Let me set up how I saw the marketing campaign for Gracie: coming of age slash sports comeback movie set against a tragic background – promised son dies right at the beginning. So to start you know there’s going to be sadness, but it seems like generally an uplifting plot. Sports heals all, women get to play the game, and we have a sort of Rocky-esque climb to the top with all sorts of training montages, slow claps and the likes.

That’s what we expect, or what I expected.

Truthfully, I only came to this movie, because of Julia Garro who plays Jena Walpen in the movie. I went to grade school with her and ever since I saw her look into the camera and say, “My name is Gwen and I like to fuck,” in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, I’ve been mesmerized. So really I came to this movie simply expecting to see Julia do something, and of course the whole adolescent sports movie etc.

What I got was something much, much darker. It’s set up the same as most sports movies – there is controversy (star player’s/son’s death) that must be overcome. But the whole uplifting-let’s-get-to-work-and-get-over-this takes a whole lot longer to get to, because, to put it simply, Gracie’s whole decent into darkness takes a long, long time, and goes deeper and darker than I thought possible in a movie of this type.

Trust me (or see the movie for yourself), she goes deep into the rabbit hole or heart of darkness or whatever you want to call it. I mean I figured there would be the whole sadness and overcoming that, but she gets to the point where she’s getting over drugs, alcohol, one night stands with college guys in the back of her car, and a father he becomes completely distant – like absurdly distant. That was one of the things that shocked me, they went 100% into this family falling apart. They did not just gloss over it like some movies do. The father goes into a deep hole too.

There’s a scene where Gracie runs up to Jena and just blurts out that she wants to do two things that she’s never done before and do them at the same time. So I think they go to the Jersey shore and she start banging some dude in the back of the car before her father comes and pulls her out.

Additionally, the whole comeback scene – not so much of a uplifting comeback. Gracie gets slide-tackled in the face – IN THE FACE. Her father beats on her – not like physically punching her in the face, but consistently says she isn’t good enough, that she should give up, that he is wasting his time. Then he usually downs another beer. Love it.

Then even in the big finale, the big Gracie finally gets on the field and plays for her dead brother game, she gets the shit kicked out of her. If I remember correctly, there’s a time where she gets tripped up and while in the air is essentially body slammed into the dirt. Good stuff. The movie really just stays dark throughout. The only gleaming moment is at the beginning when the brother is real nice to Gracie and everything, gives her a chance to prove herself by kicking a ball at a bottle on the hood of a car. Good stuff, but that’s about it. Sure at the end, she’s up there playing, making beautiful music on that field, but it’s something with a heavy bass that is kicking the shit out of her body. She’s bloodied, bruised, and probably emotionally disturbed. Dark, dark shit.

