#34: Porsche. There Is No Substitute.

 (Risky Business, Paul Brickman, 1983) 

The feeling of not belonging or not being good enough is one that most everyone can identify with. There have been times in all of our lives where we've been in a situation where we've thought to ourselves "I am completely out of my element. I don't belong here. I want to go home." I had a profound moment of feeling out of place recently when I had my departmental orientation for graduate school. I found myself seated amongst 23 other new graduate students, all of whom seemed to have a much firmer grasp of who they were and what they were doing there. For the first time since being admitted I found myself thinking "I don't belong here, they must have let me in by mistake." In Risky Business Tom Cruise's Joel has his moment of doubt when the Princeton representative lets him know that his many high school achievements just aren't quite Ivy League. I only mention that because this is ostensibly a post about Risky Business, but let's face it, it's really going to be a post about my first week of graduate school and how on the second day I had a sincere moment of thinking that I might just throw in the towel.

Because I feel like I must, I will take a moment to discuss Risky Business. It's a good film. The world certainly has this film to thank for the rise of Tom Cruise: Megastar. Or maybe they have this film to blame, I guess it just depends on how you want to look at it. That one underwear dancing scene is certainly entertaining, and Joel's first call girl turning out to be a call transvestite is rather amusing. I enjoyed this film heartily, though admittedly many months ago. However, the scene that I briefly mentioned above has stayed with me and rung true with me for all of those months, so any time I reference the film in the rest of this post it will most likely be to that scene. Sorry. I know that I once made the statement that this was a blog about film, but that probably hasn't been true for a long time. With that in mind, let's start our journey through the insecurities of a graduate student in English.

One month ago I was so excited to start graduate school that I could barely contain myself. I even went out and bought all of my textbooks in the first week of September and then proceeded to stare at them and marvel at the wonders and brilliant ideas they would be providing me with in mere weeks. I bought new pens and notebooks, dug out my trusty highlighters, and dusted off my school bag while I anxiously awaited the day that I would return to school, my mind ready to be filled with new and exciting things. By the second day of class I was convinced that my admittance to a graduate program was either a horrible mistake or a cruel joke. The stack of books in my room suddenly seemed like it was taunting me, its ideas far too complex for my feeble, undergraduate-quality mind. I was no longer the lone shark in a lake, I was suddenly a guppy in the Pacific ocean. And there were 23 hungry sharks staring at me as if they hadn't eaten in months.

One of the lines in Risky Business that I remember most comes from that scene I mentioned above. Joel and the rep are in their meeting, and after running off a list of Joel's high school achievements Mr. Princeton says bluntly,  "you've done some solid work here, but it's not quite Ivy League now, is it." In a strange way those words have haunted me ever since. I now worry that I'm going to hear that or some variation of it every time I go to a professor with an idea for a paper or a topic that I'd like to research. "Well Caroline, you've got some interesting ideas here, but they just aren't quite graduate school quality, are they." I know I shouldn't think like that, but I hear those words echoing in my head every time I think I've come up with something good.

The decision to go to graduate school was one that I made fairly quickly. I think a part of me never really absorbed what was happening or the gravity of the situation that I had put myself in until I was actually in it. I felt a bit like Joel when he realized how in over his head he was with Lana's pimp and the repair costs for his father's Porsche (seriously, a lot goes down in this movie). He's in a situation that he's put himself in and has to do what he can to get through it. While I can't really solve my graduate school woes by turning my house into a brothel (fear not, parents), I do have to just do what I can to get through it.

Near the beginning of the film Joel's friend Miles gives Joel some interesting advice that Joel later repeats to the Princeton representative. It's advice that I'm trying to use whenever I find myself thinking "it's just not graduate school quality now, is it." When Joel tells Miles that his parents are going out of town, Miles says to him "sometimes you gotta say 'what the fuck,' make your move. Every now and then saying 'what the fuck' brings freedom. Freedom brings opportunity, opportunity makes your future." Of course, the difference between the film and my life is that Miles is trying to convince Joel that it's a good idea to hire a hooker (spoiler alert: it's not), ad I'm trying to remind myself that the chances of them letting me into graduate school as a cruel joke are probably pretty slim. But the advice is sound. Sometimes you have to let go and not worry so much and take chances and do the things that you want to do. So, you know... what the fuck (sorry, mom). 

