Away We Go (Sam Medes, 2009)
Oh garbage!
I remember seeing ads for this in Dufferin Station back when I would get up super early to go to work at the TTC. I started at 7:00am, so I woke up at 6:30. I had a pretty good system worked out for dealing with such harsh hours. The coffee would be made beforehand and all my clothes would be chosen and laid out the night before. So, when my alarm screamed the sounds of JazzFM I might have even smugly hit the snooze button on occasion because I knew, no matter what, that system I worked out would get me to work on time. Here’s how it worked:
I turn off the alarm. It’s 6:30am so I have to confront not only extreme fatigue, but also the emotional strain of no-human-being-should-be-up-at-this-hour-ever. It’s hard to tell which is worse but the physical pain of forcing your body into an unnatural situation has an unpleasantness factor of about 10. But a few stumbles away I flick the coffee machine on and then schlep over to the sink to brush my teeth. It helped that at the time I lived in an apartment the size of a shoebox. Once I get dressed, I flip on the CBC. I love the CBC, but at this hour it’s kind of useless. I always seemed tojust be catching a strangly detailed, fringe sports update. And as irrelevant as sports updates are to 99.9% of the population, this broadcast happens to include high school sports. It seems absolutely insane. What’s next? Are they going to have DIY punk show listings on the national public broadcaster? Maybe updates on some other vain hobby? Who cares? Stick to public affairs and real civic issues, traffic, culture, and - I don’t know - things that apply to normal people? Sorry not everyone knows someone in some house league sport thing, and if we do, we can get the freaking scores from them!
Anyhow, if I could withstand the pain of the normally excellent CBC feeding sports blather, I put my helmet on, clip on my pass (which also gets me on transit for free), and gulp down as much coffee as I can without scalding my insides. Once I walk down Bloor at this hour it looks weird. Really weird. There’s nothing but blowing newspapers, the weird banner ad for some out-of-touch looking Portuguese play, and the construction workers hoarding the Tim Hortons. In order to insulate myself from this scene I synch my iPod with the greatest podcasts in the world. If I’m blessed then I will have a new Best Show Gems podcast cued up, or - even better - a Best Show podcast proper. If not I could always rely on - before he forsaked us through his retirement - Politics with Don Newman. Probably the last public affairs radio program made for grownups still on the air, except maybe The House, which, thankfully, is still with us.
So when I get to the subway station there it is. The last thing before I’m in motion: The movie posters. There was some Seth Rogan poster up for awhile but then, or possibly at the same time, there was this poster for the film Away We Go. It had not only a stylish design, and a SNL cast member, but also Dave Eggers on it. I was intrigued. In truth, of Dave Eggers, I’ve only ever read his interview with Bob Dylan, which was okay I guess. But I thought he must be pretty good. I figured, he’s this smart, rich, New York intellectual that all my smart friends like, so what I mean to say is that his name, and these other beforementioned factors, made me pretty sure that this was a film I should probably see.
Well it’s not surprising that a guy that reports to work everyday (temporarily, of course) does not get out to any movies very much. So I didn’t see it. But down the road I eventually acquired a copy of it on video. One night before bed I turned it on. I think I was about 10 minutes in total and listened to a patchwork of about 30 additional minutes in total. The reason for this is that I was more tired than I thought. But It’s also because Away We Go is the type of cliché, bullshit, gen-x inanity that I thought had gone the way of shows like Friends or something. This film was the stuff of bad television.
Oh, and I took exception to the sad, rich, Montreal couple who have trouble having kids. “Our generation is selfish,” the would-be father says, “we wait until we’re 30 and then wonder why when we try to have a baby it doesn’t work.” And for the first time I felt like engaging with the film. How dare you?, I thought, with the cost of student loans combined with stagnated wages and off-the-wall housing costs, compared with that of our parent’s time, many in our generation can’t even afford to start a family until our 30s. How insulting!
Utter rot, I say!
I remember seeing ads for this in Dufferin Station back when I would get up super early to go to work at the TTC. I started at 7:00am, so I woke up at 6:30. I had a pretty good system worked out for dealing with such harsh hours. The coffee would be made beforehand and all my clothes would be chosen and laid out the night before. So, when my alarm screamed the sounds of JazzFM I might have even smugly hit the snooze button on occasion because I knew, no matter what, that system I worked out would get me to work on time. Here’s how it worked:
I turn off the alarm. It’s 6:30am so I have to confront not only extreme fatigue, but also the emotional strain of no-human-being-should-be-up-at-this-hour-ever. It’s hard to tell which is worse but the physical pain of forcing your body into an unnatural situation has an unpleasantness factor of about 10. But a few stumbles away I flick the coffee machine on and then schlep over to the sink to brush my teeth. It helped that at the time I lived in an apartment the size of a shoebox. Once I get dressed, I flip on the CBC. I love the CBC, but at this hour it’s kind of useless. I always seemed tojust be catching a strangly detailed, fringe sports update. And as irrelevant as sports updates are to 99.9% of the population, this broadcast happens to include high school sports. It seems absolutely insane. What’s next? Are they going to have DIY punk show listings on the national public broadcaster? Maybe updates on some other vain hobby? Who cares? Stick to public affairs and real civic issues, traffic, culture, and - I don’t know - things that apply to normal people? Sorry not everyone knows someone in some house league sport thing, and if we do, we can get the freaking scores from them!
Anyhow, if I could withstand the pain of the normally excellent CBC feeding sports blather, I put my helmet on, clip on my pass (which also gets me on transit for free), and gulp down as much coffee as I can without scalding my insides. Once I walk down Bloor at this hour it looks weird. Really weird. There’s nothing but blowing newspapers, the weird banner ad for some out-of-touch looking Portuguese play, and the construction workers hoarding the Tim Hortons. In order to insulate myself from this scene I synch my iPod with the greatest podcasts in the world. If I’m blessed then I will have a new Best Show Gems podcast cued up, or - even better - a Best Show podcast proper. If not I could always rely on - before he forsaked us through his retirement - Politics with Don Newman. Probably the last public affairs radio program made for grownups still on the air, except maybe The House, which, thankfully, is still with us.
So when I get to the subway station there it is. The last thing before I’m in motion: The movie posters. There was some Seth Rogan poster up for awhile but then, or possibly at the same time, there was this poster for the film Away We Go. It had not only a stylish design, and a SNL cast member, but also Dave Eggers on it. I was intrigued. In truth, of Dave Eggers, I’ve only ever read his interview with Bob Dylan, which was okay I guess. But I thought he must be pretty good. I figured, he’s this smart, rich, New York intellectual that all my smart friends like, so what I mean to say is that his name, and these other beforementioned factors, made me pretty sure that this was a film I should probably see.
Well it’s not surprising that a guy that reports to work everyday (temporarily, of course) does not get out to any movies very much. So I didn’t see it. But down the road I eventually acquired a copy of it on video. One night before bed I turned it on. I think I was about 10 minutes in total and listened to a patchwork of about 30 additional minutes in total. The reason for this is that I was more tired than I thought. But It’s also because Away We Go is the type of cliché, bullshit, gen-x inanity that I thought had gone the way of shows like Friends or something. This film was the stuff of bad television.
Oh, and I took exception to the sad, rich, Montreal couple who have trouble having kids. “Our generation is selfish,” the would-be father says, “we wait until we’re 30 and then wonder why when we try to have a baby it doesn’t work.” And for the first time I felt like engaging with the film. How dare you?, I thought, with the cost of student loans combined with stagnated wages and off-the-wall housing costs, compared with that of our parent’s time, many in our generation can’t even afford to start a family until our 30s. How insulting!
Utter rot, I say!