Obscure Film Review

Netflix allows me to see movies I have never even heard of. Sometimes this is a good thing. While others times I hadn't heard of the film for a good reason: it wasn't very good. Today's review of a movie I had never heard of before last week is of "The King of Comedy," the least well-known of the Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro collaborations.

The film came out in 1983 - I was 2 - and is about Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) an aspiring comedian with an unhealthy fixation on late-night host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). "King" borrows a bit from Psycho (Pupkin has recreated a set like Langford's in his mother's basement, though it appears his mother is still alive, not a skeleton). In fact, it could be alleged that Seinfeld ripped this film off in the "Merv Griffin Show" episode, but we'll have to save that for another day. Along with Psycho, the film follows the plotlines of many other "perverse fascination/assassination" films where a celebrity is abducted or murdered. After many attempts to have Langford listen to his audition tape, De Niro, who is only somewhat convincing as a down-on-his-luck geek, ends up abducting Lewis and holding him hostage with his release depending on De Niro being able to do his act on that night's show. De Niro does his predictably laughless act (I was born in Clifton, NJ - before that was a federal offense!) and then is arrested. In the interim, a crazy Sandra Bernhard acts crazily crazy in front of her love object Lewis. For this role, it was perfect casting.

De Niro is sent to prison, but when he gets out, he has a bestselling book, lots of comedy work and his face is known worldwide. And while every director whose film doesn't break the box office takes the time in the making-of DVD featurette to say the movie was "ahead of its time" - in this case, when Scorsese says it (and he does, let there be no doubt), it's actually true. Seeing this movie now makes a lot more sense to me than I think it would have to someone my age in 1983. The focus on celebrity is ubiquitous (or at least it seems like it is when you get three channels and they are always showing ET, Access Hollywood or the Emmys).

While movie watchers in 1983 may have been simply disturbed or bored by Rupert Pupkin (Scorsese said Entertainment Weekly called the movie the biggest flop of the year at the time), I think today's celebrity-soaked sycophants would be pulling for him. Pupkin gets his 900 seconds of notoriety (avoid cliches like the plague...whoops!), and I can't help but feel that lots of people would trade places with him, including the stint in prison.

I don't know what this means for me, you, our society, etc. Maybe we aren't better off than we were in 1983, that simpler time of almost a quarter century ago. But I know one thing: DVDs and Netflix didn't exist then, so this conversation probably wouldn't be happening. So although I have to put up with the Britney guy, Mike Patrick, Mike Gundy and sneezing pandas, I don't mind. I'll get by.

Quick obscure film side note: I was reading a book that mentioned a 1978 film called "The Big Fix" starring Richard Dreyfuss. I wish it were on DVD because I've heard it's good. But alas, it is not. I was wondering if some of my...ahem...older readers had possibly seen this film or were aware of it at the time. The book I was reading that mentioned the film excerpted a great line in which Dreyfuss, playing Private Investigator Moses Wine is asked why his arm is broken. His reply is priceless:

"You know, a couple of cops hassling a black kid."

Heavy Thunderstorm Edition

We are in the midst of quite a storm tonight in Tucson. The windows have been rattling with the booms of thunder and the lightning has been quite impressive. I feel as though I'm being transported back to my youth in Nebraska when loud thunderstorms often kept me awake at night. Back then, I thought that every storm meant there would be a tornado, and thus, I think I bothered my parents quite a bit. I always wanted to sleep downstairs, even though they knew there was really no danger. They were nice enough to let me do that (or even crawl in with them when I was really small). Living with a poodle that likes nothing better than to sleep right on top of you every night has taught me what a large sacrifice my parents were willing to make. I still very much appreciate it, though I'm glad I don't have those same fears anymore.

