Anyone who manages to catch a glimpse of the wonderful show, QI, already knows that the time spent watching is well rewarded by Steven Fry's dry sense of humor, which is offset by the ridiculous nature of his contestants. The show if full of subjective factoids, obscure references and bathroom humor. All of which make for a unique quiz show that challenges the contestants to not only be smart, but also absurd.
If you've never seen it, watch it. If you have, tell you friends. It's wonderful TV for when there's nothing better to do.
Years ago, a slightly younger and much more optimistic me had just finished reading The Dubliners by James Joyce. It happened over a break, when I was staying at my parent's house. When I read it each story felt vital to me, and when I reached the end of the last story the feeling I was left with was overwhelming. The last paragraph of the book is one of the most famous literary passages in the whole English languages, and for the hell of it here it is:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
This passage has always stirred a particular feeling in me that brings on a heady high like no other. If you haven't read Dubliners, or at least The Dead, you should, because it's an amazing book. Each time I read it, it reminds me of feeling I had reading it years ago. It's a feeling which I pursue throughout my life, and every day I feel like that is a success of kinds. This feeling, more than any other, makes me want to be a better person. It's full of sadness and lonliness, but also full of hope for something better; it's fear of dying and most importantly a sense of complete an utter freedom. Reading Dubliners is about this feeling more than anything else for me. In the second story, "An Encounter" two boys ditch their "mundane" lives for a day, seeking excitement, and during they experience the joy of a fleeting sense of freedom. It is such an intense feeling because of its brief temporal nature.
It's in these moment that I find the reason for living. It's not when I'm happiest that really makes me keep going. It's this feeling that I get every so often that is so wonderful and scary I sometimes can't even handle it.
Clint Eastwood has had one of the most remarkable careers out of any single person in all of Hollywood. Rarely does a prolific actor follow his acting career by becoming one of the greatest directors of all time. Eastwood's acting career reached its zenith with movies like The Good the Bad and the Ugly and Dirty Harry. These are among the coolest movies ever, but it is not by cool moments in his filmography that make him an important filmmaker. The moments which make Eastwood both respectable and fascinating are moment like the end of Grand Torino.
Many avoided this movie entirely (I only saw it on video), but this movie captures what Eastwood has spent the latter half of his career trying to do: Urging a change in the American Hero. The current version of the American Hero, is the one Eastwood is largely responsible for creating. He is the hero of the spaghetti western. A genre of movie which rejected the notion of white hatted good guy cowboys seen throughout the fifties and sixties (often played by John Wayne). The new cowboys wore dark hats, were perpetually covered in grime and beads of sweat, they kill men without much of a thought and break the law at their whim. They abide by a moral code, but one that is created by each character. The code is usually centered around violence and greed, yet these characters make for interesting protagonists.
Another film archetype Eastwood helped to create was in his Dirty Harry series. Here we have a similar character, one who lives outside the rules which normally govern detectives, and one who survives by his own morality. He, like the spaghetti western hero, is a violent man who takes care of criminals through horrific acts of mass murder and general ass kickery.
These two characters are the archetypes for nearly every tragic or troubled hero which followed them. All being violent, and horrible. Characters which we like to watch but would flee from in real life, because while these characters always have a scruffy charm, they also are trigger happy sociopathic killers
Eastwood, however, has attempted to show his disdain for this character most notably in two of his films. The first being Unforgiven, and the second is Gran Torino. Unforgiven is often regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and is on the AFI's top 100 list. I think it is, however, something of a failure for Eastwood's first movie as a director, because it doesn't end like it should. Throughout the film, the retired gunman played by Eastwood is torn between the violent nature of his past, and the peaceful life of a struggling farmer and father he has grown into. Eastwood's path crosses a young boy(Jaimz Woolvett) who offers to split a bounty with him in exchange for his help killing the two men with bounties on their heads. After they pick up his old partner(Morgan Freeman) the group goes out to find and kill the men. The violence in the film (which is almost nonexistent with the exception of two parts) is brutal. The long, slow death of one of the targeted men stands is sharp contrast to the quick, clean deaths so often seen in movies.
Eastwood might on occasion lack subtlety, because if you see the clip above it's fairly plain that he is not glorifying this violence in the way movies so often do. Still, at the end of the film (Spoiler Alert!), after Freeman has been tortured and executed, Eastwood gives the moviegoers exactly what they want. He walks into the saloon and starts whoopin' ass. The characters who have never before seen violence are stand ins for the people watching the film, and, are horrified at the gruesome display. The movie glorifies that violence by this bloody ending, and though this marks the beginning of Eastwood's journey away from that kind of violence, it doesn't accomplish quite what it needs to.
