Mis-Matchmaker

Associated Press film critic Christy Lemire (that is NOT her on the left) wrote the following about the lead characters in Judd Apatow's new movie Knocked Up.

"Clearly these people are totally wrong for each other. Ben is round and hairy; Alison is leggy and blonde."

Calling this a mismatch seems a little screwy to me. What's so "totally wrong" about roundness and legginess, hairiness and blondness? If "round" is to be read "short" and "leggy" means "tall," I see what she's getting at, but I'm still mystified by the "hairy" and "blonde" pairing.

Perhaps the point is Ben the Hairy (Mr. Apatow's alter ego) is rough and brutish. Alison, the blonde, is delicate and refined (not unlike Mr. Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann, who appears in the film).

Perhaps Ms. Lemire knows her readers will make these inferences about hairy guys and blondes and will see why hilarious misadventures are in store. Maybe she's accurately reflecting the cultural shorthand of the film's creator and the targeted audience.

One friend ~ who is neither round nor hairy as far as I know ~ broke it down into genetic contributions from the pregnant pair: It's personality from the guy and looks from the girl. Apparently, he gets it. (Maybe it's a white thing.)

I never saw Apatow's earlier acclaimed film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but I feel his television work ~ "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared" ~ effectively subverted stereotypes about white suburban youth by lampooning them. Apatow's a deft writer with a refined ear for dialogue though these short-lived series lacked racial and ethnic diversity on camera and, presumably, in the audience.

Frankly, I don't mind the narrowness of Apatow's vision because it's so sharp and smartly observed.

But I do hope "round and hairy" doesn't become another Hollywood character trope like the eye patch (Casino Royale), bad teeth (Pirates) or cheek piercings (300).

If Knocked Up makes the projected $7 trillion worldwide, the round and hairies won't be able to buy on-screen action and good hobbit roles don't come along every day.

No, sir.




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I'm OK?

Most days I'm a reasonable, foursquare, no-nonsense kind of guy.

I can also be a prick ~ belligerent and insufferable, ask my ex ~ but that's OK. From where I sit, the bastards of the world (BOWs) are plotting to take the shine off the day for unsuspecting nice people.

My Zen friends don't see the threat. They're as tranquil as Tahitian waterfalls.

Not me. I'm always on the lookout for "bummer Ninjas."

The chick on her cellphone manuevers her Escalade between my '95 Mazda pickup and the Escort 20 feet ahead of me. I look in the rearview and there's a quarter mile between me and the next car. I'm boiling mad and shooting rays of karmic disaster at the back of her ponytailed head.

A guy in mossy fatigues and workboots decides to slow his pace as he crosses the street. Is he daring me to hit him? Are these the moments ~ slowing traffic ~ that give his life meaning? Is this his middle-finger to the man? Am I the MAN?

The driver of the Xtend cab in the next lane is feeling superior because he can carry three passengers and I can't. "Get over it, Opie. It's still a truck."

It's time for the guy in the Lexus in front of me to remove the "W" sticker from his back window. I think the same thing about the dancing rainbow bears on the Honda to my right. "Keep up, people!"

It's 7:50 in the morning. Who are you talking to on your cell? Is London calling?

Skippy runs the stop sign, cutting me off as he races to the parking lot. I lean into my horn ~ which these days gets as little attention from student drivers as parking tickets ~ and follow him into the lot. He cowers in his car, pretending to examine something really fascinating in the passenger's seat. I wait for a minute then realize a middle-aged professor ~ no matter how strapping ~ shouldn't be taking on a 20-year-old hopped up on Red Bull. So, I let him off with a stern warning: "I'll hit you the next time."

Admittedly, the threat doesn't make much sense but I feel a little better. Somebody's got to stand up for the nice people in the world, dammit.




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Bugged

Something insidious is at work in William Friedkin's latest film, "Bug," in which Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon are consumed by paranoid delusions of government-sponsored infections and insect conspiracies.

It's inspired lunacy.

The guy sitting behind me in today's matinee apparently was expecting something other than what was delivered.

"That was weak, man," he said to me, as he packed up his empties and headed to the exit.

"I was into it," I said. And I was.

But I was reading the movie -- which really is horrifying, that much of the trailer is true -- as a metaphor for the really frigged-up way we can see what isn't there and believe the incredible because, for some reason, we can't bear not to. Maybe doing so would mean having to admit that our trust has been betrayed, we've made bad choices or that we will have to take some painful steps to setting things right.

Judd's character, Agnes, is desperately lonely, guilt-ridden and victimized by her sadistic ex-con husband (an impressively buff Harry Connick Jr.). She falls for the quietly creepy Peter (Shannon) who clings to Agnes after telling her he was a "lab rat" while in a Gulf War hospital and he needs her to keep him safe from the "machines."

In no time at all Agnes is swatting at noseeums and clawing her flesh bloody like her new beau.

I've read amateur reviews that complained the film was too talky. Lots of words are exchanged, no question. But they contain intriguing ideas about disconnectedness and distrust and kindness and caring. Maybe too many for the average moviegoer.

At one point early in the film, the camera frames a red onion in a supermarket bin. Though the onion is a trigger for one of Agnes' especially tragic memories, it was also to me indicative of how many layers of madness were going to be peeled off over the next hour or so.

