In Praise of Silent Movies, or Shut Your Big Mouth

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books, humor, movies, rant, The Artist, The Descendants

Copyright The Weinstein Company

Movies are awesome…

I love movies. They can be visually stunning, intellectually stimulating, and just plain old fun. There is nothing quite like the experience of standing in line for your ticket, getting snacks, finding your seat, checking your watch repeatedly to see how soon the movie will start, and then getting that little jolt of anticipation as the lights dim for previews. The movies return us all to the imaginative days of childhood, when we could ignore the world around us and be mesmerized by an engaging story. Unfortunately, many movie goers are apparently transformed into children in another way– lack of manners. This is not a post all about how incredible silent movies are. This is a post about how annoying unsilent movie theaters are.

This week I saw two movies in theaters: The Artist and The Descendants. Both were absolutely outstanding. The Artist was clearly deserving of the best picture Oscar, and Jean Dujardin’s acting is some of the best I have ever seen in recent memory. The Descendants was poignant and entertaining, and George Clooney remains one of my favorite actors of the past few decades. If only the movies were being considered, I would have a tough time choosing which I enjoyed more. The movie-going experience was very different between the two.

Copyright Fox Searchlight Pictures

…but shut up!

I saw The Artist in the middle of a weekday, in a theater that was nearly completely empty. The three other people in the theater were very quiet, and I can’t remember hearing a sound that didn’t come from the movie for the entire two hours of the film. That was an especially important detail as the The Artist is largely a silent film. My wife and I saw The Descendants during the evening, in a surprisingly crowded theater for a movie released months ago. The noise was unbelievable, and the experience was much less enjoyable as a result. For that reason, I have crafted a list of guidelines for moviegoers who might forget the laws of decency.

• Don’t let your snacks become a distraction. Before the movie even began we noticed a strange rhythmic sound, something akin to an army of caterpillars devouring the produce section at a grocery store. It was the popcorn chew. I’m not sure if people were chewing with their mouths open or if the popcorn was plated in aluminum foil, but the volume was ridiculous. This rule also applies to those of you rustling your candy wrappers or shaking your box of Junior Mints to get the last few stragglers that escaped the vacuum that is your mouth.
• TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE!!! I can feel my blood pressure spiking as I type this rule. I understand that when cell phones were new, you might occasionally forget to turn them off. That excuse died more than a decade ago. How many times does the theater have to play the request to turn off cell phones for it to penetrate your thick skull? I could even be forgiving if it rang and you immediately silenced it and turned it off. What I can’t forgive is the lady sitting behind us last night who answered her phone and proceeded to talk on it. It is a minor miracle that I am not on trial for cellular homicide.
• Keep Your Reactions to Yourself. Part of the fun of movies is allowing yourself to be taken in by the world on the screen. Movies engage your emotions and can evoke strong reactions. I get it. If you get scared, gasp. If you think something is beautiful, murmur admiration. If something is funny, laugh. That does not mean you should repeat your reaction ten times (I am talking about you, lady who said a dozen ‘Wows’ every time there was a shot of Hawaiian scenery). That does not mean you should repeat the joke or discuss with your companion how scared you were, especially not at your normal speaking volume!
• React appropriately. This is an addendum to the previous rule. I recognize that we don’t all react to the same scene in the same way. What I find funny might not amuse you, and what you find sad might not seem so touching to me. That said, it is not difficult to recognize moments that are meant to be sad. Do not ruin them by reacting inappropriately. For example, there was a heartbreaking scene in The Descendants in which one character gives a very emotional speech to a woman in a coma (I won’t ruin it with specifics). In the middle of the speech, the camera cuts to the woman in the coma. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is open, her cheeks are sunken, and she looks every bit the part of a brain-dead patient. It was extremely sad. Half of the audience laughed at the dying woman’s appearance. REALLY?! YOUR ONLY REACTION TO SEEING A PERSON BARE THEIR SOUL TO A DYING WOMAN IS TO LAUGH BECAUSE THE COMA PATIENT LOOKS STRANGE?! If that wasn’t bad enough, soon after that scene the dying woman’s husband says his goodbye. After speaking to his dying wife, he leans in and kisses her on the lips. This touching gesture was greeted by a chorus of “EWWS!” If you can’t contain your childish reaction, then don’t go see a movie that requires adult emotional responses. Stick to Michael Bay’s special effects spectaculars, there is much less thinking involved.
• Do not finish the lines for the actors. I go to the movies to see good actors reciting well-crafted dialogue. I do not want to hear you finishing lines with what you either expect the actor to say or wish they would say. The Descendants won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. If memory serves, you weren’t one of the people who accepted that trophy, lady sitting down the row from us. It is a very simple rule: SHUT UP DURING THE MOVIE!!!

