Author: Benjamin Rosenstock

Still Stressed about Movie Rankings

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Recently, in an effort to produce a somewhat accurate top 10 list for 2016’s best movies, I’ve been trying to catch up and see some of the most acclaimed of the year. I follow a procedure after I finish a movie: I strike it from my ‘to watch’ to list, I read all the reviews I’ve saved beforehand from critics I like, and I add it to my 2016 ranking, which I assemble as I go throughout the year.

I’ve found recently, though, that making rankings isn’t that easy. When I left the theater after watching Moonlight, I felt like I was in a daze, like I couldn’t just go about my day as usual. I knew that it was one of the best movies of the year, and when I got home, I added it as #4. It just couldn’t match the pure ecstasy that I got from watching Sing Street, the hilarious absurdity mixed with tragedy of Swiss Army Man, or the nonstop laughs mixed with deep emotion of Don’t Think Twice.

And yet, in the weeks since I saw Moonlight, I’ve thought about it more than I thought about any of those other movies in the aftermath of watching them. While I used to have a strict rule about keeping my rankings in their original order, I’ve now made an amendment and allowed myself to tinker with them. Moonlight is now #1.

And while Captain America: Civil War used to be in my top 10—I gave it the four-star ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, which means I loved it—I’ve moved it below movies like Southside with You and Kubo and the Two Strings, neither of which I said I ‘loved’ originally. In retrospect, Civil War isn’t that radically different from any other Marvel movie, and the more of these superhero movies there are, the higher the bar is set for me in expecting something ‘different.’ There are a lot of internal character contradictions in Civil War, as Film Crit Hulk explained, and in general the movie was just kind of a solid action movie for me, fun while I was watching but ultimately forgettable. I’d rather re-watch the original Avengers, or maybe just cherry-pick the airport scene from Civil War.

I’ve also had trouble figuring out how to rank movies based on what actual emotional reactions they provoke in me. Watching Manchester by the Sea was certainly an emotional experience, and I entered the same sort of trance I had when I watched Moonlight, but because the movie is pretty unsentimental for long stretches, I didn’t have any one moment as emotionally overwhelming as the scene of Hailee Steinfeld crying in The Edge of Seventeen. (Keep in mind that this may just be because watching a teenager express her deepest insecurities still feels very relatable to me.) How do I compare Manchester by the Sea and The Edge of Seventeen in my rankings, when the former ‘feels’ like it should be higher but the latter does so many specific things that I love? Does loving unabashedly happy endings and teenage romance justify keeping Sing Street, or should I place it below something audacious like Krisha?

Then, today, I watched Arrival. The first three quarters or so of Arrival I really liked, but more for its intelligent ideas and amazing direction than for how deep it cut emotionally. I kept thinking, ‘This is brilliant,’ but I never thought ‘This is emotionally destroying me.’ Then the last 20 minutes or so happened, and I found myself swept up in everything, brought nearly to tears every time I even thought about the implications the ending made. I didn’t quite cry, because I’m emotionally stunted, but I felt my face contorting into that ugly face that people make when they cry.

So where do I place a movie that I generally really liked, but which didn’t really enrapture me until its ending, which is probably the best ending of the year for me? How does that compare to something like The Edge of Seventeen or Manchester by the Sea, both of which completely held my attention throughout?

The answer, of course, is that there’s no answer. I realize that this is the same issue I already wrote about last year, when I struggled with justifying putting movies like Trainwreck, Spy, and Kingsman: The Secret Service higher in my rankings than Carol or Spotlight. And I’m still vexed by the same issue, and I’m sure I’ll continue to experience this every year that I remain stubbornly dedicated to creating movie rankings.

A Week Out of a Zombie Apocalypse Movie, Except Instead of Zombies, It’s Classwork

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It’s one of those weeks, guys. The three weeks between Thanksgiving break and winter break are always hard—Thanksgiving break is only a tease, then suddenly you’re thrust back into an emotional warzone, final exams and final essays coming at you like grenades, or whatever better fits this war metaphor—but this is worse than usual. It’s only Tuesday, and I am so exhausted. I got four hours of sleep last night, and tonight was supposed to be my night of recovery, but it’s looking like I’m going to have to put that off for a couple more nights, because I have so much still to do tonight and tomorrow.