elfboy: Quick disclaimer: my internet sucks here, so I may get disconnected at various points throughout
SlimShaney: Okay…I’ll include that
SlimShaney: First a little introduction: I am Michael Shane, editor/founder/correspondent for this here magazine. Talking with me today is my cohort Jed Cohen also an editor/correspondent type. This section of the magazine will be a monthly discussion between me and Jed (and perhaps later more people) on a book we’ve read in the past month. This month (read - it took me eight months to finish) we’re discussing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Anything you’d like to add from the start Jed?
elfboy: Hah, the eight months speaks not to slow reading, but rather to careful, close reading
SlimShaney: And the fact that I didn’t read it for about three months from January to April. A span in which my brain melted a little.
elfboy: As did all of ours
SlimShaney: So Infinite Jest is a mammoth 1000 page tome by Wallace. Jed wrote his thesis on this book, so I’m going to let him give the reader’s digest plot summary. Ten words or less (only kidding)
elfboy: Hah, well, I’ll do my best:
elfboy: Essentially Infinite Jest is the story of Hal Incandenza, a tennis phenom and lexical prodigy, and Don Gately, a former drug addict who now works at a recovery house. The story mainly focuses on two locales: the Enfield Tennis Academy, where Hal goes to high-school, and the Ennet House Recovery House, where Gately works and lives. Foster Wallace, in a nod to Dickens, includes scores of minor characters to supplement Gately and Hal, most of whom attend school with Hal, or are in the halfway house with Gately. Now, besides the character-based plots, there is an almost Clancy-like plot involving a videotape that is so pleasurable it kills its viewer. And the videotape, dubbed the samizdat, is kind of what ties Gately to the Incandenza family as well as to many of the minor characters
SlimShaney: I’d like to note, in a nod to Wallace, that I could be masturbating right now and looking at porn and no one would know.
elfboy: And in a nod to Mike’s E.S.P., that is exactly what I’m doing
SlimShaney: Unfortunately I’m not, as I’m in my parent’s dining room
elfboy: Anything else, Mike?
SlimShaney: No, I think that sounds pretty good.
SlimShaney: Okay, so first off, I’ll note that I started reading this book at Jed’s prompt because he said to me one night that it was his favorite book of all time. What originally drew you to the text? And what do you like about it so much now that you’ve read it a few times and written a thesis on it?
elfboy: Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve only read the book one and a half times
SlimShaney: Ah. The truth comes out, but respond anyway.
elfboy: So, I guess what drew me to the text was 1) praise from friends whose taste in literature I trusted, and 2) its length. I had (and still have) an attraction to super long books. I remember buying DeLillo’s “Underworld” while I was still in high-school just because it was long. And I didn’t read it until last summer.
SlimShaney: Here that, boys, Jed enjoys the length.
elfboy: Girth too, girth too.
SlimShaney: I, conversely, read mostly short stories. So this was a true marathon for me
elfboy: Right, which are, of course, a difficult thing in their own right. Well, this was the start of a new focus on novels for you, no? Or at least longer pieces.
SlimShaney: Well, I’m going to try both in writing and reader to tackle fiction pieces longer than 25 pages. But now let’s delve into the real critical reading of Foster Wallace’s book. We talked about this briefly in person, but I think we can hash out more here. Every character in Infinite Jest is either morally flawed themselves or has come from some morally flawed background. Child beatings, wife beatings, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, even the minor characters have weird things like their father’s disappearing into a MASH obsession. Is Foster Wallace saying that this is the world we’re approaching? A world devoid of any sense of the moral structure we have today? And if he is saying that there is a new moral code? Who exhibits it in the book? Who is our moral compass?
elfboy: This is actually something I talked a lot about in my thesis, as it concerns the illustrious critic James Wood, who I was actually writing against in my thesis. Wood bemoans the fact that there is a moral void in our contemporary literature. Or at least in certain contemporary literature, of which Infinite Jest is part. The fact that each character is flawed in some respect serves two purposes: one, it gives the reader an easy way of remembering a character, as the proliferation of minor characters and plot digressions can make it difficult to remember which characters are which. This is also a nod to Dickens, who was a notorious creator of “flat characters:” characters who have a superficial characteristic that allows them to be easily identified. This is the more practical reason for having the personal character flaws.
SlimShaney: What about the fact though that it really is every character? Everyone we meet in this book is fucked up. That added with the fact that this book is set slightly in the future (exactly what year is it? The book gives you clues, but I’ve forgotten) makes me believe that Foster Wallace believes that our society, each subsequent generation is going down the shit hole in every personal sense. And also, I should note, political sense. Do you think that’s what Wallace is actually suggesting?
elfboy: Though the book is set slightly in the future, I think he’s very much talking about his contemporary moment, which is the early- to mid-nineties, which seemed kind of the beginning of this heavily medicated, heavily analyzed populace. DFW has a tendency to exaggerate the case — to take everything to the nth degree. So he takes the phenomena of many Americans being in therapy or taking certain medications, or self-medicating (drugs) and just lets it spiral out of control. Hence, you get Pemulis, who’s clearly on his way to being an addict. Or Ken Erdedy, who’s addicted to a supposedly non-addictive drug, marijuana. And then I guess it becomes a behavioral thing rather than a physical thing. But I don’t think Foster Wallace actually believes Americans will descend into this hedonistic, fucked up place, do you?
elfboy: Addendum: Hal is also addicted to marijuana, but it’s something in the behavior, the ritual, rather than the actual substance
SlimShaney: I’m unsure. I haven’t read any of Wallace’s (or as the cool people seem to call him: DFW) other stuff so I can’t really speak to his tendencies. But generally, in a book set in the future where the author takes our present behaviors and pushes them out to the nth degree as you said, I think there is some part of the author that believes we’re heading down that road. I feel that there has to be at least a little bit of belief in order to write this whole thing.
SlimShaney: The drug and alcohol abuse I could understand as just a continuation of a problem, but what really gets me is all the other fucked up things he puts in there. Not just the addiction but the crippling emotional disorders and the walls put up between people and all the shit like that. That’s what really makes me believe the DFW believed to an extent that our society was on its way down the shitter so to speak.
elfboy: I mean, I don’t think Foster Wallace has a bright view of the future necessarily, but I also don’t think it’s as bleak as it might seem. We discussed this in person as well, but the most redemptive character in the book seems to be Gately, who has triumphed over his addiction. And ends up almost sacrificing his life for his charges at the Recovery House
SlimShaney: Perhaps the ignorance is bliss type character in that he is the BIM (big indestructible moron).
elfboy: Right, but then I actually don’t think he’s as ignorant as he could be. Even Joelle acknowledges that he’s not as dumb as he makes himself out to be
SlimShaney: Yeah. Absolutely. Especially because pretty much every time we’re told about Don Gately it’s from a third person limited point of view so everything we see and hear and think about Gately is really his own view of himself.
