April 3, 2013

1.625 Cheers for "Admission"

The basic problem with "Admission" is that Tina Fey isn't funny in her role as a staffer at Princeton's Admissions department. Otherwise, it's a pretty intelligent movie on an interesting subject. I rather liked it, but, be forewarned, it's not very funny.

Now, for reasons that are no doubt explicated at some length in the roughly 13,000 articles I haven't read all the way through to the end about why the career of Tina Fey is of epochal importance for the social evolution of the world, many seem to feel they, personally, have a lot invested in her. Me, I just like her when she's funny and don't otherwise think about her.

So, the opening of "Admission" requires Fey to do a lot of voice-over explaining the elite college admissions process from the inside, the overly polished kids, the insufferably pushy parents, the cliches about "Just be yourself," and so forth. 

A lot of decent movies founder on this kind of introductory expository voice-over, which is hard to get right in tone. Blade Runner is a notorious instance. For example, if you ever want to see a fine Bonfire of the Vanities-lite satirical movie about Miami, check out Big Trouble based on Dave Barry's novel, which has a much better selected cast than the movie version of Bonfire. But, Tim Allen airballs a few jokes in the opening voiceover, and a lot of viewers wrote it off then and there without noticing that Big Trouble keeps getting better and better.

It's particularly hard to get the tone right in Admission because the natural emotional response to elite college admissions would be, oh, say, Dr. Strangelove-style satire. But, "Admission" won't let the system have it with both barrels. When it does engage in satire, however, I was impressed with the accuracy (the SAT scores and GPAs of the applicants are exactly right), and with some subtle subversiveness. 

For example, Admission revolves on the fate of a diamond-in-the-rough applicant with a 1.5 GPA after three years of public high school in a hick town in New Hampshire where his parents run a mini-mart. But, the first teacher (played by Paul Rudd) smart enough to understand what Jeremiah's talking about realizes his student is an autodidact, so he has him sign up for 8 Advanced Placement tests, even though he's never taken an AP course. Jeremiah gets 5s on all 8. (I'm a big fan of AP tests being incorporated more into the application process than they are at present, since if kids are going to test prep like crazy, they might as well test prep on real subjects like chemistry and European history.)

Jeremiah then takes the SAT and scores a 2360 out 2400.

And Jeremiah is white and working class. In fact, Paul Rudd does some sleuthing and decides that his young prodigy must be the child Tina Fey secretly gave up for adoption when they were at Dartmouth together. (Not a spoiler because it's in the trailer. And I don't care much about the 21st Century spoiler obsession, which makes writing intelligently about movies even harder than it was before.)

Tina is unmarried and nominally childless, having lived with the insufferable head of the Princeton English Department (Michael Sheen, who usually plays Tony Blair) for ten years, until he dumps her for the department's new Virginia Woolf superstar. 

The point of being an admissions "officer" is that although you don't get paid all that much, you have huge amounts of travel to do, and the faculty don't respect you, you have Power. You get to reward kids who remind you of yourself. (As long, of course, as they are budding young sociopaths who are willing to sacrifice all shreds of dignity -- "Write an application essay about my mother's excruciating death from cancer? Why that's a great idea!" -- to fit into and get ahead in the System.)

For example, the aging preppie admissions staffer really wants to push the legacy applicant who is captain of the high school sailing team (how many schools have sailing teams?) but "doesn't test well." (A braver movie would have also shown the gay staffer pushing all the gay boy applicants.)

But, having spent 16 years in this job and having her usual self-esteem issues, the thrill of boosting Mini-Mes who seem like you but are really Other People's Children has lost its thrill. 

Tina's character can't stand all the manipulative parents she has to fend off, but "Admission" raises the question of just how far she would go to get her own kid (assuming Jeremiah really is her baby) into Princeton? 

Pretty damn far, it turns out. 

Periodically, I read articles about how we don't have to worry about affirmative action in the long run because Real Soon Now, black parents will all decide that their kids getting special breaks just isn't fair, so they will demand the end of racial quotas. Yeah, right ...

Other clever aspects: the Paul Rudd character is a globe-trotting do-gooder who moves every few years to some new Third World poverty zone to teach the locals how to dig ditches or whatever NGOs do. Rudd's character hates being thought boring. Along the way, he has adopted an Ugandan boy who is now in 6th grade at the New England alternative school where Rudd teaches.

