Ramin Karimloo, No Hurricanes, and This Time I Remembered My Pants!

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Last week, I took a long weekend in New York for a little solo vacation. Aside from forgetting my phone charger and having to buy another one, it was a very successful trip. No hurricanes and I didn’t forget my pants! I also went to Ellen’s Stardust Diner, where the waitstaff sings to you while you eat, went to Coney Island on Saturday and rode the Cyclone, had some awesome pizza and garlic knots, and went to Central Park, where I went to the zoo and found the sea lions. (Ten years ago, on my pre-GPS first trip to NYC, Christiana Krump and I wandered around the park forever trying to find the zoo, specifically the sea lions, and never did. Mission finally accomplished!)

But none of that is the reason why I went there.

If you know me or have been reading this blog for awhile, you know of my love for and obsession with Les Miserables (and if you’re new, here’s my 3,500-word explanation of why I love it so much), so of course I had to go see it when I heard it was going back on Broadway. And I got even more excited when I heard how amazing Ramin Karimloo, who plays Jean Valjean, is. Listen to him here, singing “Bring Him Home” on Katie Couric’s show.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeWIV1cFohs]

So on Friday (the 20th), I took the bus down and went to see the show. And Oh. My. God.

I’ve seen Les Mis in Boston a few times, but this was the first time I’d seen it on Broadway. I can say definitively that this was the best production I’ve ever seen, and unquestionably the best portrayal of Valjean. Ramin’s rendition of “Bring Him Home” brought me to tears—and that’s not even my favorite song from Les Mis! I thought that performance on Katie was good, but multiply that times a zillion awesomes and that’s how he sounded in person. I’ve never heard an audience applaud that long after a song not at the end of an act. And of course I was crying again a bit later during the finale. The cast was just wonderful—Caissie Levy, who played Fantine, was particularly impressive. Immediately, I went into my “Les Mis high,” a phenomenon affecting…well, just me, that will put me into an incredibly good mood for about a week after seeing Les Mis onstage. I talked about this a bit in this post, but while I don’t really like concerts and have never gotten the high from live music that so many people seem to, I do get that from musical theater, and that high is much stronger from Les Mis than from any other show.

I wanted to meet the cast at the stage door afterwards, but I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t until Sunday that I read online that at this theater, the entrance is on 45th street but the stage door is on 46thstreet. So on Sunday, I grabbed my program and went back to the stage door after the matinee show. I met most of the cast and got their autographs and it was AWESOME! I also got a teeny glimpse of Idina Menzel, aka the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem, since the If/Then stage door was right next door.

Then came the moment  I’d been waiting for—Ramin came out and signed my autograph and I told him how incredible he was. Then I asked if I could take a picture with him and he took this one of us.

HOT VALJEAN HAS TOUCHED MY PHONE, YOU GUYS.

The whole trip was fun, but man…this musical.

Sometimes it’s nice to have things to obsess over. It makes me feel alive to have so much passion about something, and my love for this show is now over ten years old. I love it even more now than I did back then, and I hope that never changes.

Why E-Readers Are the Devil

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I moved about a mile away on May 31 and am loving the roommate-free life so far. Moving is a huge pain, though, and despite my efforts to get rid of as much as possible prior to moving, I still ended up realizing that I have way too much stuff. I do, thankfully, have more space for it in my new space and I’ll be working again to get rid of more of it, but still.

A lot of the stuff I have, though, is books. Here’s what my bookshelves look like AFTER I got rid of the ones I didn’t want:

As much as a pain it was to move six or seven full boxes of them, though, I’m glad I own all these books. I have no intention of being a person whose bookshelves aren’t full.

And I absolutely have no intention of being a person whose books are all contained in an e-reader. As a matter of fact, I think e-readers are the devil.

Why? Well, there are many reasons, but the biggest one is that they are putting bookstores out of business.

Let me repeat that: they are putting bookstores out of business. For book lovers, I don’t know how that’s not the end of the argument right there, but somehow it isn’t. It seems that after years of reading the printed word, book lovers have suddenly found it inconvenientthat books are, you know, objects. With mass. And weight. And apparently, the desires not to carry things under five pounds and for more room in their bags have seduced them towards these bookstore-destroying e-readers.

Back in the days when You’ve Got Mail portrayed big bookstore chains as the enemy, I never imagined that I’d be defending Barnes and Noble as fervently as I have been, but here I am lamenting that aside from college bookstores, there is now exactly one Barnes and Noble in the entire city of Boston. Borders is now long-gone, slain by the e-Reader phenomenon. The Boston area does, at least, have a good number of used and independent bookstores, but I miss having options for book superstores, where you could settle into a chair and read and where you KNEW they’d have the book you were looking for.

There are plenty of other reasons, of course. I don’t think the experience of reading should feel like looking at a computer, which I do all day long at work. You can’t lend eBooks to your friends. You can’t have them signed by your favorite authors at readings. If you have kids, your kids will have no idea what you’re reading if they see you on your Kindle or Nook and won’t ask about it or try to read it themselves. E-readers might spare you some embarrassment if you’re reading 50 Shades of Grey in public, but they also spare you the shared experience of someone else who’s read the book bonding with you. And you can’t hand your favorite eBooks down to your children and grandchildren.

There’s also the matter of Amazon being a bully towards publishers. Here’s what they’ve been doing to Hachette Books recently. If you have a Kindle, you’re supporting this—so for the love of God, at least get a Nook if you absolutely MUST have an e-reader.

