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Oscar Resistance 2013

As you know if you followed my blog last year around this time, I have a love-hate relationship with the Academy Awards.  I love discussing them, watching them with friends in a party-like atmosphere, and competing with my family to see who can predict them the most accurately.  This year, I have a new activity to love: watching as many Oscar-nominated movies as possible in one weekend with my friend and fellow blogger Allison (allisonscoles.wordpress.com) and some other friends.  Here’s what I hate: the Academy’s narrow and outdated ideas of what a nomination-worthy film looks like.  I also bear a pointless hatred toward the practical constraints of an awards show; I wish every good movie that came out in the past year could get a nod.  Yes, the ceremony would be really long, but I would watch it!

Over the past week, I have gone to the local second-run theater to see three movies that will not be winning any Oscars this year because they weren’t nominated.  Even though I didn’t plan this “Oscar Resistance,” as I’m now calling it because it sounds AWESOME (cue that song by Muse), it will serve as a nice counterpoint to the above-mentioned event, Allison’s “Moviepalooza.”  And now I’m going to tell you about the movies I saw.

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I saw this on strong recommendation from my two siblings and my mother, none of whom are teenagers.  So I figured it wouldn’t be just a cliched teen angst movie, and I was right.  All of the main characters are in high school, but the problems they face–and this is a movie, like most good movies, about people with problems–aren’t unique to teenagers; they’re human problems.  As you can probably guess from the title, one of those problems involves finding a few people you can feel comfortable with, so that you can be okay with not “fitting in,” whatever that means.  If you’ve never faced this problem, you are one of a very few fortunate people, and you probably won’t get this movie.  If you have faced this problem, whatever your age, this movie will probably make you cry.  The carefully chosen songs on the soundtrack are a large part of that; so is the excellent acting.  Logan Lerman broke my heart (I mean that in a good way).  And if, like me, you’re a Harry Potter fan wondering how Emma Watson will fare playing an American Muggle, have no fear; she’s great.  But I do have to admit that when her character, Sam, admitted to completely bombing her SATs, my first thought was that Hermione would never do that.

2. Here Comes the Boom.  Okay, look.  I know this movie doesn’t deserve a single Oscar nomination.  But neither was it a complete waste of my time.  There is an in-between, you know.  Some movies don’t want to win Oscars, and that’s fine.  I do have a slight beef with the way Here Comes the Boom was advertised; it was made out to look like a zany comedy, and it was actually more of an inspirational teacher movie plus an inspirational sports movie, with some zany comedy thrown in.  As with most films from the above-named genres, I was asked to accept a few improbabilities, but Kevin James as a mixed martial arts fighter was actually not one of them; the guy has muscles.  Who knew?  The other notable cast member was Henry Winkler as a somewhat pathetic but lovable and very funny baggy sweater-wearing music teacher.  Between the teachers in this movie and Paul Rudd’s character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I was just full of inspiration for my first week of spring classes.

3. Hitchcock.  Now here’s a movie that may have been trying for a few Oscar nominations.  In fact, Helen Mirren was deservedly nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Alfred Hitchcock’s talented and long-suffering wife, Alma Reville.  Probably the reason why this film ended up flying under the Academy radar is that it isn’t a DRAMA.  There were no tears, no screaming (except when one character was getting stabbed…in a shower)–it was actually a pretty conventional love story between two people who share thirty years of marriage.  The context in which the love story takes place, however, is rather unconventional: it’s the making of Psycho, complete with quirky actors, cantankerous censors, and some trippy magical-realist scenes in which Hitchcock (you can call him Hitch; everyone in the movie does) voyeuristically observes and converses with Ed Gein, the real-life, significantly less sympathetic (mainly because he isn’t cute) version of Norman Bates.  I believe my own familiarity with Psycho helped my enjoyment of Hitchcock, but my aunt and cousin with whom I saw Hitchcock had never seen Psycho and still had a good time.  (Oh, if you’re worried about spoilers, you may want to avert your eyes frequently.  But seriously, Psycho has been out for 53 years; you have no excuse.)  As the title character, Anthony Hopkins does an excellent job, as always.  Even putting his acting aside, he deserves some props for gaining an alarming amount of weight for this role.  (I thought the Academy liked that kind of stuff, altering your appearance and all that?  But maybe they didn’t want to be seen to condone obesity.  Heaven forbid.)

