Captain America 2, The Winter Soldier: Short, Controlled Bursts

It's a fucking snakeskin turban, people. And no, Mom,
 she doesn't "just look that way" and those aren't her real
cheekbones. Gah, we argued so much about this dumb movie.

It's always a kick in the pants when the Oscars come around. My degree is in cinema studies and working at a grocery store comics. This left me rather depressed, having read my living-the-dream, scriptwriting amigo's annual top ten list to discover I'd only heard of any of the films via a fashion blog I read and not seen a single one. I haven't seen any of the nominees this year, except (cough) Maleficent which is up for costume design. Arg.
through high school and college, I was ever so tapped in to Hollywood (and beyond). The steep drop in my consumption of film--at least current film--coincides quite noticeably with the absence of any disposable income to speak of. Ah, how culture eludes the impoverished! I graduated six years ago in the spring and I've reduced myself to what I can steal from the internet, my streaming-only Netflix subscription, and movies related to my chosen field,

Giving Me a Number, Taking Away My Name

More than the snobbish angst of having not enjoyed any high art at the multiplex this year--and that's being generous in assuming some was made, I'm a cynical snob--is that I have no brevity in my nature. My articles on Watchmen and The Hunger Games are more akin to essays, and between tracking down images, writing and editing, they took days of time to produce. This is a hurdle, more than a flaw, I'd say: It's the way I tend to rant articulately about my opinions to a few people, promise myself and others that I'll write down my thinking and then never do that is the real, real problem. But, since I'm a deli-slicer extraordinaire these days (we don't give out numbers, actually), I might as well do as Devo commands and get up off my ass.

I've Got One Hell of a Job

This is a challenge all writers face: Not writing and feeling bad about it. Let's remember to work with what we've got, draw inspiration from whatever truly does inspire us, and just keep trying to write it down. I did see some movies that were in release this year. I do have opinions about them, discerning critiques as a writer, a filmgoer and a scholar of the silver screen. Let's get nitty and gritty, let's think critically about mass-audience entertainment, let's commit to following through on our promise to ourselves and each other and elevate even the lowest common experiences to the level of intelligence befitting discourse! Or, at least let's delve into a very long exploration of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, like I fucking said I would when I saw it in April. Yeehaw!

After this point, there are mega-spoilers, not that I probably need to warn anyone about a movie this old and some triggering things like descriptions of violence. Oh, and hereafter, there will be no more references to "Secret Agent Man" by Devo, in part because Steve Rogers makes the worst secret agent ever.

Several New Ones

There's really no sense in spending this post tearing Ridley Scott's "effort" Prometheus the...criticisms it deserves. I can only count my stars lucky that this was not the film that emerged in the stead of Alien, given that the strong, independent, yet achingly feminine Ellen Ripley might have been replaced by a shrieking female lead defined by little more than an obsession with pregnancy and a fuzzy understanding of the important difference between belief and proof.

What to learn, what could it be? I like characters that attempt--even in vain--to lift themselves above their emotions when the situation requires. I like love stories: It's love that moves the mountain, or at least, what makes you want to move it. But there are more interpretations of the love-drive than the howling abandonment of reason in the face of loss. It's a good first step to realize this as an author. The next step is allowing your characters to learn the same lesson. Sometimes there is work to be done; suck it up, leave your boyfriend in quarantine and go do it.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

This film's title gets two (pesky) songs stuck in my head, Dandelion by The Rolling Stones and the old barbershop standard My Coney Island Baby. My mother used to sing the whole rhyme to me and my sibs while counting the buttons on our dress shirts, stopping (based on some rule I now forget) and determining which of the roles we "were". To top it all off, my sister actually watched the original miniseries one summer while we were growing up, flagging this version as a possible point of commonality between us (a bit of a rarity, these days). So TTSS has been nagging at me since I saw it a few weeks ago.

Beyond the stellar ensemble casting, intimate performances and exquisitely claustrophobic mise-en-scene that brought the Circus to life, TTSS offers a valuable opportunity: A reminder that British cinema is foreign cinema. It's harder to see here than in other foreign films. We've been fed most of the cast for decades, many in non-accented roles. And this being a period piece further muddies the water (though Gilliam's epic Brazil put a hyper-Brit, hyper-bureaucracy into the cult consciousness forever ago, and the source material, as it were, is well displayed in TTSS). Toss in the fact that there are swaths of Canada that require subtitles, and you've got about as subtle a genre piece as you can find (subtlety being an indicator of the film's foreign status, of course. Sorry Hollywood).