I’ll admit that there are a few upsides to e-readers aside from the more-room-in-the-bag thing. eBooks are less expensive to produce, so they allow publishers to release books that wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise. I actually do have a Nook for PC on my laptop because I wanted to read this book by Lois Duncan, a sequel to Who Killed My Daughter?, which is only available in eBook format. eBooks also help authors because they don’t have to worry about losing money from used book sales.

But that’s it. I can’t warm up to the idea of e-readers because I just keep getting stuck on the bookstore thing. I do not want to live in a world without bookstores. Browsing a bookstore and flipping through pages of a book I haven’t read is one of my greatest pleasures in life. A couple of years ago, Ann Patchett (an author whom I’ve seen speak twice and who is as talented at speaking as she is at writing, which isn’t always the case with famous writers) appeared on The Colbert Report and spoke about how, since her hometown of Nashville no longer had a bookstore, she’d opened one herself. She thought the community needed somewhere to have conversations about books and have story time for kids and get recommendations from actual people. In a wonderful bit of wisdom that applies to so many things besides buying books, she said, “If you never, ever talk to people and you meet all of your needs on the Internet, you wake up one day and you’re the unabomber.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Look, I’m not saying you’re a bad person if you have an e-reader (really, I think more than half the people I know have one), but I am saying that you should think about the consequences of the choices you’re making. Because when bookstores are all gone and buying online is our only option and there’s nowhere to go and browse and we’ve all turned into little unabombers? Well, I hope you enjoy all that extra room in your bag.

My Internet Origins

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Recently, Television Without Pity, aka TWoP, ceased operations. In April, they stopped posting any new recaps and on May 31, the forums shut down. Even though I hadn’t posted in the forums for a long time and only occasionally popped in to read a recap, I was sad to hear it. This was a site I used to spend a lot of time on. I was very active in the Gilmore Girls forums for a long time and I made a lot of friends I’m still in touch with today.

But let’s back up a bit. The loss of TWoP, a place that was a huge part of my online life for a long time, got me thinking about what Lorraine and Sweeney on Snark Squad refer to as “internet origins.” Theirs are hereand here. And here’s mine.

When I was a freshman in high school, we got the Internet. I used my mom’s email to write to my friends, and I’d send these long, very enthusiastic emails to my friends. Except once I got a friend’s email address wrong and it went to some random guy.

We had dial-up Internet (my parents actually had dial-up until I was a senior in college), so I couldn’t spend too much time online for fear of tying up the phone line. But I never spent a whole lot of time online until the summer before my junior year of high school, when I got into The X-Files.

I got into The X-Files at a weird time—during the summer between the seventh and eighth season, just as the show was losing David Duchovny and the quality was about to rapidly decrease. Back then, they showed reruns daily on FX, and I’m kind of impressed with myself for how quickly I got caught up with the show considering that TV on DVD was not yet a thing. Instead, I just watched and taped those reruns, and since I was watching them out of order, I discovered X-Files fan sites that helped me make sense of what had happened on the show so far.

There was one big fan site in particular, now defunct, called Idealists Haven, where I discovered this little thing called fanfiction. I read a ton of XF fanfic—often saving them so I could read them offline and not tie up the phone—and eventually started writing it myself.

Yeah, that’s a deep, dark secret from my past. No, I will not share that fanfic here. Believe me when I say that it is truly, truly awful. I need to remove all traces of it from the Internet and then pray that the Internet is not, in fact, forever.

Then I went to college and The X-Files ended. Freshman year of college, the big thing was finally having high-speed Internet. I joined AIM and posted lots of melodramatic away messages. (Actually, I think I enjoyed coming up with different profiles and away messages more than talking to people.) I downloaded a ton of music through questionable means. I finally had my own email address.

Sophomore year of college was when I rediscovered Internet fandom. I was watching Monk at the time and started a short-lived Angelfire page (which I’d lost the address to until recently) where I just kind of rambled about my thoughts on each episode and which character had been the “coolest” in those episodes. While I’d always liked Gilmore Girls, this was the season where I started connecting with fellow fans online via TWoP.

Nothing has shaped my Internet life more than TWoP. I’ve made so many friends through that site and a lot of us have stayed in touch through Facebook and posting on a private forum. I’ve even met some of them in person. We used to have local TWoP cons where TWoP posters from Boston would meet for lunch at The Cheesecake Factory, and meeting these people I only knew by their screen names was awesome and kind of surreal. I went to my first TWoP con my junior year of college and I was so nervous, but I had so much fun!

But, uh…one time I accidentally started a flamewar. It actually got a write-up on this site called Fandom Wank that documents Internet drama. I’m the Katie they mention in that post (they seem to agree with me, thankfully), but basically what happened was that after one Gilmore Girls episode that most fans liked, the recapper, Pamie (whom I actually like and who has since published several books and written for many TV shows), posted a really negative review. TWoP had this kind of asinine rule that you couldn’t criticize the recappers in the forums (although showering them with praise was fine), so when Pamie linked to the recap on her blog, I left a polite blog comment saying that I disagreed with her and other fans joined me. Well, the next thing I knew all the other TWoP recappers were piling on yelling at us and it majorly escalated, culminating in Pamie posting this really sarcastic recap for the next episode. I was mortified and, even though I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, ended up apologizing to Pamie. I had not meant for any of it to happen—but now I kind of think the whole story is hilarious. Years afterward, I saw the incident mentioned elsewhere on the Internet and was like yeah…that was me.

Oh, yeah, and I started writing fanfic again. It got to be kind of an obsession—I’d be sitting in class planning out my next story instead of taking notes. But it was great writing practice and enough people read and liked my stories that it boosted my confidence a lot. (I’m actually pretty sure that more people have read my fanfic than anything else I’ve ever written.)

