Anchor Christmas Ale

 
I first had Anchor Christmas a couple of years back. I wasn't impressed. Christmas beers are hard, either nothing special or too heavy on the nutmeg. A few manage to get it about right, but for the most part it's nice packaging around something that would work just as well any time of the year (I'm looking at you, every brewery that puts out a passable porter/stout and tells me it's holiday-themed). But in the spirit of seasonal forgiveness, I decided to give Anchor another chance to get me drunk this Christmas.

The winter warmer-style beer pours medium dark; I'd call it mildly translucent.

It smells heavily of malt (in deference to the style), with light hints of some vague spice.  Let's call it clove?

Nutmeg (here we go) hits the tongue first, but is soon washed away by dry, hearty malt, which dominates the flavor until the end. The post-malt swim is short and dry, like the ghost of a beer.

Medium-bodied, the beer feels like it's aiming for heaviness, but falls a little short. It's makes for a decent session beer, good news for those who run the family-presents-meal marathon today.

Overall, this one is mild and inoffensive, but short and pleasant enough that a second may well be in order for a Christmas afternoon.

Grade: B

The Disaster Artist

"I'll do my own project and it will be better than everybody else. You think this movie we just saw was tragedy? No. Not even close. I will make tragedy. People will see my project and... you know what? They will not sleep for two weeks. They will be completely shocked. You watch."
-- Tommy Wiseau, per The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell 

I'm not going to try to explain The Room. Because I can't. Anyone who claims they can adequately explain the film in less time than it takes to watch it is lying. But as a psychological case study meets film-making how-not-to crash course, The Disaster Artist is worthwhile. At the very least, it's entertaining.

Greg Sestero is a struggling actor and much-too loyal and forgiving friend, which, combined, help to explain how a good-hearted guy with potential and a wild dream fell into the orbit of Tommy Wiseau and thenceforth into The Room. First brought on as a line producer, Sestero eventually inherits the role of "the Mark," best friend and cuckold-maker to Wiseau's protagonist "Johnny." With ghostwriter Tom Bissell, Sestero spins a yarn of the inept production of a bad movie and a decade-long friendship with the incomprehensible Wiseau. 

Alternating chapters are dedicated to Sestero's stop-start acting career. These chapters make for a decent story and the reader feels for his frustrations, but they are fraught with a burning question: Where's Tommy?

Luckily, Tommy is never more than a page or two away from calling Sestero, or showing up at the apartment he's let to Sestero, or moving in with Sestero. All the while, Wiseau manipulates the poor kid (at least twenty years his junior, though no one's totally sure of Wiseau's true age, likely not even Wiseau himself) into hanging out with him--and no one else, ever--or indulging him in his self-evidently awful "feature movie" project. These traits--the manipulation, the neediness, the pitiable misconceptions about himself and the world around him--veer from funny to sad to terrifying at a pace that leaves the reader marveling at Sestero's hardiness.

The world has plenty of people who exhibit these behaviors, of course, but few of them have a bank account that an uncircumspect teller would describe as "a bottomless pit." However and whenever he attained his fortune (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is an exiled heir to the Habsburg throne, allowed to keep his money in exchange for never returning to Austria), he has been insulated from ever having to embrace anything like reality. Sestero calls The Room a testament to "unrelenting drive and determination," proof that a dream--however ill-concieved--can be made real. But it helps a lot when you're able to put up six million dollars of your own money to ensure that that dream is realized.

And by all appearances, Wiseau believed that The Room would be a genuine masterpiece, a modern day Sunset Boulevard, a comparison Sestero makes in regard to his relationship with Wiseau, except that Norma Desmond's pretensions to talent and fame weren't entirely delusional. It's hard to know what he'd make of this book. Or the title. But when his film continues to make money hand over fist, it's hard to tell him otherwise. It's not Avatar, but people on multiple continents continue to line up to see The Room--and convince their friends to join them--in a way they don't for films that they think are well-made. Blame my generation's love affair with irony (though I'd argue that many people's love for The Room punches straight through irony, passing into total sincerity), but Tommy Wiseau has done very well for himself, if not for the reasons he might think.

There's a lost chance toward the end of Disaster Artist, when the world premiere of The Room brings Wiseau's dream to life, to explain how that first small, cobbled together audience interpreted the film and how it shifted from that into the cult hit acknowledged in the introduction. All we get is a beaming, tearful Wiseau and a dashed-off "proud of you, buddy" from a guy who's spent the previous 300 pages catering to everything that the cult is dying know. But maybe that's not Sestero's story to tell. As he observes, "The magic of The Room derives from one thing: no one interprets the world the way Tommy Wiseau does."