In case you didn’t notice, I am a little bit irritated. Call me old-fashioned, call me grumpy, or call me unreasonable. Whatever you call me, wait until after the movie to open your trap! Here endeth the rant.

The Jeopardy! Experience, Part 1

Tags

books, humor, jeopardy, travel, tv

My picture with the real Trebek will be e-mailed in July…

A few of my regular readers may have noticed my complete absence from the blog world over the past few weeks.  I wasn’t allowed to post anything about the reason, but am now at liberty to do so.  I have not been reading or posting for the past month because I was busy studying for an appearance on the classic TV game show Jeopardy!  This post will tell the first half of the story, but I can’t reveal the ending until my episode airs on July 2^nd.

How did I get here?

I have been asked by several people how I came to be on Jeopardy to begin with.  The process is long but relatively straightforward.  It starts with an online test, which I took in February of 2011.  If you do well enough on your online test you get an e-mail inviting you to a live audition.  My live audition was held in Kansas City in June of 2011.  At the audition you take another test (written this time) and play a short game of Jeopardy against two other potential contestants.  While playing your game, the contestant wranglers do a personality interview similar to what Alex Trebek does with the actual contestants.  The contestant wranglers at my audition were two lovely ladies named Maggie Speak and Corina Nusu.  They were both very entertaining and did a great job of drawing the potential contestants out of their shells.  I thought I did fairly well on the written test and had a great time playing the game and being interviewed.  At the end of the process, the wranglers told us that we were in the contestant pool.  The contestant pool is something like limbo.  It’s not a guarantee that you will be on, but it’s not a rejection.  It’s an 18 month-long maybe.  You aren’t allowed to tryout again until your 18 months in the contestant pool expires.  My time ran until December 2012.  That was it for the next several months.  I kept watching Jeopardy, but forced myself not to think too much about the possibility of getting called.  For the next few months following my audition, every conversation with a family member would include the question “Have you heard from Jeopardy yet?’.  I would remind them all that it could be more than a year before I heard anything, if I heard anything at all.

The Call

After roughly six months had gone by since my audition, I began to have a feeling that I would not get called on this attempt.  I still had a year to go in the contestant pool but I convinced myself that it wasn’t going to happen for me this time.  I wasn’t depressed or upset; I just wanted to force myself to face the likelihood that I would have to wait and tryout again in 2013.  As it always seems to happen with these kinds of things, I was proven wrong a short time later.  Just a week or two after convincing myself that it was not going to happen, I got the call.  My debate team was participating in a tournament in Houston on Friday, January 27^th and Saturday the 28^th.  We had just spent four hours on a charter bus traveling all the way from Dallas and were in the process unpacking our materials in a gymnasium that had been designated as the tournament rallying point.  My phone rang as we were setting up and I chose to ignore it (as I usually do with numbers I don’t recognize).  The unknown caller left a message, which I immediately checked.

“Hi Taylor, this is Corina with Jeopardy.  I am just calling to make sure the information in your file is current.  Please call me back when you get a chance.”

I dropped everything and called back immediately.  Corina went through all of information as though she were just updating my records, and then casually added “We would like to invite you for a taping on February 22^nd, do you think you can make that date?”  I agreed and the whirlwind began.  Corina reviewed all of the pertinent information with me and gave me a few instructions for things I would have to do before my taping.  I was strictly instructed not to post anything online until after my taping.  From that point on I was in study mode.

You can barely see the faceplant damage…

A Bumpy Ride

What followed were three long weeks of nervous studying and excited planning.  I was allowed six guests, and quickly had a full quota.  My wife would accompany me, as would my father, my younger brother, my grandma, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law.  We booked flights, hotel rooms, and the biggest rental car we could.  I sent in my legal paperwork and filled out three questionnaires to provide material for the interview with Alex.  I tried to focus on doing my job and studying when I could, but the excitement was building.  The day for departure arrived around the same time that I reached the point that I couldn’t stand to look at another flash card.  The party met at the airport (minus Grandma, who would meet us in LA) and we boarded.

