He Speaks for the Trees!

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax as a grindhouse movie. If this were a real film, I would watch the hell out of it.

Ich bin Kreativ

In his infinite wisdom, Cal saw fit to bestow an award upon my humble blogs and said a lot of really nice things about me that made me blush. Thanks a lot, Cal! That was a real spirit boost, and I appreciate it.

This award has some conditions with it. The first is that I must tell you seven things about me that you might not know. Since I'm forthright to an almost embarrassing degree, I'm not sure what you might not know about me by this point, so I'm going to skip that bit.

I also must tag seven others with this award, and that I will do.

1. MC @ Culture Kills... wait, I mean Cutlery, because his take on pop culture is snarky without being vicious for the sake of viciousness. Also, his Enemies List posts were some of my favorite reads last year.

2. Splotchy @ I, Splotchy, because I love Unconnected Tuesdays and he pushes me to do those turtle comics. (Sadly, I need to be pushed, because I'm lazy and unfocused.)

3. Mob @ Dear Bastards, for doing it every day, for his Big Suck Loser reviews, for being one of my earliest and longest-lasting readers, and because I think these awards amuse him.

4. Jaquandor @ Byzantium's Shores because I love his blog, especially his thoughtful posts on movies he's just seen or is revisting, for inspiring my return journey to Prydain last year, and for sending me Twilight, which led to one of my more popular blog series of 2009.

5. Allen L. @ Septendary for those awesome Listening Posts, which he let me participate in several months ago.

6. Some Guy @ Some Guy's Blog for the Lieberman impression. Did you see his Lieberman impression? Go to his blog and watch it. I'll wait.

...

Is that funny or what? I think I watched it 96 times.

7. YOU. Because you obviously have great taste in blogs.

(Yeah, I did the Time magazine cop-out thing there. But hey, you do have great taste in blogs.)

Thanks again, Cal, for taking that blow to the head and being fooled into giving me the award. It's too late to take it back now! Mwa-ha-ha!

Happy 60th Birthday, Erin Gray!

She was at the Chicago Comicon this year, and it was a thrill seeing her in person. She's still so beautiful.

One Is the Loneliest Number

I am very much not a fan of Jimmy Fallon, but I do respect him for having the Muppets on his show pretty often. Just before Christmas, he, the Muppets, and the Roots did a nice performance of "The 12 Days of Christmas." Well, today NBC released this video of the rehearsal, in which Fallon and the Muppets (and the Roots) break into an impromptu performance of "One." And like anything to do with the Muppets, a big smile was plastered all over mah face.

Irony

Film Week

A review of the films I've seen this past week.

MISS CONCEPTION (2008)
Not as bad as the movies I usually end up seeing just because Heather Graham is in them. Heather plays a British woman who finds out she's only got one ovum left and has to be pregnant in the next week or else she'll never conceive. But her boyfriend, a documentarian, is out of town and isn't even sure he wants kids. So decides to get knocked up any way she can. Not as silly as I figured it would be, but not really a winner, either. Heather still looks beautiful. **1/2 stars.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER (2009)
Nice try, but no. Sofia Vassilieva, the star of my beloved Eloise movies, plays Kate, a teenager who has been dealing with leukemia her entire life. Her sister, Anna (Abigail Breslin), was basically bred to provide bone marrow and other biological resources. The story begins when Kate starts to get close to renal failure and Anna, supposed to give her kidney to her sister, challenges her parents in court to keep medical control of her own body. Having lost a teenage sister to cancer a few years ago, I wanted to like this movie, but I found it ultimately too typically Hollywood (read: shallow) in its approach to something so big and dramatic. The science fiction court case is really only there to put a clock on the drama and force a sort of urgency out of the audience. The compelling stuff happens in flashbacks, and even then it's just one section of the movie that details Kate's relationship with another teenager who is also a cancer patient. That was genuinely sweet and moving, watching two kids with a tragic awareness of their impending mortality fall in love. It's enough to watch a family being torn apart by illness, but the movie make unnecessary additions and imposes a flashback structure (complete with competing narration) that doesn't work and turns the whole enterprise into sentiment porn that loses entire characters (why is that brother even there, really, other than to have his outburst in the courtroom?). Vassilieva and Breslin are very good. I felt bad for Cameron Diaz; she has a hard job. She comes across as a total bitch in everything she's in, and here she had to play a woman whose drive to care for her sick daughter has made her hard and single-minded. That she generates any sympathy at all is either miraculous or very good editing. ** stars.

