more like Wizards of the MOST
...
D&D is fun
Dungeons and Dragons is every bit as nerdy and fun as you imagine it to be. That hardly seems like a loaded sentence; maybe you'll understand better in a moment:
Dungeons and Dragons, as advertised, is a game wherin the characters you and your friends generate (or have generated for you) are limited only by your character sheets' numeric allegiances (5 Strength, 2 Dexterity, etc. with flowchart correlations to lower functions like skills and abilities that the player adds to dice rolls when determining action viability) and your collective imagination.
The keen player will immediately infer that it is their own fault if the grandiosity of the adventure doesn't stack up with their expectations, and that all limitations beyond that which have been imposed by the game proper (via character sheets and what can only be ultimately barebones story arcs) are those imposed by the party at hand.
At its best, it's a game about solving complex problems with a group of people you care about.
At its worst, it's everything we hate about ourselves and our friends. So just weigh that out real quick.
There is a Correct story arc presented, and your party can stray from that arc, provided your Game Master is prepared to deal with that and your party will forgive Her any missteps.
See that clever little lateral move implied, there? That shift of onus?
The business model is to defer as much of the Burden of Entertainment onto the player as possible while infinitely granulating the process through which violence is conducted, every iteration and revamp of this process (we're up to version 5 now?) seeming dedicated to re-edifying the inevitable need for combat, confrontation, the taking of Space from The Other. Every year more and more rules are laid down concerning what is and is not allowed during these confrontations, precious little gives us a solid framework or layout of what the world at large looks like or how we might contribute to it overall.
Do our characters exist in a dictatorship? A federation, or direct democracy? Are we a republic or monarchy? Can we work to change that? Do we have families? Where are they? Is this a Pangaea world like Earth in Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, or have the continents drifted and left oceans between landmasses that contact betwixt which may be as yet unknown? What do they eat here? Am I beautiful?
Just the kind of thing you'd be punched in the arm for asking. Who cares?
Well, everything is related, and if everything is whatever we say it is, then where does that logic conclude? What isn't possible? Why don't these threads match up? That the game universe, as all others, is a roiling sea of nihilistic chaos and destruction, feels unsatisfactory in a framework governed by spreadsheets.
D&D is not necessarily guilty of any of these charges or any malocclusion it produces really at all. It eludes conviction on all fronts. It sacrifices itself on the alter of player creativity. It crawls to us, desperate: "Please." It wheezes."I am only what you make of me."
Well who the fuck has time for that? Boardgames have rules, big-people no-fuck-around rules, and when I'm playing a good game it's obvious who's turn it is and what I'm supposed to be doing. There is not shortage of rules in the D&D universe, but that's a problem too.
Ahh! Are you lost? So am I, and I've been sifting through manuals for days.
It is whatever comes out of you when sitting down to play, and we betray our Disney-esque programming in our obvious longing for hideous sub-species who are necessarily malevolent to do battle with and squash heroically.
Fuck Goblins. They're ugly and a lower life form and always bad. We attack!
At all turns the question of scope rears its hideous, slavering maw:
If you want something that can be anything, you can't tell it what... not to be?
Can someone check my pulse?
I'm overwhelmed with curiosity. If every game can be whatever I want it to be, then the only limitation is me, and I failed if I didn't make it awesome enough for me. Also, that means that the game itself represents a potentially infinite repository of fun that I may or may not be accurately tapping into at any given time. So any time I alot for D&D is a good investment, because it is (via the possibility, for all intents and purposes) Maximum Fun, and also any moment it is not Maximum Fun is wasted. If one in ten times I spend playing D&D is Maximum Fun then all the rest of it was worth it, because the meta game is vying always to learn how to recreate the Maximum Fun for a Maximum Period, which is limited always by player scheduling and snack/beverage reliability.
So if x represents the minimum possible amount expended,
MFxMP
----------
xEffort = An ideal Dungeons and Dragons game
It all looks perfect on paper, I know, but perfect it is not. Playing D&D is fun because playing make-believe is fun. It's the first game anyone learns and for a few it's the last. If you get invited, go to a D&D party, anyone can do it. This really is one of those situations where latching on to people who are more skilled than you, doing little and contributing where you think you can while minimizing mistakes can truly generate a positive yield reliably.
If, however, like me you find team sports repulsive, you might find the challenge of coexisting with whoever would agree to such an unclean ritual a challenging social puzzle that offered minimal personal risk and real potential for human connection, if in brief spurts.
Play D&D
Saturday, August 12, 2017
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Gilmore Girls, Retrospectively
How can one express?
...
The girls are... well, either you know or you don't. If you don't know, I understand it's my undertaken position to try to explain, but I'm feeling a lot of feelings about this lately and I just need you to be there for me right now.
In preparation for the Netflix revival, a rewatch from season 3 has been undertaken, and we're going to be one season shy by the time the new miniseries comes out. There will be four one-and-a-half hour episodes totaling six hours of instant classic Gilmore Girls.
In the pilot episode, the town of Stars Hollow is fully built and is consistent throughout the series. It's a comfortable happy place where all the problems are very neatly presented and you just don't need to worry about certain types of crime and human behavior pervading the still reasonably plausible little world they've made here. You come to adore the quaint goings on of the little plebs of the GG's small town; we laugh at their inferiority and quixotic personality disorders to feel better about ourselves while simultaneously rewarding ourselves for being so empathetic as to adore the little silly people. It works for me! The nonsense they prioritize as well as the clear and present desperation they exude while struggling through the logic puzzles they entrap themselves within is just gold and serves as ample balm to my ego when I'm sad, sick or just nostalgic for a bizarre but naive and emotionally earnest padded emotional rollercoaster of youth - but you know, without any personal consequences.
We watch the development of Rory in concert with her actresses' progressing maturation into womanhood, and here again is gratification in feeling like we somehow contributed to the rearing of somebody any parent would be proud of without having to actually do anything. It's a princess story, is what it is; Rory Gilmore is the scrappy smalltown tomboy who's serious about education and somewhat inherits all the backing and support of a set of millionaire grandparents. These grandparents offer payroll allowing her to attend an extremely distinguished finishing school which sets her up for lofty post-secondary goals, but as in real life priorities shift and in finding her footing Rory makes the mistakes necessary to learn who one is and ultimately strike out at the world as a collected and composed Young Professional. She's gorgeous, but she doesn't know it. She loves intensely but with caution, and her always-appropriate curiosity is juxtaposed by her mother's untempered abandon and fits of passionate poor decision making. So really there's something for everybody all the time, the middle ground where these two meet keeps them in balance and each gives the other a fixed point in the universe around which they might revolve. Hijinks beset them as well as real tragedy, but there is no rape in Stars Hollow. It's like 9/11 never happens and things are pretty much solid on the East Coast.
Not to say certain characters don't wind up having relatively crappy lives, and not to say that a conscientious observer might conclude that certain characters are the way they are because their upbringings were objectively just awful, but room is left for younger, more tender viewers to whom this might not occur to let those subtly dark themes slip by. We get that it was hard for Lorelai and Lane in that we get that it was hard for Cinderella to have to do all the cookery and washing up for her evil step-sisters, but there is room to linger over what's entailed in what we know about the respective characters histories (much less endings) and think: "Fuck."
And speaking of endings, the series didn't, not properly. They sort of left things open for a new season, but this was during the time that downloading was really becoming a thing, and I'm not sure they really had any idea how many people were watching at that point, and there's no real reason why they would. Netflix brings back what people watch, and I still remember the thrill of hearing the two were joining forces while silently steaming at having spent paper money, Christmas money, at an age when those two things meant quite a bit, on a box set (which is admittedly now somewhat scattered).
I remember being told by a friend that Gilmore Girls was the first show ever erected by an advertising conglomerate as a result of market testing on the tone, tempo and nature of what is acceptable for mothers and daughters after school with regards to susceptibility. If you imagine how pleasant and fast an advertiser needs to give you thirty seconds of voiceover about why you could really use a particular brand of cleaning agent, that's the speed and rhythm of a good amount of the conversation in Gilmore Girls. They want you pliant and supple when you are delivered to the commercial, already lulled into their language and nature, anesthetized and eager to be told. When the advertiser speaks to you, it is easier to imagine they are your friend in some sinister way, but watching the show without commercials is like all the glory of getting drunk without getting hosed with a bar bill later. But you know. Emotionally drunk.
Watch Gilmore Girls.
...
The girls are... well, either you know or you don't. If you don't know, I understand it's my undertaken position to try to explain, but I'm feeling a lot of feelings about this lately and I just need you to be there for me right now.
In preparation for the Netflix revival, a rewatch from season 3 has been undertaken, and we're going to be one season shy by the time the new miniseries comes out. There will be four one-and-a-half hour episodes totaling six hours of instant classic Gilmore Girls.
In the pilot episode, the town of Stars Hollow is fully built and is consistent throughout the series. It's a comfortable happy place where all the problems are very neatly presented and you just don't need to worry about certain types of crime and human behavior pervading the still reasonably plausible little world they've made here. You come to adore the quaint goings on of the little plebs of the GG's small town; we laugh at their inferiority and quixotic personality disorders to feel better about ourselves while simultaneously rewarding ourselves for being so empathetic as to adore the little silly people. It works for me! The nonsense they prioritize as well as the clear and present desperation they exude while struggling through the logic puzzles they entrap themselves within is just gold and serves as ample balm to my ego when I'm sad, sick or just nostalgic for a bizarre but naive and emotionally earnest padded emotional rollercoaster of youth - but you know, without any personal consequences.
We watch the development of Rory in concert with her actresses' progressing maturation into womanhood, and here again is gratification in feeling like we somehow contributed to the rearing of somebody any parent would be proud of without having to actually do anything. It's a princess story, is what it is; Rory Gilmore is the scrappy smalltown tomboy who's serious about education and somewhat inherits all the backing and support of a set of millionaire grandparents. These grandparents offer payroll allowing her to attend an extremely distinguished finishing school which sets her up for lofty post-secondary goals, but as in real life priorities shift and in finding her footing Rory makes the mistakes necessary to learn who one is and ultimately strike out at the world as a collected and composed Young Professional. She's gorgeous, but she doesn't know it. She loves intensely but with caution, and her always-appropriate curiosity is juxtaposed by her mother's untempered abandon and fits of passionate poor decision making. So really there's something for everybody all the time, the middle ground where these two meet keeps them in balance and each gives the other a fixed point in the universe around which they might revolve. Hijinks beset them as well as real tragedy, but there is no rape in Stars Hollow. It's like 9/11 never happens and things are pretty much solid on the East Coast.
Not to say certain characters don't wind up having relatively crappy lives, and not to say that a conscientious observer might conclude that certain characters are the way they are because their upbringings were objectively just awful, but room is left for younger, more tender viewers to whom this might not occur to let those subtly dark themes slip by. We get that it was hard for Lorelai and Lane in that we get that it was hard for Cinderella to have to do all the cookery and washing up for her evil step-sisters, but there is room to linger over what's entailed in what we know about the respective characters histories (much less endings) and think: "Fuck."
And speaking of endings, the series didn't, not properly. They sort of left things open for a new season, but this was during the time that downloading was really becoming a thing, and I'm not sure they really had any idea how many people were watching at that point, and there's no real reason why they would. Netflix brings back what people watch, and I still remember the thrill of hearing the two were joining forces while silently steaming at having spent paper money, Christmas money, at an age when those two things meant quite a bit, on a box set (which is admittedly now somewhat scattered).
I remember being told by a friend that Gilmore Girls was the first show ever erected by an advertising conglomerate as a result of market testing on the tone, tempo and nature of what is acceptable for mothers and daughters after school with regards to susceptibility. If you imagine how pleasant and fast an advertiser needs to give you thirty seconds of voiceover about why you could really use a particular brand of cleaning agent, that's the speed and rhythm of a good amount of the conversation in Gilmore Girls. They want you pliant and supple when you are delivered to the commercial, already lulled into their language and nature, anesthetized and eager to be told. When the advertiser speaks to you, it is easier to imagine they are your friend in some sinister way, but watching the show without commercials is like all the glory of getting drunk without getting hosed with a bar bill later. But you know. Emotionally drunk.
Watch Gilmore Girls.
