The Philosophy Factory

Old Words

2011-12-02T08:43:00.003-06:00

I wrote this about a year ago, found it in a notebook a couple days ago, and decided it's a pretty good representation of where I'm at these days. As usual, I'm impressed by the wordplay but not sure if it means anything.
--
Pen to paper at a moment of loss. Lost words for the gains, hard fought and little seen, for the fine line between crashing and burning brighter than sunrises over desolate scenes. To friends, well loved and woebegotten, whose dreams end and whose lives begin, who awaken now and cannot speak for the labors endured, challenges met, freedom gained, identities lost. Lives forged in hostile fire, ideas made and ideals sacrificed; the firm satisfaction of having done so much for so long and its gone.
To back of the mind, the memories that haunt that are one last lost chance and that final goodbye and that wonder if you could ever feel like this again.
It belongs to you.
In its whole steaming self you made it. You owned it. You can love it like there's nothing else to love.
Not true.
Hold on to your dreams spoken swiftly and never forget, its bigger than that. We all know. Let it be. Don't forget.

A Dense Record of Thought

2011-11-27T06:36:00.003-06:00

Some thoughts. Some assembly required.

For some time, I have been concerned with self-creation. I hold firmly that we are not masters of our own destiny, as though what befalls a person is a matter of choice. Nor, however, are we satisfied with a random world dictated wholly by chance. As always in a clash of absolutes, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The middle ground I stake is that we cannot help what life throws our way, nor can we know what will come from our actions. We can know what we do and why. The antidote to regret is remembering why we opted for one course over another in a moment of choice. Don't mistake retrospection for responsibility. What's past is past; the person you were could not have chosen differently because he or she did not choose differently. We can't change that. What we can change is who we are. How you respond. This is self construction.
The exercise is not simple. We are mired in life, produced by families, friends, cultures and the choices of others. We are born into a world we did not choose. To take a step further, the distinctions between self and other, will and world, or inner life and outer (take your pick) are not so firm as some might like to believe. Self construction belongs to a legion of useful fictions, tools for living. It's a way to resolve the tension between the world as random and uncaring and the world as a theater of judgment for our every action.
The point, then? Live well. Know who you are; know why you are who you are. Do not be defined by regret but by growth. Where you own happiness is concerned, assign neither blame nor responsibility. It is as all things ephemeral (which is not to say unreal). Don't think you've got the answer to life. Just know what you're going to do about it.

Traffic Cops

2011-06-01T21:13:00.003-05:00

I hate traffic cops. Arbitrary, unnecessary, discriminatory, disingenuous. Bad encounter yesterday; it inspired this.

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The continuity of difference.

Moral sleight of hand.

I just don't get it.
Words make worlds and
mine's so fine
most of the time
until it fall fall falls
and I break.
It's not pretty.
I've nothing witty to say.
These days they pass and I ask
what a reasonable man should do.
Aha! That conceit
still with me
as though a reasonable man
is some real thing
not the sum of our eccentricities
divided by our gross.
And what do we want?
It flies in all directions
life lessons, more time, less stressing.

I wondered what to write
and the words kept falling
I play tetris with the fragments
that I'm calling knowledge.
With baited breath I'm making good
on secret promises to no one
that came into this world as lies.
It should be no surprise
that a long walk lets out lost sounds
and winding paths and darkened skies
are a chapel for the faithless
and a good one at that.

You see, I've been thinking.
Because feeling's no good when
you're lost to the world and
I need battle plans not words.
It's a hostile space and
I've a name to make
if not a dollar.
And when the revolution comes
I can't wait to take up arms
or just to escape,
get out while the horrors
get swept away.
I have nothing earn nothing learn nothing
but I'm making it through
and one way or another
I won't be used.

Text, Not Dreams.

