Category Archives: movies

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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.

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When is it ok to take work home?

This is part 3 in my series on lessons for young professionals from recent movies.

3. Total objectivity is impossible and overrated.

I need to start this post with a disclaimer: Boundaries between teachers and students, therapists and clients, and other parties in professional relationships are important.  In the examples I give in this post, the professionals in question respect the legal and ethical boundaries while allowing themselves to become emotionally invested, to a healthy degree, in the people they are helping.  Philosophers and psychologists tell us that complete objectivity is impossible; we all bring biases and baggage to whatever we approach, including our careers.  That’s not a bad thing, and in the two examples below, I hope to prove that it can even be beneficial under the appropriate circumstances.

First, we return to Anna Kendrick.  In 50/50, she plays a mental health counselor to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, who has cancer.  At first (and I think this has a lot to do with how young she is, and feels) she is overly vigilant about maintaining professionalism, which makes the counseling sessions tense and awkward (and, admittedly, very funny).  A breakthrough occurs when she gives her client a ride home and he gets a chance to see her as a real person with a very messy car.  At this point, she begins to open up about some of her own personal worries, which allows the therapeutic relationship to become natural and unforced.  Ultimately, the counselor learns just as much as the client does, and in the end (AFTER the counseling sessions have ended, I must stress) she gets a really great boyfriend out of the deal.

A similar principle is at work in The Woman in Black, in which Daniel Radcliffe plays a widowed lawyer with a young son.  (If you’re having trouble picturing that, remember that this is a late 19th/early 20th century period piece–people died earlier back then, so they had to get started earlier.)  I believe that his grief for his wife’s death and concern for his son’s safety, far from interfering with his work, endow him with the emotional intelligence and perceptiveness necessarily to solve the spooky case he gets caught up in, which involves the death of a woman and a young boy.

In the next post, we’ll begin to look at some negative examples.

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Working for an audience of one

This is part two in my series on examples of young professionals in recent movies.

2. Please your boss and ignore the naysayers.
If you’ve been following my blog recently, you know that this summer I wrote a paper about Moneyball. During the research process, which consisted mostly of watching the movie over and over, I found another inspiring young professional in Jonah Hill’s character Peter Brand, a mid-twenties economist whose unorthodox ideas and lack of sports experience make him unpopular with the establishment–i.e., the Oakland A’s scouts and coaches, who call him (disparagingly) “the kid” and (irrelevantly) “Google boy.” Peter makes the smart choice to ignore those people and concentrate on continuing to impress the person who’s actually his boss, Billy Beane. He does his job and lets Billy take care of the jerks. This story demonstrates that often all you need is one person to see that you’re doing good work and thus to champion your cause. It is helpful, though not absolutely necessary, if that person is your boss.

Next post: more Anna Kendrick, plus lessons in professionalism from a horror movie.

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Advice for young professionals

Do you ever feel like you’re too young for your job? I do. Actually, let me clarify: I know I’m quite capable of doing my job, but I worry that others think I’m too young, which in turn negatively affects my work. Fortunately, recent movies provide a number of good (and bad) examples of young professionals doing their thing. Today I’m starting a series of posts on lessons I’ve learned from them.
1. Anna Kendrick is a great role model.
I was born the same year as the Up in Air and 50/50 actress, which is one reason I feel an affinity with her. I also take inspiration from her age-appropriate, realistic portrayals of sincere and capable but sometimes fumbling young professionals. (She also played a high school student in Twilight, but I give her props for breaking out of that mold earlier than many actors her age.) In a great example of the circular process by which life imitates art which imitates life, both Anna Kendrick’s characters (one of which I’ll examine more closely later in this series) and Anna Kendrick herself, who was nominated for an Oscar for Up in the Air, have earned the respect of their older colleagues by doing their jobs well.
Next post: Please your boss and ignore the naysayers

