Two of my very best friends were born on the same day, April 2^nd.  It makes keeping track of special dates pretty easy, but it also makes this day a special one for me too, as I get to see not one but two people who are incredibly important to me get showered with love and praise that they most rightfully deserve.

Over the years, I have actually done a good job of never doubling down on birthday stuff for them. Part of the reason I haven’t is because these two gals are two of my best friends, but they actually have very little in common.  One, Lindsay, is one of my oldest friends.  We met in the seventh grade and have been pretty inseparable ever since.  The other, Stephanie, was my roommate throughout college and I just saw her last weekend during a mini-USC reunion.  I couldn’t ask for two better friends and I couldn’t possibly adequately describe them in a single blog post.  Instead, I thought I would tell a story about each of them that reminds me of them and makes me smile, hoping that it might do the same for them on their special day.

I’ve spoken of Lindsay on here before and our love for “The Chipmunk Adventure”.  But, in honor of her 31^st, I think today I will tell a story about 31 flavors, aka Baskin-Robbins.  At first glance, my very slight childhood friend may not seem like she can eat all that much.  She is about my height, but easily weighs 25 pounds less than I do, so I can see how people make that mistake.

Be warned though, Lindsay needs to be fed and fed frequently.  My senior of college, she drove my car out to Los Angeles with me.  We had to stop every four hours to feed this child, and I am not talking grabbing her a granola bar at the gas station. No, we stopped at Wendy’s and I ordered a chicken sandwich and a water. Lindsay sits down with a double cheeseburger and a Biggie sized fry and asks, “Is that all you’re getting?” I tell her yes and she informs me not only will she be eating every bite of what she ordered, but she intends to head to the gas station and get a Snickers bar before we hit the road again.

We both have our sweet teeth, that is for sure.  We also both hail from some pretty redneck roots, which means our stomachs have the ability to expand when we smell a bargain. All you can eat buffet you say? Just hand me that stack of seven plates, I’ll be needing all of them.

Therefore, when we were in our college years and heard of Baskin-Robbins offering a free scoop night, we scrapped any existing plans and made a beeline to the nearest ice cream parlor.  Once we got there, we saw that there wasn’t much to the process. Stand in line, get a cone. No ID check, no coupon, nothing. Which got us thinking…and while we thought, we finished our ice cream, and promptly decided…we needed more of where that came from.

Over the course of the next two hours or so, we proceeded to hit up all seven Baskin Robbins in the city of Lexington, Kentucky.  At no point did we consider skipping one or not eating the entire cone either, oh no. We ate seven scoops of ice cream each, because these were the days before our metabolism up and died and, dammit, we made the most of them for a couple of years thanks to the generosity of one ice cream company.

While I don’t think I will hit up every Ben and Jerry’s in Las Vegas, next Tuesday I do plan on raising a cone and perhaps pouring some out for my dear homey, who won’t be close enough to celebrate Free Scoop Day.

As for Stephanie, well, she can get a little hangry too, but my story is her is less about food and more about my theory that she is secretly Amish.  Steph claims to be from the South Chicago suburb of Flossmoor, but I still think that is a giant front, for my friend came to college with virtually no knowledge or understanding of contemporary pop culture whatsoever.  As a graduation gift, I typed up and bound a small booklet for her called “100 Movies You Need to See in Order to Be Culturally Competent”, where I offered her explanations of why she needs to see movies like “The Godfather”, “Jaws”, and “Gone with the Wind”.  To this day, I doubt she has seen more than 20 of them, but she still holds on to it and even scribbles down titles in the margins of other movies that have come across her radar.

It wasn’t just movies Stephanie didn’t know though.  I always joked she didn’t know how to watch TV, because she would pop popcorn, turn out all the lights, and refuse to let anyone speak so we could watch the reality gem “Temptation Island”.  She hated the mall and didn’t know how to wander around and window shop.  She would beeline straight to the store she needed, then immediately left.

Perhaps it was this unwillingness to really look around the mall that led to one of my favorite exchanges between the two of us ever:

Me: “Hey Steph, I am running to the mall, do you need anything?”

Stephanie: “Yeah, we could use a new dish drying rack and a loaf of bread.”

What I love most about Stephanie is that some things never change.  Just a few weeks ago she texted me to inform me her husband Matt told her he was running to the hardware store.  She asked him if he could grab some lime Jello while he was there.

In many ways these girls have stayed the same amazing gals I knew when I was younger, but in other ways they have grown up and wowed me with their accomplishments.  I often feel like they are my babysitters or big sisters, offering me sage advice on life that I don’t really have to offer in return. But, I can offer silly stories, an endless rant of inside jokes, and years of years of friendship that I hope will be followed by years and years more to come.