The little black boy is the movie's wise Numinous Negro, but he's used with a twist. Rudd expects him to be a whiz at schoolwork, but he's not. Why isn't he getting As in Spanish? After all, they've been back home in New England for two years and it's time to head off to the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador to heal the world. But Rudd's adopted son is sick of traveling, sick of the Third World, and likes playing bridge with Rudd's rich Republican mother. The Ugandan kid wants Rudd to marry Fey because Fey is boring and he's sick of Rudd wanting to be interesting all the time.

Director Paul Weitz (who co-directed with his brother Chris Weitz the definitive Hugh Grant performance in the similar About a Boy in 2002) is the son of John Weitz, fashion designer (my mother sent me of to college with a least a dozen pairs of elegant John Weitz socks), race car driver, novelist, historian, and spy, a definite candidate for Most Interesting Man in the World, mid-Century version. I suspect that all of Paul and Chris Weitz's movies are, in some way, about their father.

58 comments:

  1. The lib elites like Tina Fey for the same reason that Freud initially appreciated having Jung around. Most of Freud's acolytes were Jewish, and so his theory was seen as Jewish. But with Jung onboard, Freud hoped to push his ideas to the 'Aryan' society.

    A lot of female comics tend to be Jewish or not attractive or both. Many of them tend to be very ethnic. So, how nice to have a good looking and bright goy girl around to be the face of sophisticated NY humor. Also, the success of Tina Fey flatters white gentiles that they too can be great wits and oh so very funny just like the Jews.

    I think she's sort of funny but nothing special. Mostly vapid. Fey is afraid to go all the way. Her main shtick is "I'm witty AND pretty." It's the AND that really sells her.
    Okay, a rare combination, but she's not exactly beautiful and she's not exactly the greatest wit(even on SNL).

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  2. If you do some Googling for "Tina Fey feminist" or "Tina Fey sexist" or "Tina Fey racist", you get some interesting articles and blogs. I think it took people a while, but they finally realized that she's not nearly as left-wing as they hoped she was.

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  3. In fact, Paul Rudd does some sleuthing and decides that his young prodigy must be the child Tina Fey secretly gave up for adoption when they were at Dartmouth together.

    Jesus H Christ - spoiler much?!?

    I quit reading at that point, just in case I might actually see the dadgum movie some day.

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  4. Tina Fey has got great eyesight. She can see Russia from her house!

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  5. introductory expository voice-over

    Susan Sarandon's worked in Bull Durham, but she was still too old for the part. All the romantic scenes felt creepy.

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  6. I don't like Fey. There's no edge, no grudge. Resentment, not contentment, is the secret to great comedy.
    Though some comics play it cool and light--as Allen sometimes did--, the comic edge and/or energy comes from the fact that the comic is an outsider in terms of ethnicity, personality, respectability, and etc.
    So, even when Allen played it cool, there was a sense of a scrawy ugly Jew trying to get even. With Sam Kinison, it was that he was fat and ugly and white trashy. Dangerfield--funniest guy that ever lived in my book--couldn't get any respect. Eddie Murphy's schtick was he born wild and crazy and couldn't control himself. Bette Midler had to push because she couldn't get any attention with looks alone.

    But Fey has the looks, and she's bright enough to make to do well in society. She was born to be the popular girl. So, there's too much of air of contentment and complacency around her. In her MEAN GIRLS, it was hard to tell with whom her sympathies were really with. Even though the blonde girl was a bitch, it seemed like the ugly kids were hardly better.

    Fey is to comedy what Dana Stevens is to film criticism. Maybe they got the brains and credentials, but they were born to be eased into the popular crowd. We don't get any sense that they really had to do battle and make a scene to get noticed.

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  7. The greatest.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1it1O-DXOE

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  8. (As long, of course, as they are budding young sociopaths who are willing to sacrifice all shreds of dignity -- "Write an application essay about my mother's excruciating death from cancer? Why that's a great idea!" -- to fit into and get ahead in the System.)

