Review of Bobby

Emilio Estevez's grandiose ensemble piece takes place at Ambassador Hotel over the course of the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Estevez who wrote and directed the piece is a little too overeager in his attempts to make the film a time capsule of the 60's with sloppily constructed newsreel montages, and references to things like CHADs that have the subtlety of hitting you over the head with a hammer. One of these references is fairly accurate, however: Anthony Hopkins, who plays a veteran of the hotel staff, asks one of the kitchen staff if he's seen the movie Grand Hotel, which is a lot of what the movie feels like. Grand Hotel was a best picture winner from the 1930s that boasted Hollywood's biggest stars (all 5 of them) all in the same picture. Estevez has done an admirable job in assembling his assortment of Hollywood's glitziest and most glamorous stars (preferring the showier Elijah Wood, Ashton Kutcher and Lindsay Lohan to thespians like Haley Joel Osmont, Tobey Maguire and Scarlett Johannson, for example). When stars like Sharon Stone, Anthony Hopkins and Christian Slater pop up without warning, it creates a sort of excitement that isn't usually present. Bobby plays out a lot like Nashville or Kansas City with different story lines going in their own directions and fusing together. Some of the story lines work and some don't but the ones that do are interesting enough to sustain us through the ones that don't. William H. Macy and Sharon Stone shine at the center of the film as the hotel's hard-nosed owner and his all-too-faithful wife, while Freddy Rodriguez, Christain Slater, and Lawrence Fishburne make for an interesting microcosm of racism in the hotel's kitchen. Shia LeBouf and Brian Geraghty provide comic relief as two straight-laced campaign workers discovering LSD and blotching the most important day of their young careers. What unites all the characters together, however, is their place in history when Bobby Kennedy was shot and Estevez's passion for the historic figure and his ideals, which lurk underneath the story lines, really stand out throughout the film.

The Trials and Tribulations of a non-driver

This is an article I wrote for a school website, that you can find on www.jmaddy.com. It was about what it's like to be a non-driver and the problems that ensue on my school campus. It's entitled "Dude, Where's My Car" so you can find it off their website:


I had my first class of an ISAT (College of Integrated Science and Technology) course this week on Energy and transportion and the professors were pointing out how we are probably gonna run out of gas in 40 years and how we have to stop driving cars so much.

That sounds all well and good but the problem is as I'm writing this, I'm currently stranded in Northern Virginia with no really easy way to get to JMU for class on Tuesday and I am racking my brain looking for a solution to this.

Now for those of you who are wondering why I don't drive, I did at one point drive a car and believe me I know how much fun it was. In fact, it was too much fun. After a series of fender benders, I totalled a car at the age of 19 and when I had another collision a year later, the insurance company strongly recommended (aka basically forced me) that I stay off the road for three years or else my rates will go through the roof.

In the meantime, I have transferred to pristine James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Unfortunately, Harrisonburg, Virginia is now considered by the buses and railroads to be in the middle of nowhere. I did initially consider transferring to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis because it was in a city and that meant easier access to transportation, but in-state tuition for JMU was cheaper which obviously makes a big difference.

I am very pleased with the bus system for Harrisonburg and JMU. Most towns of this size don't have as good public transportation. However, this campus is humongous. Obviously I'm aware that exercise is good for us, but do people realize how far some of these distances are? Last year, it was a mile from college center to my dorm in the lakeside area and about 4/5 of a mile to the ISAT building were a lot of my classes were. That is something grade schoolers run in PE as a test of endurance or a brisk walk for a suburbanite to do on the weekend. For a daily commute, however, it is a distance that will wear you out. Especially if it's round trip and you're carrying a back pack on your shoulders.

As for the College Center (a building that's farther away from my dorm than the college center), that is a trip that I would never make non-stop if I had my way. Like I should prop up a tent on the side of Carrier Drive and make it a two-day trip. What kills me is those times when
you realize you left JAC Card somewhere else when you're in line at the Festival or PC Dukes and the manager is telling you they have no problem ringing you up just as soon as you get your JAC Card. I will probably die of starvation and/or exhaustion before I can make a
return trip with my card.

Fortunately, with the intercity transportation system, mobility and time management can be made easier if one either memorizes the schedule and times their day according to it, or if they are lucky enough to have a bus' route coincide with where they are going at their specific time of need. The bigger issue, however, is intra-city transportation which refers to helping people get into and out of town. When my older sister's friends went to JMU around the turn of the decade, there were train and bus lines servicing the station. When I first transferred to JMU, there was a bus stop, so at the very least we had Greyhound service, however uncomfortable it might be. Now, the only option is homeride which limits when we can leave and return to one day a week each and that's if we live in any of the selected areas.

