2012: A Year of Firsts

It’s the last day of 2012. Society practically dictates that you take a look back and reflect on what you’ve seen and done throughout the course of the last 365 days (plus one for a leap). For film critics and other fanatics, this usually takes the form of “best of the year” top ten lists. I suppose I could have written one of those. However, in comparison to years past, I’ve hardly seen anything. Instead, I’ve looked wider and deeper at my life to uncover what I’ve accomplished this year for the first time ever. Don’t get too excited, as the following list still leaves me wanting.

1.) A full-time job. I know, I know. At 26, this should have happened to me earlier in life. But remember, I’ve been in school for about 20 cumulative years, and I only ever worked part-time before. Anyway, I’m still getting used to spending 8-hour-long days, five times a week, on my feet (and decidedly not behind a desk). This is just one of the many reasons why I’m not ideally suited to this particular full-time upright position. Side note: I was also an election judge for the first (and probably the last) time ever.

2.) Experience working with kids (no, I never babysat during my teenage years). More specifically, experience working with ESOL students. As you may already know, I think I want to be a public school teacher whose specialty is English for Speakers of Other Languages. For years, I have been working toward achieving this goal. 2012 was not without its setbacks in this regard, but in response to the first one I received, I chose to volunteer in the ESOL classroom. So far, so good. I’m set to continue my work next year.

3.) A movie-centric blog. I created CINE FEEL YEAH in January and redesigned it several times as its content areas quickly expanded. It took up so much of my time that I have all but quit hosting it. Perhaps next year I will return, with a simpler conceptual framework. Either that or I will start all over again, as I am wont to do.

4.) Compulsive TV-watching. Sure, I have always watched TV. But never before have the hours spent watching TV programs outnumbered the hours spent watching movies. Moving back home, where there is premium cable, at the end of last year pretty much sealed the deal. Some of my favorite programs to watch include Raising Hope, The Mindy Project (which I hate-watch, actually), The Neighbors, Modern Family (way over-hyped, but it’s solid entertainment), Nashville, Parks and Recreation (the best comedy on television), Grey’s Anatomy (don’t judge; I hate it as much as you do), Elementary, Rock Center with Brian Williams, Shark Tank (I’ve waxed rhapsodic about this one before), Downton Abbey (before everyone else was hooked!), Girls, True Blood (whose only good season was the first), and Boardwalk Empire, which leads me to the last item on the list…

5.) A crush on Jack Huston. His character on Boardwalk Empire, though a ruthless killer (he trained his sniper rifle on over 60 men during his stint fighting the Great War, which also left his face horribly disfigured, his voice raspy beyond all repair), is the most sympathetic and respectable of the bunch. What can I say? Men in three-piece suits just kill me. I freely admit that my admiration for Huston’s anti-hero has influenced me to see the actor in a special light. I’m not that familiar with his other work, and I suppose that if my crush was more fevered, I’d probably be rushing out to see David Chase’s coming-of-age rock ‘n’ roll story, Not Fade Away. But I’m not.

Here’s to hoping that, starting tomorrow, next year will be filled with even more firsts!

I’ve Seen This Before

Way too much overlap on TV tonight:

On Ben and Kate, special guest star Rob Corddry shoved a handful of shelled peanuts into his mouth, masticated, and then spat out the fibrous outer bits. Upon seeing this, I thought, I’ve already seen this kind of thing just this hour! That’s because, on Raising Hope, Jimmy and his adorable dad Burt competed in a contest to see who could hold more grapes in his mouth. They each held onto their spoils a little too long, and when it came time for them to talk, Jimmy and then Burt spat out the round fruits one by one. Gross but funny.

And it didn’t end there. At the beginning of the second season premiere of Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, Chloe shot her put-upon roommate June with a tranquilizer gun. Why? To keep June from interfering with her plan to stop BFF James Van Der Beek from organizing a Dawson’s Creek reunion.

Déjà vu. Also on Raising Hope, special guest star Wilmer “Fez” Valderrama shot Jimmy and his fiancee Sabrina with a tranquilizer gun—only he was aiming for a wild bear that was about to attack the couple and missed.

Honestly, just writing about these strange occurrences made me notice that not only are these sitcoms less-than-original (though of course they’re not aware of each other’s scripts ahead of time), they’re also really crazy.

Brainstorming in the Shower

While in the shower this evening, I tried to brainstorm topics for today’s post. Although everything I conjured up interests me in some way, I determined that none of them are really worthy of their own report. That’s just an excuse for my laziness, probably. I don’t have the energy to thoroughly engage any of the following subjects right now. After all, I have to get up at 5.30 tomorrow morning, and I have the first Presidential Debate to watch in a few minutes.

1.) I thought about writing on the documentary Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which premiered on PBS’s Independent Lens on Monday and Tuesday of this week. I DVR’d the second half because I was unable to see it as it aired last night. Since I have yet to watch these last two hours, I hesitate to comment on it. Suffice it to say that I found Half the Sky deeply moving even if I sometimes questioned the filmmakers’ editorial choices. You can watch the full episodes, 1 and 2, online through October 8 & 9, respectively.

2.) It also occurred to me to write something about how I’m afraid that the very talented Lena Dunham, writer-director-star of the controversial HBO series Girls (c’mon, you know what I’m talking about), is becoming the “voice” of my generation, an idea she satirizes on her show. First, there are reports that she is shopping around a memoir/advice book to the tune of $1 million. Is it a tie-in with her character Hannah Horvath’s aspiration to be a memoirist/very important essay writer/arbiter of taste (meaning: an instance of life imitating art imitating life)? I’m being cynical, I know, especially since I generally agree with her sentiment that, “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.” But does this justification for the book mean she’s transforming into a female James Franco? Is she spreading herself too thin? Then I read today that she spoke at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday. Vulture determined that the main takeaway from her talk was her regret that women viewers of color lamented the lack of racial diversity on the show, a problem she has sought to rectify in the program’s sophomore season. But say what?! Why is she speaking at this event? Who else spoke at the convention? And who exactly were the people in her audience?

3.) I might have mentioned that I noticed three generations of an acting family, all from the distaff side, appeared last night on two Fox TV comedies. First, Melanie Griffith guest-starred on Raising Hope, a cute sitcom with a wacky premise, as the mother of one of the main characters. Griffith’s own mother, Tippi The Birds Hedren, made a surprise cameo, too, playing her real-life daughter’s mother. And though I didn’t watch it, Ben and Kate, which aired immediately after Raising Hope, features Griffith’s daughter, Dakota Johnson, as the titular Kate. (You can see why this observation isn’t interesting enough to warrant its own post.)

I thought of other things while I was in the shower, but I have predictably forgotten them. Oh, if only I could use a pen and paper to jot my ideas down while standing under a faucet gushing gallons of water.