Respecting the roll and getting more cash

I would like to acknowledge Jay Leno's brilliant deconstruction of the Cottonelle "Respect the Roll" ad campaign on TV. Those ads are practically begging to be nitpicked and lampooned, but Jay Leno has beat me to the punch. The one he chose to focus on is one in which an elderly black couple spies on the bathroom of some neighbors across the street. Why are they spying on their neighbors, why does the neighbors' house have the toilet facing a window, and most importantly of all, how does it show "respect" to a roll of toilet paper to cover it up prior to using it for its ultimate purpose and denouement?

Another ad campaign that deserves a similar treatment is Capital One's "more cash" ad campaign with Jimmy Fallon. Everyone likes more cash, with the exception of a grumpy little baby, who expresses wordlessly how most grown-ups feel about Jimmy Fallon. It's bad enough we make our infant children compete in beauty pageants, now we must expose them to the evil, corrupting power of money as early as possible? But more importantly, and why hasn't this occurred to anyone else:

If you really want more cash, cancel your credit cards! And maybe get rid of your debit cards, too.

So we are supposed to feel grateful that the credit card companies, out of the exorbitant interest rates and fees that they charge us, return to us a tiny, trickling bit of that in the form of what is euphemistically called "cash rewards"? If you are not too ensnared in credit card debt, it is time to pay them all off, cancel them, and keep more of your hard-earned cash where you want it: in your wallet. What exactly have the credit card companies done that they deserve any cut of our hard-earned paychecks? Exactly!

Back to the pilot

When I read the entry for last night's episode of Family Guy in TV Guide, I thought "Oh brother, they're really running out of ideas." But the Good Wife was about a death penalty case, so I decided to give the Family Guy episode a chance. It was... alright.

Brian pretends to want to travel back in time to retrieve a tennis ball he buried back in 1999, but his real reason is to tell his former self about 9/11 so he can become a hero by preventing it. Naturally, this has unforeseen bad consequences. Next thing you know, there are dozens of Brians and Stewies on the Griffin lawn trying to untangle the Gordian knot of causes and effects all their time traveling has caused.

Any time travel story is bound to have some confusing aspects. One of the Stewies acknowledges this, admitting to being confused. But some other questions naturally arise: why is Stewie still a baby? It has been fairly clearly established that Brian is now 8-years-old, and he was 7 when the show started. But now this episode cements the notion that time on the show is concurrent with real-life time: since Stewie's first birthday, Bush the Lesser has served two terms as President of the United States.

Also, what would be the true, unintended consequences of preventing 9/11? Wouldn't George W. Bush simply have asked his good buddy Osama bin Laden for another attack?

Take a shower and get a job... how exactly?

So a lot of conservative pundits are saying that those Occupy Wall Street kids need to go home, take a shower and get a job. It sure sounds easy when you put it like that. But, just for the heck of it, let's nitpick those instructions.

First, "go home." Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are young adults. If they have a place of their own, it's most likely a rented apartment. But, for reasons we'll get into later, some of those young adults have had to move back in with their parents. For the most part, though, they have somewhere they can call home and go to it.

Second, "take a shower." This is perhaps the easiest one. If you have somewhere to go home to, it's almost a given that you can take a shower.

Lastly, "get a job." I feel like I'm repeating myself here: the conservatives love to bitch and whine about how high taxes are, and they say that without tax breaks, the private sector can't create jobs. Well, the rich are now taxed at very low rates compared to just a few decades ago, so where are the jobs? With all that dough rolling in, what is the excuse for not creating jobs?

The bottom line is that getting a job these days is not easy at all. And if you manage to beat the odds, you find yourself overworked and underpaid. Rich people feel that just for doling out a few pennies, the working poor should be bending over backwards with gratitude, ready to do absolutely anything that is asked of them.

Next time some conservative jackass tells the Occupy Wall Street protesters to take a shower and get a job, they ought to tell him to create some jobs first.