2011-05-16T06:36:00.000-05:00

Last semester the finals rush moved me to songwriting; a rare thing for me that emerges in the same way as poetry. There's no intention behind it. A string of words congeals incessantly and fights its way out of mind and into text, drawing along with it a threshold of affect I can only ever hope survives the transition into words. It becomes a fixation. Though unfinished, I've sung this song to myself under my breath or out loud to the night sky innumerable times since I brought it into existence. Without further ado, here's that verse:

You make me sleep like tryptophan
and I don't need it.
I'm a free man going to bleed
and I don't care about
your weakness
or excuses
or the bruises that'll
weight down what remain
of all the days you wondered
when your train would come.

Because I'm halfway home
and I'll take my throne.

I sing it in a low register to an imagined bass beat. It signifies the flight from my natural tendency to sit back and go with the flow; an assertion of control to combat complacency with where I'm at and what I'm doing. It's not the sort of idea I usually express, and I think that's a good thing, or at least something necessary.
I think we all look for that place to rest. Some get drunk or high, seeking to forget their troubles. Some put their hopes in love, seeking that completion in another when they can't find it in themselves. I think I look for it in words. Another poetic fragment comes to mind: "The poet's dream is to escape from prison by describing it's bars/but I think I've seen enough bars to give up on dreaming." One more fragment made it into a facebook status: "What's the use of dreamtime when there's no escape from the sunrise?" These probably come across as pessimism. They're not.
A place to rest isn't out there somewhere; you carry it with you. Aesop Rock says "dream a little dream/or you can live a little dream/I'd rather live it/'cuz dreamers always chase but never get it." Dreaming and its uselessness is a new theme for me, and I'm growing to be surprised how deeply I mean it. I've got a lot of big ideas brewing, but they don't mean much until they've fought their way out of mind and into words. Imperfect though it may be, text is better currency than thought.

On Promises

2011-05-04T01:19:00.000-05:00

What's in a promise? If you believe Nietzsche, the whole of human history (insofar as it's human, but that's another post entirely). A promise privileges one future over another. It invests the actualization of that future with moral content. No one, after all, likes an oath-breaker.
There's a question of power here. We don't all get what we want. Some promises conflict, and so some will be broken. Whose promises get kept is a complicated question. Nietzsche would call it strength, but that seems a bit simplistic. Strength comes in many forms. Suffice to say, where history is concerned, the result is more important than the process.
The astute among you will have noticed the wrinkle. Strength may determine virtue, but history defines strength. Enter the accountants of value. The promise may bind the future, but memory tells us whose promises were kept. A simple thing to to make strength out of convenience by re-fashioning a broken promise according to an actual outcome, or to deny strength by hiding the connection between past and present.
So what is a promise without control over its terms? Ah, the naivety of Nietzsche's nobility! To be defined by the exercise of strength without concern for its maintenance. They never stood a chance (if indeed they ever existed). Guile always beats strength.
Even if it holds true, a promise is a form of tyranny. It holds the present accountable for the past, enslaving who you are to who you were. We do this every day. Some call it identity. I call it a cop-out. Who among us is a static creature? Who would want to be? Does change not define us every bit as much as continuity?
A promise, then, is a moment of bravado, a foundational gesture that breeds anxiety as soon as it's uttered. The initial premise of this writing lays in ruins; has anything been gained? Perhaps. Beneath the promise is the sense of duration. Without memory, without foresight, we have nothing but the ever-emerging ever-dying present. The promise both creates history and gives it meaning.
If there's a resolution to this thought, it is that this dual function of a promise tells us much more about living than the constraints it entails. The continuity of past, present, and future also contains difference, and from that difference manifests value. To become historical does not have to mean being an accountant of virtue, but perhaps reveals the contingency of virtue and the all-too-human imperative to attend to its creation and destruction in the pursuit of a way through life.