The Vampire Siries (I should have just said Vampire Diaries)
This show hooked its hands under my armpits and lifted me up off the ground like a surprising new friend who's amiable enough but a little too emotional. You hang out with them anyway, because that can be exciting and fun when it isn't bad.
I'm not caught up to the current season, I'm breaking into the sixth (6th), but I feel like we can call this one. All the beautiful people have such complicated problems, and they're all in conflict with each other and all of their claims are so emotionally just. You find yourself texting the acronym "TVD" to people and putting the word "so" in two capitol letters, multiple times, within the same message.
It's not scary at all. It's not even creepy, like an utterly straightfaced Buffy that asks fewer questions and puts more emphasis on coiffed hair and killer outfits. And the outfits are super killer.
I'm just never watching it and thinking: "I wish I was not watching this." The best part about the show is that I don't yearn for it, you can take this in at any pace, devouring or left alone for weeks at a time, and it's always just chock full of feelings. There's just always more turns, events unfold to reveal more history and we get to jump between multiple storylines with a large enough ensemble to keep it interesting when pairings get shaken up. It's late highschool/early college period vampy drama on the right side of complicated. As someone not usually inclined I couldn't help but scoff and say to myself things like "Well, that's a ridiculous plotline. But obviously you would want to get the magic immortality ring and use its abilities to stage a distraction for the werewolf-vampire hybrid, so I bet Mary is going to meet up with Greg, oh! He's going to tell her that Sally is a vampire now! OMG!!!1!"
If you can't let yourself get swept up in crap like this, you may have lost something, and you might invest in trying to get it back. This is harmless fun in massive supply and if you've tasted the delight of BBC soap opera and need more you might be surprised how much stuff there is out there aimed at this audience but created by the same people. It's weird that the vampire that remembers before America was a thing wants to scam on some highschool girl, but I'm watching it, so what does that make me? To be fair, though, it's only because he's exploring a connection from her to an equally antique undead woman he used to love and must suppress with arcane magicks for totally serious reasons with far-reaching implications. If we could ever tie off the vampire craze, I suppose The Vampire Diaries could be the way to do it. There's clearly respect due to the Anne Rice-verse here, and we're sort of meant to assume an Eduardian/Lestat cross. It's the show I think a lot of people wanted Twilight to be so badly they made those movies into a match for their needs. This is a re-roll of that, with the shiny element taken out and a few others put in. If you need still more after this, the spinoff series The Originals awaits, so #showhole will not pervade your entity entirely upon finishing. There is hope.
Watch The Vampire Diaries.
This show hooked its hands under my armpits and lifted me up off the ground like a surprising new friend who's amiable enough but a little too emotional. You hang out with them anyway, because that can be exciting and fun when it isn't bad.
I'm not caught up to the current season, I'm breaking into the sixth (6th), but I feel like we can call this one. All the beautiful people have such complicated problems, and they're all in conflict with each other and all of their claims are so emotionally just. You find yourself texting the acronym "TVD" to people and putting the word "so" in two capitol letters, multiple times, within the same message.
It's not scary at all. It's not even creepy, like an utterly straightfaced Buffy that asks fewer questions and puts more emphasis on coiffed hair and killer outfits. And the outfits are super killer.
I'm just never watching it and thinking: "I wish I was not watching this." The best part about the show is that I don't yearn for it, you can take this in at any pace, devouring or left alone for weeks at a time, and it's always just chock full of feelings. There's just always more turns, events unfold to reveal more history and we get to jump between multiple storylines with a large enough ensemble to keep it interesting when pairings get shaken up. It's late highschool/early college period vampy drama on the right side of complicated. As someone not usually inclined I couldn't help but scoff and say to myself things like "Well, that's a ridiculous plotline. But obviously you would want to get the magic immortality ring and use its abilities to stage a distraction for the werewolf-vampire hybrid, so I bet Mary is going to meet up with Greg, oh! He's going to tell her that Sally is a vampire now! OMG!!!1!"
If you can't let yourself get swept up in crap like this, you may have lost something, and you might invest in trying to get it back. This is harmless fun in massive supply and if you've tasted the delight of BBC soap opera and need more you might be surprised how much stuff there is out there aimed at this audience but created by the same people. It's weird that the vampire that remembers before America was a thing wants to scam on some highschool girl, but I'm watching it, so what does that make me? To be fair, though, it's only because he's exploring a connection from her to an equally antique undead woman he used to love and must suppress with arcane magicks for totally serious reasons with far-reaching implications. If we could ever tie off the vampire craze, I suppose The Vampire Diaries could be the way to do it. There's clearly respect due to the Anne Rice-verse here, and we're sort of meant to assume an Eduardian/Lestat cross. It's the show I think a lot of people wanted Twilight to be so badly they made those movies into a match for their needs. This is a re-roll of that, with the shiny element taken out and a few others put in. If you need still more after this, the spinoff series The Originals awaits, so #showhole will not pervade your entity entirely upon finishing. There is hope.
Watch The Vampire Diaries.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Jingle Most of the Way
You know what movie I don't want to watch all the way through? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jingle All The Way, the cringingly funny Christmas classic that Netflix offered up for a 20 minute thrill. I think it's funny that he's threatened by his disgusting hipster liberal intellectual neighbor, who is decidedly a villain and a demon upon closer inspection (as are they all), but overcomes him with good old-fashioned American hatred and head-down dogged determination. Nevermind that our protagonist is emotionally unavailable and his wife is drowning in a manicured, ticky-tacky mental prison of her own demise, her deep-seated loneliness and depression are no match for what I'm sure is another in a long string of promises and false lessons from our silk-shirted huckster hero. There's nothing that can get some stupid toy into the hands of a needy child quite like the pure intensity of the reddest Austrian you know, and as symbols of devotion, protection and dedication go, action figures might as well do.
It strikes me that we open on Arnie desperately grasping at straws in his sales job spouting flatly empty promises to who need ridiculous and impossible things, and telling them that they're his #1 priority because they simply cannot be told that they aren't. Whether he's reading that correctly or not, he has to bend to their every whim, because the consequences for not are unthinkable. As with the toy, Arnold's wife will take his child away if he doesn't somehow pull off this Christmas miracle. Nevermind that he wastes his life buried in paper behind a desk shouting into a telephone while micromanaging spreadsheets. It's common practice for his assistant to hold up and flip through signage to communicate messages to him because the idea of having adequate time between phone calls to speak like a human isn't realistic. He bleeds desperation and pressure, everything about this strikes me as a comic dystopic outtake from a much better movie, something in Brazil's B-reel. It's far too sympathizing for me to decide he's an asshole ten minutes later.
Nevermind that he slaves this way to feed and clothe the family he's decried for neglecting. Motherfucker I am out here feeding you, is that not perfectly clear? The man is a lion; he laughs at hobbies and personal reflection. He needs money, because that's how his family interprets love. Do you see where they live? In 2015 that kind of area is gated when built. 2016, sorry.
Whatever. There's some goofy shit and he's so loud and it's awesome when people fall down. Everything about this is fucked, the essence of consumerism and an absolute boiling point of misdirected intention intersecting at a terminal endpoint that would give any sane person a nervous breakdown and force a total reevaluation of priorities, which his family seems to demand but likely might not accept. You cannot tell me it would have meant the same to that kid for his Dad to have been home with him all that time rather than scouring the malls all hours like some verminous post-apocalyptic scavenger. He needs it Christmas Day. Bitch you need to be thankful Christmas came at all, there'd be no presents for three Christmases if I knew the legitimacy of my contribution to my family after 8-10 hours a day of pressure-cooker sales 50 weeks out of the year was ultimately proved worthy by whether or not the right toys were under the tree.
The movie is about misplaced values. It's about putting too much emphasis on the wrong things, and I agree that their family would have been better off in a smaller, shittier house, with fewer toys, and more time for the father to be around making stuff with the son and doing family projects. If the point of the movie is that Arnold needs to stop grinding away at the wrong things and focus more on the important stuff, family love and enjoyment, I support that entirely. I'm imagining Arnold learning his lesson here and staging a Jerry Maguire walkout, demanding to know "wchooos camin' wit meh?!" He loves, he looses, he loves again, he has heartfelt realizations about his deepest issues and displaced priorities and focuses on his artistic side. They move out of the suburbs and into a lower rent community, but Arnold is working with a not-for-profit and finding he doesn't miss his suburban now that what he does with his time means real change for helpless people.
I wonder how pleased his wife and son would be then. Maybe they'd be amazed at the openness and warmth of their new patriarch. Or, it could be that this man wasn't the gripping acquisition-driven man his wife married, that she liked nice things, and took pride in having the kind of house and accouterments that comes with a successful husband who knows how to close and just wants to spend his free time loving the people he sacrifices all his free time for. I wonder if it ever occurred to these people that they got more out of telling Arnold that he was fucking everything up than they would from having him smiling and blinking from across a coffee table every night, asking them what they wanted to do. Particularly if that meant a hit in quality of life, and little Jordan or whatever his name is didn't get to have his clearly brand-name shit. There's a benefit not often perceived by young people to having their AND-1s and crisp preppy stuff, those who don't have it recognize it the most and those who are also at this level often take it as a baseline for prospective playmate material. But that's none of my business. You don't need to be rich to give your kids a good life, but I do understand the impulse to try to give them the best. The movie tends to reassure us this guy is an asshole repeatedly, and I'm like, yeah. He is an asshole. I don't want to hang out with this guy. But they tend to attract and raise people like these, for whom I have little sympathy as well. The whole thing gestures toward a cultural ouroboros nobody can benefit from, elbowing me in the ribs and going, "THAT guy doesn't know how to work the system." It's a broken, garbage system, and I don't agree with working it, and I don't admire people who do. So. In letting go of the emotional bonds Jingle likes to tug at we can all take pleasure in giggling at Sinbad shrieking.
Watch the parade scene and the warehouse scene in Jingle All the Way.
You know what movie I don't want to watch all the way through? Arnold Schwarzenegger's Jingle All The Way, the cringingly funny Christmas classic that Netflix offered up for a 20 minute thrill. I think it's funny that he's threatened by his disgusting hipster liberal intellectual neighbor, who is decidedly a villain and a demon upon closer inspection (as are they all), but overcomes him with good old-fashioned American hatred and head-down dogged determination. Nevermind that our protagonist is emotionally unavailable and his wife is drowning in a manicured, ticky-tacky mental prison of her own demise, her deep-seated loneliness and depression are no match for what I'm sure is another in a long string of promises and false lessons from our silk-shirted huckster hero. There's nothing that can get some stupid toy into the hands of a needy child quite like the pure intensity of the reddest Austrian you know, and as symbols of devotion, protection and dedication go, action figures might as well do.
It strikes me that we open on Arnie desperately grasping at straws in his sales job spouting flatly empty promises to who need ridiculous and impossible things, and telling them that they're his #1 priority because they simply cannot be told that they aren't. Whether he's reading that correctly or not, he has to bend to their every whim, because the consequences for not are unthinkable. As with the toy, Arnold's wife will take his child away if he doesn't somehow pull off this Christmas miracle. Nevermind that he wastes his life buried in paper behind a desk shouting into a telephone while micromanaging spreadsheets. It's common practice for his assistant to hold up and flip through signage to communicate messages to him because the idea of having adequate time between phone calls to speak like a human isn't realistic. He bleeds desperation and pressure, everything about this strikes me as a comic dystopic outtake from a much better movie, something in Brazil's B-reel. It's far too sympathizing for me to decide he's an asshole ten minutes later.
Nevermind that he slaves this way to feed and clothe the family he's decried for neglecting. Motherfucker I am out here feeding you, is that not perfectly clear? The man is a lion; he laughs at hobbies and personal reflection. He needs money, because that's how his family interprets love. Do you see where they live? In 2015 that kind of area is gated when built. 2016, sorry.