Justice fantasies

Legal dramas give us nice fantasies of the right thing happening at the last minute after it looked like a gross miscarriage of justice was completely unavoidable. The Good Wife is no exception. On last night's episode, Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) pro bono case has her defending a white man identified by a black eyewitness (Sterling K. Brown) as a convenience store robber. It isn't until close to the end that it is revealed that the black eyewitness is in fact the perpetrator of the crime, and the innocent man is set free.

Meanwhile, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baransky) decides that the firm must stop doing pro bono cases, and urges those attorneys with pending pro bono cases to plead them out. Diane goes to visit the legal aid clinic to tell them in person, but instead winds up offering them office space at her firm when learning that they're going to get kicked out of their current office.

That's nice, but I wonder how many law firms are actually doing that in real life. Another difference between real life and this particular episode: In real life, the black eyewitness would have been treated like a suspect from the get-go.

White cluelessness

Let me preface this by saying that I am white. I need sunscreen to go pick up my morning paper. So I can say things such as the fact that white people are clueless about many race issues. Really. I can read all of Maya Angelou's books and watch all of Spike Lee's films, it doesn't make me an expert on the black experience.

But, clueless as I am, I do know certain things: for example, if I am the coach for a basketball team, I know enough that I shouldn't call my players by a certain word even if they use that word amongst themselves completely casual. This has actually happened, the coach was on the news. Also, I know that if I am an art photographer, I shouldn't take a picture of a white man in blackface. Taking a picture of a black man in blackface is also taboo. But what about taking a picture of a black man in whiteface?

Apparently, white artist Nathaniel C. Shannon thought that yes, that is okay. Last week I went to an art show near Detroit's Eastern Market. Nathaniel there had a whole series of photographs of a black man in whiteface playing golf in unlikely locations around the city. It was titled "Detroit Community Golf Course," if I recall correctly.

Maybe the whiteface wasn't the most offensive thing about those photographs. Maybe it's the idea that Detroit as a setting for photographs is only good for pictures of urban decay and poverty, what is sometimes called "urban porn."

Now, I will confess that I don't know much about art. Why should I pay ten grand for a large canvas painted with a uniform shade of green with a red dot in the corner if I can drive to Home Depot and hire someone to produce something exactly like that for a fraction of what the artist is asking for? Art photographers are usually not much better. At another show, I think it was at CCS, there was a very blurry photo that looked like two men having sex. The tag said $500. A lot of these modern artists, it seems to me, are just using bold concepts as a means of compensating for weak technical skills.

Going back to Nathaniel's photos: the man has technical skill. If I had been at his side with my Canon Powershot taking pictures of the man golfing, my pictures wouldn't look anywhere near as polished as his. But, if he has skill, why does he need to resort to race-baiting to sell his work? Alonso Delarte wrote a very short article on Examiner.com about Nathaniel's work that prompted quite a few white people to bash the writer, spilling far more ink on the topic than the original writer.

If you had any doubt that Alonzo's Jewish, this proves it: Mark Penxa remarked, at the end of a long diatribe: "I hope you enjoyed the free food and drinks, you *seemed* to be having a great time the entire night." You can just imagine one of Adolf Hitler's friends in 1917 pointing out that the Jewish critic at his art opening last night ate all the mini burgers yet had the gall to write a negative review of Hitler's paintings.

Alonso was also taken to task for not asking the photographer about the meaning of his work. But why should he have? So that Nathaniel could spout off some clueless rhetoric pretending to understand what black people go through in Detroit? Or so that he could admit that it was just a ploy to sell off an entire series of photographs?

He did ask black men for their opinion (and they were tough to find in that gallery, at most there were five black men among three hundred people or so packed in there). But there is only one man who would have anything meaningful to say about those photographs, and that is the black man who agreed to have a make-up artist put him in whiteface so he could be photographed around the city playing golf.

So in summary, I won't be expecting an invitation to speak at an NAACP event any time soon. Neither should Nathaniel C. Shannon.

Really, Director Vance?

It must have been a couple of weeks ago that I got back into watching NCIS: Los Angeles. They've been rerunning the last few episodes of Season 2. In the season finale, "Familia," we learn that NCIS director Leon Vance (Rocky Carroll) backs up all his critical files on his Microsoft SkyDrive. He asks Nell Jones (Renée Felice Smith) to disable the keystroke recognition software on her computer before he types in his password—

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Director Vance, head of an American intelligence agency, keeps his critical files on the Web just like that? Are you kidding me? Does this make any sense to you? It's one thing to hide things in plain sight, but this just seems idiotic to me. I don't keep critical files on the Web, and I don't even have a security clearance.