    In 1820 80% of Americans were farmers and beholden to no one so they spoke their mind openly and truthfully.
    Now 95% of us work in the Great American Bureaucracy and you must kiss someone's ass(sub cauda smooch) to get ahead.
    So nowadays everyone is more or less forced to be like the Liars on the show Survivor, establishing relationships with somewhat measured words and then throwing those relationships to the side after they have been used to get you ahead. So the characters on Survivor(it should be called Liar) are like the players in our Great American Bureaucracy, cozening up to others only to use that trust falsely. And our nationwide cup of bitterness overfloweth.
    Of course I am a proud Loser in that Sociopathic game.

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  9. Fey's dimple did it for me the first time I saw her on SNL. (See also Gina Gershon; I just have a thing for chicks who look like they're smirking at all times.) Can't say I've seen her in anything beyond that, though. Seems like everything she's in is presented as being self-consciously smart and witty, as if it's saying, "You WILL like this. Like it!"

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  10. "I think she's sort of funny but nothing special. Mostly vapid. Fey is afraid to go all the way. Her main shtick is "I'm witty AND pretty." It's the AND that really sells her."
    Her schtick is more fem-slob than lipstick witticism, and her tenure on SNL was one characterized by spectacular mediocrity. Her movies are usually pretty bad, too, but the early and middle seasons of 30 Rock comprise some of the greatest situation comedy since Seinfeld.

    I imagine I'll be called an agent of das jude for expressing an enthusiasm for Seinfeld but there you have it.

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  11. Oh brother.. It figures that Sailer of all people would like that crap-can movie...

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  12. "Get the Gringo" was also somewhat impaired by voiceover overdrive. Just stick to the terse explanations, no abortive attempts at wit, please.

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  13. The expository voice-over is a lazy device usually. That's the basic reason why so many of 'em don't work: they can't work. I mean, movies are visual - what's the audience looking at while a mumble-mouthed pretty boy/girl invisibly says some lines buried under the mix anyway? (Please remember that a good percentage of any audience has hearing deficits. Neither Aunt Edna nor her 14-year-old nephew has, or can have, engineers' ears.)

    The way to win with a narrative V.O. (beside getting an actor with a voice and putting that voice top in the mix) is to incorporate it into the style of the movie - i.e., present the movie as a storybook tale, not as a narrative film with a snippet of confusing talk slipped in under the front credits. For example, let's say that at the beginning of your film you have Patrick Stewart appear on screen as narrator ("Hello everyone. Got enough to drink? Hope you're comfortable out there"), then his narration runs more or less throughout the film, and he's a character in the story, and at the end you bring him back on screen as narrator to round out things ("Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen and others, you know who you are") - well, that sort of thing would work 100% of the time. But now you have another problem. You just made a quirky art film. This is known in the business by the technical term, "kiss your shirt goodbye."

    Hitchcock got away with his intros and outros on the tube only because you saw him doing them. Orson Welles got away with (or did he?) his cinematic V.O.s only because the world knew him as a radio personality. Tim Allen, Harrison Ford, Tiny Fey - they fit into neither of these categories. You can't simply have an actor (even an A-lister) mumble unseen something under the mix and then blame the depressingly inevitable result on "the writing" (that goat of goats).

    (Serling? His voice was terrific and you sometimes saw him while he narrated. Carol's "The Third Man"? Didn't think Carol's own narration worked - sorry. Cotten's is only marginally more effective. And so on.)

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  14. in a hick town in New Hampshire

    I missed the film which lasted about a week before its mercy-killing here in NorCal theaters. Did he get admitted? Did the other rich Princetonians from Hong Kong and the UAE hassle him over his cheap wardrobe?

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  15. Like FDR or Reagan I suppose Tina Fey is eternally bound to be claimed as "one of our own" by each and every of the Internet's geek sects, apparently now including the #2 pencil fetishists led by Steve. Am looking forward to her star dramatic turn in the movie version of Being White in Philly

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  16. Fey's a utility hitter in that staple role of the media menu, "zany porcelain-complexion chick" electronic representations of which probably account for 3% of GDP not counting the cosmetics industry. Look at her old Second City clips when she was fat but at least serviceable for purposes of color coordination. I bet she's resentful as hell of Zooey Deschanel, who not only got to play-act for a while as indie rocker but additionally was filmed staring out a window asking her phone if it's raining outside.

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  17. Speaking of Tina Fey, I am waiting for Whiskey to explain her husband. If he is not a beta looking white male, I don't know what is.

