Moot Point

It’s a bit late this week because of school-related exhaustion, and the first two are repeats that I’m kind of written out about.

1. El Sacerdote (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1978): I’m so in love with this movie, I could talk about it all day. I love how his relationship to Catholic doctrine is borne out on his body, what with the self-flagellation and the increasingly extreme measures of mortification of the flesh.
2. Dark Habits (Perdo Almodóvar, 1983): This one’s still also amazing. I love the nun-cabaret bit at the end the most.
3. Padre Padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1977): I actually rented this one by accident. I wouldn’t say that I really enjoyed watching it — it’s kind of the platonic ideal of “Italian art film that won the Palme D’Or” — but it was good at what it was doing. It’s the depressing but kind of inspirational tale of Gavino Leddo this shepherd who’s pulled out of school at a young age to tend sheep all by himself and get beaten by his dad a lot, but eventually becomes a linguist. There’s lots of shots of the unforgiving Sardinian landscape and sounds of harsh winds blowing, and also a lengthy bestiality montage that is intercut with sex with actual women. Which, is as gross but kind of impressive. It’s a seriously good movie, if you enjoy tales of child abuse and hardship; even the “hopeful” ending is kind of brief. It doesn’t really sell that American-style pull yourself out of hardship and everything’s cool Hollywood version of triumph over adversity.
4. Grand Theft Auto (Ron Howard, 1977): Okay, I never thought I’d recommend a Ron Howard movie, but this was amazing. It’s basically a comedy version of Vanishing Point, with the high-speed car chases and the radio DJ narrating the whole thing, only instead of a dude driving as fast as he can to (basically) his death with no clear motivation, you have a couple racing to Vegas to get married. Like all American comedies, it’s really about class: she borrows her Daddy’s Rolls (and eventually winds up driving it into a demolition derby) and they’re running off to get married because Daddy doesn’t approve of her less-than-rich boyfriend. (At one point he literally yells “Get out of my mansion!” — it’s amazing.) Anyway, all the rich people steal various cars and crash into other cars and offer rewards and there’s a lot of chaos and car crashes that don’t hurt anyone every five minutes; and everyone’s in totally inappropriate cars, like some kind of automotive Bakhtinian carnival. Oh, so they are being chased by: the plutocracy (her rich fake fiance, who doesn’t take off his polo helmet for the whole movie), religious orthodoxy (a greedy Evangelist priest) and the “patriarchy” (her dad, who totally has a CIA-like operation designed to get her back). Awesome. (See also: Arbogast on Film on Grand Theft Auto).
5. 13 Going On 30 (Gary Winick, 2004): I always try to see the good in movies, especially “chick flicks,” because I think that being designed primarily for women doesn’t necessarily make a movie suck. But this movie? I can’t stop thinking about how many different ways this movie bothered me. I started to watch it on TV because I think Jennifer Garner (or as I still call her, “Alias”) is pretty charming and “Female Big! How bad could it be?” The answer: pretty bad. Setting aside the lazy timeline — you have a 13-year-old in 1987 who likes “Jessie’s Girl,” which came out in 1981; has memorized the “Thriller” dance, which came out in 1983; and then later does “Love Is a Battlefield,” which also came out in 1983 — it’s one of those awful “women can have a career or be good and have a boyfriend” movies. At first I thought it was about innocence and choices, because we find out that Jenna (J. Garner’s character) has been transported into her future body at just before the time she started being a kind of a selfish jerk. So she has a chance to see how she’s lost out on love because she’s apparently spent the last years being kind of an asshole while climbing the corporate ladder at a fashion magazine. There’s a whole lot of talk about how you can’t go back and undo your choices. But (and I’m giving away the ending) — of course — the movie ends with her getting to go back and undo her bad choices. Her reward: eating fucking disgusting gum candy and being married to Mark Ruffalo who’s a “cool” photographer. High powered careers that are everything you ever dreamed of are too scary and hard! I found it especially galling that all the things that she and Judy Greer (her magazine frenemy who happens to have been the popular girl in high school) are castigated for were things typically associated with femininity: they’re basically “in trouble” for buying into what the magazine they now work for was selling them when they were kids. Also, the fact that the choice was this zero-sum professional success or true luv thing, is just, no. It’s also, like, not really entertaining: it’s not particularly funny and the love story isn’t particularly convincing, mainly because you have no idea what that dude sees in her, especially given that for most of the story she has the mental and emotional maturity of a THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD. I’ve been obsessing about how much I hated this movie for days now. The whole thing was just this weird fantasy about getting out of being responsible for your mistakes by reverting to your youth combined with a lot of sad fucked up ideas about where women’s priorities should be.

