"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
As fellow capper Zee pointed out, finally — finally — a movie about a guy with a lot of kids who marries a woman who also has a lot of kids! Thank you, Hollywood, for finally having the courage to tell this tale!
Cheaper by the Dozen 2 opens (for some reason) next month. Throw in a Brady Bunch reunion special and you’d have yourself a real trifecta of crap there.
Today, I received two hits in my search referrals for “fred coppersmith penn state english 444.2”. So…do you think I’m being stalked by a former classmate or teacher? Or both?
Unless memory fails me, English 444 was my Shakespeare class. I’m afraid I don’t really remember any of my fellow students, or even the professor all that well. A couple of my papers from that class are up here, though.
So, if we’re to believe Caryn James of The New York Times, homosexuality is an award-baiting stunt (on par with physical and mental deformities) whose increased popularity with actors is thankfully mollified by the fact that so few of them are actually homosexual themselves. The growing number of stories about homosexual and transgendered characters couldn’t have anything to do with the audience’s increased tolerance of the subject matter, or the newly found realization in Hollywood that portraying such a character will no longer necessarily make an actor a pariah at the box office, now could it? Is it inconceivable that an acotr or studio could be drawn to such material without the promise of Oscar buzz or accolades? And is it altogether too farfetched to think that maybe, just maybe, a small handful of (as of yet largely un-nominated) films does not necessarily spell a trend toward Oscar-baiting by way of homosexuality? Maybe these films are just films. Maybe homosexuals and the transgendered are just people. Maybe Hollywood, or at least the actors it employs, are slowly coming to realize and accept this. Maybe Caryn James could try doing the same.
Of course, James’ whole argument leaves out the possibility that maybe some of these actors are not pretending. It has no room for actors like Ian McKellen, who happen to be gay, and who happen to have been nominated for playing gay characters. And it ignores what are probably overwhelming statistics against it — because even if homosexuality is just stunt-acting, there’s no indication that stunt acting in itself actually leads to nominations or awards.
The Los Angeles Times reports that:
This season, the TV drama “Lost” will make pop culture history when it becomes the first show ever to have a character write a book in the real world.
Which the publishers of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer — to say nothing of The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper, Hidden Passions: Secrets from the Diaries of Tabitha Lenox, or The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red — might take issue with, as all of these books were “written” by fictional characters from television programs. And books by fictional characters are hardly anything new.
Of course, what separates those earlier TV books from this one, as the Times does point out, is that it “neither explains nor expands upon the show but seeks to be an authentic artifact.” You could, therefore, conceivably read the novel without any prior (or subsequent) knowledge of Lost as a television series. (This is different, then, even from the number of fake websites that have sprung up in connection with the show.)
It’s a little unclear, then, what exactly the point of the whole endeavor is — unless it’s just to see how far fans’ obsession with the show actually will go, and just how much they’re actually willing to buy. It sounds a little like a marketing ploy.
I tend to stay away the websites above, or the many forums that obsess over details and screenshots and audio clips from the show. I avoid spoilers like the plague. I think the show is terrific, but my own obsession with it stretches only so far. I don’t forsee reading this upcoming novel myself, if only because I’ve already got so much else to read.
Via Boing Boing comes news of an upcoming anthology of essays titled She’s Such a Geek. And they’re looking for submissions:
We want introspective essays that explain what being a geek has meant to you. Describe how you’ve fought stereotypes to be accepted among nerds. Explore why you are obsessed with topics and ideas that are supposed to be “for boys only.” Tell us how you felt the day you realized that you would be devoting the rest of your life to discovering algorithms or collecting comic books. We want strong, personal writing that is also smart and critical. We don’t mind if you use the word “fuck,” and we don’t mind if you use the word “telomerase.” Be celebratory, polemical, wistful, angry, and just plain dorky.
Requirements are 3,000-6,000 words, and the deadline is January 15, 2006. Payment is $100 plus two books.