SlimShaney: Now here’s a question, who is our narrator in the book?
elfboy: Right
elfboy: Now that is an interesting question. One which I spent an entire chapter of my thesis on before abandoning and rewriting it.
SlimShaney: Obviously it jumps around a bit and we get a first person narration from Hal at times, but other times the narrator references an “I” that isn’t clearly a character in the story or any noticeable character
elfboy: The book is for the most part in third-person narration, but that narration is heavily infected by the character it’s focused on. You think there’s an “I” that’s not a character in the story? Like DFW himself?
SlimShaney: Or just some abstract narrator. There’s a point I believe towards the end when DFW is describing the players getting ready for the Canadian warm-up match to the What-A-Burger and he uses an “our” without referencing an I earlier in the piece (and Hal isn’t there). I’d try to find it, but everything’s impossible to find in this book.
elfboy: That is true, and that is a scene I can’t quite remember
SlimShaney: But I definitely think there is a narrator outside the characters who are actually in the book.
elfboy: That’s funny, because I thought the book was pretty self-contained. In that there were no extra-textual elements. Or that if there were, they rarely showed up. Though DFW does make use of meta-fictional devices, I don’t think he ever “shows his face” so to speak to comment on the characters.
SlimShaney: I don’t think it was distracting to the book, but it was something I picked up on (perhaps falsely). I’m trying to find an instance.
SlimShaney: I don’t think it’s necessarily DFW as this abstract narrator, but I think sometimes there is a character telling us the story who we don’t necessarily know, if that makes any sense. Like when they’re in the locker room, I felt like the narrator was there as another kid in the academy but not necessarily one we were familiar with. It’s a device some writers use to pull the reader into the action a little more.
elfboy: It’s certainly possible. I guess I saw that as a very subjective third-person narration. A narration that’s very present, and affected by the characters, but that isn’t necessarily another character.
SlimShaney: HA! I found the section. p. 964.
elfboy: Hah, okay, I’ll take a look
SlimShaney: I’m scanning it. Again I might have been wrong. Note to any potential readers of book - it might make you dilusional.
SlimShaney: p. 966 - third line - middle, “A couple of us remarked how Hal wasn’t eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal.”
elfboy: Right. I definitely see what you’re saying, and I’m trying to figure out who it is, if anyone at all.
SlimShaney: Yeah, point being that it could be no one. It could just be a device to bring us closer to the story.
elfboy: Okay, so I guess the book is still self-contained, in that DFW is never commenting from outside the story: the third-person narration is either heavily infected by the characters in question, or he’s masquerading as a character. Which also speaks to fluidity of narration in Infinite Jest: because even in that section you described, it kind of moves back and forth between a very present third-person and a more removed, but still infected narrator.
SlimShaney: I’d agree with that. He definitely doesn’t insert himself as a god type narrator.
elfboy: Do I dare drop the postmodern bomb here?
SlimShaney: Metastic!
elfboy: Hahah, exactly. But this seems a classic postmodern technique: having a fluid point of view or narrative distance that is constantly shifting.
SlimShaney: As well as his play with linear narrative. Very po-mo.
elfboy: Speaking of which, I love the random vignettes thrown in in the voice of a random character, like the broken argot of Clenette Henderson. I always wondered if he wrote a chronologically coherent version of novel, and then just cut things up and rearranged them
SlimShaney: Ha. That would be interesting. I once wrote a really time shattering short story that I did the opposite to. I turned it into a coherent narrative. It was much better. But, two good things to go on right there. First, the vignettes. I’m glad you brought them up. A lot of them I thought were funny and gave useful character information, but sometimes I was just like, why?
SlimShaney: For example, right after that section I just had you looking at, there’s an entire vignette on the trainer. What was the point of that? We end our story at the Tennis Academy with an anecdote about the trainer. A character we’ve barely seen before and never see again. Also I had a similar problem with the end of Gately’s narrative. I’m not saying that I need everything to be wrapped up nicely, but why end on random characters and stories? Gately and Facklemann’s story at the end just sort of confused me. I found myself curious as to why I was being told this when I already knew all of it.
elfboy: Well, I think the way I argued for them in my thesis was a tendency in postmodern literature for inclusiveness and egalitarianism. Basically, I don’t think DFW necessarily wants to privilege any character over another, although he invariably does, and he wants to give each of them a say in the narration. He’s obviously not thinking about furthering a plot point with the vignettes, though I do think they enrich “flat” characters.
SlimShaney: So you really think that’s the only reason he tells us the whole 100 page (maybe not 100) story about Gately and the Faxster? ‘Cause that’s a goddamn lie (<-- line from book for those who care)!
elfboy: You get their voice, and a snippet of their singular story. This is embarrassing, but I don’t remember the section you’re referring to.
SlimShaney: Cingular. The new AT&T
SlimShaney: I know part of it is right at the end. It’s literally how we end the book. From p. 972 on at least. Also pp. 934-938, and I believe the whole story starts back at p. 923 with the introduction of one Pamela Hoffman-Jeep and Gene Fackleman.
SlimShaney: Note to readers: I finished this recently. Jed since finishing this a while ago has also read Vanity Fair as well as others I’m sure. So forgive his forgetfulness. I’m a little more recent with the book.
elfboy: Right, I just stumbled upon it as well. Well, I here must admit my ignorance, I had completely forgotten about this entire facet of Gately’s story
SlimShaney: And it’s an interesting facet and vignette and everything. I just don’t understand why DFW chose it as our last image of him
elfboy: Looks like I’ma have to finish my second reading. Well, I think Foster Wallace’s reasoning there is that he’s eschewing typical storytelling. He sees no reason to end the story in a specific way.
SlimShaney: Yeah. I mean I guess that’s really the only reason one can have
elfboy: Especially since the book kind of doubles back on itself
SlimShaney: This is true. I guess I might just be a sucker for conventional story telling. Although, another problem with putting that particular vignette in that particular place is that I think we learn something important about Gately that changes his defense of Lenz and makes it seem even more “heroic” or whatever. So my point is why put something at the end that furthers the character? And if the answer is just “Because I’m fucking with regular methods of story telling” then I think that’s a little bit of a cop out. Then again DFW probably thinks I’m a cop out.
elfboy: Isn’t there something to be said for an experimental technique for its own sake? I think the other thing about Infinite Jest, which Wood also harps on, is the immense amount of storytelling in the novel. There are stories everywhere, whether they contribute to the overall story or not. So in this case, you get a story about Gately and Facklemann (a story I can’t remember), which clearly enriches Gately’s character, but does nothing to tie up the story
elfboy: Which also reminds of this Derridean visualization of the text as a tapestry. Though there are interrelations and coincidences, it’s anything but a coherent, linear thing. So you can have threads going off in different directions, etc.