Well, this post is entirely too long.  I apologize.  I invite you to join the Oscar Resistance by watching some recent films that didn’t get the blessing of the Academy.  And remember, you can be part of the resistance and still go see the nominees–I’m going to see Les Miserables next week.

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There and back again

No, this is not a review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, although I will take this opportunity to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, enough to see it twice.  Look, if the ambivalent hype has made you skittish about seeing it, just remember that you’ll be in the capable hands of Peter Jackson.  Has he ever let you down before (at least when it comes to Tolkien material)?  And if you start getting cold feet during the lengthy prologue, just stick it out a bit longer, and you’ll spend the rest of the movie in the charming company of the absolutely delightful Martin Freeman.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Actually, the title of this post is a reference to a post called “Returning” that I wrote nearly a year ago.  It was mostly about the themes of restoration and homecoming as they appear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I didn’t know it then, of course, but those themes in general, along with the story of the prodigal son, ended up being prominent in my mental and spiritual landscape throughout 2012.

For example, there was the David Crowder Band’s epic two-disc farewell album, Give Us Rest or (a requiem mass in c [the happiest of all keys]).  In a year that saw the release of some great albums, this was one of my favorites, not only because I love a good requiem (Mozart’s is wonderful), but also because so many of the songs are on that theme of returning, which is one way of looking at the death of a saint.  In fact, one of the songs is called “A Return,” and it mainly consists of the repeated lyric “the son has come home/we’re rejoicing.”  I usually just call it “the prodigal son song.”

Then I read Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.  (FYI: I’ve read all of his novels now except for Barnaby Rudge, which I plan to read soon.  Perhaps a Dickens mega-review when I’m finished?)  Of the many memorable characters in that novel, the one who haunted me the longest after I finished reading was Charlie Hexam, a prodigal son who never returns.  Dickens characters usually get some sort of closure; they may come to a good end or a bad end, but the point is that they come to an end.  Charlie doesn’t.  After he formally renounces his family, he disappears into the bureaucratic machine of the Victorian educational system, and we never hear from him again.  It may be a minor plot line, but I read it as a frightening cautionary tale.

After I had been thinking about these themes for a while, I got the opportunity to teach a month of lessons in the 5th-6th grade girls’ Awana club I was volunteering in at the time.  One night, I decided to tell the story of the prodigal son and focus on the older son, who’s just as lost as his little pig-slopping brother.  Lo and behold, the issue of Christianity Today that I received that very day included a reflection on that very topic, and I was able to incorporate the author’s thoughts into my lesson.

These things may not seem like a big deal, but they provided something like mental background music for me all year.  I even wrote a little poem in October about the different types of prodigal sons.  It would be nice if I could provide examples of the way that this theme affected my life in visible ways, but I’m not sure if that happened.  Or maybe I won’t be able to see that it happened until I get some distance from 2012.

There’s a Bible verse that keeps popping into my mind because it has the word “returning” in it, but it also has four other major nouns. The verse is Isaiah 30:15, in which God, “the Holy One of Israel,” says to his people, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”  It’s too early to say, but maybe one of those other nouns will become my theme for 2013.  I know that rest and confidence, in particular, are things I want more of, and nobody’s keeping them from me but me.

This post has been more self-reflective (you might say navel-gazing) than I usually like to be on this blog.  So let’s make this a conversation–do you ever choose or discover a theme for a given period of time in your life?  I would love to hear some of them (and possibly borrow one from you).

