"Mad Men" and Slice Of Life Anime

Even since returning from Anime Boston last month, I have been on a streak of watching anime. I usually go through patterns of this along with movie watching or TV season finishing so it only makes sense to end up on this pattern again. So far I have watched "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" (which I could definitely write a full analysis of), "The World God Only Knows" (kind of a throw away but I liked the demon girl), and "Haibane Renmei" which might have somewhat provoked this entry.

As you might have noticed from other things I've written, I view anime like I view movies and quality television: I analyze it to the ends of the Earth. And speaking of quality television, let me talk about the only show I currently regularly watch on TV: "Mad Men."

"Mad Men" is the best show on television and has been for a while. Don't get me wrong, there are some really enjoyable shows out there (I personally like "True Blood", "Doctor Who" and "Dexter") and there are some other shows that I am told also have a lot of the same weighty writing as "Mad Men" ("Breaking Bad" is a frequent example I get from people) but there is something "Mad Men" has that other shows don't. Everything about "Mad Men" from the acting to the writing to the set and costume design is made to fit together into a perfect, unchangeable entity that is often so brilliantly subtle that it is lost on a lot of people.

The only compliant I ever hear from people about "Mad Men" is that "nothing ever happens" which must sound like a comment directly in opposition to what I just said about the actual quality of the show. How can a show where nothing happens be quality? Well, first of all, it is untrue to say that nothing happens in "Mad Men" but I can understand why some might say that. "Mad Men" is a show that is very strict about staying in the realm of reality. Character development and interactions hold the same subtly as real life. One of the most shocking things to ever happen on the show was a British guy getting his foot run over by a lawnmower (long story).  In fact, I think I found the first episode most shocking but only because the early 60s attitudes were so unfamiliar to me. I couldn't understand how a doctor could threaten to take away birth control pills from a patient if she "misuses them" but how all the men on the show could have affairs so casually.

"Mad Men" is all about themes and subtly in displaying those themes, making the show very realistic. The main theme of "Mad Men" is defined as "change and how people react to it" which is why it is set in the 60s, a decade stuck between the wholesome 50s and the liberal 70s but there are also themes in character development and individual episodes as well as plenty of 60s nostalgia to go around.

The thing is, a lot of people don't look to television for themes and subtly and something to make them use their thinking head lump thing. Movies, books, and music as mediums for which this sort of thing are more acceptable but television is often seen as something to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It is to entertain and provide the viewer with a little escapism and even though "Mad Men" takes place in the 60s, it really doesn't have the escapism element as everything is presented through a sort of pessimistic realism that is mostly unappealing to live in. This might be why "Mad Men" still struggles a bit to stay on the air in spite of its critical acclaim.

Now let me talk about anime or more specifically the genre of "slice of life anime." Slice of life anime is probably exactly what it sounds like: shows that portray real life as it is without much embellishment. Also, as you can imagine, the negative remarks about slice of life anime are the same as those of "Mad Men": "nothing ever happens." I would also like to point out that these remarks come mostly from Western viewers.

Now slice of life anime has to be taken on a case by case basis but most of the slice of life anime I was initially exposed to was lacking in the same subtly and themes as "Mad Men" and often was focused on the lives of high school girls. Take, for example, "K-On!", a popular slice of life anime. The premise of "K-On!" can be summed up as simply, "Four high school girls form a band" and every episode can be explained just as simply: "the one where the girls get jobs to buy Yui's guitar", "the one where they perform at the school festival", "the one where they get a rhythm guitarist". The characters are static and cutesy and if I didn't know better, I would think it was a kid's show or at least a show meant to appeal to kids under 13.

I personally didn't get the appeal so I wondered who exactly was making this show popular. Was it boys who thought the girls were cute and liked the slight lesbian undertones? Was it little girls who get escapism from the idea of growing up to do the things they did? Was it anime fans who would literally watch anything? Either way, I didn't see much in the way of escapist entertainment in the show and certainly couldn't see how it would appeal to guys or girls in the 13-30 age range so I had another idea. In Japan, there are a lot of ideas surrounding "shojo" (girl) culture and one such idea is that of the appeal of shojo to older men. Now, you are probably thinking about the schoolgirl fetish aspect which is a time-honored tradition in many countries including Japan but that isn't what I'm talking about. There is a psychological idea that Japanese businessmen often feel very stuck in their roles. They are expected to devote themselves to their company as a means of supporting their family. There are expectations that they will get to this point by getting into a good college, a good high school, a good middle school. The pressure is constant and they are stuck on this path that repeats and repeats until death. To these men, the ultimate example of freedom is the shojo. She is already in high school and doesn't have to go to college if she doesn't want to. She doesn't have to get a job. She isn't even thinking about the future because no one is pressuring her. She can do what she wants: talk about manga all day, go shopping, join a band, anything! This feeling towards the shojo creates a fascination in older men with shojo culture making things like "K-On!" a window into a world they could never be a part of.

