I did this on Facebook, but the response was less than stellar. So let’s try it here! It’s really simple: just quote a movie villain for me.
See? Simple!
OMG.
Suddenly, a trip to Oklahoma has become a much more desirable thing….
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This was NOT a boat accident!
(It’s an animated GIF, but it doesn’t show up animated on the main page. Click through to see it in motion! Image via.)
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So-and-so wants to be friends.
I watched The Social Network a month or so ago, and going into it, I had high hopes. I used to count myself among Aaron Sorkin’s biggest fans, but he started to disappoint me midway through the third season of The West Wing (and after rewatching Season Three recently, I’m even clearer in that conviction — post to come at some point), I found Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip ultimately disappointing, and Charlie Wilson’s War didn’t really impress me a whole lot, either. But when the reviews for The Social Network were almost unanimously raving, I hoped that Sorkin had recaptured some of his earlier mojo. Alas…I was entertained, but ultimately, again I was not terribly impressed. I wonder if I’m over Sorkin completely.
I don’t have much to say about the story of The Social Network. Nor do I have much to say about the characters, because I’m starting to wonder if Aaron Sorkin has lost his ability to create characters with their own distinct voices. Or, putting it slightly differently, I’m wondering if he ever really had the ability to create characters with different voices, and instead relied on actors to give their characters voice. My problem is that everybody in this movie sounds the same – and they all sound the same as other characters in other Aaron Sorkin movies and teevee shows. It’s frustrating for me, wanting to like each new Sorkin project, and only end up hearing the same tropes he brings to every bit of dialog.
What do I mean? Things like: characters speaking in sentences that are longer than sentences found in nature. Conversations that loop back and forth, in which characters will refer back to things said earlier in the conversation using the exact same wording. The only affirmative response to any question being “Yeah.” One character will be stuck on a certain part of whatever project it is they’re working on, and then in the middle of a conversation on a completely unrelated topic, another character will just happen to say something that leads the first one to the breakthrough on the problem they’re stuck on. Sharp debates on issues will be somehow won by one side or the other, often without the benefit of an actual argument being made. Supremely arrogant characters will defend their arrogance on various grounds. Someone will say something along the lines of “X isn’t going to happen because of Y. X is going to happen because of Z.”
I was trying to cut the movie some slack along the way, trying to get involved, but the Sorkinisms just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming, until I finally had to admit that I just couldn’t get involved at all. The one that finally ejected me from the movie was during one of the court deposition scenes. The lawyer is following a line of questioning that Zuckerberg planned to cheat his onetime partner out of ownership of Facebook out of jealousy, and Zuckerberg fires back thusly:
Ma’am, I know you’ve done your homework, and so you know that money isn’t a big part of my life, but at the moment I could buy Mt. Auburn Street, take the Phoenix Club, and turn it into my ping-pong room.
This is supposed to make Mark Zuckerberg look confident and dismissive of the entire proceeding under which he is being sued for ownership of Facebook, but hearing that, all I could think of was another court deposition scene, almost identical in tone, from the Sorkin-scripted movie Malice, in which Alec Baldwin delivers his noted “You ask me if I have a God complex? I am God.” speech.
Ultimately, I just didn’t care about the people in this movie as I was watching it. I just didn’t. The creation of Facebook is probably one of the most important cultural events of the 2000s, but The Social Network, for all its long and circular speeches and its whiplash dialog, just didn’t make the behind-the-scenes story all that interesting to me. Nobody in this movie is sympathetic; nobody in this movie was anyone I really cared to know anything about. In Aaron Sorkin’s best work — The West Wing, The American President, A Few Good Men — there are characters to care about. In the things he’s done that didn’t impress me — Studio 60, The Social Network — all there is are people who say lots of neat-sounding things but whose problems don’t involve me one whit.
The film’s first scene has a girl telling Mark Zuckerberg that he’s an asshole, and that is ultimately the problem with the movie. Everybody in it is an asshole. And an asshole with lots of great speeches to give is still, in the end, an asshole.
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Sentential Links #250
Wow…two hundred fifty of these! Amazing! Incredible! Or…something.