Some Narcissistic Musing

2011-04-29T02:15:00.000-05:00

There was a time when I wrote ceaselessly. It was a nightly ritual, purely narcissistic; I wrote for myself and myself alone. The words formed a history of thought, and I value those tattered pages because they illustrate both continuity and change. I revisit these old journals from time to time and can't help but laugh. It's the same story written in new ways. Same thoughts, new metaphors. Same feelings about different people.
There's a bias I'm always mindful of in these retrospectives. When you talk to yourself, it's probably because you don't have someone handy to listen to you. I still value the insights, but I recognize that they emerge from a particularly lonely, particularly discontented iteration of myself. The inwardly-focused person in those pages isn't me, entirely.
This disjuncture between who I think I am and who the journal represents makes them objects of a weird sort of anxiety. On the one hand, it's someone I consciously am not. The thought that someone else might read them and who they'd make me out to be as a result is terrifying. On the other hand, they are meaningful. Equally terrifying is the thought that the insights I find so precious are just wasted words, valuable only to the author.
I don't write much anymore. You could say it's because I'm not lonely and don't need to write for myself anymore. That's a problem--for someone like me, writing is essential. I shouldn't have to feel isolated to make it happen. I think the larger reason, though, is that I can't figure out how to work through the disjuncture all that old writing represents. In a way, returning to the blog is a way of getting that process started.
The anxiety here is obviously unwarranted. It's a problem for me because it's about me. For anyone else, it's something to either ignore or just feel a little awkward about. Maybe I have someone's sympathies here, maybe not. It's not particularly important. Still, I'm willing to waste a few words here because I like the idea that how I think and what I feel doesn't have to be confined to closely-guarded journal pages. A fool's hope maybe, but it's a start.

Untimely returns

2011-04-18T00:26:00.000-05:00

Somewhere deep down, the intention for this blog was to be part lectern, part confessional. The minister preparing a sermon or the Catholic child summoning sins to be forgiven both agonize over every detail preparing, because souls are at stake in finding the proper combination of words to speak before God.
It's time to betray that intention. The half-finished posts sitting in the queue, that never quite found the necessary perfection to be presented to the lord of the heavens represent too great a weight to leave behind. My return to writing is untimely because I don't have the time to craft perfect offerings, and I haven't since I stopped posting.
Yet here I am. Grad school doesn't make for free time and nothing is perfect in this life. I have nothing to confess, nor do I want to craft sermons. No souls are at stake. One of the imperfect thoughts waiting to be finished to be posted is about the impossibility of communication. Perhaps it went unfinished because if it were a perfect thought there would be no point in voicing it. New creed, then: cogito, ergo dico. I think, therefore I speak.
Thoughts unvoiced refract in idle minds. My brain feels like a marching band in an echo chamber sometimes. Every trivial thing gets caught in some network of ultimate significance that must be wholly uncovered before it can be made real. A silly mistake for someone who reads Nietzsche--it's stupid to theorize an ideal world when we live in a real one. Robert Frost might have put it better in For Once, Then, Something. The best we ever get when reflecting is a hint that something exists beneath the mundane. Stringing together discontinuities reveals only the continuity of imperfection. There's no value to it; at least not in the sense that the endeavor intended.
So, for an untimely return, this is a celebration of imperfection. May the ideal silence the real no longer. I write now in hopes that echoes become ululations; chaos become celebration; discontinuity become encounter. I hope you're along for the ride.

On Conflict, Memory, and History

2009-10-28T07:03:00.000-05:00

I write now of forgotten stalemates. No battle is ever won; one side or the other simply forgets to continue fighting. It may be trite to imply that death is but another face of forgetting. Surely, in any contest there is a loser, and history's defeated masses stand in silent testament to that inexorable fact. But that one side loses does not mean that the other has won.

It is not bodies which clash, but ideas, of which we are simply instruments. The repetitions of history are proof enough of this precept. Humans take up their various arms under the banner of one particular vision of life against another, and the war rages until one side runs out of bodies. Death is one source of this shortfall. Forgetting is the larger.

What is important, then, is that nothing is forgotten forever. All victories are hollow because all enemies persist. The winner's false hubris collapses under its own weight, while still more bodies search amid the rubble for the forgotten banners, and are filled with great pride and misplaced nostalgia at the remembrance of something which stood against the inadequacy of the status quo.