I won’t bore you too much with the details, but let me just say that I thought I had a lot more time than I did, then my WiFi abruptly stopped working and I spent most of my night fighting a losing battle to download complicated drivers and fix the problem. Riveting, I know. But to me, this simple, small conflict felt like a potentially world-ending one.

Tonight is the kind of night that makes you jaded about college. It’s one of those nights when you have to decide whether to prioritize your own mental health or your grades. It shouldn’t have to be one or the other, but the reality is that sometimes it is. Sometimes getting good grades means you don’t eat, or you don’t sleep, or you don’t have a social life, or you don’t consume any of the art you’ve been wanting to. (Tonight, I made the wrong choice and watched an episode of Jane the Virgin, thinking I had all the time in the world.)

I’m not sure exactly what my point is with this post, except to say that sometimes school is hard, and it sucks when it has to get in the way of the things you’re passionate about, because school is supposed to be about doing what you’re passionate about, isn’t it? Right now, my dream day would consist of ten or 11 hours of much-needed sleep, then a day to just catch up on TV and watch a movie and journal, because I’m way behind on journaling.

Sometimes, when I’m having an apocalyptic week or day like this one, I like to open up my journal and just write a short post to myself to pump myself up. Something reminding myself to calm down, reminding myself that when it comes down to it, whether I get a B+ or a C+ on tomorrow’s exam won’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

So let me do that right now: Ben, and anyone else out there who might be going through a similarly terrible week, it’s all going to be okay. It feels long right now, but in a few days—and, even more so, in a few weeks—you’ll be done with it all and you’ll be able to take a breath. The end is in sight; in the blink of an eye, you’ll have all the time you want to relax, binge-watch whatever TV you want, catch up on your 2016 movie list, and, oh yeah, start actually reading for fun again. You’ll have time to journal and explain all the things that have been going on, and you’ll be able to hang out with all your friends, or just be alone, if that’s what you want most.

Hang in there, everyone. This is hard for everyone.

The Comfort of Public Readings

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Last Friday, my friend Karen invited me to an open mic night for anyone who wanted to share their writing—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or even songs. Karen’s the editor-in-chief of Xylem, an independent, student-run literary magazine on campus, so some of the staff shared their work, but most of the readers were just people in the audience who decided to share.

Almost every reading I’ve been invited to I’ve gone to, but it’s a weird thing, because I don’t really love them. Okay, to be specific, I don’t love listening to people read. I’m not always the best auditory learner—my mind drifts, and I end up thinking about whatever’s going on in my life, in the same way your mind wanders during a particularly boring lecture. It makes it harder that I’m not super good at understanding poetry; sometimes I can work out the meaning (either the dramatic narrative or the emotional symbolism) if I sit down and concentrate hard and reread the poem a few times, but it’s almost impossible for me to figure it out when it’s being read aloud.

Even if I could carefully pay attention to every single person reading, I’m very bad at telling when poetry is actually good. Every student reading I go to, I hear poems that I sense are pretty good, since there are some decent images and cool words being used, but I have no idea what they actually mean. I know the point of poetry isn’t to figure out what it all ‘means,’ per se, but it still can be frustrating when you feel like you’re not getting much out of a poem aside from the sense that it sounds kind of interesting.

There were some stories and poems I really liked on Friday, when I was able to fully engage. One girl shared a ‘letter to all the guys she kissed,’ which involved a lot of wordplay with numbers. It was pretty hilarious, and well-read, and everyone was laughing with every line she read. One guy sheepishly read a short piece about the couch he owns, with all its mysterious and questionable stains—also very funny.

I thought a lot that night about why I continue to go to events like these when I’m only fitfully entertained and engaged in the reading itself. Well, for one, I go for my friends, like Karen. I want to support them, to hear them read their writing or see what they’ve dedicated their time to outside of class.

But I go mostly for the community. When I sat there in that room—the cozy back room on the second floor of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tearoom—I felt, momentarily, at peace. It came at the end of a long week dealing with the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, and for a moment I wanted to just stop talking and thinking about it all and just sit and be with people who I felt understood me—even if I didn’t actually know most of them. One essay mentioned the election, but most of the pieces were about other things. When you’re dealing with what we all dealt with this week, poems about regular old teenage heartbreak are downright comfort food.

