Bookbyte Blog

Archive for the ‘Entertainment’ Category

The Worst Cinematic Portrayals of College Life

This guest post was written by Crystal Hall over at thebestdegress.org. You can read the full version here.

Let’s start here: you were cooler than you think in college. Although movies often rest on the assumption that their viewers will suspend disbelief for a few hours and fall into their world, some films fare better at this than others. This is not to argue that movies should all be hyper-realistic — they’re pieces of art, and there’s real life for that. But there’s something to be said for the hyper-ridiculous setting. Enter: the universities portrayed in the movies. And because no one wants to be bored with a list of bad flicks, we’ve found instead the most ridiculous. While college life may be a time of wild partying, barely making it, and coming of age, these nine movies feature the most unrealistic (“the worst!”) cinematic portrayals of the subject. Sit back, relax, and thank your lucky stars that you didn’t get your degree in one of these nine worlds.

The Rules of Attraction

The dark comedy Rules of Attraction is one of those movies that’s so stylized and oozing of manufactured cool, it’s almost too annoying to exist. But if you’re into popping Xanax, it could be kind of good — as was the Bret Easton Ellis novel on which it’s based. Although everyone loves a good dark comedy (and the book was certainly that), the apathetic, entitled, depressed, addicted, and oversexed characters in the film make college life seem like more of a high-school chore. Love triangle drama plus pseudo-poignant paragraphs of maudlin social analysis plus crazy parties with rapes and orgies equals college life to the Rules of Attraction crew. Not what we’d bet most folks remember from the glory years of their education.

Accepted

This funny movie has a lot of fans, and was an early vehicle for some of today’s top young stars, but there’s nothing about Accepted that does college on the real. The South Harmon Institute of Technology is a fake college created by Justin Long to appease his movie parents after being rejected from everywhere he applied. And on the first day of class, he learns that there’s a host of other people who were also accepted. A student-led fake college ensues. The film gets self-awareness points for the school being billed from the outset as a farce, but that doesn’t make an abandoned building that former high-schoolers inhabit and play around in all day any more of a realistic university setting.

The Skulls

The Skulls could take up three spots on this list, as the film spawned two(!) straight-to-DVD sequels. But we’ll spare you that to tell you this: if you’ve ever been in a secret society in college, you know that it’s less about political intrigue and more about making you binge drink ten times and wear some type of bedsheet as clothing before its members will let you in their club. Also highly dubious that any college secret society, no matter how powerful, runs mental hospitals and conspires with local police departments. And nobody wants to see Craig T. Nelson with a pencil thin mustache showing up to their secret meetings. Nobody wants to see that.

Click here for the rest of the list.


Category:

College Life, Entertainment

Tagged with:

Neil Gaiman’s Brilliant Career Advice

Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech to the graduates of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, embedded above, is, much like his books, charming, enjoyable, and full of lots of legitimately good insight. Listen to the whole thing if you’ve got the time, but if not, at least read the best part, transcribed below. (In the clip, the below quote begins at 14:06.)

You get work however you get work. But people keep working, in a freelance world — and more and more of today’s world is freelance — because their work is good, and because they’re easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it’s good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

Category:

Books and Publishing, College Life, Entertainment

Tagged with:

Taking Advantage of a Great Deal (Just Because It’s a Deal)

A coupon saying "Was 149.00... now 148.99"

There’s a story my fiancée likes to hold against me from when we were first dating. We went into a Blockbuster (which might date this story right off the bat) to pick out a movie. She badly needed to use the bathroom, but figured we’d be in and out of there in a second, and my apartment was right around the corner, so she didn’t say anything. I wandered into the “4 for $20” section, and started browsing for the next half hour. I found three movies I wanted, but for the fourth, I could only find movies I’d pay money to not have to see. Meanwhile, the woman I’d later decide to spend the rest of my life with was doing her best to be patient with my indecisiveness. She said, “Look, just get the three you want and throw away the fourth. It’s still a deal!” But I still kept hunting for a worthy fourth. Finding nothing, I eventually gave up, leaving empty-handed. My poor girlfriend’s bladder was put through that ordeal for nothing.