1. I like Gossip Girl now. Initially, I did not like it because I thought it was “joyless” and it was impossible to root for Dan and Jenny. Now, the show’s less centred on Dan and Jenny, plus Jenny’s all bad now, and it’s really…fun. It’s also more clever than I first gave it credit for, less “joyless” than “enjoyably bitchy.” It’s like Douglas Sirk for the 21st century: fun and beautiful, but also sort of exposing all the cracks and contradictions and anxieties around sex and class and family and so on. Jacob (who I love) from TWOP explains the appeal:

   Honestly, I think it characterizes why I’m so mad about this show: it’s easy to say, “Rich people, meh. You don’t have to worry about it, because rich people suck and their lives are secretly horrible behind the mask.” Because that’s true. But the show takes the next step, which is that behind every mask is an actual life, so you’re dumb for just getting off on the fact that their lives are weird and sucky, or for thinking that people deserve misery for having more money than you do. You can take it at that level, and enjoy it, but the real truth is that behind the money and the mask, these people are still people, and dealing with shit that makes the money unimportant. My dear friend Karen was talking a while back about how of course I love this show, because it chops off most of Maszlow’s hierarchy and says, “And then what?” I’m comfortable in a world where the usual tragedies and wars and fights and terrors happen in a place where survival, food, shelter, are not the issue, but the pain and fear and ugliness are exactly the same. If you had no material worries in this world, you’d still feel fucked up and weird and wild the majority of the time, because people fuck each other up regardless.

2. So tonight was Andrew Lloyd Weber night on Idol, which had me really excited because the trainwreck potential was so high. It was disappointingly…not that bad. Some of them were even legitimately good: Carly got back in my good books by doing “Jesus Christ Superstar” from one of the two ALW shows I actually like (the other is Evita which has sex and cynicism and political intrigue). I didn’t hurt that half the top 6 are apparently musical theatre nerds (Syesha, Carly, and resident “rocker” David Cook, who sang pretty well but totally lost any “cred” he had). It’s such a weird, weird choice when it comes to selling people stuff. If your narrative is David Cook: raw, authentic rock dude, having him sing “Music of the Night” completely straight is…maybe not the best strategy.
3. My new discovery wordie.org. It’s neat, because you can use it to make lists of words. Mine are here.

I have officially decided to stop having opinions about the American Presidential Election until either the Democratic candidate is decided or October of this year, whenever it stops being annoying.

I obviously care who wins but: Obama and Clinton both have flaws as well as good points. John Edwards was the funniest of the three on Colbert Report the other night, which makes sense because he’s not actually running anymore.

Every two weeks or so the press finds some other total non-issue to push, meanwhile the whole thing is rife with actual sexism and racism as well as overwrought trumped-up accusations of sexism and racism (not to deny the reality of actual sexism and racism, but there are both in this thing). Honestly, I’m not an American voter, so while I do care about the actual election, I am so exhausted with the minutiae; I think Obama and Hillary are both pretty good people to have as president options, given that they are professional mainstream politicians, but that that is a big given in a system where these people will have basically been campaigning for two years to be president and also you pretty much have to be a millionaire to be elected to the Senate in the first place. Seriously, there’s a war on, who cares about bowling?

