"Will anybody ever read what we write here, after today? I am sure our writing will persist in the World Wide Web, but will anybody ever read it again?"
Ending up in a kind of soundlessly
spinning ethereal void as we all must,
per Ebert.
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March 25, 2009
February 21, 2009
The pendulum swing
I have an uneasy relationship with Lost this season. Longtime readers will remember that I've had similar periods before, so I almost feel foolish about it; at the end of most episodes this year I feel relieved, "See, that wasn't so bad," as though some weight of crapulence has descended on the show and is only barely being lifted on a weekly basis. Something about the storytelling just rubs me wrong, right now. With the long-questioned flashback structure negated at last, the show seems rushed, and vacant, and hard to follow. There's too much going on. Jack - who is still, as far as I'm concerned, the hero of the series - has been sidelined to day-player status until this week's episode, when he finally seemed to become the lead again; but in doing so, we went no further than that, or no deeper. It's as though with 4 seasons of character relationships set up, the writers have decided "Well, you know enough about them now; let's just see them act, rather than be." If each season prior has defined itself with a core thrust - the island, the hatch, the Others, the freighter - and this one is "the time travel"... well, it's either unaccountably daring that they have reformulated the structure of the show to so closely approximate the time-jumping island on which our characters reside, or it's just plain madness. Each episode comes with held breath. I wonder how the season as a whole will feel on Blu-Ray.
This piece, in which Ebert eulogizes Gene Siskel on the 10th anniversary of his death, is predictably lovely.
To further cover off the backlog, I didn't like Dollhouse really very much at all. The pre-show expectations hold true: this show is not appealing. It doesn't have a premise. It doesn't have a main character, and it doesn't have, really, an idea of any kind at all. Or at least that's how it feels, given how spectacularly badly thought out the pilot was. Can someone explain to me: why, if your daughter was kidnapped and you needed a hostage negotiator, you would (instead of hiring an actual hostage negotiator) hire someone who had been mentally programmed to think they're a hostage negotiator? Was that covered somewhere, and I missed it? I don't understand what advantage the Dollhouse presents, in any of the engagements depicted in the first episode. If you wanted a high-price whore to spend your birthday weekend with, why go to the additional expense and trouble of a mind-programmed prostitute, rather than a real prostitute? Just so she can race bikes? Why send a tactical operative into a safehouse who has never actually held a gun before, but only thinks she has? This pilot is proof that you can't actually develop an entire series concept in the bathroom while waiting for the fish course to arrive. Oddly enough, with a 13-episode order and a million-and-change bump on viewership from Sarah Connor an hour before, it might survive to the summertime, and lord knows, that first season of Buffy was crappy too. But it wasn't stupid. The first episode of Dollhouse is stupid.
October 27, 2008
The inflatable Roger Ebert
To briefly continue my pre-stated Ebert crush, the fella put into words on his blog what I've been noticing all of this year: since the loss of his voice, that man's writing (which didn't suck to begin with, by the way) has fucking skyrocketed in quality. It's sort of amazing, sort of beautiful, sort of sad. I guess it's just the way things go, but it makes me think a lot about what I'm doing, and what I'm writing, and what happens upon the redirection of rivers.
Not merely to draw attention to how cool I am - though I am cool - but I am now reading Bat-Manga!, which was a gift from Matty Price, and is magnificent. It has all the tropes of the 60s Batman TV series and the assorted Godzilla variations, i.e. there's still Clay-Face but now Clay-Face turns into a giant pterodactyl to fight Batman. At long last, we have discovered the road Chris Nolan should take in forging Batman Begins Some'Third. Batman in Japan! Japan-Batman! Bat-Japan-Man! They already crossed the Joker with Ichi the Killer, now imagine if they crossed the Riddler with the fuckin' Bugmaster? Well, had him played by Tadanobu Asano anyway. I'd watch that guy do anything. Domo. Domo arigato.
The thing I've been writing of late, a piddling 6-page 2-hander called Guy in the Sky, actually got taken to what I'd call a nearly successful half-assed draft yesterday, which means that I should write it at least twice more, but that if I do so, it might not suck. So that's something.
