Why hello!
I’ve unacceptably taken a month-long hiatus from my little entries, in spite of watching a bunch of movies I wanted to write about. I’m going to try to crank out a few before the school year picks up speed. This was my first week back, so time is of the essence.
Before getting to today’s movie, though, I’m proud to say that I adhered to my commitment to specify a search strategy and a set of selection criteria within a week of my last posting. This was facilitated by a very productive telephone meeting with my mentor, where these were finalized. I felt very satisfied with myself and my efforts. I subsequently started working on a rough draft of my thesis proposal, and promptly hit an emotional roadblock to working on my thesis that has been difficult, as always, to overcome. It’s partly the result of having a very busy summer, with little time at where-I-live home. I find it really difficult to work when I’m somewhere unfamiliar/I don’t live, especially when I’ve got that weird vacation guilt where the experience feels wasted on me if I work while I should be having fun. Or something. I also keep experiencing this uncomfortable self-doubt where it seems like I can’t possibly really be ready to get started collecting data or writing a final draft of my proposal, because there’s no way I really actually know what I’m doing, because I’ve never had to write a thesis before. Even though, at the end of the day, these things really aren’t all that complicated.
Clearly I need to let that feeling go, and simply get off my ass and get this shit done.
The lucky thing is that my mentor is really pretty special, and very well-suited to help me along. She’s scheduled monthly meetings with all of her mentees, and we had one yesterday. After (jokingly yet appropriately) shaming me for not having collected any data yet, she told me to start emailing her every Sunday to give her thesis updates. This is precisely the kind of accountability I need. Especially now that I’m going to be (finally) sitting in the where-I-live city for a little while, I’m in a place to get work done if I just decide to be motivated. The tiny tinge of fear-of-mentor looming at the end of every week is hopefully the little additional push that will help me actually be productive.
So now I just need to have something to tell her in three days...
Terrifyingly huge graduate school requirements aside, I watched a pretty sweet movie with my little brother while I was where-I-grew-up home again a few weeks ago. Based on my enduring love of zombie movies, he recommended “Zombieland” (2009). It was FABULOUS.
I admit that it’s perhaps a little strange that I love zombie movies as much as I do. I generally hate gore, and routinely cover my eyes during anything too icky. As monsters go, I used to love the cool, sexy intellectualism of vampires above all else—and, “Twilight” saga aside, I still do love them. (“Let the Right One In” (2008) may be one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen in the last few years, for example.) Zombies, on the other hand, are messy, inelegant, and brutish. So what’s the allure?
In a way unlike every other horror subgenre, zombie movies are ultimately examinations of some of the most interesting and problematic questions of human life. They pit humanity’s violent, animal nature against its virtues in a fight to the death. Are we fundamentally beastly creatures driven foremost by our basest hungers, or are we something better than that, even in the most horrifying of circumstances? Vampires gain a superhumanness through their immortality, while other monsters (like werewolves) literally become or are something non-human. Zombies are still darkly, frighteningly human. In this way, they hold a disconcerting mirror to the most gruesome aspects of human nature.
And then, oftentimes, they’re also funny as shit (see also: “Shaun of the Dead” (2004)). Because zombies lack dignity, they’re perfect fodder for comedy. “Zombieland” is a very enjoyable combination of these two aspects of the genre.
So basically, as with all zombie movies I’ve seen, “Zombieland” opens post-zombie apocalypse, where only a few non-zombie humans survive. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Columbus, a gangly, awkward kid who at the outset acknowledges the unlikeliness of his survival. The secret to his success? Lots and lots of rules. Wear a seatbelt. Limber up before entering possible zombie territory. You get the idea. As if zombies weren’t enough, the rules introduce yet another thing that can make horror movies in general really fun: rules, and their breaking. It is within the structure of this pseudo-controlled environment that crazy things happen.
Eisenberg’s character takes his name from the fact that he’s attempting to get to Columbus, Ohio in the hopes of finding his parents. The three characters rounding out the main cast are also named for their destinations as a way of purposely depersonalizing their relationships with each other. In a world where nothing can be taken for granted and “Don’t be a hero” is the most important rule of all, establishing any kind of intimacy with strangers has been deemed decidedly foolhardy.
