A Girl...

Once and Again (and Again and Again)

Rants and raves:

A few entries back, Janssen left a link to Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle, which is plenty funny all by itself but frakin' hilarious if it sounds like everything that has come out of your boyfriend's mouth recently.

Now there's Hillary Is Mom Jeans (courtesy of Holly), which has killed me dead with funny. It's like Sarah Brown's Things We Hate series but instead of, like, ten things on the list every few months, there are thousands and growing--a veritable catalogue of everything that has ever bugged you about anyone ever. Hillary didn't RSVP to your evite. Hillary hotlinked your jpg. Hillary says you look tired. Hillary misuses the word "irony"! And finally all that time absorbing meaningless pop culture finally comes in handy: Hillary put baby in the corner! Hillary tastes like burning! Hillary likes turtles! HA! I have been refreshing and submitting like a madwoman. If you see "Hillary sent the Mormon missionaries to your house" or "Hillary is voting for Nader," that would be me.

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We saw Once and although I liked it a whole lot, two things made it less for me than I'd hoped:

(1) We saw it the day after the two main characters won an Oscar for Best Song, and having heard Glen Hansard's acceptance speech about how the film was shot with two handicams and made in three weeks for $100,000, both Simon and I watched the whole movie convinced it was autobiographical and the personal work of two people and a handful of their friends. In every scene, Simon and I speculated whether the extras were hired actors or the real deal. We decided the guys on the stoop outside the girl's apartment were the real guys who hang out on the stoop outside the real girl's real apartment. We decided the guys at the jam session dinner party were real guys who really get together every month to play music and sing together over Guinness. We couldn't wait to watch the DVD special features to see how everything was put together and, damn, we we couldn't have been wronger. It was a regular movie, filmed with a regular crew, based on a fictional script by a third-party director, and cast the way any old movie is cast. The leading man, whom we cheered throughout the movie as some random talented schlub from Dublin who caught a lucky break and now basks in the golden limelight of Hollywoodland, is actually the frontman of the band the Frames, which is not only fairly well known but also in the realtively small list of bands I have seen in concert. This revelation made the film only marginally less wonderful, but still, I hate disillusionment.

(2) In the movie, the band's bassist looked like Will from last season's Beauty and the Geek. Remember? The guy who made the girls sit quietly and listen to him read Poe? Once I figured that out, I couldn't get over it.

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I'm almost finished with The Time Traveler's Wife, and I have to admit it got better. My initial criticism (that it's Replay all over again) still stands, but only for the first section of the book, when the author is (necessarily) laying the groundwork for readers not already well-versed in the mechanics of time travel.

Alas, some of your criticisms came to the forefront as well: Henry IS a dick; Clare IS annoying. Although humanizing contemptible characters seems to be the new black (see: every hit series on HBO), I don't think that's what the author was going for here, and yet, I admire the bravery it took to center a novel around two people who are not just imperfect in a comfortable, hey-they're-just-like-me sort of way, but actually sometimes downright messed up. Even better, the characters' less-than-savory actions seemed organic and not just thrown into the narrative for shock value, which is a rare feat in what little I know about contemporary fiction. (I can't say the same for Clare's use of the c-word to describe her ladyparts after a crucial plot point has them perform no less than a miracle. Who uses the word like that, in that context? I'm not criticizing the character's diction so much as questioning whether the author (a) was using a thesaurus for help or (b) has never actually heard the word used in real life.)

Current assessment: Don't not read the book because of me. Unless something incredibly stupid happens in the last fifty pages, it's been worth the time I've spent on it.

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Finally, BlogHer08 early-bird registration prices are only good for another few weeks, so if you haven't registered yet, do it right the hell now or be prepared to suffer the consequences. I will be there, and if that's not incentive, Simon will be too. Give him your free cocktail coupons and win a friend for life!