Here I Go Again
Every three months or so, judging by my archives, I get the urge to jump back in to blogging. I put up a post, edit and re-edit said post for about a week, get depressed that no one's ever going to read the stupid post I've just spent a week re-editing, and resolve to drop blogging again for another three months.
Well, apparently it's about that time again, and for this go-around I've decided to try something new. I started up a
Tumblelog. Tumblelogs (via
Tumblr) are a form of
microblogging -- no comments, minimal design options and only basic tools on the back end that point towards an emphasis on rapid and supershort (or "micro") blog posts. My principal complaint with blogging, and online social networking stuff in general, is that the shit just takes too much
time. That's particularly true for my perfectionist ass, who can't seem to put up a flip, two-paragraph post without spending several hours -- if not days -- writing and re-writing the thing until I've got it just fricking right. (Seriously. I do this every single time. For
blog posts.) So we'll see if the microblogging thing, with its inherent stopgaps against over-blogging tendencies, works better with the way I prefer to spend my time on the net.
To the extent that I still use it anymore, this blog isn't going anywhere. I love this site, even if I don't update it very often, and in the event that I have an itch to post some longer original content I'd much rather l do it here than on someplace like MySpace. Who knows? If it works, or even if it doesn't, at least it will give me something to post about the next time I get the blogging bug. Which, going by my usual pace, should be around mid-October.
Here's that link again, if you're interested in tracking my progress.
Here's the RSS feed.Labels: metablogging
Dogvlogging
"Vlog" has got to be one of the most singularly hideous words in the English language. This is a significant achievement for a phrase that
has only been around since about 2001. This word, along with its only-slightly-less-awful cousin "
vodcast," represents an unfortunate impulse in our nation's media to repeat and proliferate a phrase it percieves as appealing to a younger demographic, no matter how banal and ridiculous that phrase may be. It's the same vein of thinking that has resulted in the annointment of every Generation following "X" with the subsequent letter in the alphabet -- to say nothing about the unfortunate naming of "Generation X" itself -- and of the now-widespread use of such breathtakingly stupid gangsta rap prhases as "bling-bling" in everyday language. What's wrong with phrases like "video blogging" or "video podcasting?" Nothing, except that some lazy idiot in the media thought "vlogging" and "vodcasting" sounded trendier and ran with them, influencing thousands of other lazy idiots in the media to do the same. One could almost imagine the media to be full of such lazy idiots. One could almost imagine.
Anyway, why the screed? Because THIS is my first-ever VLOG ENTRY! That's right! Sunday was my dog Ozzie's last day of
agility class at the San Francisco SPCA, so I had Christy take the video camera along. When I got home I edited the footage into a goofy-ass music video that you can check out by clicking on the photo below (you can also right click the photo and hit "Download linked file as..." to save it to your computer). So will this be the first of many thrilling VLOG entries?* Gosh, will I have to start calling this thing
The Rocketdog VLOG?!?** Only time will tell, my friends, only time will tell!
*doubtful
**noLabels: dog stuff, metablogging, video blogging
Pppppbbbbbt.
Ok, I give. It looks like I bit off more than I could chew with this Oscar blogging thing. I'll go ahead and post the write-ups on the next three movies as I get them finished; going by my current pace, that should take me about a week. In the meantime, if you're planning on watching the show tomorrow night, do me a favor and root for
Capote.
Me? I'll be driving back from Tahoe. Impromptu ski trips are way more fun than the Oscars.
Labels: metablogging, movies
Good Night, and Good Luck. Plus: I Don't Watch the Oscars, I Just Blog About Them
I don’t care about the Academy Awards. Even causal observers realize that, for any given year, the nominated films and performances aren’t necessarily the best among contenders. This is largely because official selections are determined as much by multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, paid for by the studios and specifically targeted at a few hundred Academy voters, as any notions of critical merit. I also don’t care for the self-important pomp of Hollywood studios pretending that the ultimate measure of a film’s success is anything other than its bottom line. While I do believe that most studio types have aspirations towards making quality films, this element is always,
always, held subservient to the net gross. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that; movies are a business, after all, and they cost a shit ton of money to make. But the Oscars – and the annual September - December deluge of studio-produced faux-indie Oscar-bait films that precede them – are nothing more than a result of Hollywood trying to affect its own measure of artistic credibility. It’s a farce enabling the movie industry to perpetuate the fantasy that, in the end, it’s something above all the dollars and cents. It’s not. Sorry, Hollywood, I’m not buying into your shameless orgy of self-deception. You’re a bunch of money-grubbing corporate whores, and one night of manufactured pomposity isn’t going to change any of that. So it is for these reasons that I never watch the Academy Awards. I tend to avoid pretty much all discussion of them, and whether or not a film has won or been nominated for an Oscar generally has no influence over whether or not it’s one I’m going to add to my Netflix queue.