Woody Harrelson plays Tallahassee, the first non-zombie Columbus encounters in his trek. I haven’t seen Harrelson in much of anything, so he wasn’t really on my radar. This is apparently a huge tragedy. Maybe he’s just really well-suited to badassery, but he was very fun to watch in “Zombieland”.
Further along the way, Columbus and Tallahassee encounter sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (a surprisingly cast and absolutely delightful Abigail Breslin). The girls dupe the boys out of their weapons and car and ditch them, only to dupe them a second time when Columbus and Tallahassee catch up to them farther down the highway. As you might expect, hilarity/awesomeness ensues. The four eventually unwittingly team up, and decide on a common destination: an amusement park that the girls believe is the only zombie-free place left on Earth.
So... Initially I told my brother I was going to give this movie a 5. I really enjoyed it (and especially enjoyed watching it with him). I laughed out loud many times. Even *I* could watch the splashy, ridiculous gore, so I didn’t feel on edge the way I sometimes due in more brutal or realistic zombie movies. Bill Murray has an *amazing* cameo that delightfully pushes the movie briefly over the edge into zany absurdity. It’s delicious (as if I needed another argument for loving him). The characters are nuanced, the story is interesting (if not wholly airtight—they never refuel their Hummer during their cross-country roadtrip, for example). “Zombieland” is brisk, fresh, true romping fun.
...But the more I thought about it, I’ve had to rethink my initial 5 decision. I’ve reduced my rating to a 4.5 (sorry Booboo), and here’s why: the Selena of “28 Days Later” (2002) standard.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I love the heroes in “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “28 Days Later” because of their radically normalizing portrayal of race. In the latter film, I was referring to the character of Selena. I love her.
Maybe it’s a weird thing to say because she appears in a zombie movie, but Selena is one of the most perfect modern feminist characters I’ve ever seen in film. She is an embodiment of a multidimensional model of feminine power. With her short-shorn hair and unforgiving machete, she is unflinchingly self-reliant and as effective (if not more so) at dispatching zombies as any male character in the movie. However, her backpack stuffed with food and pharmaceuticals enables Selena to reveal a different kind of power: when she and a younger girl, Hannah, face rape by a voracious band of soldiers, she feeds the girl a strong dose of painkillers. Hannah asks, “Are you trying to kill me?” Selena replies, “No, sweetheart. I’m trying to make you not care.” In these ways, she exercises masculine and feminine, aggressive and protective power. She is a rejection of stereotypically weak and defenseless femininity without wholly giving herself over to the male paradigm of you’re-only-as-strong-as-the-shit-you-can-destroy. Furthermore—and here’s the real modern feminist clincher, in my opinion—she is not so militantly self-sufficient that she robs herself of the ability to love others. By falling in love with Jim and protecting Hannah, she embodies a breed of feminist who knows that no human is an island, and that it is ultimately in building partnerships with others—friends, lovers, colleagues, whoever—that people are most likely to thrive.
Really, that is the ultimate thesis of any zombie movie: humankind’s better nature is derived from our ability to love and protect each other, even when the world as we know it is over. Losing that ability means losing our very souls.
So it is to Selena that I compare other heroines, especially in zombie movies... And Wichita and Little Rock are pretty badass, but they just don’t completely pass the test. While “Zombieland”, too, eventually supports the aforementioned zombie movie thesis when Wichita shares her real name with Columbus, facing the perils of intimacy, I’m put off by the girls’ reliance on more stereotypically feminine strategies of survival. They play the weak and imperiled damsels in distress, only to screw Columbus and Tallahassee over. It’s effective and perhaps more feasible for two relatively young girls, but I just find emotional manipulation kind of unsavory. It makes the girls harder to root for, because they lack integrity. Yes, of course, most people would probably resort to worse if their survival was on the line, but I have such a soft spot for the startling, genuine courage of characters like Selena that it’s hard to settle comfortably for less.