SIN NOMBRE (2009)
I found this film very moving. It focuses on two young Latin Americans--Mexican Willy, a gang member fleeing retribution, and Honduran Sayra, seeking to be reunited with her father--headed for America and an illegal border crossing. It's a very moving story about the drives and motives illegal immigrants have for seeking a better life in the United States, but it's also about compelling characters. You relate to Willy and Sayra emotionally, and in personalizing the journey to America, the film succeeds in not reducing their story to a cliche or in turning them into three-dimensional characters among a bunch of cliches. No one in the movie is a cliche immigrant or an extra simply there to fill the screen. It forces you to see them for the people they are, desperate to find a place where they can catch a break and eke out a better living for themselves or their families. In an America that dehumanizes these people into a political issue, I found it remarkably powerful and necessary. One of the best films of 2009. Beautifully shot, too (eschewing a lot of today's stylistic cliches). **** stars.

AN AMERICAN AFFAIR (2009)
Fitfully interesting movie about a teenage boy in 1963 Washington, DC, who becomes obsessed with the woman across the street, a beautiful blonde (Gretchen Mol, whom I always like) with ties to John F. Kennedy. It drags in spots, but is a mostly okay, if heavy-handed, coming of age drama/political intrigue movie. **1/2 stars.

THE EGG AND I (1947)
Cute movie with Fred MacMurray giving up city life to buy a run-down chicken farm in the mountains and try to hew his life out of the earth. Claudette Colbert, as his new wife, is sort of forced to hang on for dear life and adapt to what he wants, which she certainly does. This is the movie that introduced Ma and Pa Kettle--I've seen none of their movies, but Marjorie Main is delightful in this one as Ma. It's a comforting movie about the closeness of community, and I probably would have loved it a lot more when I was 10. As it is, though, I thought it was very nice and pleasant. *** stars.

LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH (1928)
Lon Chaney in one of his many excellent performances stars as a traveling clown who finds an orphaned girl and takes her in. When she grows to womanhood--into gorgeous Loretta Young--he falls in love with her, though she loves someone else. Rather than a simple love triangle, the film elevates their clashes of passion, as the salvation of both men lies with the girl and their love for her. The mere force of Chaney's performance makes this a film hard to look away from. **** stars.

SALT OF THE EARTH (1954)
This film has been labeled as a communist one over the years, as are most socially conscious works that actually care about the struggles and well-being of people who do the actual work in this country. This film (directed by Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten) doesn't propagandize an ideal, but it does focus on the struggle of Mexican-American miners in a labor dispute. For 1954, it's unusually sensitive to what happens to women in the world of poor workers; feminism ahead of its time. It's sad that now, 56 years later, this movie is as relevant as it was then, as we experience the abuse of labor rights and regulations, and prejudice against Mexican-Americans. The use of a mostly non-professional cast gives this a naturalistic feel that makes it more urgent. **** stars.

Bisexuality Senses Tingling...

Sheesh, Show Buisiness

Messing around with the camera today, trying to take some pics of my Muppet figures. Lots of bad pictures, but I like this one.

Get a Life, Moron

Someone or other called Peter left a comment on one of my G.I. Joe recaps that made me laugh my ass off:

i dont understand, YOU HATE LADY JAYE?
but in almost every episode of this ¨ ¨GiJoe review¨, there are a picture of her.
so...
Get a life moron.....

I always love this kind of quote. I mean, what would the internet be without this kind of anonymous lunacy that passes for discourse?