However, not all slice of life anime lack the themes that "Mad Men" does. "Haibane Renmei" for example manages to infuse the slice of life genre with a bit of a mystical element that is actually very theme heavy. The premise of "Haibane Renmei" is that there is an isolated town full of humans and "haibane" who are not allowed to leave. "Haibane" are human-looking beings that have wings and halos who are hatched from eggs that just appear in the town. All "haibane" have some sort of former life they don't remember but must instead become accustomed to the town and its rules regarding them. The show starts in the same simple episode fashion ("Rakka grows her wings", "Rakka goes to work with Nemu to see if she might want to work in a library") but it eventually focuses more on subtle character development and theme as it goes on keeping the mystical elements on the back-burner the whole time so you can focus purely on the emotions that slowly bubble to the surface. This show kind of gave me hope for the slice of life genre that there might be more shows like this out there but it still did have the magic element that slice of life anime is most often without. Does this element change the validity of the themes?

Recently I watched an episode of a new anime called "Sakamichi no Apollon", a slice of life anime that actually takes place in the 60s. From one episode I can tell that while it doesn't quite have "Mad Men"'s subtly (the unfortunate effect of a first person narration), it certain has themes and the added bonus of the era.

So I wonder, could "Mad Men" spark more of this genre in the Western world? Is an accurate expression of the real world in media less exciting/purposeful/amusing than a more sensationalized or fantastical one? Does Japan have a larger preference for realism than the Western world?

No idea.

I just like comparing the Western and Eastern worlds.

The Lost Teens Of The Internet

There was once a time when not fitting in with your classmates meant that you were almost entirely alone. School was really the only way to meet kids your own age unless you made friends through your parent's friends or extracurriculars outside of the school walls. The reputation you established amongst the kids you go to school with would be the reputation you would carry with you until college unless you move to a new town. Alienating yourself from your peers would mean many Saturday nights alone in your room.

But weep no more, lonely ones! The teens of the modern world have the amazing Al Gore box to facilitate their need for human interaction. Social media websites are some of the most popular on the internet losing only in popularity to I'd guess porn sites (not fact based). While there are websites that are more tailored to interacting with just people you know, like Facebook, there are many sites that allow you to interact with anyone you can find like Twitter or Tumblr. Also, there are plenty of more specific sites where people get acquainted with each other based on shared interests like Deviantart, sites were you can post your writing, and forums for anything you could imagine.

Now, everyone has heard the online horror stories (I don't have any personal ones to share) and, to a lesser extent, the success stories. One of my best friends made a friend through a sports blog and developed a full friendship with a girl she met once at a skating competition years ago by keeping in touch online. I also have a friend who met his wife through a mutual friend and spent years talking to her online because they lived in different countries before moving to America and marrying her. As you get older, making actual friends online is not as scary as it used to be when you were told in fourth grade that everyone is secretly a child molester. Websites like Myspace and then Facebook have made telling the truth about yourself online more common while at the same time all the excessive warnings about the internet have made us more cautious.

Whether or not making friends online is a good thing is up to debate of course because what I actually want to talk about is the reasons why people make friends online based on my own experiences with the "kids of Twitter." I will use three examples and, for the reference, two of them are now friends of mine so if they object to me using their stories, I will have to take them down.

First let me give a quick back-story of how I met these people. Back in April of 2011 I was out of college and barely employed so I decided that I needed something to occupy my time so I made a Twitter account to post things about the comic/show "Fullmetal Alchemist" and the fandom surrounding it. As a result, I picked up a lot of followers who were interested in the show and a lot of people who had Twitters based on roleplaying the characters from the show who all knew each other from the roleplay (also known as RP).

 BOY A

Boy A was an RPer, the oldest of the group, who initially talked to me using his RP account, making comments on my tweets from the character's perspective. After a short time he switched over to his RL/RP (real life/roleplay) account and started talking to me as himself. At first he thought I was male because I spoke in a gender neutral manner but I corrected him (this is important). We started talking a lot on Twitter and switched to AIM and later Skype and I learned why he started RPing and found out a lot about the reputation he had developed online. His best friend moved before their last year of high school and for a while he was alone. This lead to him spending more time online and eventually creating an RP account to make funny comments, leading to him getting pulled into the RP group. Aside from this RP persona, he developed what a lot of internet kids end up developing: "a real life persona".

Online, "RL" is supposed stand for "real life", the opposite of "RP." It is supposed to be you as you actually are away from the internet. However, many of these people actually develop three levels of reality: "RP/roleplay" which is entirely fictitious, "real life" which is who they actually are offline, and something we (me and Boy A) have come to refer to as "RL", a fictitious version of themselves as how they want to be perceived online. RL usually has some basis in truth but it is without limits and is often standing in for an aspect of real life that the person is lacking.

Boy A's RL functioned to make up for his lack of experience with women. While he eventually made new friends at his school, being naturally shy and going to a single sex school meant that his interactions and experience with girls his own age were extremely limited. His reputation online became that of the pervert. Unless a girl was much younger than him, he would often try to "cyber" (look it up) with any girl he talked to, the anonymous nature of the internet allowing him to be tactless and in control of his interactions with girls in a way he couldn't be in real life. He also participated in two roleplays (one as a fictional RP and one as an RL roleplay) of relationships. As expected, this got him into trouble, once when he mistook a relationship roleplay for actual feelings and, even worse, when someone developed actual feelings for him and he had no idea how to deal with it, hurting her deeply.

I managed to avoid this treatment from Boy A for quite a while, most likely because he initially thought I was a guy and his mentality towards me had not yet changed. After he saw a picture of me however, I got the same treatment as the other girls but instead of indulging him (the sad response) or running from him (the sane response), my amatuer psychologist instinct took over and I tried to fix him. Ultimately he did change, abandoning RP and RL entirely and developing real life normal relationships with girls but only after he had a destructive experience where his RL persona and real life collided.