SlimShaney: And as a teacher once told me “There’s a reason it will always be called experimental fiction.” We weren’t talking about DFW but there’s something to be said for that. While this book is great and interesting, it is in its essence experimental.
elfboy: Well yes, but I don’t think Infinite Jest, apart from the length, is inaccessible.
SlimShaney: Experimental does not necessarily mean inaccessible. But it does mean, a lot of the time, that it will be remembered more for its “daring” narrative techniques than its actual narrative.
elfboy: I agree, which is really a shame, because not only is DFW breaking rules of conventional narrative all over the place, he’s incredibly clever, he’s funny, he’s an extraordinary mimic. He’s doing things with language, drawing on Burgess and Joyce.
SlimShaney: I agree. I think he has some great things to say and notices some really interesting things about how people relate to each other (I especially like all the nicknames that he comes up with) and how the world is made up. But he does definitely hide it within the complex tapestry, as you said, of vignettes, footnotes, side characters, etc.
elfboy: Right right. I mean, I won’t discount the comment that what DFW really needed was a good editor, but I love it for its excessiveness. Just like I love Ulysses for its excesses, or Underworld for its excesses. Tom LeClair, who’s a big fan of postmodern literature and an ardent defender of DeLillo, wrote an entire book on this called “The Art of Excess,” which defended these novelists and their mammoth novels. Interesting stuff: he’s really into systems theory
SlimShaney: Did DFW even have an editor? I was very curious about that. Because I liked the excessiveness too, but to a point. Excessiveness for the sake of excessiveness I think is where I got a little annoyed.
SlimShaney: Note to readers: Jed is much more well read than me (than I?).
elfboy: Hah, not so much…if we start talking about Carver I’ll be completely outdone, and I’m not sure about the grammar.
SlimShaney: Well, interestingly enough, Carver does seem to have a similar view of the world in that everyone in his stories were alcoholics and divorcees and mysogynists and on and on.
elfboy: Misogynists
SlimShaney: Below me.
elfboy: Hahahaha
elfboy: Well, there you go, you can populate the longest novel and the shortest story with extremely fucked up individuals and still get art
SlimShaney: But we digress. Back to the book. As Jerry Seinfeld might say, what’s the deal with the footnotes?
elfboy: Well, there’s the interest in breaking up linear narration, as we discussed before
SlimShaney: Note to readers: Shortest short story ever: “For sale: Baby’s shoes. Never used.” - By Raymond Carver.
SlimShaney: But at certain points the footnotes are the actual narration.
elfboy: Right, which I also think might have been DFW acceding to his editor who thought the book was just too outrageous, and told DFW to relegate certain things to the footnotes, which are supposed to be supplementary information, but which occasionally provide much needed background
SlimShaney: Interesting. But the entire filmography of James Incandenza? I thought that was a bit much.
elfboy: Well, the cool thing about that is it’s a microcosm of the entire book. Read through it again carefully and you’ll see that the plot summaries of each of the films echo the plot of the book as a whole. I can’t remember who figured that out, but it works.
SlimShaney: And here’s one thing that really annoyed me actually. When DFW would footnote something with “[some character] did not really say this” or “These were not [some character]’s exact words.” I wanted to punch him in the face when he did that.
elfboy: Right. I’ve noticed trends like that in a lot of contemporary fiction. Eggers’ novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity” has a complete turnaround akin to that, where the secondary character contradicts the narrator’s entire version of events. It’s manipulative, yes, but I again think it’s a commentary on the subjectivity of storytelling, and it forces the reader to choose who he or she believes. Sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure
SlimShaney: Hahaha. I’ve heard that Infinite Jest was originally blocked out as a chose your own adventure but then they decided it was a little too hardcore for children. (JOKE)
elfboy: Hahah, you don’t think kids could get down to drug addiction and remorseless animal killings?
SlimShaney: See, I didn’t really see it like that and maybe it’s because I wasn’t looking at it from a critical point of view and more from the point of view of the type of writer that I am myself in that I just found it unnecessary. Most of the time when DFW would use a footnote in the way I described above, I thought it was obvious that it wasn’t the characters words and nothing really needed to be said. It just paused the story for me as I flipped to the back of the book and tried to find the footnote.
elfboy: I agree with that. I mean, I feel like you either look at it like an imposition, or kind of a funny thing. I was both annoyed and humored by it
SlimShaney: I suppose I was simply annoyed by those ones, but others I found funny. Though I always thought it impeded the progress of the story.
elfboy: Just a tip to readers: when I was reading through the book a second time, I had a bookmark for my place in the main text, and a bookmark at the last footnote I checked. It makes it much easier to flip back and forth.
SlimShaney: Note to readers: I did that without Jed’s advice on the first read because I’m smarter and more practical than him.
elfboy: Note to Readers: Mike went to Gallatin, where nothing is practical.
SlimShaney: About the remorseless animal killings, I felt like that part of the story was so much more violent than the rest, and in fact after that I thought the book got a more violent and vomitaciously descriptive. Did you notice that or was it just my imagination?
elfboy: I did notice that as well. I guess that’s what happens when the AFR gets down to business although the Antitoi killing happens in the first half, and that’s pretty violent. I believe there’s a railroad spike involved
SlimShaney: Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe it was just the fact that Lenz was killing innocent animals that made me more attuned to the violence in the rest of the story.
elfboy: Right right and there’s the scene when Gately accidentally kills that Canadian diplomat, which is a pretty macabre scene.
elfboy: Alright, should we wrap this up? ‘Cause I’m wicked hungry
SlimShaney: Haha. And we’ve been going on for almost two hours.
elfboy: I mean, I could talk about this book all day
elfboy: The question is whether people would want to read about it
SlimShaney: Probably not, but who cares.
SlimShaney: Okay, we’ll close it off here with one last thing. If you could talk to DFW, what would you say to him regarding Infinite Jest?
elfboy: What would I say…I guess I would say, “Stop wearing a bandanna in all your jacket photos”
SlimShaney: My jacket doesn’t have him in a bandana.
elfboy: Really? Then I guess he’s already beaten me to the punch
SlimShaney: Yeah. The 10th anniversery edition.
elfboy: Did you read the Eggers’ introduction?
SlimShaney: No. Not yet. And by not yet…I mean I probably won’t. Actually, maybe I will. It’s not that long
elfboy: I mean, it doesn’t really provide anything new about the book, but it’s interesting to read one respected contemporary writer on another. And “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” plays a lot of the games that Infinite Jest does, though it’s a little more self-consciously whiny
SlimShaney: Right. Another one I haven’t gotten to. But anyway, I would say to him, “Go fuck yourself you pretentious bastard.”
elfboy: Nice
SlimShaney: And I think that’s all the time we have today. Next time we’ll do what Jed, Wonder Boys?
elfboy: It’s certainly an easier read and I’ve been meaning to reread it, so if you’re down…
SlimShaney: I’m reading it now and enjoying so let’s do it. Till next time. Read Wonder Boys, too, and then this discussion might make more sense next time.