Unfortunately, unlike in Friedkin's earlier masterwork, The Exorcist, no one was coming to drive the demons out of these two profoundly f-ed up people.

No, sir.



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True Color

Two colleagues and I were gorging ourselves on barbeque at lunch today, as we tried to untie some knots in our current research. The topic of celebrity endorsers came up, and I asked if they could name a black woman who was currently hawking a national product.

Mike and Ted, both African-American males, thought for a minute.

"There's that black woman who promotes Pine-Sol during daytime television," Mike offered.

"She's not a celebrity," I said.

"Sounds like she's a latter-day mammy figure," Ted said, with a laugh.

"Who better to know how to clean a bathroom?" I said.

"And be happy doing it," Ted quipped.

"I can't think of anyone since Paula Abdul and Diet Coke," Mike said.

"Does she read 'black'?" I asked.

"I think most people would look at her and say 'light-skinned black'," Ted said. (Ms. Abdul is actually Syrian/Brazilian/Canadian.)

"Really?" I said. "You don't think most people would say 'Hispanic'?"

"No," Mike said.

"Who DOES read Hispanic, then?" I asked.

Mike thought for a minute.



"I think without the surnames most Hispanic celebrities would be identified as white -- Oscar de la Hoya. White."

"Really? You don't think he looks Hispanic? What about Jimmy Smits?" I asked.



"I think most people would say he's white," Mike said.

I was dumbfounded and a little sad. Two of the smartest guys I knew seemed to believe that the general public viewed the world fairly monochromatically ~ folks were either black or white.

But then, that makes sense, considering the public's slotting of the biracial junior senator from Illinois as a contender to be the country's first BLACK president.

And the living is easy

I'm taking some time to pinch a few bolls, reflect on the past school year and chart a course for the coming months.

Remember, it's 2 to 1 ~ 2 cups of cold water and 1 cup of sugar and 8 to 10 teabags for southern sweet tea.

Hang tight, sweet prince

I was hunting audio speakers in the electronics section at Big K yesterday when I heard the saleswoman bemoan the credit card bill she'd just received.

"Over $400," she told the woman at the counter.

But then she chirped, "I bought my grandson a zoomer camera to take to Afghanistan!"

I wondered if her grandson would be vacationing in the Middle East or doing a very different kind of camping among the poppies. Considering where I was -- a discount store in a southern town whose young men were chronically undereducated and underemployed -- I was assuming the latter.

I was struck by her enthusiasm and wondered if she was aware of how dreadful things were going in the Middle East. Folks across the pond were.

I had read in The Times earlier that morning that Prince Harry, a tank commander in the British army and third in line to the throne of England, would NOT be going to fight in the Middle East. According to the army chief of staff, Harry's celebrity made him a marked man whose presence in Iraq would elevate the danger to himself and his fellow soldiers. So, his comrades were going but Harry was staying put.

Some Brits were no doubt wondering, as I was, if pulling the prince's deployment -- which had been announced months ago -- was more about the public relations catastrophe that would happen were he not to return. I can't imagine the sadness and outrage the Brits would feel if this enormously popular, though raffish, young man, whose mother was loved and admired, were to be a casualty of this enormously unpopular war.

The army chief of staff said the prince's profile put him and those under his command at "unacceptable risk."

To my mind, when a war lacks purpose and conscience there's no such thing as "acceptable risk."

No, sir.

Making the Grade

An important lesson I learned during my first year in the academy was about marking student assignments.

All of the participants in a "new journalism professors workshop" had to submit a course syllabus for review. The instructor said during my one-on-one that describing my grading process as "subjective" was a mistake.

"Students will see that as unfair," he said. "You have to have measurable criteria to evaluate their work."

I took his point and eliminated the term from my syllabus and from my thinking.

A colleague was in my office the other day, distressed because she'd been pilloried by student evaluations of her teaching.

"They don't understand that grading is subjective," she said.

That word again.

My relationship with this colleague precluded my sharing with her my approach to marking student work; she's fairly resistant to the advice of peers. So, I kept silent.

I understand her position, though. Creating quantifiable measures for journalism isn't easy. And our presumed association with the relatively nebulous standards of English composition doesn't help.

I've been teaching for nearly 15 years and though I'm comfortable with my approach to grading, I'm constantly refining it because too many students come to University ready to negotiate everything. Many of them look for weaknesses in the instructor or the instruction to exploit. Rather than decide they'll clear the bar, they look for ways to lower it.

Some of my colleagues' syllabi have grown to incredible lengths, and still students find loopholes. It's frustrating and exhausting to have to lay it all out but, I feel, we have to do it.

I tell my former co-workers who are still in the newspaper business that the toughest part of my transition to the academy was deconstructing my process of news gathering and writing. What worked and was generally successful? What was anomalous and of limited usefulness? What have others done that was effective? And on and on.

War stories are entertaining but have limited utility in the classroom.

I had to standardize criteria to be applied to all of the students -- length and structure of the lead, number of sources, word-count minimums and maximums, etc. -- and explain to students that it benefits them to have these standards. Of course, those who are immune to instruction or allergic to discipline pay no mind, and their grades reflect it.

The good eggs, however, tell me that knowing how their work is evaluated gives them confidence that they're actually learning -- which they can't say about every class they take.

No, sir.