GIRL B 

Girl B is a case of someone who roleplayed but who never developed an RL persona. She is only ever herself or a character.

I don't know the full story of how she started roleplaying but I do know that she roleplayed with an original character for a while before abandoning RP to only speak as herself on her personal Twitter. The reason for her being online is also directly tied to why she eventually stopped RPing. A lot of kids start RPing 1.) to meet people with shared interests or 2.) to escape from the reality of their own lives. On the first point, in the case of Girl B, she had spent her entire life moving from place to place so she had a hard time maintaining close friends and through the RP she was able to meet people who she would never move away from and to have a sense of community. On the second point, Girl B was going through depression brought on by severe family troubles and her lack of close friendships and RP could partially help her escape.

Eventually however, her depression took hold so firmly that she could not mentally escape it and instead she finds people online to talk to about it. Tumblr in particular has a large community of teenagers with depression and eating disorders who constantly try to give each other hope when they have lost it themselves. The problem is that she encounters many caring strangers who want to help her but later decide they can't handle her burden and abandon her.

I don't know what her future holds or if she can escape this but I think college will be the answer for her, specifically a college far from her troubles where she can live permanently for four years and meet entirely new people in real life while keeping the online friends who are actually her friends.

GIRL C

Girl C is probably exactly the kind of person you think of when you think of kids looking for friends online. She is young, homeschooled for conservative and religious reasons, and naive. Her outlook on the world is so sheltered and unlike the usual bitter teenager's interpretation as she has never had to face the hardships associated with peers. She tweets from the second she wakes up to the second she goes to bed. Her world exists online and, in particular, in the RL. I have no idea if she has any real life friends; the only one she mentions is a neighbor who she dragged onto Twitter with her. I do know that she does have extracurricular activities but, aside from that, she never seems to leave her house unless it is with her parents.

I said that RL always serves a function of making up for something lacking in one's real life. For Girl C, RL makes up for everything. She "real life roleplays" everything: playing outside (ironic), hanging out with friends, marriage, raising children/family, relationships, etc. The fact that I know so little about her real life social life is ultimately false. Her whole social life is online in a series of roleplays where she is a version of herself, interacting with versions of other people.

As of now, she probably has the most destructively relationship with the internet. It allows her to interact but it keeps her from forming a real life. One has to wonder if she even tries to make good friends in her extracurriculars. She probably believes that she has everything she could want already in her virtual world.


So is internet social interaction a good thing or a bad thing? I personally think based on the stories above that it is good if done in small doses. It is important to have a real social life and to not replace it or aspects of it with a virtual world, but you really can make valuable friends online.

The most important thing though in my personal opinion is to come as you are. You don't need roleplay or an RL persona.

If you want to pretend to be a character, write a first person perspective fanfiction.

If you want to talk to people, be yourself.

Lisbeth Salander Is Death.

I found Lisbeth Salander's styling in the American remake of "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" really odd and jarring when I first saw it.

Then something hit me:





Did someone actually just style her after Death in one of the most internationally famous Swedish movies ever?

And if they did, is that really clever or kind of pretentious?

Is it even an appropriate parallel?

Some Thoughts On "The Fall" and the American Melting Pot

So I saw a delightful movie recently, Tarsem Singh's "The Fall" (no, it's nothing like "The Cell"). To those who don't know, this movie is about an injured stuntman, Roy, in 1920s Los Angeles telling epic stories to a little Romanian girl, Alexandria, in the same hospital in an effort to gain her trust so she will get him pills to commit suicide with. Oh, and the epic stories are shown in beautiful detail with unaltered on-location shooting in over 20 countries that makes for some of the best architecture/nature porn I have ever had the privilege of seeing.

The general critic opinion of this movie is that while it is one of the most visually stunning things ever put on film, the plot itself is thin and conventional. When I heard this I was a little shocked because I honestly got a lot out of the actual plot that had little to do with the beauty of the setting (although I'm not trivializing that; I would literally become a part of the scenery if it was possible).

First of all, I developed an interpretation of this movie very early on that it held a strong theme of the "melting pot" aspect of America and American culture.

Starting with the obvious, the two main characters are an American man who is in the profession of creating movies, a visual export that can provide representations of one country to other countries, and a Romanian immigrant girl who is only about six and has clearly not been in America very long as her English is a bit off and her accent is very thick. Based on the time period, the girl seems like a representation of the wave of immigration that occurred in the early 1900s.

Alexandria's "old world" sensibilities are represented most clearly through the story Roy tells her. While he is telling the story, the visual representation of the story is shown to be a product of her mind as the characters in the story are played by people she actually knows and the setting is fluid and dreamlike with no clear location and no connection from place to place.

Like the scenery, the female character of the epic has clothes that fit in many different lands at once and are constantly changing origin. The five heroes of the story seem a bit more constricted to there lands being an African, an Indian, a Brit, an Italian, and a Spaniard (then Frenchman) but in truth, they probably aren't.

