I Have Found Jesus

-
He was in my old shoebox.

I do not have an update for One Tree Hill because Carrie was over last night and we talked and talked. One of the things I did observe in passing is that it's difficult to distinguish the teenagers from the parents. Many times did I wonder why that one blond woman was walking down the hallway in the high school. I first assumed that she was there to attend a PTA meeting, but then she put on a cheerleading outfit and so I guess she's meant to be a student. Perhaps there was a plot line I missed where she was a high school drop-out who decided to pull her life back together at 30 and enrolled in high school. Or maybe she's an undercover cop posing as a student in order to bust the rampant popper problem at the school. I vaguely recall from this episode--oh, yes, now I remember! After replaying the ridiculous events from the final five minutes of last week's show, they opened with a scene from It's a Wonderful Life. For the rest of the time, Bobby or Chad or Tiger or whatever his name is--the kid who had the heart attack last week, walks around the town with an old dead friend (his father? his older brother?) who is there to show him what life would be like for everyone in town if he died. Here's the bestest, bestest part: the actor playing the dead character is a guy who never quite made it into the Brat Pack in the 80s. He was in one of my favorite movies, Some Kind of Wonderful and he played the bad guy. He might also have been in Lost Boys, but I'm not sure (I feel like every not-quite-Brat Packer was in Lost Boys). Oh, okay, I obviously haven't been watching the show, but according to IMDB, he was in 55 episodes of One Tree Hill. He had by far the worst sort-of-not-really moustache I've ever seen. It was very faint, like a five o'clock shadow, except only above his upper lip. It looked ridiculous.

Anyway, the whole show was about Chad seeing what life would be like if he were dead and listening to dumb cliches from Craig Sheffer. What would've been awesome is if everyone's life improved drastically after his death, but no, I believe they were all heartbroken, down to the bus driver who knew him in grade school. But, okay, the parallel between this show and It's a Wonderful Life doesn't quite work because the whole point of It's a Wonderful Life is that George (played by one of my favorite old time actors, Jimmy Stuart) thinks his life is worthless and that no one would miss him. He's actually standing on a ledge of a bridge in the beginning, ready to plunge to his death. Seeing what would happen to his family and friends and business partner if he were to die is what saves him because the central conflict is that he thinks he's worthless and the angel shows him that he's not. As far as I can tell from my three episode expertise, Chad has it pretty good and knows it. It's not like he's debating whether he wants to live or die. Right? So, what's the point in showing him how crappy the world would be if his heart gives out? I don't know what happened in the end, but he probably lived or came out of it suddenly while everyone from his high school was gathered around the hospital gurney. They may have mixed movies and had him look around in wonder, saying, "I had the strangest dream. And you were there. And you, and even Toto was there too!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more