Where would my self-esteem be without the simple poetry of people taking the time out of their busy days to leave me a delightful missive telling me how much I'm wasting their time?

What would I do with my days if I didn't have the occasional commenter calling me a moron because, in their simplicity, they don't have the ability to come to grips with their own idiocy, and so must lash out at others over the most trifling of things?

What would I laugh at on the internet during the day if not for the spectacle of people so thrilled to think that they might catch me on some kind of inconsistency that they actually forget grammar, spelling, and the elements of style?

Yes, Peter. Truly, I am a moron who needs to get a life. After all, I just wasted all of this time reading someone's blog recaps of G.I. Joe episodes and getting pissed off about them.

Oh, wait. That's YOU.

I guess I could respond to you by simply explaining that Lady Jaye is popular with people who read those posts, or that Lady Jaye's near-ubiquity on the series makes it impossible to ignore her, since she's one of the major players of the show and has a ton of screen time.

But instead I'll pay you the respect you paid me in your dim manner and just answer you in the parlance of the internet:

Yes, there are a lot of "picture of her" That's cos' she's on nearly every episode, shit wit!

FYI: "Parlance" is a fancy word for "vernacular." Which means "way o' talkin'."

But hey, thanks for wasting your time reading Electronic Cerebrectomy.

Evaluating Disney: 1956

1955 had seemed a triumph. Lady and the Tramp was a success with audiences. Millions of kids were wearing mouse-ears or coonskin caps. Walt himself was a household icon. And, at long last, Disneyland was open to the public and making money hand over fist, much of which Walt reinvested straight back into the park.

But what of the animation itself? Once the only concern of the studio, it was now one of many, and as a result it was suffering. Walt's interest in animation simply didn't exist; as animator Frank Thomas put it, "I think he had really spent himself on what he wanted to do in animation." The animation studio continued along now out of tradition and habit. As far back as 1953, with the twin failures of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan under his belt, Walt had admitted to Bill Anderson that he wasn't interested in animation, but that he felt the studio couldn't give it up completely. By 1956, Walt dreaded the studio and spent as little time there as possible; the animators had to beg him to attend story meetings and even needed to prod him to put any animated shorts into production at all.

Much of the studio's animated output in 1956 went to the long, long production of Sleeping Beauty--in development since 1952, and which would not be released until 1959--and into the TV shows, Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club. The TV animation tended to be of such poor quality--simplified in order to save money on the production of the show--that there was talk of farming it out to other studios to get better quality.

Walt knew the quality was bad. He just didn't care. For him, it was all a part of raising more money to keep building Disneyland. With the park open for less than a year, he was already happily tinkering away, closing some attractions to focus on others and sketching out ideas for a skyway, a monorail, a submarine ride, and a mountain sled ride. Whatever the studio produced was, it seemed, merely a fund for Disneyland.

2/15: Sardinia
People and Places. These still aren't available on DVD, so I still haven't seen many of them.

2/24: Chips Ahoy
Donald Duck. Sadly, Chip 'n' Dale make their last film appearance until 1983 in this hilarious short. Actually inspired by the Little Golden Book Donald's Sailboat, this Cinemascope cartoon has the two chipmunks stealing Donald's model ship from a bottle (great sight gag) to get to an acorn tree in the middle of the pond. Jack Kinney directed, and the pacing is great. The gags are all good, and the Cinemascope adds depth without calling attention to itself. A solid cartoon, and a real highlight in the waning days of the shorts.

4/27: Hooked Bear
Special cartoon. The first of, alas, only two solo cartoons for Humphrey the Bear. All of the Humphrey cartoons are wonderful, but it's interesting here to see him without Donald Duck as a foil. Instead, he's foiled by his constant stupidity, spending so much of his time trying to get fish the "easy" way that he completely misses out on fishing season. There are some great sight gags with Ranger J. Audubon Woodlore seeding the lake with new fish (I especially loved the hatchery that looked like a garden). The animation of Humphrey himself is superb; he's such a well-realized pantomime slapstick character. (I think I noticed some reused animation from "Rugged Bear." Par for the course by this time.)

