My Cinematical Mind

I don't always have the firmest grip on reality.

Once, walking into a friend's empty kitchen to find the sink faucet on, I concluded that it was in fact the work of demons (i.e. the opening scene of The Ring- you know something bad is coming when appliances start to act of their own accord) and ran from the room screaming/laughing, until someone went in and turned it off.

I watch a lot of movies and, on occasion, they distort my life a little bit.

I tend to worry that men will come into my house and shoot me while I sleep (Capote), or that all of my friends will meet untimely and gruesome deaths because of my thirst for knowledge and unwillingness to accept the natural circle of life (Frankenstein).

My sense of logic is not entirely unhinged, for there is some small part of me that always knows these situations are a tad unrealistic. Even so, I sometimes find myself in a hybrid world of fact and fiction. I take in my surroundings and let my imagination do what it will (don't worry though, no singing cartoon penguins here. I'm not that far gone just yet).

But for the sake of preserving my status as a functioning member of society, it's probably a good thing that people can't hear my thoughts.

Attack of the clones: there's an end in sight

Hollywood to Actors - No Surgery Please - NY Times

Here's some good news: Hollywood seems to (finally!) be tiring of plastic people. At least a little bit.

America's body image issue definitely has its cultural base. As a friend of mine pointed out, our up-tight attitudes about nudity (a result, I think, of our Puritan roots) prevent us throughout childhood and adolescence from seeing bodies other than our own and those in the media. And since media bodies are often fake and airbrushed, our perception of beauty is distorted. In Turkey, she said, women, young and old, sit around naked in bathhouses together, so girls see what real bodies look like and thus have greater confidence in themselves.

I think Botox is poison for actors. How can someone with a job so heavily reliant on facial expressions want to plasticize their skin? They obviously feel pressure to do so, but still, for the sake of the craft, should abstain.

As 30 Rock's Liz Lemon said to panicking actress Jenna, "You can be like Madonna and cling to youth with your Gollum arms, or you can be like Meryl Streep and embrace your age with elegance." Aptly put.

Excuse me, have I seen you before?

I love this video- so much so that the number of times I've watched it in the last four weeks is embarrassing. A brilliant parody.

See, it's funny, 'cause it's true.

Let's do the time warp again

Cell phones ruin everything. No longer does the dashing young man promise to meet his beautiful love interest at a certain place at a certain time, only to be detained by a series of unfortunate complications resulting in a tragic misunderstanding and fate's cruel destruction of what could have been. Now he can just text her and say "sry babe, runnin late."

Screenwriters nowadays face the challenge of tastefully incorporating the inescapable presence of everyday technology into plot.

Some embrace it. In He's Just Not That Into You (2009), Drew Barrymore's character frets about rejection by means of text, e-mail, and MySpace. Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer features brilliant usage of a GPS system to help unravel a mystery.

The reaction I particularly enjoy seems popular among independent filmmakers--setting movies in non-descript or recent time periods. The Coen brothers have long favored writing movies set in the recent past: Fargo (1996) takes place in 1987, The Big Lebowski (1998) in 1991, and No Country For Old Men (2007) in 1980. Jason Reitman's Juno and Drew Barrymore's Whip It both take place in unidentified years, but don't involve frequent (if any) use of cell phones and computers. Personally, I find it refreshing to see people use pay-phones and spend an hour and a half with no mention of Facebook or Twitter.

Going back to simpler times allows those good old-fashioned elements like plot and character to develop, without any of the distractions that so often keep us from our homework.

Read all about it

Polanski article from the Financial Times

Tobias Grey's feature on Roman Polanski is an intriguing exploration of the director's personal history and the story behind his latest film, The Ghost Writer, released in the wake of his stint in Swiss prison and sentencing to house arrest for a sex crime he committed in 1978.

I saw, and loved, The Ghost Writer. There may be some parallels to Polanski's present predicament, but screenwriter Robert Harris says they are purely coincidental. Nevertheless, critics and audiences alike will be making these assessments in the weeks to come.

The article demonstrates how certain events in Polanski's life have contributed to his work. The same is true of any artist. But it seems that when the event is a crime or social taboo, the correlations become newsworthy and subject to criticism.

Should we allow a filmmaker's personal life to so thoroughly infiltrate our perception of his work? I don't think so.

I have a friend who refuses to watch Woody Allen movies because she objects to his relationship with his former partner Mia Farrow's adopted daughter. Has Allen's work changed since the news of the affair came out in 1992? If it has, I certainly don't see it. It's not like he's been churning out material to procure public acceptance of his father-stepdaughter situation.

Watching The Ghost Writer, I noticed that the characters' foulest words had been dubbed over with tamer expletives. This, I suppose, was done to obtain a PG-13 rating (PG-13's are permitted only one F-bomb--any more than that and it's rated R). There are only to explanations I can think of: it was either an attempt to draw in the under-17 crowd, or, more likely, a message to American audiences, saying "Don't worry, there's no rape in this film!"

The censorship doesn't do much to diminish the quality of the film, except for taking some reality out of it. If you were accused of war crimes in a reputation-shattering international scandal, would you really be shouting freaking this and bloody that instead of the grown-up version of the word?

With all art, the viewer's interpretation is far more important than the artist's intent. If this is true, personal scandals should matter even less. Movies should be judged for what they are, not for the lives of the people who made them. Leave the tabloids out of it.

(no subject)

Making up titles is clearly not my strong suit.

This blog will cover the only subject I feel remotely qualified blogging about--movies. So I guess I'll be writing reviews, sharing opinions, and whatever else comes up. And if you're lucky, maybe an in-depth analysis of The Graduate, because there was definitely something you missed.