Hating on the powder-blue Goliath

Ah, the last day of March. Finally we’re toward the end of time of year that’s always full of cognitive dissonance for me – college basketball season. I grew up in ACC country, and therefore I’m supposed to be completely obsessed with college basketball, but I’ve always been more aware than really invested. I don’t really have a strong tie to any one team. My mom’s from Georgia, so I liked Georgia Tech growing up. I grew up practically next door to Wake Forest, so there’s that. One sister is a die-hard Dukie, and another went to N.C. State. I guess the strongest affiliation my family has is this: we all hate Carolina.

That’s still more cognitive dissonance. It’s the flagship of my home state’s public university system, and one of the best basketball programs in the country. But… no. I think I’d pull for Newt Gingrich before I’d pull for Carolina. Sure, they’ve got an excellent program. It’s hard to explain without sounding like straight-up bitter hater, which I’m not. I have dear friends who went to Carolina, and I respect Dean Smith and even Roy Williams, who's developed this freakily effective Gump/ninja style of coaching.

When I was a kid, it was almost a form of entertainment to see how Tarheel fans would contort themselves to avoid admitting that any loss was due to the team just being outplayed. Tarheel fans seem to live in an alternate reality where UNC Chapel Hill is still a scrappy public school that draws its players only from who’s available in-state, when the reality is that virtually no Division I program operates that way anymore. When a Duke player declares for the NBA draft, he’s a rat deserting a sinking ship; when Harrison Barnes does the same thing, it’s all “Godspeed,” like he’s going off to do mission work in Africa or something. Tarheels are all humble, salt of the earth academic scholars and Duke is a humanoid laboratory, at least until it’s time to point out how many UNC alums go on the NBA vs. Duke alums. (That one really gets me… you’re basically bragging about your college being a farm program and ridiculing a university that has the gall to actually admit qualified student athletes and educate them.)

Recently, just after Duke’s exit from the men’s NCAA tournament, a Carolina fan said to me, about Duke, “They’re smart and they’re rich – they don’t get to be good at basketball, too.” And I thought, have you looked in the mirror??? That’s when it clicked for me.

The reason I’ve always disliked Carolina and many of their fans isn’t that they’re snobs, because they aren't, universally – it’s that the ones who are huge snobs won’t admit that they’re snobs. It’s the hypocrisy. Every single thing that Carolina fans list as reasons to dislike Duke are true about Carolina, too. Sure, at one time UNC was the public university that welcomed academically gifted and driven students regardless of need, but that time’s long fracking gone. UNC is one of the most elite and selective colleges in this country, and that’s great for our region’s economy. But you don’t get to act like you’re still some backwater cow college going up against a deep-pocketed Goliath.You ARE Goliath. Put down your gourmet Franklin Street dinner and own it.

And then I thought… where have I heard this before? What other group do I regularly encounter that lives in an alternate reality and can’t admit its own privilege? Carolina fans and Republicans aren’t totally a 1:1, but there are some commonalities. Someone who thinks that a team with multiple national championships is an underdog to anyone is likely to get along swimmingly with the person who thinks that earning $200,000 a year makes one middle class, is all I’m saying.

When I was growing up, the kids who got away with murder because of where they lived and who their parents were – all Carolina grads (and people who pretended to be). When I see a certain shade of powder blue, all it does is make me put up my guard. Maybe not nine times, but a good 7.5 times out of 10, I know I’m going to run up against a person who didn’t grow up in a household where nice Christmas presents and multi-day vacations were ever in doubt; who unironically throws around terms like “up by the bootstraps;” and who doesn’t even get that the best that most people in this state can hope for is just to look through the glass at all those championship trophies.

I’m always relieved when “March Madness” is over. It means at least a short time of relief until football season starts, and at least I can remind these smug Powderheads about this.

The week in gore

(Yikes, it's been a busy month...)

I have seen a LOT of movies lately, and I found myself thinking something similar about three of them. Each got press at the time of its release surrounding their graphic violence (or, in one case, lack thereof), and naturally I had opinions.

First, "Drive," the movie starring the guy I can appreciate yet not totally fall for, Ryan Gosling. Ryan's a stunt-driver in Hollywood who moonlights as a getaway driver for various robberies. Here's a sampling of things I heard about "Drive" from reviews and other people who saw it in the theatre: "80's eye-candy;" "ultra-violent;" "adrenaline-fueled;" "non-stop escalating tension;" "I will forever boycott the Oscars for not nominating Albert Brooks." Etc.

For possibly the first time in my life, my reaction to a movie was so diametrically opposed to that of the critical consensus that I wondered if I'd seen a different movie. Usually I can understand where critics are coming from even if I don't agree with their opinions, but never do I check my DVD multiple times to make sure I didn't get a director's total re-cut.

