PICK FUCK!

Does anyone else realize the big joke in the film about the Tracy's banner looking like a big giant "PICK FUCK" (especially on the cupcakes)? I heard that Alexander Payne specifically put her posters in all caps to make it look in that way. The movie is far superior to the film to me because of the great symbolism A. Payne uses throughout the film. The Book just lacks any deeper meaning then what is explicitly written on the page, and without the movie, this would be a very dull story.

The film captures so much more in the characters and storyline through great subtley. I love the battle of Coke Vs. Pepsi because it is a goofy analogy, and much more interesting than the Bush/Clinton/Pierot Election. At the beginning of the film, Tracy mentions Coke is Number 1. Mr. M is later drinking a pepsi when he gets the idea to have Paul run for office. If you watch the film again you will see countless references to the cola wars, especially when Tracy gets shot down or runs into problems with the election (most of it is Mr. M's doing). Another reoccuring motif is that of temptation leading to a fallout, in the form of, what else, Apples. (Fruit always get a bad wrap in films, i.e Godfather and Oranges). Mr. M makes an analogy with democracy with apples and oranges to the semi retarded Paul Metzler to convince him to join the election. Also after the affair is commited, Mr. M is under an apple tree when he gets stung. And let's just get it out of the way that neither Mrs. M or Linda were attractive at all.........

Why couldnt more stuff like this be included in the book??? The movie captures those people we all knew in high school and gives them this great depth which made it even more comical as we peer into the lives of these strange individuals. We all have felt like Mr. M at times with those people in High school (though not as extreme) and the book fails to give the connection with Mr. M's character that Ferris Bueller gives us in the film. Reese Witherspoon does this amazing job of being such a........sorry to say it.... wait im not going to say it because their are feminists in the class, but it rhymes with the word bunt. There is no other way to describe her. She embodies the relentless politician/know it all/closet slut that the book cannot, or rather does not translate to the screen. Why can't more films do what A. Payne did for Election? I dont know. But their are several films I like better on screen than in pages

1. Election
2. Fight Club
3. Trainspotting and Clockwork Orange (hard to read you need a codex to read through the book)
4. Thank you for smoking
5. Any story in the bible

The ending in the film is also much better.....

Slaughterhouse 5

I had often heard about Slaughterhouse 5 from my mom and various high school teachers who all claimed it was a classic. To me classics arent always the most interesting thing to read (Great expectations or The tale of two cities), yet when I finally read it, it redefined what I thought about "classic" literature. I was expecting something completely different which made me come to appreciate the story even more. It was disorienting (which paralleled Billy's own disoriented timetraveling life) and a compelling read.

The time travel aspect interested me very much. How would you act if throughout your life you would blink your eyes and open them to see your future or past all over again. Would you panic and try to fix the mistakes of the past? Or would you become this zen-like objectivist much like Billy? Since none of us will probably ever experience an event like this, then it is safe to say we will never know. The paradox I talked about in class was "the Predestination Paradox". If Billy was predestined to go back and forward in time at random points of his life, then no matter what he does, he will not change history but rather fulfill whatever he is supposed to do (it is usually irony at its best). Though most films dealing with this scenario are much more drastic (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), Billy goes through time not to save the world, but just as a result of aliens intervening in his life. The science fiction element of the story is a Macguffin as it is unimportant whether it is real or not.

We, as the reader, are unsure whether the narrator is reliable about Billy. If Billy goes through time at any given moment than who knows how long he has been a time traveller. He could be trying to change history for years but is unable to change his life in a Back To The Future Style sort of way. That could be the reason he is the same solomn tone throughout the book, his body is there but his mind (in a metaphysical sense) is not. When he stands and is almost shot it seems as though he is trying to change his fate, despite his knowledge that he will die much later in his life. He is imprisoned in this time conundrum and he eventually becomes the Tranquil and reserved Billy that we all know. He can only change himself as he goes through time. He cannot change what goes on around him, only his personality and outlook on what I guess you can call a life. He accepts his fate to be unable to change what goes on in the world around him. To me Billy is like a Zen Master and has accepted his eternity of life (as he can never truly die as he will only wake up in his past) and simply put, he just is. He has no other option but to live this way.

i think for anyone to try to figure out all of the philosophical kinks of this story would be ridiculous as there is just no way. But it definately makes for a good story.......

Onion post

I do not read The onion that often but when I was in LA, it was free in those little newspaper compartments on the street. I remember one time when I was walking home from work, I stopped abruptly and did a double take. The title of the article was "James Gandolfini shot by closure seeking fan". At first, I thought it was a real article because it was right next to the New York Times stand. I pulled one issue out and on the cover was a James Gandolfini look alike in a hawaiian shirt with his face down in a pool of blood on a restaurant table. I kept thinking of THe Godfather while looking at the image and I could not help but laugh. Part of me wished this really happened as I was so disappointed with the ending to that series (cut to black at a crucial climax on your own fucking time David Chase). It would have been the true definition of Irony if something like this happened in real life

In the article, James Gandolfini was in a restaurant when "Louis Bowen walked into the small Italian restaurant Occhiuto's at approximately 7:40 p.m. and headed directly toward Gandolfini's table. Bowen then drew a snub-nosed .38 revolver from his jacket and shot Gandolfini point-blank in the head three times before dropping the gun and calmly exiting the eatery." The ending echoed of that famous Godfather scene where we see Al Pacino transform in a matter of minutes (I think that David Chase did this on purpose to make the audience paranoid.) Bowen was a fan of The Sopranos but was troubled by the series ending. Bowen's motives for his actions was "I couldn't let it just hang.....Eight years of my life, and a fucking artsy cut to black? It was eating me up inside." I was once a rabid Sopranos fan (but i stopped watching after seeing too much of Meadow bitch and moan about college, and Christopher's whole rehab schpiel) and I had mixed feelings about the ending. I think it was kind of smart because leaving an open ending always gives you something to talk about after, and you can create what happened in your own mind. Optimist/pessimist kind of deal. But many people were so righteously furious with the ending and of course the editors of the onion had to put their two cents in.

I think articles like this point out the ridiculousness in what we watch and how creators can ultimately fuck it up. But it also brings up the very valid point that we care too much about pointless garbage. We grow so attached to these shows and if one thing goes wrong or something occurs on the show that we dont like, the show is shunned. The OC got cancelled because they killed that really scrawny broad. It so weird because we always demand more and more, and then because of this , the show becomes crap ae: Lost. I feel bad for producers who are creating shows, and they are forced to raise the stakes until they soil their precious big late night hit.