Media Consumption
Sep. 13th, 2012 01:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueDuring a day of fairly upsetting news (I'm loosely connected to people who died at the Libyan embassy; to people in Benghazi; to Coptic Egyptians [connected in some conspiracy theories to the inciting film]; to Israelis [ditto]; to conspiracy theorists; to anti-conspiracy theorists; to journalists; and to the film industry [which means I find it necessary to have opinions on whether the film in question might reasonably have cost $5 million, as claimed by the pseudonymous inciting filmmaker, even though this is really far afield from what anybody cares about]), I was coincidentally shielded from the constant updates by captioning baseball all day.
It was a pretty nice day! I have a new understanding of what people get out of sports. It is a special kind of escapism that is not about imagining you are in a different place or time, but which is about focusing intensely on being in your city at exactly the present, the moment that a rookie batter is in a 2-0 count with runners on first and second.
My various birthday presents have arrived after shipping delays and/or us just not being organized. Ciro got me a map of the world, a book of poems by Wislawa Szymborska, and Darth Vader and Son. With moneys from my grandmother, I got a shirt from eshakti, an online made-to-measure clothier. Their style is more conservative than mine, but I wanted to know what it felt like to have a shirt that fit in the waist and shoulders without straining across my chest. Let me tell you: it feels pretty comfortable. I have made a deal with myself that from now on I'm going to have all my clothes made to measure or tailored. This is more on the order of a philosophical deal, because I never buy clothes and finding a tailor is lower on my To-Do list than, for instance, writing 200 unattached metaphors. (Yes, this is a real, typed out, and regularly modified list that lives in Google Docs.)
I had the luxury of getting to sit down and watch three movies this week (some at home and one at the Somerville Theater, which had a real projectionist and real film, gosh) by three of my favorite directors:
Melancholia, Lars Von Trier - beautiful, thought provoking, funny, sad. A fairly perfect depiction of depression in a way that wasn't moralizing or miserablist: just here is a way that life is for some people. Highly recommended, although I am sure it is one of those films like Hotel Rwanda that people think they ought to watch but never work up to watching.
Mirror, Mirror, Tarsem - quite a strange film. It's more like The Cell than like The Fall, in that it's not scripted by Tarsem, such that there's tension between the film he's interested in making and the film he was hired to make. As a result, it's tremendously visually inventive, and many of the sequences, performances, and jokes are delightful. And then mixed up with that is an incredibly bizarre lowest-common-denominator kids' film with attendant pacing problems, questionable gender notions, and very little desire to make sense or have forward momentum. I did like it, and it's even weird enough to mostly defang the aforementioned questionable gender notions. It's a must-see, I'd say, for being Eiko's last film, if for no other reason.
The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan - I have no idea what other people are saying about this film; since I was so late seeing it, I missed reading all the discussion as it was happening. A dense enough film I should see it a few more times before I can fully unpack it, and one that redeems the first film in the trilogy (which I didn't dislike, but found to be thin soup). The theme that stands out to me is that of systems which you create to help you but which then limit you, which is not just in the obvious places in the movie but in each detail - the rope in the pit, Batman's rule against guns. Despite being propulsive high-action movies, Nolan's films always remind me of themes and variations rather than Freytag triangles, more like symphonies than like other action movies.
It was a pretty nice day! I have a new understanding of what people get out of sports. It is a special kind of escapism that is not about imagining you are in a different place or time, but which is about focusing intensely on being in your city at exactly the present, the moment that a rookie batter is in a 2-0 count with runners on first and second.
My various birthday presents have arrived after shipping delays and/or us just not being organized. Ciro got me a map of the world, a book of poems by Wislawa Szymborska, and Darth Vader and Son. With moneys from my grandmother, I got a shirt from eshakti, an online made-to-measure clothier. Their style is more conservative than mine, but I wanted to know what it felt like to have a shirt that fit in the waist and shoulders without straining across my chest. Let me tell you: it feels pretty comfortable. I have made a deal with myself that from now on I'm going to have all my clothes made to measure or tailored. This is more on the order of a philosophical deal, because I never buy clothes and finding a tailor is lower on my To-Do list than, for instance, writing 200 unattached metaphors. (Yes, this is a real, typed out, and regularly modified list that lives in Google Docs.)
I had the luxury of getting to sit down and watch three movies this week (some at home and one at the Somerville Theater, which had a real projectionist and real film, gosh) by three of my favorite directors:
Melancholia, Lars Von Trier - beautiful, thought provoking, funny, sad. A fairly perfect depiction of depression in a way that wasn't moralizing or miserablist: just here is a way that life is for some people. Highly recommended, although I am sure it is one of those films like Hotel Rwanda that people think they ought to watch but never work up to watching.
Mirror, Mirror, Tarsem - quite a strange film. It's more like The Cell than like The Fall, in that it's not scripted by Tarsem, such that there's tension between the film he's interested in making and the film he was hired to make. As a result, it's tremendously visually inventive, and many of the sequences, performances, and jokes are delightful. And then mixed up with that is an incredibly bizarre lowest-common-denominator kids' film with attendant pacing problems, questionable gender notions, and very little desire to make sense or have forward momentum. I did like it, and it's even weird enough to mostly defang the aforementioned questionable gender notions. It's a must-see, I'd say, for being Eiko's last film, if for no other reason.
The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan - I have no idea what other people are saying about this film; since I was so late seeing it, I missed reading all the discussion as it was happening. A dense enough film I should see it a few more times before I can fully unpack it, and one that redeems the first film in the trilogy (which I didn't dislike, but found to be thin soup). The theme that stands out to me is that of systems which you create to help you but which then limit you, which is not just in the obvious places in the movie but in each detail - the rope in the pit, Batman's rule against guns. Despite being propulsive high-action movies, Nolan's films always remind me of themes and variations rather than Freytag triangles, more like symphonies than like other action movies.