Perhaps what matters, then, is the sides you take. I speak not of dedication to a single idea, but the rigorous self-definition entailed by the remembrance of so many forgotten stalemates. In a century such as this, it may well be that there is nothing left to die for. Paradoxically, there might neither be some one thing left to live for. So many forgotten battles are history's great burden on its youngest children, and if we are to live well, we must not only bear this burden, but do so with pride.

I Watch the Watchmen (But I'd Rather Read Them)

2009-06-22T05:28:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the delay. I had planned a rather extensive theoretical entry on how I watch movies, but actually writing it turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. So, I'm shifting gears with a topic that's near and dear to my heart.
Before we get to the meat of it, I've got a few autobiographical words to shed on The Watchmen. I saw the movie the week it opened, which also happened to be the week my squad and I dedicated to preparing for the National Debate Tournament. I kept close tabs on the legal disputes which preceded the movie, the trailers as they came out, and any other news I could find. I am a huge fan of graphic novels, and The Watchmen is, by most accounts, the gold standard. Further, 80's culture, the Reagan administration, and the cultural status of the bomb are all areas of strong interest for me. So, it's a bit of an understatement to say that I was excited about this one.
Given my expectations, it was probably inevitable that I found the movie disappointing. Strangely though, I thought the film was a fairly faithful adaptation of the graphic novel. Thus today's question: how can a film fail where its graphic novel equivalent succeeded?

The two main criticisms of the film version of the Watchmen I have are (1) that it was shot as a superhero movie rather than an antihero movie; and (2) that the relevant cultural references were not updated.

Beginning with the first point, let's first clarify the terms. The Watchmen graphic novel was by all accounts innovative, in large part because of the way it treats its superheroes. The mainstream superhero stories serialized by giants like DC and Marvel all tend to share certain characteristics. Here's a short list of relevant aspects of these hero stories:
Character focus: The story is driven by events surrounding a single character. I distinguish this from plot focus in that character-focused stories don't necessarily have a single defining conflict, but instead have multiple conflicts that intersect mostly based on the protagonist's interaction with them
Emphasis on origin stories: Spider-Man's radioactive spiderbite, Superman's exodus from the exploding planet Krypton, and the traumatic discovery of mutant powers in adolescence experienced by the X-Men are all memorable and crucial aspects of their respective stories. Superheroes generally get superpowers by accident, and also undergo an associated traumatic event that lands them squarely in the "good guy" column.
"Heart of Gold" moments: It's easy to be selfless when you're invincible. Heroes prove they've got hearts of gold by finding themselves genuinely threatened and acting super-heroic anyways.
The ways in which The Watchmen is not a superhero story, then, are legion. There is no single protagonist; if you were to contend that the story has multiple protagonists, you'd end up having to include at least four separate characters who work against each other from time to time. The origin stories for Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan follow the first and second parts of the origin story archetype, but neither follows the other and all the other heroes lack superpowers and owe their origin to nothing much more than a decision to dress in tights and kill bad guys. "Heart of Gold" moments are few and far between, and when they are present (Rorschach at the end, for example), they hardly resonate goodwill.
None of this is by accident. A defining aspect of The Watchmen was its deconstruction of the superhero. It is not primarily a fantasy about people with the power to fight evil, but rather a realistic story about what would happen if people who believed they had these powers existed.* The way the graphic novel did this was through chapter-ending sections of mock-archival information: a mock autobiography of a former superhero, a fake hack newspaper defending costumed vigilantism, and so on.
The movie did not incorporate these sections. It ran instead as what you would get if you used the traditional comic panels of the graphic novel as a storyboard for a film. The plot comes across loud and clear, and much of the tone of the graphic novel is captured. What is missing is the self-reflective sections which communicate the character backgrounds.
Further, the shot selections and directorial emphases the film uses are standard comic book fare and do little to go beyond them. The scene where Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II get ambushed during a night out on the town is a slurry of quick cuts and gore, almost like a lost scene from Kill Bill. It was not a particularly crucial scene in the graphic novel, important only in that it gave the two heroes a taste of the life they had left behind. In the movie, however, it reads as an imported trope from other comic book adaptations: the small-time crime thwarted by the heroes that points to a larger plot.
The movie further misses the satiric double entendre of these two heroes ending up in bed with each other. The movie gives us star-crossed lovers, doomed by Dan's insecurities and Laurie's relationship with Dr. Manhattan. Forbidden love is a well-known hero movie trope. Consider, for example, Spider-Man's prolonged debates over whether or not he can be a hero and date Mary Jane, or just about every girlfriend filmic Batman has ever had. Alan Moore, however, seems to have been reading Freud, not Shakespeare when he wrote his version of this scene. While both versions use sex to show Dan and Laurie's libidinal investment in super-heroing, the graphic novel goes a step further, saying that, for them, sex is the only reason they got dressed up in the first place. You can gauge this dynamic by the couple's interaction with Dr. Manhattan after the fact. Dan in the comic book is flustered and afraid--he acts as you or I might if suddenly confronted with a partner's ex. Dan in the movie is strangely cool and collected. This reaction seems unrealistic to me, but it is certainly in keeping with a typical hero motif.
The sacrifice of psychological realism for comic book style can probably be seen in other parts of the film as well, but I think you get the point. The net effect is that the movie stays a movie, and its characters stay characters. The movie doesn't stick with you like the graphic novel did, and it's because you've seen it all before.