    She is fairly attractive and would seem to have been able to land a more alpha man. According to wiki, she started dating this guy when she was about 24, and married him at 31. So it is not likely that she rode the 'carousel' and then settled on Mr. Beta when her looks were gone.

    I thought women like Fey, especially liberal ones, hated beta white males.

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  18. "So it is not likely that she rode the 'carousel' and then settled on Mr. Beta when her looks were gone."

    This may be TMI, but Fey has publicly said that she lost her virginity at age 24 and that Richmond is the only man she has ever slept with.

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  19. I don't like Tina Fey because I'm a pretty partisan conservative and I remember her ragging on cons all the time on SNL. I know that sounds petty, but it is what it is.

    I also remember her saying something to the effect after the '08 election that she was glad she'd never have to ape Sarah Palin's "annoying" or "irritating" accent again. I'm not a big Palin fan and I don't have the accent Palin has, but I thought it was a petty, classist thing to say.

    " Seems like everything she's in is presented as being self-consciously smart and witty, as if it's saying, "You WILL like this. Like it!""

    Yup. I remember after Bridesmaids was released, you heard this barrage from the entertainment media, "Tina Fey and Amy Poehler et al. have killed the myth that women are not funny!"

    I never believed that women can't be funny to begin with. Like Cail said, it seems that we're all supposed to believe Fey is a comic genius, well, just because.

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  20. "zany porcelain-complexion chick"

    Zany, swarthy Greek woman, more like. Are we looking at the same person?

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  21. Fey is self-conscious about the scar on her face from an assault as a young girl by a "vibrant" "youth."

    So she's probably a bit lower down on the looks area (she's careful not to have it photographed) and in self-image.

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  22. Speaking of Tina Fey, I am waiting for Whiskey to explain her husband. If he is not a beta looking white male, I don't know what is.

    You really need Whiskey to explain to you that group tendencies don't rule out individual exceptions? I'd have thought anyone commenting here would already know that.

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  23. Captain of a high school sailing club who doesn't score well?

    A somewhat sly reference to the old idea that Whites do better on SAT's because Blacks don't know what a 'regatta' is?

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  24. LOL, I smell another "Idiocracy" here.

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  25. Oh brother.. It figures that Sailer of all people would like that crap-can movie...

    Its a bit of a stretch to say he liked it. He liked some things about it.

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  26. Fey's dimple did it for me the first time I saw her on SNL. (See also Gina Gershon; I just have a thing for chicks who look like they're smirking at all times.

    Gine Gershon, oooh now we're talking. She's filthy.

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  27. zany porcelain-complexion chick

    "Zany"? On what planet? This is so off it actually makes a valid point in reverse. Whether you find her funny or not, Fey is going after quite the opposite of "zany".

    It took us a long time to work through that unfortunate recourse of about half of the aspiring comidennes out there (anybody remember Judy Tenuta?). Goldie Hawn was the original hot zany chick, and she was never funny, just very cute. Of course, I always thought Lucille Ball was quite attractive, but I only get odd stares when I say so.

    For a long time it was "zany" or the angry feminist schtick (if there is any justice Brett Butler is back in her trailer with a well-worn vibrator, or that ex husband she made a career out of slandering).

    Now we've got girls trying to out-vulgar the guys. Chelsea Handler and that overweight woman (I think there might be two of them--no, that isn't a fat joke--one of them was in Bridesmaids). It's just grim if you ask me.

    I suspect guys like Fey because she's pretty enough and comes off as--can it be?--reasonable. She also manages to do self-deprecating humor without coming off like a Cathy comic ("oh these split ends; oh these menstrual cramps!"). Compared to the angry uplift of Margaret Cho, or the fag-haggery of Kathy Griffin (gay men, if we apologize and promise never to make fun of you again, will you put them, and Nene, away? I mean, come on, a little friggin' humanity!)

    I think I even saw a NYT article trying to spin Fey's low-key appeal as--what else?--guys just won't accept a strong woman.

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  28. "she's not nearly as left-wing as they hoped she was."
    Who is?

    What I've seen of 30 Rock had an impressive joke density, mostly pretty good. Basically, the opposite of this.

    I've noticed a very disproportionate portion of female stand-up comics are lesbians. No one thinks anything of a woman doing comedic film or television, but stand up is overwhelmingly male. Part of it may have something to do with their pride in going over the line, offending audience members, and then destroying anybody who yells back at them. In contrast, Maria Bamford (admittedly, someone who has been in an institution) talks about being on the verge of tears because some radio D.Js from who-the-hell-cares talked down her material, or having a breakdown because someone in the audience heckled her.