The movies that I really like (love is such a strong word) as in beyond “Hey that was fun and didn’t mind spending that money to enjoy 2 hours or so of entertainment,” but more along the lines of “Hey, I’m really glad I spent that money to be thoroughly entertained for those 2 hours or so of my life” - anyway, the movies that I really like usually have one thing in common: they go beyond what I expected of them, what they seemed to promise, and what their genre usually accomplishes. Examples: Casablanca - goes beyond being just one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) love story of all time and expands beyond romance into drama, comedy, and even political thriller, transcends genre and any expectation you might have for a 1940s romance movie; The Notebook - again billed by many as your common romance, but there’s so much more to this movie; just like Casablanca it has comedy, but more than anything what makes this movie transcend it’s genre and expectations is the actors and most of all the well put together story - I genuinely believe this is a great movie because it is put together and told so well (I’ll have to write more about The Notebook later). Those are two examples off the top of my head. Given time, I could probably come up with a lot more - but the common denominator would no doubt be that there’s something about the movie that makes it transcend normal genre roles for me.

District 9 is definitely in that category. The previews were awesome in that they disguised a lot of what the movie was about. All they really told you was that it contained elements of Science Fiction, was shot in a documentary style, and had some action elements (if i remember correctly there’s some shots of action in the previews - of course this depends on which one you saw), but they didn’t actually introduce you to the main characters or show any parts of the story other than the concept of the film - aliens are stuck in and above Johannesburg.