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Victoriana

I just watched Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005), and I enjoyed it more than I have enjoyed the past few Tim Burton movies I’ve seen: Dark Shadows, Alice in Wonderland, and Sleepy Hollow (which, I realize, is not a recent film, but I saw it for the first time this year). Corpse Bride was better than those others for several reasons.
1. It’s short, which means it doesn’t have time for a ridiculously convoluted plot. It would have been even shorter without the songs, which I thought were unnecessary.
2. Instead of deriving from a single source (novel, short story, or soap opera), it instead is an homage to/parody of the Victorian marriage plot in general. This means that there is less opportunity for fans to accuse it of not being “like the original.”
3. It’s animated, which allows Tim Burton to indulge to full extent his fancy for caricature of the human form. Many characters have delightfully exaggerated noses, chins, or eyes, and the contrast between the tall, thin characters and the short, fat characters is reminiscent of some of Phiz’s illustrations to Dickens’ novels. (Check out this illustration in particular; I love it.)
I think Corpse Bride may have restored my faith in Tim Burton. You should do yourself a favor and watch it. If you hate it, you’ve only wasted about an hour and fifteen minutes.

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Haunted by dead European males

I’m working on my Moneyball paper, and I’m afraid I’m about to argue myself out of the point I’m trying to make.  I want to argue that Moneyball isn’t really about money; it’s about worth, something for which money is merely a symbol.  But the evil little Marxist inside my head keeps saying that everything is about money, and that by silencing the issue, the film is complicit in the economic disparity it initially gestures toward critiquing.  I think the evil little Marxist’s argument is reductive, but I don’t know how to refute it.  I just can’t buy that everything is about money.  Similarly, as intrigued as I am by Freud’s ideas, I just can’t buy that EVERYTHING is a phallic symbol.  Someone did a presentation on Star Wars yesterday in which it seemed that pretty much every scene was a castration, and I was really frustrated.  I think I just need to get OUT OF HERE and back to people who talk about normal stuff.

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Penelope hasn’t died.

Weep not for me, my friends.  I’m still alive.  (Someone please tell Hermione Granger to stop using my name as a convenient alias.)  I’m just finishing up my PhD coursework.  (So, not quite alive, actually.)  I fully intend to make a big comeback in August with some really awesome posts, some of which will, I’m sure, draw on some of the themes I’ve been thinking and writing about this summer.  Think that sounds like a snooze?  Think again!!

Preview: I’m working on a paper right now about Moneyball, so get ready, Brad Pitt fans (also Jonah Hill fans).  I might even post a picture of your guy–accompanied, of course, by some amazing insights about the movie.

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Things I liked about Brave…

…the new Pixar movie released this weekend, which I saw today.
1. Scotland
2. Emma Thompson
3. Mumford and Sons
4. a heroine with spectacularly explosive hair
5. a heroine who doesn’t think getting married should be her #1 goal in life (but who is open to getting married at some point)
6. a great, and realistic, mother-daughter relationship
7. bagpipes
8. beautifully animated scenery
9. magic
10. kilt humor

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Fraternitas

Last night, as part of my recent Robert De Niro fascination, I watched Raging Bull, an unrelenting film about the humiliating self-destruction of a boxer who has Othello-esque jealousy issues.  I don’t necessarily recommend that you watch it for fun.  It is a great piece of film-making, though.  It was directed by Martin Scorcese, who is good at stripping attractive Italian-American actors of their dignity (cf. Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator).

I’ve been ruminating since last night on the final scene of the movie, in which De Niro’s character, Jake LaMotta (a real person, BTW) is preparing himself for an event in which he plans to recite from a variety of authors including Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams.  (Don’t ask how that happened; it’s complicated.)  While looking in a mirror at his ravaged face and rapidly aging body, he quotes at length, and with proper attribution, from the “I coulda been a contender” scene in On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando (who, along with De Niro, played Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather I and II, respectively–irrelevant movie nerd fact).  In that scene, Brando’s character is essentially blaming his brother for the failure of his prize-fighting career.  So when LaMotta quotes those lines, he is not only commenting on his own downfall as a fighter but also touching upon his fraught relationship with his own brother, who was his manager until they had an ugly falling-out.