Watching Obama on The Daily Show last night, it was like he was saying words, but all of his responses were so carefully polished and rote and calculated to be inoffensive that the whole thing just kind washed over me. What really drove it home was when Jon Stewart asked Obama to “hope up” things like “I’m calling to find out if you’re happy with your cell phone service?” It was a funny bit and it was nice to see Obama have a little fun, but honestly, isn’t it all kind of starting to sound like they’re selling cell phone service anyway? Continue Reading »

1. The Crime of Father Amaro (Carlos Carrera, 2002): This movie would not have worked if Gael Garcia Bernal was less attractive, as it is totally convincing that every woman in the village falls in love with him. It was really controversial when it came out in Mexico because it is about a corrupt Catholic Church. I like how they combined the very dark “love” story of the priest and the girl with the story about the church’s complicity with criminal drug lords. It’s much more serious and cynical than salacious though; he gets to be increasingly ass-ish as the movie goes on (presumably as he is more and more ensconced in the social and political power of the church he feels less bad about doing fairly awful stuff); it’s interesting because you start out sympathizing with him, and then you slowly have ot pull away.
2. Airport ‘77 (Jerry Jameson, 1977): Man, this movie has everything. It’s from the height of the all-star disaster movie craze of the ’70s and doesn’t have the hamhanded “political commentary” of something like King Kong (where the film crew of the original turns into an oil company and the final King Kong showdown is at the World Trade Center — of course). It’s pretty fortunate that Jack Lemmon is both a professional pilot and an amateur scuba diver so he can save his passengers when the plane crashes in the ocean and sinks. There’s this weird tendency of the movie to have characters kind of narrate things, so we know how risky it is when, say, the Navy tries to raise the plane with balloons. My favourite in the all-star cast was Lee Grant, the drunken kind of slutty wife of holier-than-thou Christopher Lee; their marriage is a failure, so they totally both die, but she so fabulous and fun with her big hair and her cocktail ring.
3. The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007): So let me tell you a story; I was kind of feeling worn out the other day and so I decided I’d take myself to the movies as a break from the like full-time scholarly solitude I have been in for the past 3 weeks. So I looked at what was playing in the nearby theatres, and there was not really a lot of movies that appeared to be worth my time; which is why I wound up seeing a movie about the Holocaust as a nice relaxing break. It wasn’t really a fun time, but it was a pretty good movie. I have mentioned probably a few thousand times on this blog how big a fan I am of melodrama, and I think this movie is a good example of how melodramatic techniques can be used to deal with truly complex moral issues. You have this story of guys in a concentration camp who get special treatment for counterfeiting money for the Germans, which is good because it keeps them alive, but bad because the counterfeit money is what’s keeping the war effort going; so they’re torn between their own lives and comfort and the greater good. The movie does a really good job of not underplaying the difficulty of the choices they make, nor the horror of the Holocaust (mainly by showing very little of it, but keeping the horror of it in the background with occasional sounds of gunshots on the other side of the wall and so forth). I am generally dubious about Best Foreign Language Oscar winners, but this was pretty excellent and dark-edged for a prestige-y historical drama.
4. Suburbia (Penelope Spheeris, 1984): Punksploitation! I love it. This was a genuinely fantastic movie, making TCM Underground a winner again. It’s basically about these kids with bad home lives who run away and all live in this abandoned punk house at the edge of town; it doesn’t really glamorize the situation, what with the frequent close-ups of cockroaches and emphasis on how dirty the house is, plus all the crimes the kids commit, but it also treats the kids sympathetically, not just as fodder for some kind of sensationalistic “Punks Are Scary” thing. Spheeris used mainly non-actors for the kids (including pre-Chili Peppers Flea), a neorealist technique that really makes the whole thing sing. The movie starts with a little sequence of a kid getting eaten by a wild dog, then it moves to a punk club where some jerks sexually harass this girl (they rip off all her clothes and surround her while she screams, it’s awful); it takes awhile before you find out the wild dogs live in the same abandoned neighbourhood (seized under eminent domain to get turned into a highway) where the punk kids do. It’s never too thuddy with the symbolism, but the dogs are these figures of wildness who were created by and then abandoned by human society. I know you’re going to look

I also want to make special note of the badness of Moonraker: I didn’t watch the whole thing, so no write-up, but Alex was watching it on TV and I believe it contains the worst action sequence ever put to film. There’s a gondola that turns into a…hover-gondola for some inexplicable reason and the whole thing is so badly edited, with the going back multiple times, and then a pigeon does a double take. It’s famous enough that a google search turns up 14,700 results, but I couldn’t find video of it, but this recap does it justice.

So you know how some people think that Starbuck on BSG is not a cylon, but her crazy return from the dead can be explained by the fact that she actually the first cylon-human hybrid?