[Insert big sigh here.]
Until this year. No, this year I’m going to try to care. It’s not because the movies are better (always debatable). It’s not about my man-crush Jon Stewart hosting the telecast, which I’m probably not going to end up watching anyway (I had thought about watching last year when Chris Rock was the host, but copped out when I remembered that I’d still have to put up with all of that ridiculous Oscar crap in-between Rock’s emceeing).
No, this year it’s different. Because this year, folks, this year…it’s about having a blog. It’s about me not having anything else to post about on that blog. It’s about this idea I have about writing a separate post reviewing each of the five of the Best Picture nominees, and doing it before the show airs on Sunday.
Yes, this year, it’s about setting goals. Goals like, “I’m going to blog about 100 movies this year.” Except that it’s not, because this time I’m going to do better than living up to
only 4 percent of that goal. Also, the Olympics are over, and I have nothing else to do with my free time.
“Now wait just a damn minute,” you may be saying to yourself. “Five reviews in six days? Good lord, he only wrote four over all of last year! Is he crazy?” I reply: Perhaps. But just as the Academy Awards are Hollywood’s attempt to perpetuate the fantasy of its own artistic relevance, blogging about
the Best Picture nominees perpetuates my fantasy that people actually read my blog. And thus, like the Oscars, as an exercise it is absolutely
vital. To that end, I begin:
Oftentimes, films rooted in historical fiction, such as biopics, or those depicting a certain event, suffer from too much sexing-up. Artistic embellishments of the kind added for dramatic effect by writers, directors, and producers to make a story more appealing to an mass audience can sometimes result in material that is out-of-touch with its subject, or that is so unbelievable as to lose its credibility as a realistic account. With
Good Night, and Good Luck, the story of legendary CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow’s on-air clashes with Senator Joe McCarthy, as seen from the point-of-view of Murrow and his news staff, I’m wondering if the opposite isn’t true: the filmmakers had so much respect for their subject – and communicating its topical messages – that they forgot to make the film dramatically suspenseful.
That’s not to say that the drama isn’t there – there’s certainly loads in the source material, and screenwriters George Clooney and Grant Heslov manage to parcel out plenty of well-played tense moments along the way, such as when Murrow (played the excellent David Straithairn) and his co-producer, Fred Friendly (Clooney), first make the decision to take on McCarthy. In the end, though, the action never reaches a boiling point; there’s really no dramatic climax to the film. I hope I’m not giving too much away here plot-wise (this is a matter of
historical record, after all, but if you really don't know anything about this movie and really hate spoilers, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph), but a typical example of
GNGL’s dramatic shortcoming occurs when Murrow’s staff finds out about McCarthy’s pending investigation by the Senate, an event that will eventually lead to McCarthy’s censure and the end of his own investigation. All of the real action of this scene happens off-camera; instead, we hear the news via a telegram read out loud in the news room. This exposition via a secondary source is all we ever get of this event ever occurring. Instead of dramatic payoff, we only see the result: the relieved smiles, the joyful back-slapping among the reporters – but the moment itself, the humiliation and the eventual downfall of Senator McCarthy, all happens miles away, in another location.
Part of the reason for these shortcomings may be in
GNGL’s use of archival footage to present public figures of the day, such as McCarthy himself. While this technique does a fine job in setting the period of early 1950s America, immediately transporting us back in time in a way that a digitally manipulated recreation could never achieve, in retrospect this decision may have been the rope the filmmakers were using to bind their own hands. In giving us all of this great archival footage of McCarthy, his witnesses and his colleagues in the Senate, the filmmakers ensure that fictional representations of these people are impossible. For that reason, these characters, so critical to the dramatic development of the film, are forced to remain peripheral; we can’t be present with McCarthy when he hears the news about his pending investigation, because
there is no archival footage of that event happening. Instead, we as the viewer have been locked in the newsroom with Murrow and Friendly, while the most important events in the story happen outside its doors. With this in mind, the filmmakers may have been better off leaving the archival footage, fascinating as though it may be, to the DVD extras. (Incidentally, I just thought I’d mention that test audiences’ chief complaint about the film was that the “actor” portraying Senator McCarthy was “too unbelievable.” If you’ve never seen footage of McCarthy in a full anti-commie fervor, he’s something to watch.)
One other beef with the film:
GNGL is in fact one of those constantly beating-you-over-the-head “message” movies. In a year when an arguable four of the five best picture nominees are overtly liberal “message” movies,
GNGL is not a standout for pressing an agenda. I don’t have a problem with any of that, per se, but
GNGL is not a subtle film. Unlike, say,
Brokeback Mountain (which I will get to later in the week),
GNGL states its message, or rather multitude of messages, in finger-wagging snippets of dialogue ostensibly spoken to other characters, but clearly aimed at the audience. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a huge problem, and frankly I think it’s easier to get away with this sort of thing in a historical fiction than in a straight-up
fiction fiction (I have no doubts, for example, that Murrow actually spoke in the terms he conveys in the film). But blatant statements of the BIG MESSAGE of any film via dialogue spoken by the characters always comes off as a little clumsy, and
GNGL has several of these moments.