Did I need those movies? No. Did I really want to see them? Maybe a little. But I wasn’t considering buying 4 for $20 because those were the movies I most wanted to see. I was attracted to it just because it was a deal. On the simplest level, that was it. Four for the price of one, more or less. The idea of saving money appealed to me first. The idea of what the entertainment was appealed second.

That’s something I tend to notice more and more, especially with digital access to books, movies, and games. The easier (and therefore cheaper) it is to get something, the more likely I’ll buy it. There’s less and less entertainment I’ll really go out of my way for. The more I pay attention to where to get the best deals, the more likely I am to just choose something based on whether or not it’s a good deal.

For example, Amazon offers 100 albums for a $5 each, and rotates which albums are available every month. Every month I find myself checking it out. Steam routinely offers huge discounts on downloadable computer games, sometimes as much as 50 or 75 percent. In both cases, I’m not going to buy something I’m not interested in, but I’m more likely to look closely at something that’s discounted, and more likely to make an impulse buy before the sale ends.

Companies like Groupon or LivingSocial work on the same idea. Nobody goes to those sites with a specific purchase in mind. They go so that those sites can suggest some sort of restaurant, activity, or outing. While browsing their deals, people usually aren’t thinking, “I sure hope I find a coupon for Ethiopian food.” People are thinking, “Wow! 50% off lunch at that Ethiopian place. Maybe I should get around to trying that out.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach to entertainment, but sometimes I wonder if I am bogging myself down in the cheap and convenient, at the expense of the stuff I really want to read, watch, play, or do. My list of books I own and still need to read is massive and it tends to grow faster than I can shrink it. But it would be much smaller, and probably of a much higher quality, if I had to pay more for each book I bought. For example, I picked up Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., the other day because, first, it was on sale for 99 cents, and second, because it was the basis for one of my favorite horror movies, The Thing. I honestly don’t have any overwhelming desire to read it, but it seemed like something I’d enjoy having if I ever needed a new book in a pinch. I didn’t buy it because I wanted to read it immediately. I bought it to take advantage of some time down the road (kind of like a Groupon).

I’m still willing to drop everything when something I really want comes along. I didn’t skip out on The Avengers just because I had unwatched movies on my DVR, for example. When the latest George R. R. Martin book came out last year, I had no problem putting aside my current book to read that.

But every once in awhile, convenience starts to feel like a chore. I’ve got an unused Living Social coupon for wine tasting burning a hole in my pocket as I try to figure out some way to work it into my schedule. I’ve got a couple indie games that I picked up on Steam that I still haven’t gotten around to playing for more than an hour. And books? Definitely my biggest weakness in terms of both impulse buys and not knowing when I’m going to work it into my schedule.

Anyways, I’ve got to wrap this post up before it sounds like I’m really complaining about a world full of cheap and accessible entertainment. It’s just that sometimes I need to check myself before I get too caught up in a low price. It’s got to be rough for the truly impulsive.

Category:

College Life, Entertainment, Games, Movies

Tagged with:

Maurice Sendak and the Importance of Being Scared

Source: Artgalleyartist.com

Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and a bunch of other books that likely played an important role in your childhood, passed away yesterday at the age of 83.

Sendak’s public persona had a bit of resurgence in his 80s. Last year, he released a new book, Bumble-Ardy, and gave this absolutely hilarious two-part interview on The Colbert Report. In 2009, when the Spike Jonze-directed film version of Where the Wild Things Are was released, a Newsweek reporter asked Sendak what he would tell parents who thought the film adaptation was too scary. Sendak told these theoretical parents to go to hell. (Here’s the interview. The whole thing is worth reading.)

Sendak has long been a proponent of the idea that children are much more capable of handling complex and dark themes then they get credit for. When he won a Caldecott in 1964, his speech defended the importance of encouraging fantasy among children — “that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.” Sendak’s intent was never to traumatize children, just to create a story where fears, repressions, and insecurities feel just as authentic as the real world but are made manageable in the restraints of fiction.