This poses a definite problem to which I can't think of a quick-and-easy solution offhand. For those of us who came to JMU when we had intracity transportation and relied on that transportaiton, we are somewhat screwed. At the very least, I hope student ambassadors are selling the campus to prospective students as accessible via Greyhound cause its not.

On a more general note, I also think people underestimate the effects of a car on stress management and your social life. Not having a car is an impediment to my overall wellness because I can't escape town and go somewhere get some space by driving out of town
when I want to. I don't know how many drivers take for granted the fact that with their car they can get away, even to Bridgewater or downtown or wherever with such ease. There's also the difficulty of running errands of course and the amount of time it gobbles up. But, lastly, I also find it an impediment to my social life, when you rely on people for rides it always makes you less desirable of a friend and puts you in the hole on a give-and-take relationship as someone more on the taking end.

My main point, therefore, is that I'm doing everyone else on the road a favor by not driving, because my history shows that I am not a safe driver. I am doing a favor to every other driver by easing gridlock because there is one less car on the road. But more importantly, I am doing a favor to the environment and helping keep alive the possibility that we wont use up our
fuel in our lifetimes by staying off the road. And as you can see from the fact that I can't even get to my class on Tuesday without spending a rediculous sum of money through a plane fair or a taxi cab ride, I'm not rewarded for it.

We constantly send the message: don't drive a car and help the environment out, but for JMU students, its nearly impossible to not have one.

Therefore, I encourage us all to help make it possible. First of all, I urge everyone to give rides, offer rides when you see someone walking a long way with a heavy backpack, its a really easy way to make an impact on someone else's day. Most things in Harrisonburg are within a mile or two of each other. This is about 5 minutes by car and about 25-30 minutes on foot. Even if its a little out of your way, just think about how much time that saves for someone, especially if
they need it. I am always hearing that this college is supposedly a really friendly one, and that is one of the easiest ways you can dispel stereotypes that thats not just BS. Also for intra-city
transportation, take more advantage of the ride board or even the one on this site. Remember that will benefit you too, because we all will be more than happy to contribute to gas. It might even be a good social experience and one things for sure: we really do appreciate it.

The AP top 25 poll

I used to be really into college basketball from around 10^th to 12^th grade, and oddly enough this year, I’ve gotten into it again. That means I’ve never followed college basketball closely pre-March Madness while I was in college, but I just never went to schools with good basketball programs and I just shifted my interest to the NBA.

This year, I started following college basketball again. I don’t know why, exactly. I think it’s an interesting time because people who would have been in the NBA are now forced to do at least a year in college, so that makes it all very interesting and we know that at least some of the players are NBA-worthy. Anyway, one thing that used to annoy me back in the day and still annoys me now is the AP Polls.

It seems like the AP poll, operates under a fairly automatic system that works without much thought: Take last week's poll, move down 2-3 spaces the teams that lost, and move up the teams that won. It seems like little thought is given to the caliber of the opponent or much else. Ohio State and Wisconsin are even in the Big 10, yet Ohio State is sure to move up on them in the polls because they didn't lose last week, but that doesn't neccessarily mean they're the better team. Oregon is ranked 9^th and while USC and Washington State are tied for second in the Pac-10 ahead of Oregon, they wouldn’t be able to move ahead of Oregon in the polls, because Oregon is ranked too high to drop that far even though USC demolished Oregon twice.

Even if a top 25 team loses to a team ranked higher than them, which would be the expected outcome, (i.e. Arizona losing to UNC, Clemson losing to Duke, or Washington State losing to Oregon) they move down in the rankings while mid-major teams like Butler, Air Force, or Nevada move up for beating mediocre teams. I think there are a lot of advocates for allowing the mid-majors to have a chance, but it’s ridiculous to think that because Butler beat Southwest Missourri and Southern Mississippi while Arizona split games against North Carolina and Oregon, Butler should move ahead in the polls because it didn’t have any losses. The AP Polls also discriminate against the mid-majors anyway because they’re basically based on the preseason. If you were the preseason #1 and you keep losing, you automatically have a much better chance of staying in the top 25 two months later than preseason #20, because the voters will keep moving you two spaces down each time you lose. Preseason #20, meanwhile will be out of the polls in a couple weeks. Preseason #1 is usually going to be a team from a major conference and the mid-majors, if they make it all, will likely fill out the lower ranks.