Wiseau is a perfect little mystery: an indeterminate origin, an unfounded self-confidence, a palpable disconnect with human experience; the money might help explain those last two things but where did that come from? Sestero takes a stab at unpacking the mystery, outfitting Wiseau with a thin biography informed by vague, sparse, and largely unverifiable facts. This biography does provide an plausible source for The Room's funding, but the explanation for how that money was generated is not a tidy one, by Sestero's admission.

The Room should be some kind of Kaufman-esque hoax (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is Andy Kaufman), but if it were a hoax, we'd know. Wouldn't we? No parody could be this perfect; we'd see the strings. There'd have to be some kind of wink to the audience. But there isn't. The Disaster Artist seals it--this movie really, somehow, was allowed to happen. Real human beings experienced and endured Tommy Wiseau in all his paranoia, poor judgment, and financial schizophrenia (sometimes a miser, sometimes spending lavishly and nonsensically).

Tommy Wiseau exists and the way he interacts with the world is every bit as bizarre as fans would suspect, while simultaneously so disappointingly benign. He wears his insecurities on his sleeve, making for an awkward obsessive whose every short coming is telegraphed. And his failure to assimilate is not through a lack of trying; at heart, he's more American than you or I. Wiseau is not a mad villain, just mad. And if The Room brings joy to audiences, he can't be a totally awful filmmaker. Just kind of an awful filmmaker.

The Room is still a terrible movie, after all.

Grade: B+

Now You're Just Making Crap Up, Part II

A while back, I asked if any members of my generation had experienced the fabled scoreless youth sporting event, the kind that were supposed to have ruined us for the real world. I'll get to those momentarily.

To start, Google turned up this from The Western Center For Journalism (I don't know, either) whose motto is, "Informing And Equipping Americans Who Love Freedom." No, really. This obviously well-oiled news organization links to a piece from Glenn Beck's The Blaze (at this point, we'll pretend we buy every word--fragile egos, you see) about a youth football league in California fining teams $200 when winning by 35 points or more. The fine is overkill, sure, but as discussed in my previous post, a simple skill imbalance and the easily-flustered nature of children could easily produce a four-touchdown deficit. How many youth coaches would feel good about themselves nabbing another TD at that stage? What's to prove? It would be considered classless even in the NFL. And this still doesn't exactly fit the "scoreless" bill. But both articles run on the assumption that these sorts of things are becoming "more and more prevalent," while providing no evidence outside of this particular anecdote.

A similar presumption is made in this overlong piece in the Boston Globe, which at least has the courtesy to acknowledge the complicity of gutless parents.

So we're back to nothing on this. On the whole, no one I heard from was familiar with these leagues. A few seconded my memory of mercy rules, but nothing quite like the neutered, feelings-oriented farces that we've heard tell about. One aspect I hadn't thought of, though: memorabilia--the ribbons and trophies commemorating participation. Yes, the famous 'participation trophies,' shiny harbingers of millennials' presumed entitlement. There might be something there: years of receiving physical manifestations of the most basic commitment to a youth sports team. Didn't matter if you were a star or a benchwarmer. How is that not supposed to spoil children and warp their expectations of success?

To start, kids know what those baubles are. They see every other kid get one, regardless the merit, and they know. I was crap at most youth sports. I played badly and got frustrated. Or I got bored. Either way, I usually ended up following through because my parents wouldn't let me quit I was afraid of letting someone down. I learned to ride the bench. Sitting was a better fat kid sport, anyway. Except for that one year of youth basketball when all the other kids came up to my shoulder--I grabbed every rebound without having to jump. Those were good times.

In all other cases, though--baseball, football, two weeks of soccer--I knew I hadn't earned those ribbons, didn't deserve those trophies. They were reminders of a mandated charity of which I was the recipient. They didn't make me feel good and some part of me knew I couldn't expect that to go on forever. I won't say the trophies lit a fire in me, or prodded me to work harder for future trophies. But they did teach me which achievements meant something and which didn't. I'll take your trophy (refusing would be a dick move). But I know what matters to me. I still regard that as a pretty good lesson.

Finally, and slightly more interestingly, even if those trophies had imparted entitlement issues upon myself and my generation (and I'm sure they overinflated some poor kid's head), who was handing them out so recklessly? Did we ask for them? Possibly, after we saw other kids get trophies. Kids always crave what other kids have, even if they don't actually want it. 

However. Aren't these the occasions to explain to your stupid son or daughter that they hadn't earned a trophy? That they needed to work harder next time and maybe the trophy would be theirs? Or was it easier to throw a hunk of metal at the brat and get on with your day? The same goes for the presumptive scoreless games.

I've said before that I don't believe in generation blaming. It's entirely dependent upon a myopic single lane perspective, it creates needless division, and it gets us nowhere. But let's recognize our own faults, shall we? Take a serious look at what we're bringing to the table before we huff at somebody we don't know for being conceived thirty years before or after we were? Because we have real problems to contend with.

And there are no points for making shit up.