The Office

It’s finally ending!

Now, I have to confess, I started very late in the series.  In fact, I wasn’t a dedicated viewer until after Steve Carrell left, so I started without any attachment to the Michael Scott antics.  And despite what everybody else says, the show does not suffer for it.  If anything, it proved that the show didn’t depend on a single person but was great because everybody involved was great.

I have since seen almost every episode from the beginning and am current with this whole Farewell Season.  And it is succeeding in a major way.  I can tell because of how bothered I am by the current state of Jim and Pam’s marriage.

Jim and Pam’s romance was always the heart of the show.  The first three seasons were all about getting them together despite their engagements and other relationships.  And then they got married and had a kid (which was the best episode of the whole show, period) and then they had another.

Since then, they’ve had some personal struggles but no major challenges with each other or that both of them were facing.  Now that Jim has gotten them into his mid-life crisis and desire to get rich quick, their marriage and livelihood are in trouble.  This is a real situation that does come up a lot in life, I totally understand where both are coming from and I sure hope to see how the two of them get through it.  How this resolves determines how The Office will be remembered for years after it’s over.

The rest of my thoughts on the final season so far: last season, Angela married the gay senator and had a child.  Now, I’ve never liked Angela.  She and Dwight had a Hot Lips Hoolihan and Frank Burns relationship (although they hid it better than the M*A*S*H couple did) but long after their breakup, where Hot Lips evolved into a strong, wonderful character, Angela has stayed the same snippy, egotistical twit she was from the beginning.  But it was nice to see her happy because she has had so few opportunities.

This season, Oscar is having an affair with the senator.  This sucks because I’ve always liked Oscar; he always handled Michael’s insanities with the most class, had the most social graces of anybody in that office, and was always sort of an underdog at work, which everybody loves.  Now I hope he is miserable and lonely the rest of his life.  Now I want Angela to get a divorce, get custody of the child and move out; nothing humanizes a character more than having them be betrayed.  (Of course, some will say that she’s only getting her just desserts from the Dwight-Andy triangle, but you know? the last sentence still stands.  That was the moment that both Dwight and Andy felt like people to me.)

I used to root for Andy and Erin being together.  That drove the last season almost the way Jim and Pam’s romance did the first half of the show (though not nearly as powerful.)  Now, I want them to split and the new intern to get Erin.  He’s screwed up their relationship way too much now.

 Dwight has developed about as far as he can go.  He’s still a dork but he’s a likeable dork now.

Nellie was a one-shot appearance during the “Boss Interview” episode, but she was the second-most memorable one.  Unlike Robert California, (who became the CEO last season), she became more than her interview quirk.  She’s honestly a better boss than Andy, though without the title, and has integrated herself so well into The Office that I can’t imagine the show without her anymore.  This season she has grown into the Mama Bear of these people and I hope that that develops even more till the end of the show.

It’s kind of sad to see Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak to leave the show, (especially since Kaling’s new show is so boring), but their characters had gone as far as they could go, and their departure was just a repeat of the same tired joke.

Overall, I hope it ends with a bang.  Nine seasons of air time puts them in the same league of other sitcoms like Friends, Everybody Love Raymond, Seinfeld, etc., and they deserve no less a finale than any of those other shows did.

Paperman and Wreck-It Ralph

I love how Disney gives us shorts before their main feature.  Best decision they’ve made in the last decade and because of that decision, we have “The Paperman”, which is likely going to be my favorite romance of this year.  This short alone is worth your ticket price.

Or if you’re not as adamant as me, you can always go with my cousin’s mantra: “Better love story than Twilight.”

I was so happy about this movie that I almost forgot how bad Wreck-It Ralph is.  And before I get any hate posts, let me say that the feature was cute.  The glitch girl was easily my favorite thing about this: she was funny, sweet, when she cried I wanted to cry and when she was happy, I couldn’t help but root for her.  The love story between Fix-It Felix and the super soldier was awesome.  And the Race-Car world was fantastically designed.  There was nothing about it that didn’t charm me, from the Twizzler vines to the NesQuik Sand, the Oreo guards to the exploding Mentos.  Everything about it was genius.

What’s my problem with the film?  I couldn’t turn my brain off.