Labels: metablogging, movies
Bonsai Kittens, and the Dark Underbelly of Olympic Curling
Something I thought I would mention over the last week but never got around to: Christy would like me to point out that the
Bonsai Kittens website I linked to several days ago is, in fact, not real. Well, when I say Christy would like me to point that out what I really mean is that after the idea of Bonsai Kittens sent Christy into a hyperventilating fit I thought it might be a good thing to mention. So everyone calm down, nobody really keeps little kittens alive in jars as decorative objets d’art. Bonsai Kittens are a
notorious Internet
hoax. But they are also
very funny.
I also thought of another reason to love Curling yesterday while watching the US Men’s team’s heartbreaking Semifinal loss to the Canadians: American skip (team captain) and Minnesota pizza-parlor entrepreneur
Pete Fenson looks exactly like a younger
David Lynch. I shit you not! Click the links!
Labels: metablogging, movies, sports other than baseball
The Ten Best Movies of 2005: A Confessional
I’d thought about doing a top ten of 2005 list like a lot of movie-writin’-about folks are doing around this time of year. Unfortunately, as soon as I started to plot this llst out I was forced to confront a harsh and embarrassing reality about myself: I don’t even think I watched 10 movies last year that were actually released in 2005. Here I write a blog that’s at least 70% ostensibly about movies, and I don’t even fucking
watch movies. Well THAT sure bummed me out. Stupid goddamn blog.
It’s been a dirty secret of mine for a while now that I don’t actually see all that many movies. I’ve been doing better recently, but the thing is that once I started film school, watching movies became sort of like homework. Even if whatever I was watching wasn’t for a class, I’d inevitably end up writing out three or four pages of notes, because I felt like I
should be doing stuff like that. The obsessive analysis just got too be too much work, and it stopped being fun. Why do anything you don’t enjoy anymore if you don’t have to?
So this is embarrassing for a lot of reasons, obviously, considering the profession I claim to be trying to break into. I tried doing something about it on my old blog when,
back around this time last year, I made plans to watch at least 100 movies in 2005, and afterwards post a short review of each one. A year later, my grand total for reviews written in 2005…well,
it was four. I wrote reviews on four movies. Out of 100. And the really sad thing is that, even leaving the reviews aside, I didn’t
watch 100 movies last year. Nowhere close. I wasn’t really keeping track, so I can’t be sure, but I probably didn’t even see half of that.
But here I am with my stupid list, which I decided to draw up anyway. Sort of. I guess you could say I kind of half-assed it. In fact, I kind of really half-assed it (one-quarter-assed it?!?). Not only are several of the movies on this list not actually from 2005, there are at least two movies on this list that I didn’t even watch in 2005, but since they were released last year I’ve included them anyway in order to make the list at least marginally relevant (ha ha!).
So here we go: In descending order, a list of the 10 best movies I watched in 2005, regardless of whether or not they were actually made in 2005, or frankly whether I even got around to watching them in 2005! Thanks a lot for reading the blog. I’m going to go slam my head in the refrigerator door for a few hours.
(I’m in the middle of a personal Woody Allen retrospective right now, so there are a few of those on the list. For films not released in 2005, I’ve indicated the appropriate year in parenthesis after the title.)
My ten favorites:
Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
Capote
Grizzly Man
Bananas (1971)
Brokeback Mountain
Interiors (1978)
March of the Penguins
A History of Violence
Love and Death (1975)
Supervixens (1975)
A few honorable mentions:
War of the Worlds
Play it Again, Sam (1972)
Winged Migration (2001)
Harry Potter and the Whatever It Was This Year
The Aristocrats
Labels: metablogging, movies
Before I Forget
This site has an
RSS feed. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
go here.
My friend Meghan asked me a few days ago what podcasts I'm listening to. This gave me the idea of putting links to some of the ones I like over there on the sidebar (under "Podcasts I'm Listening To" – hey hey). In short, the first three are about movies, Slate features articles from their
website, OTM is the same as the NPR radio show, BP Radio is about baseball for math nerds, and Podnography is a hilarious and well-produced podcast about the porn industry (the link is
not work safe).
Finally, In case anyone reading my old blog thought that the "major post" I mentioned last week was referring to a pending announcement for
It's Something Special, THAT major post is coming in a few days. Stay tuned.
Labels: metablogging, podcasting
First Post
Welcome to the Rocketdog Blog. Here's to hoping I can keep this thing more current than my last one. Any comments or suggestions on the site design would be much appreciated.
Also:
am I too obsessed with my dog? Just wondering.
Labels: metablogging
