Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2009

Thanksgiving / And something amazing I am thankful for

First, a brief Thanksgiving tale.  My mom and stepdad are making Thanksgiving dinner for themselves and my grandma.  They were planning to make a green bean casserole of some sort, using a can of mushroom soup.  They were also going to make sweet potatoes with marshmallows.  While cooking, they somehow (?) accidentally put the mushroom soup in the sweet potatoes instead of the green beans.  Not thinking that was such a big problem, they decided to still melt the marshmallows on top of the thing.  So it's sweet potatoes AND MUSHROOM SOUP with marshmallows on top.  And my mom thinks that sounds okay to eat.

Second, something amazing I am thankful for.  And a sentence that has never before been uttered in the history of the world:

The dryer in my apartment building is broken, BUT IN A GOOD WAY.  

It doesn't need any quarters, and it doesn't stop running.  So, although usually it takes two full cycles to dry my clothes, and I have to keep remembering to check and put more money in, tonight it didn't need any money, and just kept going until I checked and my clothes were dry.  It's a Thanksgiving miracle.

(Serious things I am of course thankful for are too numerous to list, but include the fun little wedding save-the-date magnets that arrived in my fiancee's mailbox this afternoon.)

ABA Journal Holiday e-Card

Check out the ABA Journal holiday e-card.  I think I'm allowed to say I wrote the disclaimer for them, even though it's not credited on there.  In any case, if you think it's funny, I wrote the disclaimer.  If you don't, we can pretend I didn't.  How about this for a (lame) holiday contest: if you can guess any of the three lines on there I didn't write, I'll send you the full unedited version that's about three times as long as what they used.  All the outtakes.  :)

Colbert Christmas Special

Really funny.  Just watched it.  Really funny.  Fun parody Christmas songs, neat musical guests, really really well done.  Stephen Colbert can pretty much do anything.  Seriously, they should just give him a network and let him parody every kind of program out there.  Stephen Colbert game shows, Stephen Colbert soap operas, Stephen Colbert saturday morning cartoons, it would all be better than 95% of what's on there now.

Also worth checking out: Frost/Nixon.  Saw a screening on Sunday.  If you liked Charlie Wilson's War, you'll love Frost/Nixon.  Historical-ish drama with some compelling character work.  I liked it better than Charlie Wilson's War, and probably better than almost every movie I've seen this year (The Visitor and possibly Slumdog Millionaire top it, although I'm going back and forth between Slumdog and Nixon).  No previous knowledge or point of view about Nixon required to enjoy.

Top Chef: New York

Someone just left a comment asking if I had any thoughts on this season of Top Chef so far.  Well, I'm looking forward to tonight's episode... thought last week's was solid, although I'd read an advance review that called it one of the most emotional episodes of TV all year and I'm not sure I'd go that far.

There's a game on Bravo's website where you pick the 3 chefs each week you think will earn the most points -- they get points in the game for winning challenges, for getting compliments, for being cooperative, and lose points for being in the bottom 3 or getting eliminated.  Based on just reading the bios before last week's episode, I picked Stefan, Fabio, and Leah -- and they turned out to be pretty good picks.  Stefan won both challenges, and Leah was in the top 3 of the elimination challenge.  For this week, I've kept Stefan and Leah and replaced Fabio with Hosea.  So I'll see if that turns out well.  After one episode, I predict one of those three will be the ultimate winner.  Although Eugene was pretty impressive in last week's episode.

Someone else left a comment on the previous post asking how my grandma is doing.  She's doing well physically but the stroke has damaged her memory, especially her short-term memory, and it doesn't seem to be resolving itself much over time.  In the moment, in person, you can have a real conversation with her, but she forgets most of what she does and says pretty quickly, and gets confused pretty easily about people and places.  I call her every day to say hello, and I know she appreciates it and she definitely knows who I am and we have a conversation that, at least to some degree, makes sense... but every day she asks pretty much the same questions, about where I'm living, and what I'm doing, and whether I've set a date for my wedding yet... she usually remembers I'm engaged, but then I've gotten used to saying the wedding is in May, and then she asks what month we're in now, and then she counts how many months until May....  It's hard and frustrating and sad and I miss her being able to be a real part of my life and a source of advice and someone I could really talk to, and she knows her memory isn't working right and so she's frustrated with it, and it's just really hard, day after day, to have the same conversation and know that nothing's sticking... but at the same time I know she appreciates that I care, she's able to articulate her feelings, and I know my family and I are doing the best we can for her... I guess it's just inevitable, something eventually happens to everyone.  And, at least for now, she's physically in good shape, she's not in any pain, she's able to get around and go places and enjoy herself, she's in relatively good spirits most of the time, she has a live-in aide now who makes her food and takes her places and she likes her.  So it could be a lot worse, and I know that unfortunately it will probably get worse at some point.  But as long as she doesn't fall, and as long as she doesn't get sick, she's doing okay even though it's hard to deal with how much of herself she's lost.  I don't know what else I have to say at this point about it.  It's sad.  But it's a sadness I know everyone faces, more than once in their lives, and I was lucky that she was able to be so active and involved for so many years of my life.  I'm glad I got her movie reviews down on (virtual) paper when I did, and wish I'd done something similar years sooner.  

