Let it be known that I am going to the DOOM movie whether or not it sucks. I just want to see the BFG9000 in all it’s glory.
Probably the same devotion to the video game franchise that took me to see Super Mario Bros. in the theatre, but I’m going anyway!
Enlightenment: the beatitude that transcends the cycle of reincarnation; characterized by the extinction of desire and suffering and individual consciousness.
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A strange thing happens when you reach your 120 months of HTML programming history. I seem to have hit a higher plane of coding. Not in any particular skill nor style, but instead in attitude. The process is painless, but similarly undesirable. I can do anything with any graphic, video, or flash animation… especially flash animations. But applying it to HTML holds no wonder for me now.
Making updates to websites is no more challenging than washing dishes. There’s the occasional Javascript akin to eggs ‘over easy’, that require the effort of a green scrubpad. There’s the never-empty bin of dishes that is always to my left, as I build the clean dishes to my right. Never stressed to get the work done, but simply keeping pace with the flow.
Today, I’m a dish washer.
I’m already a couple of weeks into my new Film Studies courses, and I’m reminded of how much time homework takes up! Kind of irritating to coordinate with three classmates on a mutually agreed-to time, then also coordinate with another classmate for a different class. Outside of the working world, this would be easier, but it takes a real effort to set it up while most/all students are living 9-5 Monday-to-Friday lives. On a positive note, it certainly demonstrates how much I want my career to go in this direction, if I’m so readily willing to sacrifice parts of my weekend.
The toughest challenge now is buying a digital video camera. When I initially signed up for the course, Livewire was going to buy a 3-CCD camera that I could train on, and generate yet another source of revenue for the company. Situations changed and there was no longer a “business case” to support the purchase. Now, I have to find a cheap, digital camcorder to use for my projects. The class teacher said that such a camera is fine for the purposes of this course, but it really feels like a letdown to get a $500 JVC after having my hopes built up to a Panasonic AG-DVX100A.
For the other course I’m taking, I had to meet up with three classmates from Screen Writing I. We wound up at a Second Cup on Yonge for about three hours, fleshing out a short film plot using each of the characters we had each created the week before. I was curious to see if it might become a competition where everyone wanted his or her creation to become the hero. Preparing myself, I figured that I could handle being a supporting character. However, my creation wound up starting as the protagonist and was later ‘demoted’ to a secondary character. It happened once it was evident that the plotline we were following didn’t really allow for the character development I had lined up for her. We teamed up for a really interesting story, and I think everyone has a significant part in its creation, so I don’t feel my ego has been bruised.
After a lazy day on Sunday (’lazy’ meaning that I had to clean up the apartment after the deconstruction and reconstruction of my bedroom), I have to “re-imagine” my character in order to fit into her new role. Since that class is tomorrow night… that means Stephen’s doing homework tonight!
School was a lot easier when the only time your homework is encroaching on is your drinking time.
After watching “The Notorious Bettie Page” I was really more in the mood for something built for raw entertainment value. Going to “Transporter 2″ would be akin to mixing Radiohead followed by The Darkness “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” (I’m talking to you, Dave Bookman). My brain just wouldn’t be able to handle that. Instead, we went to an early release of “Corpse Bride“. The comparison kinda works because of the use of retro-filming styles.
Corpse Bride simplified the traditional process by using digital SLR still cameras for the frames rather than film or digital motion cameras. It’s pretty cool to think that the digital revolution actually makes stop-motion easier. Any comparison between CG animation and traditinoal stop-motion doesn’t usually figure in how much easier stop-motion is now.
The plot was predictable through to the end from about twenty minutes in, but that really didn’t take away from the raw enjoyment of this movie. It never really slows down, and makes the 76 minutes seem like almost 90 minutes of entertainment. Seventy-six minutes. Ick. This could kill it when it opens next weekend. You could watch it three times including bathroom breaks in the same time it takes for someone watching the extended Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
Back to my point, definitely a fun movie - not quite brainless, since there’s a lot of clever humour. Singing characters in a movie is still a weird experience - since it became acceptable for artists to “sell-out” and have their music used in a film, there really haven’t been a lot of original music scores over the last ten years. The Oscar each year for best song is usually a selection of the few films that have tunes from a currently relavent music artist.
