When you’re sitting at a ballpark or other sports stadium, the crowd is doing the Wave, and you see the crest heading straight for your section, do you rise and raise your arms in rhythm with your neighbors? Or do you scowl, remain in your seat, and lecture your friends about how the Wave is conformist tomfoolery?
When your coworkers decide they’re not in the mood for cafeteria food or the tiny Weight Watchers meals they brought in their lunch bags and decide to order pizza or Chinese takeout together, do you go with the flow and chip in a few bucks for a little something different for yourself? Or do you denounce their impulsive extravagance and consign yourself to the turkey sandwich you brought because it was slapped together with only the purest of motives?
When you need to buy drinks at the grocery, do you base your decision on advertising? Do you buy drinks regardless of their advertising? Or do you specifically boycott any drinks that have ever been advertised in any way because advertising is shallow and irritating and unholy, and instead limit yourself to buying only products that have never been advertised in any medium?
If you’re at the theater watching a movie that the other patrons seem to be enjoying a lot more than you are, do you leave them to their difference of opinion and count down the minutes till the travesty is over? Or do you castigate them for their life choices and demonstrate the superiority of your disdain by chasing them around the theater with a stun-gun?
I saw Silver Linings Playbook over a week ago and have been procrastinating saying anything about it because it’s tough to express my opinion without ruining the ending. I suppose the ads aren’t that coy about the gist of the film, but part of my enjoyment was derived from that rare feeling of having no idea what would happen next. Under the guidance of director David O. Russell (previously appreciated for The Fighter and Three Kings), I wasn’t sure if Playbook would be predictably atypical or deceptively Hollywood about the strange relationship between its May/December starring couple. Would it end in for-your-Oscar-consideration breakup and tears? Would it opt for the mushy happily-ever-after ending, complete with gratuitous dance party at the end? Would the payoff be just-good-friendship, like Lost in Translation? Would they both die horribly of movie cancer? My second-guessing was useless against it.
On tonight’s new episode of Bunheads, “There’s Nothing Worse Than a Pantsuit” (that’s the episode title, not the main clause of this sentence), our heroine Michelle is forced to cope with two (2) formidable challenges. First up, as spoiled in the episode title: pantsuits! With Fanny MIA from an episode once again, Michelle is left alone to work with Milly on the next step of the Millicent Stone Performing Arts Center process: zoning approval from the town committee. Michelle nearly tries to go it alone, but Milly scolds her for not keeping her in the loop on any important issues. (“Anything that can’t be answered by reading a Judy Blume novel? CALL ME.”) Such formal requirements, in Milly’s estimation, cannot be completed while wearing anything except a pantsuit. Leave it to Truly and the magic of Sparkles to provide Michelle with options, all equally businesslike and hard to tolerate, even with meatball-sized beads and whatever “color blocking” is. Later in the episode she comes to terms with this temporary fashion detour and recognizes the inherent advantages — fewer wardrobe malfunctions; more pockets than dancewear has; and, on a metaphysical level, the pantsuit is “binding, so it keeps all your powers in.”
Each year since 2009 my wife and I have made a day-long date of visiting Keystone Art Cinema, the only dedicated art-film theater in Indianapolis, to view the big-screen release of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but we appreciate this opportunity to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of celebrating, whether we agree with their collective opinions or not. A few of the past marathons have varied wildly in quality, but this year’s proved a superb bunch. To be honest, this is the first time in memory that I’ve preferred the live-action contenders to their animated colleagues.
Each year since 2009 my wife and I have made a day-long date of visiting Keystone Art Cinema, the only dedicated art-film theater in Indianapolis, to view the big-screen release of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but we appreciate this opportunity to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of celebrating, whether we agree with their collective opinions or not.
Literacy pundits wept this week over a 
Fun trivia: I bought my very first ebook at 
Sasha’s parents may be divorcing and deserting Paradise in separate directions, but judging by the evidence presented in tonight’s new episode of Bunheads, “Take the Vicuna”, their forgotten credit cards are keeping their daughter company in their absence. Their magically limitless credit line is enough to secure her new luxury apartment, cover the utilities bills (and hopefully the learning curve that goes with those), provide two carts’ worth of startup food and accessories, and still have thousands left over to throw a righteous housewarming party for her core friends, several classmates, the grownups who didn’t abandon her, and for reasons unknown Aubrey (Victoria Park), her onetime cheerleading captain. The snacks are plentiful, the guests receive parting gifts, and the decor is so over-the-top ornate, you’d think Sasha shares an interior decorator with Tom Haverford from Parks and Rec.
After seeing Zero Dark Thirty as part of my annual Best Picture nominee binge, I exited the theater with just one thought on my mind: I’d hate to be a guy trying to start a new country in this day and age.
If you’re among those fans rooting for Michelle to remove foot from mouth and get back in good graces with her surfer bartender oceanographer near-beau Godot, this week’s new episode of Bunheads, “The Astronaut and the Ballerina”, may have been a disappointment for you. Michelle approaches, makes bad jokes, digs her hole a little deeper, gifts him with a copy of Finding Nemo because of oceanography, but then watches her baby steps to forgiveness interrupted by a surprise visitor: her deadbeat brother Scotty!
After months of squeezing in an episode here and there whenever time permitted (which was rarely), tonight I finally finished watching all five seasons of The Wire. It’s sixty episodes of the most politically charged, complicated, incisive, meaningful, profane, discomfiting, provocative, challenging television I’ve ever seen. It’s not a show for everyone, but following the storylines of its roughly eight thousand different characters (give or take three) became an unprecedented adventure that part of me secretly hopes has left me scarred and ruined for any other TV show or fictional tale that dares to try impressing me in the future. Its multifaceted examination of life on the streets of Baltimore at every level made my own lower-class upbringing look like the life of a prince, put my comparatively benign hometown in perspective, and has made it hard for me to read any local crime news without wondering how much they’re not telling us.
Longtime MCC readers are surely aware of my addiction to writing lists. I confess before you now that my lifelong listaholism extends beyond what you’ve seen here in the past. In our household I appointed myself Chief Grocery List Officer. I keep track of all the comic books I own on Excel sheets. From 2000 to the present I’ve kept Notepad files of every single movie I’ve seen in theaters. Many a Post-It has died in service to my never-ending attempts to remember what chores and repairs need to be done around the house. All the odd sights we see on vacation each year have been made possible by lists, though those are always collaborative efforts with my wife the list-enabler.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 