I sort of thought this whole concept was odd and weird until I figured it out: she is the first cylon-human hybrid and a copy of Leoben Conoy (the scary Keith Callum Rennie cylon who held her hostage on New Caprica and also who she tortured earlier in the series) is her dad.

OMG OMG it makes so much sense. That’s why he was the guy in her crazy dreams before she fake died and that’s why he’s the only one besides her mom who’s obsessed with her special destiny.

It makes so much sense.

…The final cylon? I kind of have no idea. I kind of like that I don’t know, because I can’t just watch TV, I am constantly on the lookout for ways these things are being telegraphed. Laura Roslin seems like a possibility, mainly because she’s currently the last person I think could be a cylon (except the Admiral) and that was true of most of the four new secret cylons.

Loosely related: Documentary Fetishism in Battlestar Galactica. I tumblred this, but I basically assume no one reads my tumblr so I am double-linking.

1. The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand, 2003): I really liked it because it’s about intellectuals coming to terms with the fact that being an intellectual is kind of a joke, but it’s not like you can go back once you’re in it, because for all that a lot of theories are kind of bullshit, they give you ways to look at things that you can’t unsee. That sounds a lot snobbier than I mean it to, but I just mean that, like, once you start examining something you can’t unexamine it. Like, Remy the main character of the movie can’t go back to seeing history as this slow march of progress, but he also can’t uncontextualize the Holocaust from all the holocausts that have gone before; he knows that the 20th century was bad, but that other centuries were worse if you look at the raw numbers. Just like I can’t just sit down and watch a movie without automatically analyzing it and drawing parallels and thinking about how I’d write it into an essay anymore. Oh, also about love and dying and stuff. It’s really good and really engaging, and I imagine I’d have gotten more out of it if I’d seen Decline. There’s lots of old people trying to pretend they’re all sophisticated and fabulous in the face of mortality, while the younger generation (in the form of Remy’s devastatingly hot capitalist son) runs around and throws money at stuff so they can keep doing that until the very end.
2. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999): I have seen this movie so, so many times, but I needed to rewatch it for like one little detail that I thought wasn’t there, but turned out to actually be there, meaning I am on the right track. It’s still a really good movie, I am just starting to get worn out on this whole period of Almodóvar. I will make it into thesis magic though, mark my words.
3. Belle Epoque (Fernando Trueba, 1992): This is kind of just a charming if kind of annoyingly male fantasy fulfillment based sex farce (young man meets old guy, sleeps with each of his four daughters, marries the youngest, hurray!) with an awesome Bakhtinian carnival thrown in, until you remember when and where it’s set. Early 1930s. Spain. The monarchy’s on its way out, the republic’s on its way. There’s this kind of ominous tone there because we know that the civil war’s on its way (though the priest who hangs himself holding an Unamuno doesn’t), but they obviously think the future’s so bright they’ve go to wear shades. It’s not great, but it’s good enough that I forgive it for being a costume film with lush scenery and winning Best Foreign Film.
4. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Doug Liman, 2005): What a delightful movie! Seriously, what more could you want? It’s got Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie both being preternaturally pretty and charming, by which I mainly mean pretty; it has Seth Cohen, killing me with the meta as he wears a Fight Club tshirt while Brad Pitt threatens to beat him up; it has lots of guns and car chases and explosions. Could have done without Vince Vaughn though. I never saw it because it was supposed to be bad and it was caught up in the whole Angelina vs. Jen thing (which in retrospect makes rebound guy Vince Vaughn’s involvement even weirder), but it’s really a good time. I am always into winkingly self-aware destructions of bourgeois suburban life. The first part of the movie, where they’re rivals even though you know they’re obviously never actually going to kill each other because it’s too obvious how into each other they are and how their mutual skill in killing people only makes them hotter to each other¹,that part ends as they fight and shoot and explode apart their crazily perfect suburban home and then make love in the ruins (very reminiscent of Buffy and Spike but minus all the self-loathing). The second part ends with a massive shoot-out in a warehouse department store, which is really just a good time. They like, embrace and shoot guns over each other’s shoulders and wear yellow sunglasses and grey suits and are preternaturally beautiful some more.

I also saw most of Manhunter, which I’m now convinced is absolutely brilliant, but in the way I actually take seriously so I want to watch the whole thing before I write it up.

