Posted: March 7th, 2011 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Movies | Tags: indie, marx, Movies, trotsky | 1 Comment »
Seventeen year-old Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) thinks he’s the reincarnation of Bolshevic revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He has meticulously studied the life of his hero, and he intends to replicate it in every way possible, from marrying a girl ten years his senior, to leading his fellow citizens in revolt against the forces of oppression. When his father (Saul Rubinek), the owner of a small factory, gives him a job, Leon organizes his father’s workers into a strike. Leon’s father gamely punishes his son by pulling him out of the private prep school he’s attending and placing him in a public school. Because, after all, the real Trotsky attended a public high school too. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 19th, 2011 | Author: miconian | Filed under: TV | Tags: The Office | 1 Comment »
Michael Scott, of The Office, has spent years making his indie feature, Threat Level: Midnight, starring his co-workers (season 7, episode 17). TLM, taken as a reflection of real life, makes no sense whatsoever. But its genius is that it is a very accurate reflection of movie-life. It borrows structurally from so many films that it does feel a little bit like a studio movie, even though it has no budget. As we watch it, we are also, implicitly, watching a whole series of popular films through the eyes of Michael Scott, cringing as he commits them to memory but fails to understand the relationship between the fiction and the reality that it more or less represents. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 12th, 2011 | Author: miconian | Filed under: TV | Tags: Karl Marx, Sports Night | 2 Comments »
A friend recently forwarded me a job listing, by which I was both amused and horrified:
“We have reached the point where we can’t grow it any more on our own, and we aren’t very good at sales anyway. We should focus on the code while someone else does the bizdev. We have outsourced everything that can be outsourced and need someone to step in as head of marketing/sales…However, you should also be up to date. Like, if you don’t have an iPhone 4 or recent Android phone, or if you use Windows at home, don’t apply. It sounds arrogant, but you need to be comfortable with our stack and with the increasingly mobile nature of software. We trialed one person who was older and didn’t jive on this particular point, and it didn’t work for us.
We are essentially looking for Alec Baldwin’s character in this scene.”
And the scene linked to is this one: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 17th, 2011 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: high school, martin luther king, MLK, SME | 3 Comments »
My high school, which had been around long enough for my mother to attend it, had never officially acknowledged Martin Luther King Day, up until my senior year. A few words from my favorite teacher, and I was resolved to change that.
Mr. DeBarthe had been pointedly relegated to the classroom that was as far as one could get from the principal’s office and still physically be in the school. He was a Mormon with an elaborate mustache and no beard, fond of wearing Hawaiian print shirts, especially one that said “Tahiti” on the pocket. He went on archaeological digs. He coached the chess team. HIs grading system was difficult for many students to understand. He refused to answer yes or no questions. He could draw a perfect circle on the blackboard, and he often came up with reasons to do so.
My first real interaction with Mr. DeBarthe happened when I was taking a journalism class my sophomore year. I was writing an article about the chess team, which regularly attended the national high school chess championship tournament, despite paltry support from the district. Mr. DeBarthe had some inflammatory things to say about the school board, and I put them in the article. The journalism teacher refused to accept my assignment, insisting that no teacher in his right mind would make such a statement if he knew it was going to be printed and distributed to the administration. I returned to Mr. DeBarthe, explained that we were talking on the record, and asked if he wanted to change his quote. I read it back to him.
“I was being too kind,” he said, and gave me another quote, twice as inflammatory. Upon hearing about this, the journalism teacher threw up his hands, and the quote went into the paper.
I resolved to spend as much time as possible in Mr. DeBarthe’s classroom for the remainder of my high school career.
Read the rest of this entry »
