Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Days Seem Shorter

Which is true in terms of daylight time, but not in terms of hours that I have to get stuff done. Yikes.

Monday I had my first ADR class (Alternative Dispute Resolution), which seems like it's going to be an excellent reprieve from the usual daily grind of law school classes. It's supposed to be much more practical and skills oriented, so we'll see how that shapes up over the semester.

Between LSA Council duties and easing back into the routine of reading for school ... I'm exhausted. On the bright side, I'm really happy with how the LSA website is turning out. I'm hoping that people are finding it easier to navigate and more functional/useful this year.

Last night we began painting our bathroom, and to escape from the fumes for a couple of hours we decided to hit up a movie. Unfortunately for us, the only thing that we could both agree on seeing was Tropic Thunder (there honestly isn't much out there for movies right now). Luckily, we used Airmiles coupons, so it wasn't something that we had to pay for ... because if I'd shelled out my own cash, I'd have been pretty mad.

After seeing the film, I can say that in my opinion, all the controversy that surrounded it was well warranted. I understand that the movie was trying to get at humour through being offensive (and believe me, nobody was safe from this ... there were racial jokes, sexual orientation jokes, the marginalization of women ... etc.) ... BUT ... every time someone mentioned the mentally handicapped character that Ben Stiller's actor character portrayed, it was mentioned with the word "retarded" and always with words like "stupid", "idiot", etc.

I can't help but think that if a group of people is going to be picked on, it's in incredibly poor taste to pick on mentally challenged people, and in even poorer taste to analogize being disabled with being stupid. Seems like a really cheap way to get a laugh.

Apart from all that, the movie did have a few moments that were funny. I'm a HUGE Jack Black fan, but his character was pretty weird in the movie. Robert Downey Jr. was pretty good, but again, there were just some really weird parts where you felt like it was designed to engage laughter, but it was too awkward to give the appropriate response. While I'm definitely more sensitive on the "I'm offended" scale than my Husband, even he agreed that, as a movie, it was a pretty weak effort by Ben Stiller.

Oh well ... now we don't have to wait in line to buy it when it comes out on DVD ... ahahahahaha.

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