Whatever. There's some goofy shit and he's so loud and it's awesome when people fall down. Everything about this is fucked, the essence of consumerism and an absolute boiling point of misdirected intention intersecting at a terminal endpoint that would give any sane person a nervous breakdown and force a total reevaluation of priorities, which his family seems to demand but likely might not accept. You cannot tell me it would have meant the same to that kid for his Dad to have been home with him all that time rather than scouring the malls all hours like some verminous post-apocalyptic scavenger. He needs it Christmas Day. Bitch you need to be thankful Christmas came at all, there'd be no presents for three Christmases if I knew the legitimacy of my contribution to my family after 8-10 hours a day of pressure-cooker sales 50 weeks out of the year was ultimately proved worthy by whether or not the right toys were under the tree.
The movie is about misplaced values. It's about putting too much emphasis on the wrong things, and I agree that their family would have been better off in a smaller, shittier house, with fewer toys, and more time for the father to be around making stuff with the son and doing family projects. If the point of the movie is that Arnold needs to stop grinding away at the wrong things and focus more on the important stuff, family love and enjoyment, I support that entirely. I'm imagining Arnold learning his lesson here and staging a Jerry Maguire walkout, demanding to know "wchooos camin' wit meh?!" He loves, he looses, he loves again, he has heartfelt realizations about his deepest issues and displaced priorities and focuses on his artistic side. They move out of the suburbs and into a lower rent community, but Arnold is working with a not-for-profit and finding he doesn't miss his suburban now that what he does with his time means real change for helpless people.
I wonder how pleased his wife and son would be then. Maybe they'd be amazed at the openness and warmth of their new patriarch. Or, it could be that this man wasn't the gripping acquisition-driven man his wife married, that she liked nice things, and took pride in having the kind of house and accouterments that comes with a successful husband who knows how to close and just wants to spend his free time loving the people he sacrifices all his free time for. I wonder if it ever occurred to these people that they got more out of telling Arnold that he was fucking everything up than they would from having him smiling and blinking from across a coffee table every night, asking them what they wanted to do. Particularly if that meant a hit in quality of life, and little Jordan or whatever his name is didn't get to have his clearly brand-name shit. There's a benefit not often perceived by young people to having their AND-1s and crisp preppy stuff, those who don't have it recognize it the most and those who are also at this level often take it as a baseline for prospective playmate material. But that's none of my business. You don't need to be rich to give your kids a good life, but I do understand the impulse to try to give them the best. The movie tends to reassure us this guy is an asshole repeatedly, and I'm like, yeah. He is an asshole. I don't want to hang out with this guy. But they tend to attract and raise people like these, for whom I have little sympathy as well. The whole thing gestures toward a cultural ouroboros nobody can benefit from, elbowing me in the ribs and going, "THAT guy doesn't know how to work the system." It's a broken, garbage system, and I don't agree with working it, and I don't admire people who do. So. In letting go of the emotional bonds Jingle likes to tug at we can all take pleasure in giggling at Sinbad shrieking.
Watch the parade scene and the warehouse scene in Jingle All the Way.
Friday, December 4, 2015
T's Take on The Last Hunga Gamezz
So, yeah.
If you saw the first of the two last Hungry Games, you don't need me. If you care at all you'll have seen it and liked it, or you're just a bad person who can't pleased.
Wait.
What we're seeing in this fourth iteration of a jonky euphemistically feminine dystopia wherein the mincing, fashion and art-focused cultural swine of a neo-doofus, nega-liberal populous allows the enslavement of entire swathes of humanity (districts, as you will come to know them) in favor of the special indulgence of the .00001% because they're just sort of weak artsy lady-people who don't even understand things like whatever. They care about aesthetic and poetry and culture and literature and all that other artsy-fartsy idiot stuff that dangerous Intellectual people indulge in when society runs away with itself. It's not even discussed that this one district in more than a dozen(?) exists entirely in a state of tireless pandering to and worship of its most elite members, nor how crushing and oppressive and bitter, heartless, cruel that regime might be to serve from the inside. I would rather have found this entire sequence to events to have been viewed from the perspective of a janitor in a government building than the Great Miss Everdeen. The parallels are appropriately cutting, the requisite pomp and circumstance are offered to the title Hunger Games wherein young, supple, reasonably attractive combatants are sentenced to assassinate one-another in effectively sentient, deadly environments that resemble any sort of Truman Show that could possibly make any sense at all. We are all Katniss, of course, in that we are thrown by society into impossible circumstances, ill-equipped but convinced that humanity alone can save us even in a harsh wilderness of predatory instinct and industrial construct.
I should alert you to a spoiler here. The Whatever'th Hunger Games are even announced by title, only to have that illusion dumped at the first opportunity and allow a will-they-won't-they un-pissing contest between noncombatants Petra Malark and Whatsits Thorsbrother. There is zero chemistry, at all, and everything is just fine I guess. Good talk bruh.
It's a political documentary, and it always was. There happened to be some high points early in the production, but there might be in just such an uprising. The author and perhaps the movie production crew took far too much/little care in creating a believable end to the successful pundits of a newly run revolution. The wartime champions, the ones that will win you an empire; the Churchills... they're not fit to rebuild & they don't want to. It's best to let them to their cabins, to their solace, to their lovers and their comforts and whatever ease therapy might provide them. Unchallenged and without the need of the common man, their relevance evaporates and they are suddenly and horrifically Real People. You don't want to look at them any more, and are horrified by your repugnant reaction to them.
Imagine that: if the 300 Spartans just sort of waited it out and killed their way through the million or so (I don't know about history) human beings thrown at them. Imagine if that worked. And then it was just like, "Okay, Leonidas. Just... go home." So he did. And he won. And it was over.
And he did a good job. But, like, you still gotta go to the market on Sunday. So, here's Leonidas at the market.
And then he goes home again and eats the food from the market.
Thanks for watching.
*credits*
I just walked away from this IMAX climactic opus, this ultimate peak of the four-part masterwork that's been stealing my imagination for what feels like a rival to the fucking Harry Potter series, and I'm just... I walked out of that theater feeling ultimately unresolved. I felt completely cheated, and completely hollow, and like none of it was really worth anything, and that the people who could possibly benefit from my having suffered this ordeal would be the unseen masses who were supposedly fought for in all of this. The wholeity of humanity at this point consists of violent revolutionaries and cultish, slavish pundents who only exist to serve a ruling class that now rejects and despises them, rather an inversion of the former rather than a reformation of true meaning.
I rather think we might have spared a half minute to delve into that than spent still more forlorn long-shots and meaningful looks between would-be lovers. In retrospect, it feels like a lot of people had to die for Katniss's pride. It feels more true that she'd have been tackled and strung up there with lascivious old Patriarch in the end, figures like herself rarely escape martyrdom (sad but true). Her negligence in leaving Snow to be torn and bludgeoned apart by the masses was a particularly hideous and unforgivable breach of the humanity to which Katniss would appear to want to have represented. My eye was immediately drawn to the canny use of resources in this critical moment of execution (one must always appreciate an instance of Two Birds with One Stone) but certainly not to its dedication to her character or really the subject matter at hand. Her inflexibility is both the thing establishes her as the best thing since sliced bread in this oppressed world and a tragically wounded and irredeemably broken person capable of and perpetrating crimes just as morally bankrupt as her competitors. I had rather hoped that more of her detrimental reflexive tendencies might be addressed, overcome, that she might learn her perspective was in some way incomplete and worthy of reappraisal.
Nope! Don't worry, you didn't need to do this at all. You were exactly right, all along, there was never a point to anything the opposition believed, and you're entitled to leave them to suffer at the hands of whatever the most savage individual(s) might have to offer you in the assailants' moment of ultimate passion and the criminals' moment of ultimate vulnerability.
Just do whatever you want to the bad guys.
They're bad.
Snow was laughing because Katniss had become him, and learned (without understanding) that all the morality she'd been clinging to all this time evaporates in the face of individual gain & the grasping for safety. Once consequence had been removed, she wouldn't do her enemy the condolence of a relatively painless death. She wanted him to be destroyed, utterly, because it was a fitting message to the attentive remainder of humanity. It has been said that a populous can be judged by its treatment of its captors, and if Katniss intended to make the point that intolerance cannot be tolerated, she communicated rather a conflicted message given that it contained wanton cruelty in and of itself. How is a public stoning less barbaric than a Hunger Game? At least Katniss was given the opportunity to procure her bow and arrows. Dude was tied to a stake and like a thousand people bumrushed him.
Thank God the rule of law has been restored.
Color me dissatisfied with this interpretation of justice. I rather hoped I'd paid to be uplifted by this fantasy world, but the only thing that made any sense at all was to just let it fizzle out once the remaining combatants had slunk from the chessboard to take up with their comforts while the New World Order organizes and implements itself. A sensible society would either put Snow to work or execute him humanely; what Katniss allows is an unthinkable treachery that goes beyond poor taste and into the territory of truly evil. I'm not interested in her position, however emotionally just a viewer might perceive it to be; the type of society where one person gets to decide that another is torn to pieces on live television is precisely the thing you've built yourself to oppose. YOU MAY NOT TORTURE PEOPLE TO DEATH. Also, you shouldn't do it on primetime for capitol and political gain. No more may you enjoin others to do the same, and walk away as though allowing and endorsing such a thing is not to confer complicity in it.
So once Katniss has had her Princess Peach removed from the plotline she is free to be inhumanly cruel to a person who repeatedly showed restraint when in a position to destroy her, utterly disregarded the democratic process which she herself has just instilled, undermined the principles of her new world order before even bothering to produce any stable template or mode of conduct to replace the at least functional one which she has just caused to implode, and vanished to the countryside without a word of explanation.
If this ending is unsatisfactory, you may possibly sense my point.
If you saw the first of the two last Hungry Games, you don't need me. If you care at all you'll have seen it and liked it, or you're just a bad person who can't pleased.
Wait.
What we're seeing in this fourth iteration of a jonky euphemistically feminine dystopia wherein the mincing, fashion and art-focused cultural swine of a neo-doofus, nega-liberal populous allows the enslavement of entire swathes of humanity (districts, as you will come to know them) in favor of the special indulgence of the .00001% because they're just sort of weak artsy lady-people who don't even understand things like whatever. They care about aesthetic and poetry and culture and literature and all that other artsy-fartsy idiot stuff that dangerous Intellectual people indulge in when society runs away with itself. It's not even discussed that this one district in more than a dozen(?) exists entirely in a state of tireless pandering to and worship of its most elite members, nor how crushing and oppressive and bitter, heartless, cruel that regime might be to serve from the inside. I would rather have found this entire sequence to events to have been viewed from the perspective of a janitor in a government building than the Great Miss Everdeen. The parallels are appropriately cutting, the requisite pomp and circumstance are offered to the title Hunger Games wherein young, supple, reasonably attractive combatants are sentenced to assassinate one-another in effectively sentient, deadly environments that resemble any sort of Truman Show that could possibly make any sense at all. We are all Katniss, of course, in that we are thrown by society into impossible circumstances, ill-equipped but convinced that humanity alone can save us even in a harsh wilderness of predatory instinct and industrial construct.
I should alert you to a spoiler here. The Whatever'th Hunger Games are even announced by title, only to have that illusion dumped at the first opportunity and allow a will-they-won't-they un-pissing contest between noncombatants Petra Malark and Whatsits Thorsbrother. There is zero chemistry, at all, and everything is just fine I guess. Good talk bruh.
It's a political documentary, and it always was. There happened to be some high points early in the production, but there might be in just such an uprising. The author and perhaps the movie production crew took far too much/little care in creating a believable end to the successful pundits of a newly run revolution. The wartime champions, the ones that will win you an empire; the Churchills... they're not fit to rebuild & they don't want to. It's best to let them to their cabins, to their solace, to their lovers and their comforts and whatever ease therapy might provide them. Unchallenged and without the need of the common man, their relevance evaporates and they are suddenly and horrifically Real People. You don't want to look at them any more, and are horrified by your repugnant reaction to them.
Imagine that: if the 300 Spartans just sort of waited it out and killed their way through the million or so (I don't know about history) human beings thrown at them. Imagine if that worked. And then it was just like, "Okay, Leonidas. Just... go home." So he did. And he won. And it was over.
And he did a good job. But, like, you still gotta go to the market on Sunday. So, here's Leonidas at the market.
And then he goes home again and eats the food from the market.
Thanks for watching.