BC was on Facebook pretty early, when Facebook was just for college students and the URL was thefacebook.com, and I actually held out for a bit until I joined in December 2004. I was never on Myspace, though. All those pages where music started playing the second you opened the page annoyed me so much that I could never bring myself to join.

The same month I joined Facebook, I started my first blog, which I’ve since made private. I was very ambivalent about the idea of any kind of online journal or blog for a long time, but I finally decided to start one that only my online communities knew about. In 2006, several of my online friends and I joined Livejournal, and a few years later I started a second LJ where I did share some things with real-life friends. I no longer use either of them, though.

In September 2006, I started this blog. That same year, I got back into fanfic, this time for The O.C. (I have not relapsed since, though. And yes, I have often referred to it in terms of an addiction, because it is highly addictive!)

My most recent online community has been 20sb. Once I joined that, I discovered so many awesome blogs—and people—and have become friendly with many fellow bloggers. I wish 20sb was as active as it was in 2011-2012, but maybe that will change with the new redesign they’re planning.

And that’s my life online so far. More will be coming soon, specifically changes to this blog…stay tuned!

Ode to the Juno

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I’m moving on the 31st, only about a mile away. I’m going to be living alone for the first time, which I’m really excited about. Eventually I might change that by getting a cat.

Until then, though, I’ll be living without a cute furry thing for the first time in three years. That’s because for those three years, I’ve been living with my roommate and her dog, Juno.

 

Juno, in my humble opinion, is the best dog ever. She’s probably a flat-coated retriever, and she loves you. Really. Even if she doesn’t know you, she loves you. Because she loves EVERYBODY. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you are a human, she loves you.

We should all be more like Juno.

I like to think she loves me more than the average human, though. I love her so much. I love how she likes to cuddle even in 90-degree heat. I love how she never stops wagging her tail. I love how she’d rather have attention than dog food and is always rolling on her back begging for a belly rub. I love how she’s six years old but still acts like a puppy. I love that she thinks she’s a lapdog despite being sixty pounds. I love how many kisses she gives. I love how excited she is to see me when I get home.

I have a lot of nicknames for her: Junebug, Puppy-girl, The Black Furball of Need, Princess Waggytail, Cuddles McFurry, You Ridiculous Beast. She doesn’t call me anything, but I call myself her Backup Human. If she could talk, as I’ve said before, I’m pretty sure she’d be singing a song that goes something like, “I’m the cutest! I’m the cutest! I’m the cutest!” (It’s not a very complicated song because she’s not a very complicated dog.) But she does have very high self-esteem.

She’s super quiet, though, which I appreciate. She very rarely barks, and when she does, it’s usually because she saw a cat out the window.

I never had a dog or a cat or any pets aside from fish growing up- my parents are just not pet people. This was the first time I’d ever lived with an animal, and living with her improved my quality of life immeasurably. During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber, I spent a lot of the day anxiously petting her on the couch and thinking she’d make a great therapy dog.

No, even the best dog ever isn’t perfect. She sheds like crazy. She’s ridiculously needy and completely shameless. The firefighters down the street give her treats, which she knows, so one day when I was walking her, she saw that the firehouse door was open and yanked my arm out of the socket and the next thing I knew, I was in the firehouse, awkwardly standing there like, “Uh…hi. My dog wants a treat?” And she is the lickiest dog I’ve ever met in my life- while I like getting puppy kisses, my friends are not such big fans and I constantly have to tell her, “Juno, I know you love everybody but that does not mean you have to kiss everybody.” But even so, someday in the distant future I want my own dog, but I feel really bad for that hypothetical future dog—Juno has set the bar really high. It’s going to be hard to find a dog who’s half as awesome as she is.

I’m going to miss you, Juno. Keep being the best dog ever, and it has been a privilege to be your Backup Human.

We Reduce People

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In fiction, moral complexity is in. Today’s golden age of TV have brought characters who are difficult or whose intentions are ambiguous out of the realm of literary fiction and art house movies to popular shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and countless others. And we love it. When you consider a character, your opinion of that character is colored by many things other than “hero” or “villain.” On Mad Men, when nearly every main character has either cheated on a significant other or knowingly slept with someone who’s cheating, how do you measure which character you enjoy the most? On Breaking Bad, why do some people root for characters who’ve killed innocent people but hate other characters for smaller, personality-related reasons? I don’t watch Game of Thrones, so I can’t really comment on it, but I’ve picked up on some of the Snark Ladies’ interesting thoughts regarding the actions of some characters on that show.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing lately: this cultural embrace of moral ambiguity does not extend to actual human beings. With current events, there always has to be a villain, even in accidents where no one was really at fault. On the Internet, if anyone says anything regrettable, they’re never given the chance to backtrack or apologize—and even if they do, people will label them and discount anything they say from then on. There’s this ridiculous Tumblr, which I won’t link (if you’ve heard of it, you’ll know which one I mean) that catalogs everything that popular celebrities say that could be construed as “problematic”—even though some of those things are hardly problematic and some of them are things said or done while playing a character.

We reduce people.

We boil down every single thing about a human being—all experiences, all circumstances, all thoughts, all actions, all feelings—to one single thing we don’t like and slap a label on them.

We do it all the time, with everyone from celebrities to politicians to criminals to people we know personally or engage with online. It’s too much work to consider the bigger picture or to imagine that there’s anything more to a person than whatever we don’t like.

