Thoughts on The Apartment and Dumb: The Story of Big Brother Magazine

The Apartment, a classic romantic comedy with a somber vibe from 1960 in which Jack Lemmon is a put-upon underling at a big company who is pressured by his supervisors to let them use his apartment to screw their mistresses while he has to kill time outside. Shirley MacLaine is the elevator operator that he falls for who ends up being one of the mistresses, who is in a miserable secret relationship with Fred McMurray, knowing he will never leave his wife for her, and her performance is so sweet and heartbreaking. I forgot how cute MacLaine was as a very young actress, and how she brought such an endearing care to this ordinary character. Lemmon was also sweet and funny too, especially as someone who was really sick of being used as a sap by his bosses, but I was just more touched by MacLaine’s performance. This won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Lemmon and MacLaine were both nominated.

Dumb: The Story of Big Brother Magazine, is a Hulu documentary from 2017 about the 90s skateboarding magazine Big Brother, where the origins of the Jackass creators and stunt team came from. It was decent, pretty much a lot of overgrown skater dudes with a teenage mentality in their twenties making a skateboarding magazine that had a lot of boobs and dicks and off-color ad jokes in it, wanting to be the rougher side of skate culture. It definitely felt like a boys’ club to me, especially a lot of young white guys with dumb humor who had very few women or BIPOC in their staff, so it felt more insular to me. I did think it was funny that when they got bought by Larry Flynt, the magazine got a lot more tamer, because Flynt didn’t want more pornography magazines, and the corporate culture took away the scratchy DIY thing they had going on. It was fun to watch, as someone who watched a lot of Jackass when I was younger, but I also did think a lot of their humor was pretty dumb and trying too hard to shock, which it easily did with suburban parents that went on the news complaining about it, which now seems quaint in comparison to Internet accessibility to porn.