Happy birthday Stephanie and Lindsay!

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As I glanced at my Twitter feed as work was winding down yesterday, I got concerned.  The reactions to the series finale of “How I Met Your Mother” were rolling in and they weren’t just negative, they were angry, horrified, and outraged. To paraphrase the comic book guy from “The Simpsons”: Worst. Episode. Ever.

I wasn’t going to not watch though.  I jumped on the HIMYM bandwagon somewhere between Seasons 2 and 3 and loved the show from that jump.  I was like Ted with a French horn to pledge to this sitcom, which found that balance between funny and poignant, and let me just say there is not nearly enough poignant on TV these days. 

Most of the reason I gave the show a shot in the first place was because Alyson Hannigan, aka Willow from Buffy, was involved.  I came for Willow, but I stayed for Cobie Smulders and for Robin.  While I don’t identify with Robin the same way I do Liz Lemon or Veronica Mars, she is a female on TV I respect, which is something I can’t say for many characters in this alleged “Golden Age”.  She was independent, but could still be feminine and attractive.  She cared about her job, she could crack a joke, and she could be a guy’s girl and a girl’s girl.  In other words, in Season 1, I hated Ted for choosing boring, lame Victoria over the awesomeness that is Robin.

My adoration for Robin waned in these later seasons, in part, because I never really bought the Robin and Barney romance and, in part, because she had become a bit removed from the chill Robin I had grown to love.  Even so though, last week when she vented her wedding jitters to Ted and wondered if she had missed her chance with the right guy, I teared up.  Robin may seem so down to Earth and career-driven, but I always loved how the show gave us a glimpse at the side she keeps from people that wants to be swept off her feet, that wants to have children, and that wants to be taken care of by someone.  She may seem self-sufficient, but that isn’t because it is what she wants, it is because she has learned to be that way for lack of other options.

I think that is why I pretty much adored all but the last four minutes of the show’s finale last night.  Yes, it was disappointing to learn Robin drifted from the group, but it would be insane if she didn’t.  Her summation of “the gang” to Lily in the empty apartment was spot on.  Robin isn’t going to sacrifice her self-respect and punish herself by watching the two major men of her life move on without her.  Like I said, she is a girl who learned the art of self-preservation, and you’d destroy yourself trying to live all those years in a situation like that, even though it makes us sad as viewers.

I was okay with Robin and Barney quietly getting divorced, that made sense.  I had grown to be okay with Robin and Ted not ending up together, especially once I got a glimpse of The Mother and how truly awesome she is.  Yes, I thought they were a good match, but there are often times in your life where you think you’ve found the right person and, guess what, you’re wrong.  I wanted Robin to find happiness though.  I wanted her to find someone to be with or new friends or something.  Instead, she spends a good decade of her life in purgatory with nothing to do but wait.

Most people are upset that the finale of HIMYM undercuts the lesson that Ted’s long period of waiting and near-misses was worth it because of what was waiting for him under that yellow umbrella.  By pairing him with Robin in the end, it does somewhat feel like you are invalidating something. Some might argue this resolution invalidates the relationship with The Mother, but I am inclined to disagree.  Ted’s monologue about Tracy that he tells his children, in which he told them he cherished and loved every minute of every day with her and knew never to stop loving her with all his heart was just the payoff I was hoping for in that relationship.  He went through a lot, he felt like the right person got away several times, but in the end it was worth it.  I don’t even mind that their love was cut short, as I’ve indicated here in these posts before.

What I do think it invalidates though is Robin, not to mention the relationship between Robin and Ted.  We really are supposed to accept that Robin did nothing but wait around alone with her dogs for Ted to come back?  We are supposed to be as invested in this relationship as we were in the pilot, even though we know about Tracy and how amazing she was? 

I guess I should admit here that I can be a little judgmental when it comes to widowers.  I understand that not everyone is like my mom and content to be alone.  But being a widower and a divorcee are two very different things.  A widower is no longer with the person they loved because they have no other choice, not because things didn’t work out.  So, while I know many a widower who remarry and it certainly isn’t that they don’t love their new spouse, there does seem to be a certain amount of inequality in the spousal rankings that isn’t as present in someone who divorces and remarries.  If you were Robin and saw what Ted and Tracy had, how could you agree to date this man for a third time?  How would you not spend the entire relationship wondering how you measured up, wondering if you were just Plan B because Plan A died?  In a way, it is like an even crueler thing to do to yourself than stay entrenched in the group.