6/8: THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE
Great film based on the true story of a Union attempt in 1862 to steal a Confederate train and cut off valuable supply and communication lines. It's easy to imagine this project catching Walt's interest because of the trains (though he was very hands-off on this production, which was mostly overseen by Lawrence E. Watkin), and he was quick to cast Fess Parker in the lead role as James Andrews, the Union spy and the leader of the raid. Parker was quite the commodity because of Davy Crockett, and he was under contract to Disney. There are several factors that make this one of, in my opinion, Disney's best films: chief among them is the authentic feel of the chase itself. Disney may have taken some liberties with facts, as movies will, but the train engine used (the "William Mason") was built in 1856, and the entire sequence with the actual train chase (about a third of the movie) is the best part. Jeffrey Hunter is very good as William A. Fuller, the Southern conductor whose train is stolen and who goes to great lengths to track it down. Hunter and Parker have quite the battle of wills when you consider that they barely have any screen time together. And the Cinemascope looks great. It's just a completely enjoyable film, one that doesn't get talked up as much as some of the other live action films, but I loved it.

7/8: How to Have an Accident in the Home
Donald Duck. A fun Cinemascope short that seeks to educate about all the ways people can have accidents in their homes through carelessness. It's surprisingly modern for Disney; it pokes fun at modern conveniences and electronics. Some great sight gags in this one, especially Donald's system of plugs. Great backgrounds, too.

7/18: Jack and Old Mac
Special cartoon. Bill Justice directed this cartoon, which attempts to ape the UPA style of limited animation. It's really a double bill, with music by George Bruns. The first part, "The House That Jack Built," is great. It has jazzy music and a nice abstract look, with animals and buildings taking shapes from the words themselves. It's short, even slight, but very creative. Unfortunately, most of the cartoon is taken up with the inferior "Old MacDonald Had a Band," a jazz take on the schoolyard staple, which goes on and on forever. Even for this period of Disney, the animation is terrible (except for some of the Fred Moore animation, recycled from "All the Cats Join In"), and the song is repetitive. The color styling, by Eyvind Earle, is a high point.

7/18: DAVY CROCKETT AND THE RIVER PIRATES
Davy had been killed at the Alamo, of course, but the series (and the feature film edited together from the three episodes) had been such a runaway success that it was inevitable that he couldn't stay dead for long. This film is cut together from two more episodes which are meant to take place, I believe, somewhere between the first and second episodes. Although it's obvious this production has been lavished with more money than the first, it didn't quite grip me the way the other film did. Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen are still amiable and extremely likable in their roles, of course, but there's a kind of pall over this one that's perhaps a result of not really having strong historical points to play off of. The first Davy Crockett was, in some way, an idealized Americana in response to the social upheaval of the 1950s. This film, however enjoyable, is merely another adventure featuring some of the same characters. The boat race is the best part of the film, I think, and Jeff York as Mike Fink, king of the river, is an excellent blowhard.

7/27: In the Bag
Special cartoon. Humphrey's final appearance on film is one of the most popular and most enduring Disney shorts. It doesn't get mentioned in the same breath as earlier luminaries like The Band Concert, but this is one of Disney's most memorable shorts and gets brought up again and again by people who watched it when they were kids and have never forgotten "The Humphrey Hop," the wonderful song introduced in this cartoon. In another of Disney's cartoons with an anti-pollution message (and a cameo by Smoky the Bear), Ranger J. Audubon Woodlore tricks Humphrey and the other bears into cleaning up tons of garbage left behind by campers. One of the last great Disney shorts, one of the best ever, and one of the most fun.

11/6: Cow Dog
A live action short I've been unable to find. I remember seeing it, as so many others, on a filmstrip when I was in (I think) junior high school, but I haven't seen it in the decades since.