1 – This is in the kind of movie world where killing people is morally neutral, like in Grosse Point Blank or True Lies, where it’s okay to kill people as long as they’re all “bad guys,” so you kind of just have to table your real-world moral feelings re: killing, even though you think it might be a different kind of movie because it’s really a love story with some gunfights. Okay, it’s some gunfights with a love story.

I am pretty bummed about brownfemipower’s taking down her blog.

I don’t really want to comment on the actual controversy (which you can read about at this Feministe post and of which something really nice seems to have come of at Shakesville) but I am sad that BFP chose to take down her blog. I learned a lot from her and her writing is one of the things that made me really rethink my stances on a lot of feminist-adjacent issues and my approach to feminism in general.

I’m not writing this to take a side or declare an allegiance, I just wanted to note it here and express regret that I never left a comment to say thanks back when there was somewhere to leave a comment at.

So, thanks.

Hey everyone, it’s my birthday. I am 25 years old. You’d think I was doing something extra-special to mark this exciting arbitrary occasion, but sadly, I am going to work on making some thesis magic, go to school, and then go out to dinner.

Anyway, to celebrate, I jumped on the muxtape bandwagon, and made a lady mix for ladies and gentlemen. It also is like a microcosm of my taste in music. Hurray for ladies!

1. Life Classes (William D. McGillivray, 1987): I had been told going in that this is the kind of movie professors love, so I was kind of prepared to hate it, but I actually found it really compelling. It’s about this woman who lives in Cape Breton and then she gets pregnant and then she moves to Halifax and she does paint-by-numbers art and then she gets a job as a nude model for life drawing and then she learns to draw for real and becomes self-actualized and I realize how unwatchable I’m making this sound. But it was pretty smart: there’s lots of mocking of the art world (especially this scene where a visiting German sculptor explains that she has people to do all the actual making of her sculptures, she just has the ideas); plus it has all this weird ambiguous stuff with TV; plus her landlady had been displaced from Africville, so it gave me a chance to do my “Canada has a shameful racial history too” spiel to my students.
2. Left Luggage (Jeroen Krabbé, 1998): “Hey Brenda, want to watch a self-consciously excessive melodrama with a cute kid in it?” Yes, yes I do. It’s also about Jewish identity and stuff (apparently the whole over-the-top sentimentality is characteristic in Yiddish popular theatre and literature). Isabella Rossellini was really good as the little boy’s mom, but the story was mainly about the nanny, Laura Fraser, who is not so much good at acting.
3. Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, shot in 1986, released 1989*): This is a really interesting movie, that did a lot of really smart things stylistically — like the tableaux with the murder victims that sets up the end. But I don’t know if I can say I really enjoyed watching it because there’s not a lot of pleasure of any kind to be had in the watching. The film is most famous for its affectless portrayal of the violence: there’s no one to sympathize with, as the victims are just a parade of mostly dialogue-less women, who we mostly just see after they’re dead, and Henry and Otis are so powerfully unsympathetic that it’s hard to root for them even in a perverse Norman Bates way. You’re kind of just left…watching them kill people. That said, it’s kind of a fascinating entry in the serial killer subgenre of horror with all the over-explaining of sex hangups and whatnot: it’s hard to know what to do with Henry’s weirdly inconsistent story of killing his mama, with the way he wipes his mouth after Becky kisses him, with Otis’s weird gay moment.
   Actually the main reason I decided I should watch this was reading Analee Newitz’s account of it in her serial killers chapter Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, which is the rare film studies book that I’d recommend to someone who isn’t a giant film studies nerd but still cares about Marxism and horror movies (which I guess almost presumes you’re a giant film studies nerd). It’s marked cultural studies/film and while it’s a little bit lighter on textual analysis than I’d like (because I am big on close reading), it’s hugely insightful and thought-provoking, and shows a strong grasp on the theory without necessarily requiring her reader to be up on Lukács. Anyway, her basic argument about serial killers is that they’re reflective of capitalism because they mass-produce bodies like capitalism mass produces stuff, because they are alienated, etc. She also takes these kinds of American stories back to their historical literary influences. (I kept thinking of Man Bites Dog and Cannibal Man, but she was just doing American movies.)
4. Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972): I am a big John Waters fan, but I am more of a fan of his slightly more accessible 80s and 90s period — Polyester on through Serial Mom — but since I have written academically about his work, I felt like I should see this. Oh boy. You know how sometimes you see movies that were controversial when they came out and now whatever was supposed to have been shocking just seems banal? This is not one of those movies — and I spend a lot of time around fairly “extreme” movies — but man. You mostly just read about a couple of the scenes — the sex thing with the chickens and then the dog shit at the end, both of which are actually as hard to watch as you can imagine, even if you’re kind of prepared — but there’s a whole panoply of other kind of horrifying stuff that never gets mentioned: the male stripper with the gaping anus, the cannibalism, the incest, the poor girls the Marbles keep in the basement to be baby machines in their adoption business, oh and the castration. Actually, mentioning the whole “keeping girls locked in the basement to produce babies for profit” because of the thing that really struck me watching it: as much as it’s a movie about confronting you with bad taste, the whole thing is really tied up in ideas of class. Our heros live in a trailer park; the villains live in a middle class house. Also, I keep mentioning the baby-selling because to me that’s patriarchal capitalism taken to its logical conclusion — people’s bodies reduced to machines of production. There is also the whole party with the eating the police, another example of turning bodies into flesh, but this time the perpetrators are on the wrong side of capitalism. I could write like 5 different papers on this movie, but I feel like someone’s probably already written all of them. I’m making it sound horrible and dry, but it’s a really funny movie and is actually really engaging, with the really strong Baltimore-accented narration and the ’50s rock soundtrack and the utter joy to watch that is the late Divine. I picked this still because it made me think of how Divine fits into the whole “capitalist monsters” category. Newitz gives a chapter to the media and its monstrosities — and I think the fact that Pink Flamingos ends in a murder-cum-publicity-stunt really underlines how much it’s a horror movie as much as it’s anything else. (See also: Serial Mom for more John Waters serial killer media circus action.)
5. Leatherheads (George Clooney, 2008): This was really entertaining and Clooney and Zellweger (surprisingly) were a lot of fun to watch together; I just wish they’d had more of the banter. But it’s kind of an odd experience. For one, the script and the acting styles are really reminiscent of your classic ’30s screwball comedy. However, a lot of the cinematography and editing is really very modern and feels really out of place with Clooney’s mugging, which would not necessarily have been out of place in a Cary Grant comedy. So you’re kind of always aware that you’re watching this exercise in recreating an old genre with the old conventions — similar to The Good German, actually. It starts off with this interpolation of actual video of a football game and black-and-white photos of a football game, which kind of seems to be announcing its nostalgia, which might work if it was an art movie, but doesn’t really for audiences who show up wanting to be entertained. John Krasinski was better than I expected, but only because I read reviews that made it sound like he was just doing Jim Halpert. He does have a pretty limited range and Jim Halpert is obviously the best thing he can ever do, but I thought he did a reasonably good job of making his golden boy who kind of coasts on charm be pretty sympathetic. In conclusion, Clooney’s a good director but I do think he has kind of a nostalgia problem.

*It had troubles with the MPAA and was initially X-rated for its “moral tone.”

1. Dolly Parton is great in every possible way.

2. Why do I watch American Idol? Not that many people I know watch it, so that whole thing of watching it to feel plugged into culture thing is right out. I don’t particularly like it or any of the stars on the show, except sort of Ryan Seacrest. I would never buy an album put out by a contestant with the possible exception of Kelly Clarkson. I know why I watch other reality shows, but I honestly don’t know why I feel compelled to obsessively watch a talent show whose content is basically 100% promoting things. I realize that all TV shows are basically just “content” to get people to watch advertisements, and that often the need for ad money seeps into the actual show itself in the form of product placement, but I believe that good art can be made within this structure. American Idol really doesn’t transcend the necessary evils of capitalism though: the genius of the show is that they milk them for all they’re worth. The contestants star in “Ford Music Videos.” The judges drink Coke-branded cups. You can download everything on iTunes now. Also, the whole show is basically a giant ad for the debut CD of whoever wins.

3. I don’t even like any of the contestants this year!

4. Brooke White is now officially more annoying than Carly Smithson.

5. Seriously, why do I devote so much time out of my life to this show again? I don’t know.