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About yesterday, and about Christmas

Yesterday after I heard about the elementary school shooting (a phrase that should never have entered the language) in Newtown, Connecticut, I tweeted a link to Dylan Thomas’s poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” which is about the inadequacy and, often, the inappropriateness of words in the face of death, especially the death of a child.  I hope that in the following comments I will not violate the spirit of his poem or dishonor the victims, that I will not “murder / the mankind of [their] going with a grave truth” (14-15).

One of the most striking things about this event is how close it happened to Christmas.  A friend of mine mentioned last night that the children’s parents had probably already bought their presents.  This certainly makes what happened all the more horrible, but we shouldn’t be shocked that someone could do something like this during the holiday season.  Sometimes we (that is, Western civilization in general) think that people magically become more charitable or at least more “decent” at Christmastime.  Charles Dickens, in A Christmas Carol, played a large role in creating this misconception.  In the story, it is the spirit (literally) of Christmas itself that brings about an unforeseen, quick, and complete transformation in Scrooge.  Though I love A Christmas Carol, I think Dickens is wrong–which is not something I say very often, so this is important.

Christmas does not make us better people.  Christ does.  This is called sanctification, and it takes a long time and can be difficult.  The statistics we hear every year about depression at Christmas, and now yesterday’s shooting, are evidence that the month of December has no special power to transform lives.  Only the one whose birth we celebrate at Christmas can do this.

I’m not trying to be cynical.  If our favorite things about Christmas–the music, the decorations, the gift-giving–prompt those of us who are Christians to act like what we are being transformed into–the image of Christ–so much the better.  And even better if our celebration of Christmas becomes an act of witness-bearing, to give those who do not yet know Christ a glimpse of what the world might look like if all people were restored to what we were created to be, and still have the potential to be: God’s children.  But the music, the decorations, the gifts are only symbols.  Symbols are powerful, but they can’t do what Christ can.

Another mistake we make at Christmas is to forget that Christ has promised a second Advent.  The first time Jesus came, the time we celebrate at Christmas, he didn’t fix everything that was wrong with the world.  Of course, he changed everything; he gave us a way back to God.  But the world is still broken.  Children still die.

This Christmas, I hope you remember that Christ has promised to come again and fulfill the rest of the Messianic prophecies we read at this time of year.  Someday he will come and set the world right.  There won’t be any more elementary school shootings.  There won’t be any death at all.  And “of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7).

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A year with Penelope

My dear readers–as of yesterday, this blog is one year old!  In celebration of this milestone, I invite you to revisit some of our favorite (your favorite and my favorite) posts from the past year.

  • My most viewed post of all time: A review and listening guide of Mumford and Sons’ first album, Sigh No More.  Hmm…maybe I should do one for Babel.
  • Post that elicited the most interesting comment: After I jokingly suggested that Penelope Clearwater Revival would be a great name for a Southern-inflected wizard rock band, a commenter who’d Googled the phrase wrote to say that she had started recording music under that name!
  • Several readers’ favorite post: Some of my most loyal readers told me that they enjoyed this zany stream of consciousness about pandas, punctuation, and Coldplay more than any other post.
  • Facebook fun: My blog made a social network appearance when my mom shared this post about two of the loves of my life, Samwise Gamgee and Neville Longbottom, on her Facebook page.  Next time you see something you like on my blog, I’d love it if you shared it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or a personal website!
  • Christmas cheer: Now that advent has begun, you might like to check out some posts from last year on Harry Connick Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas, Handel’s Messiah, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I’d like to thank you all for a wonderful year.  I wouldn’t keep this blog going if I didn’t know that you were out there reading it.  Please let me know what topics you’d like to see me address in the coming year!

