by Grace Crawford and Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures.

Grace: Chaos. Destruction. Ruin.

Why is it that we love to watch as our world falls apart? Whether it’s for real, like a riot in a far-off country or another celebrity splattering their bad choices all over the Internet like a monkey throwing its feces, we love to watch a train wreck. It’s why we crane our heads to see an accident on the highway on the way to the office, even though we know it’s making us (and everyone behind us) late to work. It’s why we laugh uproariously when some sixteen-year-old kid on Youtube flubs a skateboard trick and slams his junk against a metal bar, most likely making him a soprano for life. The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude. It means, “taking pleasure from another’s misfortune.”

That basically defines the entire monster movie genre. Cities are leveled, lives are destroyed, and people run amok in the streets, screaming their heads off and looking for someone to save them. And someone will: a hero, marked by fate (or by the screenwriter), will stop the monster threat and save the city… or what’s left of it.

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by Thom Yee and Grace Crawford

Silver Linings Playbook images courtesy of The Weinstein Company

Thom: Mental illness is a serious and pervasive issue in today’s society and it behooves us all to take it seriously and to treat those who suffer from these maladies with respect.

Or so I’m told. As far as I can tell, mental illness has had no appreciable impact on any significant element of my life. No appreciable impact that is, except for almost every customer that walks into the A/V shop I work at once a week, mostly for the discount. For those that don’t know, I work and live in downtown Edmonton, and it seems like at least every other customer who walks into my store suffers from some chemical imbalance, whether it’s the old lady hermit who’s constantly buying different TV antennas and can’t stop complaining about having to pay so much to Shaw when she only wants to watch CBC, the guy who works at the nearby car wash who’s always asking to use the phone before buying another DVD player only to return it three days later, or the self-proclaimed “audiophile” who swears he can tell the difference between the cheap and expensive speaker wire (and as a commissioned salesperson, thank God for that guy).

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