:: To me, the depictions of people trying to break free of whatever and whoever were holding them back, and to escape what wasn’t working, to have the opportunity to find something better and more fitting, even from the oh, so woeful adolescence I thought I was experiencing, were stories, ideas and feelings I had never experienced before. I had never been reached like this by a rock band, hell, any kind of band, before, with such intensity and meaning, such power and understandable message. And, hey, having a saxophone as a key instrument and Clemons an upfront member were vital to this then-tuba player. (A fine tribute to Clarence Clemons, by Buffalo writer Kevin J. Hosey. Check it out!)
:: Interesting thing about about my mother’s interment this year is that it became the first time that my daughter had had the opportunity to see where my father was buried. She has seen pictures of him, and she talks about him fairly regularly, surprising considering the fact that she never in person. Somehow, it seems as though he became a bit more real to her. And this made me happy. (I love the look on the kid’s face in the first picture on this post — it’s like she doesn’t quite believe that Pop-Tarts are food.)
:: Lesson of the day: let go and stop worrying so much. I have spent a crazy amount of time worrying my ass off about things that never came to fruition. Truly, the big problems are the things that hit you suddenly that never crossed your mind in the first place. (This is a relatively new blog to me. I can’t remember if I’ve linked it yet.)
:: Either something is natural — that is, part of the Universe — or else it doesn’t exist.
:: I am a woman. I write science fiction.
More next week! The second half of the road to 500 of these posts begins!
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I stand in awe….
UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to the article I quote. Fixed!
See the older fellow in the middle, there? That’s a guy named Trygve Trooien. He’s a farmer in South Dakota, and he collects overalls. He owns more than two hundred pair of them!
“It kind of started by accident,” said Trooin of his bib overall compilation. “I’m a packrat. I save everything, including my old overalls. And when you live in a house that has 18 rooms you have a lot of space to store things.”
About a dozen years ago, Trooin realized that his compulsion for saving had inadvertently resulted in an extensive bib overall collection. A friend of his suggested that Trooin put on a fashion show as a way to share his bib overall collection with others.
“It seemed like a good idea,” said Trooin. “I now have over 200 bib overalls in my collection. There are 80 different kinds that include 42 different brand names.”
Wow. Two hundred pairs! This puts me to absolute shame. Last time I counted — as part of Ask Me Anything! August 2010 — my collection topped out at between 25 and 30 pairs. That struck me as a lot, but wow, does Mr. Trooien ever have me beat. That’s absolutely amazing.
I actually have not purchased a single pair of overalls in several years, but now I’m wondering if I don’t need to start up again! I do still check eBay once in a while, mostly for vintage pairs — I’d love to find a white painter’s pair that has a “traditional” chest pocket, as opposed to the big triangular pocket that most painter’s pairs have — but I’m rarely tempted, and even when I am, the bidding quickly shoots up higher than I have any interest in pursuing.
What cracks me up is that Mr. Trooien displays his collection by having “fashion shows”! He gets a bunch of women together, and then they apparently walk a runway showing off his overalls. This is awesome!
More photos here. Long live Trygve Trooien! He’s a big damn inspiration, I tell you what!
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Sunday Burst of AWESOME!
No weirdness this week, just awesome, in honor of saxophone great Clarence Clemons, who passed away yesterday. This is my favorite Bruce Springsteen song: here’s “Born to Run”.
In truth, I don’t know Springsteen’s oeuvre all that well; he’s always been one of those people whose work I eternally mean to explore more without ever actually doing it. I think it may be time. I always thought Clarence Clemons was all kinds of terrific. May his work be remembered for decades to come!
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Saturday Centus
We’re back to 100 words this week. I decided to experiment with a bit of free verse. I tend to not like my own poetry all that much, but…well, you be the judge!
In Britain there is a cave,
and therein lies the wizard.
Trapped there by a woman he was,
some say by through treachery,
and others by love.The wizard brought a King once,
a once and Future King;
a King who will return again,
but when that day may be,
is for none save the Wizard
in his cave to say.So the world awaits the future King,
and wonders about the wizard
in the cave. Will Arthur not
return one day, and free Merlin
from his tomb within the stone?