Fortunately, the seeding for March Madness isn’t done by the polls but by a committee and by the RPI, which is probably something like the BCS system. I think any computerized system is going to be much better than the AP Poll because it doesn’t suffer from human problems of having short-term memory and the like. I don’t know much about college football, but if the BCS system places teams mathematically, that’s gotta be better than human judgement in this case. People tend to complain when the AP Poll disagrees with whomever the BCS assigns as #1 and #2 but if the AP Poll in Football is anything like the AP Poll in Basketball, I’d much rather trust a computer.

Digging up Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty's past

The last week, I've been going to the Central Library of Arlington, VA and looking up stuff in the Virginia Room (which is their county archives), for a grad school study project, and while I was there I thought, what the hell, I'll look up info on Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. They are part of my hometown but I’ve never known much about their connection.

It was an interesting reveal.

So first let’s get the two last names out of the way.  They’re both Beattys but Shirley MacLaine must have been found enough of her middle name back then to include it in the yearbook because she’s listed as Shirley MacLean Beatty. She later substituted her middle name for her last name on the spot at one of her first theater auditions because a casting director couldn't pronounce "Beatty" and altered the spelling.

The two had no other siblings growing up and were pretty close. A positive relationship has been alluded to in interviews the two have given as adults although Shirley wishes her brother was less of a philanderer.

Both siblings were noted to be trouble makers in their pre-adolescent days which must mean they did some truly outrageous things (considering all kids are pretty capable of mischief). They would evidently lie on the street and stop traffic and play neighborhood pranks that were reported to their dad. Their dad was a principal of an Arlington middle school and admitted to being a little ashamed of their antics.

Shirley was a cheerleader at W-L and participated in ballet in high scchool. She went to Broadway the summer before her senior year where she had bit roles. The next summer after graduation she went back to Broadway and landed a role in the Pajama Game that got her discovered by Alfred Hitchcock. Soon she was cast in the film “The Trouble with Harry” within one year of graduating W-L. Not long after that came “Around the World in 80 Days” which was one of the most expensive and profitable films Hollywood had made to date and led to an extensive career that earned her five Oscar nominations and one win among many other accolades.

Beatty was a star football player in high school and the class president senior year. His high school yearbook pictures are a lot more amusing to look at than his sister's because of his crew cut. He was also his senior year class president.

He got into the theater the summer before his senior year when his sister recommended he do it as a stagehand at the National Theater in D.C.  Still, it was his football playing that stuck out. He got somewhere in the ballpark of 10 scholarship offers but he turned them down to study acting at Northwestern University.

So that’s the story so far. There are obviously many more files in the library, so I look forward to doing some more digging…

Top 10 Athletes of 2005

1. Roger Federer: when you have both the best and cockiest tennis players whoever lived proclaiming you to be the best in history and you’re only 24, then you might just be the next best thing. Roger Federer’s close to invincible in his sport of men’s tennis, losing only four matches the whole year, frustrating the hopes of would-be tennis prodigies Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt who still haven’t been able to find a hole in his game.
2. Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart

Those irritating BCS squabbles over who deserves to be in the title game, (of which USC was itself a victim in 03-04) were never an issue the past 2 seasons for USC who made the issue of the nation’s #1 team unquestionable. On January 4th, 2005, Heisman trophy winner Matt Leinart threw an Orange Bowl record 5 touchdown passes to win USC the national title, and they haven’t lost a game since. This year, running back Reggie Bush won the Heisman Trophy giving USC the distinction of the only team in history to have two Heisman Trophy winners on the same team.
3. Bode Miller-Miller entered the skiing scene in 2002 as the comeback kid after making up for a blotched first run with a near flawless second run, coming through in the clutch not once but twice to take two silver models. Since then his clutch-skiing has propelled him to unforeseen heights for any American skier in this year’s coming Olympics in Turin. In 2005, he became the first American in 22 years to capture the overall world cup title (ALA #1 skier in the world), breaking through an incredibly strong Austrian contingent. But Miller is just as much a great down-to-earth personality as he is a skier. He’s just as likely to win the race as he is to crash and finish the course on one ski for showmanship purposes, and he’s ok either way.
4. Danica Patrick-Patrick wasn’t just someone who broke the gender barrier in race car driving, she was someone who was a threat to be the best at the sport, guy or girl. When she took the lead at the Indy 500, she was gunning first and made a noble effort in her fourth place finish.
5. Dwayne Wade-Wade made incredibles strides in his sophomore year to go from promising rookie to dark-horse MVP candidate. Unlike contemporary LeBron James, who also blossomed into a superstar this year, Wade managed to get his team into the playoffs, taking them through two rounds and a 7th game against Detroit up into the conference finals. And yes, it was Wade’s team at that point, not Shaq’s. He took over the leadership and did much more than was asked of him when Shaq fell into injuries come playoff time. And he’s also one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People.
6. Chicago White Sox-Paul Kroneko and the Sox finally gave the Windy City, Cub fans included, the pennant they’ve been wishing for since that fateful Cubs-Marlins series of ’03 and way beyond. The Sox were untouchable in the standings throughout the season and when playoff time came they dismantled last year’s dream team, the Boston Red Sox and marched straight on through to the title.
7. Detroit Pistons-“No one gives us any respect,” complained Rasheed Wallace, and in a way he was right. The younger and flashier newcomer title threats, the Pheonix Suns and Miami Heat got more attention up until playoff time, but the Pistons fought hard to show their championship season wasn’t a fluke. With the two Wallaces blocking shots and stealing in the front court and the league’s most athletic swingman in Rip Hamilton, the Pistons steadlily chipped away at the Heat and pushed the Spurs to 7 games. This season, so far, they’re the team to beat again with an astounding record of 24-4 at the end of 2005.
8. Houston Astros-The team didn’t win the World Series but the city was just happy enough with their team to take the pennant for the first time in the franchise’s history and for the first time in Lance Berkman, Jeff Bagwell, and Craig Biggio’s storied careers. Also, consider St Louis was no easy pushover. Add to that, Roger Clemens’ pitching arm which still throws strikes better than anyone at the age of 43 and you have a team of heroes that any city would be proud to have as a World Series runner-up.
9. Rick Pitino and the Louisville Cardinals-Although Roy Williams and UNC is an obvious pick, I’ll go with Rick Pitino because Williams already dealt such a good slate of players to start with when he jumped ship to UNC. Pitino’s storied legacy looked all but over when he failed miserably in the NBA and couldn’t go back to his old job as a coach of Kentucky. However, he settled down elsewhere in the Bluegrass State at the University of Louisville and built up arguably the best interstate rivalry of the last few years before the fruits of his labor came to fruition this year when he became the first coach to reach the final four for three different schools.
10. Lance Armstrong-Won a record 7th Tour de France amid increased hecklers and increased accusations of doping, and then retired so we can see someone else win or stop watching cycling period, cause it wasn’t that interesting in the first place.

Top 10 Athletes of 2006

I love to make those top 10 lists that I see everywhere where the year ends. It usually starts out when i see in some magazine, the top 10 in sports or something, and just for fun I try to predict what will be on the list, and often it usually ends up being me making my own. Here are a couple left over I found on my a drive

10. Billy Donovan-The unconventional coach and former Pitino protege, who’s known for going the extra mile on recruiting trips, finally won a title for the University of Florida which happens to be the state’s first with a talented quartet of sophomores.

9. Amilie Mauresmo-A perennial threat to any Grand Slam semifinal over the last 5 years, Mauresmo finally jilted cold nerves to break through the hegemony at the top of the game usually occupied by the Williams sisters or the Belgian duo of Henin-Hardene and Clijsters. Mauresmo not only made a final for the second time in her career after more than five years and countless semifinal appearances, but she might long-standing nemesis Henin-Hardene in both the French and Australian Opens.

8. Ohio State-Michigan Game-One of the most anticipated regular season football games in years. The Wolverines fought for a shot at the title game and a chance to honor a late coach and the Buckeyes fought off their biggest threat to their undefeated season. Neither side dissapointed in a 3-oint win that went down to the last play.

7. Chris Paul and Reggie Bush-Two newcomers to the NFL and NBA, respectively, helped enhance the prospects of their teams to help uplift the spirits of a city in need of something to look forward to. Rookie Chris Paul was passed over for fellow point guard Deron Williams in the draft, but in his first season he became runaway choice for rookie-of-the-year and led his team from the lottery doldrums to a very close race for a playoff spot in a more competitive Western Conference. On top of that he was selected as the starting point guard for the USA Basketball team in the 2006 World Basketball Championships. Reggie Bush, similarly has been a major catalyst for the New Orleans Saints and has relished his role as the city’s savior. He is playing a big part in the Saints winning season.

