Category Archives: JM13D

“Best in Show” is a funny, dry humored mockumentary based on the participants of a dog show.  The film is cast with a plethora of underground, and some who since have become mainstream comics and actors who to my knowledge took a bare bones script and turned it into a somewhat improvised realistic comedic dialogue.  What I found to be the most appealing part of the movie was that all different stereotypes of people are represented in a scenario where they take themselves too seriously and the viewer is given a chance to poke fun at the eccentricities of seemingly everyday normal people.

Such stereotypes of people represented in”Best in Show” are a redneck, a gold digger and her lesbian counterpart, a yuppie couple, a nerd and his wife who seems to have gotten around, and an over the top gay couple from New York.  If you can appreciate the weirdness of “ordinary” people being poked fun at then this film is for you.  The witty back and forth dialogue keeps the movie going and although it isn’t really laugh out loud funny, if you have a sense of humor you will find yourself snickering the whole way through.  I mean really who can’t appreciate making fun of the yuppie couple who met at Starbucks, is seemingly perfect but after closer inspection we realize they are both insane!  The beautiful thing about this movie is how the exaggerated stereotypes are carried out, but the director and the actors still keep them close enough to home that with more than just a few of the characters I’m sure you can think of somebody who they remind you of.

The settings used are also great, realistic plasticky Florida houses, a fly fishing shop in nowheres-ville redneck land, even the un-glorious hotel the participants stay at in anticipation of their years culmination is scarily, realistically appropriate.  If you are a weirdo, and you might not know it until you watch something like this or a film similar, you may not find this too funny as it may hit a little too close to home!  What better way to find out if your a freak than to give it a shot.  I recommend this film to anyone with a dry, quirky, sense of humor, and also to anyone not sure of their level of creepiness to check it out and see how well they can relate!

The movie “Best in Show” is a seemingly simple and straightforward film, with a surprisingly profound meaning. Initially, the characters are depicted as having mundane, as well as a bit peculiar, lives as owners of dogs. To myself, this prospect seems unfamiliar and even a bit ridiculous, but perhaps that’s because I’m a New Yorker, and deathly afraid of dogs as well. To myself, I ask the question: Who in the world would spend so much time and effort to groom and cater to a domestic pet to bring it a competition? And even so, why would they do such a thing? But when you apply the concept of each individual having their own idea of happiness to this movie, that’s where things begin to fall into place and to make sense. The characters in the film are chasing happiness, and they are doing so through their dogs. For every single one of the owners, they are alike in that their dogs are their pride and joy, regardless of how different each of the owners is. Attending a dog show would be a nightmare for some, but for these characters make it their top priority to compete in it. And then at the end of the film, when there is one winner, the rest of the dog owners and their dogs go on to do things that they find thoroughly enjoyable. This ending can be interpreted as a way of showing that happiness isn’t always what you think it is, and that again, happiness is not the same for everyone. A humorous but sometimes disconcerting film, “Best in Show” is a film you might want to watch with a particular group of people, maybe ones that have an odd sense of humor. Like I said, you won’t find me at a dog competition anytime within the next decade. Pictures of cute dogs are okay with me, though. 🙂

It was really exciting to hear that we were going to watch a movie in class. At first I thought it would be some boring documentary that the class was going to watch, boy was I wrong. I really liked the film. It was a comedy film that did not have corny jokes, the class actually laugh pretty hard for a few of the jokes.

I enjoyed the movie a lot but while watching it I could not help but to think that there was something more to the movie than the jokes and the funny ‘accidents’ the characters get into. This feeling grew more when Prof. Kaufman asked what this film had to do with happiness. So I asked myself what did this film have to do with happiness?

Well in the film the 5 contestants for the Mayflower Dog Show said they were happy and that if they won the “Best In Show” title they would be even more happy. I did not think the same way. Especially for the Swan couple, they were seeing a psychiatrist because of their dog. Apparently their dog was upset all the time and was hard to handle, which somehow caused the couple to be grumpy and upset too.  Just from the first scene that the Swan couple was introduced I already knew that they were not happy, they seem as if they forced their smile while saying they loved their dog. Near the end of the movie the Swan couple broke down resulting in a disqualification and it seems like I was right about them. In the end they got a new dog and seem genuinely happy.

Another thing I thought that was interesting about the movie was the ending. For the losers they seem to have found happiness outside of the dog show business and went into other areas still related to dogs. As for the Fleck couple it seems that everything is nice because they are now celebrities but Mr. Fleck meets another one of Mrs. Fleck’s old boyfriends. Mr.Fleck reacted the same way he did to the previous his wife’s  ex-boyfriends; he was upset.