Gran Torino in some ways feels like a triumphant rejection of that kind of hero, and it is appropriate for Eastwood to have made this film as his career reaches its end. These two films, Gran Torino and Unforgiven, have so much in common that it's hard not to compare the two, but if asked, I believe Eastwood would say Gran Torino is the superior film. Both contain an awful scene involving a rape and a torture. Both involve a retired man who used to live a life of violence, both share the same sort of loathing and glorification of violence, and both films slowly build towards a bloody climax. Gran Torino, however, triumphs in its ending where Unforgiven does not.* The first thing almost everyone says at the end of Gran Torino is, "Why didn't Eastwood shoot up all the gangsters?" It's disappointing to wait through a whole movie only to find Eastwood doesn't kick gook ass at the end, but it's hard not to appreciate a filmmaker who comes so close to giving his film the ending the viewers want, then utterly rejecting their desires to give the move the ending the film needs. Not using violence to end his film is in defiance to the moviegoer. Eastwood's self sacrificing gesture is a moral stand against a bulk of his previous work, and the ending still manages to feel sincere. In Gran Torino Eastwood is attempting to look past his previous roles and move towards something better. Most of the movie is spent on Eastwood growing away from the bitterness and hatred life gave him, and towards a kinder man. Shifting away from The Man With No Name, or Dirty Harry and becoming a more kind, accepting person. The end of the movies brings the gangsters to justice not through Eastwood's violence, but rather the police actually arrest them! It's unique for a film like this one, and it works wonderfully. Most of Eastwood's characters would have killed the gangsters. He did just that in Unforgiven, but this older, more mature Eastwood has found another way. He is not the violent mass murdering American Hero any longer, but rather a man who is more at peace with himself and the world around him.
I'll admit it sounds pretty wussy to write a whole essay about how Eastwood's coolest characters and best movies are bad because he plays mean people, but I don't think that. I consider many of his films to be great, but I also think that Eastwood doesn't think that those characters should be admired. Those characters might be entertaining to watch on a screen, but if we want a moral character, then the end of Gran Torino is where we should look.
*I seem to be judging Unforgiven quite harshly. I really do think it's a great movie, and a much better movie than Gran Torino. I'm judging it in a specific way so just roll with it.
After watching sports for so long, I'm becoming frustrated with some of them (basketball) and fond of others (baseball). The reason for my frustrations is that some of these sports (basketball) leave me feeling cheated at the end of their seasons, while others don't. Here's why:
Sports are, at their core, irrational. It's why I love them. My love for a team isn't founded in rational arguments, it's based on the various experiences I have while watching any given team play. I love failure, so watching teams like the Lions and the Nets makes me happy. Sure I'm often hoping they lose, but I'm still extremely fond of them. Your hometown team is beloved because when you watch these games with friends you form a unit of people all rooting for something out of their control (really, how people behave around sports is exactly like we do about everything else, but I'm not ready to go there yet).
This irrationality at the core of sports makes being fair a difficult thing to do. We pretend to argue fairly about sports, but if you watch any NFL halftime show, you know that people who played for a team (i.e. Shannon Sharpe and the Broncos) will often create arguments as to why their team will win, even though it's improbable that they will. I often find myself over exaggerating the strength of a team because I want them to be good, and usually I don't even notice I am doing so.
I suspect referees are just as susceptible to this bias, but for them, they might not always be rooting for a team or a player, they might be rooting for themselves as well. The only reason I can fathom why there is such a disparity of records between home and road basketball games is that the refs get swept up in the noise and tend to make close calls in favor of the team that doesn't have 30,000 screaming fans within a square kilometer. If I put myself in their shoes I wouldn't even hesitate to favor the home team. I couldn't resist the cheer of the crowd for my suspect foul call. I'm not, however, a professional referee, and I don't think that they mean to favor the home team, it's a natural reaction. Everybody wants people to like them.
The bias of a referee changing games hurts sports, because it's one thing to get beat by a team, but another to lose a game to officiating. This year in Denver sports, we've seen both the nuggets and rockies make the post season, and my experiences watching each team play revealed to me how badly basketball needs to be fixed before I can truly respect it. After the Rockies lost to the Phillies in the first round I was saddened, but it was such a good season for them that I carried no residual anger towards the Phillies or the league. I felt like we lost to a better team and that's part of being a fan. When watching basketball, however, in nearly every playoff game it seemed like the winners were determined by the referees. A bad call during a crucial moment is all it takes to completely alter the game. There are always countless penalties that are miscalled, some more important than others, and this aspect of the game may never be fixed. Too many calls are made too quickly and the rules are too vaguely worded.
In baseball there are definite rules, and they are adhered to strictly and easily. The strike zone is an exception, but one that is fairly consistent and rarely seems biased. When baseball institutes instant replay, it will be as fair a sport as there is, and that's a good thing. It means that the winning team does so by their own merits, which leaves fans feeling disappointed rather than disenfranchised. I'll probably still watch basketball, but even though I love the Nuggets, I'm increasingly hating the sport.
After some friends started their blogs (I'm looking at you Paul and Rachel), and being jealous of them for having a place to write down whatever they felt like, I decided to start a blog myself. I haven't written in a while, so please excuse all my awkward sentences as I get back into the groove of things.
If your wondering, dear readers, what I might possibly have to say on a blog, the answer is, not much. As the name of the blog already suggests, I will fill these posts with inside jokes, and references only I understand which, somehow, will make me feel like I am rationally defending my adoration of pop culture. Also, as my title suggests, I will often be writing while its late, and possibly, sometimes, when I am quite intoxicated. I will try to avoid the latter too often.
The real point of starting this blog is that I find that too often I am willing to waste time and feel guilty about it. I know that as long as I am actually doing something productive like writing, wasting time won't bother me (if writing a blog nobody reads feel productive to me, imagine what some of my free time looks like). So onwards we go. I'll start writing sometime soon, and maybe, I'll even tell someone about this blog someday.