I can understand why Ted, who get so lonely so easily, would try to win Robin back after his wife died.  What I can’t understand is why Robin would agree.  Yes, she had her doubts at the wedding, but that was something like 17 years prior to the rekindling of this relationship.  If Robin, who always learned to get by on her own and act strong even though she may not have felt strong hadn’t moved on at that point, how miserable must those 17 years have been? I’m sure she dated other guys during that period, but if we are to believe that the thought was always in the back of her head that Ted was the guy, this is way more depressing than the fact she isn’t at McLaren’s with the gang twice a week.

So I pretend the last four minutes of HIMYM never happened not because of The Mother, though the show exceeded my wildest expectations, as did actress Cristin Milioti, whose scene with Josh Radnor under the umbrella was pitch perfect in every way, not because of Ted and his journey and what it meant to viewers, though I am partial to the reading that all his bad timing and close calls only made what he found with Tracy even better, but because of Robin, who deserves more than to be the afterthought, who deserves more than to wait for years and years alone and wondering if she did this to herself, and who deserves to meet her own happiness instead of relying on the unhappiness of someone else to make her life complete.

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As you get older, things that seemed very normal growing up turn out to be not run of the mill at all.  Many of these involve local customs, traditions, and restaurants that you assumed as a kid were available everywhere.  When you are young, differentiating between global and local is tough.  Until you get a better sense of scope, how can you really gauge how small your little corner of the world is without knowing how big a world you live in.

When I was a kid, my dad was heavily involved in the local HAM radio scene, which meant that he knew every local weatherman in town.  Each of them was over at our house at least once, and each time I watched in awe that my dad knew someone famous.  I would always ask if Dan Rather would ever come visit, because I didn’t understand that there was a difference between local and national news.  If the guys who did the weather on the TV came over, why wouldn’t the guy reading the news join them?

Needless to say, Dan Rather never came over for dinner and I eventually learned the difference between local and national news.  Over the years I also learned about local vernacular, regional cuisine, and all the other customs of Kentucky that don’t exist elsewhere.  Even as an adult, every once in a while, I still get surprised that something isn’t a thing in the rest of the country.

That happened this weekend when I decided what I needed to munch on while watching the University of Kentucky basketball team secure its spot in the Final Four (Squee! btw) was a nice batch of beer cheese.

Problem is, they don’t sell it in Nevada.  Come to find out, they don’t really sell it anywhere besides the Commonwealth.  I actually had no idea beer cheese was a Kentucky-specific thing.  It is so delicious and decidedly not Southern in my brain, that it never dawned on me I hadn’t really seen it anywhere else.

Just what is beer cheese, you ask?  It is basically hummus for rednecks.  It is a cheesy spread that consists mostly of very sharp cheddar cheese, an array of spices and condiments like cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder, garlic, dried mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and in some recipes, a little horseradish.  It also contains beer.  Basically, you take these ingredients and combine them with flat beer (the general consensus is Newcastle is the way to go, but I would love to try a batch with Kentucky Ale Bourbon Barrel fwiw), then mix them up in a food processor and let it chill overnight to attain a more spreadable consistency.  Then you serve it cold with crackers, pretzels, or assorted crudité. 

The key to a good beer cheese is the bite.  You want it to have a kick, but not be too hot.  My ideal has always been the Hall’s on the River recipe, perfected at, who guessed it, Hall’s on the River restaurant, a quaint wood cabin situated directly on the Kentucky River. I’m not huge on spice, so I prefer the more Worcestershire-heavy combinations than those that lean on the cayenne. 

Today I made my first homemade batch of beer cheese and quickly learned that it isn’t that difficult to whip up at all, which makes me all the more confused why this delicious concoction didn’t catch on other places.  It does appear that in Wisconsin there is a similar dish of a hot variety called beer cheese soup.  It also seems like pub cheese, often prepared with wine, bears a similar resemblance to what I am talking about here.  People like cheese, people like kick, people like things to dip crackers in.  This isn’t rocket science.

My beer cheese turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.  It isn’t exactly Hall’s caliber, but it will certainly suffice to try to spread the word about the spread.  I may not be able to get Dan Rather to come over and try it, but I can do my part to make sure this is not just a local phenomenon.

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When it comes to picking favorites, I was always that person who could never pick the obvious choice.  Out of all the incredible basketball players that have come through the University of Kentucky, my all-time favorite is Tony Delk. My favorite on the current roster is the now-injured Willie Cauley-Stein.  I was not an Anthony Davis girl, nor did I think Nerlens Noel was all that.  I like the underrated and underappreciated.  This is why I think Fredo is the best.  It is why Dumbo is my favorite Disney movie.  It is why I never like to root for the obvious or bet on the favorite.

