Bar-blasé

My life is all about bar review, as if you couldn't tell, and today the bar story is about a youngish woman who studied corporations for 7 hours on Tuesday in preparation for the NY practice test, couldn't take it anymore at 11 pm and walked a mile home exhausted, woke up blearily at 8 am, went to take said practice test, and (1) estimates that she got about 3-4 points out of 20 (you need 10 to pass) for the essays, but (2) marvels that the most intense feeling she had about the whole thing was not anxiety, but boredom.

Seriously, I went to the bathroom halfway through and considered taking a 10-minute break to check email, because I was SO bored by the test. It's not that I find it easy. It's not. I didn't know the law well enough, and even when I did know the law, it was hard to apply it on the test. But the overwhelming feeling was one of boredom and resentment.

The other thing my life is about right now is finding funding, and I haven't done much on that front after an active few days here and there earlier this month. On Monday, however, The Turtle had an interview with the local bar association's foundation, and reported that it went very well, although the interviewer only makes recommends to the committee, who then in turn recommends grant recipients to the full Board. But she liked the project and the only problem is that our nonprofit status is pending, which may simply take us out of the running from the get-go. Fortunately, we'll probably find out about that by the end of next week.

The Turtle and I are going to see the pro bono manager at a large local firm tomorrow, basically for kicks, since she's already said the chances of getting funding from the firm are nil. But The Turtle thinks it'll be good to get the word out about us, and who knows, maybe a miracle will happen and the firm will give us money.

On a topic shockingly not related to the bar or funding, you may have seen that a few days ago, I linked to this blog post written by Joss Whedon. During one of my many mini-breaks yesterday, I delved a little deeper into the topic, and discovered there's been a big controversy about a soon-to-be-released slasher pic (or, as people have recently been calling it, torture-porn) starring Elisha Cuthbert called Captivity. You may have seen the ads for it -- I saw them on subway trains and, even before reading about the hullaboo, thought they were disturbing/effective. Well-done, even, the goal being to attract attention.

The film (which is by most reports not very good) is about the kidnapping, gruesome torture, and killing of the Cuthbert character, a model. The controversy was about the ads that the production company claimed had been "accidentally" released, which depicted four frames of Cuthbert labeled "Abduction," "Confinement," "Torture," and "Termination." There's a copy of it here, if you want to see it. (I did.)

I would never see any of the recent spate of "torture-porn" films (Saw, Hostel) and I would never watch Captivity either; the minimal torture scenes in 3 Kings, House of Spirits, and The Good Shepherd made me feel ill and bothered me for days, and the stuff I learned about in Tuol Sleng, a notorious prison during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, haunted me for months. I can sort of understand why people make films like this and why people watch -- there's a rawness and primacy about absolute power used to hurt others that makes for an intense viewing experience. I remember the torture scenes in those movies with wincing clarity. They brought a menacing edge, a real fear to the stories being told about war and political unrest.

I guess there can be value to creating and viewing torture porn too, sort of like the value one gets from horror movies in general. I don't like being scared, but others do, and again, there's that rawness of experience, an exhiliration of sorts that comes from dipping your toes into the pools of darker human emotions.

Not having seen Captivity (it comes out in July, and apparently there will be no advance viewings) or any of the other films of that ilk, I can't sit here and make any judgments about their artistry. But I find the whole controversy extremely interesting. Where do you draw the line? Why did Stephen King say that he liked Hostel II, where apparently a young woman gets cut in half, but that Captivity disturbs him? Why did some people find American Psycho (in which the main character kills one of his a male victims with a bat and uses, among other things, a drill, some cheese, and a rat to torture a woman) brilliant while others thought it completely lacked all artistic merit? Are some types of otherwise gender-neutral torture more disturbing when done to a woman? Is the torture of women on some level more disturbing than torture of men?

It's all very icky and I don't like to think about it, but it's also fascinating. If you haven't heard anything about Captivity, its ads, or torture-porn, you might find it worth Googling too.

And that is all that has been occupying my head for the past few days. The End.