Unneighborly Neighbors: Comedic gaps in cinema

Brittany Harvey offers a much-belated criticism of  Nicholas Stoller's Neighbors (2014):

I realize writing about this movie is not exactly timely, considering when it came out, but my husband and I just watched it. It was dumb. I like a lot of dumb movies—usually those starring former cast members of Freaks and Geeks are my favorites—but even Seth Rogan could not pull this one out of the depths of its excuses for humor. Basically, it is a movie about a bunch of people who are all discontent with their present lives, who through the unsuspecting plot twists and wild antics, realize their lives are not that bad. The problem is that in order to arrive at the newly found contentment, all the characters must be absolutely, unrelenting in their awfulness toward one another. Violence, lies, deception, adultery, and tattle tales are the means every character uses to relate to one another. The depiction of humanity the movie creates is bleak, and we are supposed to laugh right along as neighbors fight each other, launch firecrackers at one another, and drink each other to oblivion.

Kill Your Heroes, or how Bill Cosby murdered Heathcliff Huxtable

Brittany Harvey has written for LCB in the past. Here are her thoughts on Bill Cosby as an entertainer and the unsealing of a 2005 deposition: 

Bill Cosby has not been tried. Nothing has been proven. He has not been charged with anything. The theatre of the courtroom has been reserved for television and the internet. As Whoopi Goldberg stated on The View, the man is innocent until proven guilty.

Still, this innocence must be reconciled with fact. And the fact is we know Billy Cosby admitted to not only purchasing quaaludes but purchasing them as a means for drugging women to have sex. Not many crimes are more predatory, preconceived, or disgusting. The intent here is absolute in its evil, for it denies others agency with ongoing repercussions. My heart goes out to all the women he violated in anyway. And, no matter how this ends, Cosby clearly did something awful, perhaps multiple times. It is horrific, and inexcusable.

A Fan's DNA: Raising a son who knows Dean Smith

My sister and I grew up in the home of an avid UNC fan, our father. When she grew up, she married a Duke fan. Two months ago, she and the Duke fan had a kid together. I asked her to write about it:

In sickness and in health.

Parents pass all kinds of things on to their children. Hair color, skin tone, blood type, mannerisms. Of course, biological parents have no control over what the child’s hair color will actually be. It is all complicated genetic science. And it is all out of the parents’ control. So no matter who the child looks like, and whether or not the child’s genes come from her parents, all parents work to pass on values, morals, and the traits that make up a personality. Yet, even though parents of all types work to instill these things in their children, they really have little control over what gets carried on and what gets left behind.

Excuse Me, Mr. Oscar, You Forgot Something

Brittany Harvey is graduate student at Austin Theological Seminary. You may recognize some of her previous work here at LCB--she once wrote this on R.E.M. The work below is a yearly passion of hers:

After seeing this performance, the Academy should have nominated Gossling out of fear.

There are many critics out there making many predictions about who will be going home with
an eight pound, gold, naked man February 26. I am neither a critic nor a predictor of the future,
but I was a film studies minor and here are my thoughts on who got left out of the running this
year. In saying who got left out, I make no claims about any nominations that should have been
left out.

The Amazingly Awful: A Response to the Vanderbilt Basketball Team Thus Far

Editor's Note: The Vanderbilt men’s basketball team began the season ranked as the #7 team
in the country and were mentioned in the same breath for the first time ever with contending teams like North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio State. The Vanderbilt Commodores are now 6-3, and have lost two games in a row to ranked opponents (Xavier and Lousville), not to mention one game to an unranked opponent (Cleveland State).


Josh Spilker, the author of the piece below, is somewhat concerned about Vanderbilt basketball considering more “tough” nonconference games still must be played (Marquette) as well as “tough” conference games (2x Kentucky/ Florida, 1x Alabama). Due to these circumstances, he is left to wonder about the value of his Vanderbilt season tickets.

All Things Begin and End With R.E.M.

Photo by Kevan Williams

Over the next week or so we will be posting various thoughts, articles, etc about the band R.E.M., who recently called it quits after thirty-one years. Kicking things off is my sister Brittany Harvey. She has a blog of her own, attends Austin Theological Seminary, and is a graduate of James Madison University. She, like myself, also spent a lot of her childhood in Athens, GA. Here are her thoughts:

It is a common belief in Christian theology that all things begin and end in God. God created all things, and in the end, all things will return to be reunited with God. This is the eschatological view not as popularized in the media as predicting the exact day of the Day of Judgment--win sinners will be condemned and all that mess. I believe the first thought--all things begin and end in God. But I also believe all things begin and end with R.E.M.

