Posts Tagged 'craptastic'

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Ugh

Published August 21, 2009 local 3 Comments
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You know, I love a good human interest story as much as the next person, and in this age of declining newspaper sales and, well, newspapers, maybe small-market journalists would be better off staying close to home and reporting on local flavor, but this is pushing it.  This is the big story on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s online paper today.

I’m really disappointed in the papers in Wisconsin these days.  I used to subscribe to the Capital Times and while I acknowledged that it was a pretty bad paper, the poor quality had its charms.  Paragraphs were often repeated several times, stories often had no conclusions or discernable points, and local news could be about something as inane as me.  Well, it never quite reached that level, but it teetered close to the line.  But now, with only the State Journal and the Journal Sentinel left, I feel lost.  No question, the Milwaukee paper is way better than Madison’s version (putting aside today’s ridiculous story), but when I want daily Madison news, I’m left with the cold, charmless and incomplete State Journal.

Thank goodness for the Isthmus.

So angry

Published May 12, 2009 local 15 Comments
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I was angry when Mayor Dave recently proposed raising bus fares from $1.50 to $2 a ride.  This made me so angry, I could barely articulate the reasons for my rage.  This is Madison, WI not Chicago or NYC or any other major metropolitan area where such a fee may be reasonable.  As salaries are being cut, jobs lost and a general recession/depression sets in, this is the worst time to raise bus fares.  Particularly in my fair town, public transportation is used in disproportionate numbers by the less well-to-do.  [As I’ve said before, I am one of the only people I know who regularly takes the bus.  I do so because it is fairly convenient for me, parking is too expensive and I’m trying to do something environmentally sound from time to time.  Additionally, given that I refuse to bike in winter, it just makes sense most of the year.]  A fifty cent increase hurts everyone, but it is a particular smack in the face to those who make a paltry hourly wage.  Four dollars to ride round-trip in Madison!  Well, said the mayor, we must have this money otherwise we will be forced to cut services.  The Transportation Committee on the Common Council voted down the increase, but the Council overrode that vote.  Bugger!  So, now, here we sit at $2 a ride, one of the highest rates in the country.  Well, phew, we’re not cutting services.  Right?  Right!  Not only are we not cutting services, we’re increasing services!  And where?  Between the UW campus and the UW hospital.  Who rides this route the most often?  Well, I’d have to guess that it’s mostly students.  Students who get a free bus pass with their student fees.  And, I was told by my alder, that the contract for those passes was not in negotiations at this time.  So, basically, if all of this is true, the rest of us lowly busriders are just subsidizing a primarily UW student bus route.  WTF?

And another thing that really, REALLY pisses me off are these &^%$@#* “mobile billboards” or whatever the f— they’re called.  You know, the ones for, say, TQ Diamonds…A dumb truck drives around town with a big billboard-y type thing on its  bed with a sign for a dumb store in town.  Most often it is TQ Diamonds.  I don’t know where this shop is, but I hate it.  I called them once to tell them so, but it didn’t seem to have much of an impact.  In this economy and in this environment, what kind of insensitive moron do you have to be to think that advertising on a gas-guzzling truck for your blood diamonds is anything but a morally condemnable idea?  Dis-gusting.

Ok, sorry for the rant.  I’ll be nothing but sunshine tomorrow.

Teapots

Published April 15, 2009 local 22 Comments
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I guess I was the last to hear about these imaginative tea parties being hosted by our nation’s finest today.  Well, I’ve heard now.  I just came back from outside where I was checking on what these folks were up to across the street at my beloved Capitol.  There are hundreds of them!  There are buses pulling up and depositing very un-Madisonians all over the Square.  Many are carrying signs that say things like, “Stop taxing me!” or whatnot.  I’m slightly puzzled by the timing of this, as I had more money than before in last week’s paycheck.  I understand, of course, that some people hate paying taxes.  I am not one of them.  I think taxes are very helpful in creating an orderly, civilized society.  I realize, also of course, that these taxes are not always spent by the gov in great ways.  I, like everyone else except people who control these things, am not a big fan of all these bailouts.  I get protesting against stuff like that.  I understand being worried about the debt the country is getting itself further and further into.  Protesting against that makes sense.  But it doesn’t seem to me that that’s what the people across the street are protesting.  I don’t know what the hell they’re protesting actually.  It seems everyone might have a different agenda.  One sign complained that Obama is violating the Tenth Amendment (what?).  One that urged us to make sure we exercised our Second Amendments rights.  Several people had tea bags affixed to their signs.  Someone said they were “Tead off!”  [Side note: some people had some wicked ugly homemade signs.  That always irks me.  You know, like the ones where the person starts out writing something like, “STOP TAXING me” and they have to make the “me” really small because they ran out of room.]  Then there were others who expressed their anger with Doyle, others advocating term limits and still others who want the US out of the United Nations.  Focus, people!  The biggest offender, though, goes to whomever made their eight year old hold a sign that says, “Don’t forget: everything Hitler did was legal.”  Yes, this country right now is strikingly similar to Nazi Germany.  Sharp minds.

