Finbar Connors plays professional football, but he isn’t a millionaire, nor is he a star. Instead he’s an aging wide receiver who has caught on as a player-coach with the Centerport Cossacks, a team in the upstart Northeast Football Association, in Larry Gaffney’s comedic novel “One Good Year.” By using football as a springboard to explore male camaraderie and the anxieties that surround it, Gaffney is able to balance crude humor with a nuanced portrayal of the acceptance of maturity.
All posts by James
Simpsons Did It! Simpsons Did It!
I’ve never really been able to have low expectations for things. Setting myself up for disappointment never mitigates its arrival; instead, it just makes me feel like I should’ve known better than to have wasted my money.
After seeing The Simpsons Movie Sunday night, I can safely say I don’t feel like I wasted my money. The opening Itchy and Scratchy sketch primes the crowd with its excess, and the movie maintains the manic pace through the first act, with gags about church and inter-species sexual confusion, as well as a killer mob scene.
Our Imperfect Brains
The New York Times Science Section has an article on how easy it is to manipulate the little machines that lie at the heart of us.
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.
That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
Scents, signage, and symbols can all act as little triggers, the article tells us. There’s no word on whether the scientists credit Elvis Costello for his early work on the subject.
Harry Potter and the Banality of Evil
I resisted the Harry Potter juggernaut for a long time, partially because of my age, mostly out of willfulness (“Ain’t no best seller list gonna tell me what good readin’ is!” I reasoned). But when I finally fell, I fell hard, reading the entire Potter saga in the past year and a half. The fact that that was an easy task testifies to one of J.K. Rowling’s greatest strengths: she’s a page-turner, through and through. Each of her stories is propulsive, building to the point where you say, “Just one more chapter, and then I’m going to bed” and find yourself still reading three hours later.
That’s not to say Rowling is a perfect writer. Her emotional moments, while sincere, are often too on-the-nose, and her supporting characters are typically limited to their one note. Over the course of 4,100 pages, Hagrid, Dean Thomas, and Professor McGonagall fill the same roles, without any real sense of growth or indications of an internal landscape.
Coreys, meet Coreys
In a strange case of synchronicity, A&E network has announced a new show, “The Two Coreys,” which is set to debut this Sunday, July 29. As the show’s website announces:
Yes, you heard right, the Coreys are back together! Corey Haim and Corey Feldman met in 1987 on the set of the iconic teen film The Lost Boys. The “Two Coreys,” as they instantly became known, grew to be best of friends, growing up together both on and off screen. Propelled by their legendary onscreen chemistry, the two went on to star in a series of films that would define a generation, including The Lost Boys, Dream a Little Dream and License to Drive. They were kings of the 80s teen box office. Their posters hung on bedroom walls and their faces adorned countless magazine covers. They had it all. Money. Fame. Girls. Then each was faced with personal setbacks. While Feldman ultimately took control of his life, Haim’s life and career took a downturn. Now, nearly two decades later after taking separate paths in life, the friends are back together on-screen and under one roof in the A&E Real-Life series THE TWO COREYS, premiering July 29th at 10:00PM ET/PT.
This very premise, of course, was explored by FLYMF cartoonist Bobby D. Lux in his comic strip “The Coreys.” A coincidence? Perhaps. Life imitating art imitating Corey Haim’s need to pay off that Ferrari he totaled back in ’95? More likely.
At the moment, there are no plans to pursue litigation, but if “The Two Coreys” features Haim mistaking himself for Sean Astin, working the men’s room at LAX, or holding the same immobile position for episode after episode after episode after episode after episode, we may have to conclude some theft of intellectual property occurred.
(For the record, the celebrity we mistake Corey Haim for is Anthony Michael Hall.)