That’s a viewpoint I’ve always appreciated, even as I generally see the world tilt in the opposite direction. I grew up in the early ‘90s, so one of my favorite cartoons (and still one of all-time my favorite shows) is Batman: The Animated Series. One of the amazing things about that show, watching it today, is seeing how the show was able to fit within the network’s strict standards for kids’ shows while never holding back on very mature themes. For example, you won’t see a drop of blood, but you will see Bruce Wayne have a nightmare about his parents’ death. In one episode, Batman arrives too late to a police shootout that ends with Commissioner Gordon being badly wounded. Gordon is placed in intensive care and Batman returns to his hideout, where he smashes computers, overturns desks, and breaks equipment. He throws a tantrum, basically. And then he guiltily sulks for the rest of the episode. As a kid, I didn’t just see the hero always do the right thing (he’s back to his crime-fighting ways by the end), but I got to see him feel universal emotions like guilt, regret, frustration, and inadequacy. Those feelings aren’t just universal: they appear almost as soon as we begin to understand the world around us.

As a kid, it’s always incredibly frustrating when you can actively see the world trying to coddle you, even if you don’t want it. When I was very young, all playgrounds were wood and metal. By the time I was around 8, they all started to turn plastic. In many places, they even replaced the wood chips on the ground with a spongy and springy floor. As an 8-year old, I hated it. I couldn’t put it in words then, but I was simply angry that the world was removing the manageable danger of cuts, bruises, and splinters.

Even as adults, we still crave manageable danger. It’s the reason we go rock climbing and river rafting. It’s the reason we travel to other countries without knowing the language. And it’s the reason we seek out fiction that will give us an emotional reaction — whether it’s a scary movie, a heartbreaking book, or a TV show that gets laughs from uncomfortable and unexpected situations.

Sendak understood that, and built a career around that. While just about every publication has released their own posthumous tribute focusing on his “it’s OK to be scared” mentality, many of them seem to overlook just how gently he handled real emotions. After all, Where the Wild Things Are ends with Max returning home to eat his mother’s still-hot soup. Despite the wildness of Max’s adventures, in the end, his mother’s love wins out. An exciting story and a comforting conclusion — that’s a good formula for any story, not just one for kids.

So rest in peace, Maurice Sendak. You will be missed.

Category:

Books and Publishing, Entertainment

Tagged with:

Racism, The Hunger Games, and Bad Reading Comprehension

Rue from the Hunger Games

Source: AceShowBiz.com

I’m sure by now many of you have already heard about the Tumblr page “Hunger Games Tweets.” It’s a collection of tweets by people griping about the casting of a character named Rue. You see, the film cast 13-year old actress Amandla Stenberg (see above). The tweeters targeted by the Tumblr page bemoaned the fact that the film version of Rue just had to be black. Which is confusing, because in the book she is black, in no uncertain terms. She’s described as having “dark brown skin and eyes,” and later, when the reader is introduced to another character named Thresh, we’re told that he “has the same dark skin as Rue.”

Plenty of whatever the online equivalent of ink is has been spent on this story — what it says about race in America, connecting it to Trayvon Martin’s tragic murder, etc. — but I want to focus a little bit more on what the Tumblr creator’s intent was. His blog has said, essentially, that the main problem is not poor reading comprehension. Rather, it’s that readers naturally assume that Rue, a portrait of doe-eyed innocence, must have pale white skin.

For the sake of this column, we’re going to ignore the insane, aggressively racist tweets. That bigoted nonsense isn’t worth anyone’s time. The more interesting ones are subtler. A number of the tweets say that Rue “should have” looked like some other literary characters, like Harry Potter’s Luna Lovegood or The Lovely Bones’ Susie Salmon. Notice the theme? Characters who represent sweetness, naiveté, and innocence (or innocent victimhood) are automatically assigned long blonde hair, big blue eyes, and very pale skin.

If you deconstruct this story even further, it asks interesting questions about how we read and how we imagine. When we’re not prompted with details, how do we fill in the blanks? If a story just begins in media res, with no description of the narrator, what do you assume he or she looks like? Do you picture yourself? Do you picture an “average” person? What does “average” mean? Is it, as this Destructoid article pointed out while criticizing modern video games, a middle-aged white man with brown hair and stubble? Or do just keep you mind blank about the specifics until some details can paint a fuller picture?

I’m not suggesting that defaulting to a white male protagonist is racist and sexist. But I do think it’s worth reflecting upon where our mental casting assumptions come from. It’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg question. Are fictional characters assigned certain racial archetypes because that’s what the audience assumes, or does the audience assume certain racial archetypes because that’s what their fictional characters have always looked like?

Category:

Books and Publishing, Entertainment, Movies

Tagged with:

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.