So that’s were that .5 went.
On that note, goodnight!
<3
Showing posts with label Master's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Master's. Show all posts
Friday, September 3, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
"Despicable Me" and My Lack of a Clever Title
Hey cats.
Last weekend I saw a movie about a tirelessly career-driven adult who stumbles into single parenthood, necessitating a reevaluation of their priorities. To my delight, this was not the tired rehashing of the work v. family debate you might expect. “Despicable Me” (2010) tells the story not of a power-suited investment banking CEO wannabe woman (or some boring equivalent), but of a second string male supervillain vying for evil supremacy. Much like the production of “Death of a Salesman” I referred to in an earlier post, where changing one trait of the central family added new dimension to a cherished narrative, performing a simple gender swap allows the audience to look at the challenges of the work-family balancing act through a male lens. This gives the old screaming match over professional and familial priorities a modernizing breath of fresh air.
Seriously though, particularly for a kid’s movie, I thought “Despicable Me” did a very nice, balanced job of portraying the conflicting pressures confronted by working parents. Gru (the main character, voiced by Steve Carell) haphazardly adopts three little girls solely to use them as bait as part of an elaborate scheme to go into space and steal the moon, hopefully securing his standing as the greatest supervillain EVER. While the “awwww” factor of the three cute girls might be enough of an argument for the joys of parenting for some movies, this film does a pretty respectable job of constructing a genuine attachment between the members of the new family. Watch out for the amusement park sequence—I thought it was utterly delightful.
However, the truly noteworthy element of the portrayal of this dilemma is that the film doesn’t undersell the unique rewards of following your professional dreams: Through a series of moderately heartbreaking flashbacks, we see a young Gru have his aspirations to go to he moon quashed over and over by a chronically unimpressed mother. By lending his professional goals emotional salience of their own, this ensures that the kids-job battle is a relatively fair fight—a tough job in a kid’s movie, where it’s probably safe to assume your audience may come down pretty solidly on the kids side of the argument. In my opinion, the resolution of the debate is pretty artful.
In any event, as a feminist I deeply appreciate a film that presumes that men can and perhaps should feel *just* as torn between work and family as women do (how novel!). Since I at least currently plan to work when I have children, figuring out a graceful compromise between family and career is something about which I have a decent level of anxiety ahead of time. Frankly, this has been treated as a uniquely feminine challenge for so goddamn long, and it’s really irritating. To state the painfully obvious, last time I checked dads contributed pretty significantly to the creation of their kids, so why isn’t this something *all* working parents are expected to wrestle with, instead of just all working moms? If balancing professional and family life is increasingly discussed as a *parent’s* issue and not just a *female parent’s* issue—even in such a silly forum as a children’s movie—maybe that could lead to more practices and supports being put into place that make the balancing act more doable for everyone.
I suppose what I’m driving at is that I like this movie largely because it normalizes something I think should already be normalized, but isn’t. I benefited from having a father who was just as active in my upbringing as my mom, and many other moms. He worked (like my mom), but made time to be at home, come to events at school, and come to soccer and softball games, all because he felt it was important for him to balance time with me with time at work. I certainly don’t mean to imply that fathers who have trouble pulling this off don’t *want* to. What I *do* think is that it is maddeningly presumed in most *workplaces* that fathers don’t want to. Normalizing a father’s desire to balance work and family as comparable to any mother’s is a weirdly belated but very needed step in establishing true gender equality in our culture.
So now that my little rant’s over, we can talk about some more fun things in the movie. First of all, Steve Carell is wonderful as Gru. While watching the movie, I found myself doubting my memory that he was voicing the main character. Some celebrity voices in animated movies can be really distracting since you’re so conscious that THAT GUY is the voice of THAT SQUIRREL (or whatever), but Carell almost completely effaces himself while still creating a very entertaining character. Also, if you can see the movie in 3D (are you even able not to? I don’t know...), do it for the roller coaster sequence. I’m really ambivalent about the whole 3D cinema thing, but that shit was cool.