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Gobs of fun in the kitchen

Tonight I thought I’d be all domestic and try out a new recipe.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  Here’s how it actually went down: On Monday, my co-worker who directs the Foreign Language Lab was going around asking people from Canada, Korea, etc., to contribute desserts to tomorrow’s International Candy and Dessert Tasting.  When she approached my office, I quickly attempted to ward off the question by saying, “I’m an American!  You don’t want my food!”  But apparently the United States is a nation, which means it’s included in “international,” so my excuse didn’t work–which was fine, since I do like to bake.  In keeping with the educative nature of the event, I decided to contribute a regional favorite from Pennsylvania.  I had always thought it was a specifically western PA specialty until I learned in my research that it’s also popular among the Amish.  It also exists in New England, but under a different name–read on.

I’m speaking of the gob.  The term gob, like hoagie (i.e., a sub) and steamer (i.e., a sloppy joe), is a word designed by Pennsylvanians to confuse other English speakers.  Most people, if they are aware of this delicacy at all (and I’m finding that a lot of people aren’t) call it a whoopie pie.  Regardless of what you call it, it consists of two large, soft chocolate cookies (really more like cake rounds) with marshmallow creme or another white icing-like substance between them.  Invariably, they are served in plastic wrap (because they tend to stick together), which makes them great for bake sales.  The best thing about gobs from my standpoint as a dilettante baker is that they don’t have to look good; they just have to taste good.  Also, please note: If you’ve had a Moon Pie or one of those Korean Choco-Pies, you have not had a gob.  Similar concept, but the store-bought ones are pale imitations.

After a brief evaluation process, I decided on a recipe from this website, which not only details the history and geography of the gob (the site favors the term whoopie pie, unfortunately) but also provides several variations of the recipe.  I went with the Amish Whoopie Pie, figuring it would be the closest to the experience I wanted to capture.  If you don’t have an electric mixer, though, go with one of the other two recipes.  I don’t have one of those fancy stand mixers that’s pictured on the site, but my bright green Kitchen Aid hand mixer (a birthday gift from my parents, who are probably tired of buying me kitchen appliances) works just fine.  

That’s about all I can tell you right now because I haven’t assembled my gobs yet; I’m still waiting for the cookie part to cool.  Well, I can tell you that the batter tastes really good.  I’m a little nervous, but since odds are that most of the people at tomorrow’s event won’t know what a gob is supposed to look or taste like, there’s not much pressure, I guess.  I have some extended family members who would probably destroy me in a gob-baking contest, so perhaps next time I’m with them, I can watch them at work and try to learn their ways.  Meanwhile, give the recipe a shot and let me know what you think.  And if you’re in Lynchburg on Wednesday, November 14, stop by Liberty University’s Center for Writing and Languages and try one of mine!

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Kung Fu Panda eats, shoots, and leaves: A stream of consciousness

Hi everyone, I’m back. I’ve done many things during my regrettably long blogging hiatus, including looking at some pandas. Last week I was in San Diego for the International Writing Centers Association conference with two of my colleagues, and we went to the famed San Diego Zoo, which has a new baby panda who’s still too young to be on exhibit. So we watched the baby on the zoo’s webcam (you can too: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/pandacam/), and we saw his grown-up friend (not his mother; she’s with the baby) live and in person. The employee working at the panda exhibit told us an interesting fact: Pandas can be very aggressive if provoked. (I know; they’re bears, duh. But they look so genial.)

This fact made me think of Kung Fu Panda, a great movie and the source of my favorite example of the importance of articles (I mean a, an, and the).  During the climactic battle scene, the evil snow leopard says, “You’re just a big fat panda.”  In response to which, Po, the title character, says, “No.  I’m the big fat panda.”  Really, that’s a brilliant piece of dialogue.  A lot of breath and trees have been wasted in discussing the best way to teach the rules of articles to English language learners whose native languages don’t have articles.  And actually, I learned at the conference last week a theory that incorrect article usage may be one of several “untreatable errors” that simply can’t be addressed with rules.  But I have the solution for everyone: Just watch Kung Fu Panda.