I say “we” because I’m guilty of this, too—too often. It’s easy to reduce. It’s harder to look closer and find the humanity in people we don’t like, or people who do things we don’t like.

I mentioned before that Schindler’s List, which I saw for the first time last year, is something I have a hard time talking about. The reason why is that what I took away from it was very personal, and I was afraid if I tried to explain it, it would come out sounding like I was making a movie about the biggest genocide in modern history all about me. But this was the revelation I had while watching it, a movie about a man who, despite doing an incredible thing that saved over a thousand lives, was not by any means a saint: if you lose your ability to see beyond whatever you don’t like about a person, if you can dehumanize people enough to boil them down to a single thing about their complex being—then that’s one thing you have in common with the Nazis.

When you don’t consider the humanity of every person, the inherent worth everyone has just by being alive, even people who do terrible things with their lives, it looks pretty ugly.

I’m often amazed by people who are more generous, compassionate, and forgiving than I am. When Fred Phelps died recently, I was surprised by the subdued reaction, which could be summed up as “let’s not stoop to his level.” My basic instinct is more often than not a desire for revenge, even if it always stays just a revenge fantasy, but thank God for the example of people whose hearts are bigger than mine.

Sometimes I’m not very good at forgiveness. But I’m trying to get better.

There’s no one thing that inspired this post. It’s a conglomeration of observations of things around me and in the world. But this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and something I always want to keep with me as I check my reactions when anything upsets me.

I don’t want to reduce people. And I don’t want anyone else to, either. People are all more than the sum of their complex, sometimes infuriating parts. I need to remember that while there is a great capacity for evil in humans, there is an even greater capacity for love, kindness, and compassion. And I need to recognize that greater capacity in all people as well as in myself.

Song of the Moment: Nobody’s Crying

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Sometimes when I do these “Song of the Moment” posts, it’s a song that’s timely. Maybe it has to do with the time of year, or something going on in my life, or something in the news, or it reminds me of someone’s birthday.

This one is none of the above. It’s just a song I love and think you should know if you don’t know it already: Patty Griffin’s lovely “Nobody’s Crying.” Despite the title, the gentle but emotional way she sings it, like her heart is breaking, often makes me want to cry. It’s been covered a few times, but Patty’s original version is my favorite.

May you dream you are dreaming in a warm, soft bed
And may the voices inside you that fill you with dread
Make the sound of thousands of angels instead
Tonight where you might be laying your head
Darling, I wish you well
On your way to the wishing well
Swinging off of those gates of hell
But I can tell how hard you’re trying
I still have this secret hope
Sometimes all I do is cope 
But somewhere on the steepest slope
There’s an endless rope
And nobody’s crying


[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeismlcQdv0]

Thoughts on Last Year’s Movies

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I am picky about movies—I tend only to see the ones that have gotten critical acclaim, which means I spend the most time watching movies in the latter half of the year. Some years I see everything nominated for Best Picture, but not this time. I don’t want to see Her because the whole premise of it creeps me out. I won’t even talk to Siri, so the idea of falling in love with a computer is just… *shudder*. And despite my abiding love for Leonardo DiCaprio, based on what I’ve heard about The Wolf of Wall Street, I don’t think I’d like it. However, I did see all the other Best Picture nominees.

Out of those nominees, my favorite, surprisingly, was Philomena, which I hadn’t heard a whole lot about before I saw it. Out of the movies I saw that were not nominated for Best Picture, my favorite was Saving Mr. Banks.

Here are my thoughts on last year’s movies, in no particular order.

Prisoners

This was intense. VERY intense. It’s a thriller in which two young girls disappear from a quiet Pennsylvania neighborhood on Thanksgiving. A mentally challenged young man who drove an RV in the neighborhood where the girls were last scene is questioned, but ultimately released. Then the father of one of the girls (Hugh Jackman) takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping the man and torturing him to try to get information out of him. Meanwhile, a detective named Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) searches for the kidnappers in a more conventional way.

I really liked this movie, even though one of the friends I saw it with figured out the ending pretty early. Some things about that ending still confuse me, but the writing is excellent (it’s so literary that I thought it must be based on a book and was surprised to find out that it wasn’t), there’s gorgeous cinematography, and I think Hugh Jackman should have gotten more recognition for this role than he has.

Gravity

In a lot of movies that are shown in 3-D in the theater, the 3-D can be superfluous, but this is the kind of movie that was made for it. I don’t think watching it on DVD at home, minus the objects floating around in space, would be as interesting. Overall, it’s a good movie, but I’m kind of surprised that it’s gotten as much critical acclaim as it has. It’s a very simple story and the characters are kind of flat—George Clooney is basically playing George Clooney as an astronaut (Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s Golden Globe crack about how the movie’s about “how George Clooney would rather float off into space and die then spend one more second with a woman his own age” was priceless) and Sandra Bullock’s character’s one distinguishing characteristic is that she had a daughter who died.

Enough Said

It’s hard to find good romantic comedies these days, but this is one of those rare gems. Even rarer is that it’s a love story about two people in their fifties about to become empty-nesters. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a divorced masseuse who, at a party, meets a woman (Catherine Keener) who becomes her new client and her friend as well as a man (James Gandolfini) whom she begins dating. Things are going well until she realizes that her new friend is her new boyfriend’s ex-wife. She doesn’t reveal what she knows to either of them and is unable to stop listening to her friend’s complaints about her ex-husband—“She’s like a human TripAdvisor!” she says at one point.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, famous for her work on TV, is great in her first, and hopefully not last, lead role in a film. Sadly, it was one of the last films that James Gandolfini completed before his death last year. It turns out the man famous for playing a brutal mobster was also great at playing a very sweet, regular guy, and it’s a shame we won’t be able to see any more of that.