I have new and different fears, but they seem much more easy to deal with than storms I had no control over. Thinking back to one's childhood can make that past life seem very simple or very complicated. It can do the same for one's adult life as well. Life as a 6-year-old may have seemed like a piece of cake, but I had a lot about which to be irrationally afraid. These days I have a lot to be irrationally afraid about as well - the difference is that now I know it is irrational. That is a piece of wisdom which I must regularly remind myself. I guess it is nothing more than the trope that "it's all small stuff."

But I know for certain that bolts of lightning that lit up my walls adorned with sports stars and loud thunderclaps that had me covering my ears did not feel like small stuff. That's when you need people you can turn to. In that room where I would bother my parents on stormy nights, there was a message on the wall that said something about giving two things to your children: "the first is roots, the last wings." I can recall reading that as a child and not really understanding it - I think for a while I thought when I grew up I'd literally be able to fly. But when I think back on it now with a better understanding of what it means, I have to thank my parents for doing just that.

I realize that this has come off as equal parts Prairie Home Companion and back-to-school special, but I can't really help it. I once had a discussion with my dad about whether Garrison Keillor was actually funny or simply had a better memory than every Midwesterner. My dad said he was funny, while I felt that he could just remember the names of long-forgotten toys and grocery items so well that listeners simply remembered the humor of their own childhood.

But like many things, I find now that I was wrong. When I think about home, I can remember every single thing that was hung on the walls and every single piled box in the garage. I don't know what it is like now, but I can tell you exactly how it was then. And if Garrison Keillor could tell me a story that reminded me about being afraid of tornadoes, drinking cranberry juice, being trapped with friends in our house without electricity and without parents, or watching the 49ers in the Super Bowl, I'd laugh, too.

If I wasn't crying.

(Sorry about that. I don't really know where all that came from, but I felt like it was somewhat real, so I'm leaving it. I'll probably regret it, but it's OK. I'll have my regularly scheduled nonsense soon. Here is a link, via The Basketball Jones, that I am currently enjoying.)

Sunday Night is Blogging Night in America

I've been told that keeping a journal during law school is a good idea. I haven't been doing it - but then again, I haven't been following much of the advice I've been given. To follow more than half of it is impossible because most of it is contradictory. However, I was hoping that every Sunday night I could blog about law school. Maybe I won't be quite as open as I would be if no one could read it, but since the readership of this blog isn't exactly in the hundreds, I'll probably be fine.

So far my routine every Sunday night has been to
1. shave for the only time I will all week
2. burn my entire library of law school-related documents (assignments, notes, powerpoints, etc.) to a CD to prepare for either my laptop freezing, being broken or being stolen and
3. worry obsessively about the coming week.
I have no plans to change this procedure, although I threw in a step 2.5 tonight with a haircut, thanks to Kat's fine work with a pair of scissors.

I have my usual fear, but I have fallen into a bit of a routine when it comes to school. In part, this causes me apprehension (the imminence of which is an element for the civil tort of assault!) because I don't want it to get so comfortable that I forget that I'm not actually learning everything I should. But on the other hand (as we're always taught to consider in law school), it doesn't help the learning process to be on edge every single day.
But I don't think the anxiety will probably ever go away for me. In each class there is only one graded assignment - the exam at the end. So you can never know how you are doing until you really find out how you did. But it is the same situation for everybody, so there is really no reason to complain. I think everything will be fine, but confidence isn't my strong suit.

However, I'll close with two good things in an attempt to lighten the mood.
1. I was chosen as one of two Student Bar Association representatives for my section of the class. This was a good thing.
2. I found some law students with whom to play basketball every Friday. This is also a good thing.

In closing, I don't think this post was helpful to anyone probably. If you think I should do the law school kvetching in a private notebook and save the blog for talking about Ed Hochuli's prodigious guns or other sports minutiae feel free to let me know. Or if you like the pallor that this post has thrown over the entire enterprise feel free to let me know that, too.
OK, I hope to see you in a week.