Craptastic take two

Published February 21, 2009 movies 10 Comments
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Saw The Reader yesterday. My first words (letters, really) when the ending credits rolled were, “WTF?”  Seriously, WTF?  I am so confused by the seriousness with which people are taking this movie.  I am floored that this movie has gotten positive reviews.  It is, in a word, craptastic!  It starts out ok — the relationship between Michael, the boy, and Hannah, the woman, is somewhat interesting and benefits from the young Michael’s charm.  During this portion, we are in late 1950s West Germany (at least mostly; sometimes we are in a more modern-day Germany with Ralph Fiennes being all cold and distant).  And that’s pretty much where any part of the movie that could be considered good ends.  After this point, the acting deteriorates rapidly and the inanity begins.  Michael goes off to law school in Heidelberg and takes what can only be described as the dumbest law school class I’ve ever seen.  The six or so students sit around and look morose and pained while discussing the then-current prosecution of former members of the S.S.  One of the students is prone to ridiculous outburts that are all over the map — he alternately thinks the judicial proceedings against six female guards is “justice!” and then, later, a “diversion!”  He screams and screams while his professor stupidly stands around looking impotent and saying things like, “A diversion? From what?”  and “Exciting?  How so?”  These kids really should demand their tuition back.  Anyway, as you know, Michael attends these proceedings to discover that Hannah is one of these former guards on trial for her life.  It is at this point that Kate Winslet really lost it, in my opinion.  Her constant forlorn, deer-in-the-headlights, confused look as to why she was on trial for sending her prisoners to Auschwitz was just plain ridiculous.  Is she stupid, naive or evil?  Are we somehow supposed to find nuance or humanity in her here?  It’s just dumb and unbelievable.    This stupidity and unbelievability are summed up in the image of another of the defendants knitting during the trial.  I don’t dare to suggest that it seems entirely implausible that any country’s justice system would allow a defendant to knit during her trial, but how annoying and over-the-top was it to force this image down our throat?  Oh, these women are just horrid!  They were guards in a concentration camp and in the mid-to-late 1960s they still don’t get it, they are callous, unapologetic, evil ladies.  Making characters purely evil like that is the place of comic book stories.  I just had to roll my eyes. 

After this point, Michael’s behavior becomes inexplicable to me.  Actually, everything after this was inexplicable to me.  The law student becoming such a hystrionic weirdo; the other law student storming out of the class; the vacant, Alzheimer-suffering professor; Hannah deciding it would be better to admit to horrendous war crimes than to admit she can’t read; Michael deciding he must confront her about this, only to back out; Michael growing up unable to be close to anyone made known to us by him telling us that (was this because Hannah was a Nazi or because of the fact he had a serious affair at 15 with a much older woman or because he had suffered from scarlet fever as a kid or just because?  Does anyone care?); Michael making cassette tapes of the books he had already read to Hannah and sending them to her in prison, but refusing to acknowledge her attempts at literacy; Michael visiting her in prison when she is set to be released and refusing to touch her (this seems way more to me because she is old now, and not because he now knows she was a Nazi); and Hannah’s you-could-see-it-coming-from-almost-the-first-frame-of-the-movie-suicide.

Maybe the weirdest of all, though, was the near-final scene of the movie.  Hannah is dead and she has left her money to a woman who had been a young girl in the camp at which Hannah worked and grew up to write a book about her experience (she had testified at Hannah’s trial).  This woman, played by Lena Olin, is so unbelievable I felt I had missed something.  Michael goes to see her in America and their conversation is beyond odd.  I want to recount it word-for-word just to emphasize the totally bizarre quality of it, but I will summarize it as this:

Michael:  I don’t know if you heard, but Hannah just died.

Lena Olin:  Am I supposed to feel bad?

Michael:  No, but she was a friend of mine.

Lena Olin:  I demand to know what kind of relationship you two had!

Michael:  We had an affair a long time ago.

Lena Olin:  People always ask me what I learned in the camps.  No one goes to the camps for an education.  Nothing comes out of the camps!!!!

Michael:  Anyway, she left you this money.

Lena Olin:  I cannot accept that money!!  If I gave it to a Jewish group having something to do with the Holocaust, it would be inappropriate!!!!

Michael:  I was thinking a literacy group.

Lena Olin:  Oh, yeah, that’d be ok.  But Jews can read.

Michael:  Thank you so much.

Lena Olin:  I’m keeping this tea tin.

Basically, the end.  Again, WTF?

A cliched Monday & a wrestling spoiler

Published February 16, 2009 movies 36 Comments
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I am in such a bad mood again and I feel terrible about it.  The day started out fine.  I mean, it’s Monday and I’m still shaking this cold, so I was a little foggy, but mostly it was ok.  Pup and I took a stroll around the block.  My bus driver asked me if I was spoiled on Valentine’s Day.  And a nice lady in the elevator made a friendly comment that I didn’t understand until she got off on the fourth floor.  Oops.  But then. 

