Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Fat Discrimination

We're on Day 3 of an infinite number of days of Headline News returning to their favorite topic: obesity. The omnipresent spectre was discussed today in light of a Gallup Poll which determined whether folks felt they had been discriminated against because of their weight, and whether employers would be likely to discriminate against folks because of their girth. During the report, the weird, awkward Gallup guy pantomimed a gut and made sure to point out that more Americans are overweight (according to the AMA) than said felt they were overweight... he clearly felt ashamed of those Americans who did not admit they were overweight. It was very strange...

Stayed up too late watching The Rules of Attraction on cable. This movie probably isn't for everyone, but after endless cable reruns of Road Trip and American Pie 2, it was interesting to break from the mold and see a movie about quasi-sociopathic yet recognizable college kids. I know American Pie, et al, are always supposed to have "heart", but the cute and fuzzy bunny characters never appeal to me, and the stories always seem to downshift into sentimental glop about some randomly boring love interest when the beginnings of the movies always make it look like the characters are having much more fun NOT being in love. I'm not even sure I would say Rules of Attraction was a good movie, but it differed enough from the cute and fuzzy bunny formula that at times I knew that if I'd seen this in college, it would have made a boatload more sense to me than those movies mentioned above.

The other fun part of The Rules of Attraction was when, about forty minutes into the movie I suddenly put 2 and 2 together and realized the James VanDer Beek character was supposed to be Patrick Bateman's little brother from American Psycho. Suddenly everything became so very, very clear. (BTW, while the book of American Psycho is fairly disturbing and not for everyone, the movie version was pretty lame and ended up as a fairly tame slasher fliock... ). Anyway, realizing the connection also solidified the theme of adding "American" as part of your title to give it some sort of ubiquitous meaning and gave a different gravity to the end of the flick.

Am currently reading Jimmy Olsen: Adventures by Jack Kirby. Check it out, comic geeks. This is some great, great stuff.

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