I ordered something off Amazon the other day that epitomizes this obsession with being a contrarian.  So, my best friend from childhood works at Disney World, which means one of the lovely perks when I visit is free trips to the park.  On each of these visits, I lament to her my frustrations at being unable to attain enough Dumbo merchandise or why Figment at Epcot Center deserves a higher profile position within the empire.

What I mostly bitch about though is The Muppet Ride and Bean Bunny.  If you’ve been to Disney World in the past 15 years or so, you’ve likely opted to check out this show in an attempt to get out of the sun.  You’ve probably also wondered who that bunny in a cardigan is. He’s Bean.

Bean first came into existence back in 1986 in the Jim Henson non-Muppet character special “The Tale of the Bunny Picnic”, which is a riff on Peter and the Wolf combined with the story of the Trojan horse (strange, I realize, but the music is damned catchy). With bunnies.  Bean is the star and the bunny who cries wolf, or in this instance, dog, and constantly finds himself in trouble with his kin.  After the success of Bunny Picnic, Bean was incorporated into the Muppet cast of characters.

The whole schtick of Bean is that he is cute to the point of insufferability.  The other Muppets draw attention to his cuteness in a wholly negative manner, but keep him around for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet.  Henson and company even went so far to incorporate Baby Bean into the Muppet Babies cartoon in the later seasons, where he was voiced by none other than Uncle Joey, Dave Coulier of Full House fame.

Most people hate Bean because he doesn’t have much going for him besides his sharp cardigan and his unerring precociousness.  Being three years old when Bunny Picnic was released, I was obsessed with Bean and would get rather impatient with the other Muppets bagging on him all the time.  He just wants to be cute and have friends, and young me didn’t understand the humor in the obnoxiousness of his cuteness once removed from the Bunny Picnic setting.  Over time, I grew to love the schtick, but still maintain unironic love for Bean, who seemed to always be getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop in various Muppet capers.

Eventually, the Henson company seemed to give up on making Bean happen.  The Jason Segel reboot of The Muppets did not include him, yet managed to include every other Muppet that ever existed.  I normally give Segel carte blanche to do whatever he wants, as he is super talented, but not cool Marshall, not cool. 

I get similarly irritated that the Muppet attraction at Disney World, developed in the early 1990s in the peak of Bean-dom prominently features Bean in the attraction, including an adorable, fuzzy animatronic version of him, but once you get to the gift shop, there is no Bean to be found. Not a stuffed toy, not a t-shirt, not a pencil, nothing.  The best friend has to deal with my ire every time we are there, even though her role within the Mouse corporation has nothing to do with retail inventory.

My love for furry cute things others find obnoxious extends to the Star Wars universe as well.  Return of the Jedi is WAY my favorite of the movies and it is mostly to do with the Ewoks.  In actuality, my favorite Star Wars universe movie is Ewoks: Battle for Endor, but I try not to say that out loud too often, as it would ruin any nerd/film nerd street cred I have left.  This is purely a nostalgia thing.  The two Ewoks movies played on the Disney Channel constantly growing up, so I simply watched them dozens of times more than the original franchise, kind of like how kids now are obsessed with Clone Wars, but could care less about the movies.

What I am getting at here is that I love Wicket.  He is my favorite.  That pudgy, furry little bear cub of a creature is the best and one of the more underrated characters in the Star Wars universe if I do say so myself.  Like I said at the beginning, I realize these characters are pretty unredeemable to everyone else. I’m sure most think of them as the Cousin Oliver of their respective franchises, but I don’t care.

Today, the greatest figurine in history arrived at my doorstep.  I discovered it on Amazon a few months ago when I was typing “Bean Bunny” into the search function to prove to Lindsay he was neglected.  Instead, I found a figurine issued for a special Disney Star Wars weekend last year celebrating the 30th anniversary of Return of the Jedi (coincidentally the same year I celebrated the 30th anniversary of me).  This, ladies and gentlemen, is Bean Bunny dressed up as fucking Wicket. Damn straight:

 

I don’t know who did the research and figured out that those folks who love Bean Bunny probably love Wicket for the very same reasons.  Perhaps it was just a happy coincidence or perhaps these people invaded my wildest dreams and tried to satisfy them with this unbelievable concoction.  Either way, there is probably no one on Earth as excited that this thing exists as I do.  In a world where fandom and its offerings are becoming increasingly more precise, I am still beyond floored that this exists, that is how off the wall it is.

