Tag Archives: Movies

No Backlash for Me

Posted on by
1

I’ve succeeded so far in avoiding the Dark Knight backlash which is now inevitable for every big movie.

Not that the media hasn’t tried, what with the Batlogo superimposed on the IMDb; and the nonsensical commercials for cable TV with the man and the two teens and the woman and the man conspicuously holding the newspaper with the “BATMAN SIGHTED” headline; and the pizza commercial featuring some of the Joker’s goons.  ‘Cause they’re all related, naturally.  It’s an organic progression from cheap pizza to damaged playboy industrialist superheroes.

I’ve done well in the way I did well last year, for a different reason – I imposed a media blackout on myself the week before the last Harry Potter book came out, so that no precocious virgin blogger nor loveless snot-nosed magazine writer who hates himself could feel important by ruining my surprise.  And what do you know, it worked, and my reading of the book that Sunday went thoroughly interrupted, save for food, and finally and temporarily the world responded in my efforts to shut it out.  (Thankfully, those days are gone.)

I like to build my own suspense with events like this.  The people who market the piss out of movies like this really have the easiest job in the world, but they make it hard on themselves by having to squeeze out every last dollar.  I can’t blame them for that, but let’s call it for what it is: selling metaphorical food to metaphorically hungry people.  At not entirely unreasonable prices, either.

I’m really hungry but it’s too late to eat.

Go-Go-Gadget Everything!

Posted on by
Reply

Every pitcher in baseball that has come back from Tommy John surgery throws significantly harder than he did before the surgery.  Kind of like in Rookie of the Year.

I’d consider getting elective Tommy John surgery on all my joints – starting with the knees and elbows, of course, and then hitting the other ones (fingers, toes, ankles, back, and so on) until I run out of ligaments.  I’d be unstoppable!  A human frog that can launch a baseball like a cannonball and jump over a backstop, dunk with my feet, and throw darts through the bulleye?  Bring it on.

Seating’s Reasons

Posted on by
Reply

I thought Winter was the time of year to stay inside, to avoid the cold curled up with a book and a fireplace, and an ottoman, and a dog – or if you’re not in the castle of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast: a beer and a television, maybe still an ottoman and a dog.  December-January are nice months to eat more, drink more, celebrate the end of a year and the new one, and realize we’re part of an ongoing human evolution by still realizing a life in accordance with the seasons.

Caution: Spring’s gone by the wayside, Fall’s still hanging on, but I think Summer’s the next season to go.  To me it seems too damn hot to do anything outside, at least in my asphalt jungle of Astoria.  So here I sit, six months removed from winter, staying as indoors now as I did half a year ago and will again in the same.

Just a Couch

Posted on by
Reply

Just threw out a couch.  Left it right there on the sidewalk, as if to be sat on.  If I were in college and I had a porch, front or back, this is the couch I would have there.  But it’s years past college now – and couch, the bell tolls for thee.

Its replacement, a maroon sleeper, came via a generous donation from an old friend and from several hours of grimacing, yelling and grunting, and leg removal, to install it in the old couch’s place.

The deposed couch had been in my family for years and has done me well these last two and a half.  Before the aforementioned sleeper, I’d never had a real grown-up couch.  The first years out of college, in New Rochelle and Manhattan, were futon years, when college friends and otherwise would seem to be stopping by with some frequency.  But when I moved to Queens I didn’t bring the futon – too immaturish.  Fewer people visiting.  More permanence, I thought.  So I instead lugged back the couch from my father’s den, which had sat there for some fifteen years hence.  A gift of my aunt’s, I had chicken pox on that couch when I was ten.  That glorious week in fifth grade, oatmeal baths aside/included, entailed me sitting L-shaped on the couch, back straight against the arm, legs outstretched, as I watched movie pair after movie pair (my parents got two a day for me, to keep me entertained) and busied my hands by threading beads, of all godforsaken things.

It lost much usefulness as the years flew by, as I watched those years scurry firmly planted on that couch.  If a couch’s uses include being comfortable, and retaining the shape of a couch, it was one for two.  Barely.

So push came to shove, shoving one couch in and one couch out, after I didn’t turn down a friend’s generous offer.  Now, no matter what happens, I’ve got that couch thing taken care of.   The old one had been with me through some dark and smoky times, and many good ones, too; witnessing the world in all its dull glory from the trenches.  But I’ve been with me too, y’know, most of this time – so while it’s easy to be sentimental regarding the intransience of this object relative to who I was and how I’ve changed, and how things were in the Long Ago, it’s best just to keep going.  So after all this nostalgia and movie quoting, here’s this last one, Lester from American Beauty:

It’s just a couch!  This isn’t life, it’s just stuff.  And it’s become more important to you than living.  Well honey, that’s just nuts.

A Thousand Words is Worth One Picture

Posted on by
Reply

Been flipping through blogs, as you do, and have been overwhelmed by the number of grainy pictures, obviously stills from YouTube movies, with right-facing arrows in the center of them.

The world isn’t becoming flat – it’s becoming visual. It’s as round as it ever was, it’s just turning into one giant watery eyeball.

My biggest concern with this increasing preoccupation with what can be seen is not a personal one, because I like everyone else loves to watch movies because they are fundamentally powerful and expressive (not to say “moving”) and can affect the mind so much more intensely than writing can, for whatever that’s worth.

And it’s not a creative one, because I’ve made some short movies myself, and know how entertaining they are to make, not just to watch.  And really, I’d rather see the next Indiana Jones movie than read its novelization.  And what form expression takes, so be that.

And it’s not a really a cultural one either, because movies brought so many of our American predecessors together, literally, in enormous movie palaces, and bridged the chasms that existed if only because of the spoken and written language I find so important.

That’s the key. My biggest concern with all this is professional. Hard to be a novelist when there’s no market for it. Hard to write the novel that brings people together when no one’s on the same page. My books may well have a good long shelf life – but that’s only laudable in perishables. I want those books to see the light of day, or bedside lamp, and on their insides, too. Well illuminated throughout.