My second problem with the film is the dated cultural benchmarks. Part two of the strength of the graphic novel was its commentary on the culture of the late cold war. The threat of nuclear weapons bred a culture squirming like a beetle on a pin. These days, mass annihilation is passé. I have more sophisticated words on the subject that could be spilled elsewhere, but it suffices to say that now the cold war fear has diffused into the terrorist threat--something no one is safe from because it can hit anywhere without warning, but markedly less devastating that human extinction.
Admittedly, it would have been difficult to rewrite The Watchmen to be about terrorism, and I'm not claiming I could have done it well. My claim is only that there's little to no contextual relevance to the movie, while the graphic novel will be useful to cultural anthropologists a millennia from now. Zach Snyder's position here was a difficult one given the graphic novel's cult following. Substantial changes to the plot would anger the fanboys, who constitute the film's core audience.
Those caveats aside, I present my exhibit B: V for Vendetta. The film was enormously successful, and, in my opinion, quite good. It was also an Alan Moore graphic novel in the 80's known for its commentary on political culture. The graphic novel commented on Thatcherite Britain by contrasting fascism and anarchism. The movie was successfully updated as a commentary on the Bush administration, and, though still set in Britain, discussed issues like suppression of civil liberties in the name of security and the state's mimicry of the terrorism it hunts.
The point is that The Watchmen could have done what V for Vendetta managed, but failed. The result, again, is that the film lacks contextual resonance.

Thus, we return to the opening question: how can a movie fail where its textual equivalent succeeded? The second criticism gives a partial answer. The time delay between the graphic novel and the film limited what the latter could say about its context compared to the former. This is more a problem of a too-long production process than an inherent problem to film as a medium.
The first criticism is more damning, and is difficult for defenders of film to account for. Where the graphic novel was critical, the movie was cliché. Imported tropes replaced psychological realism, and the result is a pale shadow of The Watchmen. The graphic novel's more brilliant sections required the reader's active engagement. Mulling over the nuances of Moore's created world brought revelations about its characters, and forced the readers to reconcile the Watchmen with their preconceived notions of what a superhero is. The movie affords no such time for thought. It captures your attention by keeping the plot moving at a brisk pace, with regularly interspersed action sequences.
My conclusion, then, is that discerning what’s wrong with Snyder’s version of The Watchmen also tells us how we should judge other filmic adaptations of graphic novels and comic books. That is, we all know by now that a conventional comic book movie will make money by sticking to the formula and keeping audiences entertained. A great one, however, will make us think as well. The Watchmen was good, not great, which is tragic considering the greatness of its source material.