Slumdog Millionaire

Sometimes movies can surprise me.

I had the script for Slumdog Millionaire, but among a big pile of scripts I'm reading only for my own benefit, and without any outside guidance as to what's most worthwhile, any script that opens with someone being beaten and electrocuted is not going to keep me reading.  Character getting beaten on page 1 is usually a good proxy for "I will not enjoy this film.  This film is not for me."  And so I put it down and never returned to it and only went to see the movie last night because a friend wanted to for his birthday, and the reviews were really good.

And it's a great movie.  Non-spoiler plot: bottom-of-the-social-class Indian kid ends up as a contestant on their local version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.  Vaguely sounds like the plot of "American Dreamz" from a few years ago, except that was a broad, unambitious comedy and this was an Epic.  The most ambitious movie I've ever seen and enjoyed, I think.  A story of class struggle in India and life at the bottom of the social caste, effectively trapped in poverty and fighting just to stay alive.  Whether or not it was an accurate portrayal of life in India, it *felt* authentic, it *felt* real.  This is the anti-Monsoon Wedding.  No one seeing this movie will leave ever wanting to go to India.  No one seeing the movie will leave unmoved.

It's a brilliantly done, wonderfully cinematic, piece of art that takes you into a world you do not know and lets you explore.  It did not feel like two hours had passed from beginning to end.  It was balanced with enough levity and lightness.  Some movies, I leave and I like them but I think, hey, properly inspired I could probably write something like that.  This movie, I could never have written.  Which is part of what made it particularly rewarding to watch.

Bar Exam

I hear the New York bar exam results come out this week.  Good luck to anyone who that's relevant to.

Last month, when I was back in New York for a few weeks, I (finally) had my character and fitness interview -- you get three years from the bar exam results to fill out the paperwork and get licensed, and I'd been dragging on it until this summer when I realized I should get it done so, just in case I ever want to practice, I don't need to take the bar exam again.  So I got all the paperwork in, and had the interview -- it was literally 90 seconds long.  Anyone worrying about their character and fitness interview -- who doesn't have a real reason to worry, I assume -- shouldn't.  They had me meet with this very friendly lawyer in Bay Ridge, at his office.  I go in, he says he's looked at my resume and it all looks good, he asked me about Anonymous Lawyer, he asked me if I had any questions or concerns about serving clients ethically, he wished me luck in my career, and gave me an article to read from a law school alumni magazine about ethics in lawyering.  And that was it.  Next time I'm in New York, I'm signed up to take the required 3-hour legal practice class, and then I'll get sworn in and will officially be licensed to practice law.  Yippee!

Follow The Roar

My friend Bob spent the past year watching every hole that Tiger Woods played.  His experience is chronicled in "Follow The Roar: Tailing Tiger for All 604 Holes of his Most Spectacular Season" which just came out today from HarperCollins.  My copy's on order from Amazon; I'll write a quick review once I read it.  For this post, I've asked Bob to answer a few questions about the book:

Q: What's the book about?

A: The book is an everyman's adventure through the world of Tiger Woods and his amazing 2008 season.

Q: What's golf?

A: Golf is a sport with roots going all the way back to early Chinese... oh who cares - it's the sport where you hit the little white ball into the hole.

Q: Who's Tiger Woods?

A: The greatest human to ever play the game of golf.  I can't speak for non-humans. 

Q: Why should someone check it out even if they're not that interested in golf or Tiger Woods?

A: If you like the writing of Bill Bryson and the idea of demented journeys, you'll still enjoy this adventure. And when it's all done, you WILL be interested in both golf and Tiger.