11/6: A Cowboy Needs a Horse
Special cartoon. Imaginative, dreamy cartoon about a boy who dreams he's a cowboy. It's very much like Jack and Old Mac, modern and music-oriented, only it's not boring. It's not necessarily compelling, either, but the flat animation style is nice and colorful. This is the final animated short of 1956; all of them were in Cinemascope this year.

11/6: SECRETS OF LIFE
The fourth True-Life Adventures feature is another winner. After The African Lion had shed all of the critically-derided (and distractingly stupid) cartoon affectations and anthropomorphized silliness of The Living Desert, this continues with a film in the vein of the earlier short subject Nature's Half-Acre. It doesn't have one single subject, but takes a look at many different aspects of life on Earth--from bees and ants to flowers to underwater creatures to volcanoes--but ties them together thematically. It's an excellent documentary, well-photographed (especially the underwater footage and the time-lapse film of flowers blooming) and informative, simply fascinating and a joy to watch.

12/20: Disneyland, USA
A People and Places short which I don't have, either.

12/20: WESTWARD HO, THE WAGONS!
A feature film that I have just not been able to find at all. Disney's third Western feature this year starring Fess Parker, who was starting to get tired of playing the same role over and over again. When I am finally able to see it, I'll talk about it in this space.

12/20: Samoa
Another People and Places I have yet to see as an adult.

For as much as the studio was active this year, you can see where very little of it involved theatrical animation. Only six animated shorts were released this year, augmented by re-releases of Fantasia, Song of the South, and Bambi. Resources not directed to the television series (and to be fair, not all of it was bad--The Great Cat Family, from the Disneyland episode of the same name, is a gem of a cartoon) went also to a series of 16mm filmstrips for Disney's educational films division. These were produced for schools. You may have seen some of them as a student if you're the right age (I know I saw many of them, both in schools and on Disney Channel). The different series--The Nature of Things, You And..., and I'm No Fool (with it's wonderful theme song)--were all hosted by Jiminy Cricket, with Cliff Edwards reprising his role.

But nothing, it seemed, could stop the death knell for theatrical animation. In 1957, Walt Disney began closing the shorts units entirely, and many found themselves out of work as a result--he was unsympathetic to their offers to move to the live action units, feeling it would be too hard to "retrain" them. How ironic that, this year, he was given an award by the Guild of Variety Artists for his "increasing efforts to discover new ways to keep the greatest number of people in the field of show business gainfully employed."

The same was true of animation all over Hollywood. Paul Terry sold his studio to CBS and retired. MGM, on discovering that a reissue made 90% of what a new cartoon made, shut down their animation arm completely; Hanna and Barbera made the transition to TV as a result. Warner Bros. had shut down its animation studio briefly in 1953; once it re-opened, it limped along without its former zest and vigor to an inevitable death in the early sixties.

Walt's ineffectual attitude towards animation was only added to by the slow pace of work on Sleeping Beauty, a pace he was only making worse with indecision and disinterest. The shorts program would never see the same output again. And Walt Disney simply didn't care.

Kristen Bell Mondays

Euphemism and Terrorism

In this case, Christopher Hitchens has it exactly right:

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets. The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

Song of the Week: "Orange Crate Art"

I actually didn't realize this when I picked this song for today, but today is Van Dyke Parks' birthday. Nice little coincidence. Here he is with Brian Wilson in 1995 performing their song "Orange Crate Art," from their album of the same name. I love this song (and the album), but I think it's even better just seeing and hearing Brian and Van Dyke, no overdubs or production, just one of my favorite singers of all time and a piano. Nice.

Sunday Hottie 257

ANNA FARIS

The End of Time, Part Two

Spoilers, of course.

It's a cliche to say that something is the end of an era, but like everyone who points out that something is a cliche, I am now going to employ it: this is the end of an era. I knew this would be a goodbye, but I wasn't prepared for it to feel so much like goodbye.