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  29. @Whiskey
    Regarding her scar, check out her memoir "Bossypants" some time.

    There, Tina Fey displays the ultimate in white suicidal tendencies...she actually "e-races" her OWN victimization (slashing) at the hands of her obviously black attacker.

    She claims that people assume her attacker was black, yet...wait for it...she never revealed his race! (though apparently she has no problem with us assuming it was a man).

    This is just sick. She knows he was black but e-races him to supposedly entrap people into making racist assumptions.

    The attack occurred circa 1975 in Upper Darby Township, Penn., which if you look at the Census numbers was in the midst of its white-flight phase at that very time.

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  30. A Dr. Strangelove movie about admissions could be brilliant. "We must not allow...an extracurriculars gap!"

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  31. Mr. Sailer, when you and your bigoted readers get rid of that latent antisemitism, you'll eventually acknowledge we're disproportionally admitted in top universities simply because we're much more brilliant .

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  32. "Zany, swarthy Greek woman, more like."

    Tina Fey isn't swarthy. Not all Greeks are, and, in any case, she's German and Scottish on her father's side (white enough for you?).

    "Though some comics play it cool and light--as Allen sometimes did--, the comic edge and/or energy comes from the fact that the comic is an outsider in terms of ethnicity, personality, respectability, and etc.
    So, even when Allen played it cool, there was a sense of a scrawy ugly Jew trying to get even."


    Well, let's see: From Woody Allen's Wikipedia page:

    "Unlike his comic persona, he was more interested in baseball than school and his strong arms ensured he was the first to be picked for a team."

    If memory serves, Steve has mentioned that Allen was also the captain of his school's basketball team.

    As for his ethnicity making him an outsider: in New York and Hollywood? Seems unlikely. And his looks didn't keep him from dating Mia Farrow or Diane Keaton.

    "But Fey has the looks, and she's bright enough to make to do well in society. She was born to be the popular girl. So, there's too much of air of contentment and complacency around her."

    There's also her having her face slashed when she was younger, and struggling with her weight when she was younger too.

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  33. Paul Weitz' mother is Mexican-American, FWIW

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  34. Paul and Chris Weitz's mom Susan Kohner got a Best Supporting Actress nomination in 1959. Their grandmother was a Mexican silent film ingenue who came to Hollywood in the 1920s and married Mr. Kohner, her producer. She was still alive at 101 when I checked a year or two ago.

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  35. Let's! said...

    ...Tina Fey displays the ultimate in white suicidal tendencies...she actually "e-races" her OWN victimization (slashing) at the hands of her obviously black attacker.

    She claims that people assume her attacker was black, yet...wait for it...she never revealed his race! (though apparently she has no problem with us assuming it was a man).

    This is just sick. She knows he was black but e-races him to supposedly entrap people into making racist assumptions.


    So what are the facts? Has she acknowledged the race of her attacker?

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  36. Tina Fey will keep her mouth shut about her attacker, because doing so will ensure she will live the kind of insulated life where she will never be vulnerable again.

    I can't find anything on her attacker, which means he's black, or at least a NAM. I'm sure NBC, whether Fey knows it or not, has researched the story, if they found out he was a white Pennsylvanian, the story would be told to fortify the narrative,"violent Redneck can't stop brilliant, beautiful, liberal, atheist, evolutionist, feminist, homophilic, multiculturalist flower from blooming."

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  37. the #2 pencil fetishists

    #2's?

    #2's are for humanities* majors.

    STEM majors start at #3's, and go up from there.

    Snark doesn't work if you get your facts wrong.


    ***************
    ***************
    ***************


    brilliant, beautiful, liberal, atheist, evolutionist, feminist, homophilic, multiculturalist

    One Attribute to rule them all, One Attribute to find them,
    One Attribute to bring them all and in the darkness bind them:

    "Philo-Semitic".





    *Literally - Stalin wrote his notes in crayon - I kid you not.

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  38. Tina Fey is just not that funny.

    We are told she is, over and over again, but a lot of people just don't see it.