My earliest memories of routine are of my dad driving me to preschool in the church we attended, and where my dad worked in Athens, Georgia. On our way we would pass a little red church. At some point the church was taken down--though I always imagined it being transported and set down somewhere else perfectly unchanged--and all that was left was the steeple, rising out of the ground. I had a deep love of this church/steeple as a kid. It was my favorite place in Athens, though I never saw it outside of my dad’s car on the way to preschool at our church.

It turns out that the church we passed everyday was St. Mary’s Episcopal, where Michael Stipe, and drummer, Peter Buck lived, and where the band played its first live show. Though I was in preschool well after the transition to Warner Bros. records, I had no idea who R.E.M. was, and no idea that that steeple on the ground had anything to do with them.

I became familiar with them in elementary school, listening to them as the high school kids in the church youth group who were on the trips my dad led played Automatic for the People and Monster. I kind of stumbled onto a concert they were giving on the National Mall in middle school while on a church trip. I got into them myself in high school. For about ten years, they have been one of my favorite bands. That list always fluctuates, but they are consistently in the top five.

My experience of R.E.M. throughout my life has been one of familiarity--whether it was familiarity with an Athens landmark or my own record collection. It has been one tied to the church. It is through my connection with the church that I know who R.E.M. is, what they sound like, why they matter. If Christian doctrine says that the end is like the beginning, then I guess the end of the world will be familiar in that it will find itself wherever R.E.M is relocated--perfectly reassembled like my childhood understanding of St. Mary’s--and left standing, rising out of the ground like a steeple, directing our gaze beyond themselves. And if Michael Stipe’s voice is at all prophetic--and I believe that it is--then the end of the world will sound pretty good. He will DJ, and I’ll feel fine.

When Belief Becomes Bankable: The Rays Uprising

Carlos Pulido

Josh Spilker is a Tampa Bay Rays fan, and he's written here before about that and other things. He also has a novella out now (digital), which you should definitely check out (hard copy...scroll to bottom), but he's here today to talk about baseball, money, and miracles. Enjoy:

At this dinner meeting with people from church, with a small smoky fire, bratwursts and italian sausage, pumpkin bread, it was fall, near the end of September and the whispers of October hum on the horizon. Things turn inside and then wrap up, and the St. Louis Cardinal fan/homeowner turns on the television. St. Louis taking care of business, Braves stumbling, Boston in a rain delay and the Rays left for dead. A Red Sox fan looks at the TV-- “Call the game,” he says and “Yankees killing the Rays.” There may/

may not have been a high-five and I fell back into a recliner. The recliner sunk and sighed; relieving itself.

The Passing of Carl Crawford: A Retrospective

Josh Spilker has been here before, writing about the Vandy pipeline that gushes onto Soldier Field, basketball vignettes, and SEC picks. He also is the proprietor of the indie music blog Deckfight and writes an indie lit. column for Impose magazine, but all that is neither here nor there because, right now, Josh just needs to contemplate what the loss of Carl Crawford to the Boston Red Sox means to him and his fellow Tampa Bay fans:

Russ' Midseason NFL Report

Russ, a History and Philosophy major from JMU, is here to give the keynote address for today. His topic for discussion is a midseason perceptions on everything that's happened so far this NFL season, as well as a look at what will happen the rest of the way.

Team by Team Observations

AFC East

Miami Dolphins- I love watching the wildcat.

New York Jets- Matt Sanchez eating a hotdog on the sideline during the Oakland game will be my memory of this Jets season.

Buffalo Bills- QB issues since Jim Kelly and the K Gun continues.

New England Patriots- Will the defense be good enough to make a run this year?


AFC North

Cleveland Browns- How can you regret hiring a coach before the midway point of his first season? You can be the Cleveland Browns.

Baltimore Ravens- Offense is on the way up, defense is on the way down.

Pittsburgh Steelers- With the running game coming along, absolute contender to repeat

Cincinnati Bengals- One win away from sweeping both the Ravens and the Steelers. No one predicted that.


AFC South

Indianapolis Colts - Just another year for Peyton Manning

Jacksonville Jaguars- Prediction: Jaguars will be out of Jacksonville in 5 years.

Tennessee Titans- With Chris Johnson running from the cops every week and defense becoming healthy, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get back to 8-8

Houston Texans- Steve Slaton has five lost fumbles on the season already. Fantasy bust.


AFC West

Denver Broncos- Bill Simmons was probably the only person to pick the Broncos as a sleeper this year. I bow to the Sports Guy.

San Diego Chargers- Sometimes its remarkable how fast running backs fall off once they hit 30. It happened to Eddie George, Preist Holmes, Shaun Alexander, and now Ladainian Tomlinson.