Captain Phillips

I adore Tom Hanks, so I’m a bit biased towards anything he’s in, but this movie is another in the win column for him. Since it’s a true story that only happened a few years ago, obviously you know how it ends, but that didn’t prepare me for the last five minutes of the movie, where we see the captain crying in shock and covered in other people’s blood as the medics examine him. On the basis of that alone, Hanks should have gotten an Oscar nomination. Barkhad Abdi, as the leader of the pirates, did get a nomination, well-deserved.

12 Years a Slave

I liked this movie, but actually not as much as I thought I would. The main reason why is something that sounds so insignificant if I say it but really did matter to me—I thought the movie didn’t show us enough of Solomon’s life before he was a slave. There’s been a lot of commentary on the light this movie has shown on the horrors of slavery, but I thought that with the lack of humanizing details about Solomon, it became too much the story of slavery and not enough the story of Solomon Northrup, therefore turning him into more of a symbol than a person.

I don’t know. I haven’t heard this criticism anywhere else, so maybe it’s just me. Even so, it is definitely well-done and worth seeing.

All Is Lost

I was kind of wary about seeing this one. I mean, there’s one character in the whole movie and almost no dialogue and the entire thing is about him trying to survive on a sinking boat. I’d heard that it was best to see on the big screen, and I can see how that would be the case, but it was pretty compelling even when watched at home. Robert Redford plays the guy on the boat. We never get any backstory on him at all—not what he’s doing out there, nothing about his family situation, not even his name. But even so, you’re rooting for him all the way, even as things seem increasingly hopeless.

Frozen

I finally saw this after hearing about it for months, and it was wonderful. It has all the best elements of the classic Disney movies—great music (“Let It Go” is the best Disney song in many, many years), cute animals and comic relief (a reindeer named Sven and a snowman named Olaf who dreams of summer, in this case), and romance, although it takes a backseat here. With this and Brave, Disney has put a positive spin on the princess craze by writing princesses who are strong and independent, and this movie has two of them, sisters Anna and Elsa. I love that it’s about sisters and the love they have for each other—I can’t remember the last movie, animated or otherwise, I saw that had sisters at the center of the plot. And it cleverly turns the love-at-first-sight fairy tale trope on its head by pointing out how insane it is to think you’re in love with someone you don’t even know.

Saving Mr. Banks

To quote what a friend of mine posted on Facebook when the trailer for this movie came out: “Emma Thompson? Good. Tom Hanks? Good. Mary Poppins? Gooooood.” I love Tom Hanks, as I said, and Mary Poppinswas like the movie of my childhood, so I was prepared to like this movie. However, I ended up loving it even more than I thought I would. I am shocked that Emma Thompson didn’t get an Oscar nomination. As PL Travers, she’s perfect at showing her persnickety, proper side as well as the hurt and vulnerability she carries with her from her painful childhood. Colin Farrell is also great in flashbacks as her loving but unstable, alcoholic father. And I was also surprised to see what other famous faces popped up here—BJ Novak as songwriter Richard Sherman, Paul Giamatti as a chauffeur.

American Hustle

I actually didn’t like this as much as I thought I would. It’s got great acting all around, interesting and hilarious characters, and plenty of ridiculous 1970s hair. Plot-wise, though? It kind of lost me in the middle. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about what these people were doing or who was scamming whom by doing what. I wonder if it would have been better or worse if they’d stuck more closely to the true story it’s loosely based on. Still, it’s fun, and who wouldn’t want to see Jennifer Lawrence accidentally blow up a microwave?

August: Osage County

This is the kind of movie that’s enjoyable while you’re watching it but leaves you uncomfortable when it’s over. Like most movies based on plays, it’s very talky, and the plot is basic dysfunctional-family-comes-together fare. Some characters are better developed than others—Meryl Streep’s painkiller-addicted matriarch and Julia Roberts’ bitter oldest daughter are among the more developed, while Juliette Lewis’s breezy optimist sister comes off more cartoonish. The acting is terrific, but it’s the kind of movie where absolutely nothing is resolved at the end and you’re left wondering what the point of the whole thing was.

Dallas Buyers Club

This was really good. Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are both excellent as, respectively, Ron Woodruff, a homophobic rodeo enthusiast whose HIV diagnosis leads him to find and sell alternative treatments to the harsh AZT he’s prescribed,  and Rayon, a transgender woman with AIDS who becomes Ron’s unlikely friend and business partner. From what I’ve read, it takes a lot of liberties with real life events, but it’s still a great story and both McConnaughey and Leto deserved their Oscars.

Blue Jasmine

This was actually really sad, which I wasn’t expecting. I think I thought it would be more of a Woody Allen comedy, but while there are funny moments, it’s more of a tragedy about the downfall of a Wall Street wife named Jasmine French after her husband goes to prison. I’ve never seen A Streetcar Named Desire, but from what I know about it, this story has a lot of parallels to it. Cate Blanchett is fantastic as Jasmine, who, even as she does her best to start life anew, ultimately finds herself longing for the riches she’s lost. You root for Jasmine even as her behavior is cringeworthy and slightly insane, and when you finally learn the entirety of the backstory that landed her in her predicament it’s surprising and heartbreaking.