I know, I know

I haven't blogged in an epoch because I've been trying to learn the meaning of justiciability (as well as how to say it!) and about a thousand other things that are hard to say and harder to understand. Someday I'll get back to blogging, but I'll be less interesting. That is a disturbing consideration for people who have read my blogs previously because they obviously aren't page-turners.
Despite what it may be doing to my sense of humor (and my psyche) I like law school. It's fun in a way most people would consider totally not fun.
I'll try to blog now and then about topics wholly unrelated to law school because no one wants to read about me rambling around in the darkness. But right now I have no other thoughts outside of law school, so you'll have to content yourself with this. Sorry.

Summer of Jeffrey comes to an end

As I type this it is my final day of non-law school freedom. I'm both excited and mortified about getting started. I've had a good summer and appreciate Kat for allowing me to live the life of the idle rich at least for awhile.

All the preparations have been made for law school - tuition paid for, laptop bought, books purchased, loans in arrears, fingernails nonexistent, fears in overdrive. I busted out my old laptop today as sort of a bridge to when I was last in school. I played some of my old mp3s (sadly trapped on the antiquated machine because it crashes if I try to use the disk drive), played a few games of Minesweeper and thought about what I liked about school in the first place.

I've written in this space and others about this matter for quite some time, and I think everyone is quite bored with it. It appears that it is time for me to put up or shut up. I'll let you know which way it goes.

Adventures in Computer Purchasing

(Note appended after I was done writing: This is long. It is in the spirit of "The Worst Thanksgiving in the History of the World Ever," which was a family favorite, although I can find no proof of it online. Also, there is a point made at the end that some may find poignant or at least not totally horrible. If you like, you can just skip down to there and read that.)

I am a rube.

And apparently, employees of electronics superstores can sense this. That, and my constant bad lucks, are the only explanations for what I've been through over the last few days. I was finally ready to buy a new laptop computer for law school. My trusty Compaq Presario (purchased in the summer of 1999 at Circuit City, I believe) still works, although there is only one hamster still alive and he is now very aged. But I'm impressed that it can still even turn on eight years after the fact. But obviously, that computer is not good enough. And Kat would like to retain control of her IBM Thinkpad because, after all, it is hers and I don't have a great track record in protecting her computers (no link available but it involved a sweet MacBook now theoretically being used by a Northwest Airlines baggage handler).

So it was clear that I needed a new unit. I checked out Circuit City and Best Buy and liked the prices, but the good prices are for computers that don't have enough memory to actually run Windows Vista at the same time as doing much else. So I had to bump up to 2 gigs of RAM and I wanted the Intel Core Duo processor for the speed as well as a CrystalBrite screen and, of course, at least a 2 MB L2 cache. (I stopped knowing what I was writing about a few sentences ago if that wasn't abundantly clear).

And therein lies my problem, I couldn't really justify why I wanted what I wanted, but Kat sought out the opinion of her father, who actually knows things. I would have liked to have asked The Smartest Man I Know but I couldn't really reach him. So rather than going to Best Buy or Circuit City, I decided to make the purchase at Play It Again Sports. Now most people would think that would be a terrible place to buy a laptop - and they would be right. At Play It Again I got a sweet dartboard with darts for only $11.98. Then I went home, grabbed the BB and CC circulars (which are actually rectangular, but stay with me) and reared back and fired.
The lucky computer was the Aspire 5630 by Acer. Maybe you have never heard of this computer or computer company, but I had little choice. I had to trust the darts.

The next morning I tromped to CC and stood in front of my chosen notebook PC. And stood there and stood there. They must not be working on commission at CC or else I had achieved my goal of becoming invisible. (However, if I became invisible, the computer department of CC would not be one of the first 333,000 places I would go). Finally, I had to loudly say "Sir," to a man who did not deserve to be called "Sir." He deigned to look up from his MySpace page long enough to say he'd "Be right there." He wasn't. Finally, he sauntered over and I said "I'll take this one." He said "I'll see if we have it in stock." I knew they did because I had looked online. At this point, after 10 minutes of research, I was smarter than most actual employees of CC. When he said "We do have it," I pretended to be surprised and happy. (I didn't do a very good job of it.) We wandered over to his work kiosk, which appeared to be a Commodore 64 that had been poorly taken care of.