*credits*
I just walked away from this IMAX climactic opus, this ultimate peak of the four-part masterwork that's been stealing my imagination for what feels like a rival to the fucking Harry Potter series, and I'm just... I walked out of that theater feeling ultimately unresolved. I felt completely cheated, and completely hollow, and like none of it was really worth anything, and that the people who could possibly benefit from my having suffered this ordeal would be the unseen masses who were supposedly fought for in all of this. The wholeity of humanity at this point consists of violent revolutionaries and cultish, slavish pundents who only exist to serve a ruling class that now rejects and despises them, rather an inversion of the former rather than a reformation of true meaning.
I rather think we might have spared a half minute to delve into that than spent still more forlorn long-shots and meaningful looks between would-be lovers. In retrospect, it feels like a lot of people had to die for Katniss's pride. It feels more true that she'd have been tackled and strung up there with lascivious old Patriarch in the end, figures like herself rarely escape martyrdom (sad but true). Her negligence in leaving Snow to be torn and bludgeoned apart by the masses was a particularly hideous and unforgivable breach of the humanity to which Katniss would appear to want to have represented. My eye was immediately drawn to the canny use of resources in this critical moment of execution (one must always appreciate an instance of Two Birds with One Stone) but certainly not to its dedication to her character or really the subject matter at hand. Her inflexibility is both the thing establishes her as the best thing since sliced bread in this oppressed world and a tragically wounded and irredeemably broken person capable of and perpetrating crimes just as morally bankrupt as her competitors. I had rather hoped that more of her detrimental reflexive tendencies might be addressed, overcome, that she might learn her perspective was in some way incomplete and worthy of reappraisal.
Nope! Don't worry, you didn't need to do this at all. You were exactly right, all along, there was never a point to anything the opposition believed, and you're entitled to leave them to suffer at the hands of whatever the most savage individual(s) might have to offer you in the assailants' moment of ultimate passion and the criminals' moment of ultimate vulnerability.
Just do whatever you want to the bad guys.
They're bad.
Snow was laughing because Katniss had become him, and learned (without understanding) that all the morality she'd been clinging to all this time evaporates in the face of individual gain & the grasping for safety. Once consequence had been removed, she wouldn't do her enemy the condolence of a relatively painless death. She wanted him to be destroyed, utterly, because it was a fitting message to the attentive remainder of humanity. It has been said that a populous can be judged by its treatment of its captors, and if Katniss intended to make the point that intolerance cannot be tolerated, she communicated rather a conflicted message given that it contained wanton cruelty in and of itself. How is a public stoning less barbaric than a Hunger Game? At least Katniss was given the opportunity to procure her bow and arrows. Dude was tied to a stake and like a thousand people bumrushed him.
Thank God the rule of law has been restored.
Color me dissatisfied with this interpretation of justice. I rather hoped I'd paid to be uplifted by this fantasy world, but the only thing that made any sense at all was to just let it fizzle out once the remaining combatants had slunk from the chessboard to take up with their comforts while the New World Order organizes and implements itself. A sensible society would either put Snow to work or execute him humanely; what Katniss allows is an unthinkable treachery that goes beyond poor taste and into the territory of truly evil. I'm not interested in her position, however emotionally just a viewer might perceive it to be; the type of society where one person gets to decide that another is torn to pieces on live television is precisely the thing you've built yourself to oppose. YOU MAY NOT TORTURE PEOPLE TO DEATH. Also, you shouldn't do it on primetime for capitol and political gain. No more may you enjoin others to do the same, and walk away as though allowing and endorsing such a thing is not to confer complicity in it.
So once Katniss has had her Princess Peach removed from the plotline she is free to be inhumanly cruel to a person who repeatedly showed restraint when in a position to destroy her, utterly disregarded the democratic process which she herself has just instilled, undermined the principles of her new world order before even bothering to produce any stable template or mode of conduct to replace the at least functional one which she has just caused to implode, and vanished to the countryside without a word of explanation.
If this ending is unsatisfactory, you may possibly sense my point.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
T's Take on FATAL ATTRACTION
I hate to say it, but don't impregnate strange women. Michael Douglas is just slimy enough to be perfect for this role. A grown man with a wife and son sleeping with a business associate is wrong for (at least) four very big reasons. And then, no protection? Talk about flirting with disaster.
The whole thing feels very overblown to me. Baby or no, I cannot believe this woman felt honestly that her course of action could lead to anything but a massive explosion of hate and drama. Some women want that, I'd discovered in my life, but they also tend to be very easy to spot.
This was a horror movie more than a thriller, if you ask me, with everything about it blown out of proportion to chill us to our bones. People like this woman tend to be in jail or a psychiatric facility by the time they're thirty-six. For her to just snap and self-destruct at the notion of rejection, well... While I cannot speak to the plausibility of it, because indeed, it is the plausibility of such a scenario that makes it so bone-chilling, the likelihood is rather slim. Like, one in five hundred thousand, minimum.
Movies made for the express purpose of revealing the destruction of a family are things I rarely frequent. With So I Married An Axe Murderer, it was a goofy foray into unbelievable silliness, touching briefly on the idea that you never really know who somebody is. Fatal Attraction shoves misery in your face for an hour and a half. It was like watching Audition. I guess I'm glad I saw it, if only because I know what people are talking about now, but I'll probably never watch it again. I was grateful for the semi-happy ending, though, which is to say the only person who died was the insane lady.
It was fine, I guess, for an unpleasant movie that went out of its way to be weird and unnerving.
Don't watch Fatal Attraction.
T's Take on SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER
What a delightfully dark movie. It reminded me of Envy, with that intentionally uncomfortable tinge of loathing and desperation. I liked Envy, just like I liked Axe Murderer, because I respect a filmmaker who doesn't care whether their viewers feel uncomfortable.
That was meant as a compliment.
Mike Myers does his best to be entertaining, which can be compelling and distracting moment to moment. I can see the director waving his hand at Mr. Myers and saying, “Just do something funny.” It felt unfair to leave the guy hanging with ballerina prancing in the quad at Buena Vista park for a solid two minutes while Ms. Cardboard offers the same cryptic open-ended statements we come to expect.
It's his winsome, pure enthusiasm that carries him through performances like this, but the guy just falls flat sometimes. It's not his fault. The movie leans on his personality too much. We just cycle back to the same two notes the whole movie through, which is enough, but barely. Jim Carey, John Candy, Robin Williams, whoever – we can't just throw these people into a movie and let good intentions carry them through. Mixing slapstick and mothers-kissing-friends fodder with the notion of brutal serial axe murdering is an uneasy combo at best, and shifting back and fourth between touching “take me seriously” romantic sequences and the abusive drunk Scottish father screaming at his child and wife made me wince more than once.
I like this movie. I honestly do. However, it feels conflicted, and that conflict muddies the fun I feel like we were supposed to be having here. The bits that included Mike's cop friend were hilarious, and the trip to Alcatraz was perfectly uncomfortable. Bryan Cranston absolutely nailed his role – the guy had me rolling. The spoken word segments were a lot of fun too, and the beat generation references made me feel comfortable and warm inside. All in all, it's a win. I can't really imagine another way it could have come out.
Watch So I Married An Axe Murderer
M's Musings on SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER
So I Married an Axe Murderer. Dir. Thomas Schlamme. Screenplay by Robbie Fox. Ft. Mike Myers, Nancy Travis and Anthony LaPaglia. Sony Pictures, 1993.
Well, no actually, you didn't. While the idea of her being an axe murderer was an excellent one, what is the point if it is actually her crazy ass sister? So there was some kind of weird sexual tension between the two of them that was never resolved... Between who, you say? Well, between all of them, in a weirdo sort of way. Pick your two.
My favourite part of the movie was the decision to make the love interest a butcher. The jokes throughout those sections made my day. I liked the tension and hilarity it added to this idea of her being a murderer. Somehow, the film never stopped being lighthearted, even in its most serious moments. Instead of almost dying... Mike Myers gets kicked in the balls. So, he kicks back. Huh.
I am not much of a laugh out loud kind of girl, nor am I super into romantic comedies. I liked that this particular comedy played down the romance in favour of the crazy. I was not surprised to learn that Mike Myers is the same kind of comic in every film he played. I guess I was expecting something a little different. I see exactly how he "evolves" as an actor throughout the last couple of decades. In most ways, he really doesn't. Its just the same jokes for a new, slightly more youthful audience.
Okay, so I hated the scene where he first goes to her apartment. She didn't turn on the light until they were in the middle of the hugest room I have ever seen. Can you imagine following someone you just met more than 20 feet into a dark house before turning on the light? I realize this is petty and pathetic, but that is the one thing that really caught me up.
The Scottish parent storyline made me happy. As did the World News. My grandmother also reads tabloid magazines, though unfortunately she does not read them in earnest (to the best of my knowledge). This just made me wish that she did. I hope that she does, and that she secretly looks for photos of our family and friends... just hoping to solve a crime or be horrified at the depraved way in which we lead our lives.
Do redheads go grey in that particular fashion? I hope that I don't. I kind of hoped that I would never go grey, except in the most uniform of ways.
Final thought: I enjoyed this movie, but it didn't overwhelm me. I didn't laugh out loud one time. But, I am still glad I saw it.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
T's Take on SCREAM
What can I say? A couple of dudes with Halloween costumes stab people to death for almost no reason. It's one of those movies that enjoys itself, and rollicking and laughing into slaughter about as generically and offensively as it can get away with while reaching that invaluable 13-20 age range. Whenever I watch a movie that injects comedy into gore I usually like it. Scream is one of those movies you can just have going on in the background while you play a video game or surf the internet. It's meant to be talked through and poked at and made fun of. It's not good, but at the very least it has a strong grasp of what it's trying to be. I like that. There's nothing wrong with being fun and stupid.
I always resented that they forced rape into the storyline, but the nature of this movie is to take horrible parts of humanity and casually throw them in your face. It's for desensitized slasher fans, and as a member of that demographic I cannot help but be appeased. I had to laugh to myself when one of the characters said something to the effect of "Anything can happen. It's the Millennium!"
The story makes a demented kind of sense that only a mother could love, and I'm sure if you pay close enough attention to the details it all works itself out, but whatever. It's fine. This movie is fine. I remember sneaking into a theater to see it and getting a kick out of the giddy sense of humor playing out here I could only liken to Evil Dead 2, not that the two could ever be compared.
I will say that this movie was important for its time, but I will also say that it could be safely forgotten. M informs me there's going to be a fourth coming out in April 2011, the first of a new trilogy. I'm sure I'll see them and I'm sure they'll be good enough for homework and a killing an afternoon.
That's good enough.
Watch Scream.
I guess.
I always resented that they forced rape into the storyline, but the nature of this movie is to take horrible parts of humanity and casually throw them in your face. It's for desensitized slasher fans, and as a member of that demographic I cannot help but be appeased. I had to laugh to myself when one of the characters said something to the effect of "Anything can happen. It's the Millennium!"
The story makes a demented kind of sense that only a mother could love, and I'm sure if you pay close enough attention to the details it all works itself out, but whatever. It's fine. This movie is fine. I remember sneaking into a theater to see it and getting a kick out of the giddy sense of humor playing out here I could only liken to Evil Dead 2, not that the two could ever be compared.
I will say that this movie was important for its time, but I will also say that it could be safely forgotten. M informs me there's going to be a fourth coming out in April 2011, the first of a new trilogy. I'm sure I'll see them and I'm sure they'll be good enough for homework and a killing an afternoon.
That's good enough.
Watch Scream.
I guess.
M's Musings on SCREAM
Scream. Dir. Wes Craven. Screenplay by Kevin Williamson. Ft. Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette. Dimenson, 1996.
In celebration of Hallowe'en, we decided it was time to catch up on our reviews, and watch something "scary" for a special Hallowe'en issue of MT Sentiments. Like every other genre of classic film, I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies. So, like 95% of the movies we watch and review on our blog, I had never seen this classic which was an important part of my childhood and young adulthood. I simply never had the experience in the moment. For films like this one, you just can't re-live it once you are past your teenage years. I think I would have thought this film was a lot more clever if I was a 15 year-old virgin. Ah well.