I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm told that at some places that deal with issues of national security, they remove the hard drives from the computers and store them in a vault at night. This on top of the fact that the janitors have to have security clearance: so, if one of them were to steal a computer, they would still not get any sensitive info out of it. Also, CIA and NSA employees can't even take cellphones, flash drives, etc., into the CIA or NSA Headquarters. I imagine similar measures are in effect at other intelligence agencies.

This takes the cake as the most ridiculous, stupid and awkward product placement I have ever seen in a TV show.

Family drama on Family Guy

Do you still watch Family Guy? Last episode I saw, Meg stood up for herself when the other family started members their usual, boring use-Meg-as-punching-bag schtick. As boring as that shtick is, it is nowhere as annoying as the shrillness of Meg standing up for herself. Well, thanks for making it very easy for me to change the channel to CBS to watch The Good Wife, a show that now comes on on Sunday nights.

The inconsiderate dirty man

Have you seen those commercials for Viva paper towels in which a very dirty man shows up to his parents (or grandparents?—I'm not sure) and he dirties everything in his path? Luckily, the old folks are ready with Viva towels to clean up the mess. But why should they have to?

The inconsiderate dirty man even has the gall to touch a single piano key and get that dirty, too! If you come to my house all dirty and unavoidably soil only those things directly on your path from the front door to the shower, maybe I can forgive that. But if you deliberately dirty other things you didn't absolutely have to, then maybe I should never again let you come into my house.

Ad guys, go back to the drawing board with a better scenario for needing your product.

Whose rights are being violated, and under which Amendment?

I served in the Marine Corps to defend ideals like citizens' right to defend their homes against invading forces (whether that be British redcoats or escaped convicts). But I sure as hell wasn't doing it to defend a child's right to kill himself playing with a gun his parents forgot to secure. Nor to allow special interest groups to interfere in how doctors interact with their patients.

Have you heard about an idiotic new law in Florida that bars pediatricians from asking whether patients' parents have guns in their home, and if so, are those guns properly secured? Supposedly, the National Rifle Association is concerned that such questions invade patients' privacy. If that's the real reason, then they have completely missed the whole point of doctor-patient confidentiality. But just in case, let me state it: it isn't so doctors can blab your personal information to their friends; it's so they can ask questions directly relevant to treating or preventing diseases.

Or maybe this is just the NRA flexing their muscles to see how far they can take things. I don't see the pool manufacturers' lobby demanding that doctors don't ask about pools at home. Nor the bike manufacturers' lobby. And so on and so forth.

Another consequence of the new law might be that now pediatricians can't suggest parents turn to the NRA for information on securing their guns. However, the bill is not actually a law just yet. If you live in Florida, let Governor Rick Scott know what you think of this law before he signs it.

Stewie the Creator

When I read TV Guide's description for last night's episode of Family Guy, "The Big Bang Theory," in which Stewie unwittingly winds up creating the Universe with his time machine, I thought to myself, "That might actually be a good episode." And it was a good episode. It was funny and riveting, and the dumb, racist non-jokes were kept to a minimum. Also, the writers deserve props for managing to reference both Back to the Future and Star Trek: The Next Generation at the same time.

However, any episode of any show that deals with time travel is certain to have holes in the plot and nits to pick. This latest episode of Family Guy is no exception. Let's say that we buy the whole notion of the temporal causality loop and predestination paradoxes in general, and specifically the one that threatens to destroy the Universe in this episode.

For an evil genius, Bertram (Wallace Shawn) doesn't seem to fully think through the ramifications of snuffing Stewie out of existence, even allowing for the fact that the former doesn't at first know that the latter created the Universe, and conceding that Bertram understands that he can't kill any of Peter's ancestors since he doesn't want to delete himself as well.