Amazingly, I did not buy this thing right away, as I am an adult and have to have a pretty good reason to drop $30 on a toy.  I added it to my Amazon Wish List though and, as I continued to check on it, the price continued to drop.  Once it dipped below $20, I decided it was time to pull the trigger not because I was a collector or because I needed an action figure that badly, but because someone needs to love Bean Bunny and Wicket and I am just the contrarian to do it.

While I can write a blog on the generally crap selection Netflix has to offer (Prime is where it is at people), one thing they do right is documentaries. For a couple of years now, this site has provided a wealth of Oscar-winning documentaries as well as stuff I wouldn’t have stumbled upon otherwise, like the shocking “Dear Zachary”.

This second installment of this recommendation falls into the former category, as it beat the much-buzzed about “The Act of Killing” for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar last month.  While “20 Feet From Stardom” lacks some of the innovation of “The Act of Killing”, it proves one of the core tenants of good doc making: your subject is key.

This doc focuses on background singers, primarily those of the Motown era like Darlene Love, who wasn’t just a background singer, but sang lead vocal on “He’s a Rebel” and “It’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”.  As a kid, my family listened to nothing but oldies music, so it was incredibly interesting to see just what kinds of circumstances some of my favorite songs were recorded under.

Hands-down best moment of the documentary? Watching a group of singers listen to old songs and they get to the novelty song “The Monster Mash”. without missing a beat, one says:

“This is the song where they told us to sing like white people.”

In case it doesn’t go without saying, race plays a huge role in this film.  Sometimes it is addressed rather overtly, other times it is a little more veiled.  In addition to race though, what is also great is to hear people speak candidly about how some of these dancers couldn’t succeed not for lack of talent, but purely because they didn’t fit in the mold of what a Hollywood singer should look like.

I should also point out that one of my former professors at USC is one of the talking heads in this movie.  Dr. Todd Boyd, author of books like “Am I Black Enough for You?” and “Young, Black, Rich, and Famous” is one of the foremost authorities on African-Americans in the entertainment and sports industries and I legitimately guffawed when he popped up on screen because it has been so long since I’ve seen him.

But back to the question at hand–will you like this? If you like oldies music, this is a must-watch to learn more about that era.  If you like documentaries, this is one that I would take care not to miss.  Is it redefining the form of documentaries? No, it is, as I said, an example of an engrossing topic presented within a pretty standard format.  But, as someone who really thinks that form can get overvalued these days at the expense of content, I will tell you that this was a great watch for me.  I have tried to watch “The Act of Killing” and didn’t quite get through it yet, because it is not an easy breezy watch, what with subtitles (there is no English in the film), a highly visual style, and a subject matter that doesn’t exactly make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, what with the mass government-endorsed executions.

That is not to say “20 Feet from Stardom” is necessarily superior.  I think this is an instance where they are both great.  What I am saying to those who might be a little doc snobby though is this: don’t hold the simplicity of this film against it.  To me, it is what the greatest docs are all about, which is finding a story that needs to be told and letting it shine for what it is in front of the cameras.

I wish I had some sort of reasonable expectation why I have been mainlining old seasons of the Lifetime “Dance Moms” instead of digging into the growing stack of books on my shelf, plowing through some of the TCM old movies I’ve DVRed, or worked my way through the growing chunk of season two of “The Americans” I have to offer.

Really though, it is all about laziness.  At the end of the day, I find myself tired and rather than focus on really taking in something I know I will enjoy, I watch something that is the equivalent of junk food so I can write this or play a little online poker or clean up around the house.

I don’t like the feeling I am only accomplishing one thing at a time, but really am I accomplishing anything by piping Dance Moms into my ear while I work?  As a former dance competition kid myself, I was curious about this show, which grows increasingly more staged and preposterous as I now end Season 2.  Having kids learn and perform brand new dances every week? Not likely.  "Fake" auditions for the Joffrey and other Lifetime programming help create drama much like this manufactured rivalry between the show’s star, dance instructor Abby Lee Miller and Kathy, the woman who runs the quaint dance shop Candy Apples.

Like the Real Housewives, I think there is some sort of fascination from my anthropological studies days that keeps me from tuning out completely, but I got a little concerned when tonight I opted for this to be what I actually watched as opposed to the noise in my ear for the work day.  In my time to unwind at home, I should be taking advantage of the opportunity to focus, but instead I want to be able to tune out.  

I blame my queue, which is increasingly becoming heavy on foreign flicks and, well, heavy stuff.  I don’t think I would choose to watch Dance Moms over something a little easier to tackle in an evening than “The Sand Pebbles”, but there seems to be a lack of this sort of stuff online.  Prime on Amazon is getting more and more reality fare, which is the closest thing I can get to a quick fix of entertainment, so I will take it for now.  After all, I am a dancer and I guess I gotta dance when I gotta dance.