The one thing I kept going back to while watching this movie was how old the actors are who play the teenage roles. When you ARE a teenager, you don't find it strange, because you want so badly to have the maturity of those people. The kids who are actually 16 are playing 12 year olds. There is no way they could handle the range necessary to be an angsty youth. Angsty youth have no idea what life after high school is like, so there is no way they can ever be convincing in these roles. You need the wisdom in order to recreate the experience. Remember, teen movies are always about re-presentation, they are never about the original experience.
This statement is an excellent segue into the most interesting feature of this film. Its self-reflexive discussion of the genre of the teen slasher provides another level of experience onto the conventional story it is telling. Its awareness of its own limitations is parodic and charming at times, even if it is a bit over the top.
I made jokes to T throughout like this is so meta. And the movie is deconstructing itself. It is so pomo. While I was making fun of the convention of being aware of the conventions of a genre, I am sure that as a teenager I would have been really impressed by this. This is the time in our lives when we first really start to see the broader patterns that reappear in various cultural phenomena. We know enough about genre that we can anticipate action and talk about the predictability of a story in a way that is a mix of disdain and superiority which is unique to the high school moment. It is important to feel better than the entertainment you are mindlessly consuming. You have to be too cool for your own life.
Overall, I thought this movie was really fun. It helped get me back into a moment when the "millennium" was an ominous event looming in the horizon. It helped me remember what a horror movie the whole high school experience really is. Perhaps the various hacking and slashing is closer to the truth than we like to imagine. Everything feels like the end of the world or the end of your life, even when nothing is going on that you will remember in six weeks, or even six days.
It was fun to re-live the up-and-coming actors of the mid-90s. Though I really didn't see most of Friends until it had already ended, and only ever saw the last episode of Party of Five, I was immediately presented with these two women who would occupy so many people's tv sets for a good five to ten years. It was a very nostalgic experience for someone who is not very violent and doesn't really enjoy watching violence on tv.
I don't think this movie is supposed to be scary. It is too self-aware of its conventions to be overly outrageous in its portrayal of the various murders. Instead, it is just silly. The killers are in a Hallowe'en costume and talk on cell phones. They get stuck in garage door openers, and string up principals on the football field. It is just supposed to be over-the-top. It doesn't actually need to keep you awake at night.
I'm glad I watched this, but now I am safely ready for bed. Stuffed with mini-chocolate bars and a late night dinner of chicken wings, all in all it has been a pretty good Hallowe'en. We even stuck a carrot in a pumpkin to make a witch nose for our Jack o'lantern. Hope everyone did something fun and didn't get up to too much trouble.
In celebration of Hallowe'en, we decided it was time to catch up on our reviews, and watch something "scary" for a special Hallowe'en issue of MT Sentiments. Like every other genre of classic film, I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies. So, like 95% of the movies we watch and review on our blog, I had never seen this classic which was an important part of my childhood and young adulthood. I simply never had the experience in the moment. For films like this one, you just can't re-live it once you are past your teenage years. I think I would have thought this film was a lot more clever if I was a 15 year-old virgin. Ah well.
The one thing I kept going back to while watching this movie was how old the actors are who play the teenage roles. When you ARE a teenager, you don't find it strange, because you want so badly to have the maturity of those people. The kids who are actually 16 are playing 12 year olds. There is no way they could handle the range necessary to be an angsty youth. Angsty youth have no idea what life after high school is like, so there is no way they can ever be convincing in these roles. You need the wisdom in order to recreate the experience. Remember, teen movies are always about re-presentation, they are never about the original experience.
This statement is an excellent segue into the most interesting feature of this film. Its self-reflexive discussion of the genre of the teen slasher provides another level of experience onto the conventional story it is telling. Its awareness of its own limitations is parodic and charming at times, even if it is a bit over the top.
I made jokes to T throughout like this is so meta. And the movie is deconstructing itself. It is so pomo. While I was making fun of the convention of being aware of the conventions of a genre, I am sure that as a teenager I would have been really impressed by this. This is the time in our lives when we first really start to see the broader patterns that reappear in various cultural phenomena. We know enough about genre that we can anticipate action and talk about the predictability of a story in a way that is a mix of disdain and superiority which is unique to the high school moment. It is important to feel better than the entertainment you are mindlessly consuming. You have to be too cool for your own life.
Overall, I thought this movie was really fun. It helped get me back into a moment when the "millennium" was an ominous event looming in the horizon. It helped me remember what a horror movie the whole high school experience really is. Perhaps the various hacking and slashing is closer to the truth than we like to imagine. Everything feels like the end of the world or the end of your life, even when nothing is going on that you will remember in six weeks, or even six days.
It was fun to re-live the up-and-coming actors of the mid-90s. Though I really didn't see most of Friends until it had already ended, and only ever saw the last episode of Party of Five, I was immediately presented with these two women who would occupy so many people's tv sets for a good five to ten years. It was a very nostalgic experience for someone who is not very violent and doesn't really enjoy watching violence on tv.
I don't think this movie is supposed to be scary. It is too self-aware of its conventions to be overly outrageous in its portrayal of the various murders. Instead, it is just silly. The killers are in a Hallowe'en costume and talk on cell phones. They get stuck in garage door openers, and string up principals on the football field. It is just supposed to be over-the-top. It doesn't actually need to keep you awake at night.
I'm glad I watched this, but now I am safely ready for bed. Stuffed with mini-chocolate bars and a late night dinner of chicken wings, all in all it has been a pretty good Hallowe'en. We even stuck a carrot in a pumpkin to make a witch nose for our Jack o'lantern. Hope everyone did something fun and didn't get up to too much trouble.
T's Take on NEVER LET ME GO
I lied.
It IS okay for a movie to be depressing and unredemptive. There was nothing happy in this movie, nothing was resolved, and every character here starts out with a lot and ends with only a little. It's about people being bred to donate organs to everyone else. Big business has taken to cloning, and these people are trained and forced to submit to the surrendering of their vitals one piece at a time until creeping inevitable death ceases to linger over their heads, much to the hasty delight of the operating teams that hover around them throughout their adult lives like vultures. It's sick, and depraved, and a hideous reflection of humanity and values.
I loved it. It moved me. It was gorgeous and provocative and a multiple of everything I wanted it to be. I'd recommend it to anyone.
So what's the difference between this and Great Expectations? I guess it has something to do with the message. Expectations' message was that everything sucks, and sometimes you just have to loose, because you're a looser. And the everybody hates you. And as difficult as it might be for you to believe, the people you love are secretly out to get you. Here? This movie? This is done for a reason. Here we find human, believable characters living out destitute shadows of lives for a reason. Not to say that the in-movie organ farming is legitimate reason, but the statement that makes about medicine and technology is powerful.
This is a warning. At least, that's how I took it. The author of the book is cautioning us to value life wherever we find it, because if we don't, or can't, the lives we're looking to prolong cease to matter. We, the willing beneficiaries of that death and suffering, are become monsters. That vampiric visage of that alternate humanity must be avoided at all costs. Very important. Very striking. The fact that the movie starts in the seventies and moves into a present that does not exist is important. Instead of moving forward and showing a horrific destiny, it says, 'what if this had happened?', offering the viewer respite from a point of view that is indeed depressing, but not altogether bleak. By assuring us that it is not real now, we know this as a story, and not a depiction of the future, although the intonations are definitely there.
Casting, directing, screenplay, whatever... Tens all around. Gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. Maybe not great for a first date or a lazy Sunday afternoon, but important, and a must-see.
Watch Never Let Me Go.
It IS okay for a movie to be depressing and unredemptive. There was nothing happy in this movie, nothing was resolved, and every character here starts out with a lot and ends with only a little. It's about people being bred to donate organs to everyone else. Big business has taken to cloning, and these people are trained and forced to submit to the surrendering of their vitals one piece at a time until creeping inevitable death ceases to linger over their heads, much to the hasty delight of the operating teams that hover around them throughout their adult lives like vultures. It's sick, and depraved, and a hideous reflection of humanity and values.
I loved it. It moved me. It was gorgeous and provocative and a multiple of everything I wanted it to be. I'd recommend it to anyone.
So what's the difference between this and Great Expectations? I guess it has something to do with the message. Expectations' message was that everything sucks, and sometimes you just have to loose, because you're a looser. And the everybody hates you. And as difficult as it might be for you to believe, the people you love are secretly out to get you. Here? This movie? This is done for a reason. Here we find human, believable characters living out destitute shadows of lives for a reason. Not to say that the in-movie organ farming is legitimate reason, but the statement that makes about medicine and technology is powerful.
This is a warning. At least, that's how I took it. The author of the book is cautioning us to value life wherever we find it, because if we don't, or can't, the lives we're looking to prolong cease to matter. We, the willing beneficiaries of that death and suffering, are become monsters. That vampiric visage of that alternate humanity must be avoided at all costs. Very important. Very striking. The fact that the movie starts in the seventies and moves into a present that does not exist is important. Instead of moving forward and showing a horrific destiny, it says, 'what if this had happened?', offering the viewer respite from a point of view that is indeed depressing, but not altogether bleak. By assuring us that it is not real now, we know this as a story, and not a depiction of the future, although the intonations are definitely there.
Casting, directing, screenplay, whatever... Tens all around. Gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. Maybe not great for a first date or a lazy Sunday afternoon, but important, and a must-see.
Watch Never Let Me Go.
M's Musings on NEVER LET ME GO
Never Let Me Go. Dir. Mark Romanek. Screenplay by Alex Garland. Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishigiro. Ft. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010.
Never Let Me Go was pretty much the only book I read for pleasure in the entire 2009-10 school year. I read it in November during a very difficult and emotional time in my life. I knew it was going to have a large impact on me, and I was looking to gain some much needed perspective to help get me out of a bit of a funk. Contemporary dystopic fiction is my very favourite genre, particularly when it is written by such a fine author. Kazuo Ishigiro is just awesome, and I looked forward to a few hours alone with this book for at least two years before I finally let myself read it.
I loved the slow-paced journey the story took me on. So many pages of knowing and not knowing the fate of this story. So much waiting for it to get better for the characters. So many frustrated expectations, dashed dreams and misguided hopes. Even more slowly knowing, but also coming to grips with the idea that I wasn't going to get the release I deserved in the form of a happy ending. I experienced real catharsis after reading this book. I like dealing with the possibility that you can't escape your fate, and that sometimes there is no going back and saving the past through redemption in the present.
This book made me ache. I half-hated Kathy from the first page. She was never going to be the plucky, independent heroine. She was going to passively let her love fade away from her. She was going to hold onto objects and stories for years after they ended, nostalgically re-living a childhood past without real happiness. Everything just hurt. It was based on false information. It was based in deception and hope that wasn't grounded in reality.
How could they possibly capture all this emotion in a film adaptation, particularly one with a pretty small movie budget?
When I saw that Alex Garland, another excellent author, wrote the screenplay for this movie, my overall hopes were very high. As I sat down in the Oxford in Halifax after a wonderful meal with the love of my life and best friend T, I knew that no matter what this movie threw at me, I was going to have an excellent cinematic experience.
The film really capture the pacing of the book, which, is agonizingly slow. As the various layers are slowly revealed, you constantly are going through a process of reinterpreting the past action in light of the new information. By the time you discover that the characters are clones, that the gallery was to prove the children had souls, that Kathy was looking for her Original in the porn magazines, and that Kathy was going to start her first treatment... it is always too late. These moments constantly frustrate the reader, demanding that we too take on this perspective of grasping at straws and re-writing history in order to deal with all the various knowledge we gain as we go through a process of maturation and growth.
By the time Kathy gets to start her relationship with Tommy, all the passion and emotion from their childhoods is long gone. The sex she has waited so long for is difficult, and often ends in a more domestic cuddling. The love they need to prove is jaded by the years of separation, and the emotional and physical loss of their bodies. The idea that parts of their bodies are physically taken from them to keep other people healthy is fascinating. The fact that morality becomes a non-issue when mortality is on the line make it even more fascinating. When you look deep into the recesses of society and see the darkness you fear... it is a very powerful literary moment.
Keira Knightly was a great choice for Ruth, though her big name kind of took away from the lead actors. Interestingly, I would argue that this was also a good choice, because it makes it harder to connect with Kathy. I thought that Ruth's death scene, and her confession at the boat, were both bang-on. I was really, really happy with how her character came together.