And this is where the story starts getting really sad. The employee asked me, in what I considered a rather accusatory tone, "Why are you going with the Acer?" This was the last thing I wanted, to be forced to justify my purchase. I had plenty of answers I could give: "It's not for me," "Silence, plebe," or "My father-in-law said it was good, and I'd be crazy to disagree with him, for obvious reasons." Instead as I almost always do, I went the meek, frightened route. I said, "Acer is a good brand, it's just that not a lot of people know much about it." The employee said "Oh yeah, it's a good computer." I could sense he did not know what he was talking about because he sounded like me when I talk about computers.

Since new PCs come loaded with Vista but not Microsoft Office, I purchased the Office Home and Student 2007 and just went ahead and had the CC retreads install the software because I didn't really want to. (In the olden times, like when I bought that Presario, it came loaded with Office 97, and we liked it that way!) So I left at 11 a.m. and came back at 2:30 p.m. to pick up my computer. I drove home excited to jump right in and see what great graphics changes Microsoft had made to Freecell in Vista.

For the next three hours I customized the computer to my liking, got only the gadgets I liked, downloaded a few programs and set up Windows Calendar. It was a rather enjoyable afternoon. The computer was working quite well. I even sent a celebratory e-mail from the new machine. My horrible CC experience was in the rear-view and things were looking up. But then Kat came home.

She came in the house and put her phone on the table. She recently purchased a Bluetooth headset to try to simplify things when she is driving and talking. The new computer is set up to communicate with Bluetooth devices, although I don't really have need for it at this point. But this is when the story gets murky. I was looking at my computer screen when her phone rang (it was her Mom calling) and the screen started to bounce rather crazily in rhythm with the rings. That continued until the screen was nothing but stripes. I said it looked like one of M.C. Escher's nightmares, and I even took a photo in case that would be needed later (see, thinking like a lawyer, maybe I'll just take the bar now and skip that school part).


We restarted the computer but the screen didn't improve. We could vaguely see some icons, but this was no way to use a computer. Since I had only had the computer for about three and a half hours, we decided to schlep back to CC and show them. In CC's defense, I will say they were nice enough to say "Yeah, that thing is totally screwed up, we'll just give you another one." So we went up to the front and they brought out another Acer. However, the employee who brought the computer out to the front was tapping out some rhythms on the box right in front of me. "I wanted to say 'Hey buddy, this is not CC Music Factory, how 'bout you cool it with the McFerrin on my $700 purchase, eh broheems?" Instead, I went the "meek, frightened route" as is my wont and leaned over to Kat and whisperingly referred to him as "Ricky Retardo." Now, I know that's harsh, but no one heard it. Also, I stole that line from The Film Crew's riffing on Hollywood After Dark - now available on NetFlix instant viewing!

So after they handed me my new bass drum, I mean, computer, I took it back to the tech guys to install Office again. Kat and I went shopping and had a bite to eat, came back, picked it up and went home. I was too afraid to deal with more problems, so I waited until the next day. Everything has been good with the computer and I'm typing this on it now.

To return to what caused the first computer to freak out, I don't know if it was Bluetooth, simply the phone creating interference or if it was completely a coincidence. I think there was a bad connection somewhere that made the screen prone to problems. If The Smartest Man I Know has some time, he could "diagnose" what happened and then fill me in. I hope that everything works out with the new computer. As long as it can dutifully save Word documents I think it should be fine.