The transition from Ninth Doctor to Tenth Doctor was so sudden, like the regenerations usually are, that you just sort of accepted it and moved into the adventures of a new incarnation of the Doctor. The first and second series were very much alike tonally, so there wasn't a whole lot of schism. Tennant took some getting used to, as all new Doctors do, but otherwise it was quite smooth.

But this time it was drawn out, as the Doctor knew his tenth incarnation's end was coming, and we had a year-long build up to it. And then Russell T. Davies, since he's leaving the show, makes the whole thing even sadder with a long goodbye sequence that was possibly indulgent, but very nice. I liked that, as he was slowly dying of radiation poisoning, the Doctor took the trouble to go and make sure his companions would all be okay. It was as sentimental and optimistic as the entire Davies era has been, so in that respect it was a fitting farewell to Davies' Doctor Who. And the cameos were very nice.

As for the episode's story itself: very satisfying. The Doctor faced with a moral dilemma, always interesting. And I liked what they did with the Master in this episode, giving him some layers. Some of my suspicions were confirmed, such as Timothy Dalton's identity (Rassilon). I wish Catherine Tate had had more to do, but I don't know how she would have fit. Besides, that left more room for Wilf, who is wonderful. Once again, Bernard Cribbins was gold. And how appropriate was it that the Doctor's end came from his love of humanity, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for one in particular?

But who was the woman in white? Executive producer Julie Gardner referred to her as "the Doctor's mother." Fascinating.

It really feels over. Not Doctor Who as a whole, of course, but these last four series and change. I've read that Steve Moffat wants to have a different sort of show, more like the older Who, more like an anthology with stand alone episodes instead of the interconnected style Davies favored. I think that's too bad; I really liked the way each series of the show would build and build, with side trips along the way, and finally come to a head in a huge finale. But I won't second guess the show before I see it; Moffat knows what he's doing; even if he hadn't written some of the best episodes of the Davies era, he'd still have more than earned my confidence from Coupling.

But I do find myself wondering if this is the last we'll see of this wonderful supporting cast on Doctor Who. Sarah Jane and, I assume, Captain Jack Harkness will continue on in their own spin-offs. (Although what I wouldn't give to see a more fun version of that Torchwood abortion featuring a bunch of those characters, including K-9 and Wilfred.)

I don't have much to say about the regeneration. I was happy to see that Smith was kind of goofy instead of being the sort of Edward-Cullen-as-Doctor that a lot of people were lamenting. Should be interesting. I just hope it's fun, and if this trailer for the new series is anything to go by, it probably will be.



I did see a Dalek, which is always good. And Alex Kingston, too. Intrigueresting. Moffat has said things about the show that give me some pause, and I don't know if it's a sign of confidence or not that he's bringing back practically every plot he's already added into the Who universe, but I'll obviously have to see it to know if it works or not.

Here's to the new Doctor, then.

The Unmade Disney Films of Carl Barks

A sharp-eyed reader named Ricardo shot me a couple of emails last week. He's found a site I was previously unaware of, the HTML BarksBase, devoted to the work of Carl Barks.

It's a nice site, but my favorite page is this one, detailing the unfinished Disney cartoons that he worked on but which, for various reasons, never made it into production. It has some pictures, too!

This one is from one of the most tantalizing-sounding unmade shorts, Donald Munchausen.

There are also pages devoted to his oil paintings.

Thanks, Ricardo, for this excellent find!

And I am working on Evaluating Disney: 1956. Should be up sometime this week, hopefully Monday or Tuesday.

With the Retailers Ever More Desperate, I Keep Expecting to See It

So I'll just say it: better hurry, because there are only 358 shopping days until Christmas.

Disney Role Models

I've been down this rabbit hole before, and I'm sure people are sick of me talking about Disney girls and what they do or don't represent, but I saw this load of rubbish on Tumblr and need to talk about it.

Here's what someone I won't even bother linking to had to say about Miley Cyrus being voted the Worst Celebrity Influence of 2009.