The first character Roy introduces in his epic is a slave who takes form in her mind as the kind ice delivery man who Alexandria sees every day. This assignment could have just come from the fact that he was someone she had seen recently and was fresh enough on her mind to become the first character or it could have come simply from the fact that he works providing a service which is the closest reference she had to a slave. An alternate way of dissecting it would be to note that the man is black and is represented in her mind in a traditional African fashion. While Alexandria would probably be unaware of America's history with enslaving Africans, in 1920s America black people would still be granted less rights and be treated unfairly compared to others. She could be combining the way she sees him being treated with her "old world" ideas of what a black person would traditionally dress like.

The next character is a much less ambiguous case. Roy simply calls him "The Indian" and he takes form in Alexandria's mind as an Indian man who she works with. However, as Roy is describing the Indian's back-story he uses words like "squaw" and "wigwam" which clearly show that he is referring to a Native American and not an Indian from India. While Roy is thinking of America's origins, Alexandria would probably not know much about American Indians. She sees India and she sees it by virtue of knowing an Indian immigrant.

The third character is a fantastical version of Charles Darwin but this fact is not the important detail. What is however is that he is on a quest for a rare butterfly called "Americana Exotica": Exotic America. While I probably don't need to explain the significance of this name in correlating with my topic, I would like to point out that of all the real places that make up the dream universe of Alexandria's mind, at no point is there ever an American location. They show the Statue of Liberty at one point but it is the first in France, not in Manhattan. The country of America is absent from her dream world and all the characters are actually real life Americans (whether born there or immigrant) but foreigners in her mind.

This shows strongly in the last character of Roy's epic's five man band. The character is a Spanish man represented as Roy but with the additional characteristic of a gap in his teeth like Alexandria. During the second part of his story, Alexandria asks Roy why he makes the character talk in a Spanish accent and asks that he "talk normal. Like you." Normal by Alexandria's definition is an American accent, a standard accent in a land mainly consisting of people from places with very different accents. The character's ethnicity is also fluid as Roy changes him to a French man at one point to ret-con a plot error even though he sticks with the American accent. It doesn't matter where you come from, you can be American, perhaps?

Although I mainly wanted to talk about this theme, I wanted to say a few things on the actual plot of the epic. A lot of people complained about the simple story but the epic itself is realistic as a story a man might make up to tell a little girl. While the story is, for Alexandria, a bunch of people she knows on an adventure, for Roy it is a healing process with the bad guy played by the man who he blames for ruining his life and limbs. The bad guy is the same in Roy's mind as Alexandria's as she encountered him at the hospital and knew him to be the man who Roy hated. The bad guy is also the only character based on a person who wears the same clothes he did in reality: an expensive white suit of no origin. He is where fantasy and reality meet.

This movie is apparently based off a Bulgarian film called "Yo Ho Ho" that seems to have the same themes in terms of friendship and reclaiming your life after depression, as shown through Roy and Alexandria's relationship. I have not seen it so I cannot account for whether anything else could be taken from it but I can't help but think that if there's anything that would separate these two movies, what I'm trying to prove here is it.

I very well could be reading too much into this but isn't it better that I got more out of it than less? Also, I just noticed: the director is Indian but went to college and now works in America.

Maybe it isn't so ridiculous.

On Family Structure

Two of the most annoying things about the argument against gay marriage/families is the idea that allowing gays to marry will somehow destroy the sanctity of marriage and that a homosexual couple would be unable to raise children properly. The people who make this argument strike me as the same kind of people who somehow missed the sexual revolution (both of them). These are the same people who are currently raging a war on women's health when they clearly have no idea how hormonal birth control works or why people take it. Literally every one of my friends who is on the pill did not start taking it as a contraceptive but took it initially to regulate or mitigate periods. I personally was put on it when I was 16 because I hadn't gotten a period for nine months, I was vomiting everywhere even though I was unable to eat because my hormones were out of whack, and I had more acne than I ever have in my life.

But I digress because I could talk about the women's health issue for a whole entry and never get to my actual point here.

My point is there is no reason why a child needs to be raised by two parents and there is no reason a child needs to be raised by two parents of different genders. Divorce may be seen blasphemous to religious folks and those campaigning for "family values" (although apparently not as blasphemous as gay marriage; Gingrich, how are the ex-wives?) but sometimes it is the right answer. And I don't mean for the parents; I mean for the children.

This is where I get personal so be warned. Ever since my AP English class in high school it has been clear to me that there is an idea that children of divorced parents are somehow less intelligent and "normal" than those who have married parents, an idea that never crossed my mind before since most of my friends have had divorced parents too. In that class my teacher asked us how many of us still had married parents for the sake of relating reality to an article we were reading on family structure and sure enough I was the only one whose parents weren't married. The only one. Later when I went to college I was reminded of this when someone said to me, "Your parents are divorced? But you're so smart!"

Here's the thing: I understand why there's an idea that children of married parents are generally smarter than children of divorced parents. You have two people to learn from and generally a larger income to facilitate a better education. You also have two people to care about whether or not you are succeeding.

The thing that is never taken into account with this idea, however, is, "what if one of the parents is actually negatively affecting their children?"

My parents separated with I was seven. Prior to the divorce I didn't think too hard about people, relationships, or whether or not my family structure was a good one. My mom stayed at home and raised my brother and my father came home from work every day around dinner time. The only alone time I ever had with him was when my mom went to exercise classes at night and sometimes on the weekends. I don't remember ever seeing my parents show affection but I only remember them arguing once and it was right before they separated.