But I am hoping someone saves me from myself here soon, as all this screaming and yelling, fluffy as it may feel, might just start weighing me down instead of keeping me light on my feet.

It is not often I am self-aware enough in a movie that I can feel myself beaming, but it was a feeling I grew quite comfortable with as I watched “The Grand Budapest Hotel” yesterday.  It is not often I can say a movie just plug delighted me, but this one did.  With every unstacking of its Russian doll-like introduction, which unfolds from present day to the late 1960s to its core story, set in the early 1930s, my grin grew larger.  When the movie ended, I grew a little sad, but only because it was over and who knows when Wes Anderson will have a new cinematic treat for me, as beautifully composed and delectable as a Mendel’s cake.

Before I go on, perhaps it is best to backtrack a little.  If you’re wondering who Wes Anderson is, he is a film school nerd icon.  A writer/director, or perhaps we can even drop the word auteur here in spite of the risk of sounding pretentious, he is best known for his unique visual style, which you can see on display here in the Budapest trailer:

For my friends who know my film taste, it always surprises them that I count myself among the hipster filmies who idolize Anderson because I am far from a formalist when it comes to my film taste, meaning that I tend to be more drawn to subtler artistic direction, camera angles, and other technical elements and tend to privilege narrative and characters.

If you can’t tell from the clips, Anderson’s movies are highly stylized.  Every detail of every set and every costume is meticulously planned ahead of time and you could truly spend hours pouring through every freeze frame admiring the attention to the most minute of minutae.

For me though, the beauty of the Anderson mis-en-scene is that it helps to create an entire world populated with the quirkiest of characters, taking part in a narrative that has me completely rapt.  This might explain why I find Anderson so hit or miss sometimes.  While I positively adore “Bottle Rocket”, “Rushmore”, and my favorite, “The Royal Tenenbaums”, others like “The Life Aquatic leave me wanting for more.

That is the rub with Anderson.  If you don’t buy into the characters and the world doesn’t pull you in with a compelling story, the unusual look may keep you entertained for the length of the film, but you will feel distant and removed from the action at hand.

In "Grand Budapest Hotel”, there are actually three distinct looks at play.  There is the present day look, which we don’t get much but a fleeting glimpse of in the opening scenes of the film.  Then there is the 1968 look, where the hotel is presented with the same starkness as “The Shining” with the standard Wes Anderson touches, but as if they’d been unattended to for 20 years.  During this “My Dinner with Andre-esque” sequence with Jude Law and F Murray Abraham, it perfectly invokes the films of that era, but Anderson isn’t done there.

The 1932 portion of the film is a mix between a Buster Keaton silent film like “The General” and the early screwball comedies of Cary Grant.  I’m hard-pressed to believe Ralph Fiennes’ playboy protagonist M. Gustave is not some sort of tribute to the debonair Grant, while relative newcomer Tony Revolori as Gustave’s Lobby Boy-in-training Zero steals some scenes himself with his expressive face and penciled on moustache that seems to pay homage to Chaplin or another silent film star.  There are certainly some scenes like the mountaintop chase featuring Willem Defoe or the prison escape sequence that feel like Marx Brothers comedy set pieces.

If you are a fan of 1930s cinema, you will appreciate these nice touches, but you will appreciate the anachronistic moments of humor even more.  This movie is definitely Anderson’s funniest work since Rushmore and the funniest moments tend to come from the abrupt changes in tone from a poetic 1930s romance to an expletive-ridden tirade (done expertly by Fiennes and Adrian Brody).  There were a number of highly quotable laugh out loud moments in this flick for me, which was something I was certainly not expecting going into it.

Unexpected is probably the best single word I can use to describe this movie.  There is the familiarity in style and tone that comes with every Anderson movie, but most of this film caught me by surprise. Thanks to comedic moments and plot twists, I gasped more than once as our heroes evaded danger, cracked wise, and even fell in love (side note: does anyone do simple, earnest love stories as well as Anderson these days?)

It dawns on me I have written so much about this movie without really saying much regarding what it is about.  It is a caper film at its core, with dashes of other genres thrown in.  In many ways it is also a buddy comedy, as the bond between Gustave and Zero defines the film and is the emotional center of the story. It is a well-crafted relationship too, both fatherly and brotherly at the same time, sincere without being schmaltzy, and an interesting case of opposites attract.  If you’re asking me more deeply what the films themes and messages are, I can only guess after one viewing, which I am hoping is the first of many.