6. U.S. Speedskating Team-The Winter Olympics outside of woman’s figure skating, are a hard sell to the U.S. public and nothing helps the publicity machine like controvoursey. Some sports pundits said that the Shani Davis-Chad Hedrick spat was bad for the sport, but their conflict was relatively minor since both men dominated their races and picked up a brevy of other medals in a sport traditionally dominated by the Dutch and Germans. Another big winner, Joey Cheek who took a gold in the 500 and a silver in the 1000, donated his cash bonus to charity and prompted another of other sponsors to match his donation.

5. France-Remembered for Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt more than anything else, the merits of the French in reaching the World Cup final shouldn’t be discounted. This was practically the same French squad that with its diversity and upset over Brazil in the 1998 World Cup, gave the French people great cause for celebration and hope in a racially harmonious country, and after bombing out of the last World Cup and Olympic competitions, upsetting much younger squads on a tough road that included Brazil, Spain and Portugal was no small feat.

4. St. Louis Cardinals-
In a battle between two Midwestern blue-collar towns who hadn’t won a World Series since the 1980s, the power-hitting core of Scott Rolen, series MVP David Eckstein, Albert Pujols, and Jim Edmonds made the difference for a Cardinals squad that had close calls in 2004 and 2005. Tony La Russa became the first manager to win a championship with the American and National league, also of note Chris Carpenter started the all-star game, and the city treated the team and its fans to a shiny new stadium to enjoy their victory in.

3. Italy-The jolly Opera-loving Italians, who had been in danger of falling out of the league of super powers and marred by scandal, emerged from a competitive field in the ultimate global contest to win a world cup for the first time since 1982. The Azzuri had a well-balanced attack with 11 different players scoring goals in competition, a formidable line of defenders, and a little bit of luck on their side. Four months earlier, the Italians hosted the Turin Winter Olympics successfully with hometown hero Enrico Fabris garnering 3 medals including a team relay medal and an upset of both Chad Hedrix and Shani Davis in the 1500 (see #6)

2. George Mason-Cited by countless sportsradio talk show hosts within the following weeks as the biggest upset in college basketball history, the George Mason Patriots disproved the notion that Cinderellas only go so far. Defeating four of the last seven national championships in Michigan State, Maryland and UConn, the Patriots made the final four in a triumphant show of resilience in a final four appearance.

1. Dwayne Wade/The Miami Heat-The big question was when the coveted Class of ’03 would make the playoffs or the final, but to lead the team to the championship that soon was entirely unexpected. The Heat started out with what seemed like an unbalanced roster full of egos and a washed-out coach, but behind the 3rd Year from Marquette, the Heat unseated King LeBron in the conference semifinals, followed it up with a defeat of the nearly impenetrable 80-win (?) Pistons, and with a clutch win in Game 2 of the finals, it all was smooth sailing from there. As the league crowned its new superstar in Wade, it was also a sweet day as veterans Alonzo Mourning and Gary Payton were able to finally take rings home after storied careers.

Thursday night must-see blog

So I'm watching Thursday's TV night and as I'm watching rather than writing about the youtube thing I was going to write about, I start to want to write a little bit about what I'm watching on TV. I start making notes about the programs that I'm watching and before I know it, I have a whole page or two of incomplete notes, and I figure i'll finish those notes and write about them a little more in detail, so I end up with about 6 pages of notes on NBC's TV programs that appeared from 8-10 p.m. last night.
My Name is Earl last night:
My Name is Earl reminds me that one method of comedy is just to make feel-good stories. There’s a highly oversimplified saying that drama is about the failure of man and comedy is about man’s greatness, so logic suggests that comedy can be successful by capitalizing on its realm of human greatness. Not that all comedy is like that. A great deal of comedy revolves around stupid people, and one of the three elements of comedy according to Plato (no, I’m not making that up) was inferiority. Comedy, however, often capitalizes on a feel-good element that I think is underemphasized in reviews of comedy movies. The two best feel-good movies of all time, arguably, are Frank Capra’s “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Capra is primarily known as the inventor of screwball comedy. Adam Sandler, for that matter is also a filmmaker who specializes in feel-good stories. (you kno what, maybe I got the saying all wrong about comedy being about human triumph and drama being about tragedy, but who knows.)

-On My Name is Earl, I can’t help but notice that Catalina, the illegal alien who cleans a hotel,” is quite intelligent and well-spoken. This is a very positive portrayal of a Latin American woman in TV. She’s not just the illegal sassy Latin-American sidekick. In tonight’s episode, Joy is confiding to Catalina about a relationship she had with a store manager of Target or something like that because of the discount she get on audio cassettes. When Catalina asks, “You slept with a guy just because of tape decks?” Joy replies, “Well, it was before CDs were invented.” Then Catalina says, “Wait! Didn’t CDs come out in 198-,” before Joy cuts her off in embarrassment. OK, let’s take a moment to consider this: Catallina knew offhand the exact year in which CDs came out and cross-referenced it to Joy’s age to conclude that she was having sex at a really young age. That’s actually pretty hard.