#33: The Raptor Fences Aren't Out, Are They?

(Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg, 1993)

When I first started writing this I was sitting in an airport in Philadelphia. It was 4 AM in Eugene, I basically hadn't slept, and I had two hours before my plane boarded. I figured I had two choices: I could either keep reading Dorian Gray and struggle to maintain focus on it, or I could try to hammer out a blog while I had the time. So there I was, in Philadelphia International Airport, writing about dinosaurs, trying to keep my eyes open. Needless to say, I couldn't stay focused on this any longer than I could on Dorian Gray, so I eventually gave up and just sat there and stared into space. Now I am sitting in a Starbucks in Lake Placid on my first full day off from camp and facing a very similar situation. I can either sit here and try to focus on Dorian Gray while my friends talk to each other, or I can try to write about dinosaurs. As is almost always the case, dinosaurs won.

My review of Jurassic Park is going to come with another "when Caroline was a little girl" story. When I was a little girl I was not what most people would consider normal. My favorite color was black, I was absolutely fascinated by the great disasters in history (Titanic, Pompeii, etc.), and I was obsessed with dinosaurs. That meant that when Jurassic Park came out I was dying to see it. Much like my later confusion about why I wasn't allowed to watch American Beauty, I was utterly shocked and devastated when my mom told me that she wouldn't take me to see it in theaters. You see, in my mind dinosaurs were not and could not ever be scary, a feeling that my mother understandably questioned. What I didn't realize was that Jurassic Park was not a film about dinosaurs and humans getting along, but rather a film about dinosaurs devouring the very people that brought them back into existence.

My mom's ban on Jurassic Park didn't last long, though. She told me that she would allow me to see it, but only after she'd seen it first. And even then I had to watch it in broad daylight with all the lights on so as to not give myself nightmares. I could not understand what all the rules were for, but I really wanted to watch some dinosaurs so I didn't really care. After she watched it, she was hesitant. She told me that she thought it was scary, but that my dad had said that I would probably love it, so she'd allow me to see it. Not surprisingly, I was overjoyed.

Now, dear readers, we reach the point in the story that truly highlights the oddity that was me as a child. I watched Jurassic Park intensely (and in broad daylight, as requested by my mother), and I loved every second of it. I was so excited to see the dinosaurs that I'd seen in books on a television screen, moving and interacting with each other (I'm also not entirely sure that I understood that the dinosaurs in the movie weren't actual dinosaurs). I was also unfailingly on the side of the dinosaurs. When the people in the movie were scared of them and trying to kill them, I was mad. It was impossible for me to understand that I was supposed to be rooting against the giant, murderous reptiles in favor of the people. I didn't want to do it, and I wasn't going to.

Now, many years later, I kind of feel the same way. For the most part the humans in Jurassic Park are douchebags who deserve to be tormented by prehistoric monsters. The people that survive that movie are the people who deserve to survive, and the ones who get ripped apart pretty much deserve what's coming to them. I still cheer when the Tyrannosaurus rex saves the main characters from the velociraptors, and I still think to myself "see, dinosaurs really aren't that bad." I understand that this is not popular opinion, but my inner 5-year-old still holds on to it. It doesn't matter how old I get, whenever I watched Jurassic Park I'll always want the dinosaurs to win, and I'll always be happy when the helicopters fly away the the dinosaurs are left to live on their island in peace.

#32: I Rule!

(American Beauty, 1999, Sam Mendes)

I have very distinct memories of watching the Academy Awards in 2000 when American Beauty won Best Picture. I was eleven, and I remember asking my mom if we could go see it. Of course she said no, because it was an R-rated movie and I was an eleven-year-old, but based on the clips they showed during the awards ceremony I couldn't grasp why it wouldn't be appropriate (clearly I didn't understand that networks couldn't show R-rated material during prime time). My mother told me that the movie was about "grown-up things," and that someday when I was older she'd let me see it. I'm sure I stewed on that for a while, unhappy that I was being denied something that I was interested, wallowing in the gross injustice of it all,  while still knowing that if my mom said the movie wasn't okay it probably wasn't.