Whenever I have a bad experience akin to this, which is regularly to my dismay, I ask "Why does this happen to me?" When I was in my formative years, I had a T-shirt that said "If I didn't have back luck, I'd have no luck at all." I think it was a gift because it wasn't the sort of thing I'd ask for. But looking back on it, it was rather fitting (literally and figuratively). Because the bad luck (and it wasn't all bad, obviously) made me who I was. While bad luck can be difficult as it is happening, it's always worth a laugh later. The shirt should have said, "If I didn't have back luck, I'd have no stories at all." And that's how I feel. Nothing is better than looking back and telling a humorous tale of woe from a happier spot. And that's what I've enjoyed writing this. Now I realize, no one will have read this far, but it was worth it anyway.

That's it ... That's the list

I wanted to create a list of the 10 (or some other arbitrary figure) greatest long, huge, rambling album-closing songs of all time. But since I don't have the expertise or musical chops for that, instead I present an arbitrary number of my favorite long, huge, rambling album-closing songs from my music collection

Cursive "Staying Alive" - It's a truly fierce race for number one, but in the end I think this is the best song of the lot because of the mantra-like finish of intoning "The worst is over." It definitely beats jai ya and is something I tell myself regularly.

Bright Eyes "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to be Loved)" - A truly great song both lyrically and musically. This is the standard bearer for enormousness from the opening timpani roll to the hoots of applause at the close of the song and the array of sounds that comes after it.

Black Star "Twice Inna Lifetime" - While not as large as some of the others, this song includes Mos Def and Kweli along with Jane Doe, Punchline and the criminally underrated Wordsworth, whose puns earn this song a spot by themselves. At only 5:38, this is about the shortest that a rambling album-closer can be.

The Decemberists "California One Youth and Beauty Brigade" - The closer to Castaways and Cutouts is 9:50 long. It evokes wine, sea winds and sunny afternoons. After a listen, everyone will want to join the youth and beauty brigade.

My Morning Jacket "Dondante" - There's a lot going on here, like there is for many of the songs by this jam band. While it is more about the music than the lyrics, the closer "You had me worried, so worried that this would last, but now I'm learning that this will pass," works very well as a mantra.

Honorable mention for songs that would have been in this list if they had been album-closers rather than in the middle of the album includes "Inmates" by The Good Life and two by Death Cab for Cutie: "Transatlanticism" and "Different Names for the Same Thing." I think "Transatlanticism" is the best example of what I mean when I'm talking about these types of songs. Never have the words "Come On" been so meaningful.

I decided to create this list because A) it was one of the few lists that VH1 hasn't already done and B) there is a song I've been spinnin' that I thought could have made this list, but in the end didn't. That song is "In Our Bedroom After the War" off the new Stars album of the same name. Briefly, I enjoy the album but they obviously had a tough task ahead of them because "Set Yourself on Fire" is so good. The album closer was good, but not great. But I still recommend the album. My favorites are "The Night Starts Here," "Take Me to the Riot" and "Personal." While I'm not a huge fan of "Barricade," it did take me directly back to seeing Les Miserables in the Lied Center with my mom. If that's what you want, I'd suggest picking it up. This album is available digitally but not in stores because Stars released it for purchase after it was leaked. I'll be interested to see if they're actually able to sell many albums in stores in September when the disc is released.

Also, I've been enjoying the album "Cookies" by 1990s, especially "Cult Status" and "Situation." This Scottish rock band veers more toward the short songs than long, rambling, opuses, so no additions to the list to be found there.

I'm sure the long, rambling album-closer has been a musical staple for years, but I just don't have the knowledge to know. It seems like Saddle Creek bands enjoy making those songs, which is great since I enjoy listening to them. Anyone with additions to the list from recent records or even albums from the past are encouraged to add them in the comments. While I think most people scan right through a gigantic 10-minute song at the end of the album, it's what I enjoy. I like nothing better than getting to that song and listening as I move on down the road for the next 8 to 10 miles as the music rises and falls, changes and then closes with a repeating whispered refrain.