Not much else to say except that Simone and I really enjoyed it. There are still a few movies I want to see before the month is up, but I’m glad this was one of the ones I did go to.
I got Friday off in lieu for working on the long weekend, so Simone and I attended the second showing of “The Notorious Bettie Page”. The director didn’t even stick around after the intro because she was taking her kids to the Wallace & Gromit premiere. We stood outside in the pissing rain until they let us in to the Isabel Bader Theatre on U of T campus for the showing.
This was my first Toronto Film Festival movie ever. Simone asked me why I’ve never gone, since I’m such a movie buff. I couldn’t give her a solid answer since I don’t really know why I’ve never been too excited about the event. I asked her a comparitive question, why she wasn’t usually excited about the NXNE music festival. She couldn’t give a conclusive answer either.
If I had to come up with a reason, I’d say the same thing Eric Cartman said about the South Park Film Festival… “It’s all a bunch of movies about gay cowboys eating pudding”… and this year was no exception. I love Ang Lee and I think he’s one of the most extrodinary directors of our time, but as I’ve said before, a “Film Festival Movie (TM)” about deviant sex is just too predictable. I think the only significant lesson I’m taking away from this year’s festival is, if I ever become a capital-’D'-Director, I want to make a “Foreign Film” with no sexual content. In over 100 years of filmmaking, I think I’d be the first.
Keeping deviant sex as a topic, “The Notorious Bettie Page” is the story of the pin-up Queen mentioned in the title. The Vice President of Something Or Other for the Toronto International Film Festival got up and introduced the movie, and mentioned that the term, “Bio-pic”, was created by lazy film writers and critics. Yeah, well, this was a Bio-pic. Nothing more.
The first fifteen minutes covered Bettie Page’s early years. Rape, beatings, and more rape. No real context for any of them, so we don’t get an idea of character development. As I said to Simone, “You feel sympathy for the person, but you don’t feel sympathetic for the person”. By that, I meant that we watched her grow two decades without anything different about her than age.
The unique, and kinda fun part of this film was the style in which it was shot. There are a number of films now that will use a retro-filming style for effect; Sky Captain and Down With Love are two examples that come to mind. There were a lot of iris-transitions, and camera shots from high angles, very reminicent of 40’s and 50’s era filmmaking.
As I’ve found in many films that WOW the audience with some unique film style, the technique is dropped by the second act. Not completely dropped, but treated very lazily and no longer adding value to the film. There was only one significant use of the technique further into the film. The director would switch from B&W to colour whenever the film took her to Florida, but this isn’t anything so innovative that it hasn’t been explored 65 years earlier in The Wizard of Oz.
One part of the film I thought was handled well was the Church and Religion. Far too often, Christianity is given a negative representation to the point that it is now often given an assumed negative connotation in film. Throughout her own story, Bettie Page remains a faithful Christian, while wholefully believing that her nude and bondage modelling are not in confict with her religious teachings. She isn’t represented as a simple person, nor simply justifying her lifestyle through ignorance. I was impressed with how the film was able to present that duality without conflict, and in a way that wasn’t demeaning to either Bettie nor the Church.
I wouldn’t dare pan the movie outright, Mary Harron (daughter of Charlie Farquharson) is a very talented writer and director. For the plot, I would say that the development was superficial, like a list using bullet-points. Same with the film style; clever, but incomplete. Perhaps just a case of “leave the audience wanting more” run rampant?
As for the Film Festival, I don’t care what I see next year, but I’m sure I don’t want to go to a second showing… Simone and I were the only young, non-”9 to 5″ers there. The audience was mostly students and the 50+ crowd (who, I assume, find it easier to leave work early on a Friday).