Philomena

I loved this movie, and I actually didn’t know a whole lot about it before I saw it. That’s how I recommend going into it, because although I knew the basics—it’s based on the true story of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman searching for the out-of-wedlock son who was taken from her and put up for adoption—I’m glad that I didn’t know anything about how that search unfolded. So I won’t tell you much except that it turns out to be simultaneously sad, heartwarming, and life-affirming. Judi Dench is great as the stubborn, loving, occasionally hilarious Philomena, as is Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, the journalist who’s helping her.

Frances Ha

I feel like I shouldn’t have liked this movie, but for some reason I did. It has all the markings of a pretentious hipster movie—it’s in black and white for no discernable reason, it’s about a not-very-successful twenty-something modern dancer in New York City, the main character is a bit self-absorbed. And yet…it worked for me. Maybe because it’s about a twenty-something’s struggles with friends, career, and figuring out where her life is going, which I can certainly relate to. And also because Greta Gerwig as Frances is pretty damn charming. I didn’t think How I Met Your Dad sounded like a great idea, but I’m more interested in it now that I know that she’ll be starring in it.

The Spectacular Now

It didn’t knock my socks off, but this is an above-average teen movie. It’s very intense—not all about high school social status and the prom, although those are both part of the plot. And the two main characters, played by Miles and Shailene Woodley, actually seem like real people and not teen archetypes. It’s been compared to Say Anything…, and while it’s not quite that good, it is definitely one of the better teen movies I’ve seen recently.

Short Term 12

Wow, this was really good and incredibly underrated. Brie Larson plays Grace, a caring but professional twenty-something supervisor at a foster care facility for teens who’s dating one of her coworkers. Grace comes from a troubled background herself, and the arrival of a new girl at the facility combined with Grace’s recently discovered pregnancy force her to confront her past. Everything about this movie feels very real, and Larson, who reminds me a bit of Jennifer Lawrence, is outstanding. I’m excited to see what else she’ll do in the future.

Mud

I have to say that I’m a big fan of the McConaissance. This and True Detective prove that his Oscar wasn’t a fluke, and while this movie has a lot of flaws, McConaughey’s performance is largely what left me with positive feelings about Mud despite those flaws. He plays a mysterious man who two fourteen-year-old boys from Arkansas find living in the woods. It’s a coming-of-age story more than anything else, and sometimes the screenwriter seems to have consulted the coming-of-age and the Southern stereotype pages in the screenwriting bible too much. (One of the boys is named “Neckbone.” Really?) It’s also the worst kind of Bechdel-test failure, where the female characters are mainly damsels in distress and really exist only as romantic objects. And it leans on the predictable side. But McConaughey brings a certain warmth to his character that permeates the movie, and in the end the story is moving without being too sappy.

Nebraska

Not my favorite, but I enjoyed it. Bruce Dern is an old guy who’s convinced he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes and Will Forte is the son humoring him by driving him from Montana to Nebraska where he can supposedly collect his prize. He learns a lot about his dad along the way, through lines that are mostly sweet and subtle but that sometime err on the side of telling and not showing. And what’s up with both this and Frances Ha being in black and white? Schindler’s List is pretty much the only modern movie that can get away with that. But even so, this is worth a watch.

Fruitvale Station

This is the true story of Oscar Grant, who was shot to death by the police in a subway station in Oakland early on New Year’s Day 2009. Unarmed black man being killed—it’s sadly an all-too-familiar story, but this movie shows you one of the humans behind the statistics. Oscar certainly had flaws, which the movie doesn’t gloss over—he spent time in prison and cheated on his girlfriend—but we also see him as a caring son, grandson, friend, boyfriend, and father to his four-year-old daughter. It’s a bit heavy-handed at times, particularly in one fictional scene where he takes care of a dying dog, but still an excellent movie (and the rookie director, Ryan Coogan, is only twenty-seven, which makes me feel like a slacker). I saw it while donating platelets, and despite knowing how it would end (it’s a true story, so it’s not exactly a secret), I got all teary and the nurse was like, “What movie were you watching?”

About Time

I may have spoken too soon when I said there weren’t any good romantic comedies anymore, because this is the second great one I’ve seen recently. Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, aka Bill Weasley from the Harry Potter movies) is told by his father (played by Bill Nighy, whom I can never think of as anything but Billy Mack from Love Actually) that the men in their family can time travel—specifically, they can travel to places in the past that they’ve been before. Tim uses this power to help him meet Mary (Rachel McAdams), and surprisingly, the movie doesn’t end with their relationship. Instead, it’s more concerned with the day-to-day of their lives and the ways that it changes when Tim uses his power to redo things.

Yes, it’s on the sappy side and yes, there are some plot holes, but the characters are so kind and likeable that I came away feeling moved. There was a moment in the middle when I thought Tim might do something awful, but it never happened. And it’s actually a love story not just between Tim and Mary, but also between Tim and his dad and, to a lesser extent, Tim and his sister. There are some really lovely scenes where Tim bonds with his father.

The Lifeguard

I knew that this hadn’t gotten great reviews, but I thought I might like it anyway. Like the main character, I’m about to turn thirty and worked as a lifeguard as a teenager (one summer at a condominium complex much like the one in this movie). Plus, Kristen Bell! But it was actually pretty boring. One cliché that grates on my nerves like no other is teenagers dying to get out of their nice suburban town, which is found in abundance here. I feel like with some changes, the story—Bell’s character leaves her job as a city journalist to move back in with her parents and resume the lifeguarding job she had as a teenager—could have been a lot more compelling. Instead, it all just feels self-indulgent and low-stakes—and considering that there are subplots about statutory rape and teen suicide, that’s saying something.