As I mentioned earlier, what Anderson depicts in this movie is not the actual 1930s, but the cinematic version of the 30s, as the section in 1968 is a very cinematic version of what 1968 looked like in celluloid.  It doesn’t even have real Nazis or take place in a real country.  It is a romanticized version of what this part of the world should have been like during this time of turmoil, an ode to the escapism of Ernst Lubitsch and Chaplin and Preston Sturges.  Anderson drew some criticism from folks frustrated to not see him actually deal with Nazis, only address them in this roundabout way, but to me, that was the point.  Sturges made light of the Nazis to hilarious and subversively wonderful effect in “To Be or Not to Be”.  One does not need to be “Schindler’s List” in order to make a point about that era in history.

In fact, it seems like Anderson is doing a lot of very intentional manipulation of time to make a point about Gustave and Zero that our film’s narrator (Jude Law) states rather plainly at the end of the film.  They were not people of their time.  But that can be said of many of the famous names I have mentioned here.  There is something classic yet modern about Sturges, Chaplin, and Lubitsch, much like our two heroes who try to live the life of gentlemen of a time long since past, but at times seem to forward thinking for the era they are in.  Like the titular hotel, it is grand, opulent and old-fashioned, while in its peak, it was the definition of the modern place to be.

I am a classic cinephile, so it probably is no surprise that my initial reading of this movie has me theorizing about actual eras versus their cinematic representations.  It also doesn’t surprise me that Anderson has delivered another movie so rife with opportunity to delve into and try to pull out some sort of meaning that may not be right there on the surface.  It is something I haven’t wanted to do for a movie in a long time and, as I said, it was a lovely, unexpected surprise.

In my past life as an aspiring academic, it wasn’t always easy to find role models.  Yes, the faculty in my department at Indiana University was incredible, but when it came to nationally known academics that weren’t obliged to mentor me, I tended to have but a couple of idols.

One was Henry Jenkins, whose approach to intertextual film studies, fan studies, and cultural consumption jived with mine.  He had a writing style that was accessible even to non-academics, not to mention a point of view that was not as bogged down in theory as many other writers in film and media.  I knew I wanted to write like Henry Jenkins, the problem was I never was going to be able to produce anything as interesting or compelling to say as he did.

This was really my entire problem with academia.  I had things to say, sure, but they were things to say about NASCAR driver Juan Pablo Montoya or Larry the Cable Guy.  I could take someone else’s theory and apply it to something, but when it came to devising my own theories, I had very little to offer.  Part of the problem is that I found myself rolling my eyes at high theory (think the really difficult to read esoteric stuff) more than I found myself inspired by it.  I found writers like Jenkins accessible, but felt like he was the exception rather than the rule.

So I got out while I still could.  To be honest, I was probably more scared to fail than I was willing to admit at the time.  I have an idea still for a dissertation and, to my knowledge, no one has written it yet.  In the back of my head, I always think, “Someday, I’ll write that book.” Therein lies the problem though. As a chronic procrastinator, I could put off writing ten page papers in college and 25 page papers in grad school, but I don’t think I could produce a book in a 48 hour binge. So, it remains a pipe dream.

Every once in a while though, I get a sign of hope that this weird middle space I inhabited in grad school might be growing.  One such sign came this weekend, when a writer I’ve been a fan of for a while announced she was leaving academia to go work for BuzzFeed.  I first came upon Anne Helen Petersen via her Facebook page, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.  This was precisely what I had been looking for—an examination of the pop culture news of the moment through the lens of cultural studies (the field I tended to work in when I was in school). 

Reading her Hairpin article, I could relate to some of her academic frustrations, most notably the whole “being paid peanuts” thing and the fact that her given field of study, celebrity gossip, was not something her peers and her superiors necessarily afforded much respect.  My area of interest in film and media during grad school was looking at depictions of rural working class people (read: rednecks) and using a lot of theory from the horror genre to explain how our cultural artifacts tend to very intentionally marginalize them. Worth noting that, right after I exited grad school, the minstrel-show like genre of redneck reality in the form of Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty exploded.  I never said I was good at timing.

Several of my academic friends had a variety of reactions to the news.  I can see how, if you are part of the institution, it is frustrating to see someone give up years of work to go write web content on the cheap at a site like BuzzFeed.  More accurately, it is disconcerting to see one of their peers having to leave the academy because they can’t get hired despite doing interesting work that clearly has a wider reach than a lot of other work.  While I can see the disappointing side to this story, I am mostly just inspired. 