All in all, this is a perfectly fun movie. I would recommend seeing it in theaters if you can. In conclusion, I gave it a 4.
In psychological news: I’ve read approximately eight more pages of my meta-analysis book. My mentor requested an email update of my progress this week, which I just sent. Mercifully, I had some things to say. I’ve done some legitimate work (I swear), but I’m still feeling frustrated that I haven’t been able to sit down and crank out as much work as I would like. Part of the difficulty is my ongoing commitment to my fellowship work--that's the project I've been interviewing people for, in addition to doing oodles of data entry. It's work I enjoy, but I would love to be able to carve out a week or two to devote solely to my thesis. We’ll see if that happens before the summer’s over... God willing.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy the weekend!
<3
Last weekend I saw a movie about a tirelessly career-driven adult who stumbles into single parenthood, necessitating a reevaluation of their priorities. To my delight, this was not the tired rehashing of the work v. family debate you might expect. “Despicable Me” (2010) tells the story not of a power-suited investment banking CEO wannabe woman (or some boring equivalent), but of a second string male supervillain vying for evil supremacy. Much like the production of “Death of a Salesman” I referred to in an earlier post, where changing one trait of the central family added new dimension to a cherished narrative, performing a simple gender swap allows the audience to look at the challenges of the work-family balancing act through a male lens. This gives the old screaming match over professional and familial priorities a modernizing breath of fresh air.
Seriously though, particularly for a kid’s movie, I thought “Despicable Me” did a very nice, balanced job of portraying the conflicting pressures confronted by working parents. Gru (the main character, voiced by Steve Carell) haphazardly adopts three little girls solely to use them as bait as part of an elaborate scheme to go into space and steal the moon, hopefully securing his standing as the greatest supervillain EVER. While the “awwww” factor of the three cute girls might be enough of an argument for the joys of parenting for some movies, this film does a pretty respectable job of constructing a genuine attachment between the members of the new family. Watch out for the amusement park sequence—I thought it was utterly delightful.
However, the truly noteworthy element of the portrayal of this dilemma is that the film doesn’t undersell the unique rewards of following your professional dreams: Through a series of moderately heartbreaking flashbacks, we see a young Gru have his aspirations to go to he moon quashed over and over by a chronically unimpressed mother. By lending his professional goals emotional salience of their own, this ensures that the kids-job battle is a relatively fair fight—a tough job in a kid’s movie, where it’s probably safe to assume your audience may come down pretty solidly on the kids side of the argument. In my opinion, the resolution of the debate is pretty artful.
In any event, as a feminist I deeply appreciate a film that presumes that men can and perhaps should feel *just* as torn between work and family as women do (how novel!). Since I at least currently plan to work when I have children, figuring out a graceful compromise between family and career is something about which I have a decent level of anxiety ahead of time. Frankly, this has been treated as a uniquely feminine challenge for so goddamn long, and it’s really irritating. To state the painfully obvious, last time I checked dads contributed pretty significantly to the creation of their kids, so why isn’t this something *all* working parents are expected to wrestle with, instead of just all working moms? If balancing professional and family life is increasingly discussed as a *parent’s* issue and not just a *female parent’s* issue—even in such a silly forum as a children’s movie—maybe that could lead to more practices and supports being put into place that make the balancing act more doable for everyone.
I suppose what I’m driving at is that I like this movie largely because it normalizes something I think should already be normalized, but isn’t. I benefited from having a father who was just as active in my upbringing as my mom, and many other moms. He worked (like my mom), but made time to be at home, come to events at school, and come to soccer and softball games, all because he felt it was important for him to balance time with me with time at work. I certainly don’t mean to imply that fathers who have trouble pulling this off don’t *want* to. What I *do* think is that it is maddeningly presumed in most *workplaces* that fathers don’t want to. Normalizing a father’s desire to balance work and family as comparable to any mother’s is a weirdly belated but very needed step in establishing true gender equality in our culture.