It took me eleven years after that to finally see American Beauty, and for some reason it carried a special allure for all of those years. There were many occasions when American Beauty was on HBO and I could have watched it, but even though I was old enough to see "grown-up things" I always heard this little voice saying "you're not allowed to watch this! You're not a grown-up yet! Change the channel!" It didn't matter that I had long been old enough to handle it's mature content, the film maintained a forbidden status in my mind that I could never muscle past. Now I kind of think of it the same way I think of The Picture of Dorian Gray: it's something that I know is supposed to be great, but that I'm slightly afraid of experiencing because I don't want to be disappointed by it. I built American Beauty up in my head as this incredible film that would totally change the way that I looked at things, that I was being prevented from seeing because it's content was mind-blowingly R-rated, but I avoided seeing it because I didn't want to be let down when it didn't live up to those expectations. Having now seen it I can say that while it wasn't totally paradigm shifting or racy, it also wasn't a major disappointment.

I know my mother is reading this, so I'll take this moment to say that I absolutely do not resent her for not letting me see American Beauty when I was eleven. It is not a film for an eleven-year-old. In all honesty, it's not even really a film for a seventeen-year-old. The dysfunction and anger that exists between the characters is something that can really only be understood by someone who has some experience with the world, and even as a 22-year-old college graduate I'm not entirely sure that I can fully appreciate it's message. The things that the film deals with are challenging for anyone who is old enough to understand what they are, and while that makes it an excellent film it also makes it a difficult one.

One of the ways that I judge a good film is by how many times I get distracted. If I'm whipping my laptop open every fifteen minutes to check Facebook and play Angry Birds the film probably isn't that gripping. When my mom and I were watching American Beauty I don't think I got distracted once. I might have looked something up on my computer at one point, but if I did I paused the film to do so. I can't remember the last time that I have been so focused on a film, especially one where so very little seems to happen. For 122 minutes I was completely riveted. The characters experience so much anguish and face so many demons that I just didn't want to look away.

More than anything I am happy that I saw American Beauty when I did. I had plenty of opportunities between the winters of 2000 and 2011 to see it, but I didn't. Something, maybe that nagging voice in the back of my head saying that I wasn't allowed to see it yet, kept me from watching it until now, and I'm glad. Even though I don't feel like I've had enough life experiences or challenges to empathize with the characters, I at least know enough to be able to comprehend what they are going through. I learned that American Beauty is not the film that I thought it would be when I saw the pretty scenes with the red rose petals, and that's what makes it so great. On the outside it looks glossy and perfect and flawless, but it's not. Just like the characters that populate its world, American Beauty is putting up a facade for the sleaze, grime, dysfunction, and violence that are lying just below the surface.

#31: End of Line.

(Tron, 1982, Steven Lisberger)

The hardest part of writing this blog has always been the fact that sometimes I watch a film and afterwards I just don't have anything to say. I strive to make these posts a reasonable length (meaning that when I wrote about Fight Club I seriously edited myself, and when I wrote about Big Night I really stretched those words), but sometimes all I can think to say is "that was a good film," or "I guess I didn't like that one so much." Usually when I stumble across one of those films I just try to expand on that basic idea and explain why it was a good film or what exactly made me not like it so much, but that's about all I can do. Those usually aren't the most interesting posts, but I made a commitment to write about every film, so I can't just exclude the films for which I can't think of any interesting personal anecdotes or intelligent discourse. What happens when I encounter a film like this is one of these two things: 1) I quickly pound out a post in the style I explained above, just trying to make "that was a good film" into 5 paragraphs, or 2) I put it off for a couple of months and hope it'll just go away, which it never does. Ladies and gentleman, Tron was one of those films, and I'm sure you can tell that I fell into that second scenario.