My only complaint was that I felt the ending wasn't hard hitting enough. When Ruth is laid open on the surgeon table in that long, slow scene, the detachment with which the doctors pillage her body and then leave her splayed open and dead was really moving. Watching Tommy's last moments of life was positive, but without that connection to the reality of the death, it really didn't hit the same way.
The fact that Kathy is about to start her first treatment is supposed to shake you to your core. You are supposed to be so caught up in her own reliving of the past that you also are looking for Tommy over the hill. I feel like those last scenes went through the motions of the text, but they just weren't able to bring me back to the emotional space of the book. I think its just because the attachment isn't the same in a two hour movie. You just don't invest as much into the film as you do in a book.
I am interested to see what T says about this one, and what the critical feedback looks like. I am not sure if I would have had the same experience if I couldn't map my experience of the book onto the film.
I am really glad I got to see this film.
I loved the slow-paced journey the story took me on. So many pages of knowing and not knowing the fate of this story. So much waiting for it to get better for the characters. So many frustrated expectations, dashed dreams and misguided hopes. Even more slowly knowing, but also coming to grips with the idea that I wasn't going to get the release I deserved in the form of a happy ending. I experienced real catharsis after reading this book. I like dealing with the possibility that you can't escape your fate, and that sometimes there is no going back and saving the past through redemption in the present.
This book made me ache. I half-hated Kathy from the first page. She was never going to be the plucky, independent heroine. She was going to passively let her love fade away from her. She was going to hold onto objects and stories for years after they ended, nostalgically re-living a childhood past without real happiness. Everything just hurt. It was based on false information. It was based in deception and hope that wasn't grounded in reality.
How could they possibly capture all this emotion in a film adaptation, particularly one with a pretty small movie budget?
When I saw that Alex Garland, another excellent author, wrote the screenplay for this movie, my overall hopes were very high. As I sat down in the Oxford in Halifax after a wonderful meal with the love of my life and best friend T, I knew that no matter what this movie threw at me, I was going to have an excellent cinematic experience.
The film really capture the pacing of the book, which, is agonizingly slow. As the various layers are slowly revealed, you constantly are going through a process of reinterpreting the past action in light of the new information. By the time you discover that the characters are clones, that the gallery was to prove the children had souls, that Kathy was looking for her Original in the porn magazines, and that Kathy was going to start her first treatment... it is always too late. These moments constantly frustrate the reader, demanding that we too take on this perspective of grasping at straws and re-writing history in order to deal with all the various knowledge we gain as we go through a process of maturation and growth.
By the time Kathy gets to start her relationship with Tommy, all the passion and emotion from their childhoods is long gone. The sex she has waited so long for is difficult, and often ends in a more domestic cuddling. The love they need to prove is jaded by the years of separation, and the emotional and physical loss of their bodies. The idea that parts of their bodies are physically taken from them to keep other people healthy is fascinating. The fact that morality becomes a non-issue when mortality is on the line make it even more fascinating. When you look deep into the recesses of society and see the darkness you fear... it is a very powerful literary moment.
Keira Knightly was a great choice for Ruth, though her big name kind of took away from the lead actors. Interestingly, I would argue that this was also a good choice, because it makes it harder to connect with Kathy. I thought that Ruth's death scene, and her confession at the boat, were both bang-on. I was really, really happy with how her character came together.
My only complaint was that I felt the ending wasn't hard hitting enough. When Ruth is laid open on the surgeon table in that long, slow scene, the detachment with which the doctors pillage her body and then leave her splayed open and dead was really moving. Watching Tommy's last moments of life was positive, but without that connection to the reality of the death, it really didn't hit the same way.
The fact that Kathy is about to start her first treatment is supposed to shake you to your core. You are supposed to be so caught up in her own reliving of the past that you also are looking for Tommy over the hill. I feel like those last scenes went through the motions of the text, but they just weren't able to bring me back to the emotional space of the book. I think its just because the attachment isn't the same in a two hour movie. You just don't invest as much into the film as you do in a book.
I am interested to see what T says about this one, and what the critical feedback looks like. I am not sure if I would have had the same experience if I couldn't map my experience of the book onto the film.
I am really glad I got to see this film.
T's Take on GREAT EXPECTATIONS
I'll save you some time: I didn't like this movie.
We didn't even finish it. To be fair, M told me how the book ends, but I wasn't surprised and wouldn't have cared anyway. Why do movies go out of their way to be as depressing as possible? This was one of those flicks that gives you a gut-wrenching feeling of despair and longing the whole way through, and threatens the main character with dashed hopes and foiled dreams to impose an inflated sense of importance on the plotline. I hate that. It's a cheap trick and it makes me resent the film overall.
Having said that:
The cinematography was striking, the actors more than did their part, the pacing made perfect sense for the material and the script, pulled largely from the (apparently) classic novel was compelling and well placed.
And yet, bad movie.
Every individual part was done tastefully and even well, but there was just this overall slimy feel to the thing that made me bored. It was just... Cruel. Cruel for the sake of cruel. Let's watch this poor bastard throw everything he has at someone who doesn't deserve it and loose, over and over. He spends the whole movie obsessing over this girl, and she's a mean-spirited person who doesn't deserve the viewer's sympathy. The movie seems to assume that Pretty should be enough for us, because it's enough for Finn. I hate Finn for loving her, and I hate her for using him, and... it's just another one of those movies where none of the characters come across as likable and in the end nothing that happens matters to me.
This movie is like if at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Gaston killed the beast, and Belle said, "Well, I guess that's that." and just ended, with everything in tatters. This woman was trained to be a vicious man-eater. Whether it's her fault that she was cruel or not, I mean... Do we feel bad for Jason Vorhees because he was the victim of neglectful camp councilors? No! You're judged by your actions, and watching some dude gain the world just to loose it it not my idea of cinema. Fuck you, Great Expectations. Movie dick!
Don't watch Great Expectations.
We didn't even finish it. To be fair, M told me how the book ends, but I wasn't surprised and wouldn't have cared anyway. Why do movies go out of their way to be as depressing as possible? This was one of those flicks that gives you a gut-wrenching feeling of despair and longing the whole way through, and threatens the main character with dashed hopes and foiled dreams to impose an inflated sense of importance on the plotline. I hate that. It's a cheap trick and it makes me resent the film overall.
Having said that:
The cinematography was striking, the actors more than did their part, the pacing made perfect sense for the material and the script, pulled largely from the (apparently) classic novel was compelling and well placed.
And yet, bad movie.
Every individual part was done tastefully and even well, but there was just this overall slimy feel to the thing that made me bored. It was just... Cruel. Cruel for the sake of cruel. Let's watch this poor bastard throw everything he has at someone who doesn't deserve it and loose, over and over. He spends the whole movie obsessing over this girl, and she's a mean-spirited person who doesn't deserve the viewer's sympathy. The movie seems to assume that Pretty should be enough for us, because it's enough for Finn. I hate Finn for loving her, and I hate her for using him, and... it's just another one of those movies where none of the characters come across as likable and in the end nothing that happens matters to me.
This movie is like if at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Gaston killed the beast, and Belle said, "Well, I guess that's that." and just ended, with everything in tatters. This woman was trained to be a vicious man-eater. Whether it's her fault that she was cruel or not, I mean... Do we feel bad for Jason Vorhees because he was the victim of neglectful camp councilors? No! You're judged by your actions, and watching some dude gain the world just to loose it it not my idea of cinema. Fuck you, Great Expectations. Movie dick!
Don't watch Great Expectations.
M's Musings on GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Great Expectations. Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Screenplay by Mitch Glazer. Based on the novel by Charles Dickens. Ft. Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert DeNiro and Hank Azaria. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998.
Did not meet my expectations. In fact, like Pip in the novel, my expectations were frustrated in the end, and doubted throughout. At every point I was on uneven ground, which just made for a more frustrating movie watching experience. I have no idea why this movie was made. Seriously. It didn't need to be updated.
I don't think Great Expectations was ever conceptualized as a coming of age tale in the 80s and 90s. This is a time that doesn't need to be recorded. The poverty of Finn (Pip) was understated enough that it was unbelievable. I think at one point Joe ate at McDonald's. How very low brow.
Gwenyth Paltrow is a total bitch in this movie. I mean, Estella was supposed to be. But she is just SO unlikeable. This is the thing. It didn't seem like she was acting. Her conscious body displays seems so deceptive and twisted. You just know she is going to be impossible. She is the nastiest sort of tease... I don't know why anyone would like her. That said, she is probably a good match for Ethan Hawke, who is also completely unsympathetic.
I hate the idea that Finn is an artist. I don't buy it. Don't try and make this into a buildungsroman. I don't want to watch an artist grow up, and I really don't want to watch him rely on a muse who is a heinous bitch with no soul. The art in the movie was too interesting to be done by Ethan Hawke. If he drew at all, it would be very realistic, very unoriginal work. I think it would be mostly line drawings in pencil... and no one would ever believe he was the next big thing.
The main couple was so frustrating and unlikeable. Robert DeNiro is wonderful, and so is the guy who plays Joe. Both of those guys should have more screen time. The Miss Havisham character was about 40% of what I was hoping for. Without the wedding dress, it is hard to imagine her desperate sad, story and to feel the necessary sympathy and pity that makes her endearing...
I also hate that this quintessential British story was set in Florida. Florida. The class system isn't stringent in Florida. Nor is it in New York. These are not substitutes for the old world. It has to be in a place where class is very evident, identifiable by key markers that do not operate on a sliding scale. We need to see performance of class in more regards. I know Finn drives a pick-up instead of a luxury sedan... but that just didn't cut it. That said, the moustache is an interesting example of class markings. Only the poor ones have it in the movie. Heh.
Overall, I am not impressed with this adaptation. I think this book would be difficult to adapt, but at the same time, they could have done a better job. This isn't the story as it needs to be told. I look forward to a better adaptation... some day... and I hope that it is made by people with British affiliations.
Did not meet my expectations. In fact, like Pip in the novel, my expectations were frustrated in the end, and doubted throughout. At every point I was on uneven ground, which just made for a more frustrating movie watching experience. I have no idea why this movie was made. Seriously. It didn't need to be updated.
I don't think Great Expectations was ever conceptualized as a coming of age tale in the 80s and 90s. This is a time that doesn't need to be recorded. The poverty of Finn (Pip) was understated enough that it was unbelievable. I think at one point Joe ate at McDonald's. How very low brow.
Gwenyth Paltrow is a total bitch in this movie. I mean, Estella was supposed to be. But she is just SO unlikeable. This is the thing. It didn't seem like she was acting. Her conscious body displays seems so deceptive and twisted. You just know she is going to be impossible. She is the nastiest sort of tease... I don't know why anyone would like her. That said, she is probably a good match for Ethan Hawke, who is also completely unsympathetic.
I hate the idea that Finn is an artist. I don't buy it. Don't try and make this into a buildungsroman. I don't want to watch an artist grow up, and I really don't want to watch him rely on a muse who is a heinous bitch with no soul. The art in the movie was too interesting to be done by Ethan Hawke. If he drew at all, it would be very realistic, very unoriginal work. I think it would be mostly line drawings in pencil... and no one would ever believe he was the next big thing.
The main couple was so frustrating and unlikeable. Robert DeNiro is wonderful, and so is the guy who plays Joe. Both of those guys should have more screen time. The Miss Havisham character was about 40% of what I was hoping for. Without the wedding dress, it is hard to imagine her desperate sad, story and to feel the necessary sympathy and pity that makes her endearing...
I also hate that this quintessential British story was set in Florida. Florida. The class system isn't stringent in Florida. Nor is it in New York. These are not substitutes for the old world. It has to be in a place where class is very evident, identifiable by key markers that do not operate on a sliding scale. We need to see performance of class in more regards. I know Finn drives a pick-up instead of a luxury sedan... but that just didn't cut it. That said, the moustache is an interesting example of class markings. Only the poor ones have it in the movie. Heh.
Overall, I am not impressed with this adaptation. I think this book would be difficult to adapt, but at the same time, they could have done a better job. This isn't the story as it needs to be told. I look forward to a better adaptation... some day... and I hope that it is made by people with British affiliations.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
T's Take on THE GRADUATE
The graduate was awesome. M didn't get it, which I fully understand, because she doesn't get anything that's important, ever.