From my favorite example of article importance, I move to my favorite use of a punctuation metaphor in a song lyric.  Earlier tonight I was trying to read Hans Robert Jauss’s Toward an Aesthetic of Reception while listening to my iPod on shuffle.  Up came the Coldplay song “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall.”  Which do you think I was paying attention to, the song or the book?  I’ll be honest; I was dancing in my bed.  The punctuation metaphor occurs in (I think) the second verse of the song: “I’d rather be a comma than a full stop.”  Besides the fact that the British term full stop, like ginger and roundabout and a lot of other words, is inherently fabulous, the metaphor is quite apt and well-put.

At this point I was going to embark on a rant about how people should give another listen to the much-maligned Coldplay album Mylo Xyloto.  No, it doesn’t follow a neat story arc about the French Revolution like Viva La Vida does, but it still has some great songs.  Further ranting will have to wait for another time, however, because I need to go to bed.  I’ll leave you with the assurance that my next post will be more coherent, if not profound, and with this holiday wish, which I’m borrowing from a cute tin sign I bought at an antique store recently: “A merry Hallowe’en.  Scare up some fun, and have a spooktacular night.”

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Getting our loves in order

I’ve promised before that this won’t turn into a Harry Potter blog, and I intend to keep that promise.  (“I made a promise, Mr. Frodo.  Don’t you lose him, Samwise Gamgee.  And I don’t mean to.”  See?  Not a Harry Potter blog.)  But before I move on to other topics, I want to qualify the main point of my last post, in which I wrote about how one’s family is more important than one’s job.  This is true.  But are there things more important than one’s family?  As difficult as it is to say so, yes.  And tonight I grasped this truth afresh with the help of Xenophilius Lovegood.

I haven’t read a lot of Augustine other than the quick and probably shallow reading of the Confessions that I was required to do in my freshman speech class (yes, speech), but from reading secondary authors I think I’ve picked up a fairly decent understanding of his concept of the ordering of loves.  To put it in simplistic terms, it’s not wrong to love your favorite food, your favorite song, your best friend, or your mom, but these loves must be put in the proper hierarchy, and all must be subsumed under your love for God, for the sake of which you love everything else.  I can assent to this principle when I encounter it in Augustine’s terms, but I tend to resist when I read Jesus’ more stark wording in Matthew 10:37: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Anyone who’s read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows knows that Xeno. Lovegood’s mistake was not loving his daughter Luna but allowing his love for her to be the driving force of all his decisions.  Family is important in the wizarding world as well as in our Muggle world, but it’s not the most important thing.  Because X. made an idol out of Luna, he endangered Harry Potter, the person to whom he loudly proclaimed loyalty in The Quibbler.  I don’t think Mr. Lovegood’s support for Harry was insincere, but it fell apart when put on trial.

Now, I want to be careful in my analogy.  As John Granger points out in The Deathly Hallows Lectures (read it; your mind will be blown), Harry Potter is not precisely or always a Christ figure, but sometimes he functions as one, and I think this is one of those times.  Lovegood loved his daughter more than Harry (or perhaps more correctly, what Harry stood for) and therefore was not worthy of Harry.  And by the way, I think Luna would have understood this if she had known what was going on.  From everything that we know of her character, it appears that Luna, much more than her father, knows how to love well (or love good, if you like puns more than correct grammar).

I don’t have a daughter or a son, but I do have a father and a mother, and Jesus talks about them too.  I also have siblings, whom Jesus mentions in similar passages in the gospels.  As weird as it may sound, we can sometimes make idols out of our brothers and sisters (I do this when I worry inordinately about my siblings), and I think Deathly Hallows has something to say about this too, when Harry and Hermione almost have to physically restrain Ron from vengefully chasing after Deatheaters, rather than following the predetermined plan, after Fred has been killed.

Just so we’re all clear (especially because I know my parents will be reading this): I love my family very much.  But I hope I love Jesus more.  I also hope that I never have to be placed in a situation like Xenophilius Lovegood’s, in which the ordering of my loves is tested.