It’s a really small moment, but it is a great one for the positive portrayal of Hispanic people on screen, made all the more remarkable by the fact that My Name is Earl, like most comedies, is a show all about stupid people: Sublimely dumb people who think Karma was created by Carson Daly, and while Catalina has some of that charming stupidity in her (in one episode she said she thought God was a homeless man with an iguana or something), she’s also intelligent and resourceful and has turned out to amount to more than the sum of her initial character traits.

Right now, Ugly Betty is being celebrated for its positive portrayal of Latin American Immigrants amid the Immigration Debate. America Ferrarra’s character and its symbolic ramifications has been written about everywhere from Time Magazine to Newsweek and she was even honored in the congressional records when a member of the House proposed or created a resolution (I don’t know which) honoring her. But it’s often the small things that make a difference in racial perceptions.

Do you think I’m making too big a deal of a small moment? Well, I’m reminded of the textbook I read for my first film class: “Reel to Reel: Sex, Race, and Class at the Movies.” She writes about a very small moment in a film and how that helped destroy a stereotype: “I imagine all the myriad ways in which conventional representations of black people could be disrupted by experimentation. I am equally moved by that moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train when the young Japanese couple arrive in the train station in Memphis only to encounter what appears to be a homeless black man, a drifter, but who turns to them and speaks in Japanese. The interaction takes only a moment, but it deconstructs and expresses so much. It reminds us that appearances are deceiving. It made me think about black men as travelers, about black men who fight in armies around the world. This filmic moment challenges our perceptions of blackness by engaging in a process of defamiliarization (the taking of a familiar image and depicting it in such a way that we look at it differently).”

She even goes on to make a strong parallel to my Ugly Betty-My Name is Earl connection by comparing Jim Jarmusch to Quentin Tarantino, the latter of who got more attention for his supposedly “progressive” work.

OK, for a point-by-point blog, I probably should not have dwelled long on that one point but I felt I needed to right all that to make a complete coherent well-thought-out point.

-Sometimes a watch or clock can ruin a TV show. Avoid looking at a watch at all costs while you’re watching TV. In tonight’s episode Randy confesses her love for Catalina and Catalina appears to reciprocate. They hug and everybody claps. The only problem? It’s 8:15 so I know the show’s not going to end, and 5 seconds later it was confirmed that I was indeed correct.

-I really kind of like the Randy-Catalina relationship and where it’s going. I felt that before this episode they could have had a Jim-and-Pam or Niles-and-Daphne thing, where the tension get stretched out forever even though they’re legally married. I felt the ending of the episode took a back turn, because the first two relationships I previously mentioned went years where the characters weren’t together. These two are already married and had sex, so that reduces the tension significantly. What is there left? The two having good sex? Especially considering the show’s lovable innocentness, this is an unusually wrong move by the show to have two characters jump into bed together as a way to move a plot. Remember when the show played with the audience’s perceptions of what we might’ve thought Randy and Joy did when her kids were gone in season 1, through some cleverly concealed shots?

The Office:

The Office is such a great show because it’s so very, very relatable to the point where I want to live vicariously through the characters. Like an Alexander Payne movie, I’m not thinking

It’s kind of the cornerstone of the Must-See Thursday Night TV experience, and it deserves whatever accolades it’s getting. I’m sure because The Office is at the top of the heap, plenty of people are eager to attack it, because people like to attack whatever’s at the top.

The thing I feel like noting this time is there are usually just a couple brilliant moments on The Office each week, that are just pure comic gold. It’s the kind of comic setup and payoff, that you just have to gaze at the TV screen in awe of the comic minds behind it. Here are this week’s top 5 moments:

-That Dwight asked him about the preference between a brunette and a redhead in front of Pam and Jim. Way to up the sexual tension!

-Her “you’ve gotta have 8 hours of sleep” painfully akward attempt at small-talk with Jim. It was a painfully awkward moment where the usually composed Pam reverted to Michael-like behavior and in this show, lately as Michael is becoming more romantically competent this season as he’s having relationships with that real-estate agent and Jan, it’s good that the show is keeping the usual level of akwardness through other factors.