*A quick aside here: if you apply my standard of "going beyond the conceit," this is one of the ways the graphic novel succeeds where the film fails. The film gets caught in the conceit by spending most of its time showing off people in costumes fighting crime, where the graphic novel transcends the conceit by focusing on the psychological question of who these people are and how they came to dress up and act like vigilantes.

Up: The Non-Conceited Conceit

2009-06-09T14:05:00.000-05:00

Just saw Up last night, and, I'm happy to report, it lived up to the hype. My roommate Jason commented before the showing that Pixar has been very good at making movies that are compelling to children and adults for the same reasons. I agree. Today's entry will be a short one. I just want to present Up as a counterpoint to Pan's Labyrinth in that it uses its conceit effectively.
Slate ran a bit piece on how many balloons it would actually take to lift a house. The Slate article is good in that it approaches the subject of turning a house into a super-hot air balloon with the same sense of whimsical detachment to a rather silly idea as the film does. That is, from an engineering standpoint, the main conceit of the film is vaguely plausible, but tremendously impractical.
Of course the physics aren't the point. This is a movie about a love for adventure in the young and the old. The flying house is just a vehicle (pardon the pun) for the story, which is why it's an effective conceit.
Further, it adds to the story. Had the old man simply flown and discovered the kid as a stowaway, the sense that he was searching for one last great adventure would have been lost. His character was so effective because he was outwardly a tired, old man, but inwardly young at heart, someone who still has what it takes to hunt down one more elusive dream.

Pan's Labyrinth and the Overgrown Conceit

2009-06-03T22:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't made it to the theater yet, I haven't worked up the stomach to re-watch Hostel, and I haven't found anyone who wants to sit around and watch bad teen movies for a few hours, so my initial slate of posts is on hold...for now. But never fear! There's a lot more where that came from. Today, I'd like to talk about Pan's Labyrinth. Spoilers, by the way. I'll be talking about the ending.

Pan's Labyrinth was a difficult movie for me. The visuals were always compelling, the fantasy elements were well-executed, and juxtaposition of the girl's secret world with the war going on around her was poignant and compelling. Nevertheless, the movie strikes a dissonant chord with me. The girl is killed, shot by her stepfather, and yet, it turns out her fantasies were true: she really is a magic princess, and she lives happily ever after.
It could be that the film is suggesting an afterlife. For being virtuous, she is rewarded in death. But this is unprecedented by the rest of the plot. The girl's religious beliefs are not a major focus, nor is the subject of religion in general particularly crucial to the film.
It could be a metaphor, del Toro's way of giving closure to the viewer's cinematic experience of the death of a child. If this is the case, however, we are looking at a greatly overdeveloped filmic metaphor.
My position, then, is that the events of the film are meant to be taken as true; that is, magic is real, there really are fauns, and the little girl is a long lost princess. And this is my problem with the movie: it suffers from a severe case of an overgrown conceit.
We'll get back to Pan's Labyrinth momentarily. First, a few words on conceits. In fiction, and especially in fantasy, a conceit is the plainly unreal idea that the reader accepts as true in order for the story to work. Conceits are useful. They allow authors to shrug off the fetters of reality and explore all sorts of interesting literary territory. Indeed, to some extent, all fiction is "conceited" in that it asks the reader to imagine as real a whole menagerie of characters, places, and events that have at best marginal claims to reality.
Conceits can also be literary deathtraps. That is, authors can get caught up in their own conceit. They expound upon a created world for its own sake rather than the sake of the story. In doing so, they surrender something which I consider to be a critical component for successful art. Art should say something. The message doesn't have to be earth-shattering, mind-boggling, political, or even moral, but it has to get beyond itself.
A good, popular example is Star Trek. The series has a rigorously detailed fictional universe which can be investigated to no end by a fan, but it never was the parameter specifications on the warp drive that made it so enduring. The Star Trek universe is a means to an end, and that end was a hopeful vision of the future. The Trekkie who can quote from memory the star date of the Federation/Klingon alliance, but doesn't know the significance of putting the Russian Chekov in a leadership position misses the point. They are stuck in the conceit and missed the message.
The point of all this introductory stuff on conceits in a film blog is that I think the ending to Pan's Labyrinth is hardly an ending at all--it is merely the extension of the conceit. It's great for the girl (Ofelia) that, though she seems to have been killed in the world you and I might recognize as real, she's still alive in the one where everything turns out for the best, but for the story, it's a dead end.
What I found interesting about the concept for Pan's Labyrinth was it's positive perspective on a child's fantasy against the cruel reality of the Spanish civil war. Her fantasy world gave Ofelia strength, happiness, and a measure of hope when the real world provided no such things. The film's message was that imagination is not idle, that creativity can help us cope, and that even at its ugliest, life is not irredeemable.
There are limits to fantasy, though, and consequences for exceeding them. In fiction and in life, delusions of grandeur foreshadow a harrowing encounter with reality. Fantasy is a solace, not a solution, and to believe otherwise is to lose touch with the world and everyone else in it. Pan's Labyrinth's overgrown conceit breaks the rule by making Ofelia's fantasy the solution to her situation.
This is particularly problematic because the positive message of the film is softened by the overgrown conceit. The hope provided by the escape into fantasy is ultimately presented as valuable because the fantasy turns out to be real. While this makes narrative sense, it understates the value of fantasies that don't happen to be true. Guillermo del Toro is a famously imaginative filmmaker, and Pan's Labyrinth is supposed to be his magnum opus. But rather than a profound celebration of creativity as something valuable for life, what we recieve is another beautiful conceit.
I don't claim to be qualified to sit in the director's chair, or make the filmic decisions that make something like Pan's Labyrinth work. I still believe it to be a very good film; one worth watching more than once. But the overgrown conceit is what keeps it from being a great film, and I can't help but wonder how else the narrative could have been tied up.