The Book Thief

I love the book so much, but I wasn’t quite sure what a movie version would be like. And this was…not bad, but I feel like it was just a story that didn’t translate well to the big screen. In the book, for instance, you never forget that the story is narrated by death, but in the movie, death only speaks at the beginning and end. They made some weird choices about what words should be in English and which should be in German, too, and overall I think it was a better story to read than to see.

I Sincerely Hope This Is Not the Last Post of Its Kind I Write

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I mentioned this back in this post, but last year, I had a short story accepted by The Sierra Nevada Review, a literary magazine out of Sierra Nevada College.

The day before Easter, my contributor’s copies came in the mail!

It’s a pretty short story—about 1100 words and only three pages. It’s called “Things You Don’t Know I Know About You.” In the story, the narrator, a nameless cubicle dweller, tells of everything she’s learned about her coworkers by Googling them. This is something that, I admit, I do all the time—with coworkers, dates, random people from the past, and sometimes my friends and family, just to see what I find. My friends think I’m weird for Googling people before dates—I think they’re weird for not doing it. (Of course, then on the date I have to act like I don’t know things like where the guy went to college or where he works.) But I’ve found out some interesting things by Googling people from the past I think of randomly—like, there was this obnoxious hipster guy I worked with at an internship in college, and I found out through Google that he wrote a fairly popular young adult book.

It’s not online, but you can buy a copy here or just ask me if you want to read it.

I’m happy about it—I feel like it’s rare that there’s something in my life I can be legitimately proud of. Even when I accomplish something professionally, like making my sales goal last year, it’s hard to take much pride in it because of extenuating circumstances—like, I think making that goal was due to luck more than anything else. But I can’t think of any reason The Sierra Nevada Review decided to publish this other than that they liked the story—and according to Duotrope, a site that gives information on different literary magazines, it has a pretty low acceptance rate, although I’m not sure how accurate the rate they give is.

But still, I hope this isn’t the last thing I ever publish. This is actually part of a group of linked short stories I want to have published as a book eventually, with some of them published in magazines first. I’m trying to get more stories published now.

Here’s hoping that someday I’ll have more publications to blog about.

Tracy McConnell, We Hardly Knew Ye

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WARNING: I will spoil the endings of How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, Veronica Mars, The X-Files, The Office, Seinfeld, Friends, Breaking Bad, and Six Feet Under in this post.

So I was one of many people outraged at the How I Met Your Mother finale- let me rant for a minute.

The writers went with an ending that would have been satisfying in Season 2, but didn’t fit in at all with what the show had built up to. After all that, the mother (Tracy) was basically just a sidenote in the story of how Ted and Robin got together after all- even after the entire show lead us to believe in Barney and Robin as a couple and that Ted would get his happy ending. And I guess he did, but in the end he only was with Tracy for eleven years. They hit us over the head so many times with how Ted had to get over Robin before he met the mother- but this ending made me think he never got over Robin at all, and worse, maybe he was pining for her the whole time he was with Tracy. And it kind of cheapened his relationships with both women. Also, I really liked Tracy herself, and Cristin Milioti was great in this role. (I think she may have been too good—she was adorable and likeable without being Mary Sue-ish and seemed perfect for Ted, so people may have ended up rooting for her more than the writers intended.) So I wanted to know so much about her that we never found out- like, what exactly was she doing to try to end poverty? Why was that her passion? What was her book about? Where was she from? What was her family like? How did Max die? How did she die, for that matter (I mean, we know she was sick, but they glossed over her death so quickly that we never got any details)? Having kids before getting married seems very…un-Ted-like to me, too. I didn’t like how Ted and Tracy’s wedding eventually happened.

I feel like Robin really got the shaft, too. I mean, I’m sure she loved her work and all the travel she was doing, but it was literally what cost her her husband and friends for several years. Who did she even talk to during all that time she was estranged from the group? Patrice? I hope she made new friends or dated someone else or…something.

And then there’s Barney. I wondered, going into this season, if Barney and Robin would actually get married. Eventually it became clear that they would, and the show had really gotten us to invest and believe in the idea of them as a couple- so it pisses me off that they got divorced only three years later. They made such a big deal of him finally growing up and settling down with Robin- and the second they divorce, he just reverts back to being an immature slut, until he knocks some girl up and his daughter magically changes his life. The whole thing just pisses me off. I read some speculation that maybe “Number Thirty-One” will be the main character on How I Met Your Dad, which makes sense, but I hate that he referred to his daughter’s mother only as “Number Thirty-One.” Not to mention—what did Lily end up doing after she got back from Italy besides having a third kid whose name and sex we never learn?

It got me thinking, though, about how to end a show. There are other series finales that have gotten me almost as mad as HIMYM’s did, but there have also been some great ones. So here’s a look at the best and the worst of series finales:

Dexter

There are a handful of people who did like the HIMYM finale (my mother is among them), but absolutely no one liked the Dexter finale. I didn’t for a minute buy into his rekindling of his relationship with Hannah after she tried to kill Deb, so I hated how the show tried to get us to believe that she was his one true love. And then when Deb dies and Dexter decides that he’s caused people too much pain, his solution is to…cause even more pain by faking his own death and going off somewhere to be a silent lumberjack? Which is especially nonsensical because he no longer had the urge to kill? UGH. This finale made me wonder why I wasted so much time watching the show.

The X-Files

Another terrible ending. I’ve blocked out a lot of the specifics, but basically, at the end everyone was miserable and the world really was going to end in 2012. And the Smoking Man finally died for real. The movie that came out several years later didn’t do much to redeem it, either.