Anyway, I didn’t plan to say that much by way of introduction to a poem I wrote this morning, but I always say more than I plan to say.  The poem, which is called “Fraternitas” (brotherhood), includes allusions, some more overt than others, to not only the two above-mentioned sets of brothers but also some other pairs you might recognize.

I coulda been a contender

But I’ve been walking around my whole life with your hand grabbing my heel.

I could have been king

But you were born first

And Dad liked your noble deeds better.

You said, “Let us go out to the field,”

And you beat out my brains

My manhood

My heart

And you left what was left over

A bad imitation of a man

A second son

Even if I came out of the womb first.

I blamed it on our parents

I blamed it on a woman

But it was you

It was you

You were the one who shot me in the back

And sucked out what nourished me.

But we’re brothers.

Of course I love you.

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Charlie Chaplin and Peter Pan

This evening I watched probably the saddest comedy I’ve ever seen.  It had a happy ending, but only after the protagonist had survived a great deal of physical danger, loneliness, and mockery.  The film, a selection from my PhD candidacy exam “reading” list, was Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925).  It was only an hour and nine minutes long, and it was originally a silent film, though Netflix sent me a 1942 version that had a cheesy narrator and some dubbed-in dialogue in the narrator’s voice–even the female voices.  (If I were a silent film purist, which I’m not, that probably would have ruined the experience for me.  Fortunately, the narrator knew when to keep his mouth shut.)  Despite what might sound like obstacles to good storytelling (short running time and characters who don’t talk–even at the ending; you hear that,The Artist?), this turned out to be a hilarious comedy at times (I LOL-ed when the protagonist trashed the cabin in his joy after the girls promised to come over for New Year’s Eve dinner) and at other times a heart-breaking tale of man’s inhumanity to man.  Actually, it was mostly woman’s inhumanity to man; the men had guns and axes, but the women had cruel laughter, which the resilient “lone prospector” (Chaplin) was able to shake off less easily.  (Spoiler: The girls don’t show up for dinner.)

Other fun things about The Gold Rush: The special effects were pretty darn good for 1925.  (I didn’t even know they had special effects in 1925!)  Also, and perhaps most importantly, this is the movie from which Johnny Depp’s character in Benny and Joon draws his impression of the “dance” of two rolls on the ends of two forks.  Now I realize how stunningly accurate the homage is, right down to the facial expression.  If only for that reason, you should watch this movie.  But see if you can get the original version.

And now for my other, unrelated topic.  You know I love Peter Pan, the character, right?  You know how excited I was to see him at the Melbourne Zoo; you saw the picture I took as proof.  (See the post “Fairies in Melbourne.”)  I want to establish this because I’m going to share a poem I scribbled down Sunday night after watching the Alluvion Stage Company production of the musical Peter Pan.  The poem is rather critical of Peter, the character.  But my love for someone doesn’t mean that I can’t see the point of view of other characters who may not have such a rosy outlook on said person (eg. Harry Potter, Snape).  You can probably guess easily enough which character is speaking in this poem.  I’m probably reading more animosity into the story than is actually there, but I enjoy pulling out subtexts.  This poem isn’t great; I need to work more on the vocabulary and sentence structure because I want the voice to start out sounding like an adult (or someone who wants us to think he’s an adult) and descend gradually into childishness.  But, for now, here it is.

A clever chap, I suppose.

A good swordsman, you’d be a fool to deny it.

Very smart at plotting, and that sort of thing.

But really, what English young person doesn’t know the ending of Cinderella?

But he isn’t English, after all.

He’s some sort of heathen.

Probably doesn’t even know what the British Empire is.

And doesn’t understand how a shadow works?

Ridiculous, really.

Not as clever as Wendy thinks he is.

Not as clever as he thinks he is.

A horrid boy, actually.

Always has to be the father.

Always has to be the chief.

Always has to be the hero.

A horrible selfish boy

Who never,

Never

Lets anyone else be the leader.