About a month ago I got an e-mail informing me that, despite 5 months of worry and panic, I actually had been accepted to the University of Oregon's Master of Arts program in English. For a couple months I had resigned myself to not getting in due to what I believed was a fatal error on my application. Suffice it to say, I was deeply relieved to find out that not only had I not made a fatal error, but I had also proven to the acceptance committee (which I imagine to be something like the Imperial Senate) that I was worthy of admittance to their program where I could continue to say pretentious things about Shakespeare and Anthony Burgess and get college credit for it. While all of this was very grand and exciting, it has also forced me into something of an introspective funk (I swear this is going somewhere). As a side effect of this introspective funk, along with the validation that comes along with being accepted into a graduate program, I decided that it was once again time to try to tackle this blog. I sat down to start writing about Tron and words were just not coming to me. I would try to write an opening sentence and it would feel flat and lifeless, as if it was written by a fifth grader with a limited grasp of the English language. "Snap out of it," I'd think to myself, "you're a graduate student now! Surely you can write a few paragraphs about Tron without completely embarrassing yourself." However, after about twenty minutes I decided once again that it was futile and I abandoned all efforts, firmly believing that in a few days I'd be able to make my brain work a little bit better.

A few nights later I finally had a Tron breakthrough. I was halfheartedly watching Conan, staring at my open Facebook window, when it suddenly struck me: watching Tron in the 21st century is a fascinating study in all of the things that my generation takes for granted. Tron was one of the first films to employ computer animation, and even then it was only used for about 20 minutes of the final film. Even more remarkably, the computer the filmmakers worked with only had 2MB of memory, which is astounding considering the fact that every day I carry over 30GB worth of music around in my purse. What about the other 76 minutes of the film that weren't computer animated? Well, any of the scenes that are black and white with orange and blue accents were rotoscoped and colorized, which required more work than even a standard cel-animated film. The technique was apparently so difficult and costly that it was never repeated. However, when I watched the film it was hard not to laugh at how cheesy and basic the computer animation looks. My mom repeatedly assured me that Tron was mindblowingly advanced when it was first released, but I live in a world that has films shot almost entirely on a green screen (Tron: Legacy being a fine example of that) so it was almost hard for me to take her seriously even though I knew she was telling the truth.

Now, I'm not saying that today's computer animated films are easy to make. What I am saying is that nowadays when a big computer generated tidal wave takes out the entirety of New York City audiences barely bat an eye at the work that went in to making that happen. It's hard for us to be impressed with computer animation when practically every film we see has computer generated special effects and we carry in our pockets devices that are more advanced than all of the technology used to make Tron combined. The first time I saw Gollum in The Lord of the Rings I didn't think to myself, "wow, that's some incredible computer animation" because I was too busy thinking "wow, what a creepy little critter he is." Some would say that's the mark of good computer animation, and to an extent that's true, but there's a tragedy in the fact that we take such remarkable technological achievements for granted. In all honesty, if I'm without my cell phone for a day I feel like I'm missing a part of my body (and not a silly one like my left pinky finger, a big one like my entire right arm), but I never really take the time to think about the work that went into the technology that makes my life convenient and my films enjoyable. Even though it took me a while to realize it, Tron taught me a valuable lesson to not take the technology in my life for granted because 28 years ago the most advanced computer animation companies in the country had a computer with only 2 MB of memory.

If I ever am lucky enough to teach a film class I'm going to show Tron to my students (if I can even find it, that is. For a film everyone's heard of it sure is a challenge to your hands on). Not because it's a particularly great film, but because it took real work to make it. All of those scenes that are laughably primitive to us now were painstakingly made back then, and it's eye-opening to reach that conclusion. Tron helped pave the way for CGI characters like Gollum or the Balrog, and for that it deserves to be remembered.

#30: Sometimes the Spaghetti Likes to Be Alone

(Big Night, Campbell Scott, 1996)

When Big Night was first described to me I got the impression that it was a comedy. I can attribute this to a couple of points that were made during the description. For one, I was told that the film stars Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub, two men I associate primarily with humor, even if that humor is generally pretty dry and sarcastic. Secondly, I knew that the plot involved a very elaborate dinner being made for a guest of honor who ultimately does not show up, which I misinterpreted as being a comic storyline. I don't know why I made those assumptions, but I did, which is why I was surprised when Big Night turned out to not be a comedy at all (though it did contain some of that dry Stanely Tucci humor that I love so much), and actually a fairly tense drama about a failing restaurant owned by two Italian brothers who refuse to sacrifice their heritage in order to please their diners.