There are Others all over this film, and it is they who give the nod to the outsider in every Yank moviegoer. Gay men, spies, Scotsmen, women in the government--there's a social maze ancient and twisted for the characters to navigate, one so intricate that the audience might not even notice as we stride right over the top of it, from our modern, American perspectives.

But those of us who can sit in the theater and say, "Wow, England's really different," are actually invited in. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an outsider's film, for them, by them. And the moral of the story is that being an outsider hurts, really costs, but, hey, you aren't as alone as you think. Not a bad feeling to walk away with for the price of popcorn and a pint.

How Does That Even Work?

My acting experience is negligible, but it does exist (Cough, cough, high school, cough). I also know a few actual actors who have, y'know, talent and skill and careers. It is from conversations with them about their processes, as much as from my own limited knowledge, that I now ask this question of myself:

If I had a career and all the stuff that you need to get one, namely lots of training and practice (this is a hypothetical me, so let's ignore the luck/endurance/connections that getting a career in anything actually takes) and I needed to cry for a role, and I being a totally rad actor could cry for said role, how the hell would I force just one tear out of just one eye?

Is it skill? Luck? Faked by make up? I don't know. When I get weepy, my nose runs in a very undignified way. Can you... control that with acting? I heard a lot of hand-waving about Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and it was well-deserved. But Mark Strong cries a single, perfect tear of ultimate heartbreak and nuance, and the intensity of his performance has me almost embarrassed. (More on this next time)

It bears mentioning that describing the scene I'm referring to in prose sounds maudlin and trite. I mean, c'mon, "a single tear"? Snort. But on film it works. It's breathtaking. And if I see my man Mark getting type-cast with any more BS occult villain roles (Sherlock Holmes is a silly-ish movie with a serious-ish role, but, jeez, Stardust? He spends half the movie making the wtf-I-can't-believe-I'm-from-the-same-magical-realm-as-these-dopes face, and what else could he do?) I'ma make some casting directors cry.

Winner, Loser

I came back to a comic I wandered away from today (was reading it at work, no other reason), and I'll never stray again, things keep on like they are. Look Straight Ahead is actually doing something. There's a real understanding of how things feel and how to translate that into how things look. You can sense the theory, if you know it, but the experience--an experiential webcomic, now there's a rare bird--is rich enough that the thought process is never obtrusive. A seamless blend of execution and idea. Boom, yummy. Kudos, Elaine. I really like the simple truth with which you're writing Jeremy. Teens are hard; nicely done.

And I'm wandering away from a comic I've been reading for almost a year now. The Concrete World has great story, world and dialogue (minus a few nit-picky errors that crop up now and then). The art is riddled with a problem my illustrator and I call "squishy head"(go see what I mean). I read it diligently despite its miserly update schedule and occasional iffy drawing: Good story is a lot harder to find than pleasing art. And now they're going on hiatus, and I am disappointed and unsurprised. Momentum can be key in an undertaking as demanding as regularly updating your comic. Six pages a month is a dribble, and when you're dribbling it's so easy to just drop it.

The comic I work on updates around fifteen pages a month. It's grueling to produce like that, and it takes a big investment of creative energy and time. But in a medium where dropping off the face of the earth (hiatus is often code for this) is practically expected, it's invest or go home.

The Review Process

I've been thinking about how to put my own little touch on the movie reviews I'm slated to start writing for this blog. That's the "Opinion" part, you know, reviews of things. I've been trying to pick a rating system and a structure. Then I realized I don't want to write reviews.

That's not really what my training has made me good at. Academia teaches us to hunt for evidence, and to use it to either fashion a context or support a claim (or both). Each text is an opportunity to enrich the catalog of experience--both critical experience and vicarious experience. I love these experiences, crave the challenge of contextualizing and the pleasure of the immersion a good narrative experience offers equally. So I'm not going to review. I'm going to illustrate what the evidence inspires in me, be it the frustration of a poorly-constructed character or the delight of a well-crafted visual vocabulary (Or the sexiness of sex/maniacal laughter of watching stuff explode. It's not all snooty CS BS).

There's very little that I consume that I don't at least respect. Even trashy things. It can take just as much integrity to admit that something's enjoyable because it's cheesecake as to analyze high literature. Sometimes I find lessons in "what not to do," but others' mistakes have a lot of value. It's not fair to say something's terrible and not say why, but I intend to go a step further, if I've got something negative to say. If I read/watch something that's broke, I'll try to offer my fix. It's a rare case, I find, that is unfixable. "What if" is a sick game to play with your own work (once it's complete), but it's a productive analytical tool, when looking at someone else's.

Once you know what you like and why, you can start making what you like. And when you make what you like, your audience will feel your passion. That's what I'm all about.