Usually, I can suspend disbelief easily especially when I understand the rules and the rules are consistent.  Nothing here is.  Apparently, they don’t exist unless they’ve been programmed, fair enough.  So how does the gate guard exist?  In fact, why does that train station exist at all?  It’s just an outlet with more wires, not a programmed and complicated game.

The Soldier Girl was “written” a tragic backstory, meaning that none of it ever really happened, she was just programmed to feel that way.  That felt more than a little manipulative and was only played for laughs, not for any serious connection to the audience.

The bugs were the worst.  They’re a computer virus?  Really?  If that were true, that arcade shooter would have crashed way too long before.  The only reason for them to exist is that they were programmed into the game like all the other villains, in which case, why are they any scarier than Bowser?  Ridiculous.

And in the end, everything that was good about this film has been done better by Pixar already.  The Bad Guy group therapy smacks of the shark rehabilitation in Finding Nemo.  The giant guarding the little girl is so Monster’s, Inc.  And of course, anything about the inanimate having life doesn’t come close to the bar set by Toy Story.

I’m also a grump.  Take it for what it is.

Skyfall

My roommate wanted to see Skyfall and I haven’t seen a Bond movie in theaters before.  Kind of surprising, considering I’ve seen a lot of the movies, both old and newer.

Origin stories are definitely on the rise for entertainment; Daniel Craig is doing for 007 what Christian Bale did for Batman.  And the writing is some of the best yet.

There is so much I could praise about this movie: the villain may be the best one in all the Bond series, this is definitely Judi Densh’s best performance as M, and that third act at Bond’s family mansion was incredible.

And I especially loved the nods to the prior Bond movies.  The Daniel Craig trilogy may have reinvented the whole series, but that doesn’t mean they can’t acknowledge the long heritage.  My favorite line is when Bond meets with Q, gets a specialized gun and tiny radio, he asks if that’s it.  Q: “Were you expecting an exploding pen?  We don’t do that anymore.”

You know that line wasn’t meant for Bond.  That was told directly to the audience, letting us know they’ve grown up and moved past the childish things.  They are making better stories than ever before.

Alas, there is one black mark to Skyfall and it does ruin the movie for me.  Those who don’t like spoilers, don’t read the rest, although since this particular scene happens in the middle of the movie and doesn’t reveal any major plot twists.

Bond meets a beautiful woman (as usual) and has sex with her five minutes later (as usual.)  She works for the villain and leads Bond to him.  They’re both captured and after a few tense minutes, the villain plays a “game” with Bond.  The girl has a glass of liquor set on top of her head and the game is to shoot it off.

Bond is forced to play because the villain has four lackeys pointing guns at him.  Bond misses the girl and glass entirely (whether by accident or purposely is difficult to say) but the villain takes his turn and shoots the girl dead.  This was inevitable but still heart-wrenching.  In the few minutes she had on screen, I could understand her fear, saw how vulnerable she was, how she was clinging to Bond to save her, or at least have her life mean something.  And she dies without even a hope of any of that happening.

Here’s the part that bugs me: the villain asks how Bond feels and Bond says, “What a waste of good Scotch.”  Then he beats the crap out of everybody who was still pointing a gun at him.

I detached from that moment and couldn’t care less about what happened to Bond from that point on.  He sees how terrified this woman is, he makes love to her, and then he sums up her life with a little quip about the spilled drink.  No mention was made of the woman afterwards, no sign of remorse, not even once (despite the fact that she was the best actress in the whole film and the one I cared about most.)

I hated Bond from that point on.  All the good things I said about the movie are still true.  The story even got better and more powerful afterwards.  But I didn’t care and still don’t care because I think the hero is scum, as callous and cruel as the people he’s fighting.  I hold my good guys to a higher bar than what was given here.

The After-Birthday Day

In the first season of House, Cameron had to remind House that it was his birthday.  His typical way of thanking her involved something to the effect of, “I really didn’t think it would come this year, but darn it, if it wasn’t the little planet that could all over again.”

I had no party as I had to go to work that night, and anyway, I’m not much for parties, especially if I’m the occasion.  That’s too much spotlight on me.