One way to delete Stewie from the time-space continuum is to kill Lois before she gives birth to Stewie. But even doing that is fraught with the danger of consequences that could also prevent Bertram's birth. What if Peter is so grief-stricken by the death of his wife that he kills himself? Or, less melodramatically, what if Peter never goes to the sperm bank and his seed is never implanted into the woman who turns out to be Bertram's biological mother? Bertram's idea of killing Leonardo da Vinci (who is presumably an ancestor of Lois) has the danger of far more unintended consequences than killing a more recent ancestor. (And anyway how did Bertram trace Stewie's ancestry so far back?)

Bertram does succeed in killing Leonardo da Vinci. Stewie sends Brian back to the present and somehow "injects" his DNA into Leonardo's girlfriend (without having sex with her). But why would this be the thing to do that preserves Stewie's maternal line? Wouldn't that introduce genetic material that was meant to be introduced later? Or is that another predestination paradox? Wouldn't the right thing to do have been to extract Leonardo's semen? (Though I can just begin to imagine the disgusting jokes the writers would have come up with if this had occurred to them). In any case, Leonardo was already quite old when Bertram killed him. Leonardo may have already passed on the necessary genetic material, in which case Stewie's "injection" is completely irrelevant.

Lastly, I wonder how Stewie had the resources to build himself a cryogenic stasis chamber and have himself deposited in what was presumably yet to be colonized Quahog but not the resources to build himself another time machine (as Doc Brown did in the 19th Century in Back to the Future Part III).

It is precisely because the episode was actually funny and engaging that it is fun to pick it apart like this. I hope they do more episodes like this and fewer episodes in which Brian is complaining about his failures with women or as an author.

Jay Leno likes gruesome screensavers

So the White House has decided not to release the gruesome photos of Osama bin Laden with bullet holes in his head. Plenty of jokes that could be made there, like maybe alluding to the birth certificate scandal and how some people still refuse to believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

But the 'joke' that Jay Leno chose to make on the Tonight Show last night was this: "How many of you wanted to make that your screensaver?" And he raised his own hand as he asked that. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose. My reaction, if I ever got to see those photos, would be either:

a) "I'm convinced the bastard's dead, I don't need or want to look at that again." OR
b) "That looks fake. Let me look at it again just long enough to find the Photoshop seams."

NOT c) "Ooh, let me look at that guy's ugly face made even uglier by violence every time I leave my computer alone for more than a few minutes!"

Really, Omnaris?

Have you seen the Omnaris ad with computer generated graphics of soldiers in white uniforms with white helmets? Human soldiers. Am I the only one who finds this ridiculous?

Consider Nasonex, with its animated bee, or Mucinex with its animated, anthropomorphized mucus, or Lamisil with its cute monster. You can't quite get those to move the way the ad makers wanted them to, even though they exist in real life (the bee and the mucus, at least, I don't know what real toenail infection causants look like).

So apparently Omnaris couldn't get a bunch of men to put on white uniforms and look like soldiers. It should make you wonder whether they're spending more money on advertising campaigns than they are on "big picture" important things, like searching for a cure for cancer.

More women have kissed Sheldon than you think

It's tough writing a character like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. The annoying know-it-all even has an "eidetic memory" (or "photographic memory" for those of us who are not smart enough to know that term). But of course this challenges the writers to carefully keep track of what Sheldon has said and done in the past, and they trip up every so often.

Case in point is yesterday's new episode of The Big Bang Theory, "The Agreement Dissection." After Priya (Aarti Mann) rips Sheldon and Leonard's roommate agreement to shreds, Sheldon joins Penny, Amy, and Bernadette at a nightclub, and the question comes up: which women have kissed Sheldon? Apparently none, if you don't count Sheldon's female relatives or the nun to whom Sheldon once gave CPR to. The guy is hardly a Casanova, so this sounds plausible, right?

The writers forgot that Leonard's mom, Beverly (Christine Baransky) actually kissed Sheldon! See "The Maternal Congruence" from last season. Beverly kisses Sheldon, then declares she'd "rather have the busboy." Sheldon seems a little puzzled by what just happened, but you would think he would at least remember this and mention it when this topic of kissing comes up with Penny's girlfriends. Of course "You kissed Leonard's mom?" would have taken the conversation in a different direction that Sheldon would rather it didn't, but don't you think Sheldon would fail to foresee that?