List of things I get that M is clueless about that are completely important and should never be overlooked:
1) International Politics
2) Mindfreak (you know who I mean)
3) Monty Python
4) Internet Flash Animations
That's basically the top four, but you know there's tons of other stuff. This movie is absolutely hilarious, in that awkward larger-than-life (but still pretty serious) way that so many great movies conduct themselves. It's like Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, or Smart People, except forty years previous. M and I had this same problem with Youth in Revolt. It's about this little square who hurts and destabilizes an incredible amount of systems and people in pursuit of a girl he loves. I loved it. M hated it, because all she could think about were the victims. She saw a selfish person acting on selfish impulses without regard for all the well-meaning people around him. I saw somebody with wrought-iron guts who absolutely refuses to settle for less or give up on his convictions.
It's never a positive comment to infer that the viewer need search out the comedy, but I'll say it anyway, because the editorially cutty humor we've been trained to look for in cinema is absent here and as such it tends to boggle the modern viewer. The punchline is this dude's life, really, and Ben's stiffer-than-wood attitude is so unflinchingly sincere and unsure that it'll make your heart ache and cringe for him. Watching this movie is like reading a protracted Beatnick retelling of some distorted confluence of events... The main character is rarely remarkable and the deeds he commits are often completely backward on the layperson's moral barometer, but they're pure in a way that is always miraculous and noteworthy. Much of this movie is made up of unsure, jangled interactions between people who feel an overwhelming urge to constrain what they're feeling and modify emotional responses to fit their over-inflated sense of appropriateness.
The beautiful revelation here is that Ben realizes he's not supposed to have sure footing. He learns that being oblivious to the ambiguous nature of what one's career and life should look like is very much okay. He seems to understand that moving compliantly in the direction of what is safe and well known and proper will not make him happy, that achieving his undergrad and then plunging into a career in plastics at twenty-one is just not the way. Indeed, we see through his actions that doing virtually anything but a set course of events has to be better, if only on the basis that it was his choice in the first place.
He charges through the exact center of everything laid out before him and ruins lives and destroys relationships and desecrates religious institutions and publicly humiliates well-meaning family. He does it all because he wants to, because it feels right in the moment, and because he believes in himself above absolutely everything else. I see in Ben a young man in the very moment of True Realization that everyone lucky enough to glimpse through the fog of Education and Propriety eventually must have. He is a person grappling with the idea that everything he's been taught and believes in might actually be ridiculous. In the movie's beginning he is already grasping at this concept, but it takes the illustrious and beguiling Mrs. Robinson to bring him into the Desert of the Real.
I always felt as a young person that drinking and sneaking out and going to parties actually elevated me to a form beyond that of simple adolescence but falling short of pure adulthood. I understand now that what I was tasting then wasn't what I thought it was. The momentary stimulation was the key, the actual notion of power and independent action was so completely intoxicating that I probably would have chased it no matter how it was represented to me. When you do something at any age that you have believed for your entire life was Bad and Crazy and realize that it actually isn't at all, you can't help but question everything else, especially if it's your first time brushing against such an experience. When Ben realizes that family and the institution of marriage might actually exist as a procreative function that developed out of necessity (instead of the Holy and happy-granting secret-to-life he may have believed it to be) he completely snaps and throws away everything else. This is the folly of youth, but also an intensely necessary one.
A generation of human beings that does not seek to bend its limitations and demand answers from the construct around them is not one I'd like to see. Ben has it right: a person must blaze their own path, and when they see something that's important to them, they absolutely must sacrifice everything necessary - even that which they're supposed to need - in exchange. Regret makes for uneasy bedfellows, and I wish I could say I cared as little for convention and peer approval as Dustin Hoffman's character. Growing into a man is about as messy a process as I've encountered and it cannot be done gracefully. The best favor anyone who understands the great hoax can do is dirty your perceptions and force you to act for yourself. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.
Watch The Graduate.
List of things I get that M is clueless about that are completely important and should never be overlooked:
1) International Politics
2) Mindfreak (you know who I mean)
3) Monty Python
4) Internet Flash Animations
That's basically the top four, but you know there's tons of other stuff. This movie is absolutely hilarious, in that awkward larger-than-life (but still pretty serious) way that so many great movies conduct themselves. It's like Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, or Smart People, except forty years previous. M and I had this same problem with Youth in Revolt. It's about this little square who hurts and destabilizes an incredible amount of systems and people in pursuit of a girl he loves. I loved it. M hated it, because all she could think about were the victims. She saw a selfish person acting on selfish impulses without regard for all the well-meaning people around him. I saw somebody with wrought-iron guts who absolutely refuses to settle for less or give up on his convictions.
It's never a positive comment to infer that the viewer need search out the comedy, but I'll say it anyway, because the editorially cutty humor we've been trained to look for in cinema is absent here and as such it tends to boggle the modern viewer. The punchline is this dude's life, really, and Ben's stiffer-than-wood attitude is so unflinchingly sincere and unsure that it'll make your heart ache and cringe for him. Watching this movie is like reading a protracted Beatnick retelling of some distorted confluence of events... The main character is rarely remarkable and the deeds he commits are often completely backward on the layperson's moral barometer, but they're pure in a way that is always miraculous and noteworthy. Much of this movie is made up of unsure, jangled interactions between people who feel an overwhelming urge to constrain what they're feeling and modify emotional responses to fit their over-inflated sense of appropriateness.
The beautiful revelation here is that Ben realizes he's not supposed to have sure footing. He learns that being oblivious to the ambiguous nature of what one's career and life should look like is very much okay. He seems to understand that moving compliantly in the direction of what is safe and well known and proper will not make him happy, that achieving his undergrad and then plunging into a career in plastics at twenty-one is just not the way. Indeed, we see through his actions that doing virtually anything but a set course of events has to be better, if only on the basis that it was his choice in the first place.
He charges through the exact center of everything laid out before him and ruins lives and destroys relationships and desecrates religious institutions and publicly humiliates well-meaning family. He does it all because he wants to, because it feels right in the moment, and because he believes in himself above absolutely everything else. I see in Ben a young man in the very moment of True Realization that everyone lucky enough to glimpse through the fog of Education and Propriety eventually must have. He is a person grappling with the idea that everything he's been taught and believes in might actually be ridiculous. In the movie's beginning he is already grasping at this concept, but it takes the illustrious and beguiling Mrs. Robinson to bring him into the Desert of the Real.
I always felt as a young person that drinking and sneaking out and going to parties actually elevated me to a form beyond that of simple adolescence but falling short of pure adulthood. I understand now that what I was tasting then wasn't what I thought it was. The momentary stimulation was the key, the actual notion of power and independent action was so completely intoxicating that I probably would have chased it no matter how it was represented to me. When you do something at any age that you have believed for your entire life was Bad and Crazy and realize that it actually isn't at all, you can't help but question everything else, especially if it's your first time brushing against such an experience. When Ben realizes that family and the institution of marriage might actually exist as a procreative function that developed out of necessity (instead of the Holy and happy-granting secret-to-life he may have believed it to be) he completely snaps and throws away everything else. This is the folly of youth, but also an intensely necessary one.
A generation of human beings that does not seek to bend its limitations and demand answers from the construct around them is not one I'd like to see. Ben has it right: a person must blaze their own path, and when they see something that's important to them, they absolutely must sacrifice everything necessary - even that which they're supposed to need - in exchange. Regret makes for uneasy bedfellows, and I wish I could say I cared as little for convention and peer approval as Dustin Hoffman's character. Growing into a man is about as messy a process as I've encountered and it cannot be done gracefully. The best favor anyone who understands the great hoax can do is dirty your perceptions and force you to act for yourself. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.
Watch The Graduate.
M's Musings on THE GRADUATE
The Graduate. Dir. Mike Nichols. Screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry. Based on the novel by Charles Webb. Ft. Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross. MGM, 1967.
T, this movie isn't funny. In fact, it is nothing short of disturbing. It is uncanny to watch a young Dustin Hoffman pontificating and bemoaning the "next steps" after graduation that parallels a constant struggle in my own life. While I have chosen to keep moving forward instead of stagnating in limbo, graduate school doesn't always feel like as a big a step forward as I would like.
Watching this movie brought up a lot of bad emotions about what happens to people who thrive in school, but have no life skills. How does being a track star translate into becoming a successful, banker, butcher, baker or candlestick maker? It doesn't. The sad reality of this movie is that it reminds viewers that you can be good at some things and still fail at life.
That said, I think that the example of this particular kid is not at all the same as many who struggle with the beginnings of life after college. Self-definition is hard in this new, liminal phase, where you go from the top to the bottom. All bets are off, and there are no more rules and restrictions that limit you. You are free to do as you please, and the worst part is, no one is really judging or, really cares (except your parents and your ex-mistress).
First of all... If I ever found out T., or anyone else I dated... or was friends with... or had some kind of important personal relationship with... had some kind of strange sexual relationship with my mother, I wouldn't try to get with them. That is disturbing and didn't make any sense. Besides, what is the appeal of this guy anyway? He is a depressed lazy but who doesn't rise to the challenge of life at all. Instead of making hard decisions and progressing forward, he just stagnates in la-la land while his family and their friends shake their head in disgust. We thought you were so much better than this.
The girlfriend is perhaps the worst character. With her glassy eyes and her inability to stand up for herself, she lets the world tell her what to do and who to be. If a man shows her attention, even if that man has already slept with her mother, that is enough. And, after she runs away, after being married to another man, her new boyfriend won't even look at her? Why? Because she is a disgrace like him. There is no love or chemistry lost between them.
Benjamin had nothing else to do, so he decided to become a stalker instead of volunteering, looking for a job or picking a graduate school. Get it together, you strange freak show.
This whole film was absurd and frustrating. I hated it. I hated Benjamin, his mother-lover, and his girlfriend. It was all too much. Yucko.
T, this movie isn't funny. In fact, it is nothing short of disturbing. It is uncanny to watch a young Dustin Hoffman pontificating and bemoaning the "next steps" after graduation that parallels a constant struggle in my own life. While I have chosen to keep moving forward instead of stagnating in limbo, graduate school doesn't always feel like as a big a step forward as I would like.
Watching this movie brought up a lot of bad emotions about what happens to people who thrive in school, but have no life skills. How does being a track star translate into becoming a successful, banker, butcher, baker or candlestick maker? It doesn't. The sad reality of this movie is that it reminds viewers that you can be good at some things and still fail at life.
That said, I think that the example of this particular kid is not at all the same as many who struggle with the beginnings of life after college. Self-definition is hard in this new, liminal phase, where you go from the top to the bottom. All bets are off, and there are no more rules and restrictions that limit you. You are free to do as you please, and the worst part is, no one is really judging or, really cares (except your parents and your ex-mistress).
First of all... If I ever found out T., or anyone else I dated... or was friends with... or had some kind of important personal relationship with... had some kind of strange sexual relationship with my mother, I wouldn't try to get with them. That is disturbing and didn't make any sense. Besides, what is the appeal of this guy anyway? He is a depressed lazy but who doesn't rise to the challenge of life at all. Instead of making hard decisions and progressing forward, he just stagnates in la-la land while his family and their friends shake their head in disgust. We thought you were so much better than this.
The girlfriend is perhaps the worst character. With her glassy eyes and her inability to stand up for herself, she lets the world tell her what to do and who to be. If a man shows her attention, even if that man has already slept with her mother, that is enough. And, after she runs away, after being married to another man, her new boyfriend won't even look at her? Why? Because she is a disgrace like him. There is no love or chemistry lost between them.
Benjamin had nothing else to do, so he decided to become a stalker instead of volunteering, looking for a job or picking a graduate school. Get it together, you strange freak show.
This whole film was absurd and frustrating. I hated it. I hated Benjamin, his mother-lover, and his girlfriend. It was all too much. Yucko.
Monday, October 11, 2010
T's Take on THE TOWN
You know what's awesome?
Violence.
There were a bunch of gunfights in this movie, really more than was necessary, but whatever. There were dudes with huge guns shooting at cops. And the cops? They were like, shooting back.