I guess this is the point at which I should explain my special relationship with luck.  I would generally say that I have very good luck.  I have a wonderful and beautiful wife, a great family, the world’s most awesome dog, and a great job.  Life is good.  It is because life is good that my bad luck likes to trip me up every once in a while.  It is sort of like a karmic balance.  When things are going well, something has to happen to remind me that the universe is still boss.  That’s why I broke both arms (at the same time) in high school.  That is why I was bitten by a copperhead.  That is why my flight to Kansas City for my audition was cancelled (forcing my mother and myself to drive all the way there and back).  And that is why I gave the crew and passengers of American Airlines flight #2407 a trip they will never forget.

I have a long and disgusting history of motion sickness.  Fortunately, I have outgrown my tendency to get carsick.  Unfortunately, the same is not true of airsickness.  On this particular flight I went to sleep shortly after takeoff.  After a thirty minute nap, I awakened to the realization that I was about to be sick.  I headed for the first class bathroom (because it was closest) and reached out for the handle.  The next thing I remember, I was asleep in bed having a dream about getting on an airplane.  This lasted for what seemed like quite a while, before I woke up to discover that I was indeed on an airplane.  My dad was holding my head up and the flight attendants and first class passengers were watching me with looks of panic and fear.  Apparently I had passed out upon reaching the bathroom.  I heard one flight attendant ask repeatedly if I was diabetic.  My dad assured them that I was not and prevented me from getting an unneeded insulin shot.  Another said she was afraid I had suffered a heart attack (a comforting thought at the ripe old age of 25).

At this point I had pretty much returned to reality.  The flight attendants gave me a very large bottle of cold water and had me sit in the jump seat while I drank it.  My younger brother, Wiley, asked for a wet towel because my nose was bleeding.  Unbeknownst to me, I had passed out while standing at the bathroom door and had proceeded to crash face-first into the arm rest of a first class seat (a seat occupied by Don Nelson, former coach of the Dallas Mavericks).  I had a gash on the bridge of my nose and two very sore eyes.  After sitting for a while, I was ready to return to my own seat in coach, where my very frightened wife was waiting for me.  As I left first class, I told them that the in-flight entertainment was now over, which drew a few laughs (Seriously people, lighten up.  If I can laugh about it you can too!).  I wolfed down a granola bar and enjoyed the rest of the flight.

Bogart is too cool not to take this picture!

You’re not from around here, are you?

Our merry band spent the rest of the day being consummate tourists.  We visited Venice Beach, where my brother and I swam in the Pacific despite the frigid temperature of the water.  We cruised a little bit in Beverly Hills.  We went to Grauman’s Chinese Theater and examined the hand and foot prints of the stars (John Wayne had surprisingly small hands and feet).  We posed in front of the Hollywood sign.  For dinner we hit the Santa Monica Pier and ate at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.  At this point we were joined by two other members of the cheering section, friends who had flown in from Houston to watch me compete on their favorite TV show.  Through it all I acutely felt the nervous tension that accompanied the awareness of what tomorrow could hold.

This is Jeopardy!

The morning finally arrived and it was time to head to the studio.  I rode a shuttle with the other twelve contestants and the nerves were obvious in everybody’s face.  We arrived at the studio and began a two-hour process of makeup (mine took especially long thanks to my airplane mishap), rehearsals, and commercial tapings.  The rehearsals took place on the actual set, which is smaller than it looks on TV.  My first rehearsal was horrible.  I couldn’t buzz in no matter how hard I tried.  I got another rehearsal a little while later and eventually figured out my timing.  We were then returned to our backstage green room.  The contestant wranglers did a wonderful job of relaxing us and keeping us all in good spirits.  Through all of this, we had not seen Alex Trebek.  In order to avoid any possibility of favoritism they keep him away from the contestants until the episode is being filmed (We would all get a picture with him during our episodes, but they won’t e-mail them to us until the air date).  The producers did a drawing to see who would appear in the first episode, and my name was called.  My heart was beating out of my chest as they led the other contestants out, leaving only myself and my two competitors.  The time finally came, and we were marched out to the set.  I took my place behind my podium, signed in, and the fun began.  This episode will air on July 2^nd, and I will post the rest of the story shortly thereafter!