By the way, besides series creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, writers Steven Molaro and Dave Goetsch also worked on both episodes.

Boo-hoo for billionaires

Normally in this blog we nitpick movies and TV shows, but today I'd like to nitpick a story you may have heard or read in a few different places. Yesterday was the deadline to file taxes in America, which is what reminded me of this parable that supposedly demonstrates how unfair our tax code is to the rich. Yes, you read that right, unfair to the rich. Bear with me, please.

So there is this rich man who on a regular basis treats four poorer men to dinner. The men are of different income levels, but they each put a little something towards the dinner: the poorest man puts in $1, while the second richest man puts in $5. Nevertheless, only the richest man truly pays for his own meal.

Then one night, the restaurant owner reveals that, due to a clerical error or a software glitch (depending on which version of the story you've heard), he has been overcharging the men, and, being a man of conscience, issues a refund.

This is where the trouble begins. The men can't agree on how to split the refund. The poorest man says the refund should be split evenly among each of them five ways. The second richest man says the refund should be split proportionately to how much each of them put towards the dinner. Another one of the men points out that each of them is proposing the apportionment that will give him the biggest refund.

But the richest man is disgusted by all this bickering and declares he doesn't want his share of the refund: the others can fight over it but he's never treating them to dinner again. (There is also a racist version in which the poor men are black and beat up the rich white man—but rich people don't want to put it in poor people's minds that maybe they can beat up the rich and take their stuff, so violent versions of this story are rarely heard).

The first time I heard this story I thought to myself, "Well, it does sound kind of unfair when you put it that way." But there are several problems with this parable that don't quite square up with real life.

First of all, there is a big difference between money that gets taken out of your paycheck automatically and money you have to physically remove from your wallet to hand to a waiter, and even more so when the other people getting the refund are people you've come to know over the past few months. Suppose you're the poorest man in the parable. Sure you would want a fifth of the refund, but at the same time you would not want to vex the generous rich man by being too eager to grab up more than your fair share and perhaps lose your meal ticket in the process. In real life, you do know some of the other taxpayers, but you most likely don't personally know taxpayers in significantly different tax brackets. If you're a middle class single parent struggling to make ends meet in the big bad city, would it bother you if you get a tax refund of a few hundred dollars but the millionaire in the Hamptons has to pay a couple grand in taxes?

And that's another thing: do rich people really socialize with middle- and lower-class people? Maybe rich brats are closer to their illegal immigrant nannies than they're to their own parents, but beyond that, not much, really. Maybe a rich guy will occasionally take a homeless man to dinner now and then, but a regular arrangement like the one in the story sounds rather unlikely.

This should also bring our attention to the fact that the federal income tax is not the only tax there is. Consider for example the sales tax. I live in Michigan, here the sales tax is 6%. Most food items are exempt from sales tax. But many basic necessities (toothpaste, soap, clothes, shoes) are subject to sales tax. I seriously doubt that even the most extravagant rich man spends as much on these items as, say, the entire East side of Detroit.

Besides, do the rich really pay their fair share of the federal income tax? The richest 1% control 90% of the wealth, yet they only pay 40% of federal income taxes! Maybe my figures are off a little bit, but not much. Through a variety of loopholes, the rich get all kinds of tax breaks to the point that they only have to pay a few dollars in taxes.

Meanwhile, tax breaks for the poor wind up being usurped by corporations through scams like refund anticipation loans. The confusing instructions for the newer credits don't help matters at all. Subtract line 3a on form J from line 76d on form 20 but if line 4 on the 1040 is less than $500, then you... geez! I'm sure the rich find this just as complicated as the poor. But I won't be shedding any tears for a rich man who paid an accountant a thousand bucks to find him those tax loopholes. That's like a dollar to you or me.

Well, that's enough ranting from me. In the interest of full disclosure, I am getting a tax refund, from a combination of excess withholding, the EIC and the Making Work Pay credit. But with the various expenses on my to do list, my refund is almost all spent before I even get it.