Oakland Raiders- As laughable as this whole organization is right now, does having Jeff Garcia as the QB make this team really competitive right now, or is it just me?

Kansas City Chiefs- Matt Cassel experiment looks to be a failure.


NFC East

Washington Redskins- Worst Owner in Sports.

Dallas Cowboys- High hopes now make it that more hilarious when Tony Romo chokes in December.

Philadelphia Eagles- What have the Eagles gained with the Michael Vick signing?

New York Giants- Easily the biggest disappointment so far with a terrible secondary and absence of a running game.


NFC North

Minnesota Vikings - Good team, but have had lots of luck so far as well. Not sold on a Super Bowl run.

Chicago Bears - Still looking for that franchise quarterback…

Detroit Lions - When/If the time comes, will there ever be a more jovial and content fan base in the history of sports than when the Lions finally win a Super Bowl?

Green Bay Packers - With a poor offensive line and an issue of holding on to the ball too long, Aaron Rodgers will be lucky to survive the season, which will disappoint fantasy owners across the country


NFC South

Tampa Bay Buccaneers- Ironic that they wear the cream colored throwbacks the year that they are terrible just like many of those years with that uniform.

Atlanta Falcons – Explosive offense will lead them to the playoffs

Carolina Panthers- Delhomme has regressed to the point that Steve Smith is basically an afterthought in the offense.

New Orleans Saints- They can beat you running. They can beat you throwing. They can beat you with defense. Sounds like a Super Bowl contender to me.


NFC West
Arizona Cardinals - Jekyll and Hyde so far with a 4-0 road record and 1-3 home record

San Francisco 49ers - Alex Smith will determine what happens the rest of this season.

St. Louis Rams – Stephen Jackson is good. Everyone else….

Seattle Seahawks – Those green jerseys were the worst jerseys ever worn by an NFL team

Midseason Awards
MVP Offense – Drew Brees

MVP Defense – Patrick Willis

Comeback Player of the Year – Cedric Benson

Coach of the Year – Josh McDaniels

Fantasy MVP – Aaron Rodgers

Best Game – Minnesota 27 San Francisco 24

Worst Decision – Hiring a 70 year old bingo caller to be your offensive coordinator 6 games into the season



Predictions
AFC
East – New England Patriots
North – Pittsburgh Steelers
South – Indianapolis Colts
West – San Diego Chargers
Wildcard – Cincinnati Bengals, Denver Broncos


NFC
East – Philadelphia Eagles
North – Minnesota Vikings
South – New Orleans Saints
West – Arizona Cardinals
Wildcard – Atlanta Falcons, New York Giants

Super Bowl – Pittsburgh Steelers vs. New Orleans Saints

Champions – Pittsburgh Steelers

The Cliches of Kentucky Basketball; or the Aura is Back

Today we bring you our second ever keynote speaker here at LCB. His name is Quincy Jones, and he writes the blog Thoughts of Q. He's also an avid Kentucky basketball fan, which is his topic for today and the start of our many discussions on the 2009-2010 college basketball season.

“A program synonymous with winning.” “The stars are aligned.” Let’s stick with clichés for awhile. It makes for good reading when viewed through blue lenses. Kentucky basketball is famous for both its winning ways and bottomless appetite for national championships. Try to imagine racing a Ferrari and a Maserati on a ¼ mile track. You’ve been given the keys to a Lamborghini. Three great thoroughbreds. One small problem for the Lamborghini: the wheels have fallen off. That basically sums up Kentucky basketball for the past half decade. It defined the Billy Gillispie era.

The fumes of victory had long since dried up before Gillispie rolled into town. Tubby Smith, the last coach of a UK national championship team, won it on the backs of Rick Pitino’s players: Scott Padgett, Michael Bradley, Wayne Turner, Jamaal Magloire and Tayshaun Prince. He was still able to recruit the great player every now and then (see Rajon Rondo and Randolph Morris [who was a bust, but nevermind that]), but struggled to bring in a complete class of great recruits. Gillispie brought in Patrick Patterson and developed Jodie Meeks into a more than solid two guard, but it was a steep downhill in talent after that.