#66: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

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100 books, book review, books, Franzen, humor, literature

I will admit that I was sceptical of my most recent book.  I have heard so many good things about The Corrections that it bordered on being banished to my category of overly popular (and therefore unreadable)books.  I mean seriously, a book published in 2001 on Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest English-Language Novels?  Exaggeration seemed likely.  I almost purchased this book several months ago but resisted the urge.  Last week, with a 40% off coupon to Half Price Books, I gave in.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is a novel centered around the lives of elderly Midwestern couple Alfred and Enid Lambert and their three grown children, Gary, Chip, and Denise.  Alfred has rapidly progressing Parkinson’s, and Enid dreams of spending one last Christmas with her children all home.  This dream is complicated by the vastly different lives of the three Lambert children.  Chip was a university professor on tenure track but was fired after an ill-advised affair with a student.  He moves to New York and attempts to write a screenplay.  His failure in that endeavor eventually leads him to join a Lithuanian crime lord’s scheme to defraud American investors of sizable amounts of money.  Gary is the apparently normal child.  He enjoys a good job and sizable wealth, as well as having a beautiful wife and three wonderful children.  Beneath this veneer lies a man tormented by insecurity and an inability to identify and realize his own desires.  Denise is a succesful chef who becomes confused about her sexuality and falls for her boss’s wife.  The resulting affair eventually leads to her firing from Philadelphia’s hottest restaurant.  Eventually all three children find their way home and must face the reality of their father’s condition and their own failures.

The Corrections is one of those books that makes you laugh at things that shouldn’t be funny.  Franzen presents the harsh realities of aging and the failure to live up to the expectations we all set for ourselves in a way that makes them bearable only because he gives us permission to laugh.  He perfectly captures the complex influences each member of a family exerts on each other member.  The incongruities between ‘traditional’ values and the modern America we inhabit (driven by the thirst for corporate profit and individual desires) are on full display.  Franzen shines a light on the disfunction that is passed from generation to generation as each attempts to improve upon the efforts of its predecessor.  Few authors are capable of so much insight without turning out a book that is overwhelmed by its own apparent profundity.  Franzen does exactly that.  He offers his readers a sincere and insightful look at the world we inhabit without becoming superior in tone or distracted by his own wisdom.  The Corrections is engaging and intelligent, humorous and disturbing.  More than anything, this book is just plain fun to read.  I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Current Count:

66 Read, 34 To Go

#64: The World According to Garp by John Irving

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100 books, book review, books, Garp, humor, John Irving, literature, movies

Three days after finishing number sixty-four I am finally getting around to posting my review.  My most recent literary conquest is The World According to Garp by John Irving.  I saw the film version featuring Robin Williams several years ago and have been curious about the book ever since.  I happened to see it at Half Price Books recently, and a dollar later it was mine.

Garp is a difficult book to summarize.  In a nutshell, it chronicles the life of the titular Garp.  Garp is the son of Jenny Fields, a nurse who desires a child but does not want a relationship with a man.  This makes her an extreme oddity in the 1940s.  Her solution is to conceive a child with a dying brain-damaged patient who retains sexual function despite lacking motor skills and effective sensory perception.  Needless to say, Garp’s life is a bit unusual. His mother publishes an autobiography that makes her a feminist icon, while Garp becomes a moderately famous writer.  A series of tremendous misfortunes test Garp’s sanity and the love that binds his family together.  The cast of characters also features Garp’s wife Helen, former NFL player and transsexual Roberta (formerly Robert) Muldoon, and several other less important but extremely interesting individuals.  The novel touches on the themes of gender relations, the anxiety of parenthood, lust, infidelity, forgiveness, the art of writing, and many, many more.  This summary doesn’t even begin to do justice to this book. 

John Irving’s creativity is astounding.  The plot of Garp is engrossing and impossible to predict.  It is occasionally obscene but always sincere.  No matter how outrageous the characters sound, Irving manages to make them come alive.  The character of Garp is one of the most memorable and enjoyable in recent fiction, and you can’t help but love him despite his many flaws.  The ridiculous and heartbreaking events of which he is the victim are darkly humorous but poignant.  This is a book that will make you laugh out loud at things that should not be funny, including rape, death, and one shocking example of castration by car accident.  That is Irving’s most remarkable accomplishment– he forces the reader to recognize the humor lurking behind every aspect of our lives, even the most astonishing tragedies.

The Current Count:

64 Read, 36 To Go

#63: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

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100 books, book review, books, classics, humor, literature

Last night I reached a major milestone in my quest by completing book number sixty-three.  This seems an odd number to celebrate, but it means I have now matched my total from last year.  With slightly more than two months remaining, I am still a long way from the century mark but should make considerable gains on last year’s total. 