So my expectation going in was that the movie would be mostly sci-fi based. I didn’t expect something like Doom, but I thought it would mostly be a sort of basic man versus alien vibe - obviously I hadn’t read a lot about the film. The film went WAY beyond any sense of the Sci-Fi genre I had previously experienced. It had elements of sci-fi, hardcore action (no, not porn - though it does cover the issue of inter-species prostitution), political thriller, racial (or really inter-species) politics, and it was allegorical as a cave with shadows where a bunch of dudes are chained to the wall. There are a lot of great things about this movie (the acting is great, it’s shot superbly, nothing goes the way you think it will, it has a happy - if ambiguous - ending, and of course big guns), but what really blew me away was how seamlessly the movie moved between genres and styles. Put simply, the movie starts as a documentary on the aliens then moves to a more action/thriller type of movie, then goes back to the documentary while mixing in the political, racial, and of course Sci-Fi elements - all with a South African accent!

Additionally, the film’s greatest success comes in its dehumanizing humans. The film shows us the tragedies happening to these aliens and the cruelty that people are able to impart upon those they deem as “others.” It’s horrifying. The moral “compromises” that occur in the film (and are usually perpetrated by the humans) are much more disturbing than watching the aliens rip a human’s head off. The fact that the film can swing this type of emotional change in us as viewers speaks to the power of the film. That’s the type of movie I can get behind, remember, and talk about for hours.

