Why I Will Never Be a Doctor: Day 2

On the hierarchy at Emerson, I am at the very bottom. The amoeba of the food chain. The last rung. The farthest from the hub. One of those newbie volunteers who stumble through the hospital with a hesitant step and unsure gaze. So today was a sophomore volunteer effort at Emerson Hospital—a mostly mind-numbing unexercise spent in the butt-numbing seat at reception.

As far as volunteer experiences go, today was actually was quite pleasant because everyone was so damn nice. The problem: I didn't meet many people, as I spent 4 hours in a lobby with a traffic of 25 human bodies per hour—the vast majority of which whirled by without a gaze. One woman even deigned to say to me, “You must be soooo bored!”

Word.

Although 95% of my time was spent trying not to look bored, a few interesting moments did pop up. Not especially interesting, mind you, because in the context of these events, even an ant crawling would have been a welcome relief.

Exhibit A:
Man walks in.
Man: Is plastic surgery on the 7th floor?
Me: Let me check.
Me (thinking): What? Emerson does plastic surgery? This guy is pretty good looking in a creepy hot villain kind of way; he shouldn’t be having plastic surgery.
Man pulls out hand with 2-inch festering sore.
Me (thinking): Ooooooh. It looks like an acid burn.

Exhibit B:
Woman: “Excuse me sir, can you tell me what time it is?”
Man 1: “Oh sorry. I didn’t look when I left.”
Woman: “Am I making you nervous? Am I?”
Man 1: “Hey, there’s a clock right there” Points to wall.
** 1 minute later **
Woman: “Excuse me sir, do you know what time it is?”
Man 2: “It’s 4:21.”
The lady must have asked for the time on at least 4 different instances within a span of 10 minutes. Huh.

Exhibit C:
Woman (same one): “Hey look! I think that lady is Innn-dian. Doesn’t she look like she’s from Innn-dia? You know, there are so many Innn-dian people in Woburn. Doesn’t she look like she’s from Innn-dia?”

Alright, I’m done. I’m probably violating a great many patient confidentiality rules and deserve to be fired. Boredom must be the seed of all maliciousness.

Y tu mamá también (Cuarón, 2001)

Conventional wisdom tells us that to make a serious movie, you must have serious characters. Y tu mamá también flippantly dismisses this rule in the same way its two obnoxious, immature protagonists flippantly dismiss everything else.

These protagonists are Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna), two Mexican teenagers bent on getting high and getting laid. When their girlfriends depart to Italy for the summer, the two best friends are bored out of their minds, resorting to whacking off in the swimming pool.

At a family wedding, the boys meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú), a beautiful, older Spanish woman married to Tenoch’s arrogant prick of cousin. (Such a characterization would aptly describe Julio and Tenoch as well.) On a lark, they flirt with Luisa by asking her to a fictional beach called Heaven’s Mouth. When she unexpectedly accepts, the threesome departs on an improvised road trip, rife with juvenile jokes and rowdy sex.

If Y tu mamá también is sounding like American Pie: Mexican Road Trip Edition, it isn’t. Yes, it begins with the teenagers having sex with their girlfriends. Yes, there are two fart jokes in the first ten minutes. Yes, there are enough sex, drugs, and swears for a very naughty teen movie. But Y tu mamá también is, after all, a “serious” film. A serious film that treats its immature characters with not disdain but care, and chronicles life’s gritty realities through a distant but perceptive lens.

Although there are three physical characters on the road trip—Luisa, Julio, and Tenoch—there is a fourth character built from the roving camera and omniscient narration. The script, written by director Alfonso Cuarón and his brother Carlos Cuarón, is much keener than its characters. As Julio casually complains about the bad traffic, the camera meanders aside to find a covered corpse, and the narrator tells us the man was killed because he had no choice but to cross the busy street to get to work. Throughout the film, the camera wanders off the road into one of those poignant tangents, abandoning our characters for a brief moment to remind us of the world outside their insular lives. Director Cuarón does a deft job with juggling relationship of his three main characters and the film’s greater ambitions. The almost blasé manner of social and political commentary—the narration simply tells, it never judges—gives Y tu mamá también a weight that never seems laden with pretension. After all, Julio and Tenoch themselves could care less about the dead man.

Luisa, played magnificently by Verdú, is the anchor of the film as the older, wiser woman. She has her own mysterious reasons for going on the road trip, reasons that Julio and Tenoch would not understand even if they knew. It is Luisa with whom the audience sympathizes while laughing at the clumsiness of the boys in their attempts to woo her. Even with their shameless immaturity, Julio and Tenoch become almost endearing in their own pathetic manner. Although such a road trip should bring two best friends closer, the teenagers drift and jolt apart. When they finally reach Heaven’s Mouth, they are no longer friends, and by the end of the movie, they are certainly no longer boys.

Y tu mamá también is indeed a road trip movie with lots of sex and nudity, but it is so much more. What makes it memorable is not the immediate punch of brazen sexuality or pulsing energy, but its lingering and haunting sadness.

Filmic Update: Spaceballs, Psycho, Rushmore, and Your Mother Too

Spaceballs (Brooks, 1987)
Even for someone who last watched Star Wars at the age of 8, Spaceballs’ parody of George Lucas was dead on and an utter hoot. If only Star Wars itself were that entertaining.

Psycho (Hitchcock, 2001)
Entirely deserving of its classic status. The first half is slow and Marion Crane is boring, but Psycho picks up in the second, peaking in one of the most shocking and memorable finales of film history—and I say this having only watched a tiny fraction of movies ever made. The perfect, unsuspecting villain: actor Anthony Perkins is insanely brilliant.

Rushmore (Anderson, 1998)
<3 Max Fischer. <3 Bill Murray. <3 Wes Anderson. <3Rushmore.