My most recent conquest is Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  The book follows the events in the life of Tom Sawyer, a young boy in Ste. Petersburg, Missouri (based on Twain’s own hometown).  Tom is a typical boy, full of adventure but sometimes lacking in common sense.  His life is filled with pretended piracy and games of ‘Robin Hood’ in the local forest.  One night, in the course of another wild adventure, Tom and his friend Huckleberry Finn witness a murder committed by the nefarious Injun’ Joe.  Joe blames another miscreant, who is set to hang for the murder until Tom testifies about what he saw (despite the risk of being killed by Injun’ Joe for the revelation).  Joe escapes and Tom lives in fear of his revenge.  This fear is naturally not enough to discourage Tom from further adventures, including the discovery of buried treasure and getting lost in a cave for days.  Injun’ Joe also gets trapped in the cave, where he starves to death.  Tom’s triumph and newfound wealth earn him a level of fame uncommon for grown men in his town and the respect and admiration of all of the boys.   

Credit for this choice goes to my father, who gave me a very old and very worn edition of the book that he came across in an antique store (pictured above).  This is another one of those books that I should have read at some point prior to now but somehow avoided doing so.  I am glad I waited.  Tom Sawyer is definitely a book that can be enjoyed by children, with its chronicle of the many misadventures of Tom and his friends, but is even more enjoyable for an adult.  Twain writes with a wit and humor impossible to duplicate.  He reminds his adult readers of their own childhood escapades while also pointing out that age is no reason to lose the good nature of youth.   I was most struck by the similarities between children today and those of more than a century ago.  The same restless spirit and creativity that fuel Tom’s adventures continues to drive the activities of children today.  The ability to create worlds of imagination and inhabit them for hours is one of the most endearing qualities a child possesses.  I fear that technology, and especially the ubiquitous video game, may dampen this spirit of creativity, as the imaginary worlds created by children are replaced by the electronic ones programmed for them.  In any event, Tom Sawyer is a wonderful reminder of the joys of childhood.

The Current Count:

63 Read, 37 To Go

#62: Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

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100 books, book review, books, humor, Nietzsche, philosophy

There are books out there that you can read in an afternoon and feel as though you took your time.  There are also books out there that you can spend nearly two weeks reading and feel as though you blazed through them.  Nietzsche always falls into the latter category.  I enjoy reading Nietzsche for the same reason I enjoy running in the mornings– I know that the shakiness and the exhaustion of today will become the strength and stamina of tomorrow.  Reading Nietzsche can be a laborious task, but is always a rewarding one. 

Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche’s first book after Thus Spoke Zarathustra and contains a similar effort to spell out the author’s philosophy in its entirety.  While Zarathustra is written as a novel and presents Nietzsche’s thinking in a more poetic light, Beyond Good and Evil  is more systematic and less literary.  The two make for an excellent exposition of the mature Nietzsche.  Beyond Good and Evil  touches on a wide variety of themes, but the predominant issue addressed by Nietzsche is morality.  In his view, philosophers throughout history have been too willing to accept the established definition of morality (largely based on Christianity) and are therefore limited in their philosophical potential.  What mankind needs is a new breed of thinker willing to move beyond the traditional concepts of good and evil. 

Clearly that is a very compact and abbreviated summary.  Nietzsche is one of those authors whose work is so laden with profundity that any review will be necessarily lacking in detail.  Rather than write pages and pages of summary and analysis, I have opted for brevity.  I cannot overstate the depth of thinking involved in this book.  Some sections can be read five times in immediate succession and generate a different understanding each time.  I do not agree with everything Nietzsche says (particularly his thoughts about women), but everything he writes demands consideration.  He has the rare power to force a level of self-examination that is often uncomfortable but certainly worth the effort.  For a lighter look at Nietzsche, check out the Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random quote from Nietzsche with a scene from the Family Circus cartoon strip to very humorous effect. 

The Current Count:

62 Read, 38 To Go

Welcome to the jungle…

Tags

education, humor, music, teaching

It’s that time again– school starts tomorrow.  I spent the past week sitting through in-service and frantically cleaning, organizing, and decorating my classroom.  Needless to say, my reading pace has suffered.  I am part of the way through two books, and hope to finish them soon.  After a week or so things should settle down and my reading should get back on track.  As I return to the jungle that is teaching high school (Speech and Debate this year instead of English), I offer you this video.  It features a then-unknown Jim Carrey lip synching Guns’n’Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” in the movie “Dead Pool”.  Enjoy!