Cubicle Cinema

I was watching some of The Matrix on TNT this morning and realized that I had egregiously left Office Space off my quickly-prepared list of the best movies of the '90s. Man, Office Space is a classic, of course. Flair. "Heard you're missing work lately? Wouldn't say I was missing it." The fax machine. "Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks." "I love kung fu." "Um, yeah." Gutting a fish on your cubicle desk. The guy who played Oswald on Drew Carey hearing the secret plan to steal the rounding errors through the tortilla-thin apartment walls. Brilliance. Sheer brilliance.

What stuck me watching the first bit of The Matrix this morning is that The Matrix and Office Space are damn near the same movie in different clothes. Cubicle guys get fed up with cubicle culture and start working to subvert it. Neo takes the blue pill. Peter discovers zen through hypnosis by the heart-attack therapist. Same kind of thing. Jennifer Aniston gets inspired by Peter and flips off her boss (Mike Judge, Office Space's director, I believe) and gets fired. Trinity goes with Neo on a purported suicide mission to save Morpheus. Same difference. Peter writes the confession and slips it under Lumberg's door so that Michael and Samir don't go to jail. Neo goes back into The Matrix to save Morpheus. Same deal. Lumberg. Agent Smith. Same basic evil enforcer of conformity. The movies even came out the same year, 1999. I guess that's not much of a surprise given that the zeitgeist at that point in time was all about techie software companies making bucks. It was only natural that the dark side of that would end up in movies.

What strikes me as weird, though, is that playing off the dark side of that made for both brilliant comedy and brilliant drama/action. I guess it's pretty natural for any cultural inspiration to come out as comedy and drama. I don't remember a lot of these kinds of things like led to really good examples of both, though. Watergate led to All the President's Men and other noir-ish dramas (Chinatown, etc.), but I don't remember any comedies coming out of the resulting distrust. Don't really remember any good Vietnam comedies. The early '90s grunge thing led to Singles, which is a pretty good comedy, not as good as Office Space, but I don't remember any decent dramas about it. Can't think of a good civil rights comedy. The Cold War lasted so long that it produced at least one brilliant paranoid drama -- the original Manchurian Candidate (who knew that Angela Landsbury could be so evil?) -- and one brilliantly psycho comedy -- Dr. Strangelove. But the Cold War lasted over 50 years. That's long time for brilliant movies to be made.

The whole over-the-top dot com thing only lasted a couple of years, but Office Space and The Matrix came out of it. Is it because people are more apt to want to share their miseries these days? Don't know. Do know that the Wachowski brothers should have followed Mike Judge's lead and not made sequels. Especially ones with ugly Cadillacs all over the place.

License Plate

As the post a couple of posts ago indicates, I probably spend too much time while I'm driving reading bumper stickers. I find myself reading personalized licensed plates too much, too, probably. So I'm driving home the other night and notice that the Explorer in front of me has a personalized plate. I notice an "H" and an "8" together. OK, that person hates something. The "I" in front of the "H" confirms that. So what does this person hate? What are those four letters after the 8? It doesn't look like a word. E . . . S . . . P . . . N What word is that supposed to be?

Oh, no, it's ESPN! Oh my God, how can someone hate ESPN?!? What else can I find out about this person from the back of his or her car? What could possibly drive someone so insane that he or she would be willing to spend $35-$45 a year to express hatred of the greatest entertainment innovation of the last 50 years? I mean, before ESPN, maybe you catch just the listing of sports scores on the late local news. Wait, this person's license plate frame is for the Pittsburgh Steelers. What?!? You love the Steelers, but hate ESPN?!? How is that possible? What's your problem?!?

More cognitive dissonance. It was a very confusing week.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

As you undoubtedly know, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe movie came out today. The reviews have been pretty good, particularly the one in the Chronicle. Little man jumping out of the chair.

This pleases me greatly. The trailer for the movie has been attached to a bunch of movies that I've seen in the last few months -- Harry Potter, Zathura, Chicken Little, Revenge of the Sith, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Capote. It wasn't very good. It was kind of a cross between Lord of the Rings and the Sound of Music with an overlay of Lion King self-righteousness. Yuck.