I liked "Drive." The actors are wonderful (though I'd have given my imaginary Oscar to Bryan Cranston over Brooks). It's slow for an action movie - literally in some spots: very liberal, at times exasperating, use of slo-mo walking shots the like of which you usually only see where the screenplay is 68 pages long and they need to stretch the thing to feature length. But I'm okay with a more character-driven story that's willing to slow things down at times for resonance. But I didn't get "adrenaline" or "escalating tension" one bit.

But it's the gore dissonance between the critics and me that really got me. Frankly, I didn't think it was that bloody... but then, I watch a lot of zombie movies. Yes, people get killed violently because it's a film about violent people. But "Braveheart" uses more fake blood by a mile. Maybe it's more intense on the big screen. Or maybe "Drive" just attracted a lot of art house viewers who heard about it on NPR and who don't own "Dawn of the Dead," and they were caught off guard.

Then, this weekend, I saw "The Hunger Games" in IMAX and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" in my living room. I'll take the first part last. ("Quiz Show"! - see, I don't just watch zombie movies.)

So, I've expressed issues with the "Millennium Trilogy" books (of which GWTDT is the first US adaptation) because I thought they could use serious input from an editor. Well, it appears that David Fincher was that editor. (Note: I have not seen the Swedish adaptation.) Fincher streamlines the story to focus on the most important elements and move the plot along. I tend to love Fincher's unflinchingness while getting irritated with some of his indulgences - for instance, in the DVD commentary he mentions using the largest rain machine ever used on a film in Sweden on a scene that would've been perfectly fine without rain, and all I could think about was how may indie films could've been made and distributed for the cost of that rain machine. But, I think the fact that I finished watching the movie and then immediately turned around and watched the whole thing again with commentary (missing a race in the process) speaks pretty well to how engrossing it is. And Rooney Mara is *amazing.*

But, onto the gore. One reason I waited until this came out on DVD was that I was concerned with the depictions of violence toward women, which is a pretty major piece of the story. I reasoned that, in the privacy of my home, I could pause and walk away if I needed to. But I didn't need to. The basic plot is about a hunt for a sexual predator, and nearly all of the descriptions of his crimes come in dialogue or in extremely quick cuts to crime scene photos. They probably weren't very pleasant to create, but what the viewer sees isn't gratuitous.

Of course, the A-number one scene I was worried about is when main character Lisbeth Salander is violently raped. I probably would've cut away toward the beginning of the scene, because it's not like the audience doesn't know what's happening behind that closed door, but I think I can understand why Fincher didn't cut there. It's a disturbing scene, but it's not unwatchable. Others' mileage may vary, of course. Going by the commentary, Fincher felt that showing more of what happens to Salander makes the later scenes when she gets back at her rapist more powerful. Not sure I agree, but at least he put some thought into it.

Now, onto "The Hunger Games," which has actually gotten some criticism that it's not violent *enough.* This school of thought says that the writers and director are blunting the emotional wringer that is a story about teenagers forced to battle to the death. On the other side are people who a) can't sell this movie to its target audience without a PG-13 rating, and b) people whose imaginations work perfectly fine, thank you.

I haven't yet read any of "The Hunger Games" trilogy, so I have a different perspective from someone who has every word of them memorized. But, in general, movies can, and should, spell things out far less than books do. Movies have the advantage of being able to convey information visually and audibly, and so a bunch of quick cuts at a battle site or a boom of the cannon that signals a competitor has died are all you need to understand what's happening.

I've read a few criticisms of THG that I think are bizarre. (No, not the racists who got the nasty shock that there are black people in Panem. No more virtual ink need be spilled there. Or the people still bitching about Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. She's awesome, get over it.) For one, there's that "blunted impact" argument, which seems to imply that, because I didn't see 20-odd teens slaughtered, I can't have left the theatre in the appropriately somber state of mind. I don't know, I like to think that at age 31 I'm pretty perceptive to allegorical examinations of the glorifications of violence in 21st century American culture, but I'm grateful there's a critic out there who wants to remind me that forced murder is bad. Someone out there didn't appreciate Gary Ross' handheld camera, but if I could see this in IMAX and not get seasick, it couldn't have been THAT bad.

But the weirdest - shades of "Drive" in the "did we see the same movie?" department - are the critics who say the movie moved too quickly for the audience to fully digest what was happening. Was not the case for me at all, and I say that as someone who had only the film's output to go on (because I've not read the books). Even with minimal exposition, I understood the logistics of what was going on, who was who, who was bad/good, etc. That scene with you-know-who and the flowers - my dad got choked up, and he for damn sure didn't read the books. An entire theatre audience doesn't burst into applause at the climax of a movie if they didn't feel something.