Cry me a Detroit River, Scrooge Moroun

The DRIC people want to build an expensive, unnecessary new bridge between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, a bridge the tolls for which won't justify the expense of building it, and they want to stick you, the taxpayer, with the bill. You should call your legislator right now and let them know you don't want that bridge.

That is, if you believe the load of crap that is the new commercial the Detroit International Bridge Company is running in the Detroit market. This goes way beyond nitpicking, this is shooting fish in a barrel.

Let me tell you what is really going on: billionaire Matty Moroun is worried that competition from another bridge could make a dent in his Ambassador Bridge profits. Never mind that competition is supposed to be one of the cornerstones that makes the whole free market concept such a great system that we need to invade other countries in order to impose it on them—quick poll: how good was the service the last time you went on the Ambassador Bridge? Nor should you worry about terrorists taking out two Moroun-owned bridges with one plane (because at one point he actually wanted to build another bridge right next to the Ambassador). Perhaps more realistically, the Ambassador could crumble apart because it's no spring chicken; I seriously doubt any significant portion of the revenue from that bridge is going to its upkeep.

Now, I'm a billionaire, too, so I worry about those damn high taxes, and I certainly don't want to pay for another bridge, especially one that is unnecessary. But... didn't Canada offer to pay Michigan's share of the cost for the new bridge? Just Google "canada offers to pay for bridge," it'll come up. Also, why would they even make such an offer if a new bridge was so unnecessary? When was the last time you drove on Fort Street from Rosa Parks to Springwells? It's wall-to-wall trucks! Isn't there enough profit here for two strategically placed bridges?

There's a smart way to be greedy and there's a dumb way to be greedy. A dumb greedhead like Matty Moroun will put short-term profits ahead of not just common decency and our national security interests, but also ahead of commonsense and long-term profits. So call your legislator and let him/her know that you support the DRIC bridge. And maybe also suggest Matty Moroun ought to be hauled into a special congressional hearing.

Charlie Sheen: shut up!

Supposedly, CBS is going to war on Charlie Sheen by trying to take all his money so he can't support his family. Weren't they paying him about $2 million for each episode of Two and a Half Men? Talk about ungrateful. If he should be angry at any institution for taking his money that should be the IRS. Without a good tax accountant, Charlie Sheen could be losing as much as half of each paycheck to taxes. I'm no mathematician, but half of roughly $2 million is still a lot of money. Is Charlie blowing the rest of his money on coke and porn stars?

Besides, there's a way out for stars who don't save their "Back to the Future money": do DirecTV commercials like Christopher Lloyd. I can picture it just now: "With DirecTV, a sober, soulless sex hound like me can watch reruns of my hit TV show anytime I want anywhere: in my at-home rehab, in the car on my way to court to fight for joint custody of my children, etc."

Oh, and what about residuals? Maybe a normal person—with a normal brain that can't process the rock star from Mars that is Charlie Sheen—would live just fine with Charlie's residual checks.

Jay Leno: the millionaire's comedian

So Jay Leno for the most part tries to cultivate this image of himself as an average kind of guy. But in his monologue last night on the Tonight Show he showed his true colors as a rich man who has forgotten his humble roots with one unfunny joke that soured me on the rest of the monologue:

Commenting on Obama's remarks to the private sector encouraging them to hire more people, Leno joked "Because only Government hires more people than it needs." If it hadn't been for that joke, I think I might have actually laughed at his later joke about TSA workers unionizing (something about getting patted down at the airport by one TSA worker while a bunch of other TSA workers just stand around watching). I didn't watch "Headlines," I tuned out at the commercial break.

I don't know if Jay Leno is playing dumb about a little concept known as "overwork and underpay" (or, as it's known to the middle class, "overworked and underpaid") or if he's genuinely ignorant about it. But in case he really doesn't know about it, here's how it goes: say your company actually needs 10 men to properly carry out a periodically occurring assignment. What you do is you lay off 5 of those men but you pay the remaining 5 (get ready for this, because it'll knock your socks off) you pay them exactly the same as when they had those other 5 colleagues. If they complain that they can't do the job like this, remind them that you have plenty of willing workers to replace them, if need be show them a couple of boxes just filled with résumés. Maybe Government really is hiring more people than it needs. But with the private sector not hiring as many people as it needs, Government just can't pick up the slack. And then debt collectors wonder why people have fallen behind on their payments. Gee, you don't have a job, and your family members and your friends don't either? Gee, I wonder how that could have happened? We'll take your house and car anyway.