Y tu mamá también (Cuaron, 2001)
If this film is an accurate description of teenage male behavior, I think I’ve lost all hope in humanity. Julio and Tenoch are the most immature pricks I have ever encountered in reel or real life. It is usually a bad sign when the DVD special features are more interesting than the actual movie, but then, the making-of featurette was a just awesome. Although my initial reaction was very bleh, the film won’t let me forget it. On the sex: maybe my threshold for tolerance has gone way up, but I didn’t find it that shocking or even sexy for that matter--except for one scene.
Yay for HoYay! Gael + Diego = One Hot Kiss.
Internet, you fail me. How can there be no screencaps of this? Oh I see, google safesearch was on.

Week in Review + Random Musings

It has been exactly 1 week and 1 1/2 days since the end of school, though it feels more like 1 month and 1 1/2 days. The remarkable thing is that I have actually spend the past week doing things; for once in the summer, my favored companions have not been the computer or the TV, but real flesh and blood people. Of course, socialibility is relative.

Monday: Kate's party
Tuesday: Harvard Sq
Wednesday: Movies at Steff's
Thursday: Crashed Alice's
Friday: Crashed Alice's again and exploded diet Coke
Saturday: Went shopping with Mary

Yesterday, we finally got around to exploding Diet Coke after all the anticipation and ballyhooha. Well, not explode per se, more like make fountains of articifially sweetened brown liquid to compete with the pouring rain. After getting coked and stained (by Mary, who else?), the hardcore among us went outside and jumped around in the lightning and rain. My NSLC t-shirt is now a unpleasant shade of pee yellow. Fortunately, I don't give shit.

Today was shopping time because I have a grand total of 2 pairs of pants that actually like. That number has now increased to 5 with the purchase of 3 more pairs of pants. (Random tangent: Why are pants pairs? I know there are two pant legs, but its only one thing!) I bought this pair of big, brown "Bohemian" pants that are so comfy that it almost feels like you're not wearing pants. Each pant leg is big enough for two so if I ever start hating the pants, I can cut it up into 2 tube skirts. Two skirts for $7? Good deal.

You know what? It's really boring watching soccer by yourself. Especially when your choice of channels broadcasting the World Cup are either staticky and fuzzy or Spanish and fuzzy.

Movie Night: The Virgin Aquatic with Quills

Another intense movie-watching experience: eyes glued from one movie to the next with nary a second to catch a bite to eat. Okay, I lied, eating is the most crucial activity of all; it beats even watching movies. But other than those lengthy breaks for food, the night was devoted to nothing but movies.

After hastily arriving at Steff's house, we decided to do our part in fighting obesity by walking all the way to Video Signals (a distance much shorter than I just made it sound.) The journey was uneventful except for the 4 mosquitoes that I managed to feed. Remind me to never hang out with Steff outside. Somehow, she is even more mosquito-repellant than I am, a remarkable feat since I usually never get bites.

As soon as we figured out how to connect the VCR (old school VHS version of The Virgin Suicides necessitated this), we hit the couch in anticipation of a heavy night of cinema. Our stomachs demanded nourishment after the first movie, so we ransacked the kitchen to "cook." Our creation was an "omelet," more properly described as eggs + oil + pepper + cheese + random contents of the fridge, which was washed down with Coke and (possibly expired) peanut butter--a taste of college life indeed.

But yes, most important of all: The Films! Strangely enough, Steff and I had similar reactions to all of them, even the 3 minutes of A Woman is a Woman.

The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 2000)
Having loved Jeffrey Eugenides' haunting novel, I eagerly awaited Sofia Coppola's adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, also her feature debut. It is the inherent trap of adaptations that they are judged according the quality of the original work, in which case Coppola's film comes up short by much more than a razor's edge. Her film is too slight to pack the emotional weight of the novel; the script glosses over too much to find depth in its characters. Coppola is torn between balancing the boys who narrate the tale and the Libson family, and the result is a skim off the top of both. On a more positive note, this was the first, and probably last time I liked either Kirsten Dunst or Josh Hartnett in a movie.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Anderson, 2004)
When we were renting this movie, the guy warned us that it was "awful" and that he walked out "after the first 5 minutes." This put a severe damper on expectations, something that probably turned out for the best. Because The Life Aquatic so surprised me with its exuberance, its excitement, its humor, its vibrancy, its energy, its wit, its life. The Life Aquatic is clearly the work of a deft filmmaker with a vision and a love for cinema. I've always felt that Anderson's weakness was in creating an amazing cast of characters but giving them nothing to do. No such quibbles here, because the sprawling cast is both pitch perfect and provided with an adventure to boot. Someone once wrote that Anderson creates hyper reality within abstract worlds, and he does this perfectly, wrapping everything up in a purely enjoyable story.

Fangirl fawning: Wes was so hot in the extra features! Holy crap, he looks so good with longer hair. Compare with dorky guy in The Royal Tenenbaums. 0_0
Random movie geek trivia tangent: Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson are good friends. Anderson, a frequent collaborator with Bill Murray, helped convince Murray to star in Coppola's Lost in Translation.

Quills (Kaufman, 2000)
“Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.” Such deliciously lurid prose, as spoken and written by the notorious Marquis de Sadem, spices the dialogue of Quills, a highly fictional account of the Marquis’s last days. Quills is an engaging romp—juggling dark wit, tension and sordid pleasure—with plenty of sexy accents and pretty costumes. The cast is excellent, the story captivating, and the dialogue sordid. My God, a truly enjoyable film.

A Woman is a Woman (Godard, who knows)
Whoa, back up here because I watched all of 3 minutes of this film. We decided that an old French movie with shoddy sound and subtitles was too much for 3 AM and went channel surfing instead. Good choice.