So what do you do if you’re Kentucky’s ADUP (Athletic Director Under Pressure), Mitch Barnhart? Well, you find, hook, plead, beg and do everything else legally and illegally to get a coach that will absolutely put you on a path to success. Quick aside: Mr. Barnhart has a self-termed “15x15x15” plan that he is banking on for proof of his success. Basically, the goal for UK Athletics is to win at least 15 conference or national championships and rank among the NCAA’s top 5 athletic programs by 2015. Let’s take a reasonable guess and assume that Kentucky basketball wins the conference championship oh, I don’t know, every year from the 2009 to the 2014 season (6 conference championships). Let’s take another leap of faith and assume they will challenge for the NCAA title oh, I don’t know, every year through the 2014 season. And let’s say they will win two titles (2 national championships). Well that’s 8 championships from one sport. I’m sure the rest of the sports teams can pick up another 7 between them.

After another down season for Kentucky basketball and the shadow of Rick Pitino growing in Louisville, it was time for a change. The plug was pulled on ol’ Billy Boy because, as the Kentucky administration put it, there existed an “incompatibility between the school” and coach. Billy Boy is now in the John Lucas After Care alcohol rehab program in Houston. Talk about “drinking away your sorrows.”

Strolling into the limelight and pressure is John Calipari. He’s never won a national championship, but he has also never coached a program as high profile as Kentucky. And, as Rick Pitino showed us by winning high praise with his Kentucky teams (but also tanked in the NBA and whose Louisville team has yet to reach the predicted heights), when you surround yourself with great players, you just need to be good enough to “manage the game.” And, of course, you don’t really need to have great recruiting pitches to attract the nation’s finest basketball players to the bluest part of the Bluegrass state. Just ask the FOUR five-star recruits that will be playing for Coach Calipari this year: Eric Bledsoe, DeMarcus Cousins, Daniel Orton and the will-he-or-won’t-he-play, illegally recruited, played 5 years of high school, maybe ineligible, highlight reel point guard, John Wall.

There exists my favorite of clichés: “No one knows that the future holds.” The college basketball landscape is forever changing. When you have someone as seedy and loathed as John Calipari (For the record, I love Kentucky basketball, but when does integrity give way to the “win at any costs” philosophy), an illegal violation waiting to happen, you’re not even sure of next week. For Billy Gillespie, the cliché, “Pressure busts pipes,” came true. Can Calipari turn an old stone back into a diamond? The 900,000 fanatics that follow Coach Calipari on Twitter each and every day are eager to find out.

The Chicago Bears and the Bloody Knee of the SEC

LCB is pleased to announce its first ever keynote speaker. His name is Josh Spilker, and he writes for the music and lit blog Deckfight. He is also a Vanderbilt graduate, which provides him with his vantage point for today's topic:

If the SEC is a body, then Vanderbilt is the bloody knee. Everyone keeps telling the SEC to stop their bleeding, but they can't; they don't see it as an emergency. And so from this beat-up knee the Vandy football program flows. Vandy thinks they belong in the SEC, even though they are staining everyone else's program.

And if Vandy is a bloody knee, then Jay Cutler and Earl Bennett were the thin, overwhelmed gauze that tried to keep everything together.

Most know Jay Cutler because of his own indecisiveness at Denver, saddled with his unique quality of being "a good quarterback coming from Vanderbilt." He grew up about three hours from Nashville, everybody wanted to make him something else--we were just happy that a quarterback wanted to play for us.

Our measure of a "good" quarterback was pretty easy to reach, Cutler somehow made the passes--accurate and on-time and that's all it took for us to swoon. We didn't know how good he was until the scouts told us, because, well, we don't know a lot about football. But it seems more likely with the learning curve and the talent already present, that if the Titans would have selected Cutler instead of Vince Young, he would be an All-Pro several times over and have more wins to his name.

But then we wouldn't have this--five Vanderbilt players on the same roster. The Chicago Bears, of all the teams have five Vanderbilt players, not some expansion pansy like the Texans or Jaguars. A team with history, a team with passionate fans...a team with fans. Something the Vandy guys aren't used to at all.

To find five Vanderbilt players in the league is miraculous, that five are on the same team is a Jesus coming again, rapture-type occurrence. To find five Vanderbilt players in Chicago is like five homeless men getting elected to the City Council...it could happen, but it's not likely.

How Jay Cutler, Earl Bennett and D.J. Moore all ended up on the same Chicago Bears team is more than a coincidence--everyone who put those guys on the same team knew what they were doing. No team, especially not the Bears (or maybe especially the Bears) could be that stupid. So the most overlooked story arc in all of the Jay Cutler saga that unfolded the past 6 months was the fact that Earl Bennet was on the Bears team. It's no joke that Cutler had his best season with Earl Bennett catching the ball. Their learning curve will be light and easy.