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  39. 'Blade Runner' had a BAD voice-over? I liked it. Went well with the long panning shots of movement. Or 'Magnum PI' the voice-over made the the TV show work, and Selleck's voice can be a little whiny under other circumstances. But, as something to listen to while looking at a gorgeous car, gorgeous girl, gorgeous view of Hawaii, it worked great.

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  40. "Unlike his comic persona, he was more interested in baseball than school and his strong arms ensured he was the first to be picked for a team."

    Strong among other Jewish geeks.

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  41. Prof. Woland4/4/13, 7:11 AM

    Fey appeals to a generation that was never very funny or cutting edge. Having to deal with all the politically correct elephants in the room, comedy has been watered down to where there is really nothing left to laugh about.

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  42. "She was born to be the popular girl."

    It's previous obvious in 30Rock that she was a.) not popular and b.) dowdy or somewhat chunky in HS.

    But she's intelligent and a fine writer. And, good on her, is married and raising two daughters. I am a fan, even if she reprises Hollywood/SNL boilerplate liberalism at times.

    Do as I do, not as I say...blah, blah, blah.

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  43. "(A braver movie would have also shown the gay staffer pushing all the gay boy applicants.)"

    Now there's a double entendre for our times.

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  44. As mulatto children of interracist white women will be favored over white children of white women in elite institutions, the message to white women will be "if you want your child to get a leg up in life, have a child with a Negro

    The mulatto children of black women will also be favored over the black children of black woman. As I've brilliantly observed, the optimum race in 21st century America is mulatto (Obama, Powell, Condi) because they best personify multiracial multicultural diversity.. The further you deviate from the mulatto ideal in EITHER direction, the more discrimination you face. So black looking blacks can legitimately complain about being oppressed for being too black, and cold adapted East Asians face legitimate discrimination for being the most non-black.

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  45. Speaking of Tina Fey, I am waiting for Whiskey to explain her husband. If he is not a beta looking white male, I don't know what is.

    Wow. She must be a really nice person to be so talented, pretty and rich, and still let a guy who looks like that marry her. It speaks very well of her character. Most white liberals are phony hypocrites but she's the real deal.

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  46. introductory expository voice-over

    Or the voiced over intro for Dune.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ7DkBFjLRI

    "A beginning is a very delicate time."

    "Know then that it is the year ten thousand and one, ninety one. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam the fourth, my father."

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  47. Steve says,
    "As long, of course, as they are budding young sociopaths who are willing to sacrifice all shreds of dignity -- "Write an application essay about my mother's excruciating death from cancer? Why that's a great idea!" -- to fit into and get ahead in the System."

    I think about a year ago there was a post about college and name altering on the application...
    I have felt bad about my comment as it was a bit insulting, though I didn't mean for it to be. Sorry.

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  48. Border guards caught only 49% of migrants

    Drone-mounted radar found U.S. border guards caught fewer than half the migrants who illegally crossed into one area of Arizona, internal reports indicate.

    The Vehicle Dismount and Exploitation Radar, known as Vader, operated from a Predator surveillance drone 5 miles in the sky, shows U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,874 of 3,836 people who illegally crossed into a 150-square-mile stretch of the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona from Oct. 1 to Jan. 17, the reports cited by the Los Angeles Times indicate.

    This means the radar system, developed to track Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, spotted an additional 1,962 people in the same area who evaded arrest and disappeared into the United States, the Times said.

    The 49 percent capture rate contrasts with the Government Accountability Office's January estimate the Border Patrol caught 64 percent of those who illegally crossed into the Tucson sector in 2011.


    Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/04/04/Border-guards-caught-only-49-of-migrants/UPI-26391365057000/#ixzz2PWlOXt24

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  49. Mike Hunt Rice4/4/13, 1:19 PM

    @Alwaysright

    Wow. She must be a really nice person to be so talented, pretty and rich, and still let a guy who looks like that marry her. It speaks very well of her character. Most white liberals are phony hypocrites but she's the real deal.

    ---

    Tina Fey used to be fat. She was fat in 1994 when she started to date her husband.

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  50. This girl

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304083/Suzy-Lee-Weiss-Entitled-high-school-senior-sparks-firestorm-writing-biting-open-letter-Ivy-League-schools-rejected-her.html

    should have written the new Tina Fey movie.