Miley Cyrus shouldn’t have been voted ‘Worst Celebrity Influence of 2009’, Selena Gomez should have; why you ask? Because Selena is showing kids that they should be sqeaky clean & absolutely perfect. They shouldn’t. Selena is trying to portray herself as someone who has no flaws, but flaws are what make us beatiful. Miley is showing us that no one is perfect, not even her. She’s not scared to make mistakes and she takes credit for her misdoings. Many people commit suicides daily because they feel like they’re not good enough, and I guarantee you that Selena & her image will increase the suicidal rates by at least 30%. It’s simply impossible for us to be perfect, & this is what Miley us trying to show us. We could all learn from Miley’s mistakes. But Selena…she’s the bad influence. & I will strongly support my opinion on this because I know that it’s true & I have full proof to support this. :)

This is so stupid that I hate to even dignify it with a response, but here's what popped into my head.

First, I still can’t, for the life of me, see how Miley Cyrus is some kind of bad role model.

Second, I think kids today take everything far too seriously. Miley wears shorts, so she’s “promoting” some kind of slutty attitude. Selena Gomez has a clean image, so she’s “promoting” some kind of fruitless search for perfection. Effing silly.

Third, Selena Gomez defies all of the negative stereotypes of teenage girls in America. She’s poised and well-spoken, she’s professional and promotes charities, and she’s very talented. This is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone say that a good kid is somehow a terrible role model, and I hope I never read such abject ridiculousness ever again.

Fourth, having known people in trouble who have committed suicide or been on the verge of it, blaming someone who has zero influence on what someone decides to do to end their life for a spike in the suicide rate is unconscionable bordering on disgusting.

Fifth, these kids are living their lives. Just because they happen to be famous and more motivated than many other kids to use their talents doesn’t impart ANY responsibility on them to be role models to children. They’re not trying to show anyone what they should be. They’re trying to be who they are under an incredible amount of pressure from the media and fans who make a lot of demands on them. The fact that any of them hold up so well under this pressure is a testament to their character.

So don't tell me, in the world we live in, which is full of broken promises and half-hearted compromises and so much cruelty and pain, that two teenage entertainers are somehow the real problem in American society.

On the Death of Childhood

If there's one thing that Tumblr has revealed to me, it's a terrible fear of growing up among today's teenagers. I follow a lot of Tumblr blogs that are Disney-related, being a huge Disney fan, and I end up running into a lot of people between 15 and 22 who just come across as terrified of growing up and letting go of their childhoods. Is this fear really so prevalent among the young?

If there is, I kind of blame my generation. We tend to be navel-gazers. We're fascinated with ourselves and the way we were brought up. We love our toys and have problems getting rid of them. If they were sold in a garage sale the weekend we were out of town, we can be obsessive about them. We let toymakers sell us our childhoods back, and get touchy when Hot Topic sells our childhood to kids. Not all of us have adjusted well, and on the surface, a lot of us look like we never grew up.

But here's the thing: there's a big difference between collecting toys and being immature. There's a vastness between loving comic books and being illiterate.

On Disney Tumblrs, it looks like kids today love Peter Pan above all other Disney movies. I see a lot of Peter Pan stuff. And Peter Pan sentiments. They seem to really want to relate to a character who never grew up. They see him as a hero. There's a line from a Jonas Brothers song that goes "Peter Pan and Wendy turned out fine." I see that quoted endlessly.

The thing about that sentiment is that no, Peter Pan and Wendy really didn't turn out fine. These Tumblr kids seem to be laboring under the idea that Pan and Wendy got together and never grew up. But that doesn't happen in the Disney movie at all. (And, frankly, I'm not a fan of that movie, anyway.) If you read JM Barrie, Peter Pan is kind of a tragedy. It's about a boy who is so terrified of the idea of being an adult that he retreats into an imaginary world of fairies, pirates, and mermaids. That alone is practically an allegory for insanity.

Barrie's celebration of childhood actually reveals fears of social interaction and responsibility and adult relationships. Pan is a tragedy because he'll never love anyone, he'll never move beyond this callow boy who is only worried about filling his immediate needs. He's selfish and forgetful. Hell, Walt Disney hated him so much he turned him into an adolescent, defeating the purpose of the entire story.