There's really not much to say here. If you saw the trailer, you saw the movie; the plotline is about as formulaic and baseline as it gets. The characters are exactly as deep as they need to be, which is to say that they aren't, and by the time you've met all of them it's not hard to tell who's going to make it out alive.
You mean the underdeveloped nobody third-wheel driver dies? And so does the bad guy? And so does the third-strike "I'm never going back to jail!" hardass with a penchant for unnecesary cruelty? There are no twists, per say, but again, that isn't to say that any were needed. This thing could only have gone one way, and though I was never surprised, I can't say I was ever disappointed either. The odds are good that if you find yourself walking into a theater for The Town you know exactly what you're there for, and you're going to get it, too.
Ben Affleck is what he is. It's like when I first saw Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity and thought to myself, "Wow, this guy can actually carry a serious role." I guess I had that moment with Ben in The Town, but in a different sense. His character is this beaten down ex-drunk fuckup with nothing to live for and a bunch of leftover friends/acquaintences that really do him more harm than good. He's got this really convincing washed-out unable-to-care disconnect that I as the viewer couldn't help but sympathize with. He's got this depressing 'poor-me' attitude as somebody who goes through life totally unloved because he doesn't love himself. Which suits him.
I guess what I'm saying is that Ben Affleck has found his place in my life, finally, and I could watch him go uncared for all day. For the first time he subtracted nothing from the work overall and fit in nicely with his surroundings.
Watch The Town.
M's Musings on THE TOWN
The Town. Dir. Ben Affleck. Screenplay by Peter Craig, Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard. Based on the novel by Chuck Hogan. Ft. Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively. Warner Bros, 2010.
T. and I thought we'd celebrate Thanksgiving by going to the movies last night. When we arrived at the theatre, we realized we didn't know what any of the movies were. Strangely, there were no posters, and no real advertisements, so we ended up piecing together what each of the movies were about in a haphazard way. We asked a group of stoned teenagers. This was their recommendation.
When chatting with them, we realized we knew exactly what movie this was. In fact, T. mentioned that he had been waiting for this movie for months. Who knew! I came in with no expectations, beyond the fact that this was a "heist film".
I was pleasantly shocked at how much I enjoyed this film. Ben Affleck was bang on, stealing my heart while still making me want to avoid him. I loved how "all in the family" this story was. Each of the crew members were tied to each other by family, sex, money and drugs. As a result, the individual actions or desires of one member are subject to the interpretation and punishment by the group.
For the bank manager, I thought that she was kind of sympathetic, but very quick to fall for Ben. The tatooed dream boat with an honest blue collar job, is a thrill for the "toonie" yuppie who otherwise spends all her free time helping the innocent and gardening for the community. The extremes between the idyllic woman and the criminal with a heart of gold were perhaps a little too extreme. If they developed her character a bit more, gave her something besides her "sunny days", I think she would have been more likeable.
I found the search for the water very moving. I felt completely caught up with her steps as she relived it. I can only imagine how the trauma of such an experience could affect a person longterm.
T. taught me about the "death by cop" suicide attempts of the various crew members, which I thought made sense. If you only have two options, life in a maximum security prison or death, I think I would make a last stand, too.
I found it did really validate the crew's actions and emphasize their humanity. That, mixed with an unsympathetic cop who also went home to "nuke his dinner" really disrupted the binary of good/evil which made the movie more interesting. The bad guys were "punished", but the system itself was put into question. I liked that.
Overall, I did find that the movie was too violent. I found it occasionally shocking, but that probably was mostly to do with the fact that the characters were relatively well developed before they were killed. This wasn't a random massacre, but a carefully executed game of cat and mouse by men on both sides of the law.
It was also interesting that they chose to throw in a sister/lover character to act as a foil to the bank manager. She was disregarded by Ben Affleck, but at the same time, they did make a point of showing the two of them having some kind of weird pity fuck earlier in the film.
I thought this was an interesting, fun and powerful film. Usually heist films have way less heart. Good job, Ben Affleck. I think we may need to consider expanding our repertoire to include more of your films.
T. and I thought we'd celebrate Thanksgiving by going to the movies last night. When we arrived at the theatre, we realized we didn't know what any of the movies were. Strangely, there were no posters, and no real advertisements, so we ended up piecing together what each of the movies were about in a haphazard way. We asked a group of stoned teenagers. This was their recommendation.
When chatting with them, we realized we knew exactly what movie this was. In fact, T. mentioned that he had been waiting for this movie for months. Who knew! I came in with no expectations, beyond the fact that this was a "heist film".
I was pleasantly shocked at how much I enjoyed this film. Ben Affleck was bang on, stealing my heart while still making me want to avoid him. I loved how "all in the family" this story was. Each of the crew members were tied to each other by family, sex, money and drugs. As a result, the individual actions or desires of one member are subject to the interpretation and punishment by the group.
For the bank manager, I thought that she was kind of sympathetic, but very quick to fall for Ben. The tatooed dream boat with an honest blue collar job, is a thrill for the "toonie" yuppie who otherwise spends all her free time helping the innocent and gardening for the community. The extremes between the idyllic woman and the criminal with a heart of gold were perhaps a little too extreme. If they developed her character a bit more, gave her something besides her "sunny days", I think she would have been more likeable.
I found the search for the water very moving. I felt completely caught up with her steps as she relived it. I can only imagine how the trauma of such an experience could affect a person longterm.
T. taught me about the "death by cop" suicide attempts of the various crew members, which I thought made sense. If you only have two options, life in a maximum security prison or death, I think I would make a last stand, too.
I found it did really validate the crew's actions and emphasize their humanity. That, mixed with an unsympathetic cop who also went home to "nuke his dinner" really disrupted the binary of good/evil which made the movie more interesting. The bad guys were "punished", but the system itself was put into question. I liked that.
Overall, I did find that the movie was too violent. I found it occasionally shocking, but that probably was mostly to do with the fact that the characters were relatively well developed before they were killed. This wasn't a random massacre, but a carefully executed game of cat and mouse by men on both sides of the law.
It was also interesting that they chose to throw in a sister/lover character to act as a foil to the bank manager. She was disregarded by Ben Affleck, but at the same time, they did make a point of showing the two of them having some kind of weird pity fuck earlier in the film.
I thought this was an interesting, fun and powerful film. Usually heist films have way less heart. Good job, Ben Affleck. I think we may need to consider expanding our repertoire to include more of your films.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
T's Take on DICK TRACY
What can I say? Total cartoony awesome fun. I like Dick Tracy like I like iced cream. This was one of those movies my childhood best friend had over at his house, one of those trusty standbys like ET or Terminator 2 for the weekends it was too hot to want to do anything.
Knowing what we all know know about Warren Beatty, all I see is oldtimers sex when I look at that man. It makes the movie hard to enjoy. But there's a new joke or twist every fifteen seconds, so every fleeting moment of Beatty-awkward are swiftly washed away with capers and gunfights and wind-blown yellow jackets.
The kid is cute, the love interest is sweet, and the seductive dancing girl is adequately enthralling. Al Pacino gets let off his chain in this movie to completely freak out as an over-embellished mobster. It's wicked. He's exactly as intense as he was in Dogday Afternoon. It's like if they got him to play Donald Duck. Every scene of his basically stands in for a montoge. We see him telling people that he's the boss. He tells people he's taking over this town, and there's not enough room for both of us, and balah-blah-blah... It's all so reasssuringly padded you can't not have fun.
We see here frequent peril and heroism, Dick Tracy always with his ethics on his sleeve navigates the tretcherous undercurrent of crime with a kind of insatiable vigor that I'm thinking about Warren Beatty having sex again. Ugh.
I didn't used to have this problem, but it's still not a deal breaker. The color is fun and the characters are priceless and everything sort of bleeds together into this trance-inspiring picturesque collage of simplified justice and old-school storytelling.
It watches like a comic book, which shouldn't be surprising because it's based on one. I like comic books and I like Dick Tracy.
Watch Dick Tracy.
Knowing what we all know know about Warren Beatty, all I see is oldtimers sex when I look at that man. It makes the movie hard to enjoy. But there's a new joke or twist every fifteen seconds, so every fleeting moment of Beatty-awkward are swiftly washed away with capers and gunfights and wind-blown yellow jackets.
The kid is cute, the love interest is sweet, and the seductive dancing girl is adequately enthralling. Al Pacino gets let off his chain in this movie to completely freak out as an over-embellished mobster. It's wicked. He's exactly as intense as he was in Dogday Afternoon. It's like if they got him to play Donald Duck. Every scene of his basically stands in for a montoge. We see him telling people that he's the boss. He tells people he's taking over this town, and there's not enough room for both of us, and balah-blah-blah... It's all so reasssuringly padded you can't not have fun.
We see here frequent peril and heroism, Dick Tracy always with his ethics on his sleeve navigates the tretcherous undercurrent of crime with a kind of insatiable vigor that I'm thinking about Warren Beatty having sex again. Ugh.
I didn't used to have this problem, but it's still not a deal breaker. The color is fun and the characters are priceless and everything sort of bleeds together into this trance-inspiring picturesque collage of simplified justice and old-school storytelling.
It watches like a comic book, which shouldn't be surprising because it's based on one. I like comic books and I like Dick Tracy.
Watch Dick Tracy.
M's Musings on DICK TRACY
Dick Tracy. Dir. Warren Beatty. Written by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. Based on characters by Chester Gould. Ft. Warren Beatty, Charlie Korsmo, Glenne Headly, and Madonna. Disney, 1990.
I liked all the colours. And I liked the faces. They were very bizarre and unbelievable in a very convincing sort of way. This movie IS comical, but at the same time, it tried to really stay grounded in its own universe. I liked the consistent association the characters have with styles and colours in determining their identities. I liked the over-the-top dress, particularly because none of it was questioned.
On some of the exterior shots, I was very much reminded of Halifax with the bright coloured and individuated houses and businesses. I think the world should always be painted in that kind of technicolour. I find it very expressive and inviting. It appeals to my senses to see so much loveliness captured on screen.
My biggest complaint about the film was about Tess Trueheart. Though she did, indeed have a true heart, I hated that she never confronted Dick Tracy about cheating on her. I mean, I know that Warren Beatty liked to screw women, but a sweet girl like Tess shouldn't have to stand for it. It broke my heart to watch her stand by her man... I know he really and truly loves her... But that isn't good enough if he can't keep his tongue in his mouth and his dick in his (yellow) pants.
The kid was the best character. I liked him best as the kid, before he became Dick Tracy Jr.
I like the characterization of the different villians, particularly Al Pacino which looked like a caricatured version of himself. In many ways he is playing a pretty normal role for himself, but because of all the extra makeup and what not, it seems newer and more unique.
I definitely ennjoyed this movie from beginning to end. It is light, easy, and has a fun, full cast.
And, I didn't want to tell T. this, but, I am positive that I've seen it as a child! A happy memory, indeed.
I liked all the colours. And I liked the faces. They were very bizarre and unbelievable in a very convincing sort of way. This movie IS comical, but at the same time, it tried to really stay grounded in its own universe. I liked the consistent association the characters have with styles and colours in determining their identities. I liked the over-the-top dress, particularly because none of it was questioned.
On some of the exterior shots, I was very much reminded of Halifax with the bright coloured and individuated houses and businesses. I think the world should always be painted in that kind of technicolour. I find it very expressive and inviting. It appeals to my senses to see so much loveliness captured on screen.
My biggest complaint about the film was about Tess Trueheart. Though she did, indeed have a true heart, I hated that she never confronted Dick Tracy about cheating on her. I mean, I know that Warren Beatty liked to screw women, but a sweet girl like Tess shouldn't have to stand for it. It broke my heart to watch her stand by her man... I know he really and truly loves her... But that isn't good enough if he can't keep his tongue in his mouth and his dick in his (yellow) pants.
The kid was the best character. I liked him best as the kid, before he became Dick Tracy Jr.
I like the characterization of the different villians, particularly Al Pacino which looked like a caricatured version of himself. In many ways he is playing a pretty normal role for himself, but because of all the extra makeup and what not, it seems newer and more unique.
I definitely ennjoyed this movie from beginning to end. It is light, easy, and has a fun, full cast.
And, I didn't want to tell T. this, but, I am positive that I've seen it as a child! A happy memory, indeed.
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