I was unaffected by the news of the divorce after learning that I wouldn't have to move and I would still see my father fairly often. He moved into an apartment until the divorce was finalized and then into his mistress' house.

It was during this time that I actually got to know what kind of person he was. For one thing, he was weirdly strict. My mom's requests were always things that struck me as reasonable like, "Be inside by 8:30 so you can calm down before bed." He would do things like force us to eat everything he put on our plate. his mistress' cooking was pretty terrible and our tastes were never considered when meals were planned. I had to force down so many marshmallow fluff sandwiches that nearly made me vomit.

He was always disinterested in things we wanted to talk about and never had a complimentary thing to say to us. He had a crippling inferiority complex that I would later see as one of the reasons for the divorce. He would sometimes go out of his way to take us to cool places like playgrounds and science museums and introduced us to PG-13 movies but he would mostly leave us alone for long periods of time when we didn't have any other kids to hang out with. I much preferred time with my mom simply because she always acted like she cared about us.

My moment of revelation occurred one day when I went to his house and saw a wedding picture of him and his mistress. I was confused: we were his kids; why were we not invited to this event that should be significant for us? He explained that it was because they got married in Florida, but her family had taken the trip with them and he didn't even tell his family.

Shortly after, he moved a 12 hour drive away and we weren't given any reason for it. He spent lots of time after this taking my mother to court to try to pay less child support, losing badly each time. After about six months, he was only calling us once a month, if that, for no longer than five minutes and he blatantly wasn't listening half the time, just repeating a rhythm of, "cool", "great", "awesome" until he could make an excuse to hang up. The last time I had to see him I was 14 and I spent the whole trip abandoned sick on his couch while they all went out. He sent my mom the medical bill afterwards and took her back to court to pay less child support, the trip having been a plan to try to prove that he was spending money on us on his own even though that was the first time we had gone to see him in three years. He continued to send cards but he stopped talking to us entirely right after. The last time we saw him, and probably the last time we ever will, was at his father's funeral. I was 19 and my brother was 15. I refused to speak to him. He shook his hand but didn't say anything. The rest of his family gave him the cold shoulder as they had always sided with my mother. The last communication I had with him was a cruel e-mail not long after that which made me cry for an hour.

Whenever someone tries for even a second to take pity on me for being estranged from my father, I immediately shut them up. If my parents had not gotten divorced, I would be a different person than I am today. I probably would not be poor and could continue my education instead of having to work part time (since I can't find a full time job) to pay off thousands of dollars in college loans but I imagine I would be both incredibly unhappy and unwavering ignorant about the world at large. After my parent's divorce, I vowed to understand people, relationships, why people do the things they do and I've become rather good at cultivating this understanding. My father would have destroyed my life, my mother's life, and my brother's and I am so thankful that he is not part of it.

I have a friend who often seems to be a reflection of what my life might have been if my parents had never divorced. Her father is a constant negative presence in the lives of his family but her mother won't divorce him because she doesn't know how she would get by financially without him. She's depressed, her mother is depressed and her brother has behavioral issues. I try to help her however I can but I really wish there was more I could do than just try to make her feel better and insist that it won't be too long before she won't have to live under those conditions anymore.

So again, I must wonder: why are things like family structure still being treated in such specific terms? Why is it bad for a family structure to be unconventional? Being a married heterosexual person who has fathered a child does not necessarily make you a good father any more than birthing a child makes you a good mother. And adopting a child and raising him/her with your partner who is the same sex as you does not mean your parenting structure will be unbalanced or deficient.

I leave this blog with a quote from my mother. She and I don't often agree (she occasionally thinks I'm insane) and she can make quite a few insensitive comments but this was one of my favorite quotes of hers regarding the gay marriage debate: "I don't know why gay marriage is even being debated. When I was younger, interracial marriage was not allowed and now people look back on that and can't understand why we thought it was wrong. One day it will be the same with gay marriage."

Let's hope, mom.

Three Units Of Measurement The World Needs

Today I share with you three scales invented by my friend Adam for measuring things that previously had no way of being measured.


1. Man Power (a.k.a. Aggression Scale or Testosterone Scale)

This one has the most difficult units to describe of the three I will talk about. One man power has been defined as "the ability to make an assertive decision." The scale goes from zero to 100 and certain stages of the scale can be described fairly easily even if the units are difficult to define.

0 is equivalent to a priest. It is pure passivity.
1-10 is normal levels of assertiveness. Falling into these numbers means you are good at deciding things for yourself and leading.
10-20 is aggression without physical violence.
20-30 is strong aggression with possible levels of object violence.
(25 is generally the "flip a table" moment)
30-40 is strong aggression with possible physical violence. This is the point when you become difficult to be around.
50 is essentially a drunk frat boy whose only thoughts are fighting and sex and how awesome he is.
60+ is when levels of incoherence start to develop.
75 is when murder is possible in the "heat of the moment" logic way.
100 is pure insanity or the Hulk. Only a few serial killers reach this level.

We have generally decided that the highest peak in the average person's life is somewhere between 30-45 with the male average higher than the female.

It should also be stated that this scale doesn't apply to things like passive resistance. Ghandi would not rank on this scale.


2. Hobo Power

This is a measure of bad smells with the unit being the scent of one hobo. One hobo generally has a smell of body odor that has built up over weeks and similarly unwashed clothes. You can't smell it from a distance but if you are standing within about two feet of one, you can.