I find it hard to objectively evaluate this film because I went into it with expectations that it could not possibly meet. Even though I'd read the Netflix summary and realized my mistake, I still subconsciously expected humor from Big Night, so even though I know I shouldn't have been, I was somewhat disappointed when the story was fairly depressing. I really wanted Stanley Tucci to be as he was in either The Devil Wears Prada or Julie & Julia. What I love most about Stanley Tucci is his sharp tongue, and I really missed that in his performance as Secondo in Big Night. Watching dear Stanley be repeatedly defeated in his attempts at success was heartbreaking (which I know was the intent, but even so), and I really just wanted him to be sassy and catty and wave his hand at Anne Hathaway before dressing her in Dolce & Gabbana.

However, despite my disappointment in Big Night's non-comedy, I can say that I felt a lot of empathy with the main characters. Tucci's Secondo runs the front of the house for a restaurant that he owns with his brother, Primo, who is the chef. They came to America from Italy with the goal of opening an authentic, successful Italian restaurant, and slowing begin realizing that they cannot have both success and authenticity. In the opening scene, two customers (who I'm inclined to call Ugly Americans even though they're in America) complain about the way the food is made, despite the fact that Primo has made beautifully authentic Italian cuisine for them. One complains of spaghetti with no meatballs while the other is upset that her seafood risotto doesn't have overwhelmingly large chunks of seafood in it. Secondo does his best to explain to them that, sorry, that's not what Italian food is like, but they just won't hear it. Defeated, he trudges back into the kitchen and asks Primo for some meatballs.

I've spent a good amount of time in a couple of foreign countries (Japan and Italy, specifically), and I can understand how upsetting it must be to feel you have to change your cuisine in order to cater to American palettes. I ate some of the best food I've ever had when I was in those two countries, some of it just being the dinners prepared for me by my host families. Some of my best memories of Italy were the nights that I went over to have dinner with my good friend's host family, which consisted of an Italian mother and an Middle Eastern father. Renatta, the host mother, would prepare huge spreads of food that combined both of their heritages and I always found myself eating just a little more than I probably should have. The food was great because it was real. I was eating the same things that these Italians ate every day, and I would love to find a restaurant here that could replicate Renatta's polpettine and saffron rice. I also would love it if I could find a corner cafe that sold suppli, a Roman snack that I discovered far too late and ate way too little of.

My experiences in Japan were very similar. Every morning I'd wake up to a beautiful breakfast paired with miso soup, which my host mother gave me for every meal because on my first day there I told her how much I liked it. Every night she'd make me some sort of authentic Japanese or Korean dish (I have her to thank for my exposure to bibimbap, now one of my favorite dishes), and I'd savor every bite. A couple of times we went out for sushi or to a noodle house and I'd realize just how inferior most of the Japanese food I'd eaten in American truly was. Every piece of sushi was perfect, every bowl of noodles incredible, ever cup of rice a revelation. After every sojourn abroad that I've taken, I've come home fondly remembering the meals I'd eaten above all else.

Fortunately for me, there are a couple of places in Eugene that have managed to replicate some of my favorite foreign meals. We have Toshi's ramen, an incredible little place that serves ramen that makes me feel like I'm back in Japan, hunched over a bowl of noodles, straining to hear the few Japanese words I know in the conversation next to me. Occasionally when I'm in Toshi's a Japanese or Korean family will sit down next to me to have lunch and I'll smile to myself, silently traveling back in time to those three weeks in Japan. We also have an incredible, authentic Neapolitan pizzeria called La Perla, which has been verified by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, a board whose sole duty is to travel around the world and make sure the pizzerias that call themselves authentic actually are. I feel lucky to have La Perla because it reminds me of buying pizza from a cute, hole-in-the-wall pizzeria in Rome that was just around the corner from my school.

I wish Primo and Secondo's restaurant was real, and existed in Eugene, because I'd go to it every day just to show them that there are Americans who want to eat authentic Italian food. My favorite restaurants are the ones that do ethnic cuisine, and do it without compromise. I would love to dive into a bowl of Primo's spaghetti because, just like my beloved La Perla, it would probably bring me right back to the spring that I spent in Italy. Because of that I actually somewhat enjoyed Big Night. It reminded me that I'm not the only person out there who wants things to be the way they are supposed to be. Even though the film isn't exactly happy, when they all silently gather to eat a frittata and the end, there's hope. And really, what more can you ask for?