October 22, 2008
The snowball effect
The headache started yesterday at around 3 p.m. and by the time I got into bed at midnight, I actually couldn't lie still. When I left for work it was a railway spike through my left eye, and when I came home from work it had moved over to my right eye. It is impervious to painkillers, reducing only to a dull thrum at the best of times, and even then leaving me like I've been electrocuted and left to cower. I hate this headache. I hate it like a living thing. Now I'm on the couch in my bathrobe watching Deepa Mehta's episode of Young Indiana Jones, and I desperately wish I had some ginger ale.
Let's look at what I can see from here.
1. Here's the Watchmen poster, which I like quite a lot.
2. Here's an interesting (and obviously, highly upsetting) legal case against a person who knowingly infected women with HIV and is now being charged with first-degree murder. I had wondered when something like this would happen, and whether it's legally sustainable.
3. With a hefty SARAFINA DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK, here's the Season Five promo for Lost. Hoooooooooo-cheeeeeeeee mama. That doesn't suck. I'm in quite the Lost frame of mind lately, what with S working her way through season 2 for the first time right now. If we time it out right, we can step into season 4 on DVD in December and then straight into the new season. Though "timing it right" rarely applies with that "play all" button on the Lost DVDs.
4. Finally, the indefatigable Roger Ebert - that man is more and more becoming my personal hero, no matter how many slap-fights he gets into - gets into a big fucking mess about publishing a review after only watching 8 minutes of a movie, here, here, and here. I've done it too, more than once, though I (unlike him) tend to think a walkout is line one of a review, not the punchline, if only because it is as clear a message of a film's worth as any one can conjure in prose. But then, I am not professionally employed in the field, and I am also of somewhat sketchy morals when it comes to signing the practice log. Fascinating discussion and insights, regardless.
Whoa, Indiana Jones just learned about Shiva for the first time. Criminy.
November 16, 2007
Quote of the week, and not just because it involves Juno
"The unique quality of the classic comic books was that their teenagers had ordinary adolescent angst and insecurity. But if you are still dangling in taxicabs [suspended 80 stories in the air by alien spider webs] at age 20, you're a slow learner. If there is a Spider-Man 4 (and there will be), how about giving Peter and Mary Jane at least the emotional complexity of soap opera characters? If Juno (opening Dec. 14) met Peter Parker, she'd have him for breakfast." - Roger Ebert, in his review of (still haven't seen it!) Spider-Man 3
April 24, 2007
Nature's stool softener
Ah, water. I was already all into water, but now I drink water pretty much exclusively. Well, water and coffee, but never together. Ewww! Yeah anyways this is something I should have done a long time ago but dropping pop and juice out of my diet has already had fairly spectacular results. I actually went down (up?) a belt notch - whichever the thinner one is, that's where I live now.
Last night I was flipping channels after Heroes (ick!) and I came upon an episode of the third season of Slings & Arrows. I fuckin' love that show and it's a mark at just how spectacularly bad the Canadian television industry is at promoting itself that I had no idea there even was a third season. Shitheads. It's the Sarah Polley season! (All Canadian television programs are required, by law, to have a Sarah Polley season. Just like all indie Canadian films are required to cast Callum Keith Rennie.) Anyways the season's coming out on DVD in July so I'll finally get to get caught up on my Lear. Actually I might have a Lear summer - see it at Stratford, burn through my Ran DVD, and watch Slings & Arrows. Daughters, man. Useless!
I've been meaning to comment on the collapse of Premiere magazine, if only because the mag had a small space in my pre-film school education (the Iron Jim article back in '94, about Cameron on the set of True Lies, was near-biblical for me, though that led to problems later on). God knows their writing went into the ground in the tail end of the '90s, but for a few years there, Premiere was a terrific little oversize magazine. As with all things, I worry about what happens to the art form when responsible criticism on even this relative scale (Premiere ain't Les Cahiers du Cinema, folks) can't cut it. One of these days Ebert's gonna up and die on us, and then what are we gonna do?