Welcome!

2009-05-31T02:48:00.000-05:00

Hi everybody. Welcome to my blog. Here, I'll mostly be talking about film, because I find it incredibly interesting, and incredibly important to contemporary culture. The plan is to write something at least once a week, and if I get out of the habit, please feel free to harass me to get back to work. Feedback in general is appreciated, and yes, I do take requests--if you would like to hear my take on any given film, I would be more than happy to give it.
Basically, there are three basic things I want to write about: (1) popular genre movies, their conventions, and how I tell a good one from a bad one; (2) what I read into certain movies I like or find interesting; and (3) whatever's big in the theater this weekend. These categories are, of course, arbitrary and interchangeable, but they're as good a starting point as any.
I already have a few ideas bouncing around that will likely make it up here in relatively short order. So, appropriately, here's a preview of coming attractions:

A genre piece on the coming of age comedy: I've seen more of these than I care to admit, and they're almost always pretty bad. What's interesting about them, though is that amid self-consciously juvenile humor and convoluted sexual tension, they almost uniformly offer a dead serious moral message: be yourself. Playing this message against the predominant stereotypes featured in these movies, I want to look at what, exactly, these movies have been telling me and my friends to be. You can think of this one as "Sartre watches American Pie."
An "interesting movie" piece on Eli Roth's Hostel: This movie gets a bad rap (and, no doubt, deserves it) for being unnecessarily graphic--tourists trekking through Europe spend half the movie in brothels, the other half getting tortured--and the camera spares no detail. In itself, the movie doesn't do much for me. In the context of the reactions the movie generated and the responses of the filmmakers, the movie has a rather sophisticated rebuttal to those who fund such films objectionable. I'm not sure if I agree or not, but I want to work through the arguments nonetheless.
A "current movie" piece on Up: Truth be told, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to animation. I like good old fashioned 2-D, and mourn its slide into obscurity so much so that, up until Wall-E, I boycotted the newfangled CG films entirely. But I'm coming around. Up looks too good to pass on, and, if the early reviews are any indication, it lives up to the hype. I'm trying to go into this one as tabula rasa as possible, so no promises as to content, but I'll try not to write this one as a movie review--I'll leave that to the critics.

In any case, that's the plan, and I hope everybody enjoys reading!

Nick