While the wound that is the Vandy football program was oozing all around them, these guys were the only bandages--making plays, catching passes, actually bringing excitement to the meager 20,000 or so that usually show up for a Vandy football game. That we went 5-6 with Cutler and Bennett one year is amazing, that we started that year 4-0 has become a mere footnote. With solid wins against Wake Forest and Arkansas on the road, we couldn't pull out two more wins. Losses included a two-point loss to down-the-road mid-conference rival Middle Tennessee State and a 49-42 OT loss to the Florida Gators. Those four glorious weeks were filled with the dreaming and scheming to make a bowl game in Hawaii, forget that we hadn't achieved that in 50 years. The fact that with the two best players ever in Vanderbilt football's history we still couldn't do it shows just how easily this knee bleeds. Bennett went on to finish his career at Vandy as the SEC's all-time leading receiver and was drafted by the Bears in 2008, setting the stage for D.J. Moore.

If Bennett and Cutler were the most accomplished skill players in the history of Vanderbilt, somehow we also grabbed D.J. Moore, perhaps the all-around most exciting player in recent memory. A threat on both sides of the ball and on special teams, D.J. was the ultimate showstopper--we would all stop catching up about law school or med school or macroeconomics to watch him play. Not that I really ever discussed any of that, I just made fun of the people that did and then I stopped and watched also. I couldn't help it. D.J. would catch, intercept and return balls for touchdowns. If the program was all bloody and beat-up, D.J. Moore at least poured out effusively, rather than the slow trickle of fatigue that usually enwraps the whole team in the 4th quarter. Somehow, we made a bowl game last year, our own Nashville Music City Bowl as we finished out the year 7-6. Again, it was ugly, but they made it. God bless 'em.
And now here's a rant: Most say that we don't have enough "athletes" to compete in the SEC, meaning that brains and brawn don't go together. I don't think that's really the case, but I will say that we "give up" on games, quite often as a matter of fact. It's true we may not have the best athletes, but we sure know when to quit. Logically, the football ethos doesn't make sense. The odds are often against comebacks, the mantra to keep going and keep trying rings hollow to the sanest of minds. It's not that Vandy lacks "athletes," it's that the players think about how to use their athleticism...and think that it doesn't make sense to sacrifice their bodies for concussions in the fourth quarter of meaningless games.

The same goes for us, the fans. It's true at a Vanderbilt football game there will be more opposing fans tailgating than home team fans. Once, my wife's parents, die-hard University of Georgia fans asked me the best place to tailgate on campus, and I had no answer. I don't know. Most people go to frat parties, go out to eat, stop playing Halo or just roll out of bed and then head to the game at the end of the first quarter. Then and only then does it depend on whom they're playing. Chances are, most fans are likely to attend a game if a team from their home state is playing. Alabama natives attend the Alabama or Auburn game and so it goes. Or maybe we'll go to catch Tim Tebow, just because we see him on ESPN and hear he was God or something like that. But even then, God gets very few Vandy students away from Halo. We also refuse to sacrifice our bodies or solid Halo time for Vanderbilt football or the Almighty.

"I was told many years ago, by a true giant in this business, that when kids come out of those schools, they also take a quantum step in the league," said Bears general manager Jerry Angelo in a Sports Illustrated article in May about the fact that the Bears had five Vandy players. "They were more prepared to come into the league because they were more grounded, understood how to balance academic load with football load, needed less structure, meaning they could handle time and money better, because they had to balance football and school 50-50, vs. maybe 80-20 at some football-first programs."

In other words, they knew how to balance sense with sensibility compared to the other cheating, lying, no-good stupid lugheads in the SEC (One of our chants involves something with an SAT score in it, but now I forgot what it was). At least that's what us Vandy fans have to tell ourselves about players on other teams, to keep ignoring how we are the bloody knee of the SEC.

But now, Jay Cutler, Earl Bennett, Hunter Hillenmeyer, D.J. Moore and Chris Williams will play harder than they ever thought they could--it now makes sense for them too. They are getting paid to sacrifice their bodies--the risk now makes sense compared to the reward.

I know there are other "academic" schools in the same predicament as Vandy: Wake Forest, Tulane, Georgia Tech, Duke, Northwestern, even BYU. But all of those teams have had some consolation of some sort (except Duke). A solid double digit winning season in recent years. A possible Heisman candidate. High rankings. And Duke, well, Duke has the freakin' basketball program (which is supposed to be Vandy's 'good' sport though they've been sharing it with baseball here lately).

I hope these five Vandy guys find success at Chicago. I think I'm actually, kind of sort of a Bears fan as they are every Vandy fans' one hope at football glory, albeit by proxy. At least there is a rooting interest with a real sense that maybe, yes, maybe the Vandy-led Chicago Bears can find a way to victory. Which is more than I can say for the actual Vanderbilt football team.