Ahead of the Curve

Just read "Ahead of the Curve" by Philip Delves Broughton, an account of his two years at Harvard Business School.  Good book, highly recommended.  He was a journalist before deciding to go to business school, and ended up with mixed feelings about the experience -- appreciative of the classmates and the people he got to meet, but not so excited to become an i-banker or management consultant.  Not entirely dissimilar from my law school experience.  Check it out if you're thinking about business school, or just curious about it.

Movie Reviews: The Visitor and Role Models

I saw two movies over the weekend.  They were very different from each other, but I enjoyed them both.

First, The Visitor, which is a small film about a lonely professor who, through a variation on the typical romantic comedy meet-cute, ends up befriending a pair of illegal immigrants who add excitement and meaning to his empty life.  Cribbing from this excellent review of the movie, yes, this sounds like the premise of a terrible, cliched, trite, unwatchable film.  But it's not.  It's not at all.  The characters feel so real, the emotions feel so genuine... the movie works.  Last year I saw a bunch of movies that tried to be this one -- Starting Out In The Evening, The Savages, Grace Is Gone -- they all ended up at the bottom of my rankings of what I saw.  They were all character pieces about characters I didn't want to spend any time with and didn't enjoy watching.  This movie was different.  This movie was gentle and captivating and reminded me that watching a movie can be an enjoyable thing to do.  I haven't seen too many good movies this year.  I haven't seen too many movies this year at all, relative to what I saw last year.  I did a quick count -- last year I saw 33, this year I've seen about half that.  And a bunch of those were in January, when I was still getting to see free screenings because of the Writers Guild.  I expect this movie will end up ranking as the best one I've seen all year.  Watching it made me think about my own life, and think about how to find more joy in the little things.  What more can we ask a movie to do than that?  Read the review I linked to.  And go see this film if you can -- it's worth it.

Second, Role Models, which I was very excited to see, even though the premise -- two guys forced to be Big Brothers to two wacky, maladjusted kids -- again sounds unwatchable.  But the preview was funny, and I'm a David Wain fan -- Wet Hot American Summer is a very, very funny movie.  This is a Judd Apatow movie without Judd Apatow, in a lot of ways.  The cast is from the same world -- Paul Rudd, McLovin from SuperBad, etc.  And a lot of it is very funny.  The story gets predictable, and there aren't as many laugh-out-loud moments as I might have wished for, but there's a very watchable, very enjoyable light tone to the whole thing, the characters are all likeable, Jane Lynch does an especially funny job as the head of the Big Brothers program, and I really liked it.  A lot of little touches in the background that I noticed, that were amusing on their own but not necessarily called out by the script.  I hope this very commercial film gives David Wain the credibility to get more stuff made.

Sarah Palin Blame Day: Part II

"Sarah Palin does not know how to spell her own name, aides reported on Thursday.  In addition, one senior official revealed that while on the campaign trail, Palin had three secret abortions, and replaced John McCain's blood pressure medication with crazy pills, which may explain his erratic behavior and poorly-run campaign.  Palin was, according to one insider, 'a binge drinker,' and 'planning an attack on the Liberty Bell with leaders of Al Qaeda,' helping to explain her frequent visits to Pennsylvania, which top McCain aides have now revealed had nothing to do with gaining Republican votes in the state, because, according to them, 'surely, if that had been the goal, we would have had to be more successful than we were, even if merely by chance.'  One advisor reported this morning that Palin was caught masturbating on the campaign plane using an original copy of the U.S. Constitution.  When confronted, she seemed unaware of what the term 'Constitution' referred to, and confused as to the words on the document.  'Words,' Palin is reported to have said, 'words don't mean nothin' to me.'  A top campaign strategist confided to reporters Thursday afternoon that Palin was never in fact offered the post of Vice President, but that she misinterpreted an e-mail sent to her prior to the convention.  'She was offered the post of Lice President,' the strategist admitted, 'because of her experience checking the hairs of every child in Wasilla for lice, which was of course her chief duty as Mayor of the town.  Due to her lack of ability to read, she assumed we were offering her the spot as Senator McCain's running mate, and before we could stop her, she was on a plane to the convention and by then it was too late to do anything about it.'  One young deputy with the campaign commented that Palin once tried to buy the blouse she was wearing, and offered her $80,000 of campaign money, in cash.  When the deputy declined, Palin threw the cash in a garbage can and burned it.  When informed of what she had done, Palin insisted that paper money has no value, and that the only currency she was aware of was eyeballs.  She then murdered a baby, took out his eyes, and tried to buy a sandwich."