Archive for the 'Failures' Category
Monday, October 6th, 2008
I Swear.
The concept of Sarah Palin coming to office has pushed every other consideration in my life, into one corner of my brain apartment.
This I swear: If McCain gets voted into the White House, I will buy some guns the next day, and move into the woods.
Because the world will be FUCKED.
I might as well get ready for the impending apocalypse, and head out of civilization on the bounce. Pickup some supplies from Canadian Tire and run.
RUN.
Go to K-country and hole up in a cave, and await the impending fall of Western society. When every other person is stumbling around, trying to find food and shelter, I’ll have my cave pimped out with well-water, and bear skins.
This is what its come to.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Argue: Where two people scream at each other
And nobody changes their mind about SHIT.
I was privvy to a second-hand conversation about Anime a little while ago, in which the proponent of said claimed that nothing could ever be considered Anime that didn’t come from Japan. And that he wasn’t interested in anything other than the “bleeding edge” (a phrase I fucking HATE btw) content coming out of Japan.
That was it. He dismissed everything else, out of hand.
Fuck. There are few things in this universe that will instantly arouse my ire more than somebody who just writes something off without even considering it.
For instance: Many moons ago, I was somebody that took a massive shit on anything that Michael Bay has ever directed. But I realized, to my consternation, that I really hadn’t seen much of his work. It was a reputation that I believed in, not empirical data. I must SEE his work. SO I watched Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon…now the next movie would have been Pearl Harbor, which probably would have killed me, but since I was too busy nibbling the barrel of a shotgun, I was unable to press “play”. I had determined, for myself, that his work was the lowest quality schlock. If they didn’t hate one another, Bay and Uwe Boll could start a club.
My point was that I was doing something that I myself hated. I was dismissing him out of hand, without having seen any of the work I was shitting on. Now if you’ve ever compared JPN vs. US animated items, you can probably understand 2nd Hand Conversation’s objection to North American content. It’s shit, a lot of it. Okay pretty much ALL OF IT.
But here’s a quote from that conversation:
“Someone has to prove to me that, over a long period of time, original english stuff is better than stuff produced in Japan”
Are you fucking kidding?
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
The spectacle.
I refuse to watch Cloverfield.
I will go to my grave without watching that movie. If I wake up some morning, and a paramilitary group has kidnapped me, and plans to force me to watch the movie, I will swallow my own fucking tongue.
I watched the trailer with apprehension, because I hate JJ Abrams and all things associated with him. The trailer angered me, as have all his works. It began with Alias (I was never a fan, but I understood the appeal), and then transfered to Lost.
Fuck Lost. I can’t stand the abuse of the “gap”. It’s a crutch, and even if he’s using it like the ancient techniques of the master, Hitchcock, he fails to close the loop with anything near the same flair and intelligence.
But let’s return to the current object of my scorn: Cloverfield. There are two important points that must be noted about movies like this, and their failure.
#1: Like the above example, you cannot fail to close the Gap. He set up the mystery for us “What is it?”. That mystery at the beginning of the story is paramount. You must have it. Lewis Black, the comedian, talks about the gap in his pseudo-autobiography “Nothing Sacred”. In the book, he discusses his first forays into the world of Stand Up Comedy (capitalization makes it MORE important!), and in a particularly shitty bar, following a punk rock band, the room was deafened. Black lamented the murmur of the crowd, roar of bikes outside, and pinball machines in the corner. Why?
Silence. It’s an essential component of public speaking, because in silence, you find the tension (re:gap). And tension is what the Gap is all about. Whether its a joke, a thriller movie, a mystery novel, everything is a slave to the tension. What people who don’t rant about this all day call “suspense”. First, the tension must build, and then, when the moment is right, it must be released. As Axe is known to say “You can’t show a gun, without it going off”. That is why I want to kick Ol’ JJ in his dick: he doesn’t turn the tension. There’s no release. You leave the theater, or turn off the tv, and you are frustrated. And because the Television nation is constantly anesthetized, they confuse that frustration, with emotional involvement.
Dear TV Nation: You are being tricked. Please stop giving this asshole your money. It enables him to continue shitting on our lives.
#2: The camera. Fuck. I thought they had learned the lesson when they made Blair Witch, but apparently whoever greenlit that piece of shit, somehow made an impression, and producers still think it’s A-Ok. Let me explain something to the people who make movies (and why am I the one having to tell YOu this? What the FUCK):
We know they’re fake. yeah, I know this comes as a shock to you, but the viewing public understands that they’re seeing a movie. The reason the Blair Witch managed to pull anybody into their little game, was the hoax surrounding the footage. They told us IT WAS REAL. With that assumption in hand, we made our way to the screen, and some of us were pulled in. BUT… The rest of us were too busy thinking the same thing “Jesus christ, hold the fucking camera still”. The effect in BW and the effect in Cloverfield yields the same result: I am so aware of the camera moving, that I can no longer focus on the narrative of the story. You have broken the spell, so that quality or quantity of the content you are presenting means nothing anymore. My emotional wall is back up. You fail.
The bottom line is that film is a visual media that requires a very specific look to tell a specific story. The thought “hey, what if we made this look like handheld footage!” is a novelty, and has some juice. The problem arises in that novelties have the annoying tendency to wear off. Anybody old enough to remember He-Man is well aware of this fact.
Mahalo
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
The NaNoWriMo Incident.
Oh god.
The National Novel Writing Month incident. There have been pressing questions, and very few answers. A dark chapter in the Berenstain Bear book of my life. For those who don’t know, every November, the NaNoWriMo organization has a competition. It isn’t against anyone in particular, in fact it is more of a celebration of the act of writing. You have the month of November, to write a 50,000 word novel.
Well I think I’m pretty hot shit. So I sign up, I make the profile, have a pretty solid idea. November starts.
And I just start SUCKING with impunity. Oh sweet shit. Going into the month I felt like a hero. I had all the juice in the world to get this baby squeezed out, and plenty of stockpiled food stuffs to keep me from ranging too far from home base. But to quote my last girlfriend, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”. But, in this case, it was days. The slipped sonny-jim, they slipped with impunity. (I plan to use that word like, 4 or 5 more times)
The fault? I thought about what I needed in order to write, WAY too much. The bottom line was that I didn’t just vomit out pages everyday. I tried to edit early, polish dialogue, basically committing atrocities left and right. Soon, the first days of December loomed closer…and I was nowhere near done. I had the last week of the month off, and as a broken hero, I wanted one last ditch power drive. I realized though, thankfully, that throwing away an entire week, sweating out pages like a turkish bath attendant, wasn’t going to be useful. It was a crunch for the sake of nothing, except an attempt to save my own Ego. A waste.
I plan to enter again next November. I really love the idea, and I love to write, so what better way to take years off one’s life, than to obsess about a novel for awhile. The only advice I can offer: Don’t Stop. Write mercilessly.
In all things.