me of music school, where the professors wrote really "inaccessible" music, because if you wrote anything else, people could listen to it and compare it to what's colloquially referred to as "good music".

Worse than that, because these guys—and I'm including Jean-Luc Goddard, who directed this film—are so aware of the great art, they're paralyzed by it. In this movie, Michel idolized Humphrey Bogart, who of course starred in many noir films, which this movie weakly invokes, like a 30-year tenured professor trying to write an atonal fugue in the style of Bach.

Now, it probably is, besides first, best of breed. But unless the self-absorbed, self-indulgent, ultimately nihilistic point-of-view appeals to you, you probably would do well to avoid the subsequent decade-and-a-half of "ambitious art movies".

But, hey, that's my opinion. I could be wrong. (With apologies to Dennis Miller.)

How To Train Your Dragon

Back when I was trying to sell kids' books to publishers, waaaaay back in the '80s, the various publishers would send out rules of what not to bother sending. Tops on most of their lists? "DON'T SEND ANYTHING WITH DRAGONS."

Apparently there was a glut.

I didn't have anything with dragons but I sort of thought it was dickish.

Relevance to the movie How To Train Your Dragon? None, really, except that given this is based on a series of books released in the past decade, I guess the ban is up.

Which brings us to the latest venture from the team that brought you Lilo and Stitch. L&S is an underrated Disney film which managed to unselfconsciously break out of the mold of "young person doesn't meet societal/parental expectations and successfully forges own way in world" that dominated their 'toons since The Little Mermaid. It also used a lot of Elvis unironically.

This is the story of young Hiccup, a Norseman of some sort, who lives on an average Norseman island except for being plagued by dragons. Swarmed, even. So, the young of the village train to become dragonslayers.

Naturally, Hiccup's not really up for that. (We wouldn't have a children's story if he embraced the slaughter of dragon's wholeheartedly and was good at it, would we? Not these days!) He's more of an inventor; and he invents, essentially, a ballista. He manages to hit a dragon—the particular type of dragon so fast and destructive that no one has ever even seen one—and no one believes him.

He stumbles upon the injured beast, though, and discovers something other than the completely unrepentant destroyer of Norse villages he's been taught to believe. The subsequent relationship is...problematic.

This is a fast-paced, sometimes funny, nice-looking film. It walks the line between too cute, too much Kumbaya, and brutal fairly facilely. In that sense, much like Lilo & Stitch, where Stitch was both cute and a destructive monster, but far less cute. (There is a real villain in the peace, and it's fairly unapologetic in its scariness.)

Jay Baruchel (best known to me as the skinny kid in Million Dollar Baby) plays the skinny Hiccup while America Ferrara plays his jealous peer, Astrid. Astrid is one of those now clichéd overachieving girls who just wants to kill some dragons and is increasingly pissed off by Hiccup's strange increasing facility with them.

Supporting characters include Gerard Butler, as Hiccup's predictably not-understanding father (speaking of clichés, didn't we just see James Caan do this in Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs?); Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jonah Hill (kinda sorta doing Jack Black) as the skinny and fat kid vikings—though at least they made Jonah Hill the skinny(-er) one and Mintz-Plasse the fat one; Kirsten Wiig as the twin of—

Wait. Do you care? Does anyone? Why do they keep putting celebrities in animated films when a professional voice actor is probably going to be better (and way cheaper)?

Are you people actually lining up to see How To Train Your Dragon because Gerard Butler was so hot in 300? What the hell is wrong with you?

Or is it just some Hollywood trend?

I hope it's the latter. I get why actors like the voice gigs. No makeup, no costume, just hamming it up in front of a bunch of A/V geeks who are probably all starstruck.

Anyway, the movie was a hit with everyone, from the Old Man, to The Boy—who didn't expect to like it—to both the Flower and the Barbarienne. And me. It's a solid piece of work. Rewatchable. The Old Man objected to the cuteness of the main dragon, and I could see his point. The dragons were all a hair too cute for me.

Curiously, he preferred Shrek 4, but he's a definite outlier in that regard.

Interesting side-note: We saw this back in mid-June at the bargain theater and it's still playing there. That's a good sign.

Best Valedictorian Speech Ever?

I was impressed enough to believe this was a fake, but I found the YouTube of Erica Goldson reading it at her graduation.

YouTube here.

Coxsackie-Athens Valedictorian Speech 2010

Here I Stand

Erica Goldson

There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, “If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen? The Master thought about this, then replied, “Ten years . .” 
The student then said, “But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast — How long then?” Replied the Master, “Well, twenty years.” “But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?” asked the student. “Thirty years,” replied the Master. “But, I do not understand,” said the disappointed student. “At each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?” 
Replied the Master, “When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.”

This is the dilemma I’ve faced within the American education system. We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective.

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn’t you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.

John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts, “We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don’t do that.” Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.

H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States.

