Your Transtional Period Quizo Update

I am not going to speak at much length as to the Eagles loss yesterday. There is precious little to say. By any objective measure a season in which your team reaches the conference championship is an unqualified success. That the Eagles defense chose said conference championship to be terrible is unfortunate, but it is no more than that, and life goes on. 

A team that everyone had written off as hopeless two months ago was ten minutes from the Super Bowl. As I have said here previously regarding the Eagles, and as I have recently taken to saying to the Chelsea fans who are wailing and gnashing their teeth at our current dip in form, there is a distinct difference between not winning everything and not winning anything. I'm not saying that professional sports are some lame equivalent of "everyone gets a trophy day" at the local under-8s, but success is not a binary proposition. There are shades of grey between total success and total failure, and if you are really so dissatisfied at being no worse than the third or fourth best in the world at something I would politely suggest that you will find life in general to be an increasingly frustrating enterprise.

Put another, less prosaic way: the Eagles made the NFC Championship for the fifth time in eight years, and if you don't think that's pretty fucking good you are wrong and stupid.

I admit that I was fairly distraught for a little while after the game yesterday until I changed my mood in a manner I will describe shortly, but if you are still writhing in agony over the outcome and are in dire need of feeling better I suggest you go grab yourself a copy of Friday's midseason premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which will cheer you up by the virtue of reminding you that there are things far, FAR more depressing than the Eagles losing the NFC Championship, foremost among them Friday's midseason premiere of Battlestar Galactica.

I will avoid major spoilers for those who have not yet seen Friday's episode, but suffice it to say that it brings the concept of a really depressing hour of television to places I didn't think were possible. There are sad and/or depressing episodes of TV to be sure; the finales of MASH, China Beach, Deep Space Nine and Quantum Leap immediately spring to mind, but Friday's BSG blows right past depressing into pure, downright existential despair.

There is a moment from the episode, and you know what I'm talking about if you've seen it, where things are happening and everything is bopping along and then suddenly you shout "HOLY FUCK!" at your television and you realize that more than any show currently on television BSG is seriously playing for keeps. It was never silly sci-fi twaddle to begin with, but these last ten episodes are a shift in the show's essential question from "how do we survive in a dangerous and complicated world?" to "would the last person who even bothers to draw breath anymore kindly make sure they turn the gas off before they go?"

Much like being down on the Eagles, not watching Battlestar Galactica is wrong and stupid.

Now, personally, I lifted my post-game malaise by hitting my Netflix pile and popping in a movie. My choice ended up being "Michael Clayton," which now means that I have finally seen all of last year's Best Picture nominees just in time for THIS year's on Thursday morning. The movie was good enough, I suppose – that George Clooney is quite dreamy after all – but I can now state with certainty that 2008 was a pretty meager year for Best Picture nominees. Between the "good-but-meh," almost perfunctory well-made-edness of Michael Clayton, the hideously overrated Juno – and I mean HIDEOUSLY, I don't know in what kind of fucked-up parallel universe this paper-thin wisp of a movie is a Best Picture nominee, and don't even get me started on what a cruel joke that Best Screenplay Oscar is – and the baffling pointlessness of There Will Be Blood and No Country, the fact that Atonement did not win Best Picture in a walk is something of a mystery to me. It is the flat-out best movie of those five in a walk, and as you might have guessed, deviation from this point is – say it with me – wrong and stupid.

For the record, my guesses at Best Picture this Thursday are Benjamin Button, Slumdog, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon and Revolutionary Road, the last of these because a) I hate Sam Mendes and b) the world hates me. It never ceases to amaze me that I am one of the only people who recognizes the fact that Mendes needs to be shot and soon, not just for continuing to make his ponderous, overwrought, God-I-wish-I-was-doing-anything-but-making-movies movies, but for the fact that he is keeping Kate Winslet from the rest of us. So, yes, he needs to die. Or at the very least go back to the theatre (where he is actually quite good) and stay there. And also become gay.

JLK