But I won’t do that here.

The movie that irked my ire, or however you want to put it, was Year One. I simply didn’t get it. Admittedly, I wasn’t blown away by the previews, but when you’re in upstate New York and can go to six dollar matinées with your good friend (let’s call him Le Petit Roi, as opposed to his brother Le Grand Roi and French child star Le Petit Prince), you go to see things that you don’t think are going to be fabulous. I went to the movie assuming that I’d get at least a few laughs out of it. That’s what the movie promised in the least. A few laughs less than say Scary Movie (I laughed throughout that - the first one to be clear), but more than say Schnidler’s List.

The movie didn’t even come through on the “Let’s have a few laughs together promise.” Too much of the humor was predicated on fart and shit humor for me. Then the other half of the humor was based solely on the fact that they had two actors (Michael Cera and Jack Black) who play awkward incredibly well. Then there were a few “Hey! This is taking place in the WAY past!” jokes that fell flat. I laughed once at the actual movie, and I’m not positive it was supposed to be an incredibly funny moment, but both Le Petit Roi and I found it to be the only memorable funny moment of the movie. Jack Black just randomly goes into rock mode and screams, “Slave Girl! Bring me more wiiiiiiiiine!” while sliding across the floor. It was hilarious because it came from nowhere and was the one thing out of the movie that didn’t seem played out or expected or just awkward.

Maybe it’s just my sense of humor didn’t align with that of the Year One crew. I don’t find fart and shit humor all that funny (one of the reasons I don’t find South Park all that great, because they’ll have a great episode ridiculing World of Warcraft, but all anyone remembers is Cartman shitting on his mom). The thing is - I can find awkward humor funny. I love Arrested Development, for example - and saying Cera is awkward in that is more of an understatement than saying Yao Ming is Chinese. There are many different types of humor obviously and Year One had some that I thought I would enjoy. I just don’t think they truly delivered with it.

The movie did, however, have stiff competition. If you look at other movies that created satire off of a similar premise to Year One, there are two comedic stalwarts out there - Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part 1. Both of those are classics that already covered a lot of the humorous historical situations that Year One might have wanted to cover. So maybe they decided to go the other way and try the lowest common denominator humor, which in the end doesn’t appeal to me at all.

The most telling part of my movie going experience with Year One is that Le Petit Roi and I spent the entire movie wishing we had gone to see The Proposal instead.

Blissful adoration for the greatness of film will come shortly in another post.

But I digress – the point of this all is that even through watching tons of obscure and not so obscure films both old and new, I still come away thinking all of them have something redeemable about them with the occasional exception. “Everything is Wonderful” is my attempt to chronicle my love of films whether they get five stars on Netflix (insert IMDB, Amazon, Fandango, or whatever here) or none. It’ll simply be reviews of movies old and new, on DVD or in theaters but pretty much telling you the reasons why you should see the movies not whether or not they’re critically acclaimed or not, or even popularly acclaimed.

Reviews to come – reviews that in the wide world of negativity on the internet might provide some needed posititivity.

So what prompts this growing urban homogeneity? Why has it become so prolific in the past decade or so? Part of the trend comes from simple, practical reasons such as availability of material, architectural and cultural movements, and other large-scale forces, but the change exists on a very small, individual scale as well. The individual in the urban complexity wants to be increasingly safe though the global world shrinks with each new deal on airfare. People want to feel at home no matter where they are.

These new world travelers are not looking to truly explore the places they are visiting. While walking across 44th street toward 8th Avenue the other day, I overheard an older tourist group discussing where to eat. One woman said to another, “That woman back there said there was a McDonald’s just up here somewhere.” The drawl leaked from her gill-like neck. I wanted to grab her, smack her around a little, and promptly drag her into John’s Pizza (which just opened a branch on 44th street in a beautiful old cathedral) and force her to eat some real, New York style brick oven pizza. If you’re going to take the time to travel to a historic urban center, why not fully experience it? Why not envelope all your senses? I can guarantee the McDonald’s burger tastes the same in New York as Savannah and Winston Salem and Richmond and Dallas and Little Rock and Los Angeles and all the way through China, Japan, Russia, the eastern block, and Europe. Only the ketchup will really differ. These people are traveling the world in order to experience what they already know in a different setting. It’s like when The Simpsons go to Japan and constantly eat in “America Town.” It makes no sense to limit oneself like that when a genuine urban experience waits right across the street.