So now that my little rant’s over, we can talk about some more fun things in the movie. First of all, Steve Carell is wonderful as Gru. While watching the movie, I found myself doubting my memory that he was voicing the main character. Some celebrity voices in animated movies can be really distracting since you’re so conscious that THAT GUY is the voice of THAT SQUIRREL (or whatever), but Carell almost completely effaces himself while still creating a very entertaining character. Also, if you can see the movie in 3D (are you even able not to? I don’t know...), do it for the roller coaster sequence. I’m really ambivalent about the whole 3D cinema thing, but that shit was cool.
All in all, this is a perfectly fun movie. I would recommend seeing it in theaters if you can. In conclusion, I gave it a 4.
In psychological news: I’ve read approximately eight more pages of my meta-analysis book. My mentor requested an email update of my progress this week, which I just sent. Mercifully, I had some things to say. I’ve done some legitimate work (I swear), but I’m still feeling frustrated that I haven’t been able to sit down and crank out as much work as I would like. Part of the difficulty is my ongoing commitment to my fellowship work--that's the project I've been interviewing people for, in addition to doing oodles of data entry. It's work I enjoy, but I would love to be able to carve out a week or two to devote solely to my thesis. We’ll see if that happens before the summer’s over... God willing.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy the weekend!
<3
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Times Are A-"Changeling"
Hello darlings.
Last week I rented Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” (2008) through Netflix. I started it a little before midnight on a night when I really needed to be asleep by twelve to be intelligible for work at school the next morning. I had a subject coming in for the study I’m working on, and had to SCID (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders) and SIDP (Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality [Disorders]) him, a process that can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours or more. I wanted to be sharp.
So starting this movie was a terrible idea.
Really, from my little experience with his films, I should’ve known that starting *any* Eastwood-directed movie when I wanted to get to sleep on time was a terrible idea. I’m still catching my breath from “Mystic River” (2003). Eastwood is truly a formidable director, especially when he’s directing movies about bad things happening to people’s children.
So I started the movie, thinking I would watch maybe a half hour of it and finish the rest the next day. Instead, once immersed in this film, I wouldn’t have dreamt of cutting it off. This is a movie worth losing sleep over.
“Changeling” is based on the true story of a single woman in Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son disappeared from their home in 1928. The subsequent nation-wide search for Walter Collins ended when his mother, Christine, was presented with a child the Los Angeles Police Department was convinced was her son. He was not. In spite of her protestations and mounting evidence that the LAPD had, in fact, retrieved the wrong child, the police were resolute in their contention that Christine Collins was incorrect, to the point of placing her in a psychiatric hospital for her insubordination.
Angelina Jolie plays the heroine of the film. She spends much of the movie with stylish hats pulled low over her eyes, largely obscuring her face—a decision I theorize was made in part because otherwise she is so distractingly the stunning, controversial, and strange Angelina Jolie—and yet the performance that comes boiling out of her is so riveting it steals the breath. In spite of her character’s ultimate heroism, she makes you feel her gut-wrenching despair, her nauseating powerlessness in the face of infuriatingly stubborn, stupid men whose misogyny so thickens their skulls that they would rather put a woman in a psychiatric institution than believe, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, she might be right.
Oh she is so good.
She is delightfully accompanied in the film by the ever-watchable, ever-bizarre John Malkovich, who I honestly think is incapable of being bad in anything. As a Presbyterian minister and radio evangelist, he imbues each word with a taught, righteous rage seemingly meant to convert each staccato consonant into a little knife to be driven into the heart of his foes—in this case, the horrifyingly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920’s (not to be confused with the horrifyingly corrupt LAPD of the 1950’s, as portrayed in the wonderful “L.A. Confidential” (1997), for example).
The movie follows this story’s path through places of chilling, startling darkness, far beyond even the walls of the hospital that housed Christine Collins—places that seem too terrible to be based in fact, and yet were real. Part of the reason I didn’t get to bed before 3 am was that I promptly hopped on Wikipedia and Google to verify the events depicted in the movie—it was THAT GOOD. Eastwood guides his viewer’s gaze, firmly yet without undue brutality, toward some of the most troubling abilities of humankind with a solemnity and clarity few directors possess. I obviously don’t want to ruin the latter part of the movie, but suffice it to say it’s both surprising and morbidly fascinating in a way I haven’t seen perhaps since “Capote” (2005).