The first thing was there was a message for me on my work voicemail left a little after 8 am from the Board president telling me he had sent me an email and needed my vote on something asap.  Well, it was now 9:30 since that’s what time I get to work.  I check my email and there’s a dozen emails about said-item-on-which-to-vote that indicate I am the last to vote.  Oh, shut up.  Then I try to pay my mobile phone bill because I got a letter this weekend saying, “Oops!  Did you forget to pay us?”  And, of course, I have.  I must have signed up for webbills or something because I have not received a paper bill from them in some time.  This is Credo mobile, which used to be Working Assets.  Does anyone else have them?  I used to really love Working Assets but since getting their mobile plan, I’ve had nothing but trouble, really.  I’ve had to hassle on several overbilling problems and their failure to give me credit for switching plans, which they had promised.  Anyway, that has all been in the past.  But today I am trying to pay the bill online and I’ve been thwarted.  You have to enroll in their webbilling program to pay.  Well, I tried and get the response that I’ve already enrolled.  But, I tried using my normal, and variations upon the normal, userid and am locked out.  To retrieve your user id?  You have to send them an email.  What?  So, hmm.  I wonder when I’ll hear back about that.  I am trying to pay my bill, and I can’t.  I really, really hate that.

And the last thing is, my office is a total mess and it’s driving me crazy.

What I actually wanted to talk about, though, is The Wrestler.  Have you seen this little film that has generated so much buzz?  Well, if you haven’t, I definitely am not going to be the one to suggest you do.  I have no idea — other than Mickey Rourke being Mickey Rourke and being in the movie — why in the world this movie has received so much attention.  Though not nominated for best picture (thank God), it has received too big of a share of the awards season’s spotlight.  Interestingly, Springsteen’s song — easily the best part of the movie (not just because the movie isn’t very good, but because the song is a masterpiece) — is not nominated for an Oscar, despite winning Best Song at the Globedy Globes.  Explain that!  Anyway, back to the movie.  I thought the trailer was great — it looked compelling, heartfelt, honest and redemptive.  I suppose it was maybe honest.  But not really in a good way.  More in the sense that a grocery store looks kinda like the one in the movie. 

Mickey Rourke plays Randy the Ram, a professional wrestler whose actual name is Robin.  Isn’t that hilarious?  The thing is, I thought the movie was about an on-in-years professional wrestler who tries to stage a comeback, despite the industry telling him he’s finished.  I thought the movie was about pursuing your dream and not letting others tell you you’re not good enough.  I thought the movie was going to be one man’s tale of victory in the face of defeat.  Boy was I wrong.  This is a movie about a guy who’s really, pretty much, a selfish ass.  I suppose it’s a tragedy — Robin’s fatal flaw is his love of wrestling in front of a crowd cheering for him, wearing flashy tights and cutting himself with a razor blade for his fans entertainment.  And it is his fatal flaw.  Well, one of them.  The other seems to be he can think only of himself.  Let me be clear: this movie is bleak.  It is violent (in the sense that there’s a lot of blood and guts, not in the sense that people are really maliciously hurting each other) and there is a lot of ugly sex stuff, including a really super vulgar sex scene.  Marisa Tomei, playing the proverbial stripper with a heart, is in a dumb role.  She’s fine in it, of course, since she’s Marisa Tomei, but the role is ill-defined and cliched.  I know it would be unusual for Randy to meet a woman at, say, a library or the symphony, but really, it has to be that he’s in love with the on-in-years stripper?  And I fail to see any meaningful parallels between their worlds.  Yes, they are both aging in a young person’s profession.  But he loves wrestling.  I don’t get the impression that she loves stripping and is sad that the frat boys at the bachelor party reject her for being too old.  [Sidenote: I found that sort of unbelievable.  I know I’ve never been to a strip club, but I have to imagine having someone as attractive as Marisa Tomei working in a tacky Jersey strip club  would not be something a young man would thumb his nose at.]  In any event, what basically happens is Randy is going along, wrestling on the weekends, stocking stock at a grocery store during the week.  One day, bam, he takes it too far and has a heart attack.  The doc tells him to knock off the wrestling.  He asks Marisa Tomei out for a hamburger.  She says he should call his daughter.  He buys Evan Rachel Wood a pea coat and takes her to the Jersey Shore where they discover an abandoned ballroom.  He has fun at his new job at the deli counter.  He asks Marisa Tomei out again.  She tells him she doesn’t date customers and, really, he doesn’t know her and she has a kid, does he really want that?  Instead of convincing her he does want that and telling her that he’ll stop being a customer, he insults and degrades her.  He then blows off Evan Rachel Wood by having sex in a bathroom with a firefighter-loving cokehead (what was this about?).  He then decides to wrestle again.  He tells Marisa Tomei about it when she comes to apologize to him.  Yes, you heard that right.  She apologizes to him.  She quits her job and runs to find him at his big event, asking him not to do it, offering herself to him.  He rejects her, goes out to the ring, his heart is failing him, he adopts some sort of Christ-like pose and bam!  Springsteen!

What the hell was the point of this movie?  I have no idea.  I found it self-indulgent and pretty vacuous.  Plus, the handheld cams made me dizzy.

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