Veronica Mars

But this recent movie, thankfully, did redeem the series finale. To be fair, it was bad largely because it was written as a season and not series finale, but there were still things that bothered me about it—namely that Veronica’s actions over something that wasn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things and where the damage had already been done ended up getting her father in trouble. Like I said, though, the movie was so good it undid the unsatisfying series finale.

Seinfeld

At the time I hated this finale, as did most people, but it’s actually grown on me since then. Seinfeldwas not a show that dealt with feelings or happy endings, but aside from “nothing,” it was about four hilarious but still really horrible people. So putting them in jail for, basically, years of being awful was kind of fitting.

The Office

This was one show that went on way too long, and I didn’t watch the last two or three seasons. However, I’m really glad I tuned in for the finale. They’d announced that Steve Carell wouldn’t be coming back, but I was really glad when he did, even if it was only for five minutes (presumably so he wouldn’t take the focus off everyone else) in which we learn that Michael finally has kids like he always wanted. Dwight and Angela get married in a predictably weird ceremony at the beet farm. Jim and Pam start a new life in Austin. Kelly and Ryan return to hook up again, and abandon Ryan’s baby in the process. Stanley retires. Creed gets arrested for…whatever he’s done in the past. And Andy utters this oddly poignant bit of wisdom: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” The other great quote was the last line, which came from Pam and basically summed up the whole show: “There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?”

Breaking Bad

This show was never going to have a happy ending, but it pulled off a pretty satisfying one. Aside from a few lingering questions (i.e. how does one get ricin into a sealed-up stevia packet? And how, exactly, did Walt poison Brock?), they resolved everything, killed all the bad guys, and had Walt tie up all his loose ends before dying. Best of all, Jesse Pinkman lives! We last see him driving away laughing ecstatically, and I hope he found a new life somewhere else. But the moment of the finale that really stands out to me is Walt’s final meeting with Skyler. When she wearily says, “If I have to hear you say one more time that you did it for the family…” he surprises her, and us, by finally admitting, “I did it for me.” And strangely, it feels like the nicest thing he could say—probably because it’s the truth.

Friends

My memories of this finale are a bit tainted—I watched it with a bunch of friends in college, but as it happened, two of my friends who’d been dating went through a rather dramatic breakup that night, so that’s actually what I think of first when I remember this finale. But while this episode, on its own, isn’t one of the show’s best, it does wrap things up pretty nicely—Rachel gets off the plane and she and Ross are back together at last, Chandler and Monica end up adopting two babies instead of one after their birth mother realizes during labor that she’s having twins, and Joey…got his own short-lived show soon afterwards. In the end, they leave the big purple apartment behind and go get coffee.

Sex and the City
After the show ended, there were two movies- the first of which was fun at first watch but didn’t hold up upon rewatch and the second of which was just awful. If you forget about those, though, the last episode of Sex and the City was actually pretty great. For that matter, the whole last season was- SatC is that rare show where the ultimate season was its best one. Samantha is finally in real love, Charlotte gets a baby, Miranda is married with a kid and committed to her new family (even Steve’s ailing mom), and Carrie and Big (ugh) end up together, and his name is John. It worked, everyone was happy at the end, and they should have just left it here.

Six Feet Under

It’s weird that this is my favorite TV finale because the show overall is a bit of a mixed bag for me. It was about a family who ran a funeral home, and someone died in the cold open of each episode, often in a very strange way. (My near-death by falling vodka bottle would have fit right in on this show.) It starred Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall, Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose, and Rachel Griffiths, and the acting was superb. I wish I could say the same for the characters, who frequently became annoying. Peter Krause’s character, Nate, was awesome in Season 1, while his girlfriend Brenda (Griffiths), was not, and I thought Nate was way too good for Brenda. Well, by the last season, Nate had become unbearably obnoxious and selfish while Brenda had made strides toward redeeming herself, and by the end of the show I thought Brenda was too good for Nate. On the other hand, Federico, the one non-family employee of the funeral home, started off obnoxious and just got more and more so as the show went on. Michael C. Hall’s character, David, and his long-term boyfriend Keith were a couple you rooted for, but they had multiple variations on the same fight throughout the whole show. Season 4 had a really dumb plotline where David was kidnapped. Sometimes the fantasy sequences were overdone and got confusing. And I feel like whenever the writers got stuck for ideas, they pulled a character and a drug out of a hat and dedicated a subplot to seeing fill-in-the-blank character high on fill-in-the-blank drug. Seriously, way too much reliance on drugs as plot points.

And yet— the finale was excellent. It resurrected the touching moments that sometimes penetrated the weirdness and, fittingly, wrapped things up in the most final of ways—by flashing forward to the deaths of each of the main characters during a montage to Sia’s “Breathe Me.” It sounds morbid, but it was very fitting and left absolutely nothing unresolved. And rather than beginning the episode with a death, as all other episodes did, this one began with a birth—that of Nate and Brenda’s daughter Willa.

You Know What’s Awesome?

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Getting stuff done is awesome.

I was looking at this post I wrote a year ago today. And then I looked at this one from a few months later.

It feels awesome to want to do something and then actually do it.

I need to remember that in other aspects of my life. Right now I’m working on a collection of linked short stories and trying to get some other stories published- after I had that one accepted last year to The Sierra Nevada Review (it will come out in May), I don’t want that to be my only success.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again, and the luck of the Irish to you, but getting stuff done has nothing to do with luck. Or even with skill. There’s not much I’m sure of, but I do know that I’m capable of and good at working hard. So I’m going to remember this feeling: how awesome it is to realize you did something you really, really wanted to do.