If you can’t tell, I am already falling off my blogging promise for Lent.  I don’t really have an excuse either. Being in LA with friends, just being really tired, these may be explanations I guess, but end of the day, it is hard to write just to write every single evening.  Reading about Anne Helen Petersen gets me motivated again.  Knowing there are a growing number of people existing in this middle space has me hoping that, bad or good timing, there is an audience who cares about this kind of commentary. Either that, or I have a good number of people who feel compelled to read this site out of guilt or a sense of obligation, which works for me too.

I remember those college days when the NCAA tournament meant a long weekend of basketball, crowds, and loudly cheering for my teams (yeah, plural, I have a couple that I rank in the following order: 1. USC 2. UK 3. IU).  Years later, this is still one of my favorite weekends of the year, but my priorities have changed slightly.

For example, I agreed to spend the weekend in LA to hang out with not one, but two pregnant friends who would very much like to do anything that doesn’t involve basketball.  Thankfully, I had some allies in one of their spouses and the other single friend in our group, Vince, of Copacabana Beach t-shirt fame.

Vince has had my basketball-loving back all weekend, from the moment I got off the plane right as tip off for the Kentucky-Kansas state game.  I hopped in the car and we headed straight to find a place to watch, though that did not come without a little deliberation.

“We can go back to Qs where I was,” Vince offered.  “But there are so many people. And the parking. And so many people.”

Rather than pick a happening place, we decided to stay close to the airport, as Vince lives near Westwood, home of my least favorite college in the country, UCLA, whose game was tipping off at pretty much the same time.  Which is how we ended up at the Fox Hills Mall.

I don’t really know if people still call this nearly 40-year-old mall the Fox Hills Mall anymore. They’ve definitely gussied the place up a bit since I lived out here, including installing several restaurants like a Lucille’s, a BJ’s Brewhouse, and an Olive Garden.  If you thought we would beeline to BJs, the most sports bar-esque of the three, you would be wrong.

Vince runs through our options, then asks, “Do you think Olive Garden has a bar with TVs?”

“They typically have bars,” I said. “And I am definitely on board with soup, salad, breadsticks, and some cheap vino at the OG.”

That’s right—we were both genuinely excited at the prospect of a night of OG and basketball.  I really like breadsticks, not gonna lie.

Unfortunately, the OG does draw a classiness line somewhere in the sand and does not put TVs at their bars.  We proceeded to Lucille’s only to discover all their TVs were on a single circuit. Knowing we would be outvoted by Bruin fans, we bolted to the crowded BJs and managed to secure a table in the dining room where I had a view of a TV with the game, though it was a good 30 yards from my seat.  The Jess of a decade ago would not have been okay with this arrangement, but contemporary Jess thought, “well the game isn’t close and oooh flatbreads on the menu.”

Then we turned in early because, well, we had a brunch to be at in the morning.  Yeah, I didn’t go celebrate a UK victory because of a breakfast date.  As Jason Segel’s character on How I Met Your Mother notes though, you can’t really beat the awesomeness that is brunch.  This brunch, at Gjelina in Venice, was particularly delicious, but it was not a quick meal precursor to a day of basketball.  Instead, it was a precursor to a day of walking around, having some casual drinks, and playing some trivia.

Yes, trivia.

My friend’s husband Matt has done some trivia in his time and very kindly put together a game for us, which was awesome.  This is how I like to pass my afternoons, answering trivia questions, keeping an eye on the scores and turning it on when there is a close game.  We watched the first half of the Wisconsin-Oregon game, as Matt had to cheer on his alma mater. Even then though, we missed most of the second half, eagerly watching the GameCast on our phone because we walked to our dinner reservations at C&O Trattoria in Marina del Ray.

At dinner, I was more than happy with our agenda of the day though.  As I swayed my wine glass singing along to “That’s Amore”, toasted my pregnant friends, put away some garlic knots, and split some delectable linguini with Vince, I realized a couple of things.  First, that food appears to be my top priority in my traveling these days, which is both disconcerting and awesome all at the same time.  Second, that things have changed a lot in the decade since my college days in LA, but so far the important stuff, like seeing these friends of mine on a semi-regular basis, remain.  Finally, that missing out on some of opening weekend of a tournament just isn’t as big a deal to me at 30 as it was at 20.

That being said, this was how we parted last night:

“Y’all do whatever you want, but at 11:45am tomorrow, my ass will be firmly planted in front of a television showing the Kentucky-Wichita State game.  You can leave me behind, meet me later, or watch with me. I don’t care, but this is what I am doing and it is non-negotiable.”

I mean, friendship is friendship, but there is nothing, not even food, that compares with watching the Wildcats in March.