The scale breaks down like this:

0.15 is a bad smell that you only notice if your nose is pressed into it.
0.3 is when you start to become concerned about someone's smell.
0.5 is when you start dropping hints to them.
1 is the scent of a hobo.
50 is a vomit-inducing scent.
100 is theoretical and produces death.

Good smells cannot be measured on the scale as there is no negative of a Hobo.

An adult who has pooped their pants generally falls between 10-30 Hobos as Adam and I have concluded.


3. The Wooden Acting Scale

This is a scale that works in much smaller amounts than the two previous which have a definitive cut off at 100.

The unit of measurement is a Kevin Costner although it should be noted that Kevin Costner's individual performances can rank below and above one Kevin Costner. The unit is based on his average acting level.

This one is best described through examples.

* Mark Wahlburg in "The Happening" is about 0.8 Kevin Costners.

* Hayden Christensen in the "Star Wars" prequels ranges from 0.5 to 1.5 Kevin Costners.

* Robert Pattinson in the "Twilight" movies is usually 1 to 2 Kevin Costners.

* Keanu Reeves is one of the highest ranking on this scale with his performances often ranking at 1 to 3 Kevin Costners.


Feel free to use these in your daily life.

2012 Potentially Oscar Nominated Movies

(Originally posted on 2-5-2012)

Well, today is the Super Bowl and since it's Patriots versus Giants, I have decided to actually try to watch it. I watched in 2008 when it was Pats v. Giants as well and that ended with me and Kim threatening to make Alex walk home on the other side of the street if he didn't stop gloating.

Obviously, I don't watch sports but if I have to watch a sport I like to watch violent ones: football, hockey, lacrosse, etc. Similarly, if I have to support a team, I root for my home teams. Connecticut is often a divided state because it doesn't have it's own teams so you either side with New York or Massachusetts and being that I live on the boarder, my family is from Mass and I lived in Boston for four years, guess where my loyalties lie?: New England Patriots, Boston Red Sox, Boston Celtics, Boston Bruins . . . I guess with local hockey I would root for Springfield Falcons? Anyway, since football is a sport I don't mind watching and the Patriots are a team I don't mind rooting for, I will watch and hopefully see them redeem themselves after the last time.

But you know what my Super Bowl really is?

The Oscars.
(Also, the Tonys. Not the Grammys even though I'm a music freak. Too corrupt.)

*sigh*

Just sigh.

I've had this problem with the academy since 2009 when they decided to up the number of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10 for a big reason:
This move stunk of industry pressure. I blame everyone but in some way I mostly blame "Avatar." "Avatar" was not a good movie. It is probably the worst Best Picture nominee I have ever seen. I gave it to 2/5 stars which I think was remarkably kind of me. I could explain why "Avatar" wasn't good forever so let me instead say this: this movie is part of the reason for this change. It wasn't a good movie but it was highly grossing, implemented a much talked about new technology and was directed by a stupidly influential director. If it hadn't been nominated, I imagine there being problems in the industry. However, since it was awful, they needed to find a way to nominate deserving movies and cover their tracks. Conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But every year they have had this 10 movie crap, 5 have stuck out as prominently better than the rest and the ones that didn't were either directed/starring influential people or indie flicks that people constantly lament for not getting enough recognition.

The problem is, now every year we have movies that just aren't as good in this category. The standard has been lowered and never has it been more clear than this year.

In 2008 (the 2009 Oscars) we had the last year of 5 Best Picture nominees and they were all 4+ star movies with no debate. My particular ratings were: "Slumdog Millionaire": 5/5, "Milk": 4.5/5, "The Reader": 4.5/5, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": 4/5, and "Frost/Nixon": 4/5.

In 2009 the only movies I thought ranked high enough were "The Hurt Locker", "Inglourious Basterds", "An Education", "Precious" and "Up In The Air." Five movies. How coincidental.

In 2010 there was "The King's Speech", "Black Swan", "Inception", "The Kids Are All Right", and (begrudgingly admitted as I think it was overrated) "The Social Network."

This year there aren't five that stick out. I have seen 8 of the 9 nominees and 4 make the cut. The one I haven't seen, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", doesn't look like it has enough weight to fill that last spot. This is a disappointingly weak year. Every "great" movie I have seen has had substantial problems with it. Only one got a 5/5 rating from me (which should be obvious below which one) and the other three got solid 4/5 which you could argue me up to a 4.5/5. The other four movies straddled the 3.5/5 to 4/5 line which should be too low for nomination in all honesty. The fact was, so many of these movies had large flaws that I found myself enjoying movies that weren't nominated for anything even more.

This year when I make my lists, I will be including some great movies that weren't nominated for anything but truthfully should have been.

I haven't looked into the documentaries yet but I do love a good documentary.

(Again, starred movies are my Best Picture nominees.)
(This year movies that weren't nominated for Oscars will have a plus sign.)


Movies I Really Liked:

The Artist:* This would be my pick for Best Picture and in all likelihood, it probably will be at the actual Oscars. It won't even feel like a triumph like how excited I was when "King's Speech" beat "Social Network" last year. This movie is simply head and shoulders above the rest. To hear my whole rant about it click here.

