Chicago: customers are advised to allow extra travel time

I've realized I don't really like seeing mainstream comedies in the theater, because I never laugh as much as everyone else, which then means that my initial reaction is, "C'mon, it's not that funny" instead of just enjoying it for what it is.

I'm sometimes concerned that my laugh is obnoxious to seatmates who don't know me.

your laugh is boisterous and full of joy

and obnoxious

does anyone want to sample the air and water show?

p.s. my dumb job that took away my music privileges also took away almost all internet too, although they have subsequently let me listen to music again, i guess because they could tell it wasn't hurting my performance. anyway so that's why i have been absent lately.

does anyone want to sample the air and water show?

sounds... scientific.

I napped in the park yesterday at lunch (great idea, btw, I recommend highly), and the planes kept waking me up. Shit is shockingly loud. And it doesn't come on gradually, either... you don't hear the plane approaching. You just allofasudden hear this deafening thunderclap.

so let's go check it out! planes!

I saw it a couple ears ago, it's pretty frickin cool, no doubt.

years ago, obv. Although "a couple ears ago" is funny, considering how loud it is.

"Yeah, I saw My Bloody Valentine live, but that was a couple ears ago."

Mark C. - is your address still h0tmail? I'm sending a note there; correct me if I'm wrong.

So in Superbad, do the male protagonists come to the realization that fucking women who would not consent to have sex with them if they weren't drunk beyond reason is rape? Or should I just avoid the movie?

The air show is a bad day for our cats.

I get more than a sampling of the show here at home, though I wouldn't mind participating in it more wholly sometime.

The dog at my work is scared to death of the air and water show. She hides under the sink in the bathroom, or she hides her head under things. I was standing in one H's office talking to her and she came up and jammed her face face, hiding up to her eyes, into my crotch.

Jenny, omg hi! I know I kind of missed it but congratulations on taking the bar!

Hmmm. Superbad contains a number of growing-up revelations, including that getting girls drunk to have sex with them is wrong*. Nonetheless it's best to play it safe on this one: avoid the movie at all costs.

*Not really a spoiler, but still, it's something about a particular scene:

At one point Michael Cera's character gets himself drunk because he felt that it would be predatory to make out with a girl who was drunk while he was sober.

HI! Congratulations on the job and on being done with school! (You're done now, right?)

Did I read correctly that you're going to Sarah's partay??? I miss you! Let's hang!

xp to Jesse - Yeah. You know I had mixed feelings about Knocked Up, so I was sorting of leaning towards avoidance. Judd Apatow makes funny movies but he has some weird hang ups about women and sex. Maybe I'll catch it on video, just because of my Michael Cera love.

Like this from a review:

When Seth (Jonah Hill) tries to explain to his best friend, the sweet, overanxious Evan (Michael Cera) what kind of porn he likes, he insists that it has to have penises in it. "Have you ever seen a vagina by itself?" He shakes his head ruefully. "Not for me."

That plus the weird vaginal birth shot from knocked up... It's like the dude is just terrified of vaginas. Dudes being afraid of lady parts doesn't usually bode well for women.

It's also odd about how much of Apatow's work revolves around men's attempts to get access to vaginas, with this undercurrent of terror and revulsion toward the very thing they seek to obtain. That's kind of misogyny in a nutshell.

DID YOU MISS ME ILX?

I read something about how they were on the fence about the crowning scene, but they decided to leave it in in order to lend veracity or something.

Michael Cera is seriously awesome.

I think that he's making movies about man-boys who are afraid of vaginas.

HUH. Firefox spell check says no to "vaginas." It wants me to write "vaginae."

Jenny, bring me chicken noodle soup.

I kind of think I'm gonna call in sick for work tonight. Signs point to yes. I feel like pure death.

Bring me vaginae noodle soup.

thanks! I'm not actually done with school (because, seriously, I will never be done with school) but at least I'm done with everything but the dissertation.

yeah, I really loved Knocked Up even though there's definitely some feminist brouhaha to be raised there. I think the thing is, what Judd Apatow is invested in is the way men get along and women always become secondary + also, inasmuch as his movies reflect the ways groups of men think about women they are sometimes upsetting.

xposts dude, this is totally what ILX has been missing

Wow. Jenny and Jeff's pics of Colorado are...rad-o. It reminds me of my teen years in deepest Montana.

It also puts me in mind of the joys of low humidity!

Okay, Jenny, since you're here I'm going to post this.

Further thoughts on Knocked Up and contemporary movies like it:

David Denby had this article in the New Yorker sort of ruefully critiquing Knocked Up on the quite solid grounds of its inadequate characterization of Katherine Heigl's character. (I hate David Denby, but he was right about that.) But then he went on to say something's gone missing from the romantic comedy since the 30s and 40s (I mean, that argument is nothing new) and all the comedies he cited involved a strong-willed female character bracing at the institutionalized inequality of her moment. The problem he seemed to identify with modern movies involving relations between the sexes is that the female characters tend to have their shit together but concomitantly not to be fully-realized characters in the way, say, Katherine Hepburn was in many many movies. I was discussing this with a friend and she burst out with, "that's because no one knows what a woman IS when she's not being oppressed!" which seems sort of right and relevant.

I think that he's making movies about man-boys who are afraid of vaginas.

I agree. I don't think our statements contradict each other.

As for the crowning scene... I think they left it in because it's the big comedy gross-out pay off scene, the vaginal equivalent of Ben Stiller's balls caught in his zipper. If they were so interested in veracity, they could have: 1) had the female lead actually contemplate terminating her pregnancy; 2) used the word "abortion; or 3) showed a sex scene in which the female lead took off her bra (but of course, that would require the sex scenes to be less like something a bumbling man child would imagine and look more like, well, sex).