To illustrate this idea, doesn’t it perturb you to learn about the idea of “critical thinking.” Is there really such a thing as “uncritically thinking?” To think is to process information in order to form an opinion. But if we are not critical when processing this information, are we really thinking? Or are we mindlessly accepting other opinions as truth?

This was happening to me, and if it wasn’t for the rare occurrence of an avant-garde tenth grade English teacher, Donna Bryan, who allowed me to open my mind and ask questions before accepting textbook doctrine, I would have been doomed. I am now enlightened, but my mind still feels disabled. I must retrain myself and constantly remember how insane this ostensibly sane place really is.

And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.

We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school. We are all very special, every human on this planet is so special, so aren’t we all deserving of something better, of using our minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation? We are not here to get a degree, to then get a job, so we can consume industry-approved placation after placation. There is more, and more still.

The saddest part is that the majority of students don’t have the opportunity to reflect as I did. The majority of students are put through the same brainwashing techniques in order to create a complacent labor force working in the interests of large corporations and secretive government, and worst of all, they are completely unaware of it. I will never be able to turn back these 18 years. I can’t run away to another country with an education system meant to enlighten rather than condition. This part of my life is over, and I want to make sure that no other child will have his or her potential suppressed by powers meant to exploit and control. We are human beings. We are thinkers, dreamers, explorers, artists, writers, engineers. We are anything we want to be – but only if we have an educational system that supports us rather than holds us down. A tree can grow, but only if its roots are given a healthy foundation.

For those of you out there that must continue to sit in desks and yield to the authoritarian ideologies of instructors, do not be disheartened. You still have the opportunity to stand up, ask questions, be critical, and create your own perspective. Demand a setting that will provide you with intellectual capabilities that allow you to expand your mind instead of directing it. Demand that you be interested in class. Demand that the excuse, “You have to learn this for the test” is not good enough for you. Education is an excellent tool, if used properly, but focus more on learning rather than getting good grades.

For those of you that work within the system that I am condemning, I do not mean to insult; I intend to motivate. You have the power to change the incompetencies of this system. I know that you did not become a teacher or administrator to see your students bored. You cannot accept the authority of the governing bodies that tell you what to teach, how to teach it, and that you will be punished if you do not comply. Our potential is at stake.

For those of you that are now leaving this establishment, I say, do not forget what went on in these classrooms. Do not abandon those that come after you. We are the new future and we are not going to let tradition stand. We will break down the walls of corruption to let a garden of knowledge grow throughout America. Once educated properly, we will have the power to do anything, and best of all, we will only use that power for good, for we will be cultivated and wise. We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth.

So, here I stand. I am not standing here as valedictorian by myself. I was molded by my environment, by all of my peers who are sitting here watching me. I couldn’t have accomplished this without all of you. It was all of you who truly made me the person I am today. It was all of you who were my competition, yet my backbone. In that way, we are all valedictorians.

I am now supposed to say farewell to this institution, those who maintain it, and those who stand with me and behind me, but I hope this farewell is more of a “see you later” when we are all working together to rear a pedagogic movement. But first, let’s go get those pieces of paper that tell us that we’re smart enough to do so!

Shrek 4: It's A Wonderful Strife

It's always good to remember that It's A Wonderful Life isn't a comedy. It's got a lot of funny parts to it—laugh out loud funny, even—but it's essentially a dark, existential drama by its very nature: A man so overwhelmed that he considers his existence to be a negative to the world. The brooding darkness is essential to the plot.

OK, most of us don't have to worry about this much. But those of us making kiddie movies based on It's A Wonderful Life would do well to keep it in mind.

Which brings us to Shrek 4: The Final (Thank, God!) Chapter.

This time around, Shrek signs a deal with Rumplestiltskin (filling in for the Devil) to get one day away from his shrieking brood (triplets). The catch is, he has to give up one day to get it.

That day (unwittingly) being the day of his birth. (This is sort of awkward if you think about it, since Shrek has no parents even worth referencing once in the previous three movies.) And so, Shrek finds himself in Pottersville, in the form of Rumplestiltskin's witch-laden kingdom, where there's an ongoing war between the trolls (led by Fiona) and said witches.

It's not bad. The Barb liked it. The Flower thought it was okay, as did the Boy. The Old Man liked it quite a bit (more than he would How To Train Your Dragon). But it is dark.

I mean, literally. For all the advanced CGI and what-not, the bulk of the movie seems to take place at night. And some place full of ogres.

Yeah, that's one place where the movie really falls down: It's A Wonderful Life shows us Bedford Falls, all the places and people who later change due to no George Baily, and despite having three movies behind it, the Far, Far Away of this movie doesn't manage to invoke any fraction of that kind of resonance.

Which is kind of a shame, since you could have seen Lord Farquat and the evil Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming, and all the other baddies vanquished in the previous films. The setting was always a gag throwaway, but it seems like they could have made some callbacks.

Then again, maybe they did, and I just missed them.

Anyway, this is one of those movies where I'm probably the only one who cares one way or another about stuff like that. The kids liked it, forgot it quickly, and we moved on to the next summer film.