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X-Files Case Report: “Fallen Angel”
Hot on the heels of the lackluster “Space” comes an episode that marks a serious improvement: “Fallen Angel”. This is a terrific episode, one that establishes a surprising amount of background for the mytharc that would come to dominate the series.
In eastern Wisconsin, a police officer is patroling a rural route out in the middle of the woods when he sees a large fire in the distance. Meanwhile, a military air-traffic monitoring station is tracking something that is traveling very fast and on an erratic flight path. This something disappears from their screens in eastern Wisconsin, and the commanding officer immediately places a phone call to his superiors that they have a “fallen angel”. Something has crashed in those woods. Our intrepid cop is investigating, but we see POV shots of something stalking him, and the last thing we see before cutting to the credits is the cop’s death screams.
When we return, Mulder is already on the scene, trying to infiltrate what is now a military operation in the woods there. Through flashbacks, we see how he learned of the crashed aircraft: Deep Throat told him. Mulder is taking on considerable risk, as he is going far off the FBI’s standard jurisdiction and methods. He gets in close enough to get a look at what’s happening, and it’s quite clear that this wasn’t an Iraqi jet crashing (the cover story put out, which is pretty silly, as Mulder points out – an Iraqi jet over Wisconsin?!); he takes photos of what is no airplane we’ve ever seen. But of course he’s discovered and captured, and his camera is confiscated and his film destroyed. (Yes, we’re still pre-digital cameras here.) A somewhat bad-ass military officer threatens Mulder with everything under the sun after putting him in some kind of ad-hoc lock-up, which is where Mulder makes the acquaintance of a guy named Max Fenig.
At first glance, Max is an obsessive hippie-type of UFO enthusiast, wearing a baseball cap with the NICAP logo (National Investigative Committee of Aerial Phenomena). Max has been tracking this case, and it turns out that he’s part of an underground UFO community for whom Mulder’s work is legend. Max also has some issues of his own, though; poking through the trailer which Max drives around the country pursuing UFO reports, Scully notices that he is taking very power anti-psychotic medications. Is Max Fenig for real? Or is he a crank whose UFO experiences are simply a result of pre-existing psychological conditions? Well, this is The X-Files, which means that our answer is…a bit of both.
I was also interested by the depiction of the alien itself. We never see “it” directly; there are shots from its point of view as it moves very quickly across open spaces, very near to the ground, and in long shots, the alien is only “visible” as a transparent distortion of the air that quickly moves by. Very early on, The X-Files was clear to establish that its aliens were not all of one stripe. They weren’t all “grays” with the big heads, giant eyes and tiny slits for mouths. Sometimes they were something much more menacing.
“Fallen Angel” establishes a good many tropes that will be part-and-parcel of the show’s UFO-based mytharc over the next seven seasons: government awareness of the UFO threat; possible government encouragement of the UFO threat; Mulder’s status as a possible hero figure to shadowy groups that wish to investigate the UFO threat; military involvement in operations to keep the whole thing secret; and the very fact that Mulder is not as rogue an element as he might think himself to be, but that he and Scully are themselves pawns in some larger game they cannot understand.
“Fallen Angel” ends with Mulder and Scully on the receiving end of harsh criticism from an FBI higher-up, who is this close to pulling the plug on the X-Files project altogether, when he is called off the attack by none other than Deep Throat himself. This is where questions start to pile up on top of questions: just who is Deep Throat? What is his interest in supplying Mulder with information? Why is he seemingly encouraging Mulder and at the same time acting as an obstacle? When the FBI guy protests, Deep Throat says: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” It’s a fairly chilling end, because someone we’ve been led to see as an ally of Mulder’s is now claiming to be an enemy.
It’s hard not to look back on “Fallen Angel” (and, I suspect, a lot of the early mytharc stories) in light of the fact that the mytharc lost a great deal of focus as the show went on several seasons past its shelf life. But at the time, “Fallen Angel” stood out as a major early turning point in the mytharc, and now it stands out as a major early episode in terms of its sheer quality.
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THIS can’t end badly at all….