I think Apatow is just (another in a long line of) male POV comedy directors. His movies are funnier than the Something About Mary/Kingpin/Dumb and Dumber train wrecks of the past, but he's not really breaking any new ground with his cinematic angle (and in some ways (masturbation is gross and sex should wait until marriage, ie) he's regressing substantially).

Although I'm confident in asserting that Superbad is a step forward from Losing It. So he's got that going for him.

xp - HS, YES! And I think the way the female characters are most often not fully realized is in their relationships with men. It's like this underlying message to the male audience from the male directors (and a subtler and more damaging message to the female audience) that no matter how together a woman may look, she's still enough of an emotional wreck to keep some unemployed stoner's baby, even if it totally ruins her promising career (which in Knocked Up it didn't, which is another HUGE problem I had with the movie but that's another conversation). So this gives men hope (together-looking women are still dominatable in some way) and women a message (you really aren't that together, so go get into an unfulfilling relationship). Your friends comment sounds pretty solid to me. Patriarchy! You're soaking in it!

xp to Jesse - the lack of humidity was awes. We went biking in 90 degree heat and it was really... no big deal!

I'm going to go throw a can of Campbel's through Jesse's window now.

guh, that would require leaving the apartment.

I think another reason I'm inclined to cut Apatow some slack, which may be insidious, is that he's a lot more aware of gender + sexuality as an ideology than, like, the Farrelly Brothers. (My favorite scene in 40 y.o. virgin is the "you know how I know you're gay?" scene with Rudd + Rogen (totally the Hepburn and Tracy of the NEW MILLENIUM!)) But you're right, one can be aware that gender is constructed and create male characters who aren't huge assholes and still create movies with a lot of retrograde gender baggage.

Holy moly, I just read that Curtis Hanson (of Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, L.A. Confidential, etc.) directed Losin' It.

Jenny, skip Superbad and rent Laurel Canyon instead.

http://www.postersnthings.com/posters/little_darlings.jpg

Don't forget, there was equality in the teen-sex romp in 1981.

I mean, that's the thing. the romance of Knocked Up is the one between Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen, because when heat isn't being generated out of overt sexism, like it was in the 30s and 40s, women just drop off the radar as interesting characters. I guess I think it's kind of exciting from an artistic perspective, because it's uncharted territory. some directors who are invested in female characters need to get on this, I guess.

Oh dear. It's too late to call in to work. Seafood gourmands, prepare to risk the crud.

I don't think I can think straight enough to respond intelligently to anything anyone's saying, except that the bra-on sex thing really bugs the FUCK out of me in a movie. They do it either to preserve a rating or because the actor with her bra on does not wish to show boobs. In this case I think it was the latter.

Also annoying: a morning-after scene in which both characters are in their underwear.

also, yeah, Jenny, Apatow can be weirdly puritanical about sex. that was true about 40 y.o. virgin, too. the "freaky" chick really was represented as beyond the pale.

The romance in Superbad is between the 2 main male characters too. But it's also about moving beyond male bonding. I can't say much more without spoilering.

In Superbad the str8-male-male romance was fucking over the top, actually.

The credits sequence is FUCKING awesome, with Cera and whatchacallhim dancing in 70s-ish silhouette with funk music playing.

to the extent that contemporary romantic comedy is quippy and good in the way Philadelphia Story was, I think it's always straight-male-to-male romantic comedy.

(I think Denby's disapproval of that trend in contemporary movies had a whiff of homosexual panic around it.)

I can't believe you all watch that sexist filth when you could be enjoying the egalitarian Trapped in the Closet.

Some one convince me to go running today.

yeah, someone convince me, too.

<i>...when heat isn't being generated out of overt sexism, like it was in the 30s and 40s, women just drop off the radar as interesting characters. guess I think it's kind of exciting from an artistic perspective, because it's uncharted territory. some directors who are invested in female characters need to get on this, I guess.</i>

I think these kinds of stories and movies are being made all the time (of the once I've seen in the past few weeks <i>Once</i> and <i>Before Sunset</i> come to mind. Maybe there's a new model for the romantic comedy out there that hasn't been made yet. It's just that these movies aren't going to be summer blockbusters.

Though, you know, <i>The Breakfast Club</i> kind of pulled this off, as far as a Hollywood movie targeted to mall kids.

Ooh, look at all those pretty attempts at tagging italics.

I would love to go running. I can't wait till I can again. Jeff, horseshoe: run! Run while you can! For tomorrow you might have no legs!

that's true, Eric, maybe I'm just talking about an outdated model of movie. but Before Sunset isn't really a romantic comedy in my mind, just a romantic movie. maybe it's the comedy where the conservatism enters. also, don't really think of TBC as a romantic comedy.

Yeah, I started thinking about movies in general more than outright romantic comedies. The comedies will always have men and women with hang-ups, but it's hard to know what would be a new way to tell a story about those hang-ups in a way that was both satisfying and innovative.

Superbad has a really interesting relationship at its center, and its not between a woman a man, it's between two high school boys. Ebert says: "In its very raunchiness, it finds truth, because if you know nothing about sex, how can you be tasteful and sophisticated on the subject?" The Seth character is gross (and funny) about "getting some vadge", but of course he has never had sex. The Evan (George Michael) character is more respectful, but he turns "respectful" into its own fetish. There's a great sequence where he forces himself to get drunk just to keep up, and then when he gets to the girl, she wants him to drink more. He makes a slurry toast to "respect for women." The movie never for a second makes adolescent sex look any less awful and awkward than you remember it.

Don't believe the previews, Jenny, this movie is great.