-She’s supposed to answer phones with her clothes on because they have to use up the whole three hours. The presence of the stripper is hilarious as she was just looming everywhere. Wait, why couldn’t anyone in the room use the stripper? Stanley’s married. Kevin’s engaged but I don’t think that would stop him. Ryan has a girlfriend upstairs who gets jealous of everything. Same with Dwight. Roy and Jim wouldn’t want word getting around that they’re doing stuff with strippers when they want to look like a gentleman with Pam. Oscar’s gay. Hmmmm….what about the warehouse manager, Daryl?

-“That is not the real Ben Franklin, I am 99% sure.” Hillarious. Thank god Jim is back to resorting to playing pranks on Dwight.

-The fact that Michael felt the need to confess to Jan about a lap dance he had not foreseeing that he might actually get in trouble as the office manager for throwing a bachelor party in the warehouse.

OK, let’s talk about what makes The Office really good, what gives it that something extra: The Office is the best portrayal of modern romance I’ve ever seen on TV or the movies. Jim is incredibly cool and cool under pressure as well: look at how he handled that near-disastrous situation Dwight put him in by replying, Blonde. When Roy asked him what kinds of girls he likes in an episode a couple seasons back, he answered single moms. And cool guys like Jim are expected to act cool all the time, but when he’s around Pam, you can visually see his knees turning into butter, and while it was really at a high point last season, it’s gotten more complex with the competition for Pam resulting from Karen, and the fact that Roy is losing weight and starting transforming himself into the fiancé he never had the chance to be. Jim and Pam are a classic love story but there’s now a beautiful sense of ambiguity to their relationship. In each episode, as Jim and Pam are trapped in that ambiguity, and these obstacles get in their way, Jim and Pam and Karen revert more and more like clueless middle schoolers panicking at the prospect of losing their relationship.

Scrubs:

I’ve rediscovered Scrubs lately. I casually watched episodes in its first two years, but recently I’ve been looking for something new to watch in syndication, since I’ve seen pretty much every episode of Sienfeld and Friends in syndication, and Scrubs is on all the time on Comedy Central and the Superstation (which I think is TBS). I think because it’s between two great shows, that helps, obviously, and the musical episode which was really great, clinched Scrubs place as a regular on my list of programs to watch.

-They actually have some legitimate anti-war stances and pro-war stances. The arguments of people in this show for and against Iraq could actually be borrowed by politicians in a debate verbatim. Humor is usually about stupid people, but humor is also about something entirely out of the ordinary, and it’s out of the ordinary for characters to be much smarter than we expect them to be. Examples include that bit on Conan O’Brien where Max and Conan exhibit an almost encyclopedic knowledge on topics such as reality tv, Grease the musical and the Winter Olympics in clearly scripted conversations that end in a stare-off or how on Newsradio, it’s revealed somewhere along the way that Andy’s Dick’s character is secretly a licensed dentist who had passions of becoming a really bad reporter. Another example is how in the film Wayne’s World, all of a sudden everyone in this room of rock stars and roadies knows everything in detail about the history of Milwaulkee, Wisconsin and can have an intelligent discussion about it.

-With that monologue that J.D. gives at the end, this show is like My Name is Earl in comedy-by-feeling-good

30 Rock:

I think 30 Rock is doing some things that the other backstage-SNL show on NBC, “Studio 60” is not doing: it does not put us to sleep with characters who are all exactly the same and it’s just more sharply written. At the same time, I kind of do like how “Studio 60” explores the fascinating topic of what goes on backstage, and I wish “30 Rock” would do the same to at least some degree. I feel like focusing on each of the characters a little so that’s where most of my posts will center.

-It’s been a while since I’ve taken European history, but I think this inbreeding thing is actually historically true. How many people know that.

-Who’s the bald guy, exactly? Don’t like him, although he looks moderately appropriate for his environment: The 30 Rock look.

-Judah Friedlander really has the 30 Rock look.

-The 30 Rock look (what I assume they were looking for when they cast this film) is self-deprecation. People who are brilliant humorously but don’t look very good. That’s Tina Fey’s whole comic shtick: make fun of her own lack of good looks. Honestly, though, she’s pretty good-looking and I feel like her whole comedic method is based around some unresolved therapy and self-image issues. She looks great, seriously.

-Alec Baldwin is hilarious as if that didn’t need to be said.

-Despite taking a part that was initially meant for someone else, Jane Krakowski, is really doing reat stuff with her role as Jenna. She’s delightfully quirky and has great comic timing, and she gets a lot of mileage out of her main comic quirk, thinking her sexuality can solve everything. And that also makes her more sexy, too.