The trailer was very disappointing to me because I always really liked the book. In fact, I think that it was the first chapter book that I ever really read on my own. It was in fourth grade, in Mr. Shaver's class.

Third grade had pretty much been a nightmare due to a really over-the-top teacher who did things like separating the class into "flowers" and "weeds" and dissecting gophers that the janitor killed in class and making kids sit in their seats until they peed in their pants if they didn't ask to go to the bathroom just right. The little girl I had a crush on developed an ulcer. She was eight at the time. My two best friends left the school that year. Not the class, the school, because we only had one class per grade at my elementary school. One came back to the school in fourth grade, one did not. I distinctly remember the one who came back in fourth grade being dragged from the "flowers" to the "weeds" in his desk, crying. So third grade wasn't too hot.

So we get to fourth grade and it was really good. Mr. Shaver was this huge guy, about 6'4", very solidly built (not fat). He drove around in a VW Bug. He was into computers -- Apple II's, man! He somehow acquired a VCR at Island Elementary in 1979. The thing was as big as a server is now. He volunteered at the local public television station, so sometimes you would see him working the phones during a pledge drive. Just a cool guy. Mr. Slinger in Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes always reminds me of Mr. Shaver. Anyway, at one point -- probably to get me to stop asking him questions (I've always been something of a pest) -- he gave me the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to read.

Now the Muse thinks that the book is really too serious to be a great kids' book. I came at it, though, after having my brain wired from some good vs. evil stories by Star Wars (Empire Strikes Back didn't come out until the following summer, so I wasn't really wired for ambiguity yet) and I thought that the book was just great. Kids finding an unexplained portal into a place with half-humans/half-animals? Good. Kids fighting an evil witch? Good. Aslan dying and coming back? Good. Plus a cartoon version of it came out at roughly the same time that I read it. Man, you can't get any better than that.

The book's all tied up with fourth grade in my mind. I was thus quite disturbed when the trailer was not very good. Now apparently the movie is pretty good. Whew. And Enthusio wants to see it. Man, bonding with your boy over two fictional tales of your youth in one year. That's good.

Cognitive Dissonance

Like about 75% of non-engineering college students, I took Psych 1 as a freshman. In that class, the professor talked about cognitive dissonance one day. You know, being confronted with totally irreconcilable ideas simultaneously. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld's agency would put, reasons for "freakin' out."

My commute foisted on me a classic case of cognitive dissonance this week. I usually drive into the Big City for work at about the same time every day. Accordingly, I occasionally see some of the same cars headed in, presumably driven by people whose schedules are roughly the same as me. Anyway, one day this week, I'm sitting there waiting to get through a stoplight and notice the following bumper stickers on the car in front of me:

"Bush/Christ 2004"

"Help Jesus Punish The Fornicating Harlots! Vote Republican!!!"

Whoa, how do you really feel? I spent the rest of the day thinking about how over the top the second one was particularly.

OK, two days later, I'm at the same stoplight at roughly the same time of the morning and I noticed the car with those bumper stickers again in the lane next to me and about two cars ahead of me. Now, given the somewhat broader perspective I had on the car this time, I noticed what kind of car those bumper stickers were on:

A Toyota Prius! A hybrid for God's sake!

OK, now what in the world was going on here?!?

The world's most committed liberal who isn't very successful at being funny? The world's environmentally-conscious religious conservative? What, what, what was I supposed to think about this? My brain nearly exploded. I was freakin' out! Cognitive dissonance, baby.

Been A Berry, Berry Bad Blogger

Last night, out of freakin' nowhere, the Muse turns, stares at me, points her finger at me and says, "You're a bad blogger! You haven't updated your blog since November 19!" OK, OK, here it comes, baby. I'm watching 101 Most Unforgettable Moments of SNL, thus the "berry, berry" stuff. Garrett Morris's most famous character.