In the end the losers are happy and the winners are not? The winners who thought winning would be the best thing in the world to them because it would be like achieving a dream, end up unhappy. While the losers have their dreams of winning crushed are able to find happiness somewhere else.

Does this even make sense at all? Apparently so.

After having finished reading Chapter 6 of Ehrenreich’s book, I am undecided.  Throughout the chapter, I was getting really irritated by almost everything she was writing, because it felt like all she was doing was complaining about things that were completely irrelevant to positive psychology or anything else that she seemed to be originally trying to prove. It took me until page 170 to finally find some common ground with her and stop feeling like I wanted to throw this chapter out a window.

As I read, I took notes in the margins of the ideas or opinions that immediately popped into my head, so I could refer to them later on.

In the very first paragraph of the chapter, she’s describing a pessimistic man winning an election regardless of his negativity. I think that’s a normal thing that happens to everyone.  Did any of you notice that sometimes, when you think you did horribly on a test, you almost never get a result that’s nearly as bad as you expected it to be? I know that happens to me all the time. Maybe we just expect the worst so that we can be pleasantly surprised when we have good results? After all, that’s better than expecting a really high grade and then being devastated when you get your low results.

One moment of this chapter in which the author really irritated me was in her description of her meeting with Seligman, on page 152-153.  She began describing several things that delayed her interviewing him, and in my opinion she just spends way too much time complaining about it. Are you trying to talk to me about positive psychology or are you just trying to bash on this guy that you want to interview? Because it seems to me like she’s lost focus here. Do I care that he made you wait in his office while he spoke on the phone? What does that matter to me? Focus on the facts: if you want to show that he’s inconsistent, just provide detailed information about instances when he was inconsistent (which she did later on, towards the end of the chapter), don’t waste words on trying to make him out to be a bad person because he made you wait an extra few minutes in his office, or because he wanted to go to the museum.

And again on page 153 she says “Like most lay books on positive thinking, it’s a jumble of anecdotes….” Is her complaint about being in his office not an anecdote?

It seems to me that reading this chapter was almost like reading a manuscript of a documentary. She seems to be like an investigative journalist. She probably claims to be searching for the truth but in reality she is just angry with optimists (for whatever reason) and it seems to be part of her agenda to bash their ideas. She takes every positive thing she possibly can and turns it into something negative.

I think what she’s trying to show is that optimism makes you stray from realism. But she tends to stray from this idea and a lot of her evidence of this only points to the idea that optimism should instead be pessimism. She herself is a pessimistic person, which is clearly shown when she received a low score on the Authentic Happiness Inventory and on one of the questions even confessed that she was pessimistic about the future. Have you ever heard of the saying “misery needs company”? Seems like she’s miserable to me.

The thing that irks me most of all about her writing is the fact that she’s bashing something that does help some people. Yes, self-help books are not the cure to all problems, and they make it seem like changing your life is as easy as 1-2-3. Obviously, self-help books are not perfect. First of all, some of them are good and some are bad. But honestly, are there not people who are helped by these books? I’m sure the authors of self-help books don’t write the books with a goal in mind of helping all 6 billion people inhabiting this planet. It’s not possible. But, if the books do help SOME people, why bash them? I think that if there are people out there reading these books and improving their lives as a result, what’s so bad about that? Can’t you say the same thing about medicine? Medicine does not always work on all people. Each person has their own individual health situation and it’s not always that medical professionals are able to help them. Does that mean we should just completely outlaw the science of medicine? If anti-depressants don’t help 100% of the people who take them, should they just be completely stricken off the market?

What I did find interesting about this chapter was the fact that in order to get a Templeton award, you can’t have null results. So this is probably the incentive that fuels positive psychologists’ ulterior motives of finding and publishing only positive news about positive psychology. Another thing she said that I really liked was on page 172: “Why advocate for better jobs and schools, safer neighborhoods, universal health insurance, or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy?” Seligman apparently doesn’t believe there’s a point in social activism. So it seems he’s just encouraging people to stop trying to change the world, and rather to just accept it just the way it is and learn to be happy about it.  Perhaps a better way to phrase his thinking, in my opinion, would be to have people still trying to make improvements and positive changes in the world, but simply to teach them not to get discouraged or upset when things don’t work out (because oftentimes they won’t).

Basically, I think Ehrenreich definitely did her research when writing this book. She brings in a lot of different sources of evidence. However, just because there’s evidence, doesn’t mean she’s completely correct. She only shows one side of the story. It would be interesting to do research about positive psychology from all different aspects of it, and only then making a conclusion about it.