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  51. Sorry to interrupt the usual discussion here, but I just saw the movie and its pretty good. The writing and direction is pretty intelligent, in a way thats unusual in movies these days, and there is some gentle but pointed satire of the college admissions process (which granted is self-satirizing).

    Two caveats. The first is that this is definitely a romantic comedy, with the emphasis on the "romantic" part and not the "comedy" part, so it won't appeal to everyone. The second is that the writing is fairly subtle, though that may be just in comparison of what is normal for Hollywood these days, and the direction is laid back. So the movie comes off as fluffier than it really is.

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  52. Good shows helped by voice-overs, off the top of my head: Magnum p.i., Scrubs, Idiocracy, the Discworld movies, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film.

    Those last two make me think a voice-over might be especially helpful when adapting an original work that includes a lot of jokes in the exposition. Many of their best jokes are in the narration, unbeknownst to the characters. Come to think of it, Magnum and Scrubs both have the lead actor break the fourth wall now and then, so that goes along with a narrator addressing the audience directly.

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  53. anonymous:"Paul Weitz' mother is Mexican-American, FWIW"

    Susan Kohner is only half Mexican. Her father was UNIVERSAL STUDIOS executive Paul Kohner, a Czech Jew.

    syon

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  54. Mike Hunt Rice4/4/13, 8:52 PM

    The race of Fey's attacker can easily be verified by perusal of Upper Darby police reports.

    I guess the MSM isn't all that interested in the answer.

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  55. Dr Van Nostrand4/4/13, 11:03 PM

    Wow. She must be a really nice person to be so talented, pretty and rich, and still let a guy who looks like that marry her. It speaks very well of her character. Most white liberals are phony hypocrites but she's the real deal."

    He is a musician Jeff Richmond who composed the theme and BG music for 30 Rock. Pretty catchy stuff.

    Women will make all sorts of exceptions for talented musicians.

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  56. Dr Van Nostrand4/4/13, 11:08 PM

    Tina Fey is attractive but not THAT much. Much of her appeal is that she is funny ,smart, self deprecating and just attractive enough for her to be endearing to women and geeky men who believe they would have a chance with her( I remember an interview of hers on Conan where she went on and on about how much she loved Star Wars)

    OTOH, her unnattractive dweeb shtick on 30 Rock is not very convincing and a tad self indulgent- look at me Im this pretty girl trying to homely -but not TOO homely ala Charlize Theron in Monster, Nicole Kidman in that Virgina Woolf movie or Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich

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  57. When you see Martin Sheen on screen you think - Tony Blair. Everyone else thinks - head werewolf.

    The mini plot of a mediocre high school student being revealed when he takes some standardized tests, actually happens. It happened to me. I was quite surprised when as a high school senior I kept scoring in the 99th percentile om standardized tests. I had always been a poor student.

    My experience was not quite as dramatic as that of the fictional character - I never scored as high as he did - but mine was real.

    I think the reason this sort of thing happens is because of different maturational rates. And school birthdate policies.

    I was born in January so I was pushed into classes where I was always the youngest student. I matured late also. I was the last boy to start shaving and I was short. Then all of a sudden I was tall and I was smart. I grew five inches one year and began to hang out with the school 'brains'.

    Smart people do in fact mature later, so I think this phenomenon is fairly common. Standarized tests are a force for good in the world.

    Albertosaurus

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  58. "What I've seen of 30 Rock had an impressive joke density, mostly pretty good."

    "I don't like Tina Fey because I'm a pretty partisan conservative and I remember her ragging on cons all the time on SNL. I know that sounds petty, but it is what it is."

    I've seen about half of the 30 Rock episodes on Netflix and notice that most of the jokes poke much harder at liberal naivete, women's studies-induced feminist idealism, multiculturalism and geekdom than at conservatism. The jokes pointed at conservatives are overly broad and the one's aimed at liberals have more sting and accuracy. Ethnic stereotypes are even played for fun, but with a post-modern twist. Even the lone neo-con, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, is played with charm, swagger, humor and he usually imparts most of the wisdom. He is also the most likable guy on most episodes.

    It makes me wonder if the 30 Rock producers are being subversive in the similar manner as the supposedly liberal David/Seinfeld team? Nobody will ever convince me that Seinfeld was the sitcom version of a Bosch Triptych, exposing the evilness of selfish interest and shallowness in the Western world of the late Twentieth Century. It reveled in it.

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