This trend does not end with food though. The entire urban aesthetic is moving towards uniformity. To clarify, I don’t mean the entirety of urban cultural diversity is disappearing (gentrification is a topic for another article), but instead that the image of each major urban center, the attractions, the places we go are all becoming the same. The landmarks themselves may be different, but the areas around them are all slowly but surely beginning to look the same. All the shops are selling the same generic merchandise only the city names and landmarks change. It’s easy to track this change along with the change in the Hard Rock Café restaurant chain.

Originally, the Hard Rock in New York City contained unique rock and roll memorabilia and had a car running through the second story of the building that house it (a nod to Ant Farm’s Dropped City in Arizona). Now, the restaurant resides in Times Square and displays it’s generic t-shirts and marquee rather than a unique, New York rock and roll spirit. Instead, it is a misplaced illusion to, a duplicate of that spirit. This change coincided, no doubt, with Hard Rock’s new global market. Hard Rock Cafes are now everywhere, evidenced by the masses of t-shirts you see; all the same except for the city name underneath the Hard Rock logo. And that right there is the new symbol of the urban tourist: a t-shirt that could be bought at home except for the fact that it has a different city’s name underneath the logo.

Our great urban cultural capitals are traveling down the same road as the Hard Rock Café. The city names and landmarks become the only unique thing people experience about the city. The small side street restaurants, the fringe cultural and historical landmarks, and all the other peripheral urban experiences move closer and closer to the edge of oblivion, remembered only by die-hard urbanites or neighborhood dwellers.

Where does this homogenization end? The worrisome reality is that we already have faux cities popping up in Las Vegas casinos. Even our urban landmarks seem to be starting on the slippery slope towards mass production. Soon the pyramids will be in the Arizona desert, the Sears tower will spring up behind the Taj Mahal, the Eifel Tower will look out over Tokyo, and St. Petersburg Cathedral will rub its walls against Vatican City. They may be illusions or similes like the Empire State Building in the Vegas desert, but there’s an old postmodern saying that every copy takes a little bit of meaning away from the original. Our cities are becoming masses of urban illusions and duplications.

AT&T’s advertising campaign for their global phone that was recently Times Square’s subway station is telling. They list multiple city names into one like “stockholmoscow” or “viennaucklandenver” and that is exactly how our urban landscape is progressing. All our cities are combining and soon they may become so intertwined that they become even more indistinguishable. The names would change to “stocaireno,” “anchoslasienice.” As time goes on, the cities lose more and more of their individual meaning and fall into the urban illusory confusion similar to that of Las Vegas only without the understood trickery involved in the desert play land.

The biggest problem is that most urban tourists don’t recognize the decay of meaning they bring with them when they perpetuate the illusion of sameness they deem necessary to travel. They don’t realize that these cities existed in very different, unique lights in a time before McDonald’s, Hard Rock Café, and Disney created their own urban empires. The travelers, more than the architects or urban planners, are where I place the blame. Architects and planners are mainly civil servants reacting to present urban trends in order to create what they imagine to be the future. If the current urban traveler demands safety and sameness, then the future will be imagined to be just as dull; a continuation of the trend of faceless glass facades and fast food. If the urban tourist begins to appreciate the unique historical and cultural landmarks of a city, then the urban architect and urban planner will adjust to accommodate the traveler and hopefully attempt to maintain the urban identity of the city.

This responsibility does not just fall on the traveler but also the resident. The inhabitants of the city must demand that new structures don’t disrupt the meaning of neighborhoods. Just because progress must be made – and I agree that it must – does not mean that the past cannot be maintained and even referenced in the new structures. Unless we want to completely lose the unique urban meanings of our great cities, we need to reinvent the new to incorporate the old. And this movement, as with most movements, begins with the individual and their willingness to move outside of what they know and experience something different.

The layout should stay about the same with some various designs hopefully coming along from Zso Studios. If you have any questions, comments, pieces you want considered for publication, suggestions, places you want us to go, or anything really, feel free to email us at admin@fraymag.com.

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