Category: uncategorized

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

~ Mark

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The star trio is reunited! Kirk is also more bad-ass than usual. Director’s privilege? A good bit of the humor attempts fall flat, but I think the story is decent overall. The camera in this one is definitely more fluid than the previous entries in the series. Lots more long, arcing movements and mobile in-your-face stuff. I think the soundtrack was influenced by Scheherazade. If I had to describe the Star Trek films in one word, it would be idiosyncratic. The changes in tone, the weird plotlines, the ambivalence toward traditional villains… there’s a lot you don’t see in other movies. Star Trek rankings so far? Tough call, but maybe:

  1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  3. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  4. Star Trek
  5. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  6. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

B Michael Tumblr: Just Free Stuff

~ Mark

bmichael:

Rappers are very much analogous to bloggers in that both groups sort of do what they do because they want to do it, but they also know there’s not really any worth to what they’re doing – except sometimes one of their cohort gets scooped up by some faceless place with money, so there’s always a little halo of maybe-money attached to what they do. Maybe that halo’s worth more than actually making a piddly amount of money.

B Michael Tumblr: Just Free Stuff

~ Mark

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Alexander Pope.
~ Mark

It’s so intimate, and it’s one of your best friends, this stupid script that you end up living with for seventeen drafts or twenty drafts. […] You’re like, ‘You’re still here?? Can you clean up your shit? You leave it everywhere!’

Lake Bell.

A Wealth of Words by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., City Journal WInter 2013

~ Mark

There’s a positive correlation between a student’s vocabulary size in grade 12, the likelihood that she will graduate from college, and her future level of income. The reason is clear: vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.

A Wealth of Words by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., City Journal WInter 2013

In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh — Vulture

~ Mark

I loved this long interview.

On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you.

Also:

I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn’t understood until very recently: “I’d rather be No. 2 forever than No. 1 for a while.” Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It’s like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That’s the way I’ve always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make ’em.

He’s become one of my favorite directors.

In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh — Vulture

Holy Motors

~ Mark

Holy Motors. Incredible. Amazing, amazing performance from Denis Lavant. There’s no traditional plot, but the structure involves Lavant’s character being driven around Paris in a limousine to a series of appointments, each one requiring a different costume, makeup, identity, and performance. The logic is bent and ambiguous. A couple hours of mad and weird invention, wholly invigorating. Here’s Richard Brody. Ebert. Another good critical reading.

Audience as affordance: Twitter versus Facebook — Remains of the Day

~ Mark

In reference to Matt Haughey’s essay:

What could I possibly write as a status update that would be interesting to my father, one of my coworkers from my first job out of college, the friend of a friend who met me at a pub crawl and friended me, and someone who followed me because of a blog post I wrote about technology? This odd assortment of people all friended me on Facebook because they know me, and that doesn’t feel like a natural audience for any content except random life updates, like relationship status changes, the birth of children, job changes, the occasional photo so people know what you look like now. So unlike Haughey, what I struggle with about Facebook is not the constraint to be consistent with a single conception of myself, it’s the struggle to target content to match multiple versions of myself.

Audience as affordance: Twitter versus Facebook — Remains of the Day

Full Metal Jacket

~ Mark

Full Metal Jacket. Good stuff. I love how the first and second half have storytelling parallels, but with very different cinematographic styles. Tighter, controlled, fortifying training scenes vs. the looser, edgier feel in Vietnam. Apocalypse Now is definitely the better Vietnam film, though. It’s been quite a while since I last saw Platoon or The Deer Hunter. Vincent D’Onofrio was also awesome in Mystic Pizza.

My updated Kubrick leaderboard:

  1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  2. The Killing
  3. Full Metal Jacket
  4. Eyes Wide Shut
  5. The Shining
  6. A Clockwork Orange

Pina

~ Mark

Pina. Visually very cool, and the talent on display is great to watch. A few troubles I had with it: it’s frustrating to see only excerpts from longer dance performances, and even those fragments are interrupted. Also, like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, there’s a ton of talking-head praise for the title heroine, but it seems you learn even less about her. It’s possible I’m missing the point, though. Great dancing, and it takes a quite a mind to dream of such spectacles and bring them to life.ume