Even when an open mic night doesn’t come in the middle of a politically cataclysmic week, though, it provides comfort. There’s something about looking around and seeing English majors you vaguely know—that girl who talked a little too much in my Shakespeare class, that girl whose writing I was always jealous of in my creative writing class, those five people I recognize from The Michigan Daily. Even the people you don’t recognize can make you feel at home; some of the students sharing their work were STEM majors, and there was something endearing about seeing them timidly prefacing their reading: “I’ve never done this before,” or “I haven’t really looked this over yet,” or “Sorry, I’m kind of nervous.”

I looked out the window while one guy read, noticing the lights of the Ann Arbor News building across the street, the cars flitting by on the street below. I wondered if I’d have a similar, but larger-scale view a year from now, maybe living in New York and going to a reading like this one, with more people I didn’t know but who felt like my people. I wondered if I’d go to any Trump-related protests in Manhattan, if I’d have a group of liberal, revolutionary-type friends like me who wrote poetry and drank tea in cable knit sweaters and clapped and cheered for one another, even when the poems weren’t that good.

Maybe it was too romantic of an idea. Maybe we could all use a little romance right now.

 

Check out Xylem Literary Magazine here. The above photo was taken from Xylem’s Facebook page.

A Turning Point.

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It’s 10:10 P.M. on November 8th, 2016. For the past two hours, I’ve been trying to think of what I could write about for this blog post. The clear Event of the Day has been the U.S. presidential election, but I was determined not to write about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, partly because I don’t know that much about politics, partly because politics aren’t that artistic, and partly because there isn’t really much more that can be said at this point.

But it’s 10:15 now and I can’t think of anything else, because it’s increasingly looking like Trump is going to win the presidential election.

I’ve always been very confident that I’m on the right side of history. I still think that. When I imagine our ideal society, maybe a couple centuries from now, I imagine widespread tolerance for LGBT people, no discrimination against people of other races, no sexism. I imagine a humble leader. This whole thing isn’t making me question my political opinions; I’ve never once wondered if maybe I was wrong. I mean, what would that even mean? ‘Maybe Mexicans really are rapists’? ‘Maybe the best possible choice is someone who’s never had any experience in politics, who pulls everything out of his ass’? No, obviously seeing these results aren’t making me believe in Trump.

But even as this is happening, I do feel my perspective changing about things. This whole time, I had this core belief that when it came down to it, everything would work out in our favor. Hillary would pull through. That seemed obvious from the beginning, but it felt really sealed back when the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment happened. I didn’t even have a doubt! Even when the race inexplicably got closer in the past couple weeks, I still didn’t worry much. I woke up this morning knowing this would be a historic day, but I thought that it’d be historic for the right reasons.

I am a fundamentally optimistic person, who believes that people are fundamentally good. But I feel my beliefs slowly…not disintegrating, but eroding a little, maybe.

This is like a sports game. We’re watching this live like it’s SportsCenter. Except the outcome will actually shape our lives. Maybe that’s the thread that ties this to art—I still find myself viewing this all as a narrative, just one that’s existing in real time, in real life.

It continually stuns me to even imagine how actual oppressed peoples must feel right now. I’m terrified, and I am the apotheosis of privilege: white, heterosexual, male, upper-middle class.

It’s 11:40, and watching this live is so torturous. Part of me wishes I just waited until I got the actual results and had time to process it all at once. Seeing this all happening so slowly is so horrifying. CNN’s “new projection” screen triggers a Pavlovian response in me; my heart just starts racing.

I’m oscillating between feeling dead inside—not talking at all, zoning out a little, feeling drained—and feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with too many things: sadness, disappointment, mostly incredulity. And once I start to think about any of the little particulars of this election—people voting third-party instead of voting for Hillary, or the FBI looking into Hillary’s emails with a week left before the election, or any of the stupid fucking people excusing anything that Trump has done—I get so, so enraged. I imagine Barack Obama’s face and I want to cry, because he was the epitome of grace, because for any faults he may have had, he was a real president. I imagine Hillary’s face and I want to cry, because it’s so absurdly unfair that she has to lose, so unjust that I couldn’t even imagine it happening, that I still can’t imagine her not being president, even as increasingly ridiculous things happened to ensure this was the outcome.