The Descendents:* This movie has a lot of things about it that to some people indicate great but to me indicate skeptical: "directed by Alex Payne", "starring George Clooney", and "family drama." I was surprised to find that I did find it undebatably great. There is a lot of depth to this movie that really breaks down concepts of family and doesn't try to get you to like it by way of tugging heartstrings. In fact, I didn't cry but I felt those emotions full force and that's admirable since a lot of movies this year tried to appeal to the heart alone.

Midnight In Paris:* I saw this one a while ago on recommendation of my grandparents (yes, the ones who recommended "The Hangover"). I think the right word for this movie is "charming." It speaks to our own thirst for nostalgia and the way we look at history without beating you over the head with its meaning and instead takes you on a magical realism journey through another era. On a personal note, as a literary nerd and a fan of architecture porn, I found a lot of joy in this movie. My only real issue with this movie is that I feel like Owen Wilson was kind of miscast. He's fits as an outcast but somehow I just didn't really believe that his era is the 20s. Wilson belongs in the late 60s if anything.

Hugo:* Paris and old movies were two big themes this year with movies and this one had both. This is a family movie, not a kids movie; get your terms straight. The plot of this movie is really great, the directing and cinematography are amazing and damn Chloë Moretz can act. Another movie that had a lot of elements that appeal to me specifically: Paris, disealpunk 30s, old movies (specially "A Trip To The Moon",, robots, etc.

Drive:+* Let me blow your mind. I think this movie is incredibly underrated. It's a perfect character study where the character is defined by his actions and not words. The cast is great, the direction is amazing, and don't even get me started on the soundtrack. The "feel" of this movie is so perfect that it's one of those movies that you are totally immersed in.

A Separation: This movie is so well constructed it will explode your brain. The lawsuit in this movie has so many layers that even the most logical person could not decide what the right solution is. My attention was captured the whole time and the cliffhanger ending (while maddening) really paralleled the divorce case with the main lawsuit in a way that didn't occur to me until after the credits. Iran, I didn't know you made good movies!

Shame:+ One minute Michael Fassbender is walking around naked and he's totally sexy; the last minute he's staring at a women on the train and he's the creepiest asshole ever. And that's in the first five minutes. This is one of those movies that says a lot without dialogue. The exploration of sex addiction is really interesting and all inclusive without even being that graphic (why the hell is this NC-17?). His boss as a foil to him and his sister as an opposite force shape his character perfectly.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2: Okay so all nerding aside, this really was a well crafted movie and I'm glad it got an Oscar nomination in the most appropriate category. These movies really ended well after years of inconsistent films with different directors.


Movies I Liked:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Everyone who saw this seemed to either like it or hate it passionately. For the average masses this movie is too slow and confusing but honestly, I liked it a lot. The direction, lay out and visuals were all great, the acting was good, and the plot was actually a lot easier to follow than people keep claiming. The one big flaw with this movie is that there are some plot details that are displayed with so much subtly that you can easily miss them entirely. The subtly is mostly nice but there are some times when the way the movie chooses to deliver information is so obscure that you would actually have to know the story beforehand (or think exactly like the director).

Melancholia:+ This movie won't soon leave my mind. The beginning sequence of this movie is a series of beautiful images that provoke a lot of feelings without a lot of meaning and the movie slowly provides the background. A powerful look at someone with depression finally breaking down so much that they cannot lead a normal life and the after effects. The difference between the normal and the depressed is laid out in the second half with a sci-fi themed end of the world that is hard to forget. Probably the second prettiest movie this year in terms of images.

Martha Marcy May Marlene:+ A low budget movie with a lot of feeling. Like a lot of movies this year there is a present with flashbacks providing the background of why the present is how it is. Downright eerie at times as if you are as paranoid as the main character.

Beginners: Part family drama. Part romance. Part comedy. Part philosophical. And they all work together. Freaking love the cast (Plummer will take the Oscar I think) and the way the present, past, and history all intertwine. The title has a lot of dimension.

50/50:+ How do you balance comedy and drama? This. JGL is awesome as always.

We Need To Talk About Kevin:+ This movie was heavy. I love the flashback storytelling and perspective. The way it approaches the nature versus nurture idea is thought provoking and Tilda Swinton is really great.

Chico & Rita: I think this was the best animated movie of the year. The animation itself is really beautiful and I love seeing the medium used to tell a story for adults instead of children. It's a love lost and found and a lost again story with a lot of strong underlying themes of racism in the entertainment industry in the 40s and 50s.

A Cat In Paris: This is one quality kid's movie. It doesn't shy away from topics that might make parents worried and tells a nice crime story. The animation is interesting although not totally my thing.

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The break indicates a point where my liking gets more conflicted. I still like these movies and rated them similarly to the ones below it but when the movies above ended I knew I liked them and I knew how much. These movies took more thinking and debating which is actually a bad thing (they all were in between the 3.5/5, 4/5 line).

The Tree Of Life: Some people might call this movie pretentious but I don't. While it does try to tie the beginning of the universe to the lives of a single average family, it manages to mostly avoid this title and often tie together pretty well. The problem is that sometimes the connection gets really weak with scenes being cut together in fairly nonsensical ways and you wonder why certain things are being emphasized unnecessarily. One thing that is consistent about this movie though? It's probably the most beautiful movie of the year. The visuals are mesmerizing.