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Weasleys at work

This is the fifth and final post in our series on lessons for young professionals from recent movies.

Note: This blog is a bit schizophrenic–usually “I” means Tess Stockslager, but sometimes it means Penelope Clearwater, and this post falls into the latter category.

5. “Remember who you are” (Mufasa) and “hold on to what you believe” (Mumford and Sons).

I (Penelope) have often thought that my ex-boyfriend Percy Weasley would have saved himself and his family a lot of hurt if he had frequently repeated to himself the following truths: “I am a Weasley, and I am not a pure-blood supremacist.” To generalize these truths into a universal dictum, no job is more valuable than your family and your principles–even if the job makes you feel really important. Cornelius Fudge (fill in your boss’s name here) may flatter your dignity, but he doesn’t love you. And when your job requires you to help advance policies you know are morally reprehensible, it’s time to quit and go home to the people who do love you. This sounds simple, but it’s so easy to forget.

I’m not talking about physical proximity, by the way. Bill and Charlie Weasley managed to accomplish from Egypt and Romania, respectively, what Percy was unable to do from London–maintain a good relationship with their family. And this is closely related to the fact that their jobs didn’t require them to repudiate their family’s deeply-held beliefs.

And while we’re on the topic of Weasley careers, Fred and George’s joke shop is a good example of competent, customer-driven entrepreneurship. Not all of us will be able to start our own business inventing and selling items we enjoyed playing with as children, but if you have a particular skill and see a particular need in the consumer populace (e.g., “Fred reckons people needs a laugh these days”–Ron), go for it; don’t feel like you need to follow in your older siblings’ footsteps by entering more traditional industries, such as banking, politics, and . . . er, animal behavior.

Well, there you have it, young professionals. This concludes the series, but I (Tess) would love to hear your good and bad examples from movies and books–and even real life–of professionalism, workplace ethics, and other career-related issues.

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How to lose friends and make a bad impression on people

This is part 4 in my series on lessons for young professionals from recent movies.

4. True professionals respect people.

I need to begin this post as I did the last one, with a disclaimer: I realize that the legal documents that inspired The Social Network were subjected to some Aaron Sorkin alchemy, and therefore that the film is not to be taken as a nonfictional account.  Thus, this post is not about Mark Zuckerberg the person but about Mark Zuckerberg the persona, the character played by Jesse Eisenberg in the movie.

It’s disturbing to me that people are starting to use Mark Zuckerberg along with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as an example of that “you can accomplish anything you put your mind to” brand of philosophy.  It’s disturbing, firstly, because I think that philosophy has some serious intrinsic problems; secondly, because it’s way too soon to tell whether Mark Zuckerberg will have the same kind of lasting impact that the other famous entrepreneurs have had.  Thirdly, it’s disturbing because until he publishes his memoirs, the narrative version of Mark Zuckerberg most accessible to role model-seekers is the one in The Social Network, even if that isn’t the “real” Mark Zuckerberg.  And the guy in that movie is incredibly unprofessional.  This has nothing to do with the fact that he wears sneakers, jeans, and hoodies to important meetings.  In many industries, particularly ones like Internet startups, dress code is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and I believe the impression caused by bad clothing choices can be overcome by a good work ethic.  (I’ve experienced that myself.)

No, the reason Mark Zuckerberg (the character) is unprofessional is that he treats people like crap.  He doesn’t deliver promised services; he ignores email correspondence unless it’s convenient for him; he’s insolent toward those in authority, and he drives away his best friend.  This last is not only a bad interpersonal move but also a potentially stupid business decision, since the friend has business and math savvy that even Mark lacks.  Also he’s Andrew Garfield–how can you look into his gorgeous face and break his heart?  But I digress.  My point is that a large part of professionalism is summed up in the Golden Rule: Treat people well, and they probably won’t care what you’re wearing.

In the final post of the series, Penelope Clearwater talks about some young professionals she knows personally.