It’s 12:05 A.M., and overall I have the feeling that this is a turning point. I don’t know what that means, exactly. I’m not sure how much a Trump presidency will affect my own life. Maybe it will; like I said, I don’t know much about politics. But I’m scared imagining how it could affect others’ lives. People around the world, but even people in my little personal bubble, my LGBT friends, my friends of color, my female friends.

Tomorrow, there is going to be a shared understanding that things are different. My friends will be quiet. My professors will have to acknowledge what happened, if only because it’ll be all that’s on anyone’s minds.

I know, intellectually, that this isn’t the end of everything. As a critic I follow on Twitter said a moment ago, hope and humor aren’t dead; they’re just rare. I know that we can make things right, and I still believe history will work out in our favor. To be honest, I’ve never really had to be a politically active person before. I’ve voted, but I’ve never really protested, never gotten as involved as I should’ve. I regret that now. I will really, really try to change that.

Here is the picture of this historic moment: I sit on my living room couch. My roommate Kimmie and our friend Sean sit on the couch with me. My roommate Kyle sits on the armchair to our left, and our friend Emily on the floor near him. My roommate Erica went to her room, maybe to sleep or maybe just to have some time alone. The rest of us are all watching the computer screen live-streaming on the table in front of us, but we aren’t huddled with anticipation like we were before. Our comments—“oh, it’s tied in Michigan again”—are said in a halfhearted way, like it’s all incidental. It’s 12:23, and we know the outcome.

“If anyone says their vote doesn’t count again, I swear to god…” I say.

“I’ll kill them,” my friend says. “I’ll kill them, and their vote would’ve counted, but now it definitely won’t, because they’re dead.”

We all laugh more than we have in at least an hour, probably two.

I am a lucky person, because of my racial and gender privilege, but also because of my friends, and my family. I am lucky that I’ve been given enough that my optimism hasn’t been completely squashed. I am lucky that I live in a country where so many people did go out and vote, did go out and volunteer and be selfless and try to make the right thing happen.

I still believe in us. But it’s 12:56 A.M., and I am shaken.

The Freeing Nature of Halloween

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I’m not a super outgoing person. Unless I’m with people I’m really comfortable around, it’s hard for me to open up and make a lot of jokes and take risks with what I say; sometimes I worry that I’m a funny person, but that my humor only comes across to really close friends. That’s why Halloween is a special time of year for me. Ironically, it’s the one time where I can show what I’m really like. By being someone else, I can be myself. (Hashtag deep.)

I’ve always aimed for costumes that are, if not hilarious, at least noticeable. I still remember my sixth grade math teacher laughing hysterically at my old lady costume, and a lady in the neighborhood mistaking me for a girl after dressing as a nun one year. Last year, I was Jack Skellington, which involved enlisting my roommate Marnie to cover my face in makeup.

But my crowning achievement was, and probably always will be, my sophomore year of college, when I dressed up as a wacky wavy inflatable arm-flailing tube man, one of those big obnoxious things they put outside of car dealerships to attract customers. I meant to create the costume myself with only some suggestions from my crafty mom, but she ended up doing most of the work, and it got stressful for her, and I felt terrible. But I like to think the payoff was worth it, as I attracted a lot of attention.

That’s why Halloween is so nice for me. I have an excuse to make a spectacle out of myself, which I’m usually too nervous to do. On the weekend of Halloween, I can go to a party, talk to strangers about our costumes, and move on without any real fear of what they think of me. That weekend sophomore year, I took so many pictures with random strangers, and some of them have to have ended up on Facebook. I dream of finding them one day.

This year, I thought about what I could be for a whole month leading up to Halloween. Last year, there was no chance my costume would live up to the standard set the previous year, so I’d picked Jack Skellington, going for impressive in a different way: through makeup. Generally, Halloween in college isn’t treated very seriously; people mostly put on a half-assed costume and go drink somewhere. There’s certainly a charm to that, but I’ve always found it fun to go all out in college. It defies expectations.