Meanwhile, we finally have the answer to what the Simpsons movie is going to bring to the table that you couldn't get on the TV show: Bart Simpson's penis. My money's on circumcised. How about you?
I've been knocking this script idea called Glow around in my head for some time now; I think I've mentioned it before. It's based on a first draft of a ghost story I wrote about a girl who appears in an old black and white photo at my cottage, who no one can put a name to. I've tried launching the script a few times before with no success; something just ain't there yet. But I feel like all the pieces have been revolving around in my head lately and sooner or later they'll click into place. I want to be writing again. (Er, something that isn't a comic book.)
It's my parents anniversary today - thirty-five [expletive deleted] years! Man, that snuck up on me. Which is my way of saying "no gift."
May 12, 2006
On insecurities and critical legitimacy
This morning I was reading Roger Ebert's review of Poseidon. (Or, Pusweedon, as I somehow continually refer to it.) It occured to me as I was doing so that this was a relatively recent occurance: reading reviews of films before I had seen them. I gave up doing that when I was about fourteen years old, not because I was afraid of being spoiled, but for a much cloudier reason: I was afraid of having my own opinion challenged. As a maturing film fan there were few things more agony-inducing than really enjoying (or really hating) a film, and then discovering that the prevalent critical opinion was different from my own. I would rail against those critics. I would tell long tales about how I considered them thoroughly unqualified to be doing their jobs. (Some of those opinions, vis à vis the staff at the Globe and Mail for example, have stuck.) All this was, however, a big smoke screen to cover my inherent insecurity: that their opinions were more legitimate than mine, and that they might be right, and I might be wrong.
Then last summer, we were all going to see Batman Begins, and Phantom flat-out refused to come up with us, in part because (as I recall) he didn't want the critical opinion of the group (particularly myself and Matty Price) to in any way erode his first reaction to that seminal film. It made me realize how successfully I've jumped the fence, without even knowing it: not only has my critical opinion become solid enough that I can read Roger Ebert's reviews without even a note of fear that his reaction will colour my own, but apparently my own thoughts on films have achieved the bulwark of legitimacy, that "educated opinion" level that separates the plebes from the pros, the amateurs from the celebrities, the home-schooled from the school-schooled. It's what my editor at blogTO calls the "authority" of my opinion. Earned it? Zuh.
Look, I've written five or six hundred reviews in the past four years. Over that time, I've gotten better at it, even though I still like to use ugly non-words like "gotten." But the first step on the road of being able to do all this was accepting a fundamental truth that most mass-market review readers don't necessarily grasp: that the opinions of film critics are just that - opinions. They might be bourne on the wings of wider experience but they're still just one person's personal ken. And even that wider experience doesn't make them any more legitimate than anyone else's thoughts on the subject. Art is subjective and instinctual, and if it works it shouldn't need a doctorate in film theory to be understood. Nevertheless, I must admit there also seems to be the somewhat creepy, and inescapable, fact that humans apparently enjoy being told what to think. We have a prevalent insecurity about our own opinions and an ongoing interest in seeing our beliefs validated by being incorporated into the hive mind. This being true, somehow I've developed a particular (if rueful) fondness for those occasions (The Phantom Menace, The Village, Spider-Man 2) when my opinion definitively opposes the prevailing cultural viewpoing on the subject. It's sort of fun, and sort of annoying, and sort of proves that I've still got my britches on and am willing to piss in them.
If my opinions have started to intimidate the people around me... well, I sort of wish that wasn't the case. It's a hell of a lot more fun to get into a shouting match with Chris or Matthew about a flick we disagree on (boy it would be fun to have the three of us go around on Lost in Space) than it is to see the pasty-faced worry creep into the eyes of someone who thinks one thing about a movie, only to discover that I think something else. (At work, for example, I've learned that countering someone else's generalized mention of a movie they like with a more detailed opinion of my own is fraught with danger.) Maybe I'll throw over the whole reviewing thing one of these days and go back to being a quiet DVD collector and film festival enthusiast. Or maybe my podcast will take over the world. As I often say to conclude these things when there's no other way to do it, "it's an endless stream of possibilities."