Why Are We Dumb?

Goon: Flawed, but Winning

I wrote a movie review of Goon and learned that writing movie reviews is hard because of the amount of times you have to repeat names, due to the impossibility of using pronouns in movie reviews.  Here it is:

There comes a point when enough people and outlets that I trust tell met that a movie is good that despite my misgivings I have to watch it. That said, there were a lot of misgivings coming into Goon. It's a hyper-violent hockey movie with a mostly no-name cast set in the Canadian minor leagues, starring Stifler (it is also, noteworthily, the first and only big-screen reunion of cinematic titans Seann William Scott and Eugene Levy since 2003's American Wedding). Not something I ever expected to be watching sincerely, but the word of mouth eventually won out and I talked myself into sitting down and watching it.

It takes about fifteen seconds for the first half-liter or so of blood to be spilled on screen, and the first fifteen minutes consist of more or less nonstop profanity and violence sandwiched between two montages of exposition. The first introduces us to our protagonist, the soft-spoken security guard/object of his parents' disappointment Doug Glatt, the second introduces him to hockey in that familiar sports movie trope of “guy from street discovers natural ability and becomes Next Big Thing in his sport.” This does not, however, go down the road of the hero forgetting his roots and becoming too big for himself; there is no second act conflict where he compromises his values out of greed or hubris. Glatt is a symbol for every romantic ideal we have about sports, and the writers go to great lengths to keep it that way. There is a poignant moment when the team's resident hotshot former first draft pick NHL washout spits on the logo on the floor of the locker room after being chewed out by the coach and Glatt wordlessly gets down on all fours and cleans it up. He literally utters the phrase, “I'm here to do whatever they need me to do, you know? If they need me to bleed, I'll bleed for my team.” The movie's greatest feat, and what makes it a good movie in my mind, is managing to make a character who says a line like that not seem trite.

For all its predictability, though, Goon keeps the audience guessing what exactly they're watching. There are enough genuine laughs that it easily earns the designation of a comedy but the general tone of the movie is heavy enough that it could be billed as a drama with a lot of laughs. The relationship between the two puts the viewer almost constantly in the awkward position of not knowing whether or not they should feel bad, laugh, or feel bad for laughing. This identity crisis carries onto the characters; nearly every character in the film is either totally one-dimensional, or someone who may genuinely have a personality disorder. Is Doug as dumb as the movie wants you to think he is, or is he as occasionally sharp as his dialogue? Is his love interest Eva a sex maniac as she says, or a committed girlfriend who feels crushing guilt at the slightest indiscretions as she is portrayed by Allison Pill? Even the film's loose antagonist, a hockey goon in his twilight, Ross Rhea, is alternately shown to be an alright guy and a total asshole. I'd like to dig really deep and think that all of this is an intentional feature of a script that is perhaps a nod the long-term mental health consequences of hockey or maybe a meta-reflection of the film's tone, but that's probably too much of a stretch for what just feels like intermittently sloppy writing.

Despite all of that, though, Seann William Scott gives a surprisingly very good performance, for which I give a lot of credit to director Michael Dowse. To use a sports analogy, he used Scott like a rookie quarterback in the NFL: hand the ball off a lot, and make safe throws early to build confidence in the early part of the game, and get more ambitious later. Dialogue-wise, Glatt feels almost like a passive observer in the film for the first 30 minutes, speaking very sparingly and letting other characters move the story along. This changes as he gets more involved with Eva and more comfortable in his new career, but you can't help but wonder if Dowse wasn't protecting him, as it were, in the first act. To Stifler's credit, though, it was a heartfelt and well-played performance of a character with considerable depth.

Overall, I would say Goon is a good but not great film that works in spite of its sometimes clumsy writing or forays into the cliché. It works because the story it tells reminds us of why we love sports. And just like in sports, it's pretty easy to see past all the warts to get to the good stuff.

On Snacking

It looks like it has taken me all of one post to break out the 'ol "food" tag.  So be it, it's time to talk about snacks.  I'm going through one of those phases right now where I'm trying a little bit to lose weight and am having very slight success, but one of the unintended consequences of this is that I'm spending a disproportionate amount of time thinking about food.  For someone who likes to cook and loves to eat, this is a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because ideas come to me for meals and snacks that otherwise wouldn't have, and a curse because when pizza is on my mind pizza ends up on my plate. So I'm going to try writing about it instead to see if that helps.  My goals here are to answer the questions, "What makes a good snack?" and "What snacks are the best snacks?"  The answer to that question comes in the form of an acronym I literally just made up while writing this sentence that I'm unjustifiably proud of.  Introducing SATE: Satisfaction, Availability, Taste, and Expensiveness. 

Satisfaction
This is a combination of how much a snack satisfies your desire to eat, and how nutritious a snack is.  Cheese sticks for instance, will satisfy your hunger, but they're awful for you.  By the same token, raw spinach is great for you, but you'd have to eat a ton of it to be full.  Something like homemade guacamole would score well here, as it's both filling and nutritious.  Scored at 0-5 for health, 0-5 for filling, total 0-10. 