When I first began reading “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, I immediately noticed how it started with a rather detailed description of where the story was taking place which was somewhere warm and dry. As I continued reading, I realized it was in Spain somewhere because of the mention of Barcelona and Madrid. Hemingway wanted to slip in the fact that he spent much of his time there. The story started with an American man and a girl which seemed innocent enough. However, when she asked if they could drink beer, I found it a little odd since Hemingway specifically said girl and not woman which in my mind made me think that she was younger. It was clear that this story was going to be structured in a mostly dialogue fashion between the man and the girl and with a few interjections by the lady selling the alcohol. As the story progressed, I couldn’t shake the fact that all they were talking about were alcoholic drinks and in my mind I wanted to say get to the point! The girl had mentioned the white hills in the distance looking like white elephants which is a totally acceptable conclusion to draw since they’re big, round, and kind of bulge into the sky. Then when the man starts talking about a simple operation I then understood what the little biography about Hemingway was saying and how this text was a cleverly disguised story about abortion. The white elephants reference then made more sense because when women are pregnant they usually consider themselves feeling like giant elephants. However this also made me think that the abortion issue was kind of the big elephant in the room that everyone knew was there but no one wanted to say anything about it. The man and the girl were going back and forth about whether she should go through with this and talked about the fact that if they did, they would be much happier afterwards. I felt sad because I believe that babies should be given a chance to experience this world but happiness of course takes many different forms and they may well be happier. What struck me after reading this story was when the man said that he didn’t want to have the baby and that she should go through with the abortion because he didn’t want to have anyone else but her. That was just such a “really? oh come on” moment to me. It’s nice that she responds by basically telling him to shut up and drop it. I noticed throughout the story that she was the one that was excessively drinking the alcohol asking to try a new drink or if they could order more beers. This made me feel that she intentionally wanted to harm the baby on her own because of course pregnancy and alcohol don’t mix. At the end of the story she says “I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” I’m not certain but I feel that she said that because either the alcohol really got to her and thus the baby or she knew she was going to go through with the abortion.

couldn’t help but think throughout reading this story the influence of alcohol. i love Glee so i had to put this rendition in. Yep they were all hungover when performing.

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This movie boasts quite an array of eccentric and idiosyncratic characters. You have the Swan couple who basically come off as very superficial characters as shown when they talked about how they stalked each other at Starbucks on opposite blocks. They are both very OCD in pretty much anything they do. As evidenced by their constant bickering on minute details and completely going insane over a lost dog toy. Then you have the Fleck couple, who have a slut-nerd relationship. This is a running gag in the movie where almost every guy asks “hey, do I know you from somewhere” with the husband always having an “oh for f***’s sake” moment. All in all these characters were played very well and highly contributed to the comedy aspect of the film. Then you have Harlan pepper, who embodies the redneck trope. He is basically treated not only as an eccentric hick, but also as an upcoming dark-horse character (with regards to the dog show). What I truly enjoy about this character is his great work ethic and never ending enthusiasm in any given situation. And of course, who could forget the gay couple of Stephan Vanderhoof and Scott Donlan. Funnily enough, these two characters purely embody the gay-man “eccentric and flamboyant” stereotype with their gestures, tone of speech, and even their dog. These characters mainly served as stress relief for the rest of the cast during the dog show. One notable scene was when Scott Donlan went on stage with his dog in a very zesty outfit causing a loud excited cheer from the audience, and a funny gag from the judge. The final couple is comprised of Sherri Ann Cabot and Christy Cummings.  Sherri is the quintessential gold digger character with Christy being the dog handler. There is basically a capable grunt + rich blonde relationship here, where Christy does all of the hard work in any given venture, while Sherri is just a figure head and….. is in charge of make-up. The thing to note here is that they’re relationship is much more explicitly shown as opposed to the other gay couple. After they won the qualifiers, Christy ran over to Sherri and started to make out which resulted in massive cheers from the audience and judges. Chances are, the writers and directors wouldn’t even consider portraying the guys in a similar fashion. This leads to the question of why society as a whole is generally more acceptant of lesbians than the male gay community ( at least as far as media is concerned). My personal favorite character in this movie was Buck Laughlin who acted as the commentator on the dog show. He was purely the comic relief character, and kept spitting out one joke after the other with pretty much no pause in between. Though many of his jokes were admittedly off color, such as his purposeful mangling of Donlan’s dog’s name. (Shi-Tsu) All in all, these characters made the movie a fun watch. So if you’re in the mood for eccentric characters and comedy, then this is the movie for you.