Given the role of institutions of mental health in this movie, I’m obligated to make mention of the fact that I am continually disappointed by the history of my chosen profession. For such a young field, psychology has already done a number of pretty ugly things. Partnering up with a corrupt police department to file away perfectly sane women whose “affliction” consists merely of mouthing off to men in positions of authority is unsettling and awful, but unfortunately not the worst chapter in psychological history. See also: lobotomies. Or forcibly sterilizing the mentally retarded. Or conditions in state-run mental hospitals during World War II. And that’s just the shit we’ve pulled in America. Don’t even get me started on how mental health looks in less-developed nations, like Viet Nam, which I visited recently. Psychology has come a long way, but there’s still a long road ahead of us before we strike a graceful balance between protecting human liberty and dignity and effectively and consistently healing the mentally ill.
In conclusion, I gave “Changeling” a 5. Shocking, I’m sure.
In other, less depressing psychological news: I’ve read like 12 pages of my book on meta-analysis, and have learned that I can now consider myself a synthesist. Oooooh. Flashy, I know. Even though I have much more reading and work ahead of me, I’m relieved to have finally accomplished something toward completing my thesis.
I’ve also gotten to interview two subjects in the last week or so (not just the one I failed to get sufficient sleep for), which is great because a) I get to count that time as clinical hours for internship, b) I want to be a psychologist, so I like talking to human beings about their problems, and c) I have a tendency to love my participants/clients merely because they show up and talk to me about their lives (but also because they almost always reveal some unusual, special loveliness in their possession). So that was nice.
And with that, I’ll sign off. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.
<3
Last week I rented Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” (2008) through Netflix. I started it a little before midnight on a night when I really needed to be asleep by twelve to be intelligible for work at school the next morning. I had a subject coming in for the study I’m working on, and had to SCID (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders) and SIDP (Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality [Disorders]) him, a process that can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours or more. I wanted to be sharp.
So starting this movie was a terrible idea.
Really, from my little experience with his films, I should’ve known that starting *any* Eastwood-directed movie when I wanted to get to sleep on time was a terrible idea. I’m still catching my breath from “Mystic River” (2003). Eastwood is truly a formidable director, especially when he’s directing movies about bad things happening to people’s children.
So I started the movie, thinking I would watch maybe a half hour of it and finish the rest the next day. Instead, once immersed in this film, I wouldn’t have dreamt of cutting it off. This is a movie worth losing sleep over.
“Changeling” is based on the true story of a single woman in Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son disappeared from their home in 1928. The subsequent nation-wide search for Walter Collins ended when his mother, Christine, was presented with a child the Los Angeles Police Department was convinced was her son. He was not. In spite of her protestations and mounting evidence that the LAPD had, in fact, retrieved the wrong child, the police were resolute in their contention that Christine Collins was incorrect, to the point of placing her in a psychiatric hospital for her insubordination.
Angelina Jolie plays the heroine of the film. She spends much of the movie with stylish hats pulled low over her eyes, largely obscuring her face—a decision I theorize was made in part because otherwise she is so distractingly the stunning, controversial, and strange Angelina Jolie—and yet the performance that comes boiling out of her is so riveting it steals the breath. In spite of her character’s ultimate heroism, she makes you feel her gut-wrenching despair, her nauseating powerlessness in the face of infuriatingly stubborn, stupid men whose misogyny so thickens their skulls that they would rather put a woman in a psychiatric institution than believe, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, she might be right.
Oh she is so good.
She is delightfully accompanied in the film by the ever-watchable, ever-bizarre John Malkovich, who I honestly think is incapable of being bad in anything. As a Presbyterian minister and radio evangelist, he imbues each word with a taught, righteous rage seemingly meant to convert each staccato consonant into a little knife to be driven into the heart of his foes—in this case, the horrifyingly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920’s (not to be confused with the horrifyingly corrupt LAPD of the 1950’s, as portrayed in the wonderful “L.A. Confidential” (1997), for example).