Peter Pan is not someone to emulate or want to be.

Why do you think Wendy leaves to grow up? Because being a well-rounded adult is better than being Peter Pan.

The other lament, and this comes from all over the internet, is when people see something that's different from when they were a kid and says "I feel like part of my childhood just died."

It’s called growing up. You should look into it sometime.

I want to puke whenever I see or hear that phrase.

You childhood is supposed to die. You're supposed to grow and change. These are the natural processes of your life. You can't be 9 years old forever, and trying to be is pretty sad.

BUT.

But as you grow up, you find ways to assimilate the things you like into an ever-changing life.

I think a lot of peoples' problems come from the discord between the demands and responsibilities of adult life, and the strong desire to always be young and free of responsibility and to escape. So it makes change harder and harder to deal with if you're the kind of person who runs from responsibility instead of just dealing with it. I understand because I'm often guilty of this, too.

What makes me sad is having experienced a lot of the problems that come from being afraid of responsibility but having to be responsible, and seeing others fall into this trap.

Someone who's a Tumblr friend had a big blowout the other day with another user over the movie Avatar. My friend loved the movie; the other person had a lot of criticisms. And my friend just exploded. Instead of considering that there might be someone out there in the world who didn't think Avatar was very good, and understanding that that fact doesn't undermine or destroy or make any less his love for the movie, he went off about how the critic couldn't appreciate a movie like Avatar because his inner child was dead.

I think it's that fear of growing up that leads people to say something stupid like that. For my friend, it wasn't a matter of taste, or of disagreement over what they both look for in a film, or an acknowledgment that people experience things differently, or an unimportant difference of opinion. He seemed to see it as an attack on his connection with his youthful feelings and his ability to enjoy things on the level of a child. Instead of "I disagree" it became "I'm sorry you have no heart because you have no connection with the child you used to be."

There's too much of that in this generation. And for the record, the critic wasn't attacking my friend for liking it. He just felt it was too long and overly-familiar. His criticisms were about the movie itself, and my friend took it personally.

Look, nobody says you have to stop being a Disney fan to be a grown-up, and if they do, fuck them. You get to decide what adulthood is about. I think it's important to be able to connect with your childhood feelings and loves. I still have action figures, I have Star Wars calendars, I have a Mickey Mouse watch, and sometimes I love the Muppets more than members of my own family.

But I hate the sentiment that just because something's different from when you were a child, experiencing something for the first time, that means your childhood is now dead.

YOUR CHILDHOOD STILL HAPPENED.

The only thing that can "kill" or "rape" your childhood memories is you devaluing them because you hated The Phantom Menace or because Frank Oz doesn't work with the Muppets anymore or because Andy is a college kid in Toy Story 3 or DC has ruined the continuity you loved.

I'm not saying you have to be happy with these things. You like them, or you don't. Or you don't mind them. You adjust to them, or you ignore them. You don't spend 27 years of your life whining about the Ewoks.

Acting like your memories somehow never happened or a piece of your soul has died because someone didn't like a movie you loved or because something's different from when you were a kid or because you're depressed that people expect you to be able to act like an adult... these are truly immature attitudes.

Like the things you like because you like them. But you have to grow up, too.

I Hate That There Are People Who Need to Be Told This

300 laws are going into effect in Illinois today. WGN News has been telling me all morning that the law that effects "the most of us" is that it's now illegal to text while driving.

This will be virtually impossible to enforce, but I guess that's not really the point. People with common sense don't need to be told not to text while driving. People without it (and in the Chicago area, that number is massive) need to be reminded.

But the silliness of the law is not what gets me. What gets me is WGN's assertion that this is the one law that effects "the most of us." How many people are out there texting while driving? Holy shit, pay attention to the road, assholes! This is just... what? PAY ATTENTION TO THE ROAD!

Nothing like starting a new year with a reminder of the general stupidity of people.