So, back to the whole violence and gore issue... there are certainly movies where I don't have any tolerance for geysers of fake blood or for depictions of pain, usually when I feel it isn't necessary to get across what's going on. In general, I trust filmmakers to make thoughtful decisions about those things. But, like I said.........I do watch a lot of zombie movies.

The media's latest victim

Ok, before you read this... let me stipulate that there's a part of me who's a terrible human being. This happened two days ago, and I'm just now writing about it because it's taken me this long to stop laughing. Actually, I'm still laughing. I told you, terrible.

So there's this baby rabbit, and because it's born without ears, it's destined to be the next Awwwwwww media sensation. The little zoo in Germany where it lived planned to unveil cute, furry little Til at a press conference this week. But, before Til could have his moment in the spotlight, a camera man stepped on him, killing him instantly.

Here's the thing - I've planned press conferences. It's one of the few sort-of glamorous parts of my job. Ordinarily, the object (for lack of a better term) of the press conference - the person/people the media are there to see - isn't wandering around in the staging area to be accidentally stepped on.

HOW DO YOU STEP ON A BUNNY??? WHO PUT THE BUNNY ON THE FLOOR??? How do you let said bunny - the critter that's going to put your little zoo on the international media map, after all - just wonder around the press conference area waiting to be stepped on? Have you ever seen a news camera person? They carry lots of heavy, bulky stuff. They have to move around quickly to catch their shots and interviews. They aren't really on the lookout for teacup-sized bunnies. As any PR person knows, those unstructured moments when people are milling around and the cameras may or may not be rolling are the most dangerous. In this case, literally.

It's awful, I know. That poor camera guy, and that poor intern who picked the wrong moment to let the talent go for a smoke break. But....... c'mon. This is funny, right? The "Parks & Rec" writers are kicking themselves right now for letting Li'l Sebastian go so soon.

Quickie: trouble digesting a digest

Maybe it's too early in the day to be reading stories on federal policy fights... I just just stick to scanning headlines over my first cup of coffee, I guess. Because I've read parts of this article five times and I still have questions.

It's time to reauthorize funding for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, and - as with basically everything these days - that means a lengthy, bitter partisan fight in Congress over something that most of us thought was pretty well settled some time ago. I can sympathize with Republicans who have issues with new provisions in the legislation and who rightly worry that voicing any criticism will lead to yet another week of "Republicans Hate Women!!!" headlines. (Here's where having some capital with women could come in handy. Capital y'all maybe shouldn't have wasted on forced ultrasound bills, personhood amendments and calling us sluts. Just saying.) So, what are the Republicans' objections?

The legislation would continue existing grant programs to local law enforcement and battered women shelters, but would expand efforts to reach Indian tribes and rural areas. It would increase the availability of free legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, extend the definition of violence against women to include stalking, and provide training for civil and criminal court personnel to deal with families with a history of violence. It would also allow more battered illegal immigrants to claim temporary visas, and would include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.

Republicans say the measure, under the cloak of battered women, unnecessarily expands immigration avenues by creating new definitions for immigrant victims to claim battery. More important, they say, it fails to put in safeguards to ensure that domestic violence grants are being well spent. It also dilutes the focus on domestic violence by expanding protections to new groups, like same-sex couples, they say.

Okay, I can see why the GOP would take issue with anything immigration-related, because that's just one of their things. But it's the "diluting the focus" thing I don't understand. How does reaching MORE domestic violence victims "dilute" a program whose sole purpose is reaching domestic violence victims? That's like turning away starving children from a soup kitchen by saying, "Sorry, kids. This is only for starving children." Change the name of the bill, if it's that big a deal, from the Violence Against Women Act to something like Extra Funding for Programs to Help Anyone Who's Getting Physically Abused at Home Act. EFPHAWGPAHA should work just find for the literal-minded Senator Blunt, I'd think.

Again, because it's too early in the morning, I can't tell if I'm the only one who had this reaction, or if the reporter who wrote it would've dearly loved to have had space to pin down Senator Blunt, et al. I want a longer story about this, please. One that I can read on my lunch hour.

Girl Scouts together, badass are we

Girl Scout robbery fail.

Watch out, jerks of the world.

In my experience, once a woman gets over her fear of confrontation and gets a taste for self-defense, she's pretty formidable.

(Yes, I know the robbery technically succeeded because these idiots DID get the cash box... But now they're the guys who got national press for getting punched in the face by a couple of Girl Scouts. It's not like they're going to be bragging about this one too much.)