But this year, I couldn’t really think of anything impressive. I think I’m just going to end up going as Steve from Blue’s Clues, since my friend has a handy green striped shirt, and I have the same general characteristics as Steve (white, skinny, short brown hair). No makeup, no hastily assembled materials. Hey, at least it’ll be cheap, but I’m still a little sad I’m not going all out with something spectacular for my last Halloween in college.

Oh well. I still have my 20s.

Bonding through Bad Movies

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Watching TV and movies is a good way to bond with friends. Many of my friendships originally began because we shared an enthusiasm for a particular show—I still have go-to friends to text when I watch a new show that I love. But let’s be honest: when it comes to being close friends with someone, you need to have more than just a couple shows you watch in common. To take that final step to becoming close friends, you have to talk about something other than the newest episode of Jane the Virgin. (That said, the season premiere of Jane the Virgin, which aired yesterday, was emotional and hilarious, and I’ll love anyone who watches that show.)

I went on a ‘retreat’ this past weekend with a few of my friends for fall break. We stayed a night at my friend Christian’s parents’ cabin on Sage Lake. There may have been some drinking going on—not that I partook, obviously, since I won’t be of legal drinking age for another two months. But in terms of actual activities, we played some card games, played a game of sardines, and mostly just hung around by the lake or in the cabin. It was definitely a fun way to spend a day, with lots of good company.

Toward the end of the night, we settled down to watch a movie. The movie was largely fun—it was Avalanche Sharks, one of the terrible Syfy schlocky movies about poorly rendered sharks terrorizing civilization. (One of my chief complaints was that there weren’t enough sharks! There should’ve been more gore! At least we got to hear the phrase “it’s spring break” uttered 30 times.) I’m of the firm opinion that if you’re aiming to bond with friends, it’s much more fun to watch a shitty movie than to watch a good one. A couple people wanted to watch Blue Velvet, which I’ve been meaning to see, but on a night when we’re supposed to be having a bunch of fun, is watching a quality neo-noir drama really what we want?

Some of my best experiences with watching movies have been watching dumb shit. My brother and I regularly quote Birdemic, the famously terrible amateur movie about a bird attack. I still smile remembering the night in high school when I got together with some friends and watched Mega Shark Versus Crocasaurus. (We also watched Paranormal Activity 3 that night, but high-quality horror movies might be the exception to the ‘good quality = bad for fun’ rule.) The thing is, most good movies you can watch anytime. You don’t need to be with friends to do it. In fact, I’d probably prefer to watch Blue Velvet alone; it’d probably be more impactful that way. When I’m with friends, on a night kind of meant for bonding, I don’t just want to check off something on my movie list. I want to do something fun.

Maybe that’s why I started to get bored after Avalanche Sharks, when we decided to just watch some TV on Netflix. I get it. It’s a comforting default to put on an episode of Parks & Rec or 30 Rock, especially when everyone is tired. But one of my few disappointments of the retreat was that we started to fall back on TV when we could’ve made more of an effort to connect. Then again, maybe a trip where the explicit purpose is to ‘bond’ is a little forced from the beginning.

I’ve just learned more and more recently that most good TV and good movies I prefer to watch alone. There are no variables—I don’t have to deal with possible spoiler sources, or the slight self-consciousness that prevents me from really physically reacting the same way I might alone. (For example, I actually said ‘what the fuck’ many times when I was alone watching Dogtooth. If I’d watched that with a friend, I probably would’ve said the same thing, but more for their benefit, for the social aspect, than as a genuine reaction.) I don’t have to have my opinion influenced by someone else and what they might be thinking. I don’t have to get pulled out of the experience by some annoying theatergoer who’s laughing a little too hard, or a crying baby, or a guy who’s pointing out the logistical issues in the third act of Finding Dory. I can react the way I want to.

So yeah, there are a lot of reasons I don’t usually like watching high-quality movies and TV with friends. It’s usually better to just pop in something stupid. Sure, it’s sometimes fun to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when I hang out with friends from home. But every time I’ve watched Caillou, I’ve had a much more memorable time.