Moneyball: I actually liked a sports movie. How odd. Of course, this movie is moreso about a math problem with a side of a biography. I preferred the math problem portion to the biography half but I can't deny that this was a good movie. My real problem with this movie is that I feel like it might be stuck in that weird category of movies were you aren't sure if you are seeing a good movie or just hearing a good story (See: "Social Network").

War Horse: I have to put aside my love of war movies to talk about this. This is a good story, well executed but with one huge flaw: the tone. This movie combined two polar opposite genres: the boy and his x genre of children stories and a war movie with a message of both the horror of war and the "we're all human" idea (essentially "All Quiet On The Western Front"; no, really). I'm not saying it's impossible to combine these two but this movie never finds a happy medium. The war scenes are always gruesome and horrifying with the glimpses of humanity they were shooting for and the horse story scenes were full of children's story cliches (the horse friend Joey makes, the first half hour, the way they find each other again). Depending on what emotion affected you more you would either think the war scenes were too dark or the horse scenes were too light. Honestly, I think the flaw lies with the fact that Spielberg is too conventional a director to handle these gracefully. He can do one or the other but not both.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: I really tried not to compare this movie to the Swedish version too much but it's impossible. This movie is still a good one but it lacked a lot of the subtle storytelling of the Swedish one and the last twenty minutes dragged intensely. Obviously it was directed perfectly albeit a bit conventionally for Fincher and well acted except that Swedish accents are apparently hard for some people. Rooney Mara was great although I prefer Noomi Rapace's interpretation but that is purely personal preference.

Rango: (Updated: 2/9) I did think it was good; I just had a lot more problems with it than the critics seemed to. In fact, if this won for Best Animated Picture, I wouldn't have a problem with it. The biggest problem with this movie is the fact that it is constructed to appeal to both kids and adults but does so in an often alienating manner (a problem many animated movies have; Pixar movies are the only ones good at avoiding this). There were a lot of jokes that would fly entirely over kid's heads, making large portions of dialogue incomprehensible but then there are large scenes that adults might actually find boring or jokes that would seem silly. However, it's a good story, good acting, good visuals, and with a lot of really great movie references (that would again, fly over kid's heads).

My Week With Marilyn: (Updated: 2/26) This movie was decent. I thought Michelle Williams did a fairly good job as Marilyn but I was actually, to my extreme surprise, more captivated by Branagh's performance as Laurence Olivier. And I don't like Branagh. The plot was okay; I liked how it used such a small frame of time to give a full study of Marilyn as a person. Overall, though, this movie was a bit forgettable.

Crazy, Stupid Love:+ I thought this movie would be a silly romantic comedy. Here's the shock, it's legitimately funny. I laughed a lot. It also dodged a lot of cheesiness and conventions and managed to actually surprise me.

Bridesmaids: We need more comedies like this. Dragged on for too long at some points but a comedy that appeals to women that has female comedians, is actually funny, and that guys like too? How novel. This should happen more often.


Movies That Were Over-hyped:

The Help: The cast is amazing. Let's just say that. Otherwise, this movie is kind of unremarkable. It stays pretty consistently interesting throughout but loses me at the end when they try everything in their power to appeal to the audience's heart in the most manipulative and transparent ways possible. Fail.

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: (Updated: 2/26) It might be weird to call this over-hyped when the critics didn't seem to like it but it was nominated for Best Picture so that means something. This movie is another one that tries so hard to get a sympathy vote that it's almost pathetic. Also, this movie takes itself so seriously sometimes that I found myself laughing inappropriately a lot. And the message is really weak for a movie: it's not the destination but the journey + tragedy. There have been better movies with that message and better movies about 9/11 frankly. This is also one of a couple of times where I thought to myself, "I bet the book is really good and this is just a trivializing adaption."

The Ides Of March:+ I'm not sure why this movie got so much hype. Very little happens during it and nothing new is said. New innovative presidential candidate and his speech writer are going to change the way the game is played! . . . not. Good acting. Was hoping for more. That's all.

Puss In Boots: A few laughs early on but this movie gets dry in the middle and never really recovers. Puss is freaking adorable though.


Movies I Disliked:

The Iron Lady: I think it was when Adam (currently on a boat with a bunch of Canadians and Brits) and I were discussing the Oscars that he said a very sarcastic, "Oh look, Meryl Streep can act. Who knew?" Unfortunately, her crazy great acting could not save this movie. It focuses on Thatcher mostly as a senile old women and spends the majority of the time talking about her personal life and what her rise to power means in a societal sense. The actual politics are minimal and chronologically disorganized. Obviously it's difficult to make a movie about a political figure without politics becoming a part of it but this sympathetic portrayal seems odd mainly because her politics are so absent from the movie. In an attempt to be apolitical, nothing is said.

J. Edgar:+ (Update: 2/8) This movie had a set-up for success being directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Dustin Lance Black, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, if I compare this movie to "Iron Lady", this one comes out way better. Where "Iron Lady" had huge "throw out everything and start over" problems, there is a good movie here that just didn't come together. For one thing, this year has made me sick of flashback storytelling. It doesn't always work and this is a case where it really didn't. That's probably it's biggest flaw because there was nothing gained from this style. Otherwise, there was good acting and a compelling story but the real quality of said story became disjointed by the setup. Also, the make-up was humorously bad and maybe it was just me but this movie was very poorly lit.