Category: Connections

The lower-case I is symbolic

There was a time when I liked romantic comedy films. Yes, it’s true! Despite my status as a burly exemplar of stoic masculinity, I once enjoyed the mixture of clever dialogue and bittersweet tension one might see employed by an early-period Bullock, Roberts or Ryan. Then, in the late nineties, romantic comedy went right down the shitter. In a mere five years, we went from While You were Sleeping and The Truth About Cats and Dogs to Legally Blonde and Kate and Leopold. Kate and Leopold, Liz Lemon.

Things have not improved since. The men are shrill, the women are boorish, the scripts are assembled from plot coupons and the banter is a nonsense collection of zero-liners. I saw The Proposal on an airplane a year and a half ago and I’m still angry about it.

But hey! Around the same time that came out, a lady named Jac Schaeffer triple-threatened an indie movie called (unfortunately) TiMER. It has the one girl from Buffy in it, it got a tiny distribution deal, nobody saw it and it holds a 58% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also the best romantic comedy I’ve seen in over a decade. Kara found it streaming on Netflix, and I offer the following three reasons to watch it if you like this kind of thing:

  • It passes Bechdel
  • If stuck in an elevator with the characters, I would not murder all of them inside five minutes
  • It posits a semi-science-fictional plot mechanic and actually explores some of its ramifications

I realize those bars are low enough to skate over, but I am not trying to damn with faint praise: it’s a fun movie and I was still thinking about it two days later. Its premise is that you can get a timer implanted in your arm. If your One True Love also has a timer, the two will automagically calculate the day you meet and start counting down to it. This is a big honking metaphor for a dominant cultural narrative applied to women, but the movie has the grace to hang a lampshade on that and then pull the Asimov trick and wonder how this can go wrong: one character has a blank timer and is on a crusade to get other people implanted, one has twenty years of waiting to look forward to, one has a timer go off way too soon, one gets a fake timer on the Internet, one has it painfully removed. And the ending isn’t as easy as you’re thinking!

Basically, this is a movie with smart jokes and kissing and it does a better job of exploring the conflict between free will and predestination than the Wachowskis did. My only improvement would be to put more than one nonwhite character in it, and also feed everyone involved a damn sandwich. (And not have the main character be named Oona. Hey, maybe Jac Schaeffer is a Wachowski.) Doubly recommended if you’re one of the nerds who liked Machine of Death.

Tracermancy

If you’re enjoying the Ashlock stories, you will definitely want to follow along with Wolverton, a fantastic series in the same world and format that Ben Carson is posting on a matching schedule. He also keeps coming up with cooler and more exciting twists, which is great, not at all like he’s making me look bad and had better WATCH HIS ASS OR ANYTHING CARSON

“Who’s the agent in charge to get my sister-in-law into bed these days.”

In the grand tradition of Dada Everything, and appropriately via Adam Parrish, comes Josh Millard’s Previously, on the X-Files… It’s fun! In a few minutes of hitting refresh to perform my valuable human function of sorting random nonsense from random inspiration, I was able to generate some pretty great stuff, like Dana Lebowski, Scully’s Terrible Realization and Scully/Langly: Dance Remix. But the best part about it is that the transcripts from which it draws seem to include a great many standalone ellipses, which work beautifully in the context of textual noise. Besides creating these amazing awkward moments, you also get tense standoffs and very confused Mulders and this spectacular failure to communicate.

Someone make one of these for Next Generation now please yes.

Confirmation bias at work

It’s nice to finally see a little backlash to TSA securititis coming from inside the airline industry. If the sheer annoyance of half a billion people couldn’t change the way Security Theater is conducted, maybe pissy pilots and CEOs will.

Dear both of my remaining readers

You may remember that Stephen and I used to do a podcast! Then, we got tired, and he bought a condo, and I got a job where I couldn’t spend all day fucking around and editing podcasts. So the podcast stopped!

We’ll be on a biweekly-if-we-can-manage-it schedule for this season, but it’s for reals. We’ve got some amazing guest stars lined up that I can’t even tell you about–because I decided not to. I hope you will listen! But only if you like mean jokes about bad people.

I hate Lev Grossman

What’s that? Lev Grossman wrote a vacuous cover article for Time? I am taken aback! The Stranger (and its sister publication here, the Mercury) grate on me with their preciousness from time to time, but I admire the execution of Noah Kalina’s mirror-parody. It would have fit right into Modern Humor Authority, and I don’t think I’ve ever said that before about something that actually showed up in print.

If none of the preceding makes sense to you, you can pretty much reduce this entire post to its title.

How the HELL did it take me this long to find out about Hyperbole and a Half? Allie Brosh is the best humor columnist alive and she’s been doing it for years and nobody ever told me! (Until Leigh tweeted about it. Thanks, Leigh!) I cannot get through one of her posts without doing the weird crying soundless death-rattle laugh thing that always bothers my roommates, and lately “go to the motherfucking BANK like an ADULT” has been my private mantra when I’m trying to make myself do difficult things.