Maybe I would've laughed at the TSA joke on another night. But if I did laugh at a joke about TSA workers unionizing, it would mean that I have forgotten two very important details: one, that TSA workers are federal employees doing their jobs, and two, that without unions, the rich feel free to walk all over the working man without any remorse whatsoever.

And another thing: if Jay Leno had been in Conan O'Brien's shoes, getting laid off from NBC, do you think he would have made any effort to help the laborers also laid off?

Chocolate War does NOT have a happy ending

The Argo is used as a funeral pyre for one of the fallen Argonauts and Jason (Jason London) and Medea (Jolene Blalock) live happily ever after. That is how the 2000 adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts ends. Hollywood tacking on happy endings to well-known literary works is nothing new.

The Chocolate War is a novel by Robert Cormier I read a long, long time ago, feels like it was in another lifetime. When the Keith Gordon adaptation came out in 1988, I didn't go see it, I can't remember if it was because I heard it was not a faithful adaptation of the novel. Now that I've finally gotten around to seeing it, I am extremely surprised to see criticisms claiming the movie has a "happy ending"!

What I remember of my reading of the book: Jerry is given an assignment by the Vigils, a secret society at the Catholic school he attends, by which he has to refuse participating in the school's chocolate sale for two weeks (I might be off on the exact length of the assignment), but when the assignment is over, Jerry keeps refusing to participate. This becomes a problem for both the Vigils and the acting headmaster as more and more students become apathetic to the sale. Archie, who I think is the president of the Vigils, comes up with a scheme by which the sale is a success (on paper) even without Jerry's participation. At the end, there is a raffle for a 'scripted' boxing match between Jerry and Janza. Jerry definitely loses the match and is badly hurt, but I can't remember if he died or not.

In the movie, Archie (Wally Ward) is forced to replace Janza in the ring. Archie can certainly throw punches, but he can hardly take them. After Jerry (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) is allowed to get his first punch in, he goes 'off script' with a non-stop barrage that quickly knocks Archie down to the deck. The whole school applauds and cheers Jerry. Even at this point I have a hard time considering this a happy ending. But if you're not convinced yet, consider how Jerry's facial expression changes after he basks in the glow of the accolades: he sees the ghost of his mother and she's not happy about this development. Nor is his friend who had been off from school due to sickness and came by in case Jerry needed him. Listen also to the conversation they have when almost everyone else has left: "I played their game," Jerry says, "I should have sold the chocolates." Since when is the protagonist expressing remorse over his actions constitute a happy ending?

Consider for comparison a nearly contemporaneous film, Back to the Future Part III. The reason it is so satisfying to see Marty "Clint Eastwood" McFly (Michael J. Fox) knock out Buford Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) is because violence is the only thing Buford will listen to. The movie even makes sure to emphasize that Buford will not listen to reason. "I thought we could discuss this like men," Marty says. No cigar, Buford shoots anyway. Luckily, Marty is wearing a makeshift bulletproof vest, and when Buford approaches to gloat over Marty's corpse, Marty knows he has ruled out all reasonable recourse and the only option is to knock Buford out.

I would actually feel sorry for Buford if he lost a chess match to Marty or indeed anyone. And that is why I feel sorry for Archie when he gets his lights knocked out: it is on the metaphorical chessboard that Archie is a formidable foe. On the boxing ring, he needs the protection of a scheme of his own devising to succeed. An honorable man should get no lasting satisfaction from defeating such an enemy, even one who on the chessboard tortured him so cruelly.

And, as the director is at pains to emphasize in the featurettes, the real tragedy of The Chocolate War isn't any individual's victory or defeat, but the fact that a system which permits and even encourages lopsided fights continues to exist.