So I did not forget about my birthday but I did totally forget about the birthday feature on Facebook, given that I rarely check it more than once a day.  To my shock, my wall was filled with well-wishers and happy-birthdayers, and it was all so very sweet.  So I’ll give a shout out for Facebook: that Birthday thing is one of your better ideas.  You ought to be proud of yourselves for that one.

Concerning Zombies...

As much as I like the horror genre, I could never get into the zombie.  They’re not intelligent, they have no goals, and they’re not evil.  They’re just hungry, dead animals.  Or hungry, dead cannibals.  Whatever.

I’m into ghosts, vampires, witches, summoned demons, and mutants; something that’s given to more than appetite.  That’s the type of monster I want the heroes to encounter, be terrified of, and depending on the tale, overcome.

Naturally, I have roommates that love zombie flicks.  And I mean love.  The latest episode of The Walking Dead is always on the night it comes out, and most of Netflix is used to locate any and all types of zombie flicks, good, bad and even worse.  It was inevitable that I would have to watch some of these movies.

Most are so bad that I go to my bedroom to watch my anime (when I should be doing homework.)

Even in the smelliest dung heaps, though, somebody will make something that’s fantastic.  Over the past weeks, I’ve come across two zombie movies that I thought were awesome: Night of the Living Dead and Devil’s Playground.

Funny, enough, most of the drama does not come from the zombies.  In both cases, zombies are more of a plague, a force of nature, but the real enemy is the other survivors.  With Night of the Living Dead, which established the modern zombie, puts random people trying to make do with a cabin none of them lives in.  There is one admirable character, Ben, trying to save himself and the woman he took under his wing, and he knows how to defend him.  But he needs help from the group, and the cowardice and betrayal of a couple key people undoes everything he tries to do.

Same thing with Devil’s Playground, a pretty recent film and British-made, so naturally, they’re not afraid to be risky and try to be intelligent in their storytelling.  Again, the zombies never terrified me.  I could admire the cunning some characters take to evade them or take a few out, but that’s as far as it goes.  But the group of survivors sucked me in when nothing else could.  It was like watching a more action-packed version of Lord of the Flies.  There’s struggle for dominance, cowardice, betrayal, and even a spark of true heroism from the unlikeliest people.

There was still some hokey-ness in Devil’s Playground.  The flashbacks were too repetitive and never added more to the protagonist we didn’t already know.  And I hated that phony issue of how the one woman who could stop the “zombie-plague” from taking over the world should not have to be a science project.  What a selfish outlook compared to the millions in danger.

Oh, well.  I can’t say I’m antagonistic to the zombie anymore.  But they’re still not scary, just gross.  And they haven’t added anything that hasn’t already been done in any other post-apocalyptic story.  Fortunately, I like the post-apocalyptic tale.

Legal Terminology

I’m a vocabulary geek.  In high school, I was driving every other person crazy asking what a word meant in the advanced books I was reading, and after being asked to shut up enough times, I started bringing a dictionary with me wherever I went.  Never could read it cover to cover (way too boring) but every time I came across a strange word in my increasingly advanced novels, there the dictionary was to save my life.

I don’t really get to use any of these words in my everyday speech; people still get upset when they don’t know what I’m saying.  But I love having that cache of words locked away inside my head.

I started my Court Reporting program back in July and the best thing about it for me is all the new terminology I get to learn.  The idea is that if you’re going to be writing what everybody in court is saying, you might as well know how it’s spelled and what it means.

Currently, I’m going through all the legal terminology, which is just fascinating.  I always assumed the “moot” as in “moot point” was something along the lines of empty or meaningless.  Turns out that “moot” actually means “arguable or debatable, but to be settled outside of court.”

I’ve seen the abbreviation et al. come up again and again without any idea what’s going on.  Apparently, it stands for “et alius” meaning “and another.” If there’s a group of folks with the names of Yarborough, Deegan, Spielberg, and Lucas, you could refer to them as “Yarborough, et al.”

Then there’s the words for the law’s legal words: a “lexicon” is a dictionary of legal terms but then the “Corpus Juris Secundum” is an encyclopedia of laws that attorney’s use for reference.  Who knew?

The best part about this is that once I’m done with the legal, eventually I’ll move onto the medical.  I may start to have some idea of what’s going on in those TV doctor dramas.

