Taking the Bar is henceforth sexy

Particularly the California Bar. Or so implies a new documentary artfully titled, "A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar." It follows 6 people in last summer's effort to pass the 'most notorious' of bar exams. I'm a huge fan of clever titles and this one is really good, though it clearly hopes that it won't occur to us that it's mostly aspiring lawyers walking into the bar. I particularly like the warning on the film's homepage, truer words have never been spoken:

WARNING: Excessive computer usage can cause eye strain, finger injury, neck soreness, buttock fatigue, weight gain, general redness and irritation, halitosis, and possibly death.

Can't find it on Netflix but that's probably a good thing. I don't think I should watch it (or read anything else about the exam really) until after I manage positive results.

Here's a WSJ blog entry on the flick - the comments are so juvenile, makes me wonder how there are any lawyers or CPAs at all in CA.

The film has predictably not escaped ridicule. For example, Seth makes the excellent comment on QuizLaw that the story may actually be interesting if it's anything like his bar summer of "drinking, naked Texas co-eds," and (he adds, repeatedly, much to my relief and inspiration), "a lot of drinking."

Mean Mr. Mustard calls it, appropriately I think, "a new addition to my list of Things For Which the World is Definitely Not Crying Out." This post also came as a relief - after all, is it really such a big deal? I think this may all just be a product of an untrammeled proliferance of voyeurism. I can't say that I haven't contributed my fair share to that phenomenon.

My thoughts are that the film will be watched with uncommonly rapt attention by a very very small subset of the population. Myself included. I doubt that it will have a following on the scale of the "Hoop Dreams" contingency, but you never know - as we found out last month, the Academy is a sucker for atypical Oscar contenders.