Availability
This one, like taste, is not going to be static from person to person.  It refers to how easily available an ingredient is for you, i.e. how likely are you to have it in your kitchen/how far are you going to have to go to get it?  For me anything involving tortillas, cheese, peanut butter, eggs, spinach, or pasta rates highly here, a pre-packaged snack from Japan or India would rate lower.  Scored at 0-10, high score meaning I could make it right now, 0 meaning I'd have to get on an airplane to make it. 

Taste
Pretty self-explanatory, how good does it taste? 0-10, high score being the best thing and 0 being the worst thing.  

Expensiveness
Slightly trickier, this one includes both monetary and time costs.  If it takes an hour, its overall snack rating should suffer. Scored at 0-5 for monetary cost and 0-5 for time cost, total 0-10.

Now, I'll put some basic, standard snacks through the metric. 

Quesadilla- The gold standard of snacking, or at least my most common snack.
S: Very filling, not particularly healthy. 4.5+1.5 = 6/10
A: Always have the stuff to make quesadillas at the ready, but don't always have the sour cream.  9/10
T: No arguments, no blown minds. 7/10
E: Ultra cheap, 10-15 minutes of cook time.  4.5+3= 7.5/10
Total: 29.5/40

Spinach Salad- I love a good spinach caesar or garden salad.
S: Filling/less healthy with croutons and too much dressing, or very healthy/not filling if the inverse, call it 4+3.5 or 2.5+5 = 7.5/10
A: If I'm making a garden salad I might be out of one thing or another, but on the whole 8.5/10
T: Caesar tastes better, but they're both good.  6.5/10
E: Inexpensive and super fast 4+4 = 8/10
Total: 30.5/40

S'mores Pop Tarts- A guilty pleasure that I indulge now and then.
S: Fairly filling, completely devoid of nutritive value.  3+.5 = 3.5/10
A: Will have to go to the grocery store, but that's not far. 6/10
T: God they're delicious, though. 8/10
E: Cheap, open and eat.  4.5+5 = 9.5/10
Total: 27/40

Hummus and Pita Chips- Always feel like I don't eat this enough.
S: Filling and not terrible for you! 4+4 = 8/10
A: Grocery store item. 6/10
T: Depending on the hummus, this can be anywhere from 5-8, let's assume I get good stuff or make it myself 7.5/10
E: If store bought it's a little pricey but no prep, inverse if homemade, we'll say 6.5/10
Total: 28/40

I fully intend to do this more with more involved snacks, I just wanted to get my snack-rating metric out into the world.  

When it's time to party we will start a blog

Dearest reader,

I used to do this "blogging" song and dance for a while some time ago.  It was fun, and engaged parts of my brain that sleep all day now, so I guess you could say it's really an issue of flow:  this blog is the thought-Viagra intended to open the passageways for my creativity-blood to get to my brain-penis.  Looking back on that sentence, I really don't think there would have been a more eloquent or appropriate way to express that.  An auspicious start, indeed!

The medium is utterly fascinating, though.  I get the motivation.  It's the product of an individual's need to put his or her thoughts out into the world and for people to see them and respond to them.  It's the worst kind of intellectual exhibitionism and it comes, in my estimation, from any combination of A) an inflated sense of self-importance and B) panicked loneliness. 

Welcome to my shiny new blog, which I will be calling Under.  Don't get any ideas, the title isn't meant to be a statement (or even a suggestion) of a theme; there will be absolutely none of that.  I chose this title because it represents not only my favorite preposition, but my favorite prefix.  Between all the weird idioms (and aren't we all suckers for weird idioms?) that feature it and its ability to just take the piss out of just about any adjective or verb, it's just excellent.  Also, you'll probably be underwhelmed, so I want to be able to subtly plant that seed in your head to preemptively dampen your disappointment.  Finally, it sounds like it could be the title of a Dinosaur Jr song, and that rules.

If I can get past that first-post hurdle which has claimed so many would-be recorders of their scattered thoughts like some virtual Charybdis, I'll write about things like music, film, being in my late twenties, my will-they-or-won't-they relationship with alcoholism, video games, food, politics, books, and ironic reappropriation.  I might lay down some fiction.  All of this, at least, until I sell out and this space becomes a celebrity gossip blog and moves to famousbabiesandtits.blogspot.com.  Give it a week or two.

I kid.  Obviously, the realistic best-case scenario for this blog as a success in the medium looks something like this:  somewhere in the mid double digits of unique views and an eleven cent check from Google every few months because two or three people accidentally click on ads that I'll eventually cave in and post once I know a few of my friends have stumbled on to this under the guise of "just wanting to see how they match my content".   I can say safely, then, that this is a personal endeavor and not a get-rich-excruciatingly-slow scheme.  Still though, it'd be cool if you read it now and then and click on the ads once they appear if you're still around.  My early guess is that they'll be for discount antidepressants, dvd box sets, and knives. 

So there we have it.  A non-binding, non-verbal, non-contract.  I write, you read.  Enjoy the parts of me that I will be limply tossing into the ether for untold tens of people to accidentally discover and scoff at.  By way of not selling myself short, I'll make this promise to you here today: at least some parts of it won't be the absolute worst.

Tom