The movie follows this story’s path through places of chilling, startling darkness, far beyond even the walls of the hospital that housed Christine Collins—places that seem too terrible to be based in fact, and yet were real. Part of the reason I didn’t get to bed before 3 am was that I promptly hopped on Wikipedia and Google to verify the events depicted in the movie—it was THAT GOOD. Eastwood guides his viewer’s gaze, firmly yet without undue brutality, toward some of the most troubling abilities of humankind with a solemnity and clarity few directors possess. I obviously don’t want to ruin the latter part of the movie, but suffice it to say it’s both surprising and morbidly fascinating in a way I haven’t seen perhaps since “Capote” (2005).
Given the role of institutions of mental health in this movie, I’m obligated to make mention of the fact that I am continually disappointed by the history of my chosen profession. For such a young field, psychology has already done a number of pretty ugly things. Partnering up with a corrupt police department to file away perfectly sane women whose “affliction” consists merely of mouthing off to men in positions of authority is unsettling and awful, but unfortunately not the worst chapter in psychological history. See also: lobotomies. Or forcibly sterilizing the mentally retarded. Or conditions in state-run mental hospitals during World War II. And that’s just the shit we’ve pulled in America. Don’t even get me started on how mental health looks in less-developed nations, like Viet Nam, which I visited recently. Psychology has come a long way, but there’s still a long road ahead of us before we strike a graceful balance between protecting human liberty and dignity and effectively and consistently healing the mentally ill.
In conclusion, I gave “Changeling” a 5. Shocking, I’m sure.
In other, less depressing psychological news: I’ve read like 12 pages of my book on meta-analysis, and have learned that I can now consider myself a synthesist. Oooooh. Flashy, I know. Even though I have much more reading and work ahead of me, I’m relieved to have finally accomplished something toward completing my thesis.
I’ve also gotten to interview two subjects in the last week or so (not just the one I failed to get sufficient sleep for), which is great because a) I get to count that time as clinical hours for internship, b) I want to be a psychologist, so I like talking to human beings about their problems, and c) I have a tendency to love my participants/clients merely because they show up and talk to me about their lives (but also because they almost always reveal some unusual, special loveliness in their possession). So that was nice.
And with that, I’ll sign off. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.
<3
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Bienvenue!
Hi guys.
So I'm thinking about writing a blog.
The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was "The Land Before Time." I was 4. I made it about 10 minutes in, but as soon as the Tyrannosaurus Rex killed Little Foot's mom, I was done. I threw a massive fit and insisted my parents leave the theater with me. They weren't happy about it.
Years later, in spite of my early rejection of the medium, I love movies. While I'm by no means an expert in film, I've taken film classes in undergrad and while I was abroad, and fed my appetite for cinema at a relatively steady pace from the first time I had full command of a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video card in high school... in fact, I skipped a good number of days of high school in favor of watching films. I've spent a lot of time watching movies, and a lot of time thinking and talking about them.
As an expression of my love of film, I've had the recurring goal of seeing at least 52 movies a year for three years now. Surely, seeing a movie a week seems like an achievable enough aim to a devotee. To monitor my progress in this pursuit, I've kept track of every movie I've seen, including ratings from one (oh God why??) to five (marvelous!). For the first two years of this continuing resolution, I stayed admirably on course.
...And then I started graduate school in clinical psychology. I majored in psychology (or, according to my undergraduate institution, "Psychological and Brain Sciences"), and have wanted to be a psychologist since I first thought seriously about wanting to be anything. After a few years out of school, I'm glad to be a student again and grateful to be in a program I (for the most part) love. I've just finished the first year of my five(ish) year program, and in spite of the obscenities I hurled around midterms and finals, it really wasn't so bad. It feels great being one step closer to the grown-up life I've wanted for so long.
But. If you take a look at my "Movies Watched in 2009" list, you'll find a very sad state of affairs. I barely watched 50% of my 52 movies goal, and that is purely the fault of graduate school. While I'm back on track so far this year, I figure it can't hurt to add a little extra accountability into my cinematic aspirations.