Of course, the trouble is that few outside my program is ever going to care.  Heck, there’s few inside my program that even care.  There’s just in it to make money.  I don’t think I’ll ever win.

Jack of Fables

Kind of an interesting start for this series.  Jack of the Tales is the rogue character in the early part of Fables; he’s the Jack who climbed the beanstalk and any fable or nursery rhyme with “Jack” in it refers to him.

After his last major crime in Fables, Jack was exiled and given his own comic strip (what a punishment.)

Now, the thing about Jack of Fables is that it is a comedy.  Unlike Fables, with its sense of epic scope and fully-fleshed characters, Jack of Fables creates its own epic story and makes fun of it.  The enemy is a group called the Literals, which are literally literary terms embodied.

How best to describe this?  In one chapter, all the genres are gathered to determine the fate of the world.  Seriously, physical representations of Horror, Mystery, Fantasy, Comedy, Western, Science-Fiction, etc. gather to see how to obliterate the world and make a new one.  It’s crazy.  And you get to meet all sorts of characters, from Gary the Pathetic Fallacy, Dex the Deus ex Machina, Censorship, and a host of others.

Silly, and yet there’s still strong storytelling behind it.  The best way to mock the epic format is to do a good job depicting it.  Despite how compelling the series was, it’s too bad that nobody was likeable.  Not one single character.

Jack may have charm, but he’s also a selfish, greedy philanderer who has no end to his own depravity.  His son Jack Frost, while not the rogue his father is, ended up boring.  Gary was a spineless twit.  The Page Sisters were as mean and greedy as Jack.

And several of the repeated jokes were awful.  What was with the Blue Ox pages?  That was a gag that was easy to skip every issue.

This marks the first time I have been completely okay with everybody dying at the end.  In a lot of ways, there’s no other way it could finish, with all of these characters being as vile as they were.  I guess that would make this series a tragedy rather than comedy, except that it made me happy.  Figure that one out, philosophers.

Election

I wanted to do a mail-in ballot but it never came to me, so I ended up having to go through the trial of waking up when my alarm went off, finding the right parking lot for my polling place, fill out the provisional ballot, get another ballot because I marked one box wrong for a proposition, and all of which combined made me late for school.

Totally worth the pain and a great part of that may be because it’s the first time I’ve finally been able to vote.  Last election year, I had moved and when I went to register, I missed the deadline by a few days.  I was so mad about that.

Anyways, I hope everybody that can, will vote.  Might be a little late for me to post this, but take advantage of your right.

Star Wars: The Sequel Trilogy

I was going to write about something else, but this was brought to my attention just this morning.  First, as of October 30, it was announced Disney is acquiring Lucasfilm—not a surprise.  Those two companies have worked together for years and Disney is like the Blob: it absorbs all it touches.  The second bit of news: they want to make Episodes VII, VIII, and IX.

Holy crap.

These are some of my initial thoughts: Lucas is retiring.  It’s said that he’ll stay on as a creative consultant, but as far as any active work is concerned with the business, he’s done.  And with him not getting involved with the writing, the movies already have a decent start.

And, I won’t kid anyone—I will watch these movies in theaters.  Even as horrible as I knew the prequel trilogy movies were going to be, I still had to see them on the big screen.  Star Wars is an event as much as it is a movie anymore and it’s a ride I have to be on.  (But so we’re clear, I’m only doing this for the movies; I refuse to watch that Clone Wars TV series.)

The big questions I have is what story they’ll decide to tell and how this is going to affect the Star Wars literature medium.

This is not a small question.  I don’t know how large the audience is, but since Timothy Zahn wrote his own Star Wars trilogy, there is a book or set of books for every year after Return of the Jedi for nearly forty years of the Star Wars universe history.  And there are fans who are as attached to the literary creations, like Mara Jade, Thrawn, Han and Leia’s kids, and so on.  I barely read the books and even I know that some of these are as beloved as any of the original film creations.

So I’m wondering if they’re going to try and incorporate what’s in the books, ignore the books and do their own thing, or find an epic adventure that’s barely tied to the Skywalkers but explore something deeper about the Jedi.

One thing is for sure, fascinating things are going to happen within that canon.