-This episode is so solid narratively that it could work as a romantic comedy movie if you stretched it to two hours. Come to think of it, you can make two movies based on this: I could see someone pitching either the Jack-Liz subplot or the Jenna-inbred Prince as a film to a studio and having a decent possibility of getting greenlit.

-Carrying on that last thread, I think that the dynamic between Liz Lemmon and Jack Donaughy (I’m doing this on a non-wireless laptop so I don’t have some easy reference like imdb.com to look up the correct spelling of the last name so to those annoying people who like to correct spelling errors: deal with it) reminds me of a screwball comedy, which is actually quite impressive. Screwball comedies were a popular form of comedy during the Great Depression. The formula involved pairing people of two different social classes together in an unlikely relationship and the happy ending where the two get together romantically in the end supposedly gave hope to depression audiences that because love could conquer class differences in the film, perhaps their might be hope for their own poverty problems to be worked out through the compassion of the government or the people who had money or whatever else. Screwball comedies went out of style because of the socio-economic conditions that made audiences relate to them, so it’s kind of odd that in the year 2007, they kind of are starting to make that work with Jack and Liz. They are two people seperated by inconquerable class differences.

-Kenneth the Page really wouldn't be interacting with the president of NBC or the members of the show so much, in real life, would he?

Deal of No Deal (there was a commercial for this show):

This show is THE EXACT SAME THING OVER AND OVER. Some guy possibly winning a million dollars WITHOUT ANY SKILLS WHATSOEVER. THEY DON’T NEED ARITHMETIC. Why are we bragging about that? I love how they find new ways to promote it each week: this time a father of 8 is playing our repetitive game! This time a guy from Oklahoma is playing our repetitive game! Tonight Celine Dion is going to say a few words to our contestants before they do the same boring thing!

How can I report a Youtube violation?

I’d like to report a violation on Youtube: copyright violation. As a user, I’m aloud to report graphic violence, hate speech and sexual content, but reporting copyright violation is left to the copyright holders.
Why can’t I do it as a concerned citizen? I really think its just wrong for people to steal TV. Scrubs recently had a big hit with their musical episode, that they chose to give a scene of to youtube.com for free. They also have two additional video clips of the episode on their website, if you want to see it. I also suspect that you can watch it on nbcvideo.com if you go there within the week. If you want to see it past one week, you can buy the episode for $1.99 on itunes, which is a pretty fair price. But that’s not enough for some people. Rather than watching the episode, being sure to log onto the site within a week of when it’s released or paying a measly 2 dollars on itunes, they’ll just go to youtube and watch it there. About 3 people have for some reason (they probably think they are being charitable in spreading this great episode and making it accessible to thousands more people when in fact, it hurts NBC much more than it helps it).
That is perfectly reasonable, and insures that the people who made the episode: the artists themselves, get the money. It insures that they get the necessary support so that they can stay on the air. That’s what’s at stake: the videos themselves that you’re stealing. They won’t have the financial support to produce them much longer if you keep stealing them and if you weren’t so selfish to only think about your short-term gratification, you’d see that it doesn’t benefit you in the long-run to post videos on youtube and to watch those videos in place of their actual sources. I think video and audio piracy shows America at its worst.
I really don’t think youtube cares about copyright infringement either. According to Time’s Man of the Year article on youtube, “Youtube says federal law requires only that it remove videos when copyright holders complain-not to pre-emptively monitor the site for infringements, which would destroy its spontenaity.” The problem is that youtube overflows with copyright infringements left and right, too many for networks to spot and the time in between when its posted and when someone from the network stops it, is a time when people will have seen it for free and the value of the work is devalued. The Scrubs Musical episode is losing money on itunes and hits on their NBC website, by all the people who saw it on itunes for free instead, and even if NBC stopped the posters who currently posted it, others could repost it and there could be a rotating door of people who perform it. I really do hope that the owners of the intellectual property catch the culprits. And what exactly is so great about the spontenaity, anyway? Spontenaity basically means a bunch of crap gets on the internet, because a lot of people impulsively decide that something like them bobbing their head or dancing to music or commenting on something they saw on youtube is worthy of a national audience, without taking some time to think “um, is this really something that anyone outside my immediate family will benefit from?” I really don’t think it would hurt youtube if they screened things a little so they can screen for copyright infringement. I thought I’d do my duty as a citizen and report the three jerks who posted the entire Scrubs musical episode on itunes to NBC themselves, but I went on their website and could not find a place to contact the network about it and I couldn’t even find a way to contact the network period. Maybe someone else knows and can direct me.