And so: here is my little blog. It has two purposes:
1. Keeping track of the movies I watch this year. I'll include a running tally of movies-seen-to-date to determine whether I'm keeping up with my goal. I'll write little reviews and keep up with my rating system. And during busy, new-movie-watchingless weeks, I'll revisit some of my favorites and make recommendations for anyone who hasn't seen them yet.
2. Documenting my graduate life. I spent so much time thinking about what grad school would be like, and so much energy actually getting here, and yet have recorded very little of my experience over the past year. I used to be an avid journaler, but have lost the discipline for it. Hopefully this will be a venue for tracking my progress through graduate school... Not to mention monitoring my work on grad school-related things, like, I don't know, my Master's thesis...?
So really, this is a way for me to ensure I'm devoting consistent effort to two things I love, while sharing pieces of my life with my friends, many of whom are far away. After all, I feel like these two loves of mine have a lot to do with each other, and a discussion of one will hopefully somehow inform a discussion of the other. I hope that sounds interesting, and that you have time to check in here every once in a while.
Thanks for reading.
<3
So I'm thinking about writing a blog.
The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was "The Land Before Time." I was 4. I made it about 10 minutes in, but as soon as the Tyrannosaurus Rex killed Little Foot's mom, I was done. I threw a massive fit and insisted my parents leave the theater with me. They weren't happy about it.
Years later, in spite of my early rejection of the medium, I love movies. While I'm by no means an expert in film, I've taken film classes in undergrad and while I was abroad, and fed my appetite for cinema at a relatively steady pace from the first time I had full command of a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video card in high school... in fact, I skipped a good number of days of high school in favor of watching films. I've spent a lot of time watching movies, and a lot of time thinking and talking about them.
As an expression of my love of film, I've had the recurring goal of seeing at least 52 movies a year for three years now. Surely, seeing a movie a week seems like an achievable enough aim to a devotee. To monitor my progress in this pursuit, I've kept track of every movie I've seen, including ratings from one (oh God why??) to five (marvelous!). For the first two years of this continuing resolution, I stayed admirably on course.
...And then I started graduate school in clinical psychology. I majored in psychology (or, according to my undergraduate institution, "Psychological and Brain Sciences"), and have wanted to be a psychologist since I first thought seriously about wanting to be anything. After a few years out of school, I'm glad to be a student again and grateful to be in a program I (for the most part) love. I've just finished the first year of my five(ish) year program, and in spite of the obscenities I hurled around midterms and finals, it really wasn't so bad. It feels great being one step closer to the grown-up life I've wanted for so long.
But. If you take a look at my "Movies Watched in 2009" list, you'll find a very sad state of affairs. I barely watched 50% of my 52 movies goal, and that is purely the fault of graduate school. While I'm back on track so far this year, I figure it can't hurt to add a little extra accountability into my cinematic aspirations.
And so: here is my little blog. It has two purposes:
1. Keeping track of the movies I watch this year. I'll include a running tally of movies-seen-to-date to determine whether I'm keeping up with my goal. I'll write little reviews and keep up with my rating system. And during busy, new-movie-watchingless weeks, I'll revisit some of my favorites and make recommendations for anyone who hasn't seen them yet.
2. Documenting my graduate life. I spent so much time thinking about what grad school would be like, and so much energy actually getting here, and yet have recorded very little of my experience over the past year. I used to be an avid journaler, but have lost the discipline for it. Hopefully this will be a venue for tracking my progress through graduate school... Not to mention monitoring my work on grad school-related things, like, I don't know, my Master's thesis...?
So really, this is a way for me to ensure I'm devoting consistent effort to two things I love, while sharing pieces of my life with my friends, many of whom are far away. After all, I feel like these two loves of mine have a lot to do with each other, and a discussion of one will hopefully somehow inform a discussion of the other. I hope that sounds interesting, and that you have time to check in here every once in a while.
Thanks for reading.
<3
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